offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the
amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in
'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror.
Their owners, as 'senatores,' 'clarissimi,' or at least 'curiales,'
spent their lives in the cities, luxurious and effeminate, and left
their slaves to the tender mercy of 'villici,' stewards and gang-
drivers, who were themselves slaves likewise.

More pampered, yet more degraded, were the crowds of wretched beings,
cut off from all the hopes of humanity, who ministered to the wicked
pleasures of their masters, even in the palaces of nominally
Christian emperors--but over that side of Roman slavery I must draw a
veil, only saying, that the atrocities of the Romans toward their
slaves--especially of this last and darkest kind--notably drew down
on them the just wrath and revenge of those Teutonic nations, from
which so many of their slaves were taken. {p15}

And yet they called themselves Christians--to whom it had been said,
'Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For these things cometh the
wrath of God on the children of disobedience.' And the wrath did
come.

If such were the morals of the Empire, what was its political state?
One of complete disorganization. The only uniting bond left seems to
have been that of the bureaucracy, the community of tax-gatherers,
who found it on the whole safer and more profitable to pay into the
imperial treasury a portion of their plunder, than to keep it all
themselves. It stood by mere vi inertiae, just because it happened
to be there, and there was nothing else to put in its place. Like an
old tree whose every root is decayed, it did not fall, simply because