THE DANGERS OF SELF-DEPRECIATION.
[TO THE EDITOR OP TEE " SPECTATOR.1
SIR,—In your article on " The Dangers of Self-Depreciation" in the issue of August 13th you " doubt whether the courtiers and people of Byzantium ever had the slightest idea that they belonged to a degenerate polity." The historian and courtier, Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the fourth century on the troubles which beset the Eastern Empire in his day, and the events leading up to the irruption of the Goths and the battle of Adrianople, ascribes these disasters to the reluctance shown by the citizens of his modern days to make sacrifices in the interests of the State, unlike the ancients, as he terms them, of Republican and early Imperial times. Are there not signs of a similar reluctance on our part P Fortunately we are not threatened by barbarian hordes. I do not wish to compare the British Empire with the Byzantine, but merely to show that the latter contained people who were aware of the deterioration in the body politic.—I am, Sir, &c., HIBTORICUS.
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