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alone; the people who figure in the original contract having no place in the election.* Royalty is always in this stage of society but the chief of the federated feudal principalities; the king is but first among his peers (primus inter pares). France during the Carlovingian and Merovingian periods, and down to the times of Louis XI., was in fact entirely governed by the feudal aristocracy. There were pays d'obéissance-le-roi, pays des barons, and pays hors l'obéissance-le-roy. The very slight degree in which the reigning baron was elevated from his fellows is illustrated by Philip I. king of France, in 1102 buying land and doing homage to the Count de Saucerne, the king to his subject. In Spain, till the time of its greatness, the monarch was merely the most eminent of the feudal powers. The Emperor of Germany was but an elected sovereign, originally one of the aristocrats who elected him. The system became complicated by reason of incursions of the French, the Romans, and the Slaves. In Saxony, for instance, the emperor was obliged to appoint a noble or chief of the noblesse to head the army. It is an axiom, says Mirabeaut, "dans les diverses possessions de la singulière aristocratie germanique que le prince n'est que primus inter pares parmi les nobles qui forment dans chaque pays les états auxquels des événemens postérieurs ont fait admettre les villes dans un rang subordonné, et cet axiome est fondé sur les faits." These generals, duces, or dukes, soon made their office hereditary, establishing in fact a little kingdom. In England the power of the Norman king was much greater than in continental countries. A considerable portion of the landed property in England had passed through the hands of William the Conqueror,

*On the election of the Lombard kings in Italy, see Sismondi, Rep. Ital. i. 67, all free men were allowed to be present; not for the purpose of taking part in the deliberations or the election, but for the sake of publicity, that they might well know whom they were to obey.

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and was granted on his own terms. The Spartan system presents a very curious example of the retention by the military aristocracy of the right to elect their monarchs. By a series of ingenious checks they frustrated every attempt of those elected to convert the monarchical into a separate and powerful element of society. Indeed the internal jealousy of the Doric race drove them to an extraordinary shift. They feared to elect any one of themselves to assume that central dominion which was needed for the good order and unity of the nation, and they therefore sought their sovereigns from the subject race, for the best traditions concur in representing the two kings (Baoheis, doubled as a check against the erection of monarchy,) to have been Achæans, not Dorians.

On the Spartan system we therefore make two observations: First, that it is an example of the first stage of society after the superposition of a dominant over a serf race, which marks the commencement of a national existence. It is an example above all worthy of study for those who desire to possess themselves with a full knowledge of the spirit and principles of such a society, because the circumstances of the time and people afforded few of the disturbing causes which in other examples have frequently confounded the spectator. It likewise had the advantage, owing to its continuance during the times of Ionian literature, of being described by some of the master minds of Athens, who saw it in their own day in action. The second point to which attention should be called, is the singular foresight of the legislators. Their object was to stereotype the state of society, and to prevent the growth of that progress which it will be our business in other instances to trace. And as far as human power could effect it, they did stop all progress. The Lacedæmonian nation remained in its first stage, with scarcely any modification, till it was destroyed by Augustus. The dominant Spartans adhered to the laws of their legislator, and kept themselves for ages, by the

most rigorous discipline and devotion to the state, free from all causes of enervation, and able to put down the revolutions of Helots with as strong an arm as that with which their ancestors had conquered the old inhabitants of Laconia. Some luxury and degeneracy at last crept in; money and the love of it were introduced by Lysander*; the Spartan race by never admitting a new family into their number, gradually dwindled: they were compelled to hire mercenaries for their wars, and at last the final blow was given to this long-enduring constitution by the admission of the perioici to full civil rights. But by that time the character of all the classes in the state had degenerated, and it never entered on the career of national progress, but perished in the general destruction of Grecian nationalities by the Romans. Had the early rulers of every nation been as longsighted and as patiently obeyed as the Spartans, all mankind would have lived for ever under rigid aristocracies, so that the world may congratulate itself that the legislators of other nations have possessed the gift of not foreseeing the future.

