4. A first circumstance, above all favorable to the liberties of the people, was the Invention of Printing, producing rapid diffusion of information, the coincident revival of learning and the foundation of modern science. All these, working together with various other agencies, gradually swept away feudalism, checked the towering spiritual tyranny of the church and corrected a crowd of minor evils that embarrassed society, enterprise, and progress in the science of government. The intermediate stage in this progress appeared like a return to old principles. The dissolution of feudalism left the governments of Europe centralized. The lords inheriting feudal rights had become intolerable despots. For a certain period the authority of the king was the bulwark behind which the people sheltered themselves from the oppressions of their feudal superiors, and they united with him to reduce the feudal nobility to the comparatively harmless condition of the modern aristocracy, whose greatest distinction is social pre-eminence. It left them, indeed, a high, but not overwhelming, position in the body politic, which the growing education and wealth of the middle and lower classes constantly tended to reduce. This change was commencing when America was discovered. The feudal chiefs labored to extend and strengthen their power at the expense of each other, of the king and the people. The increasing activity and importance of commerce, trade and industry required the support of a broad legislation that could not be obtained while nations were broken up into petty lordships, principalities and kingdoms almost independent of each other, and whose rulers were often hostile to or at war with each other; while the support of so many rulers became a heavy burden on the resources of the people. The king represented the nation and was the rallying point of reform. To strengthen him was to promote the larger interests of the country. 5. For these reasons, and from the resistance offered by the feudal institutions, which had existed a thousand years, authority became centralized in the monarch to an extravagant degree, and this at a time when freer institutions were most required by the larger and wiser views of the people. The great usefulness of the Roman Catholic Church in civilizing and educating the modern nations and founding a center or common bond between them, which produced a degree of unity in their progress, had continually added to her power, while the disposition to free thought was ever becoming more pronounced. Thus two despotic forces, each claiming absolute obedience in their respective spheres, were rising in strength to a degree extremely embarrassing to the growing intelligence and increased activities of the commonalty. The traditional authority of the church and the king came, in the course of a hundred years after the discovery of America, to directly oppose the most important interests and instincts of mankind.