If monarchy be legitimately derived from the Cæsars, or Clovis, or Charlemagne, so also aristocracy has a legitimate foundation in the feudal system, and republicanism in the free towns of Flanders and Germany and the republics of Italy. For in the period between the fifth and tenth centuries there is no predominant form of government; there is nothing stable, fixed, or determinate; there is a universal intermingling and confusion of the social elements; and this is the peculiar character of the age of the Barbarians.

Looking at the condition of persons, we perceive freemen and liegemen, slaves and freedmen, not separated into fixed classes, but continually interchanging condition, freemen assuming the obligations of vassalage, liegemen becoming freemen, liegemen and freemen both reduced to servitude, and the slave acquiring enfranchisement. Royalty exists, but without precise authority, or determinate claims, and made up of mixed election and inheritance; popular assemblies exist, but they, who should attend them, neglect to do it; and an aristocracy exists, but neither its power nor its station is clearly defined. There are no fixed boundaries to states, no settled governments, no nationality of institutions; but an utter confusion of races, tongues, laws, rights, and social principles. Of course 'legitimacy', which is the watchword of anti-reformers at the present time, is a pretension just as unfounded as the cabala of 'divine right', which our forefathers, the hardy cominonwealthsmen, refused to revere.

This condition of universal disorder lasted so long, first, because the invasion did not terminate with the conquest of Gaul, Italy, and Spain, but was continued by the pressure of new tribes of barbarians from the North, and by the approach of the Arabs from the South, who conspired to keep up a ceaseless movement in the intermediate countries; and secondly, by the operation of the principle of personal independence characteristic of the ancient Germans, which tended to counteract the cohesion of the social

elements. But such a state of things could not endure. Men began to aspire after improvement, order, civilization ; the memory of the Empire, and the image of its grandeur and power, were present to their minds; the Church impelled them into the path of melioration; those mighty geniuses, those men of great energies and lofty purposes, by whom the world is pushed along, sprang up in the very bosom of barbarism, to work out the advancement of their fellow-men. Hence the multitude of legal codes among the tribes of France and Germany. Hence the revival of the Italian municipalities under the Ostrogoths. Hence the ecclesiastical legislation of the Spanish Visigoths. Hence the grand efforts of Charlemagne and Alfred. All these were imperfect attempts to put an end to the reign of confusion, to establish a regular and stable society; and in fact, when we arrive at the tenth century, we begin to stand upon solid ground. The great movement of the Barbarians was then at an end; and men gradually acquired local attachments, the sentiment of stability and fixedness; and the feudal system finally took possession of Europe.

The primary stage, therefore, in the progress of modern civilization was the establishment of the feudal system, the public institutions, as might have been expected, receiving their first great organization from the two elementary prin. ciples introduced by the Barbarians. Every thing, at this period, assumed the form of feudality. Kings became suzerains the towns and churches had their lords and their vassals. Not only lands, but incorporeal rights growing out of them, and even the casual revenues of the clergy, such as the fees of baptism, came to be granted in fief. The Church, however, the municipalities, the kings, in wearing the livery of feudality, did not lose their own distinctive nature: it is only among the lay barons that the aristocratic forms of the feudal system found a congenial spirit. Its prevalence, however, became so universal, and its immediate effects were so singular, that cotemporary

observers, who beheld mankind grouping themselves into the little isolated associations of lord and liegemen, looked upon that as the final dissolution of society, which in truth was the first stage in a systematic reconstruction of it.

Previously, it will be remembered, men lived collectively, either stationed in towns and cities under the influence of Roman institutions, or assembled in the wandering and predatory bands of the Barbarians. By the operation of the feudal system this state of things was reversed. The population, as among the Germans, became scattered over the country in isolated habitations; and the government of society passed from the cities to the country. The lord established his residence in some elevated spot, capable of defence, where he constructed his baronial castle, and took up his abode with his wife, his children, and his domestics. Around the base of his stronghold were grouped the dwellings of his feudal vassals, and of the tenants or serfs, who cultivated the soil, In the midst of their habitatations rose the village church. And thus, in the baron with his castle, in the vassals and cultivators gathered under its wing, and in the village church with its priest, we have the original form of a purely feudal society. In order to appreciate the influence of this institution upon the civilization of Europe, let us consider it under its different aspects, as well within each separate society, as in the relations of each to others of the same description.

