Certain evils often attributed to feudalism did not spring from it. For instance, slavery was not its offspring, nor indeed an integral part of it. The lord and the vassal were the parties who formed the feudal relationship; and though the latter was not a freeman, according to our views, he was not a slave, but had certain personal and social rights, which his lord was bound to respect and preserve. Slavery of an abject kind existed in Europe long before the feudal system appeared. It existed in the free republic of Rome; in Greece, too, the cradle of liberty; and while Athens knelt at the shrine of freedom, and poets, and philosophers, and orators, were her ministering priests, there were thousands of slaves within the narrow limits of Attica. The Germans had slaves; the Saxons had slaves--all Europe had slaves. Feudalism found slavery in existence, and attached it to itself. The system was not inimical to it, but it did not create the evil. In relation to the social disorders of the middle ages, the insecurity of property, the personal dangers, the robberies and cruelties which prevailed, it may be remarked, that the feudal system, if it did not quench them, did not kindle them; and if, in some cases, it should appear that the system fanned them into greater violence, it also appears that, in other cases, it checked their operation. The state of society, at the commencement of the feudal era, was most deplorable. It was disorganized and dissolved. The Roman empire was shattered to pieces. Monarchy made some abortive attempts to mould the scattered fragments of the social fabric into form, but failed. The kingdom of Charlemagne shone like a meteor, and vanished. The church sunk in ignorance and corruption. The religious power almost entirely left it. The times were awful. Men's hearts failed them because of fear. The moral heavens blazed with strange portents, and many cried, "The end of all things is at hand." Amidst all this disorder, the feudal principle was developing itself; on this scene of social strife and misery it had to work; this was the theatre of its operation, the field of its career; and when it terminated its course, it certainly left Europe better than at the beginning. Mr. Hallam has shown that feudalism accomplished two great political results. In Germany, it stood in the way of the ambitious designs of an Otho and a Barbarossa, and prevented the establishment of a great empire,--a powerful despotism, crushing the seeds of commerce and liberty, and retarding, perhaps for ages, the progress of civilisation. In France, it prevented the dismemberment of the monarchy, and its reduction into a number of petty and despotic sovereignties; for "who can doubt that some of the counts of France would have thrown off all connexion with the crown, if the slight dependence of vassalage had not been substituted for legitimate subjection to a sovereign?"