ished the Roman empire.

What, then, were the causes of decay which proved fatal at length to
this immense and enduring dominion? Philosophers in all ages have
pondered on the causes; but those hitherto assigned do not seem adequate
to explain the phenomenon. Not that the causes of weakness are baseless
or imaginary; on the contrary, many of them were most real and
substantial sources of evil. But what renders them inadequate to explain
the fall of Rome is, that they had _all existed, and were in full
operation, at the time when the commonwealth and empire were at their
highest point of elevation_, and centuries before either exhibited any
symptoms of lasting decay. For example, the ancient historians, from
Sallust downwards, are loud in their denunciation of the corruption of
public morals, and the selfish vices of the patrician classes of
society, as being the chief source of the decay which was going forward,
while the growth of the republic had been mainly owing to the
extraordinary virtue and energy of a small number of individuals.[4] But
the very circumstance of these complaints having been made by Sallust in
the time of Augustus, and the fact of the empire of the West having
existed for four hundred, that of the East for fourteen hundred years
afterwards, affords decisive evidence that this cause cannot be
considered as having been mainly instrumental in producing their fall.
How is the unexampled grandeur and prosperity of the empire under Nero,
Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, whose united reigns extended over
eighty years, to be explained, if the seeds of ruin two centuries before
had been sown in the vices and corruption of the rich patricians? In
truth, so far was general luxury or corruption from being the cause of
the ruin of the empire, the cause of its fall was just the reverse. It
was the excessive _poverty_ of its central provinces, and their
inability to pay the taxes, which was the immediate cause of the
catastrophe. The nobles and patricians often were luxurious, but they
were not a thousandth part of the nation. The people was miserably poor,
and got more indigent daily, in the later stages of its decay.

Modern writers, to whom the philosophy of history for the first time in
the annals of mankind has become known, and who were aware of the
important influence of general causes on social prosperity, independent
of the agency of individual men, have assigned a different set of causes
more ne