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LECTURE II--THE DYING EMPIRE.
It is not for me to trace the rise, or even the fall of the Roman
Empire. That would be the duty rather of a professor of ancient
history, than of modern. All I need do is to sketch, as shortly as I
can, the state in which the young world found the old, when it came
in contact with it.
The Roman Empire, toward the latter part of the fourth century, was
in much the same condition as the Chinese or the Turkish Empire in
our own days. Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell
you), had vanished long before. Public morality had, of course,
vanished likewise. The only powers really recognised were force and
cunning. The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the
Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force
gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the
paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and
obeyed. The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs,
concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the
basest plots, each for his share of the public plunder. The senate
only existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be,
destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing
tools of imperial cruelty. The government was administered (at least
since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which
Professor Goldwin Smith well says, 'the earth swarmed with the
consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who
received taxes were more than those who paid them.' The free middle
class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud to
labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government
spectacles. With them, arts and science had died likewise. Such
things were left to slaves, and became therefore, literally, servile
imitations of the past. What, indeed, was not left to slaves? Drawn
without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation
under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African
one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-
trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day;
the 'servorum nationes' were the only tillers of the soil, of those
'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae perdidere Romam.' Denied the
rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law,
save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight
offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the
amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in
'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror.
Their owners, as 'senatores,' 'clarissimi,' or at least 'curiales,'
spent their lives in the cities, luxurious and effeminate, and left
their slaves to the tender mercy of 'villici,' stewards and gang-
drivers, who were themselves slaves likewise.
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. {p15}
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.
'I have not thought it necessary to give a separate and distinct
reply to the theory of Mr. Congreve, that Roman Imperialism was the
type of all good government, and a desirable precedent for ourselves.
Those who feel any penchant for the notion, I should strongly
recommend to read the answer of Professor G. Smith, in the Oxford
Essays for 1856, which is as complete and crushing as that
gentleman's performances usually are. But in order to convey to the
uninitiated some idea of the state of society under Caesarian rule,
and which a Caesarian rule, so far as mere government is concerned,
if it does not produce, has never shewn any tendency to prevent, let
us give reins to imagination for a moment, and picture to ourselves a
few social and political analogies in our own England of the
nineteenth century.
'An entire revolution has taken place in our principles, manners, and
form of government. Parliaments, meetings, and all the ordinary
expressions of the national will, are no longer in existence. A free
press has shared their fate. There is no accredited organ of public
opinion; indeed there is no public opinion to record. Lords and
Commons have been swept away, though a number of the richest old
gentlemen in London meet daily at Westminster to receive orders from
Buckingham Palace. But at the palace itself has broken out one of
those sanguinary conspiracies which have of late become unceasing.
The last heir of the house of Brunswick is lying dead with a dagger
in his heart, and everything is in frightful confusion. The armed
force of the capital are of course "masters of the situation," and
the Guards, after a tumultuous meeting at Windsor or Knightsbridge,
have sold the throne to Baron Rothschild, for a handsome donation of
25 pounds a-piece. Lord Clyde, however, we may be sure, is not
likely to stand this, and in a few months will be marching upon
London at the head of the Indian Army. In the mean time the Channel
Fleet has declared for its own commander, has seized upon Plymouth
and Portsmouth, and intends to starve the metropolis by stopping the
imports of "bread-stuffs" at the mouth of the Thames. And this has
become quite possible; for half the population of London, under the
present state of things, subsist upon free distributions of corn
dispensed by the occupant of the throne for the time being. But a
more fatal change than even this has come over the population of the
capital and of the whole country. The free citizens and 'prentices
of London; the sturdy labourers of Dorsetshire and the eastern
counties; and the skilful artizans of Manchester, Sheffield and
Birmingham; the mariners and shipwrights of Liverpool, have been long
ago drafted into marching regiments, and have left their bones to
bleach beneath Indian suns and Polar snows. Their place has been
supplied by countless herds of negro slaves, who till the fields and
crowd the workshops of our towns, to the entire exclusion of free
labour; for the free population, or rather the miserable relics of
them, disdain all manual employment: they divide their time between
starvation and a degrading debauchery, the means for which are
sedulously provided by the government. The time-honoured
institutions of the bull-bait, the cockpit, and the ring, are in
daily operation, under the most distinguished patronage. Hyde Park
has been converted into a gigantic arena, where criminals from
Newgate "set-to" with the animals from the Zoological Gardens. Every
fortnight there is a Derby Day, and the whole population pour into
the Downs with frantic excitement, leaving the city to the slaves.
