Civilization and Decay 357 



it was emphatically a period when the military and 

 not the economic type was supreme. The great 

 Romans of the first and second centuries before 

 Christ were soldiers, not merchants or usurers, and 

 they could only be said to possess the economic in- 

 stinct incidentally, in so far as it is possessed by every 

 man of the military type who seizes the goods ac- 

 cumulated by the man of the economic type. It was 

 during these centuries, when the military type was 

 supreme, and when prices were rising, that the ruin, 

 the enslavement, and the extermination of the old 

 rural population of Italy began. It was during 

 these centuries that the husbandmen left the soil and 

 became the mob of Rome, clamoring for free bread 

 and the games of the amphitheatre. It was toward 

 the close of this period that the Roman army be- 

 came an army no longer of Roman citizens, but of 

 barbarians trained in the Roman manner; it was 

 toward the close of this period that celibacy became 

 so crying an evil as to invoke the vain action of the 

 legislature, and that the Roman race lost the power 

 of self-perpetuation. What happened in the suc- 

 ceeding centuries, the period of the contraction of 

 the currency and the rise of prices, was merely the 

 completion of the ruin which had already been prac- 

 tically accomplished. 



These facts seem to show clearly that the question 

 of the currency had really little or nothing to do with 

 the decay of the Roman fibre. This decay began 

 under one set of currency conditions, and continued 

 unchanged when these conditions became precisely 



