and more highly organised than any power which had arisen in Britain
since the Roman period. In Germany the Saxon line, beginning with Henry
the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary,
and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In
France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a
degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to
assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in
favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the
restoration of the Empire. The new royal dynasties did good work; even
the weakest among them, that of France, served as a symbol of unity, as
a rallying point for the clergy and all other friends of peace; but both
on practical grounds and on grounds of sentiment they left much to be
desired. National monarchy meant national wars and the right of national
churches to misgovern themselves according to their several
inclinations. Every year the rent in the seamless robe of Christendom
grew wider; political unity was disappearing, and religious unity would
soon go the same way. The kingly title made but a slight appeal to the
imagination or the conscience; with whatever ceremonies a King was
crowned, the real source of his power was the position which he held,
independently of his office, as a chief of a tribal or a feudal group;
of men who, as St. Odo bitterly remarked, being oppressed took to
themselves a lord that with his help they might become oppressors.
Sovereign power had lost all poetry and dignity; it was being perverted
to serve petty ends. An Emperor was needed to restore a higher sense of
justice, to exalt the spiritual above the material side of life.

So the idealists reasoned, and in Germany their arguments found willing
converts. This may appear strange, since Germany had taken the lead in
repudiating the Carolingian Empire, and Henry the Fowler, who
established the new German monarchy, was the reverse of an idealist. But