describing the noble savage with his eye on fellow citizens, remark that
among the Germans it is accounted a shameful thing to limit the number
of your children? The long duration of Augustus's legislation to raise
the birthrate is significant; successful it was not, but the fact that
it was maintained on the statute book and systematically revised and
developed for three centuries shows that it was at least accounted
necessary. It is true of course that the mortality rate was a far more
important factor in those days than it is in our own, and the mortality
from pestilence and civil war from Marcus Aurelius onwards was
exceptional. And it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high
in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was
going on. It is the childless marriage, the small family system that
contemporary writers deplore. In Seeley's striking phrase: 'The human
harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most
marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the
potential leaders of the race. In the terrible words of Swift, facing
his own madness, the Roman Empire might have cried: 'I shall die like a
tree--from the top downwards.'

Why (the insistent question forces itself) did this civilization lose
the power to reproduce itself? Was it, as Polybius said, because people
preferred amusements to children or wished to bring their children up in
comfort? Hardly, for it is more marked among the rich than the poor and
the rich can have the best of both worlds. Was it because people had
grown discouraged and disheartened, no longer believing in their own
civilization and loath to bring children into the darkness and disaster
of their war-shattered world? We do not know. But we can see the
connection of the falling population with the other evils of the
empire--the heavy cost of administration relatively heavier when the
density of the population is low; the empty fields, the dwindling