Well for the seer if he remembers that the kingdom of God
is within us, and that the true golden age must have its foundation in
penitence for misdoing, and be built up in righteousness and loving
kindness."[585]
EPILOGUE
These sketches of social life at the close of the Republican period
have been written without any intention of proving a point, or any
pre-conceived idea of the extent of demoralisation, social, moral, or
political, which the Roman people had then reached. But a perusal of
Mr. Balfour's suggestive lecture on "Decadence" has put me upon making
a very succinct diagnosis of the condition of the patient whose life
and habits I have been describing. The Romans, and the Italians, with
whom they were now socially and politically amalgamated, were not in
the last two centuries B.C. an old or worn-out people. It is at any
rate certain that for a century after the war with Hannibal Rome and
her allies, under the guidance of the Roman senate, achieved an amount
of work in the way of war and organisation such as has hardly been
performed by any people before or since; and even in the period dealt
with in this book, in spite of much cause for misgiving at home, the
work done by Roman and Italian armies both in East and West shows
beyond doubt that under healthy discipline the native vigour of the
population could assert itself.
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