darkness. The rust of barbarism became harder and thicker. The last hope
of man had fled, and glory was succeeded by shame. Even slavery, the
curse of the Roman Empire, was continued by the barbarians; only, brute
force was not made subservient to intellect, but intellect to brute
force. The descendants of ancient patrician families were in bondage to
barbarians. The age was the jubilee of monsters. Assassination was
common, and was unavenged by law. Every man was his own avenger of
crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law.

Nor were there seen among the barbaric chieftains the virtues of ancient
Pagan Rome and Greece, for Christianity was nominal. War was universal;
for the barbarians, having no longer the Romans to fight, fought among
themselves. There were incessant irruptions of different tribes passing
from one country to another, in search of plunder and pillage. There was
no security of life or property, and therefore no ambition for
acquisition. Men hid themselves in morasses, in forests, on the tops of
inaccessible hills, and amid the recesses of valleys, for violence was
the rule and not the exception. Even feudalism was not then born, and
still less chivalry. We find no elevated sentiments. The only refuge for
the miserable was in the Church, and the Church was governed by narrow
and ignorant priests. A cry of despair went up to heaven among the
descendants of the old population. There was no commerce, no travel, no
industries, no money, no peace. The chastisement of Almighty Power seems
to have been sent on the old races and the new alike. It was a
desolation greater than that predicted by Jeremy the prophet. The very
end of the world seemed to be at hand. Never in the old seats of
civilization was there such a disintegration; never such a combination
of evils and miseries. And there appeared to be no remedy: nothing but a
long night of horrors and sufferings could be predicted. Gaul, or
France, was the scene of turbulence, invasions, and anarchies; of