Deterioration of Roman generalship.] Roman generals had come to wage war for themselves and not for the State.  They even waged it in defiance of the State’s express orders.  If they found peace in the provinces, they found means to break it, hoping to glut their avarice by pillage or by the receipt of bribes, which it was now quite the exception not to accept, or to win sham laurels and cheap triumphs from some miserable raid on half-armed barbarians.  Often these carpet-knights were disgracefully beaten, though infamy in the provinces sometimes became fame at Rome, and then they resorted to shameful trickery repeated again and again. [Sidenote:  and of the Army.] The State and the army were worthy of the commanders.  The former engaged in perhaps the worst wars that can be waged.  Hounded on by its mercantile class, it fought not for a dream of dominion, or to beat back encroaching barbarism, but to exterminate a commercial rival.  The latter, which it was hard to recruit on account of the growing effeminacy of the city, it was harder still to keep under discipline.  It was followed by trains of cooks, and actors, and the viler appendages of oriental luxury, and was learning to be satisfied with such victories as were won by the assassination of hostile generals, or ratified by the massacre of men who had been guaranteed their lives.  The Roman fleet was even more inefficient than the army; and pirates roved at will over the Mediterranean, pillaging this island, waging open war with that, and carrying off the population as slaves.  A new empire was rising in the East, as Rome permitted the Parthians to wrest Persia, Babylonia, and Media from the Syrian kings.  The selfish maxim, Divide et impera, assumed its meanest form as it was now pursued.  It is a poor and cowardly policy for a great nation to pit against each other its semi-civilised dependencies, and to fan their jealousies in order to prevent any common action on their part, or to avoid drawing the sword for their suppression.  Slave revolts, constant petty wars, and piracy were preying on the unhappy provincials, and in the Roman protectorate they found no aid.  All their harsh mistress did was to turn loose upon them hordes of money-lenders and tax-farmers (’negotiatores,’ and ’publicani’), who cleared off what was left by those stronger creatures of prey, the proconsuls.  Thus the misery caused by a meddlesome and nerveless national policy was enhanced by a domestic administration based on turpitude and extortion.

[Sidenote:  Universal degeneracy of the Government, and decay of the nation.] Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world.  Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties.  When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man’s