custom had conspired to sap the ideas and principles that we regard as
essentially Roman. The civil was now subjected to the military power.
The authority of the state was impaired by the growth of private
jurisdictions and defied by the quasi-feudal retinues of the great. For
civic equality had been substituted an irrational system of
class-privileges and class-burdens. Law was ceasing to be the orderly
development of general principles, and was becoming an accumulation of
ill-considered, inconsistent edicts. So far had decay advanced through
the negligence of those most vitally concerned that, if Europe was ever
to learn again the highest lessons which Rome had existed to teach, the
first step must be to sweep away the hybrid government which still
claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials of the fifth
century possessed the writings in which those lessons were recorded, but
possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long
training in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was
necessary before the European mind could again be brought into touch
with the old Roman spirit.

The great service that the barbarians rendered was a service of
destruction. In doing so they prepared the way for a return to the past.
Their first efforts in reconstruction were also valuable, since the
difficulty of the work and the clumsiness of the product revived the
respect of men for the superior skill of Rome. In the end the barbarians
succeeded in that branch of constructive statesmanship where Rome had
failed most signally. The new states which they founded were smaller and
feebler than the Western Empire, but furnished new opportunities for the
development of individuality, and made it possible to endow citizenship
with active functions and moral responsibilities. That these states
laboured under manifold defects was obvious to those who made them and
lived under them. The ideal of the world-wide Empire, maintaining