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crushing taxation tends to drain the resources of the land, and at last renders it unable to bear even a burden that would have once been light.
553, the few remaining Gothic garrisons laid down their arms, gathered together, and disappeared over the passes of the Alps into the northern darkness. We have no tidings of the fate of these last survivors of the great Ostrogothic race.
because the ruling race was too small to hold down the vast territory that it had overrun, unless it could combine frankly and freely with the conquered Roman population.
Italy is left an unpeopled desert,
The personal failings of Mohammed seem to have brought into his creed a blight of cruelty, bigotry, and self-indulgence, which has rendered half-useless its higher and nobler features. The religion which legalises the slaughter and plunder of all unbelievers and consigns woman to the harem may
Islam is a good religion to die by, as its fanatics have shown on a thousand battlefields, but not a good religion to live by.
