pect of rank, as
well as of sex and age, from every nation under heaven by an organized
slave-trade, to which our late African one was but a tiny streamlet
compared with a mighty river; a slave-trade which once bought 10,000
human beings in Delos in a single day; the 'servorum nationes' were the
only tillers of the soil, of those 'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae
perdidere Romam.' Denied the rights of marriage, the very name of
humanity; protected by no law, save the interest or caprice of their
masters; subjected, for slight offences, to cruel torments, they were
butchered by thousands in the amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or
wore out their lives in 'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of
darkness and horror. Their owners, as 'senatores,' 'clarissimi,' or at
least 'curiales,' spent their lives in the cities, luxurious and
effeminate, and left their slaves to the tender mercy of 'villici,'
stewards and gang-drivers, who were themselves slaves likewise.

More pampered, yet more degraded, were the crowds of wretched beings, cut
off from all the hopes of humanity, who ministered to the wicked
pleasures of their masters, even in the palaces of nominally Christian
emperors--but over that side of Roman slavery I must draw a veil, only
saying, that the atrocities of the Romans toward their slaves--especially
of this last and darkest kind--notably drew down on them the just wrath
and revenge of those Teutonic nations, from which so many of their slaves
were taken. {19}

And yet they called themselves Christians--to whom it had been said, 'Be
not deceived, God is not mocked. For these things cometh the wrath of
God on the children of disobedience.' And the wrath did come.

If such were the morals of the Empire, what was its political state? One
of complete disorganization. The only uniting bond left seems to have
been that of the bureaucracy, the community of tax-gatherers, who found
it on the whole safer and more profitable to pay into the imperial
treasury a portion of their plunder, than to keep it all themselves. It
stood by mere vi inertiae, just because it happened to be there, and
there was nothing else to put in its place. Like an old tree whose every
root is decayed, it did not fall, simply because the storm had not yet
come. Storms, indeed, had come; but they had been partial and local. One
cannot look into the pages of Gibbon, without seeing that the normal
condition of the empire was one of