oman forms have faded
away. An entirely new polity has succeeded. No great popular assembly
asserts its sovereignty, as in the ancient German epoch; no generals and
temporary kings are chosen by the nation. The elective power had been
lost under the Romans, who, after conquest, had conferred the
administrative authority over their subject provinces upon officials
appointed by the metropolis. The Franks pursued the same course. In
Charlemagne's time, the revolution is complete. Popular assemblies and
popular election entirely vanish. Military, civil, and judicial
officers-dukes, earls, margraves, and others--are all king's creatures,
'knegton des konings, pueri regis', and so remain, till they abjure the
creative power, and set up their own. The principle of Charlemagne, that
his officers should govern according to local custom, helps them to
achieve their own independence, while it preserves all that is left of
national liberty and law.

The counts, assisted by inferior judges, hold diets from time to
time--thrice, perhaps, annually. They also summon assemblies in case of
war. Thither are called the great vassals, who, in turn, call their
lesser vassals; each armed with "a shield, a spear, a bow, twelve arrows,
and a cuirass." Such assemblies, convoked in the name of a distant
sovereign, whose face his subjects had never seen, whose language they
could hardly understand, were very different from those tumultuous
mass-meetings, where boisterous freemen, armed with the weapons they
loved the best, and arriving sooner or later, according to their
pleasure, had been accustomed to elect their generals and magistrates and
to raise them upon their shields. The people are now governed, their
rulers appointed by an invisible hand. Edicts, issued by a power, as it
were, supernatural, demand implicit obedience. The people, acquiescing in
their own annihilation, abdicate not only their political but their
personal rights. On the other hand, the great source of power diffuses
less and less of light and warmth. Losing its attractive and controlling
influence, it becomes gradually eclipsed, while its satellites fly from
their prescribed bounds and chaos and darkness return. The sceptre,
stretched over realms so wide, requires stronger hands than those of
degenerate Carlovingians. It breaks asunder. Functionaries become
sovereigns, with hereditary, not delegated, right to own the people, to
tax their roads and rivers, to take tithings