WAR AND MANHOOD 93 



ian*8 contempt for honest industry." " Soman civilization was not a 

 creative kind, it was military, that is destructive." What was the end 

 of it all ? The nation bred real men no more. To cultivate the Eoman 

 fields " whole tribes were borrowed." The man of the quick eye and 

 the strong arm gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, the 

 man with the hoe, the man whose lot does not change because in him 

 there lies no power to change it. " Slaves have wrongs, but freemen 

 alone have rights." So at the end the Roman world yielded to the 

 barbaric, because it was weaker in force. " The barbarians settled and 

 peopled the barbaric rather than conquered it." And the process is 

 recorded in history as the fall of Eome. 



" Out of every hundred thousand strong men, eighty thousand were 

 slain. Out of every hundred thousand weaklings, ninety to ninety-five 

 thousand were left to survive." This is Dr. Seeck's calculation, and 

 the biological significance of such mathematics must be evident at 

 once. Dr. Seeck speaks with scorn of the idea that Eome fell from the 

 decay of old age, from the corruption of luxury, from neglect of military 

 tactics or from the over-diffusion of culture. 



It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered from over-culture. 

 In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy Romans, we forget that the trade- 

 lords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this 

 regard to Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting the 

 slightest check to the advance of fhe nations to which these men belonged. 

 The people who lived in luxury in Rome were scattered more thinly than in 

 any modern state of Europe. The masses lived at all times more poorly and 

 frugally because they could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force 

 of untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury of a few 

 hundreds ? 



Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble as making the fate 

 of the world. Half the Roman Empire was made up of rough barbarians un- 

 touched by Greek or Roman culture. (Seeck.) 



Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the inunediate 

 cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical not a moral 

 decay. In valor, discipline and science the Roman armies remained what they 

 had always been and the peasant emperors of Illyricum were worthy successors 

 of Cincinnatus and Caius Marius. But the problem was, how to replenish those 

 armies. Men were wanting. The empire perished for want of men. (Seeley.) 



Does history ever repeat itself ? It always does if it is true history. 

 If it does not we are dealing not with history, but with mere succession 

 of incidents. Like causes produce like effects, just as often as man may 

 choose to test them. Whenever men use a nation for the test, poor seed 

 yields a poor fruition. Wliere the weakling and the coward survive 

 in human history, there " the human harvest is bad," and it can never 

 be otherwise. 



The finest Eoman province, a leader in the Roman world, was her 

 colony of Hispania. What of Spain in history? What of Spain 

 to-day ? " This is Castile," said a Spanish writer, " she makes men and 



