Amidst the ruins of the Roman Empire, we discerned all the essential elements of our Europe; we saw them come out and grow into prominence, each on its own account, and independently. During the first epoch of our history, we became aware of the constant tendency of those elements to separation and isolation, to a local and special existence. Then, when this object appeared attained, when feudalism, the boroughs, and the church, had each taken its distinct form and place, we found them immediately bent upon a reconcilement and union, upon forming themselves into a general society, a national body and government. To obtain that result, all the different systems which co-existed in the various countries of Europe were successively applied to; the principle of social unity, the political and moral nucleus, was sought from theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, and royalty. We have seen that so far these attempts failed, and that no one system or influence was enabled to monopolise society, and by its sway to secure it a really public organisation. We discovered the cause of the failure to consist in the absence of general interests and ideas, in everything being still too special, individual, and local; and it was evident that a prolonged and energetic effort at centralisation was required, to enable society simultaneously to extend and cement itself--in other words, to become at once both great and regular--a goal for which it naturally longs. It was in this state that we left Europe at the end of the fourteenth century. Europe was not able rightly to understand her position, such as I have endeavoured to display it. She did not know distinctly what were her deficiencies, or what remedies were needful. Yet she applied herself to seek out those remedies as if she had been perfectly aware of them. The miscarriage of all the grand attempts at political organisation having been made apparent, Europe fell naturally, and as if by instinct, into the ways of centralisation. {183} The fifteenth century is characterised by having constantly tended to this result, by having laboured to create general interests and general ideas, to extirpate the spirit of speciality and locality, to unite and rear together existences and minds; in fine, to call into being what had never previously existed on a large scale--nations and governments. The outbreak of this fact belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the fifteenth served to prepare it. The object of our immediate inquiry is that preparation, that imperceptible working towards centralisation, both in social relations and in ideas, which was afterwards accomplished by the natural course of events, without foresight or design.