And then the moral condition of this immense mass! Of the doings
about the palace we should be sorry to speak. But the lady
patronesses of Almack's still more assiduously patronize the prize-
fights, and one of them has been seen within the ropes, in battle
array, by the side of Sayers himself. No tongue may tell the orgies
enacted, with the aid of French cooks, Italian singers, and foreign
artists of all sorts, in the gilded saloons of Park Lane and Mayfair.
Suffice to say, that in them the worst passions of human nature have
full swing, unmodified by any thought of human or divine restraints,
and only dashed a little now and then by the apprehension that the
slaves may rise, and make a clean sweep of the metropolis with fire
and steel. But n'importe--Vive la bagatelle! Mario has just been
appointed prime minister, and has made a chorus singer from the Opera
Duke of Middlesex and Governor-General of India. All wise men and
all good men despair of the state, but they are not permitted to say
anything, much less to act. Mr. Disraeli lost his head a few days
ago; Lords Palmerston and Derby lie in the Tower under sentence of
death; Lord Brougham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr.
Gladstone, opened their veins and died in a warm bath last week.
Foreign relations will make a still greater demand on the reader's
imagination. We must conceive of England no longer as
"A precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive of a house."
but rather as open to the inroad of every foe whom her aggressive and
colonizing genius has provoked. The red man of the West, the Caffre,
the Sikh, and the Sepoy, Chinese braves, and fierce orientals of all
sorts, are hovering on her frontiers in "numbers numberless," as the
flakes of snow in the northern winter. They are not the impotent
enemy which we know, but vigorous races, supplied from inexhaustible
founts of population, and animated by an insatiate appetite for the
gold and silver, purple and fine linen, rich meats and intoxicating
drinks of our effete civilization. And we can no longer oppose them
with those victorious legions which have fought and conquered in all
regions of the world. The men of Waterloo and Inkermann are no more.
We are compelled to recruit our armies from those very tribes before
whose swords we are receding!
'Doubtless the ordinary reader will believe this picture to be
overcharged, drawn with manifest exaggeration, and somewhat
questionable taste. EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT WHICH IT CONTAINS may be
paralleled by the circumstances and events of the decadence of the
Roman Empire. The analogous situation was with the subjects of this
type of all good government, ALWAYS A POSSIBLE, often an actual,
state of things. We think this disposes of the theory of Mr.
Congreve. With it may advantageously be contrasted the opinion of a
man of more statesman-like mind. "The benefits of despotism are
short-lived; it poisons the very springs which it lays open; if it
display a merit, it is an exceptional one; if a virtue, it is created
of circumstances; and when once this better hour has passed away, all
the vices of its nature break forth with redoubled violence, and
weigh down society in every direction." So writes M. Guizot. Is it
the language of prophecy as well as of personal experience?'
Mr. Sheppard should have added, to make the picture complete, that
the Irish have just established popery across St. George's Channel,
by the aid of re-immigrants from America; that Free Kirk and National
Kirk are carrying on a sanguinary civil war in Scotland; that the
Devonshire Wesleyans have just sacked Exeter cathedral, and murdered
the Bishop at the altar, while the Bishop of London, supported by the
Jews and the rich churchmen (who are all mixed up in financial
operations with Baron Rothschild) has just commanded all Dissenters
to leave the metropolis within three days, under pain of death.
I must add yet one more feature to this fearful, but accurate
picture, and say how, a few generations forward, an even uglier thing
would be seen. The English aristocracy would have been absorbed by
foreign adventurers. The grandchildren of these slaves and
mercenaries would be holding the highest offices in the state and the
army, naming themselves after the masters who had freed them, or
disguising their barbarian names by English endings. The De Fung-
Chowvilles would be Dukes, the Little-grizzly-bear-Joe-Smiths Earls,
and the Fitz-Stanleysons, descended from a king of the gipsies who
enlisted to avoid transportation, and in due time became Commander-
in-Chief, would rule at Knowsley in place of the Earl of Derby,
having inherited the same by the summary process of assassination.
