The imperial edict of 553 invited the Archbishop of Thessalonica and the prefect to give to the foundlings all the help possible and to punish those who disobeyed the injunction with a fine of five livres of gold. In addition, the Justinian Code contained a provision by which a father whose poverty was extreme was allowed to sell his son or his daughter at the moment of birth and to repurchase the infant later. The Emperor also ordered that some organized endeavour be made to take care of children for whom no other provision had been made. Unchanged and little modified, with the exception of those amendments made by the Emperor Leon, the philosopher, these laws and these conditions governed the Eastern Empire from now on until its fall before the arms of the Turks. CHAPTER XIX CONDITIONS AMONG THE PEOPLES WHO CONQUERED THE ROMAN EMPIRE—IRISH SACRIFICED FIRST BORN—THE WERGELD—THE SALIC LAW—CODE OF THE VISIGOTHS ON EXPOSED CHILDREN—THEODORIC AND CASSIODORUS. With Church and State united in defence of the child’s right to live, we turn to the barbaric hordes that were then enfilading the Roman civilization. For the first time in the history of man the religious law was the same as the civil law, and for the first time in the history of man both represented human law. With Diocletian’s division of the Empire into four almost equal parts under two Augusti and two Cæsars, there was frank acknowledgment that the great Roman Empire was at an end. With him, too, ended the fiction of a popular sovereignty. The Roman Emperor became an Eastern despot. He was no longer a man of the people easily to be seen and showing his democracy in frequent unofficial parade. [Illustration: THE HOLY FAMILY (AFTER RUBENS) (REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK)] He was now a secluded person wearing the dress of the Orientals, surrounded by servile officials; and the Orientalism of the government went further when Constantine, at the farthest limit of Europe, built a new city, Constantinople, named after himself. Nominally it was but to divide with Rome the honours of being the capital; in reality it was to dim the even now fading lustre of the Seven Hills. From the frontiers of China to the Baltic there came pressing down on the fast disintegrating Roman Empire armies of barbarians. Amid all the disorder, the calamities without number, when civilization, science, and the arts were all obscured, the Church gained strength, its tenets held sway, its humanities were accepted as the conquerors in their turn became the conquered. The Christian religion slowly gripped them all as out of the convulsions of government there was born the modern Europe. To the Romans and their adopted allies it was a world of terror—to the Christians it was a friendly world, for the barbarians were known to the Church long before they were known to the soldiers who tried to repulse them.