2. An assembly cannot act administratively; there must be magistrates to do this. Such magistrates are all elected by the curia, for a very limited period, and are responsible with their fortunes for the integrity of their administration.

3. In great emergencies, when the fate of a city is in question, or when it is proposed to elect a magistrate invested with uncertain and more arbitrary powers, the curia itself does not suffice; the whole population is summoned to concur in these solemn acts.

Who, at the aspect of such rights existing, would not imagine he recognized a petty republic, in which the municipal life and the political life were mixed up and confounded together, in which democracy of the most unequivocal description prevailed? Who would imagine, for one instant, that a town so governed formed part of a great empire, and was connected by strict and necessary bonds with a distant and sovereign central power? Who would not expect to find here all the impulsive manifestations of liberty, all the agitation, all the faction and cabal, all the violence, all the disorder, which invariably characterize small societies, inclosed and self-governed within their own walls?

Nothing of the sort was the fact; all these apparent principles were without life, and there were others existent, which absolutely precluded their reanimation.

1. Such are the effects, such the exigencies of the central despotism, that the quality of curialis becomes not a right recognized in all those who are capable of exercising it, but a burden imposed upon all who are capable of bearing it. On the one hand the central government has relieved itself of the duty of providing for any branch of the public service in which it is not immediately interested, throwing this duty upon the class of citizens in question; on the other hand, it employs this class of citizens in collecting the taxes which it imposes on its own peculiar account, and makes them responsible for the full amount. It ruins the curiales, in order to pay its functionaries and its soldiers; it grants its functionaries and its soldiers all sorts of practical advantages and privileges, as inducements to them to aid it in preventing the curiales from saving themselves from ruin. Completely null as citizens, the curiales only live to be stripped of all they gain as men of labor and industry.

2. The magistrates elected by the curia are, in point of fact, merely the imperial agents of despotism, for whose

benefit they despoil their fellow-citizens, until some opportunity or other occurs to them of getting rid of this hard obligation.

3. Their election itself is valueless, for the imperial representative in the province may annul it; a favor which they have the greatest desire to obtain at his hands; another circumstance putting them more firmly in his power.

4. Their authority is not real, for they cannot enforce it. No effective jurisdiction is placed in their hands; they take no step which may not be annulled. Nay, more : despotism, perceiving more and more clearly their ill-will to the task, or their inability to execute it, encroaches more and more, by itself or its immediate representatives, into the sphere of their functions. The business of the curia gradually disappears with its powers, and a day will come when the municipal system may be abolished at a single blow, in the still subsisting empire," because," as the legislator will say, "all these laws wander, as it were, vainly and without object around the legal soil."1

Thus, then, it is seen, force, real life, were equally wanting to the curiales, as to the senatorial families; equally with the senatorial families, they were incapable of defending or of governing the society.

As to the people, I need not dwell upon their situation; it is obvious that they were in no condition to save and regenerate the Roman world. Yet we must not think them altogether so powerless, so utterly null, as is ordinarily supposed. They were tolerably numerous, more especially in the south of Gaul, both from the development of industrial activity during the first three ages of Christianity, and from the circumstance of a portion of the rural population taking refuge in the towns from the devastation of the barbarians. Besides, with the progress of disorder in the higher ranks, the popular influence had a tendency to increase. In times of regularity, when the administration, its functionaries, and its troops were on the spot, ere the curia had become altogether ruined and powerless, the people remained in their ordinary state of inaction, or passive dependence. But when all the various masters of the society had fallen away or disappeared, when the dissolution of things became general, the people, in their

1 Nov. 46, rendered by the Emperor of the East, Leo the Philosopher, towards the close of the ninth century.

turn, grew to be something, and assumed, at all events, a certain degree of activity and importance.

I have nothing to say about the slaves; they were nothing for themselves; how, then, could they do anything for society? It was, moreover, the coloni who underwent well nigh all the disasters of invasion; it was they whom the barbarians pillaged, hunted, carried away captive, pell-mell with their cattle. I may remark, however, incidentally, that under the Empire the condition of the slaves was greatly improved; this is clear from its legislation.

