Such is one aspect of these old arrangements; it is unnecessary to say that
with these, as with all other institutions created and worked by human
beings, the picture admits of being reversed. When by the accident of birth
men are placed in a position of authority, no care in their training will
prevent it from falling often to singularly unfit persons. The command of a
permanent military force was a temptation to ambition, to avarice, or
hatred, to the indulgence of private piques and jealousies, to political
discontent on private and personal grounds. A combination of three or four
of the leading nobles was sufficient, when an incapable prince sate on the
throne, to effect a revolution; and the rival claims of the houses of York
and Lancaster to the crown, took the form of a war unequalled in history
for its fierce and determined malignancy, the whole nation tearing itself
in pieces in a quarrel in which no principle was at stake, and no national
object was to be gained. A more terrible misfortune never befel either this
or any other country, and it was made possible only in virtue of that
loyalty with which the people followed the standard, through good and evil,
of their feudal superiors. It is still a question, however, whether the
good or the evil of the system predominated; and the answer to such
question is the more difficult because we have no criterion by which, in
these matters, degrees of good and evil admit of being measured. Arising
out of the character of the nation, it reflected this character in all its
peculiarities; and there is something truly noble in the coherence of
society upon principles of fidelity. Fidelity of man to man is among the
rarest excellences of humanity, and we can tolerate large evils which arise
out of such a cause. Under the feudal system men were held together by
oaths, free acknowledgments, and reciprocal obligations, entered into by
all ranks, high and low, binding servants to their masters, as well as
nobles to their kings; and in the frequent forms of the language in which
the oaths were sworn we cannot choose but see that we have lost something