the frontier was safely kept. They were so
much afraid lest any particular province should wish to set up for
itself and to break away from the Empire, that they took care not to
employ soldiers born in that province for its protection. They sent
British recruits to guard the Danube or the Euphrates, and Gauls,
Spaniards, or Africans to guard the wall between the Solway and the
Tyne, and the entrenchment between the Forth and the Clyde. Britons,
therefore, looked on their own defence as something to be done for
them by the Emperors, not as something to be done by themselves. They
lived on friendly terms with one another, but they had nothing of what
we now call patriotism.

28. =Carausius and Allectus.= =288--296.=--In =288= Carausius, with
the help of some pirates, seized on the government of Britain and
threw off the authority of the Emperor. He was succeeded by Allectus,
yet neither Carausius nor Allectus thought of making himself the head
of a British nation. They called themselves Emperors and ruled over
Britain alone, merely because they could not get more to rule over.

29. =Constantius and Constantine.= =296--337.=--Allectus was
overthrown and slain by Constantius, who, however, did not rule, as
Carausius and Allectus had done, by mere right of military
superiority. The Emperor Diocletian (=285--305=) discovered that the
whole Empire, stretching from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, was too
extensive for one man to govern, and he therefore decreed that there
should in future be four governors, two principal ones named Emperors
(_Augusti_), and two subordinate ones named Caesars. Constantius was
first a Caesar and afterwards an Emperor. He was set to govern Spain,
Gaul, and Britain, but he afterwards became Emperor himself, and for
some time established himself at Eboracum (_York_). Upon his death
(=306=), his son Constantine, after much fighting, made himself sole
Emperor (=325=), overthrowing the system of Diocletian. Yet in one
respect he kept up Diocletian's arrangements. He placed Spain, Gaul,
and Britain together under a great officer called a Vicar, who
received orders from himself and who gave orders to the officers who
governed each of the three countries. Under the new system, as under
the old, Britain was not treated as an independent country. It had
still to look for protection to an officer who lived on the Continent,
and was therefore apt to be more interested in Gaul and Spain than he
was in Britai