Archæology is a comparatively modern branch of study; it can hardly be said to have existed as such before the third decade of the nineteenth century, when Caumont,[96] the first real archæologist, began to awaken the interest of his countrymen in the architecture of past ages and in the science and customs of antiquity. Since Caumont there have been many workers in the field, not only in France but in every civilised country, and splendid have been the results of their earnest and conscientious labours. Among the most brilliant of these may be reckoned the strong, clear light which has dissipated the darkness that so effectually hid from our eyes the degree of civilisation attained in the Middle Ages. It is only during the last thirty years that we have become aware that the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries were not a stagnant period in the world’s progress. Buckle would not have written as he did about the Middle Ages had he come into the world a couple of decades later; or, putting it in another way, had he lived a few years longer and not been suddenly cut off in his early manhood, he would certainly have modified his caustic strictures upon the times which so nearly preceded our own. Like Buckle, many other writers of his day believed implicitly that the power of the Church during the Middle Ages was such that it destroyed all individual liberty; but now we know that though religion governed all, she stifled nothing.[97] Our ancestors were religious, they were even superstitious to a very high degree, but they loved their individual liberty with a passion that the bulk of our socialistic contemporaries would be puzzled to understand. “Our proud ancestors ignored the very idea of that unlimited power of the State which is now so ardently appealed to,” wrote Montalembert, one of the greatest students of the Middle Ages, after twenty-five years of study. “A dead level has been regarded (in the nineteenth century) as a mark of progress, and identity of yoke as a guarantee. God forbid that we should assert equality to be incompatible with liberty; but up to the present time the art of making them live together has not been discovered in any of the great countries of the great European continent.... I remain sadly impressed by the spectacle of the debasement, feebleness, and growing impotence of each individual man in modern society. Does not this stupid and servile apotheosis of the wisdom and power of the masses menace us with the extinction, at once, of every personal initiative and all strong originality, and with the annihilation, at the same time, of all the proud susceptibilities of the soul and the genius of public life?”