, is diverse, confused,
stormy; all the forms and principles of social organisation theocratic,
monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, co-exist in it; there are
infinite gradations of liberty, wealth, influence. All the various
forces are in a state of constant struggle; yet all of them have a
certain family resemblance, as it were, that we cannot but recognise.

These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them
extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise
with the rest. The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is
liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over
the other civilisations. European civilisation, if I may say so, has
entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God.

_II.--Feudalism_

It would be an important confirmation of my assertion as to the diverse
character of our civilisation if we should find in its very cradle the
causes and the elements of that diversity. And indeed, at the fall of
the Roman empire, we do so find it. Three forms of society, each
entirely different from the other, are visible at this time of chaos.
The municipalities survived, the last remnant of the Imperial system.
The Christian Church survived. And in the third place there were the
Barbarians, who brought with them a military organisation, and a hardy
individual independence, that were wholly new to the peoples who had
dwelt under the shelter of the empire. The Barbarian epoch was the chaos
of all the elements, the infancy of all the systems, a universal hubbub
in which even conflict itself had no definite or permanent effects.

Europe laboured to escape from this confusion; at some times, and in
some places, it was temporarily checked--in particular by the great
Charlemagne in his revival of the imperial power; but the confusion did
not cease until its causes no longer acted. These causes were two--one
material, one moral. The material cause was the irruption of fresh
Barbarian hordes. The moral cause was the lack of any ideas in common
among men as to the structure of society. The old imperial fabric had
disappeared; Charlemagne's restoration of it depended wholly on his own
personality, and did not survive him; men had no ideas of any new
structure--their intellectual horizon was limited to their own affairs.
By the beginning of the tenth century the Barbarian invasions ended, and
as the populations settled down a new system a