The great service that the barbarians rendered was a
service of destruction. In doing so they prepared the way for a return to the
past. Their first efforts in reconstruction were also valuable, since the difficulty
of the work and the clumsiness of the product revived the respect of men for
the superior skill of Rome. In the end the barbarians succeeded in that branch
of constructive statesmanship where Rome had failed most signally. The new
states which they founded were smaller and feebler than the Western Empire, but
furnished new opportunities for the development of individuality, and made it
possible to endow citizenship with active functions and moral responsibilities.
That these states laboured under manifold defects was obvious to those who made
them and lived under them. The ideal of the world-wide Empire, maintaining universal
peace and the brotherhood of men, continued to haunt the imagination of the
Middle Ages as a lost possibility. But in this case, as so often, what passed
for a memory was in truth an aspiration; and Europe was advancing towards a
higher form of unity than that which had been destroyed.
