the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the
empire of the West.
In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men
that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest
writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling
that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by
despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had
kings, did not preside at their councils; they were sometimes elective;
they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in
obedience with the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in
war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an
occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all
free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities,
is the remote germ of Parliamentary government. The action of the State
was confined to narrow limits; but, besides his position as head of the
State, the king was surrounded by a body of followers attached to him by
personal or political ties. In these, his immediate dependants,
disobedience or resistance to orders was no more tolerated than in a
wife, a child, or a soldier; and a man was expected to murder his own
father if his chieftain required it. Thus these Teutonic communities
admitted an independence of government that threatened to dissolve
society; and a dependence on persons that was dangerous to freedom. It
was a system very favourable to corporations, but offering no security
to individuals. The State was not likely to oppress its subjects; and
was not able to protect them.
The first effect of the great Teutonic migration into the regions
civilised by Rome was to throw back Europe many centuries to a condition
scarcely more advanced than that from which the institutions of Solon
had rescued Athens. Whilst the Greeks preserved the literature, the
arts, and the science of antiquity and all the sacred monuments of early
Christianity with a completeness of which the rended fragments that have
come down to us give no commensurate idea, and even the peasants of
Bulgaria knew the New Testament by heart, Western Europe lay under the
grasp of masters the ablest of whom could not write their names. The
faculty of exact reasoning, of accurate observation, became extinct for
five hundred years, and even the sciences most needful to society,
medicine and geometry, fell into decay, until the t
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