CAUSE OF ROME'S DECLINE 201 



population, its mystical religions, its open sexual 

 immorality, must have had much in common with 

 Memphis or Babylon. Intellectual force sur- 

 vived for some period the loss of physical vigour, 

 and we have in Roman law the last traces of the 

 energy which in Greece bore autumnal blossoms 

 of poetry and philosophy. But the scholastic 

 studies of the Romans degenerated into the 

 trivial, mechanical kind that are still favoured 

 at the Moslem university of El Azhar in Cairo. 

 In Rome, as in Greece, we appear to witness the 

 gradual exhaustion of an exotic stream of northern 

 vitality. 



Many have been the explanations that have 

 been marshalled by historians to account for the 

 fall of the Roman Empire. The immediate cause 

 was the incursion of savage enemies. But 

 behind this lies, as the causa causans, the loss of 

 spontaneity of the spirit of change in paralys- 

 ing inclinations towards habitude. In the soften- 

 ing conditions of peace the people could not 

 retain the energy that might impel them to take 

 up arms and meet their enemies. They were 

 content to bribe them, or to enlist them. They 

 might even resort to such childish expedients 

 as were used by the Spaniards of Panama when 

 they attempted to head off the forces of the 

 Welsh freebooter, Morgan, by loosing a herd of 

 bulls upon them. The marauders shot the bulls, 

 dined off them, and were refreshed for a deter- 

 mined assault on the morrow. We may read in 

 the pages of Gibbon of the despairing artifices 

 which a people that had become inured to peace 

 attempted to substitute for the self-sacrifice of 

 war. Peace and prosperity are only consistent 

 with security when they leave unquenched in the 

 national spirit some sparks of spontaneous and 

 changeful energy which, touched by the wind of 



