The vassals depended, in the first place, on the prince, because they held their lands and their offices of him. These lands and these offices becoming hereditary, their holders soon desired to render themselves independent, and to arrogate to themselves privileges which only belonged to the sovereign; such as coining money, holding a jurisdiction, and making war in their own name. From that time there remained scarcely any trace of subordination. This decline of society, or, rather, this corruption of the feudal system, is referrible to the end of the second race. Charlemagne, in his endeavours to reëstablish the empire of the Cæsars, committed violence upon the social compact, and his extraordinary efforts exhausted the powers of royalty. The bow which he had too strongly bent, broke in the hands of his successors, and his empire crumbled away, when no longer sustained by the ascendancy of a great character. Charlemagne wished to emancipate himself from the laws of feudalism; under his feeble successors, feudalism, in its turn, was desirous of emancipating itself from the crown. The greatest evil of the feudal system was that it destroyed all protective power, all tutelary legislation, which could watch over the order and safety of society. The monarch, despoiled of all authority, could neither be the support of innocence nor the avenger of crime; nor the mediator in war, nor the arbitrator in disputes that disturbed peace. Sovereignty, exercised by every man who wore a sword, was spread everywhere, without any one acknowledging its power anywhere; such was the disorder and confusion among those who disputed, sword in hand, for the wreck of sovereign power. Nothing is more afflicting than this picture; the excesses which accompanied feudal anarchy no one is ignorant of. It does not form part of our plan to speak of it to any extent; the task we have to perform is a less painful one: if we turn our looks towards old times, it is only in order to discover the origin of our institutions; and among the revolutions of a barbarous age, we have only to make known what they produced that is salutary and durable. Before we proceed further, and in order to mix a few consolatory ideas with sad and painful images, we will show, by the side of the abuses of feudalism, the advantages contemporary society received from the feudal system, and the happy germs of civilization which grew from it for the benefit of following ages.