many professions and so long as
there is freedom to oust the incompetent, it is a good system. There
can never be any real progress until the sons take over the
accumulated wisdom and experience of the fathers; if this is not done,
then each one must begin for himself all over again. The hereditary
principle is sound enough, so long as there is freedom of decapitation
in cases of tyranny or folly.

There has continued all through the history of those of the blood of
the German tribes, whether in Germany, England, America, Norway,
Sweden, or Denmark, the sound doctrine that ability may at any time
take the place of the rights of birth. Power, or command, or
leadership by heredity is looked upon as a convenience, not as an
unimpeachable right.

Charlemagne (742-814), a descendant of a mayor of the palace who had
become king by virtue of ability, swept all Europe under his sway by
reason of his transcendent powers as a warrior and administrator. He
did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India.
In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts
of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the
Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium,
Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his
kingship. He was a student, an architect, a bridge-builder, though he
could neither read nor write, and even began a canal which was to
connect the Danube and the Rhine, and thus the German Ocean, with the
Black Sea. He is one of many monuments to the futility of technical
education and mere book-learning.

The Pope, roughly handled, because negligently protected, by the Roman
emperors, turns to Charlemagne, and on Christmas Day (800) places a
crown upon his head, and proclaims him "Caesar Augustus" and
"Christianissimus Rex." The empire of Rome is to be born again with
this virile German warrior at its head. Just a thousand years later,
another insists that he has succeeded to the title by right of
conquest, and gives his baby son the title of "King of Rome," and just
a thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, in 814, Napoleon
retires to Elba. There is a witchery about Rome even to-day, and an
emperor still sits imprisoned there, claiming for himself the right to
rule the spiritual and intellectual world: "sedet, eternumque sedebit
Infelix Theseus."

Louis, called "the Pious," because the latter part of his life was
spent in mourning