Beggars on horseback, only too literally; married, most of them, to
Englishwomen of the highest rank; but looking on England merely as a
prey; without patriotism, without principle; they would destroy the
old aristocracy by legal murders, grind the people, fight against
their yet barbarian cousins outside, as long as they were in luck:
but the moment the luck turned against them, would call in those
barbarian cousins to help them, and invade England every ten years
with heathen hordes, armed no more with tulwar and matchlock, but
with Enfield rifle and Whitworth cannon. And that, it must be
agreed, would be about the last phase of the British empire. If you
will look through the names which figure in the high places of the
Roman empire, during the fourth and fifth centuries, you will see how
few of them are really Roman. If you will try to investigate, not
their genealogies--for they have none--not a grandfather among them--
but the few facts of their lives which have come down to us; you will
see how that Nemesis had fallen on her which must at last fall on
every nation which attempts to establish itself on slavery as a legal
basis. Rome had become the slave of her own slaves.
It is at this last period, the point when Rome has become the slave
of her own slaves, that I take up the story of our Teutonic race.
I do not think that anyone will call either Mr. Sheppard's
statements, or mine, exaggerated, who knows the bitter complaints of
the wickedness and folly of the time, which are to be found in the
writings of the Emperor Julian. Pedant and apostate as he was, he
devoted his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the
Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the
virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century. He found his dream a
dream, owing to the dead heap of frivolity, sensuality, brutality,
utter unbelief, not merely in the dead Pagan gods whom he vainly
tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a living, ruling,
judging, rewarding, punishing power.
No one, again, will call these statements exaggerated who knows the
Roman history of his faithful servant and soldier, Ammianus
Marcellinus, and especially the later books of it, in which he sets
forth the state of the Empire after Julian's death, under Jovian,
Procopius, Valentinian, (who kept close to his bed-chamber two she-
bears who used to eat men, one called Golden Camel, and the other
Innocence--which latter, when she had devoured a sufficiency of his
living victims, he set free in the forests as a reward for her
services--a brutal tyrant, whose only virtue seems to have been his
chastity); and Valens, the shameless extortioner who perished in that
great battle of Adrianople, of which more hereafter. The last five
remaining books of the honest soldier's story are a tissue of
horrors, from reading which one turns away as from a slaughter-house
or a witches' sabbath.
No one, again, will think these statements exaggerated who knows
Salvian's De Gubernatione Dei. It has been always and most justly
held in high esteem, as one great authority of the state of Gaul when
conquered by the Franks and Goths and Vandals.
Salvian was a Christian gentleman, born somewhere near Treves. He
married a Pagan lady of Cologne, converted her, had by her a
daughter, and then persuaded her to devote herself to celibacy, while
he did the like. His father-in-law, Hypatius, quarrelled with him on
this account; and the letter in which he tries to soothe the old man
is still extant, a curious specimen of the style of cultivated men in
that day. Salvian then went down to the south of France and became a
priest at Marseilles, and tutor to the sons of Eucherius, the Bishop
of Lyons. Eucherius, himself a good man, speaks in terms of
passionate admiration of Salvian, his goodness, sanctity, learning,
talents. Gennadius (who describes him as still living when he wrote,
about 490) calls him among other encomiums, the Master of Bishops;
and both mention familiarly this very work, by which he became
notorious in his own day, and which he wrote about 450 or 455, during
the invasion of the Britons. So that we may trust fully that we have
hold of an authentic contemporaneous work, written by a good man and
true.
Let me first say a few words on the fact of his having--as many good
men did then--separated from his wife in order to lead what was
called a religious life. It has a direct bearing on the History of
those days. One must not praise him because he (in common with all
Christians of his day) held, no doubt, the belief that marriage was a
degradation in itself; that though the Church might mend it somewhat
by exalting it into a sacrament, still, the less of a bad thing the
better: --a doctrine against which one need not use (thank God) in
England, the same language which Michelet has most justly used in
France. We, being safe from the poison, can afford to talk of it
calmly. But I boldly assert, that few more practically immoral
doctrines than that of the dignity of celibacy and the defilement of
marriage (which was the doctrine of all Christian devotees for 1000
years) have, as far as I know, ever been preached to man. That is a
strong statement. It will be answered perhaps, by the patent fact,
that during those very 1000 years the morality of Europe improved
more, and more rapidly, than it had ever done before. I know it; and
I thank God for it. But I adhere to my statement, and rejoin--And
how much more rapidly have the morals of Europe improved, since that
doctrine has been swept away; and woman, and the love of woman, have
been restored to their rightful place in the education of man?
