was but slowly and with much trouble that it succeeded in freeing itself from feudalism.  Nothing could be more strangely troubled than the West at the time of the dissolution of the Empire of the Caesars; nothing more diverse or more discordant than the interests, the institutions, and the state of society, which were delivered to the Germans (Figs. 1 and 2).  In fact, it would be impossible in the whole pages of history to find a society formed of more heterogeneous or incompatible elements.  On the one side might be placed the Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, Germans, Franks, Saxons, and Lombards, nations, or more strictly hordes, accustomed to rough and successful warfare, and, on the other, the Romans, including those people who by long servitude to Roman dominion had become closely allied with their conquerors (Fig. 3).  There were, on both sides, freemen, freedmen, colons, and slaves; different ranks and degrees being, however, observable both in freedom and servitude.  This hierarchical principle applied itself even to the land, which was divided into freeholds, tributary lands, lands of the nobility, and servile lands, thus constituting the freeholds, the benefices, the fiefs, and the tenures.  It may be added that the customs, and to a certain degree the laws, varied according to the masters of the country, so that it can hardly be wondered at that everywhere diversity and inequality were to be found, and, as a consequence, that anarchy and confusion ruled supreme.

[Illustration:  Figs. 1 and 2.—­Costumes of the Franks from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original Documents in the great Libraries of Europe.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 3.—­Costumes of Roman Soldiers.  Fig. 4.—­Costume of German Soldiers.  From Miniatures on different Manuscripts, from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries.]

The Germans (Fig. 4) had brought with them over the Rhine none of the heroic virtues attributed to them by Tacitus when he wrote their history, with the evident intention of making a satire on his countrymen.  Amongst the degenerate Romans whom those ferocious Germans had subjugated, civilisation was reconstituted on the ruins of vices common in the early history of a new society by the adoption of a series of loose and dissolute habits, both by the conquerors and the conquered.

[Illustration:  Fig. 5.—­Costumes of Slaves or Serfs, from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original Documents in the great Libraries of Europe.]

In fact, the conquerors contributed the worse share (Fig. 5); for, whilst exercising the low and debasing instincts of their former barbarism, they undertook the work of social reconstruction with a sort of natural and innate servitude.  To them, liberty, the desire for which caused them to brave the greatest dangers, was simply the right of doing evil—­of obeying their ardent thirst for plunder.  Long ago, in the depths of their forests, they had adopted the curious institution of vassalage.  When they came to the West to create States, instead of reducing personal power, every step in their social edifice, from the top to the bottom, was made to depend on individual superiority.  To bow to a superior was their first political principle; and on that principle feudalism was one day to find its base.