This is, of course, far from saying that the resulting state of things was all that could be desired. The long service system is, on this account, open to serious objections in principle, and these objections are intensified when we consider the lines on which this system developed. The second-century auxiliary, encouraged by the settled conditions of his service to form matrimonial ties, with his wife and children comfortably settled just outside the fort walls, is perhaps a more satisfactory spectacle from the moral than the military point of view. Military service in the same regiment had not yet become actually hereditary, because the enfranchised son of the auxiliary was advanced a step in the social scale and enabled to take service in the legions. When, however, in 212 the Constitutio Antoniniana swept away a distinction which had long ceased to have any real basis in a difference of race or culture, this obstacle was removed.[370] Two sepulchral inscriptions of the Cohors I Hemesenorum, so often referred to, illustrate this change. The first is erected to a veteran of this cohort and to two sons and a grandson who had taken service in the neighbouring legions I and II Adiutrix, while in the second we find the son of a veteran from the latter legion who has taken service in the auxiliary cohort.[371] It has already been noticed that the system of frontier defence organized by Hadrian made it difficult either to concentrate rapidly the garrison of a province at one point, or to send reinforcements from one province to another. The more settled the auxiliary regiments became, and the more local ties they formed, the more difficult did it become to order any dislocation of troops on a large scale.[372] In fact when Severus Alexander granted to the frontier garrisons any adjoining territory which had been captured from the enemy, insisting at the same time that their heirs could only inherit it on condition of military service, this act was the natural culmination of a long process of development which had transformed what had once been the finest field army in the world into a rural militia.[373] Unfortunately just as this development was completed and the result stamped with the seal of official approval, the emperors of the third century found themselves faced by new military dangers of a type with which the old system was least fitted to cope. Footnotes: [311] Josephus, _Bell. Iud._ iii. 5.