thus administrative and judicial functions were combined in the same hands. ----- Footnote 148: _Omnia foris placida, domi prospera; annonæ ubertas, fructuum copia_ (_Pan. Vet._, x., 38). ----- Here, indeed, lay one of the strongest elements of disintegration in the reorganised Empire, but there were other powerful solvents at work, at which we may briefly glance. One was slavery, the evil results of which had been steadily accumulating for centuries, and if these were mitigated to some extent by the increasing scarcity of slaves, the degradation of the poor freeman to the position of a _colonus_ more than counterbalanced the resultant good. Population, so far from increasing, was going back, and, in order to fill the gaps, the authorities had recourse to the dangerous expedient of inviting in the barbarian. The land was starving for want of capital and labour, and the barbarian _colonus_ was introduced, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, not, if the authorities are to be trusted, by tens, but by hundreds of thousands, “to lighten the tribute by the fruits of his toil and to relieve the Roman citizens of military service.” This was the principal and certainly the original reason why recourse was had to the barbarian; the idea that the German or the Goth was less dangerous inside than outside the frontier, and would help to bear the brunt of the pressure from his kinsmen, came later. The result, however, of importing a strong Germanic and Gothic element into the Empire was one of active disintegration. Though they occupied but a humble position industrially, as tillers of the soil, they formed the best troops in the Imperial armies. The boast which Tacitus put into the mouth of a Gallic soldier in the first century, that the alien trooper was the backbone of the Roman army,[149] was now an undoubted truth, and the spirit which these strangers brought with them was that of freedom, quite antagonistic to the absolutism of the Empire. ----- Footnote 149: _Nihil in exercitibus validum nisi externum._ -----