First, as to the interior of the baronial castle. The baron is in the full enjoyment of that sentiment of personal independence, which the Barbarians held so dear. His rights, his power, are his own exclusively and individually; his consequence does not depend upon his relation to other men, like that of a Roman senator, but is inherent in his person as the possessor of his fief, and the lord of his vassal. Hence the developement, among the feudal barons, of a spirit of power allied to cruelty, of pride degenerating into harshness, of selfreliance and contempt of danger prone to acts of violence,

of independence impatient of the bonds of law, the characteristic features of the feudal age and the moral effects of the feudal system. Again, the baron lives apart from the world. His occupations are war and the chase. The circle of his pursuits and pleasures, in time of peace, is peculiarly limited. He is one of a small society, his own family, who are above, or foreign to, all around them, and who are habitually driven back upon themselves for happiness. Hence the growth, in modern times, of that spirit of domesticity, which was unknown to the ancients, who lived abroad, in the forum or elsewhere, and whose dwellings, as we see them in restored Pompeii, were totally destitute of the most ordinary conveniences of domestic life. Hence, also, a much more powerful developement of the spirit of hereditary succession and of the love of family than in other forms of social institutions. Hence, also, in part, the dignity and influence of the female sex in modern times, produced by the combined influence of the Christian religion, which has taught the equality of the sexes,—and of the feudal system, which, through the isolation of families, rendered man more dependant upon woman, and less upon exterior society, for that fellowship of taste, feelings, and opinions, so indispensable to the enjoyment of human existence.

Secondly, as to the cultivators of the soil. Certain it is that, in all parts of Europe, a mutual attachment grew up between the members of the baronial family and the vassals on the barony; for each had the power of performing good offices for the other; and the services of the vassals, and the bounty and protection of the lord, could not fail to exert a favorable influence on the mind of each party. At the same time, the dependance of the vassal and serf was so unnatural, the power of the lord was so despotic, and so liable to abuse, that the system could not fail to be eminently odious to the cultivators of the soil, far more so than any other form of absolute government. The Scottish clansmen are the kinsmen of the chief, bearing his name, and hay

ing numerous other points in common with him; an Arab sheikh, and the tribe he governs, live together in the simplicity of pastoral life and of patriarchal relations; but the connexion of the feudal lord and of the vassals at the foot of the castle is in its nature essentially repulsive, having scarcely any properties fitted to reconcile the cultivator to the galling chains he wears. Hence the extreme aversion of the European peasantry to this form of authority, and their perpetual efforts to shake it off, at various periods in the history of Europe.

Finally, as to the relation of the possessor of a benefice with other fief-holders, or with his suzerain. It is perfectly well known that the mutual obligations of the parties, originally founded on and defined by considerations of an honorary nature, came at length to form a complicated code, detailing the duties to be performed by the respective parties to the obligation. In a word, a prescribed organization, military, deliberative and judicial, was communicated to the feudal system. It was, however, to fief-holders only, not to the cultivators, the population of the fiefs, that the system attached.

Now the marked peculiarity of the institution was the absence of political guaranties, of a controlling power, by means of which individual wills and forces might be made to observe a common rule of conduct. In the institutions, of which we have experience, there is either some one will so far superior to all others as to be able to exact obedience at pleasure, or there is a public will, an aggregate of the wills of a community, which possesses the same power; there is the public security, either of the despotism of one man or body of men, or there is a free government acting through its appointed agents. But neither of these conditions intervened in the feudal system. Undoubtedly there was the suzerain, and there were great inequalities in the power of different barons; so that, one might think, the means of enforcing obedience were at hand. But the suzerain, after all, was only a baron more wealthy than the rest, destitute