2_nd_, In a social point of view, it failed in founding either legal order or political guarantees. It was a system indispensable to give a new commencement in Europe to the society so utterly dissolved by barbarism as to be incapable of a more regular or extended form, and the feudal form, radically bad in itself, could neither be reduced to regularity, nor be made expansive. The only political right that the feudal system has given prevalence to in the European society, is the right of resistance. I do not speak of legal resistance, for that could not become a question in a society so little advanced. The progress of society alone effects the substitution, on the one hand, of public powers for individual wills, and on the other, of legal resistance for that offered by particular persons. In this is the great object and chief perfection of the social order: a considerable latitude is left to personal liberty, and when that liberty comes to fail, and is reduced to defend its rightfulness, it is to public reason only that appeal can be made, to decide the process instituted against individual freedom. Such is the system of legal order and of legal resistance. Under the feudal system, there was of course nothing similar. {85} The right of resistance, supported and practised by the feudal law, was the right of personal resistance--a terrible and unsocial right, since it is an appeal to force, to war, which is the destruction of society itself; but it is nevertheless a right which can never be completely extinguished in the human mind, for its abolition would be a recognition of servitude. The sentiment of the right of resistance had perished in the decay of the Roman society, and could not be raked up from its ashes; nor could it spring very naturally, as I imagine, from the principles of the Christian society. Feudalism, then, introduced it into the manners of Europe. It is to the honour of civilisation to render it always active and dormant, whilst it is to the credit of the feudal system to have constantly professed and asserted it. Such is the result, if I mistake not, of the examination into the feudal society, considered in itself and in its general elements, independently of the historical development. If we pass to facts, to history, we shall find that everything has happened as was destined, that the feudal regime has effected what it was sure to do, and that its destiny has been in conformity with its nature. Events may be adduced in corroboration of all the conjectures and inductions that I have drawn from the mere nature of that system.