Excerpt from The Human Harvest: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit HE human harvest was bad! I Thus the historian sums up the conditions in Rome in the days of the good emperor Marcus Aurelius. By this he meant that while population and wealth were increasing, manhood had failed. There were men enough in the streets of Rome, men enough in the camps, men enough in the menial labor or in no labor at all, but of good soldiers there were too few. Vir had given place to homo, Roman men to mere human beings. For the business of the state, which in those days was mainly war, the men were inadequate. In the recognition of this condition we touch the overshadowing fact in the history of Europe, the effect of military selection on the breed of men. This lesson, in such fashion as I may, I shall try to set forth in these pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.