The Fall of Rome was due not to luxury, effeminacy or corruption, not to Nero's or Caligula's wickedness, nor to the futility of Constantine's descendants. It began at Philippi, where the spirit of domination overcame the spirit of freedom. It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign, or remained behind in faraway colonies, the stock at home went on repeating its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, with the rise in authority of the Emperor who was the mob's exponent. Increase of arbitrary power went with the growing weakness of the Romans themselves. Always the "Emperor" serves as a sort of historical barometer by which to measure the abasement of the people. The concentrated power of Julius Caesar, resting on his own tremendous personality, showed that the days of Cincinnatus and of Junius Brutus were past. The strength of Augustus rested likewise in personality. The rising authority of later emperors had its roots in the ineffectiveness of the mob, until it came to pass that "the little finger of Constantine was thicker than the loins of Augustus." This was due not to Constantine's force, but to the continued reversal of selection among the people over whom he ruled. The emperor, no longer the strong man holding in check all lesser men and organizations, became the creature of the mob; and "the mob, intoxicated with its own work, worshipped him as divine." Doubtless the last emperor, Augustulus Romulus, before the Goths threw him into the scrap-heap of history, was regarded by the mob and himself as the most god-like of the whole succession. The Romans of the Republic might perhaps have made a history very different. Had they held aloof from world-conquering schemes Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down to our day. The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations. "The Roman Empire," says Professor Seely, "perished for want of men." Even Julius Caesar notes the dire scarcity of men, while at the same time there were people enough. The population steadily grew; Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, but self-reliant farmers, "the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines," men of the early Roman days, these were fast going, and with the change in type of population came the turn in Roman history. The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries has been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines.