very early the attention of Roman statesmen. Deficiencies of
numbers were made up by immigration, willing or enforced.
Failure in quality was beyond remedy.

Says Professor Zumpt:

'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 Roman literature a brigand's and
barbarian's contempt for honest industry. . . . Roman
civilization was not a creative kind, it was military, that is,
destructive.'

What was the end of it all? The nation bred Romans no more. To
cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The
man with quick eye and strong arm gave place to the slave, the
scullion, the pariah, whose lot is fixed because in him there
lies no power to alter it. So at last the Roman world, devoid
of power to resist, was overwhelmed by the swarming Ostrogoths.

The barbarian settled and peopled the empire rather than
conquered it. It was the weakness of war-worn Rome that gave
the Germanic races their first opportunity.