In view of these obvious negligences, it is no wonder that the Romans disregarded that more subtle thing, the soul of the empire altogether, and made no effort to teach or train or win its common people into any conscious participation with its life. Such teaching or training would indeed have run counter to all the ideas of the rich men and the imperial officials. They had made a tool of religion; science, literature, and education they had entrusted to the care of slaves, who were bred and trained and sold like dogs or horses; ignorant, pompous, and base, the Roman adventurers of finance and property who created the empire lorded it with a sense of the utmost security while their destruction gathered without the empire and within.
By the second and third centuries A.D. the overtaxed and overstrained imperial machine was already staggering towards its downfall.
§ 4[1]
And now it is necessary, if we are to understand clearly the true situation of the Roman Empire, to turn our eyes to the world beyond its northern and eastern borders, the world of the plains, that stretches, with scarcely a break, from Holland across Germany and Russia to the mountains of Central Asia and Mongolia, and to give a little attention to the parallel empire in China that was now consolidating and developing a far tougher and more enduring moral and intellectual unity than the Romans ever achieved.
"It is the practice," says Mr. E. H. Parker, "even amongst our most highly educated men in Europe, to deliver sonorous sentences about being 'masters of the world,' 'bringing all nations of the earth under her sway,' and so on, when in reality
- ↑ No really good, full, and popular descriptive history, with maps and illustrations, of early and medieval China, nor of the Mongol (Hun) and Turkish peoples, seems to exist in the English language. The writer has consulted Skrine and Ross's Heart of Asia, Hirth's Ancient History of China, S. Wells Williams' History of China, A Thousand Years of the Tartars, by E. H. Parker, H. H. Howorth's History of the Mongols, and has found much useful material scattered through Ratzel and Helmolt. He has later on made a useful section from Watters' translation and commentary upon the Travels of Yuan Chwang, supplemented by the Life of Yuan Chwang, edited by L. Cranmer Byng. Yule's edition of Marco Polo has also been a very inspiring source of material.
