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Show 134 even to our own day. ,flfiwlllwww um," The seeds of destruction he not in the race nor in the form of government, but in the influences by which the best men are cut off from the work of parenthood. "The Roman Empire." says Seeley, "perished for want of men." The dire scarcity of men is noted even by Julius L'Iesar. And at the same time it is noted that there are men enoun'h, Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, "people with guano in their composition," to use limerson's striking phrase, but the sell-reliant farmers, the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines, the Roman men of the early Roman days, these were last going; and with the change in the breed came the change in Roman history. "The mainspringr of the Roman army for centuries had been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines." \\'ith the Antonines came. "a period of sterility and barren- ness in human beings." "The human harvest was bad." llounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful. every citizen ought mantully to discharge." \Vars were conducted in the face of a decliningr birth rate, and this decline in quality and quantity of the human harvest engaged very early the attention of the wise men of Rome. "The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were. decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplicc ." Thus "lr'ir gave place to Homo," real men to mere human beings. There were always men enough such as they were. "A hencoop will he filled, whatever the (orfiinal) number of hens," said Benjamin Franklin. And thus the mob filled Rome. No wonder the mob leader, the mob hero, rose in relative importance. No wonder "the little finger of Constantine was thicker than the loins of Augustus." No wonder that "if Tiberius chastised his Subj' ts with whips, Valentinian chastised them with scorpions." ‘(Jovernment having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty.'y "The worSt gov- I35 eminent is that which is most worshiped as divine." "The. emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deal to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties." "There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and a barbarian's contempt for hon- est industry." "Roman civilization was not a creative kind; it was military~that is, destructive." What was the end of it all? The nation bred real men no more. To cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The man of the quick eye and the strong arm gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, the man with the hoe, the man whose lot does not change because in him there lies no power to change it. "Slaves have wrongs, but freemen alone have rights." So at the end the Roman world yielded to the barbaric, because it was weaker in force. "The barbarians settled and peopled the barbaric rather than conquered it." And the process is recorded in history as the fall of Rome. "Out of every hundred thousand strong men eighty thousand were slain. Out of every hundred thousand weaklings ninety to ninetyvfive thousand were left to survive." This is Dr. Seeck's calculation, and the biological significance of such mathematics must be evident at once. Dr. Sceck speaks with scorn of the idea that Route fell from the decay of old age, from the corruption of luxury, from neglect of military tactics, or from the over<liffusion of culture. "It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans sulll‘red from overculture." "In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy Romans, we forget that the trade lords of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this regard to liucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which these inert belonged. The people who lived in luxury in Rome were scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. The masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because they Could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force of untold millions of people is rendered efteiititiate by the luxury of a few hundreds .3" "Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman limpire was |