I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step, in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries” (who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the “Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them. Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe, appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain, which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but also to every schoolboy. Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician than a philosopher.