While on the one hand, in the youth of this institution, the virtues which spring from reciprocal fidelity and love developed themselves from this relation--a relation inwardly and mutually binding lord and vassal, and resulting in holding together all the members of the state--so on the other hand, where there is no restraint to insolence and arbitrary despotism, except that found in the mere sense of moral obligation, they transcend all bounds, and find their natural reaction in the resistance of the subject, destroying the very idea of a state. In the feudal system, however, it is not the state which guarantees, secures, and defends the rights of the individual. Whoever claims protection and justice is referred to his immediate feudal superior, to whom alone, and not to the state, as a whole, he owes duty. The state, as a moral person--as a society--is entirely in the background. It is one of the rarest phenomena which present themselves in the Christian laws of the Orient, that in connection with this state-life based upon pure private right, the modern notion of society should have had its rise. One of the first appearances of change was in the criminal law of the assizes. Not that this rose above the spirit of the times, for it was barbarous in the extreme, impregnated throughout with the idea of literal retaliation--for instance, whoever secretly buried a dead body, must be buried alive--and again, it recognized scarcely any punishment but death and the most horrid mutilations, such as cutting off of nose, ears, tongue, hands, etc., and cannot, with all the palliations arising from the necessities of the Crusaders, be regarded as an improvement upon the preceding. But among the genuine products of the middle ages, suddenly arose a principle which has become the basis of modern criminal law, though it won its first recognition, and that with difficulty, centuries later. Punishment inflicted upon the guilty was at that time universally regarded as an atonement due to the injured person, but the assizes declare: 'Punishment is decreed, not in the interests of the injured, but in those of the entire state.' In carrying out this principle, the sufferer from theft, when he might have taken the thief and voluntarily let him go, was punished by forfeiture of body and estate to the feudal lord, and the assizes declare that 'when no one in case of murder appears to make complaint, the king, or the ruler of the land, or the lady of the city where the dead was found, shall do so, for the blood of the slain cries to heaven.'