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Show WHY ROME FELL. A local contemporary approves the view taken by a writer in the New York American, that the JB cause of the decline and fall of Old Home 'was H due to the wealth of the people and the vices that H crept in and undermined the moral texture of the 9 people. That is just half true. Rome was all right notwithstanding her wealth until her mines in Spain and Asia began to fail and the depression came which always comes when the money of a nation begins to shrink; what followed was perfectly per-fectly natural. Men In debt sought the money loaners. For a while they kept the interest paid then they failed, then they lost their property. In the meantime all forms of property shrunk In value save interest bearing securities, and families fam-ilies who had been honorable in Roman history found that they were penniless. The money by natural gravltadon was gathered into the hand of a very few, probably one-tenth of the people. These and their sons began to give away to their vices. They made great feasts, there was a struggle for display, much as there was in New York City in the eighties and nineties. The next inevitable result followed. The sons of the depraved de-praved sires were born depraved. While their fathers had given away to temporary periods of dissipation, the sons knew no other lives than worthless ones, they became the Fishes and Fairs of old Rome. Then women whose ancestors were models of virtue, under the strain of their hard fortunes at last began to fall into the nets of temptation spread for them, until within two or three generations they ceased to be types of their I great great grandmothers, ceased to be fit to be- I come mothers of soldiers. Then, too, political cor- I ruption had perfected its methods. Rich men I could obtain the offices because they were able to I buy them, and so debased had become the masses I that they fawned upon these office holders; their I slightest movements were reported as marvellous I events; if one of them gave the amount of forty I minutes of his income for some public purpose I and in order to further his own schemes, the fact I was heralded as something akin to founding and 1 endowing a great University, and could there have I been daily papers in those day his picture would I have been published every morning for a week, I that not only all Rome would have become fa- miliar with his features, but that the people from I Hispania to beyond the Euxine might know of his I generosity and public spirit. Of course the decline could not be postponed I and it gained in momentum until the night of H the middle, dark ages settled upon Southern Eu-K Eu-K rope like a pall. The lesson ought to be a useful one to the men of the United States for thoy are not stronger than were the men who came up B out of obscurity, and in the slow advances of the old time, in seven hundred years conquered the B world. But we fear it will not be, for there is close at home such grovelling to wealth that the B evidences supplied every day are enough to make" B a sensitive stomach reject its breakfast. |