Let us now collect all these scattered features of Gaulish civil society in the fifth century, and form a collective idea, as near the fact as we can, of its aggregate.

Its government was monarchical, even despotic; and yet all the monarchical institutions and powers were falling, were themselves abandoning their post. Its internal organization seemed aristocratic; but it was an aristocracy without strength, without coherence, incapable of playing a public part. A democratic element, municipalities, free burghers, were still visible; but democracy was as enervated, as powerless, as aristocracy and monarchy. The whole of society was in a state of dissolution, was dying.

And here we see the radical vice of the Roman society, and of every society where slavery exists on a large scale, where a few masters rule over whole herds of people. In all countries, at all times, whatever the political system which prevails, after an interval more or less long, by the sole effect of the enjoyment of power, of wealth, of the intellectual development, of the various social advantages they enjoy, the higher classes wear themselves out, become enervated, unless they are constantly excited by emulation, and refreshed by the immigration of the classes who live and labor below them. See what has taken place in modern Europe. There has been in it a prodigious variety of social conditions, infinite gradations in wealth, liberty, enlightenment, influence, civilization. And up all the steps of this long ladder, an ascending movement has constantly impelled each class and all classes, the one by the other, towards greater development, to which none was allowed to remain a stranger. Hence the fecundity, the immorality, so to speak, of modern civilization, thus incessantly recruited and renewed.

Nothing at all resembling this existed in the Roman society; there, men were divided off into two great classes,

separated from each other by an immense interval; there was no variety, no ascending movement, no genuine democracy; it was, as it were, a society of officers, who did not know whence to recruit their numbers, and did not, in point of fact, recruit them. There was, indeed, from the first to the third century, as I have just now said, a progressive movement on the part of the lower classes of the people; they increased in liberty, in number, in activity. But the movement was far too slow, far too limited, to enable the people by reintegrating in time the superior classes, to save them from their decline and fall.

Besides these, there became formed another society, young, energetic, fruitful of results,-the ecclesiastical society. It was around this society that the people rallied; no powerful bond united them to the senators, nor, perhaps, to the curiales; they assembled, therefore, around the priests and bishops. Alien to pagan civil society, whose chiefs created therein no place for it, the mass of the population entered with ardor into the Christian society, whose leaders opened their arms to it. The senatorial and curial aristocracy was a mere phantom; the clergy became the real aristocracy; there was no Roman people; a Christian people arose. It is with them we shall occupy ourselves in the next lecture.

THIRD LECTURE.

Object of the lecture-Variety of the principles and forms of religious society in Europe-Classification of the different systems, 1. According to the relations of the church in the state; 2. According to the internal constitution of the church-All these systems assign their origin to the primitive church-Critical examination of these pretensions-They have all a certain degree of foundation-Fluctuation and complexity of the external situation and internal position of Christian society from the first to the fifth century-Predominant tendencies-Prevalent facts of the fifth century-Causes of liberty in the church at this period-The election of bishops-CouncilsComparison of religious with civil society-Of the chiefs of these two societies-Letters of Sidonius Apollinaris.

THE subject which is now about to occupy our attention, is the state of religious society in the fifth century. I need not remind you of the great part it has played in the history of modern civilization: that is a fact perfectly well understood. Nor is it in modern history that this fact first manifested itself; the world has seen more than one striking example of the power of the religious society, of its ideas, its institutions, its government. But there is a fundamental difference to be remarked. In Asia, in Africa, in antiquity, everywhere before the organization of Europe, religious society presents itself under a general and simple form; this is the clear prevalence of a system, the domination of a principle: sometimes the society is subordinate; it is the temporal power which exercises the spiritual functions and directs the worship, and even the faith sometimes it occupies the chief place; it is the spiritual power which rules the civil order. In both the one case and the other, the position and organization of the religious society are clear, simple, stable. In modern Europe, on the contrary, it presents every possible variety of system; we find in it every possible principle; it seems made up of samples of all the forms under which it has appeared elsewhere.

Let us endeavor, for the sake of greater perspicuity, to disintricate and classify the different principles, the different systems which have been, in various measure, adopted into