there may be, nay, there always are, formed factions, parties which, in order to arrive at their own ends, strive to conciliate the favor of the people, sometimes take in hand its interests, and, however bad may be its condition, the people, by sharing in its masters’ rivalries, exercises some sort of influence over its own destiny.  Feudalism was not, properly speaking, an aristocratic government, a senate of kings—­to use the language used by Cineas to Pyrrhus; it was a collection of individual despotisms, exercised by isolated aristocrats, each of whom, being sovereign in his own domains, had to give no account to another, and asked nobody’s opinion about his conduct towards his subjects.

Is it astonishing that such a system incurred, on the part of the peoples, more hatred than even those which had reduced them to a more monotonous and more lasting servitude?  There was despotism, just as in pure monarchies, and there was privilege, just as in the very closest aristocracies.  And both obtruded themselves in the most offensive, and, so to speak, crude form.  Despotism was not tapered off by means of the distant and elevation of a throne; and privilege did not veil itself behind the majesty of a large body.  Both were the appurtenances of an individual ever present and ever alone, ever at his subjects’ doors, and never called upon, in dealing with their lot, to gather his peers around him.

And now we will leave the subjects in the case of feudalism, and consider the masters, the owners of fiefs, and their relations one with another.  We here behold quite a different spectacle; we see liberties, rights, and guarantees, which not only give protection and honor to those who enjoy them, but of which the tendency and effect are to open to the subject population an outlet towards a better future.

It could not, in fact, be otherwise:  for, on the one hand, feudal society was not wanting in dignity and glory; and, on the other, the feudal system did not, as the theocracy of Egypt or the despotism of Asia did, condemn its subjects irretrievably to slavery.  It oppressed them; but they ended by having the power as well as the will to go free.

It is the fault of pure monarchy to set up power so high, and encompass it with such splendor, that the possessor’s head is turned, and that those who are beneath it dare scarcely look upon it.  The sovereign thinks himself a god; and the people fall down and worship him.  But it was not so in society under owners of fiefs:  the grandeur was neither dazzling nor unapproachable; it was but a short step from vassal to suzerain; they lived familiarly one with another, without any possibility that superiority should think itself illimitable, or subordination think itself servile.  Thence came that extension of the domestic circle, that ennoblement of personal service, from which sprang one of the most generous sentiments of the middle ages, fealty, which reconciled the dignity of the man with the devotion of the vassal.