a state of endless warfare. It is a still more difficult thing for a
free people to maintain its free constitution when it undertakes to
govern a dependent people despotically, as has been wont to happen when
a portion of the barbaric world has been overcome and annexed to the
civilized world. Under the weight, of these two difficulties combined,
the free institutions of the ancient Romans succumbed, and their
government gradually passed into the hands of a kind of close
corporation more despotic than anything else of the sort that Europe has
ever seen. This despotic character--this tendency, if you will pardon
the phrase, towards the _Asiaticization_ of European life--was continued
by inheritance in the Roman Church, the influence of which was
beneficent so long as it constituted a wholesome check to the isolating
tendencies of feudalism, but began to become noxious the moment these
tendencies yielded to the centralizing monarchical tendency in nearly
all parts of Europe. The asiaticizing tendency of Roman political life
had become so powerful by the fourth century, and has since been so
powerfully propagated through the Church, that we ought to be glad that
the Teutons came into the empire as masters rather than as subjects. As
the Germanic tribes got possession of the government in one part of
Europe after another, they brought with them free institutions again.
The political ideas of the Goths in Spain, of the Lombards in Italy, and
of the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, were as distinctly free as those
of the Angles in Britain. But as the outcome of the long and
uninterrupted turmoil of the Middle Ages, society throughout the
continent of Europe remained predominantly military in type, and this
fact greatly increased the tendency towards despotism which was
bequeathed by Rome. After the close of the thirteenth century the whole
power of the Church was finally thrown into the scale against the
liberties of the people; and as the result of all these forces combined,
we find that at the time when America was discovered government was