D. he had contem-
plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been
killed with all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that
the Romans made no further attempts to civilise these wild
people.
They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem
of internal reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two
centuries of revolution and foreign war had repeatedly killed
the best men among the younger generations. It had ruined
the class of the free farmers. It had introduced slave labor,
against which no freeman could hope to compete. It had
turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and
unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large
bureaucracy--petty officials who were underpaid and who were
forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for
their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence,
to blood-shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and
suffering of others.
Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our
era was a magnificent political structure, so large that Alexander's
empire became one of its minor provinces. Underneath
this glory there lived millions upon millions of poor and tired
human beings, toiling like ants who have built a nest underneath
a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some one
else.
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