We will leave where they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms, and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France.  There we recognize the same fact; there the same work of dismemberment is going on.  About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, the former governors of which, under the names of dukes, counts, marquises, and viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns.  Twenty-nine great fiefs, which have played a special part in French history, date back to this epoch.

These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a perfectly similar independence; there were certain ties uniting them to other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became the basis, or, one might say, the constitution of the feudal community; but their prevailing feature was, nevertheless, isolation, personal existence.  They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment of a great territory; those local governments were formed at the expense of a central power.

From the end of the ninth pass we to the end of the tenth century, to the epoch when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians.  Instead of seven kingdoms to replace the empire of Charlemagne, there were then no more than four.  The kingdoms of Provence and Trans-juran Burgundy had formed, by re-union, the kingdom of Arles.  The kingdom of Lorraine was no more than a duchy in dispute between Allemannia and France.  The Emperor Otho the Great had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of.  Allemannia.  Overtures had produced their effects amongst the great states.  But in the interior of the kingdom of France, dismemberment had held on its course; and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great fiefs observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of the tenth, fifty-five actually established. (Vide Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation, t. ii., pp. 238-246.)

Now, how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished?  What causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the unity of the empire?  Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of all human calculation, one moral and the other political.  They were the absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea; and the reflux, in social relations and manners, of the individual liberties but lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne.  In times of formation or transition, states and governments conform to the measure, one had almost said to the height, of the men of the period, their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character; when ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a confined circle, when means of action and expansion are wanting to men, communities become petty and local, just as the thoughts and existence of their members are.  Such was