our own days. Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell
you), had vanished long before. Public morality had, of course,
vanished likewise. The only powers really recognised were force and
cunning. The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the
Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force
gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the
paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and
obeyed. The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs,
concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the
basest plots, each for his share of the public plunder. The senate
only existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be,
destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing
tools of imperial cruelty. The government was administered (at least
since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which
Professor Goldwin Smith well says, 'the earth swarmed with the
consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who
received taxes were more than those who paid them.' The free middle
class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud to
labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government
spectacles. With them, arts and science had died likewise. Such
things were left to slaves, and became therefore, literally, servile
imitations of the past. What, indeed, was not left to slaves? Drawn
without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation
under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African
one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-
trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day;
the 'servorum nationes' were the only tillers of the soil, of those
'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae perdidere Romam.' Denied the
rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law,
save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight