of these conditions grow limited monarchies or absolute monarchies and
national nobilities.

More than any other one factor, the Crusades broke up feudalism. The
great noble, impelled by a sense of religious duty, or by a love of
adventure, arms himself and his followers, and starts on years of
journeyings to the Holy Land. Ready money is needed above all else.
Lands are mortgaged, and the money-lender and the merchant buy lands,
houses, and eventually power, and buy them cheap. The returning nobles
find their affairs in disarray, their fields cultivated by new owners,
towns and cities grow up that are as strong or stronger than the
castle. Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil,
could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs
were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste (1180) solved the problem
by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a
sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This
is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare,
that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a
peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which
lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of
Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of
England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the
powerful: brewers and bankers, and statesmen and lawyers, and leaders
of public opinion, covering their humble past with ermine, and
crowning their achievements with coronets.

The Crusades brought about as great a shifting of the balance of
power, as did later the rise of the rich merchants, industrials, and
nabobs in England. As the power of the nobles decreased, the central
power or the power of the kings increased; increased indeed, and
lasted, down to the greatest crusade of all, when democracy organized
itself, and marched to the redemption of the rights of man as man,
without regard to his previous condition of servitude.

During the thousand years between the time when we first hear of the
German tribes, in 113 B. C., and the year 1411, which marks the
beginnings of what is now the Prussian monarchy, customs were becoming
habits, and habits were becoming laws, and the political and social
origins of the life of our day were being beaten into shape, by the
exigencies of living together of these tribes in the woods of Germany.

There it was that the essenc