But if we do not praise Salvian, we must not blame him, or any one
else who meant to be an honest and good man. Such did not see to
what their celibate notions would lead. If they had, we must believe
that they would have acted differently. And what is more, their
preference for celibacy was not fancy, but common sense of a very
lofty kind. Be sure that when two middle-aged Christian people
consider it best to part, they have very good reasons for such a
solemn step, at which only boys or cynics will laugh. And the
reasons, in Salvian's case, and many more in his day, are patent to
common human understanding. Do not fancy that he had any private
reason, such as we should very fairly assign now: public reasons,
and those, such as God grant no living man may see, caused wise men
to thank God that they were not burdened with wife and child.
Remember the years in which Salvian lived--from 416 perhaps to 490.
It was a day of the Lord such as Joel saw; 'a day of clouds and of
thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains; a great
people and strong; there had not been ever the like, neither should
be any more after it: the land was a garden of Eden before them, and
behind them a desolate wilderness: Yea, and nothing should escape
them.' All things were going to wrack; the country was overrun by
foreign invaders; bankruptcy, devastation, massacre, and captivity
were for perhaps 100 years the normal state of Gaul, and of most
other countries besides. I have little doubt that Salvian was a
prudent man, when he thought fit to bring no more human beings into
the world. That is an ugly thought--I trust that you feel how ugly,
unnatural, desperate a thought it is. If you do not, think over it
till you do, till it frightens you. You will gain a great step
thereby in human sympathy, and therefore in the understanding of
history. For many times, and in many places, men have said, rightly
or wrongly, 'It is better to leave none behind me like myself. The
miseries of life (and of what comes after this life) are greater than
its joys. I commit an act of cruelty by bringing a fresh human being
into the world.' I wish you to look at that thought steadily, and
apply it for yourselves. It has many applications: and has
therefore been a very common one.
But put to yourselves--it is too painful for me to put to you--the
case of a married gentleman who sees his country gradually devastated
and brought to utter ruin by foreign invaders; and who feels--as poor
Salvian felt, that there is no hope or escape; that the misery is
merited, deserved, fairly EARNED (for that is the true meaning of
those words), and therefore must come. Conceive him seeing around
him estates destroyed, farms burnt, ladies and gentlemen, his own
friends and relations, reduced in an hour to beggary, plundered,
stript, driven off in gangs--I do not choose to finish the picture:
but ask yourselves, would an honourable man wish to bring sons--much
more daughters--into the world to endure that?
Put yourselves in Salvian's place. Forget for a few minutes that you
are Englishmen, the freest and bravest nation upon earth, strong in
all that gives real strength, and with a volunteer army which is now
formidable by numbers and courage--which, did the terrible call come,
might be increased ten times in as many months. Forget all that
awhile; and put yourselves in Salvian's place, the gentleman of Gaul,
while Franks and Goths, Burgunds and Vandals were sweeping, wave
after wave, over that lovely land; and judge him rationally, and talk
as little as possible of his superstition, and as much as possible of
his human feeling, prudence, self-control, and common sense. Believe
me, neither celibacy, nor any other seemingly unnatural superstition
would have held its ground for a generation if there had not been
some practical considerations of common sense to back them. We
wonder why men in old times went into monasteries. The simplest
answer is, common sense sent them thither. They were tired of being
the slaves of their own passions; they were tired of killing, and of
running the chance of being killed. They saw society, the whole
world, going to wrack, as they thought, around them: what could they
do better, than see that their own characters, morals, immortal souls
did not go to wrack with the rest. We wonder why women, especially
women of rank, went into convents; why, as soon as a community of
monks was founded, a community of nuns sprung up near them. The
simplest answer is, common sense sent them thither. The men,
especially of the upper fighting classes, were killed off rapidly;
the women were not killed off, and a large number always remained,
who, if they had wished to marry, could not. What better for them
than to seek in convents that peace which this world could not give?
