innate servitude. To them, liberty, the desire for which caused them to
brave the greatest dangers, was simply the right of doing evil--of obeying
their ardent thirst for plunder. Long ago, in the depths of their forests,
they had adopted the curious institution of vassalage. When they came to
the West to create States, instead of reducing personal power, every step
in their social edifice, from the top to the bottom, was made to depend on
individual superiority. To bow to a superior was their first political
principle; and on that principle feudalism was one day to find its base.

Servitude was in fact to be found in all conditions and ranks, equally in
the palace of the sovereign as in the dwellings of his subjects. The
vassal who was waited on at his own table by a varlet, himself served at
the table of his lord; the nobles treated each other likewise, according
to their rank; and all the exactions which each submitted to from his
superiors, and required to be paid to him by those below him, were looked
upon not as onerous duties, but as rights and honours. The sentiment of
dignity and of personal independence, which has become, so to say, the
soul of modern society, did not exist at all, or at least but very
slightly, amongst the Germans. If we could doubt the fact, we have but to
remember that these men, so proud, so indifferent to suffering or death,
would often think little of staking their liberty in gambling, in the hope
that if successful their gain might afford them the means of gratifying
some brutal passion.

[Illustration: Fig. 6.--King or Chief of Franks armed with the Seramasax,
from a Miniature of the Ninth Century, drawn by H. de Vielcastel.]

When the Franks took root in Gaul, their dress and institutions were
adopted by the Roman society (Fig. 6). This had the most disastrous
influence in every point of view, and it is easy to prove that