tion of
the provinces against Rome assisted in establishing the empire The
Caesarean system gave an unprecedented freedom to the dependencies, and
raised them to a civil equality which put an end to the dominion of race
over race and of class over class. The monarchy was hailed as a refuge
from the pride and cupidity of the Roman people; and the love of
equality, the hatred of nobility, and the tolerance of despotism
implanted by Rome became, at least in Gaul, the chief feature of the
national character. But among the nations whose vitality had been broken
down by the stern republic, not one retained the materials necessary to
enjoy independence, or to develop a new history. The political faculty
which organises states and finds society in a moral order was exhausted,
and the Christian doctors looked in vain over the waste of ruins for a
people by whose aid the Church might survive the decay of Rome. A new
element of national life was brought to that declining world by the
enemies who destroyed it. The flood of barbarians settled over it for a
season, and then subsided; and when the landmarks of civilisation
appeared once more, it was found that the soil had been impregnated with
a fertilising and regenerating influence, and that the inundation had
laid the germs of future states and of a new society. The political
sense and energy came with the new blood, and was exhibited in the power
exercised by the younger race upon the old, and in the establishment of
a graduated freedom. Instead of universal equal rights, the actual
enjoyment of which is necessarily contingent on, and commensurate with,
power, the rights of the people were made dependent on a variety of
conditions, the first of which was the distribution of property. Civil
society became a classified organism instead of a formless combination
of atoms, and the feudal system gradually arose.

Roman Gaul had so thoroughly adopted the ideas of absolute authority and
undistinguished equality during the five centuries between Caesar and
Clovis, that the people could never be reconciled to the new system.
Feudalism remained a foreign importation, and the feudal aristocracy an
alien race, and the common people of France sought protection against
both in the Roman jurisprudence and the power of the crown. The
development of absolute monarchy by the help of democracy is the one
constant character of French history. The royal power, feudal at first,
and limited by the immu