the presence of the Pope and his
constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became
like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result
rather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but
there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and
therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his
great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The
Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.

By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this
decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of
antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial
chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall
speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism
tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind
of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The
later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly
resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at
last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more
distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is,
he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the
land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the
old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a
difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man
being a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his
throne-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his
slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow
changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His
status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.

What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of
letters, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration
of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this
decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of
wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as
things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic
locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even
in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least w