‘ONE heard nothing,’ says a writer of that time, speaking of the days when revenue was collected, ‘but the sound of flogging and all kinds of torture. The son was compelled to inform against his father, and the wife against her husband. If other means failed, men were forced to give evidence against themselves and were assessed according to the confession they made to escape torment.’*
So great was the misery of the land that it was not an uncommon thing for parents to destroy their children, rather than let them grow up to a life of suffering. This vast system of organised 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 barbarians stronger than herself.
Abridged
From De mortibus persecutorum (‘On the Deaths of the Persecutors’) 23, by Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (?250-?325). Salvian (Salvianus) in his De Gubernatione Dei (‘On the Governance of God’, in Migne PL 53) said much the same about Gaul in his day, the fifth century. Both are quoted at length in ‘Origins of the English People and the English Language’ (1888) by Jean Roemer (1815-1892).
From a lecture given by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) at the Smithsonian in Washington DC on January 31st, 1862, in which he called for the abolition of slavery. ‘Well, now here comes this conspiracy of slavery, - they call it an institution, I call it a destitution, - this stealing of men and setting them to work, stealing their labor, and the thief sitting idle himself.’ ‘The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson’ Vol. 11 (Miscellanies) (1909).