There has been no scarcity in this world of aristocracies and despotisms.  There have been peoples arbitrarily governed, nay, absolutely possessed by a single man, by a college of priests, by a body of patricians.  But none of these despotic governments was like the feudal system.

In the case where the sovereign power has been placed in the hands of a single man, the condition of the people has been servile and woful.  At bottom the feudal system was somewhat better; and it will presently be explained why.  Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that that condition often appeared less burdensome, and obtained more easy acceptance than the feudal system.  It was because, under the great absolute monarchies, men did, nevertheless, obtain some sort of equality and tranquillity.  A shameful equality and a fatal tranquillity, no doubt; but such as peoples are sometimes contented with under the dominance of certain circumstances, or in the last gasp of their existence.  Liberty, equality, and tranquillity were all alike wanting, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, to the inhabitants of each lord’s domains; their sovereign was at their very doors, and none of them was hidden from him, or beyond reach of his mighty arm.  Of all tyrannies, the worst is that which can thus keep account of its subjects, and which sees, from its seat, the limits of its empire.  The caprices of the human will then show themselves in all their intolerable extravagance, and, moreover, with irresistible promptness.  It is then, too, that inequality of conditions makes itself more rudely felt; riches, might, independence, every advantage and every right present themselves every instant to the gaze of misery, weakness, and servitude.  The inhabitants of fiefs could not find consolation in the bosom of tranquillity; incessantly mixed up in the quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbors’ devastations, they led a life still more precarious and still more restless than that of the lords themselves, and they had to put up at one and the same time with the presence of war, privilege, and absolute power.  Nor did the rule of feudalism differ less from that of a college of priests or a senate of patricians than from the despotism of an individual.  In the two former systems we have an aristocratic body governing the mass of the people; in the feudal system we have an aristocracy resolved into individuals, each of whom governs on his own private account a certain number of persons dependent upon him alone.  Be the aristocratic body a clergy, its power has its root in creeds which are common to itself and its subjects.  Now, in every creed common to those who command and those who obey there is a moral tie, an element of sympathetic equality, and on the part of those who obey a tacit adhesion to the rule.  Be it a senate of patricians that reigns, it cannot govern so capriciously, so arbitrarily, as an individual.  There are differences and discussions in the very bosom of the government;