[1] Lactantius, cited in Elton’s “Origins of English History,” p. 334.  It should be noted, however, that Professor C. Oman in his “England before the Norman Conquest,” pp. 175-176, takes a moer favorable view of the condition of Britain under the Romans than that which most authorities maintain.

So great was the misery of the land that sometimes parents destroyed their children, rather than let them grow up to a life of suffering.  This vast system of organized oppression, like all tyranny, “was not so much an institution as a destitution,” undermining and impoverishing the country.  It lasted until time brought its revenge, and Rome, which had crushed so many nations of barbarians, was in her turn threatened with a like fate, by bands of northern barbarians stronger than herself.

33.  The Romans compelled to abandon Britain, 410.

When Caesar returned from his victorious campaigns in Gaul in the first century B.C., Cicero exultantly exclaimed, “Now let the Alps sink! the gods raised them to shelter Italy from the barbarians; they are no longer needed.”  For nearly five centuries that continued true; then the tribes of northern Europe could no longer be held back.  When the Roman emperors saw that the crisis had arrived, they recalled their troops from Britain in 410 The rest of the Roman colonists soon followed.

At this time we find this brief but expressive entry in the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (SS46, 99):  “After this the Romans never ruled in Britain.”  A few years later this entry occurs:  “418.  This year the Romans collected all the treasures in Britain; some they hid in the earth, so that no one since has been able to find them, and some they carried with them into Gaul.”

34.  Remains of Roman Civilization.

In the course of the next three generations the political and social elements of Roman civilization in Britain seem to have disappeared.  A few words, such as “port” and “street,” which may or may not have been derived from the Latin, have come down to us.  But there was nothing left, of which we can speak with absolute certainty, save the material shell,—­the walls, roads, forts, villas, arches, gateways, altars, and tombs, whose ruins are still seen scattered throughout the land.

The soil, also, is full of relics of the same kind.  Twenty feet below the surface of the London of to-day lie the remains of the London of the Romans.  In digging in the “City,"[1] the laborer’s shovel every now and then brings to light pieces of carved stone with Latin inscriptions, bits of rusted armor, broken swords, fragments of statuary, and gold and silver ornaments.

[1] The “City”:  This is the name given to that part of central London, about a mile square, which was formerly enclosed by Roman walls.  It contains the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, and other very important business buildings.  Its limit on the west is the site of Temple Bar; on the east, the Tower of London.