92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



might have remained a republic, enduring even to our own day. The 

 seeds of destruction lie not in the race nor in the form of government, 

 but in the influences by which the best men are cut off from the work 

 of parenthood. 



" The Eoman Empire," says Seeley, " perished for want of men." 

 The dire scarcity of men is noted even by Julius Cassar. And at the 

 same time it is noted that there are men enough. Eome was filling 

 up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, 

 " people with guano in their composition," to use Emerson's striking 

 phrase, but the self-reliant farmers, the hardy dwellers on the flanks of 

 the Apennines, the Eoman men of the early Eoman days, these were 

 fast going, and with the change in the breed came the change in Eoman 

 history. 



" The mainspring of the Eoman army for centuries had been the 

 patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinct- 

 ive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the 

 Apennines." 



With the Antonines came " a period of sterility and barrenness in 

 human beings." " The human harvest was bad." Bounties were offered 

 for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. " Mar- 

 riage," says Metellus, " is a duty which, however painful, every citizen 

 ought manfully to discharge." Wars were conducted in the face of a 

 declining birth rate, and this decline in quality and quantity of the 

 human harvest engaged very early the attention of the wise men of 

 Eome. 



" The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were 

 decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army 

 multiplied" (Bury). 



Thus " Vir gave place to Homo," real men to mere human beings. 

 There were always men enough such as they were. " A hencoop will be 

 filled, whatever the (original) number of hens," said Benjamin Frank- 

 lin. And thus the mob filled Eome. IsTo wonder the mob-leader, the 

 mob-hero, rose in relative importance. No wonder " the little finger of 

 Constantine was thicker than the loins of Augustus." No wonder that 

 " if Tiberius chastised his subjects with whips, Valentinian chastised 

 them with scorpions." 



" Government having assumed godhead took at the same time the 

 appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. 

 Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated 

 with insolence and cruelty." " The worst government is that which is 

 most worshipped as divine." " The emperor possessed in the army an 

 overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was 

 totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because 

 it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic 

 ties." " There runs through Eoman literature a brigand's and barbar- 



