This analysis helps us to understand why the Western
Empire, on the eve of dissolution, had already assumed the appearance of a
semi-barbarian state. In those districts which had been lately settled with
Teutonic colonists the phenomenon may be explained as resulting from over-sanguine
attempts to civilise an intractable stock. But even in the heart of the oldest
provinces the conditions were little better. Law and custom had conspired to
sap the ideas and principles that we regard as essentially Roman. The civil was
now subjected to the military power. The authority of the state was impaired
by the growth of private jurisdictions and defied by the quasi-feudal retinues
of the great.
For civic equality had been substituted an irrational system of class-privileges
and class-burdens. Law was ceasing to be the orderly development of general
principles, and was becoming an accumulation of ill-considered, inconsistent
edicts. So far had decay advanced through the negligence of those most vitally
concerned that, if Europe was ever to learn again the highest lessons which
Rome had existed to teach, the first step must be to sweep away the hybrid
government which still claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials
of the fifth century possessed the writings in which those lessons were
recorded, but possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long training
in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was necessary before
the European mind could again be brought into touch with the old Roman spirit.