They may have mixed up with that simple wish for peace the notion of
being handmaids of God, brides of Christ, and so forth. Be it so.
Let us instead of complaining, thank heaven that there was some
motive, whether quite right or not, to keep alive in them self-
respect, and the feeling that they were not altogether useless and
aimless on earth. Look at the question in this light, and you will
understand two things; first, how horrible the times were, and
secondly, why there grew up in the early middle age a passion for
celibacy.
Salvian, in a word, had already grown up to manhood and reason, when
he saw a time come to his native country, in which were fulfilled,
with fearful exactness, the words of the prophet Isaiah:-
'Behold, the Lord maketh the land empty, and maketh it waste, and
turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants
thereof. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as
with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her
mistress; as with the seller, so with the buyer; as with the lender,
so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver
of usury to him. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly
spoiled; for the Lord hath spoken this word.'
And Salvian desired to know the reason why the Lord had spoken that
word, and read his Bible till he found out, and wrote thereon his
book De Gubernatione Dei, of the government of God; and a very noble
book it is. He takes his stand on the ground of Scripture, with
which he shews an admirable acquaintance. The few good were
expecting the end of the world. Christ was coming to put an end to
all these horrors: but why did he delay his coming? The many weak
were crying that God had given up the world; that Christ had deserted
his Church, and delivered over Christians to the cruelties of heathen
and Arian barbarians. The many bad were openly blaspheming, throwing
off in despair all faith, all bonds of religion, all common decency,
and crying, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Salvian
answers them like an old Hebrew prophet: 'The Lord's arm is not
shortened. The Lord's eyes are not closed. The Lord is still as
near as ever. He is governing the world as He has always governed
it: by the everlasting moral laws, by which the wages of sin are
death. Your iniquities have withheld good things from you. You have
earned exactly what God has paid you. Yourselves are your own
punishment. You have been wicked men, and therefore weak men; your
own vices, and not the Goths, have been your true conquerors.' As I
said in my inaugural lecture--that is after all the true theory of
history. Men may forget it in piping times of peace. God grant that
in the dark hour of adversity, God may always raise up to them a
prophet, like good old Salvian, to preach to them once again the
everlasting judgments of God; and teach them that not faulty
constitutions, faulty laws, faulty circumstances of any kind, but the
faults of their own hearts and lives, are the causes of their misery.
M. Guizot, in his elaborate work on the History of Civilization in
France, has a few curious pages, on the causes of the decline of
civil society in Roman Gaul, and its consequent weakness and ruin.
He tells you how the Senators or Clarissimi did not constitute a true
aristocracy, able to lead and protect the people, being at the mercy
of the Emperor, and nominated and removed at his pleasure. How the
Curiales, or wealthy middle class, who were bound by law to fulfil
all the municipal offices, and were responsible for the collection of
the revenue, found their responsibilities so great, that they by
every trick in their power, avoided office. How, as M. Guizot well
puts it, the central despotism of Rome stript the Curiales of all
they earned, to pay its own functionaries and soldiers; and gave them
the power of appointing magistrates, who were only after all the
imperial agents of that despotism, for whose sake they robbed their
fellow-citizens. How the plebs, comprising the small tradesmen and
free artizans, were utterly unable to assert their own opinions or
rights. How the slave population, though their condition was much
improved, constituted a mere dead weight of helpless brutality.
And then he says, that the Roman Empire was dying. Very true: but
often as he quotes Salvian, he omits always to tell us what Roman
society was dying of. Salvian says, that it was dying of vice. Not
of bad laws and class arrangements, but of bad men. M. Guizot
belongs to a school which is apt to impute human happiness and
prosperity too exclusively to the political constitution under which
they may happen to live, irrespectively of the morality of the people
themselves. From that, the constitutionalist school, there has been
of late a strong reaction, the highest exponent, nay the very
coryphaeus of which is Mr. Carlyle. He undervalues, even despises,
the influence of laws and constitutions: with him private virtue,
from which springs public virtue, is the first and sole cause of
national prosperity. My inaugural lecture has told you how deeply I
sympathize with his view--taking my stand, as Mr. Carlyle does, on
the Hebrew prophets.
