been a dream of ambition and ignorance on the part of a great man, but a
barbarian. Political unity and central, absolute power had been the
essential characteristics of that empire. They became introduced and
established, through a long succession of ages, on the ruins of the
splendid Roman Republic destroyed by its own dissensions, under favor of
the still great influence of the old Roman senate though fallen from its
high estate, and beneath the guardianship of the Roman legions and
Imperial praetorians. Not one of these conditions, not one of these
forces, was to be met with in the Roman world reigned over by
Charlemagne. The nation of the Franks and Charlemagne himself were but
of yesterday; the new Emperor had neither ancient senate to hedge at the
same time that it obeyed him, nor old bodies of troops to support him.
Political unity and absolute power were repugnant alike to the
intellectual and the social condition, to the national manners and
personal sentiments of the victorious barbarians. The necessity of
placing their conquests beyond the reach of a new swarm of barbarians
and the personal ascendency of Charlemagne were the only things which
gave his government a momentary gleam of success in the way of unity and
of factitious despotism under the name of empire. In 814 Charlemagne had
made territorial security an accomplished fact; but the personal power
he had exercised disappeared with him. The new Gallo-Frankish community
recovered, under the mighty but gradual influence of Christianity, its
proper and natural course, producing disruption into different local
communities and bold struggles for individual liberties, either one with
another, or against whosoever tried to become their master.

As for the second fact, the formation of the three kingdoms which were
the issue of the treaty of Verdun, various explanations have been given
of it. This distribution of certain peoples of Western Europe into three
distinct and independent groups, Italians, Germans, and French, has been