any perceptible success. It
was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious.
It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions
to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life
and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents
to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could
send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to
give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could
make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of
the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This
they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their
turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings
was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for
kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in
the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more
powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry
brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but
long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to
take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued
to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier
and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it
sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the
avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and
exceptional consequence of peculiar ties--and from how very recent a
date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even
pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do
people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never
had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of
general opinion which never would have permitted their first