state had come.

The Roman demagogues, as is the instinct of their kind, made political
capital by attacking industrial capital. They lowered the rate of
interest, prohibited interest, and often attempted the abolition of
debts.

[Sidenote: Indescribable depravity in the Roman decline.]

[Sidenote: Dissoluteness of the women, and avoidance of marriage.]

The concentration of power and increase of immorality proceeded with an
equal step. In its earlier ages, the Roman dominion was exercised by a
few thousand persons; then it passed into the hands of some score
families; then it was sustained for a moment by individuals, and at last
was seized by one man, who became the master of 120 millions. As the
process went on, the virtues which had adorned the earlier times
disappeared, and in the end were replaced by crimes such as the world
had never before witnessed and never will again. An evil day is
approaching when it becomes recognized in a community that the only
standard of social distinction is wealth. That day was soon followed in
Rome by its unavoidable consequence, a government founded upon two
domestic elements, corruption and terrorism. No language can describe
the state of that capital after the civil wars. The accumulation of
power and wealth gave rise to a universal depravity. Law ceased to be of
any value. A suitor must deposit a bribe before a trial could be had.
The social fabric was a festering mass of rottenness. The people had
become a populace; the aristocracy was demoniac; the city was a hell. No
crime that the annals of human wickedness can show was left
unperpetrated--remorseless murders; the betrayal of parents, husbands,
wives, friends; poisoning reduced to a system; adultery degenerating
into incests, and crimes that cannot be written. Women of the higher
class were so lascivious, depraved, and dangerous, that men could not be
compelled to contract matrimony with them; marriage was displaced by
concubinage; even virgins were guilty of inconceivable immodesties;
great officers of state and ladies of the court, of promiscuous bathings
and naked exhibitions. In the time of Caesar it had become necessary for
the government to interfere, and actually put a premium on marriage. He
gave rewards to women who had many children; prohibited those who were
under forty-five years of age, and who had no children, from wearing
jewels and riding in litters, hoping by such social disabilities to
correct the evil.