centres of political life, out of the various provinces of the Roman
world. In the course of this development the Teutonic representative
assembly is at first everywhere discernible, in some form or other,
as in the Spanish Cortes or the States-General of France, but on the
continent it generally dies out. Only in such nooks as Switzerland and
the Netherlands does it survive. In the great nations it succumbs before
the encroachments of the crown. The comparatively novel Teutonic idea of
power delegated by the people to their representatives had not become
deeply enough rooted in the political soil of the continent; and
accordingly we find it more and more disused and at length almost
forgotten, while the old and deeply rooted Roman idea of power delegated
by the governing body to its lieutenants and prefects usurps its place.
Let us observe some of the most striking features of this growth of
modern nationalities. [Sidenote: Conflict between Roman Idea and English
Idea begins to become clearly visible in the thirteenth century]

The reader of medieval history cannot fail to be impressed with the
suddenness with which the culmination of the Holy Roman Empire, in
the thirteenth century, was followed by a swift decline. The imperial
position of the Hapsburgs was far less splendid than that of the
Hohenstauffen; it rapidly became more German and less European, until
by and by people began to forget what the empire originally meant.
The change which came over the papacy was even more remarkable. The
grandchildren of the men who had witnessed the spectacle of a king of
France and a king of England humbled at the feet of Innocent III., the
children of the men who had found the gigantic powers of a Frederick II.
unequal to the task of curbing the papacy, now beheld the successors of
St. Peter carried away to Avignon, there to be kept for seventy years
under the supervision of the kings of France. Henceforth the glory of
the papacy in its political aspect was to be but the faint shadow of