To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country--and these were probably the vast majority,--were thereby deprived for the rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a restraining influence upon vicious instincts.

With the lamentable effect of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not here concerned, but it was beyond doubt most serious, and must be taken into account in reckoning up the various causes which later on brought about the enfeeblement of the whole Roman Empire.[365] The point for us is that a large proportion of the population of Rome and of Italy was now composed of human beings destitute of all natural means of moral and social development.

The ties that had been once broken could never be replaced.

There is no need to dwell on the inevitable result,--the introduction into the Roman State of a poisonous element of terrible volume and power.
The second fact that we have to grasp is this.

In the old days, when such slaves as there then were came from Italy itself, and worked under the master's own eye upon the farm, they might and did share to some extent in the social life of the family, and even in its religious rites, and so might under favourable circumstances come within the range of its moral influences[366].