but force
intelligently applied, but also by patience, by an instinct for justice
and for order, Rome had welded her vast empire into a coherent whole.
Rome really, and effectively ruled. She had authority, she had prestige,
she was respected and feared, until the fatal day when, for her vices
and tyranny, she began to be hated. That day her fate was sealed.

The Teutonic races lacked the power of organization. They were strong
and comparatively free from the vices of Rome; they had a rude sense of
justice. But that very sense and instinct for that one essential of
ordered life drove the individual to take the execution of the law and
of justice into his own hands and to claim his rights at the point of
the sword. The result can be easily imagined. The sword was never for a
long time thrust back into the scabbard. Incessant wars, not at the
bidding of the ruler, nor sanctioned by the voice of public authority or
for the public welfare, but for private ends, for revenge, for greed and
booty, were waged throughout the length and breadth of Europe.

The civil government, or the empty simulacrum that went under the name,
seemed powerless, for the simple reason that the strong arm of either a
Charlemagne or a Charles Martel too seldom appeared to check the
culprits, or because the civil government itself only added fuel to the
flame, by the encouragement it gave to license and violence by its own
evil example.

But society had to protect itself. Conscious of its danger, and that it
was doomed to destruction, if some remedy were not found, it evolved in
the tenth and the following century, not an absolutely efficacious
remedy, but one which enabled it to pass in comparative safety that
dangerous period and carried European civilization to the full glories
of the age of Dante, St. Louis and the Angel of the Schools. The remedy
was feudalism.

That institution has been misunderstood. It was called forth by special
needs, and when the conditions which it met in an almost providential
manner changed, it quietly passed away. But it rendered an important
and never-to-be forgotten service to war-torn Europe. Feudalism can
scarcely be called a complete and rounded system. For it was constantly
undergoing modification. It was not the same north as south of the
Loire. It was one thing on the west, and quite another on the east of
the Rhine. In general it was, as Stubbs described it ("Constitutional
History." Vol. 1, pp. 255, 256),