In the first place, the turbulence thus arising was a
serious obstacle to the formation of closely-coherent political
aggregates; as we see exemplified in the terrible convulsions of the
fifth and sixth centuries, and again in the ascendency acquired by the
isolating features of feudalism between the time of Charles the Great
and the time of Louis VI. of France. In the second place, this
perpetual turbulence was a serious obstacle to the preservation of
popular liberties. It is a very difficult thing for a free people to
maintain its free, constitution if it has to keep perpetually fighting
for its life. The "one-man-power." less fit for, carrying on the
peaceful pursuits of life, is sure to be brought into the foreground in
a state of endless warfare. It is a still more difficult thing for a
free people to maintain its free constitution when it undertakes to
govern a dependent people despotically, as has been wont to happen when
a portion of the barbaric world has been overcome and annexed to the
civilized world. Under the weight, of these two difficulties combined,
the free institutions of the ancient Romans succumbed, and their
government gradually passed into the hands of a kind of close
corporation more despotic than anything else of the sort that Europe has
ever seen. This despotic character--this tendency, if you will pardon
the phrase, towards the _Asiaticization_ of European life--was continued
by inheritance in the Roman Church, the influence of which was
beneficent so long as it constituted a wholesome check to the isolating
tendencies of feudalism, but began to become noxious the moment these
tendencies yielded to the centralizing monarchical tendency in nearly
all parts of Europe.
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