m of Teutonic immigration; and settle here,
each man on his forest-clearing, to till the ground in comparative peace,
keeping unbroken the old Teutonic laws, unstained the old Teutonic faith
and virtue, cursed neither with poverty nor riches, but fed with food
sufficient for us. To us, indeed, after long centuries, peace brought
sloth, and sloth foreign invaders and bitter woes: but better so, than
that we should have cast away alike our virtue and our lives, in that mad
quarrel over the fairy gold of Rome.

LECTURE II--THE DYING EMPIRE.

It is not for me to trace the rise, or even the fall of the Roman Empire.
That would be the duty rather of a professor of ancient history, than of
modern. All I need do is to sketch, as shortly as I can, the state in
which the young world found the old, when it came in contact with it.

The Roman Empire, toward the latter part of the fourth century, was in
much the same condition as the Chinese or the Turkish Empire in our own
days. Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell you), had
vanished long before. Public morality had, of course, vanished likewise.
The only powers really recognised were force and cunning. The only aim
was personal enjoyment. The only God was the Divus Caesar, the imperial
demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of
self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity, whom
all envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed. The palace was a sink of
corruption, where eunuchs, concubines, spies, informers, freedmen,
adventurers, struggled in the basest plots, each for his share of the
public plunder. The senate only existed to register the edicts of their
tyrant, and if need be, destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial
murders, the willing tools of imperial cruelty. The government was
administered (at least since the time of Diocletian) by an official
bureaucracy, of which Professor Goldwin Smith well says, 'the earth
swarmed with the consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said
that they who received taxes were more than those who paid them.' The
free middle class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud
to labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government spectacles.
With them, arts and science had died likewise. Such things were left to
slaves, and became therefore, literally, servile imitations of the past.
What, indeed, was not left to slaves? Drawn without res