This institution of military companionship seems to have struck Tacitus with some amazement. He says that this kind of personal relation was among the Germans not thought shameful. This was the natural feeling of a Roman. The duty of a Roman citizen was wholly towards the state. The state might be represented either by a responsible magistrate or by an irresponsible Emperor; in either case obedience was due to the representative of the state; but there was no personal relation to the man. The old Roman institution of patron and client, which was so like the German _comitatus_, had pretty well died out by the time of Tacitus, and it had at no time been entered into by men of high rank(53). What amazed Tacitus was that among the Germans the noblest in birth and exploits were not looked on as dishonoured by entering the service of a personal lord. To Tacitus himself Trajan was the chief magistrate of the Roman commonwealth, the chief commander of the Roman army; he was a personal master to none but his slaves and freedmen(54). It was only in a much later stage of the Roman Empire that personal service in the court and household of the Emperor began to be looked on as honourable(55). But among the Teutonic nations the personal relation coloured everything; personal service towards a King or other chief was honourable from the beginning; the proudest nobles of Europe have down to this day thought themselves honoured by filling offices about the persons of Emperors, Kings, and other princes which Tacitus would have deemed beneath the dignity of any Roman citizen. We are now accustomed to see this kind of service paid in the case of royal personages only; a few centuries back men of any rank deemed themselves honoured by paying the like service to men of the rank next above their own, or even to men of their own rank who had the start of them in age and reputation. The knight was served by his esquire and the master by his scholar; and the same principle, laid aside everywhere else, lingers on in what is undoubtedly a trace of the Teutonic _comitatus_, the fagging of our public schools. Now the political effect of the existence of the principle of personal service, the institution of the _comitatus_, alongside of the primitive political community, was most important in our early history. The personal relation went far to swallow up the purely political one. To enter the service of a chief became so established a practice that at last it was deemed that it was the part of every man to “seek a lord,” as the phrase was, to commend himself, to put himself under the protection of some man more powerful than himself(56). The _man_ owed faithful service to his _lord_; the lord owed faithful protection to his man. The very word _Lord_, in its older and fuller form _Hlaford_, implies the rewards which the lord bestowed on his faithful man. The word is in some sort a puzzling one; but there can be no doubt that it is connected with _hlaf_, _loaf_, and