There is, nevertheless, a side of truth in the constitutionalist
view, which Mr. Carlyle, I think, overlooks. A bad political
constitution does produce poverty and weakness: but only in as far
as it tends to produce moral evil; to make men bad. That it can help
to do. It can put a premium on vice, on falsehood, on peculation, on
laziness, on ignorance; and thus tempt the mass to moral degradation,
from the premier to the slave. Russia has been, for two centuries
now but too patent a proof of the truth of this assertion. But even
in this case, the moral element is the most important, and just the
one which is overlooked. To have good laws, M. Guizot is apt to
forget, you must first have good men to make them; and second, you
must have good men to carry them out, after they are made. Bad men
can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions. Look at the
working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III and Anne,
and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who work
them are false and venal. Look, on the other hand, at the Roman
Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see
how well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are
working it.
Bad laws, I say, will work tolerably under good men, if fitted to the
existing circumstances by men of the world, as all Roman laws were.
If they had not been such, how was the Roman Empire, at least in its
first years, a blessing to the safety, prosperity, and wealth of
every country it enslaved? But when defective Roman laws began to be
worked by bad men, and that for 200 years, then indeed came times of
evil. Let us take, then, Salvian's own account of the cause of Roman
decay. He, an eye-witness, imputes it all to the morals of Roman
citizens. They were, according to him, of the very worst. To the
general dissoluteness he attributes, in plain words, the success of
the Frank and Gothic invaders. And the facts which he gives, and
which there is no reason to doubt, are quite enough to prove him in
the right. Every great man's house, he says, was a sink of
profligacy. The women slaves were at the mercy of their master; and
the slaves copied his morals among themselves. It is an ugly
picture: but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little,
that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries,
wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest
form, to control the passions of arbitrary power.
But there was not merely profligacy among these Gauls. That alone
would not have wrought their immediate ruin. Morals were bad enough
in old Greece and Rome; as they were afterwards among the Turks:
nevertheless as long as a race is strong; as long as there is
prudence, energy, deep national feeling, outraged virtue does not
avenge itself at once by general ruin. But it avenges itself at
last, as Salvian shews--as all experience shews. As in individuals
so in nations, unbridled indulgence of the passions must produce, and
does produce, frivolity, effeminacy, slavery to the appetite of the
moment, a brutalized and reckless temper, before which, prudence,
energy, national feeling, any and every feeling which is not centered
in self, perishes utterly. The old French noblesse gave a proof of
this law, which will last as a warning beacon to the end of time.
The Spanish population of America, I am told, gives now a fearful
proof of this same terrible penalty. Has not Italy proved it
likewise, for centuries past? It must be so, gentlemen. For
national life is grounded on, is the development of, the life of the
family. And where the root is corrupt, the tree must be corrupt
likewise. It must be so. For Asmodeus does not walk alone. In his
train follow impatience and disappointment, suspicion and jealousy,
rage and cruelty, and all the passions which set man's hand against
his fellow-man. It must be so. For profligacy is selfishness; and
the family, and the society, the nation, exists only by casting away
selfishness and by obeying law:- not only the outward law, which says
in the name of God, 'Thou shalt not,' but the inward law, the Law of
Christ, which says, 'Thou must;' the law of self-sacrifice, which
selfish lust tramples under foot, till there is no more cohesion left
between man and man, no more trust, no more fellow-help, than between
the stags who fight for the hinds; and God help the nation which has
brought itself to that!
No wonder, therefore, if Salvian's accounts of Gaulish profligacy be
true, that Gaulish recklessness reached at last a pitch all but
incredible. It is credible, however shocking, that as he says, he
himself saw, both at Treves, and another great city (probably
Cologne, Colonia Agrippina, or 'The Colony' par excellence) while the
destruction of the state was imminent, 'old men of rank, decrepit
Christians, slaves to gluttony and lust, rabid with clamour, furious
with bacchanalian orgies.' It is credible, however shocking, that
all through Gaul the captivity was 'foreseen, yet never dreaded.'
And 'so when the barbarians had encamped almost in sight, there was
no terror among the people, no care of the cities. All was possest
by carelessness and sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, sleep, according to
that which the prophet saith: A sleep from the Lord had come over
them.' It is credible, however shocking, that though Treves was four
times taken by the barbarians, it remained just as reckless as ever;
and that--I quote Salvian still--when the population was half
destroyed by fire and sword, the poor dying of famine, corpses of men
and women lying about the streets breeding pestilence, while the dogs
devoured them, the few nobles who were left comforted themselves by
sending to the Emperor to beg for Circensian games.
