no inconsiderable portion of the
broad lands which had formerly been the heritage of the Roman people.
But the Roman Empire at Rome was stricken with an incurable malady. The
three sieges and the final sack of Rome by Alaric (410) revealed to the
world that she was no longer "Roma Invicta", and from that time forward
every chief of Teutonic or Sclavonic barbarians who wandered with his
tribe over the wasted plains between the Danube and the Adriatic, might
cherish the secret hope that he, too, would one day be drawn in triumph
up the Capitolian Hill, through the cowed ranks of the slavish citizens
of Rome, and that he might be lodged on the Palatine in one of the
sumptuous palaces which had been built long ago for "the lords of the
world".

Thus there was everywhere unrest and, as it were, a prolonged moral
earthquake. The old order of things was destroyed, and none could
forecast the shape of the new order of things that would succeed to it.
Something similar has been the state of Europe ever since the great
French Revolution; only that her barbarians threaten her now from
within, not from without. The social state which had been in existence
for centuries, and which had come to be accepted as if it were one of
the great ordinances of nature, is either menaced or is actually broken
up, and how the new democracy will rearrange itself in the seats of the
old civilisation the wisest statesman cannot foretell.

But to any "shepherd of his people", barbarian or Roman, who looked with
foreseeing eye and understanding heart over the Europe of the fifth
century, the duty of the hour was manifest. The great fabric of the
Roman Empire must not be allowed to go to pieces in hopeless ruin. If
not under Roman Augusti, under barbarian kings bearing one title or
another, the organisation of the Empire must be preserved. The
barbarians who had entered it, often it must be confessed merely for
plunder, were remaining in it to rule, and they could not rule by their
own unguided instincts. Their institutions, which had answered well
enough for a half-civilised people, leading their simple, primitive life
in the clearings of the forest of Germany, were quite unfitted for the
complicated relations of the urban and social life of the Mediterranean
lands. There is one passage[4] which has been quoted almost to
weariness, but which it seems necessary to quote again, in order to show
how an enlightened barbarian chief looked upon the problem