streets, whose daily bread was the imperial dole, whose whole business in life was to watch the criminals being scourged, blinded, deprived of tongue, hand, nose, or foot, beheaded, and hanged; to bawl at the circus, to gaze upon the processions of state, to kiss the holy pictures, and to kneel before the holy images. In times of ardent controversy, too, they discussed theology. Then there were the great palaces of the nobles—later on Venice and Pisa could show their own—and the monasteries and the multitudinous churches, each with its holy pictures, its images, and its precious relics. In the port the navy of the empire was reckoned by hundreds of war-ships, and there were the countless masts of the vessels which came and went laden with the trade of East and West. As for a middle class, that gradually disappeared. What contributed mainly to its decay was the destruction of the organized civil service. When everything began to be given to favourites, when the favourites filled up the subordinate posts with their protégés, the organization of the civil departments was destroyed, and with it one important element of the middle class. Then again the connection of the citizens with the army was altogether cut off by religious fanaticism. When one of the emperors asked the patriarch to declare that those who died in the frontier wars, died in a holy cause, this patriot replied that, so far from making any such declaration, he would exclude from the sacraments of the Church for three years every man who had chosen the life of a soldier. With such teaching from the churches, it cannot be a matter of surprise that the citizens learned
