The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the last links with the Roman Empire of the East—that is, with the supreme head at Constantinople—gradually dissolved in the West, and that the modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done. This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic, Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners, and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church. On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners were the reality of that time. We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the nature of its institutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves. As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the _Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the Council of Great Men) to new holders. The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the “chieftain” of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race (which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It explains both what happened and what was to happen. That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind—the result of centuries of Roman development in that direction—is the key to all the material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise, with an object lesson for our own politics today.