nk peasant. The "useless remembrance
and the vain feud" of the decaying Roman nation was dead and gone. The
social classes of the ninth century had been formed during the travail
of a new civilization, not in the demoralization of a sinking one. The
new race, masters and servants, were a race of men as compared to their
Roman predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords to serving
peasants, which had been the unavoidable result of collapse in the
antique world, was for the Franks the point of departure on a new line
of development. Moreover, unproductive as these four hundred years may
appear, they left behind one great product: the modern nationalities,
the reorganization and differentiation of West European humanity for the
coming history. The Germans had indeed infused a new life into Europe.
Therefore the dissolution of the states in the German period did not end
in a subjugation after the Norse-Saracene plan, but in a continued
development of the estate of the royal beneficiaries and an increasing
submission (commendatio) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase
of the population, that no more than two centuries later the bloody
drain of the crusades could be sustained without injury.

What was the mysterious charm by which the Germans infused a new life
into decrepit Europe? Was it an innate magic power of the German race,
as our jingo historians would have it? By no means. Of course, the
Germans were a highly gifted Aryan branch and, especially at that time,
in full process of vigorous development. They did not, however,
rejuvenate Europe by their specific national properties, but simply by
their barbarism, their gentile constitution.

Their personal efficiency and bravery, their love of liberty, and their
democratic instinct which regarded all public affairs as its own
affairs, in short all those properties which the Romans had lost and
which were alone capable of forming new states and raising new
nationalities out of the muck of the Roman world--what were they but
characteristic marks of the barbarians in the upper stage, fruits of the
gentile constitution?

If they transformed the antique form of monogamy, mitigated the male
rule in the family and gave a higher position to women than the classic
world had ever known, what enabled them to do so, unless it was their
barbarism, their gentile customs, their living inheritance of the time
of maternal law?

If they could safely transmit a trace of th