he
people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were the Franks, who had
no native nobility, whose law of succession to the Crown became for one
thousand years the fixed object of an unchanging superstition, and under
whom the feudal system was developed to excess.

Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no
other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the
landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became
paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the
State. Every baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own
domain. The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of
local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon
the scene which proved for a time superior alike to the vassal and his
lord.

In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed the liberties of
England, the rude institutions which had come with the Saxons, the
Goths, and the Franks from the forests of Germany were suffering decay,
and the new element of popular government afterwards supplied by the
rise of towns and the formation of a middle class was not yet active.
The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the
ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision, when the process
of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church by subjecting the
prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the kings
which was peculiar to the Teutonic state.

To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty.
If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the kings whom it
anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided
victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite
despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute
authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove,
it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called
the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their
franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament
out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it
prevented the rise of divine right. A disposition existed to regard the
crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the
family that possessed it. But the authority of religion, and especially
of the papacy, was thrown on