This once magnificent people was now in a state of change and decomposition. On Aquitaine and Belgium Roman civilization had as yet produced no effect. The severe habits of earlier generations remained unchanged. The Gauls proper had yielded to contact with the Province and to intercourse with Italian traders. They had built towns and villages. They had covered the land with farms and homesteads. They had made roads. They had bridged their rivers, even such rivers as the Rhone and the Loire. They had amassed wealth, and had adopted habits of comparative luxury, which, if it had not abated their disposition to fight, had diminished their capacity for fighting. Their political and perhaps their spiritual system was passing through analogous transformations. The ancient forms remained, but an altered spirit was working under them. From the earliest antiquity they had been divided into tribes and sub-tribes: each tribe and sub-tribe being practically independent, or united only by common objects and a common sentiment of race. The rule was the rule of the strong, under the rudest forms of tribal organization. The chief was either hereditary or elected, or won his command by the sword. The mass of the people were serfs. The best fighters were self-made nobles, under the chief's authority. Every man in the tribe was the chief's absolute subject; the chief, in turn, was bound to protect the meanest of them against injury from without. War, on a large scale or a small, had been the occupation of their lives. The son was not admitted into his father's presence till he was old enough to be a soldier. When the call to arms went out, every man of the required age was expected at the muster, and the last comer was tortured to death in the presence of his comrades as a lesson against backwardness.