Those Circensian games, and indeed all the public spectacles, are
fresh proofs of what I said just now; that if a bad people earn bad
government, still a bad government makes a bad people.
They were the most extraordinary instance which the world ever saw,
of a government setting to work at a vast expense to debauch its
subjects. Whether the Roman rulers set that purpose consciously
before them, one dare not affirm. Their notion probably was (for
they were as worldly wise as they were unprincipled) that the more
frivolous and sensual the people were, the more quietly they would
submit to slavery; and the best way to keep them frivolous and
sensual, the Romans knew full well; so well, that after the Empire
became Christian, and many heathen matters were done away with, they
did not find it safe to do away with the public spectacles. The
temples of the Gods might go: but not the pantomimes.
In one respect, indeed, these government spectacles became worse, not
better, under Christianity. They were less cruel, no doubt: but
also they were less beautiful. The old custom of exhibiting
representations of the old Greek myths, which had something of grace
and poetry about them, and would carry back the spectators' thoughts
to the nobler and purer heroic ages, disappeared before Christianity;
but the old vice did not. That was left; and no longer ennobled by
the old heroic myths round which it had clustered itself, was simply
of the silliest and most vulgar kind. We know in detail the
abominations, as shameless and ridiculous, which went on a century
after Salvian, in the theatres of Constantinople, under the eyes of
the most Christian Emperor Justinian, and which won for that most
infamous woman, Theodora, a share in his imperial crown, and the
right to dictate doctrine to the Christian Bishops of the East, and
to condemn the soul of Origen to everlasting damnation, for having
exprest hopes of the final pardon of sinners. We can well believe,
therefore, Salvian's complaints of the wickedness of those pantomimes
of which he says, that 'honeste non possunt vel accusari;' he cannot
even accuse them without saying what he is ashamed to say; I believe
also his assertion, that they would not let people be modest, even if
they wished; that they inflamed the passions, and debauched the
imaginations of young and old, man and woman, and--but I am not here
to argue that sin is sin, or that the population of London would be
the worse if the most shameless persons among them were put by the
Government in possession of Drury Lane and Covent Garden; and that,
and nothing less than that, did the Roman pantomimes mean, from the
days of Juvenal till those of the most holy and orthodox Empress
Theodora.
'Who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who do such things are
worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that
do them.'
Now in contrast to all these abominations, old Salvian sets, boldly
and honestly, the superior morality of the barbarians. That, he
says, is the cause of their strength and our weakness. We,
professing orthodoxy, are profligate hypocrites. They, half
heathens, half Arians, are honester men, purer men than we. There is
no use, he says, in despising the Goths as heretics, while they are
better men than we. They are better Christians than the Romans,
because they are better men. They pray to God for success, and trust
in him, and we presumptuously trust in ourselves. We swear by
Christ: but what do we do but blaspheme him, when we swear 'Per
Christum tollo eum,' 'I will make away with him,' 'Per Christum hunc
jugulo,' 'I will cut his throat,' and then believe ourselves bound to
commit the murder which we have vowed? . . . 'The Saxons,' he says,
'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman, the Huns
shameless. But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours? Is the
Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a
Christian's? If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder? He is
utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood. But what of the
Christian who does the same? The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better
men than the Christians. The Goths,' he says, 'are perfidious, but
chaste. The Alans unchaste, but less perfidious. The Franks are
liars, but hospitable; the Saxons ferociously cruel, but venerable
for their chastity. The Visigoths who conquered Spain,' he says,
'were the most "ignavi" (heavy, I presume he means, and loutish) of
all the barbarians: but they were chaste, and therefore they
conquered.'
In Africa, if we are to believe Salvian, things stood even worse, at
the time of the invasion of the Vandals. In his violent invectives
against the Africans, however, allowance must be made. Salvian was a
great lover of monks; and the Africans used, he says, to detest them,
and mob them wherever they appeared; for which offence, of course, he
can find no words too strong. St. Augustine, however, himself a
countryman of theirs, who died, happily, just before the storm burst
on that hapless land, speaks bitterly of their exceeding profligacy--
of which he himself in his wild youth, had had but too sad
experience. Salvian's assertion is, that the Africans were the most
profligate of all the Romans; and that while each barbarian tribe had
(as we have just seen) some good in them, the Africans had none.
