ed the same by the summary process of assassination.
Beggars on horseback, only too literally; married, most of them, to
Englishwomen of the highest rank; but looking on England merely as a
prey; without patriotism, without principle; they would destroy the old
aristocracy by legal murders, grind the people, fight against their yet
barbarian cousins outside, as long as they were in luck: but the moment
the luck turned against them, would call in those barbarian cousins to
help them, and invade England every ten years with heathen hordes, armed
no more with tulwar and matchlock, but with Enfield rifle and Whitworth
cannon. And that, it must be agreed, would be about the last phase of
the British empire. If you will look through the names which figure in
the high places of the Roman empire, during the fourth and fifth
centuries, you will see how few of them are really Roman. If you will
try to investigate, not their genealogies--for they have none--not a
grandfather among them--but the few facts of their lives which have come
down to us; you will see how that Nemesis had fallen on her which must at
last fall on every nation which attempts to establish itself on slavery
as a legal basis. Rome had become the slave of her own slaves.

It is at this last period, the point when Rome has become the slave of
her own slaves, that I take up the story of our Teutonic race.

I do not think that anyone will call either Mr. Sheppard's statements, or
mine, exaggerated, who knows the bitter complaints of the wickedness and
folly of the time, which are to be found in the writings of the Emperor
Julian. Pedant and apostate as he was, he devoted his short life to one
great idea, the restoration of the Roman Empire to what it had been (as
he fancied) in the days of the virtuous stoic Emperors of the second
century. He found his dream a dream, owing to the dead heap of
frivolity, sensuality, brutality, utter unbelief, not merely in the dead
Pagan gods whom he vainly tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a
living, ruling, judging, rewarding, punishing power.

No one, again, will call these statements exaggerated who knows the Roman
history of his faithful servant and soldier, Ammianus Marcellinus, and
especially the later books of it, in which he sets forth the state of the
Empire after Julian's death, under Jovian, Procopius, Valentinian, (who
kept close to his bed-chamber two she-bears who used to eat men, one
called Golden Cam