eir interests were not remotely separated from those of other
commoners. Hence after the establishment of a House of Commons, their
best chance for a political career lay in representing the interests of
the people in the lower house. Hence between the upper and lower strata
of English society there has always been kept up a circulation or
interchange of ideas and interests, and the effect of this upon English
history has been prodigious. While on the continent a sovereign like
Charles the Bold could use his nobility to extinguish the liberties of
the merchant towns of Flanders, nothing of the sort was ever possible in
England. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every contest between the people
and the crown, the weight of the peerage was thrown into the scale in
favour of popular liberties. But for this peculiar position of the
peerage we might have had no Earl Simon; it is largely through it that
representative government and local liberties have been preserved to the
English race.

In France the course of events has brought about very different results.
I shall defer to my next lecture the consideration of the vicissitudes
of local self-government under the Roman Empire, because that point is
really incident upon the study of the formation of vast national
aggregates. Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons overcame Gaul,
they became rulers over a population which had been subjected for five
centuries to that slow but mighty process of trituration which the
Empire everywhere brought to bear upon local self-government. While the
Teutons in Britain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized subjects
and gave little heed to their language, religion, or customs; the
Teutons in Gaul, on the other hand, quickly adopted the language and
religion of their intensely romanized subjects and acquired to some
extent their way of looking at things. Hence in the early history of
France there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan liberties to be
dealt with as in the early history of England. Nor was there any
powerful middle class distributed through the country to defend such
liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent throng of Teutonic nobles,
among whom the king was only the most exalted and not always the
strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population which had so long been
accustomed to be ruled without representation by a distant government
exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic
rank and file