This is an extract from The History of the Anglo-Saxons, Comprising the History of England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, Volume 1 by Sharon Turner available on Amazon in which Salvian is quoted.

The Goths are the Wisigoths, a Germanic people who conquered most of what is now France and Spain from the Roman Empire, until overcome in their turn by the Franks and Islam.
The Bagaudæ are those who were in a state of revolt against the Roman Empire at the time.

By the 5th Century, the Roman Empire had run out of vigour, legitimacy and effectiveness.

The Romans had, in the beginning of their conquests in Britain, from motives of self-preservation, endeavoured to civilise it. When by their incentives, the national mind had been diverted from habits of warfare, to the enjoyments of luxury and the pursuits of commerce, the natives shared in the prosperity, the vices, and the institutions of the governing empire. At the end of the fourth century, the evils of corrupted civilisation, and of its invariable attendant, a weak, tyrannical and oppressive government, were dissolving in every part the decaying fabric of the Roman dominion. Its state at this period has been described to us by Salvian a contemporary, who though he writes with the antithesis without the genius of Seneca, yet was a man of sense and piety, and saw clearly and felt strongly the mischiefs which he laments, and the ruin to which they tended. He, after detailing the social vices of the Roman world at that time —its general selfishness, rivalry, envy, profligacy, avarice, sensuality, and malignant competitions— expatiates on one important fact, which deserves our peculiar notice, from its destructive hostility to the stability of the empire, as well as to the welfare of every individual. This was not merely the weight and repetition of the taxations imposed by the government, but still more the permitted and overwhelming oppressions of the authorised tax-gatherers, exceeding their authority, and converting their office into the means of the most arbitrary and ruinous oppressions.
He says, “ In all the cities, municipia, and villages, there are as many tyrants as there are officers of the government; they devour the bowels of the citizens, and their widows and orphans ; public offices are made the means of private plunder; the collection of the national revenue is made the instrument of individual peculation and none are safe from the devastations of these depopulating robbers. The public taxation is a continual destruction : the burdens, though severe, would be more tolerable, if borne by all equally and in common; but they are partially imposed and arbitrarily levied : hence many desert their farms and dwellings to escape the violence of the exactors; they seek exile to avoid punishment. Such an overwhelming and unceasing proscription hangs over them, that they desert their habitations, that they may not be tormented in them.”
Such were the evils under which the people of the Roman empire were groaning, from the conduct of the officers of the public revenue, who seem to have resembled Turkish Pashas. The disastrous consequences to the empire itself are as forcibly delineated.
“ From these oppressions many, and those not of obscure birth but of liberal education, fly to our national enemies (that is, the barbaric nations pressing on the Roman empire) that they may not perish under the afflictions of legal prosecutions. And although the people to whom they retire differ in religion, language, and ruder manners, yet they prefer to suffer the inconveniences of dissimilar customs among barbarians, than ruinous injustice among Romans. They emigrate to the Goths, to the Bagaudæ, and other ruling barbarians, and do not repent the change.”
This preference given by the Roman people to the protection of the barbaric government, to that under which they had been brought up, explains impressively the facility, with which the German nations, at this period overwhelmed the Roman empire. He mentions it repeatedly and emphatically.
“ Thus the name of Roman citizen, once so valued and bought so dearly, is now spontaneously repudiated and shunned: it is esteemed not only useless but abominable. What can be a greater evidence of the iniquity of the Roman administration, than that so many both noble and honourable families, and to whom the Roman state ought to be the means of the highest honour and splendour, are driven to this extremity, that they will be no longer Romans.”
His next assertion is, that, if they did not emigrate to the barbaric nations, they became part of those affiliated robbers who were called Bagaudæ.
“ They who do not fly to the barbarians, become themselves barbarians. In this state is a large portion of Spain, and no small part of Gaul. Roman oppression makes all men no longer Romans. The Bagaudæ are those who, plundered and maltreated by base and bloody judges, after they had been deprived of the right of Roman liberty, choose to lose the honours of the Roman name. We call them rebels and traitors, but we have compelled them to become criminal. By what other causes are they made Bagaudæ but by our iniquities; by the dishonesty of our judges ; by the proscriptions and rapine of those who convert the public exactions into emoluments for themselves; who make the appointed taxations the means of their own plunder;—they fly to the public foe to avoid the tax-gatherer.”
He declares these feelings to have been universal.
“Hence there is but one wish among all the Romans, that they did not live subject to the Roman laws. There is one consenting prayer among the Roman population, that they might dwell under the barbarian government. Thus our brethren not only refuse to leave these nations for their own, but they fly from us to them. Can we then wonder that the Goths are not conquered by us, when the people would rather become Goths with them than Romans with us.”