re, at least in its first
years, a blessing to the safety, prosperity, and wealth of every country
it enslaved? But when defective Roman laws began to be worked by bad
men, and that for 200 years, then indeed came times of evil. Let us
take, then, Salvian's own account of the cause of Roman decay. He, an
eye-witness, imputes it all to the morals of Roman citizens. They were,
according to him, of the very worst. To the general dissoluteness he
attributes, in plain words, the success of the Frank and Gothic invaders.
And the facts which he gives, and which there is no reason to doubt, are
quite enough to prove him in the right. Every great man's house, he
says, was a sink of profligacy. The women slaves were at the mercy of
their master; and the slaves copied his morals among themselves. It is
an ugly picture: but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little,
that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries,
wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest form, to
control the passions of arbitrary power.

But there was not merely profligacy among these Gauls. That alone would
not have wrought their immediate ruin. Morals were bad enough in old
Greece and Rome; as they were afterwards among the Turks: nevertheless as
long as a race is strong; as long as there is prudence, energy, deep
national feeling, outraged virtue does not avenge itself at once by
general ruin. But it avenges itself at last, as Salvian shews--as all
experience shews. As in individuals so in nations, unbridled indulgence
of the passions must produce, and does produce, frivolity, effeminacy,
slavery to the appetite of the moment, a brutalized and reckless temper,
before which, prudence, energy, national feeling, any and every feeling
which is not centered in self, perishes utterly. The old French noblesse
gave a proof of this law, which will last as a warning beacon to the end
of time. The Spanish population of America, I am told, gives now a
fearful proof of this same terrible penalty. Has not Italy proved it
likewise, for centuries past? It must be so, gentlemen. For national
life is grounded on, is the development of, the life of the family. And
where the root is corrupt, the tree must be corrupt likewise. It must be
so. For Asmodeus does not walk alone. In his train follow impatience
and disappointment, suspicion and jealousy, rage and cruelty, and all the
passions which set man's hand again