In Rome, when this change in blood was substantially complete, the state could no longer be operated under Republican forms of government and the Empire arose to take its place. At the beginning the Empire was clothed in the garb of republicanism in deference to such Roman elements as still persisted in the Senate and among the Patricians but ultimately these external forms were discarded and the state became virtually a pure despotism. The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of “Bread and the Circus”—“panem et circenses”—and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul. The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic. In America, also, strange temples, which would have been abhorrent to our Colonial ancestors, are multiplying and our streets and parks are turned over to monuments to foreign “patriots,” designed not to please the artistic sense of the passer-by but to gratify the national preference of some alien element in the electorate. These comments on the change of race in Rome at the beginning of our era are not mere speculation. An examination of many thousands of Roman columbaria or funeral urns and the names inscribed thereon show quite clearly that as early as the first century of our era eighty to ninety per cent of the urban population of the Roman Empire was of servile extraction and that about seven-eighths of this slave population was drawn from districts within the boundaries of the Empire and very largely from the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean. Few names are found which indicate that their bearers came from Gaul or the countries beyond the Alps. These Nordic barbarians were of more use in the legions than as household servants. At the beginning of the Christian era the entire Levant and countries adjoining it in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt had been so thoroughly hellenized that many of their inhabitants bore Greek names. It was from these countries and from northern Africa that the slave population of Rome was drawn. Their descendants were the most important element in the Roman melting pot and even to-day form the predominant element in the population of Italy south of the Apennines. When the Nordic barbarians a few centuries later poured in, these Romanized Orientals disappeared temporarily from view under the rule of the vigorous northerners but they have steadily absorbed the latter until the Nordic elements in Italy now are to be found chiefly in the Lombard plains and the region of the Alps. The Byzantine Empire from much the same causes as the Roman became in its turn gradually less and less European and more and more Oriental until it, too, withered and expired.