But there were noble souls left among them, lights which shone all
the more brightly in the surrounding darkness. In the pages of
Victor Vitensis, which tell the sad story of the persecution of the
African Catholics by the Arian Vandals, you will find many a moving
tale which shews that God had his own, even among those degraded
Carthaginians.
The causes of the Arian hatred to the Catholics is very obscure. You
will find all that is known in Dean Milman's History of Latin
Christianity. A simple explanation may be found in the fact that the
Catholics considered the Arians, and did not conceal their opinion,
as all literally and actually doomed to the torments of everlasting
fire; and that, as Gibbon puts it, 'The heroes of the north, who had
submitted with some reluctance, to believe that all their ancestors
were in hell, were astonished and exasperated to learn, that they
themselves had only changed the mode of their eternal condemnation.'
The Teutons were (Salvian himself confesses it) trying to serve God
devoutly, in chastity, sobriety, and honesty, according to their
light. And they were told by the profligates of Africa, that this
and no less, was their doom. It is not to be wondered at, again, if
they mistook the Catholic creed for the cause of Catholic immorality.
That may account for the Vandal custom of re-baptizing the Catholics.
It certainly accounts for the fact (if after all it be a fact) which
Victor states, that they tortured the nuns to extort from them
shameful confessions against the priests. But the history of the
African persecution is the history of all persecutions, as confest
again and again by the old fathers, as proved by the analogies of
later times. The sins of the Church draw down punishment, by making
her enemies confound her doctrine and her practice. But in return,
the punishment of the Church purifies her, and brings out her
nobleness afresh, as the snake casts his skin in pain, and comes out
young and fair once more; and in every dark hour of the Church, there
flashes out some bright form of human heroism, to be a beacon and a
comfort to all future time. Victor, for instance, tells the story of
Dionysia, the beautiful widow whom the Vandals tried to torture into
denying the Divinity of our Lord.--How when they saw that she was
bolder and fairer than all the other matrons, they seized her, and
went to strip her: and she cried to them, 'Qualiter libet occidite:
verecunda tamen membra nolite nudare,' but in vain. They hung her up
by the hands, and scourged her till streams of blood ran down every
limb. Her only son, a delicate boy, stood by trembling, knowing that
his turn would come next; and she saw it, and called to him in the
midst of her shame and agony. 'He had been baptized into the name of
the Blessed Trinity; let him die in that name, and not lose the
wedding-garment. Let him fear the pain that never ends, and cling to
the life that endures for ever.' The boy took heart, and when his
turn came, died under the torture; and Dionysia took up the little
corpse, and buried it in her own house; and worshipped upon her boy's
grave to her dying day.
Yes. God had his own left, even among those fallen Africans of
Carthage.
But neither there, nor in Spain, could the Vandals cure the evil.
'Now-a-days,' says Salvian, 'there are no profligates among the
Goths, save Romans; none among the Vandals, save Romans. Blush,
Roman people, everywhere, blush for your morals. There is hardly a
city free from dens of sin, and none at all from impurity, save those
which the barbarians have begun to occupy. And do we wonder if we
are surpassed in power, by an enemy who surpasses us in decency? It
is not the natural strength of their bodies which makes them conquer
us. We have been conquered only by the vices of our own morals.'
Yes. Salvian was right. Those last words were no mere outburst of
national vanity, content to confess every sin, save that of being
cowards. He was right. It was not the mere muscle of the Teuton
which enabled him to crush the decrepit and debauched slave-nations,
Gaul and Briton, Iberian and African, as the ox crushes the frogs of
the marsh. The 'sera juvenum Venus, ideoque inexhausta pubertas,'
had given him more than his lofty stature, and his mighty limbs. Had
he had nought but them, he might have remained to the end a blind
Samson, grinding among the slaves in Caesar's mill, butchered to make
a Roman holiday. But it had given him more, that purity of his; it
had given him, as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady
brain, and a free and loyal heart; the energy which springs from
health; the self-respect which comes from self-restraint; and the
spirit which shrinks from neither God nor man, and feels it light to
die for wife and child, for people, and for Queen.
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