applied himself to break down the national spirit by the spreading of foreign arts and luxuries among the people; judging rightly that the seductive allurements of ease and cultivation would ere long prove more efficient and less costly instruments than the constant and dangerous exercise of military coercion. “Those who did not deeply sound the purposes of men, called this civilization; but it was part and parcel of slavery itself[775].” Temples there were, fora, porticoes, baths and luxurious feasts, Roman manners and Roman vices, and to support them loans, usurious mortgages and ruin. But we seek in vain for any evidence of the Romanized Britons having been employed in any offices of trust or dignity, or permitted to share in the really valuable results of civilization: there is no one Briton recorded of whom we can confidently assert that he held any position of dignity and power under the imperial rule: the historians, the geographers, nay even the novelists (who so often supply incidental notices of the utmost interest), are here consulted in vain; nor in the many inscriptions which we possess relating to Britain, can we point out one single British name. The caution of Augustus and Tiberius had from the first detected the difficulties which would attend the maintenance of the Roman authority in Britain: the feeling at home was, that it would be much more profitable to raise a small revenue in Gaul upon the British exports and imports, than to attempt to draw tribute from the island, which would require a considerable military force for its collection[776]. During their administration therefore the island was left undisturbed; and even after Claudius had relinquished this wise moderation, and engaged the Roman arms in a career of unceasing struggles, Nero felt anxious to abandon a conquest which promised little to the state and could only be maintained by the most exhausting efforts. That this reasonable object was defeated in part by the vanity of the Romans themselves is probable[777]: but a more cogent reason is to be found in the interests of the noble usurers, of which we have seen so striking an example in the philosophical Seneca. Against such motives even the moderation and justice of an Agricola could avail but little: and after his recall and disgrace by Domitian, it is easy to imagine that the Roman officials here would not be too anxious by their good government to attain a dangerous popularity. Selfish and thoroughly unprincipled as the Roman government was in all its dependencies, it is little to be thought that it would manifest any unusual tenderness in this distant, unprofitable and little known possession: and I think we cannot entertain the least doubt that the condition of the British aborigines was from the first one of oppression, and was to the very last a mere downward progress from misery to misery. But such a system as this—ruinous to the conquered, and beneficial even to the conquerors only as long as they