Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/194

188 the new serf, there had been the free Frank peasant. The "useless remembrance and the vain feud" of the decaying Roman nation was dead and gone. The social classes of the ninth century had been formed during the travail of a new civilization, not in the demoralization of a sinking one. The new race, masters and servants, were a race of men as compared to their Roman predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords to serving peasants, which had been the unavoidable result of collapse in the antique world, was for the Franks the point of departure on a new line of development. Moreover, unproductive as these four hundred years may appear, they left behind one great product: the modern nationalities, the reorganization and differentiation of West European humanity for the coming history. The Germans had indeed infused a new life into Europe. Therefore the dissolution of the states in the German period did not end in a subjugation after the Norse-Saracene plan, but in a continued development of the estate of the royal beneficiaries and an increasing submission (commendatio) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase of the population, that no more than two centuries later the bloody drain of the crusades could be sustained without injury.

What was the mysterious charm by which the Germans infused a new life into decrepit Europe? Was it an innate magic power of the German race, as our jingo historians would have it? By no means. Of course, the Germans were a highly gifted Aryan branch and, especially at that time, in full process of vigorous development. They did not, however, rejuvenate Europe by their specific national properties, but simply by their barbarism, their gentile constitution. Their personal efficiency and bravery, their love of liberty, and their democratic instinct which