The points in which the Spartans differed from the normal condition of that stage of society, were chiefly in the checks imposed by the legislator on the elements of change for instance in the ephors and the senate, whose duty it was to prevent the king from assuming that absolute power which sovereigns are usually supposed to desire, and in the spirit of devotion to the interests of the state, which was inculcated on every Spartan, and observed by most of them, so that the Spartans did not settle into separate baronies, each a little nucleus for a crowd of subjects, but remained, like their first ancestors who won Laconia, for ever living a camp life.

The native chieftains of tribes are not only the leading warriors, but often the chief officiating persons at the

* Xenoph. Repub. Lac. c. 14. Grote, Hist. Greece, ix. 322. On the deep degeneracy of Sparta in the time of Xanthippus, see Niebuhr, iii. 589.

public prayers and sacrifices. This we know to have been the case with the reigning Homeric Barthes, and the same sacred duties appear, with scarcely less certainty, to have been in part performed by the German chieftains. "Nobilitas" in some of the early Teutonic tribes, consisted in a descent from Odin, and the reigning barons (Barnes), who had evidently been originally elected by their fellows, when they had made their supremacy hereditary, fabled that their ancestors received the sceptre from Zeus himself. The divine right of kings was an early production of inventive man. This notion of godlike

descent laid down for the leaders of the tribes a fixed line of demarcation from the general herd. It is difficult to conceive how it was first introduced, but it remained in great vitality before the introduction of Christianity among the Saxons. The seven kingdoms of this island were never ruled by any but the descendants of Odin. After the conversion of the Saxons, the chiefs ceased to consider warlike enemies as entitled to the first place in their estimation, but, says Thierry*, the successors of Hengst, Horse, Kerdic, Elle and Ide, no longer wielded the battle axe and surrounded themselves with a train of warriors, but betook themselves to founding monasteries and obtaining the favour of the Pope. At the consecration of a monastery, the chiefs and the bishops, with the king and his family in their centre, assembled as for a national ceremony. Subsequently the good understanding between Rome and the Saxon chiefs was broken off, and at the conquest the Norman clergy seized on the sacred offices of the conquered chieftains. Naturally, on all occasions, after the invasion of a superior race, the high offices of state-religion are usurped by the conquerors. And herein may perhaps be found one of the causes why the Mussulman conquerors of Christian countries failed in effecting a sufficient coalition with their

* Conquête d'Angl. i. 94.

subjects to found national bodies. Races originally one, like the Dorians and Eolians, possessed the same groundwork of religious belief, the differences were comparatively trifling, and the rites of the superior tribe were often adopted by their subjects; the previous invaders had sometimes embraced a new religion, as the Franks and Lombards, while the Scandinavians retained their old paganism, till, conquering their Christian kinsmen, they adopted their new religion, but Moslem and Christian. could never unite.*

Those who have reflected on the prevailing thoughts and feelings of these early ages, will easily perceive the enormous increase of power acquired by aristocrats, who became also pontiffs. The human mind, undisciplined by science, abandoned to the uncontrolled influence of a lively imagination, ever active in bestowing an existence on any cause of fear, recognises force, the immediate result of will, as the direct cause of every event. Force and uncontrolled will in human affairs have become associated in the minds of the people with the action of the invaders to whose brute power they have yielded, whose orders and wishes they obey. If to this is added the idea that these men are likewise in direct communication with the unknown power by which the universe is moved at will, religious awe is added to personal fear, and respect for these superior beings becomes a fixed sentiment in the minds of the subject populace. Accordingly, in proportion as the professions of priest and warrior are more closely combined, their tenure of

*The bigotry of the Spanish character was the effect of a war between races who made a difference of creed their watchword. The inquisition would never have been a Spanish institution but for the Mahometan conquest, which implanted a devotion to one faith so strong in the Spanish character that the love of persecuting, confined originally to persecuting Jews and Mahometans, at last became a generalised love of persecuting every one not orthodox according to the Spanish standard.

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