salt to the poor on similarly easy terms; the distribution of portions of land; the imperial legacies, donations, gratuities, mentioned as bestowed on occasion; the public baths provided and thrown open to all at a trifling expense, were also means of winning or retaining the good will of a fickle and turbulent populace. They neither expressed a humane sentiment nor produced a humane result. They were suggested by ambition, no better sometimes than that of the demagogue, and they begot idleness, and demoralization. But some part of the beneficence must have sprung from a more generous motive. The interest manifested by several emperors in public education, and the appropriation made for the maintenance of the children of the poor, five thousand of whom are said, by Pliny, to have been supported by the government, under Trajan, who presume never heard of Christianity,--cannot fairly be ascribed to political motives. The private charities of the younger Pliny, who devoted a small patrimony to the maintenance of poor children in Como, his native place; of Coelia Macrina, who founded a charity for one hundred at Terracina; Hadrian's, bounties to poor women; Antonine's loans of money to the poor at reduced rates of interest; the institutions dedicated to the support of girls by Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius; the private infirmaries for slaves; the military hospitals, certainly owed their existence to a humane feeling. Pliny is responsible for the statement that both in Greece and Rome the poor had mutual insurance societies which provided for their sick and infirm members. Tacitus expatiates on the generosity of the rich, who, on occasion of a catastrophe near Rome, threw open their houses and taxed their resources to relieve the suffering.[8] [Footnote 8: For references, see Lecky's "European Morals," II., p. 79-81.] Such acts attest a genuine kindness. The protests of the best citizens against the bloody gladiatorial shows,--a protest so eager and persistent that the trade of the gladiator was seriously injured--must have been in the highest degree unpopular, for the populace found in these shows their favorite amusement. The remonstrances of philanthropic men against the barbarities of the penal code; the call for the abolishment of the death penalty; the pity for the woes of neglected children; the indignation at the crime of infanticide; the earnest interest taken in the problems of prostitution and the most revolting aspects of pauperism were such as might have proceeded from nineteenth century people.[9] Stronger words were never spoken by American abolitionists than were uttered by pagan lips against the slavery that was pulling down the Roman State. [Footnote 9: See Denis, II., p. 55-218.]