d that the
king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired
to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work
the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince
refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be
deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in
even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and
violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there
were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay
him.[29]

These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the
principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his
faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the
Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St.
Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman
jurists of Bologna, like Azo.

These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of
political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages,
and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the
control of the common affairs of the community by means of the
representation of the community. For it should be more clearly
understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation
of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men--to whom even yet
the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct--it was these
men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized
government has been built up.

There is, however, yet another aspect of the development of political
civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the
nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these
centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the
administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no
clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than
this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life
of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously
by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss
the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles
the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial