So much for civilisation in general.  It is now necessary to point out the essential difference between modern European and other civilisations.  The characteristic of other civilisations has been unity; they seem to have emanated from a single fact, a single idea.  In Egypt and India, for example, the theocratic principle was dominant; in the Greek and Phoenician republics, the democratic principle.  The civilisation of modern Europe, on the contrary, is diverse, confused, stormy; all the forms and principles of social organisation theocratic, monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, co-exist in it; there are infinite gradations of liberty, wealth, influence.  All the various forces are in a state of constant struggle; yet all of them have a certain family resemblance, as it were, that we cannot but recognise.

These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise with the rest.  The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over the other civilisations.  European civilisation, if I may say so, has entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God.

II.—­Feudalism

It would be an important confirmation of my assertion as to the diverse character of our civilisation if we should find in its very cradle the causes and the elements of that diversity.  And indeed, at the fall of the Roman empire, we do so find it.  Three forms of society, each entirely different from the other, are visible at this time of chaos.  The municipalities survived, the last remnant of the Imperial system.  The Christian Church survived.  And in the third place there were the Barbarians, who brought with them a military organisation, and a hardy individual independence, that were wholly new to the peoples who had dwelt under the shelter of the empire.  The Barbarian epoch was the chaos of all the elements, the infancy of all the systems, a universal hubbub in which even conflict itself had no definite or permanent effects.

Europe laboured to escape from this confusion; at some times, and in some places, it was temporarily checked—­in particular by the great Charlemagne in his revival of the imperial power; but the confusion did not cease until its causes no longer acted.  These causes were two—­one material, one moral.  The material cause was the irruption of fresh Barbarian hordes.  The moral cause was the lack of any ideas in common among men as to the structure of society.  The old imperial fabric had disappeared; Charlemagne’s restoration of it depended wholly on his own personality, and did not survive him; men had no ideas of any new structure—­their intellectual horizon was limited to their own affairs.  By the beginning of the tenth century the Barbarian invasions ended, and as the populations settled down a new system appeared, based partly on the Barbarians’ love of independence, partly on their plans of military gradation—­the system of feudalism.