More pampered, yet more degraded, were the crowds of wretched beings, cut off from all the hopes of humanity, who ministered to the wicked pleasures of their masters, even in the palaces of nominally Christian emperors--but over that side of Roman slavery I must draw a veil, only saying, that the atrocities of the Romans toward their slaves--especially of this last and darkest kind--notably drew down on them the just wrath and revenge of those Teutonic nations, from which so many of their slaves were taken. {19} And yet they called themselves Christians--to whom it had been said, 'Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of disobedience.' And the wrath did come. If such were the morals of the Empire, what was its political state? One of complete disorganization. The only uniting bond left seems to have been that of the bureaucracy, the community of tax-gatherers, who found it on the whole safer and more profitable to pay into the imperial treasury a portion of their plunder, than to keep it all themselves. It stood by mere vi inertiae, just because it happened to be there, and there was nothing else to put in its place. Like an old tree whose every root is decayed, it did not fall, simply because the storm had not yet come. Storms, indeed, had come; but they had been partial and local. One cannot look into the pages of Gibbon, without seeing that the normal condition of the empire was one of revolt, civil war, invasion--Pretenders, like Carausius and Allectus in Britain, setting themselves up as emperors for awhile--Bands of brigands, like the Bagaudae of Gaul, and the Circumcelliones of Africa, wandering about, desperate with hunger and revenge, to slay and pillage--Teutonic tribes making forays on the frontier, enlisted into the Roman armies, and bought off, or hired to keep back the tribes behind them, and perish by their brethren's swords. What kept the empire standing, paradoxical as it may seem, was its own innate weakness. From within, at least, it could not be overthrown. The masses were too crushed to rise. Without unity, purpose, courage, they submitted to inevitable misery as to rain and thunder. At most they destroyed their own children from poverty, or, as in Egypt, fled by thousands into the caves and quarries, and turned monks and hermits; while the upper classes, equally without unity or purpose, said each to himself, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' The state of things at Rome, and after the rise of Byzantium under Constantine at Byzantium likewise, was one altogether fantastic, abnormal, utterly unlike anything that we have seen, or can imagine to ourselves without great effort. I know no better method of illustrating it, than quoting, from Mr. Sheppard's excellent book, _The Fall of Rome and the Rise of New Nationalities_, a passage in which he transfers the whole comi-tragedy from Italy of old to England in 1861.