This condition of things was indeed better than that utter confusion which had gone before, for a principle of order had begun to group and bind the tossing atoms; and though the union into which it drove men was a hard and narrow one, it was something that they should have learnt to unite themselves at all. Yet nascent feudality was but one remove from anarchy; and the tendency to isolation and diversity continued, despite the efforts of the Church and the Carolingian princes, to be all-powerful in Western Europe. The German kingdom was already a bond between the German races, and appears strong and united when we compare it with the France of Hugh Capet, or the England of Ethelred II; yet its history to the twelfth century is little else than a record of disorders, revolts, civil wars, of a ceaseless struggle on the part of the monarch to enforce his feudal rights, a resistance by his vassals equally obstinate and more frequently successful. What the issue of the contest might have been if Germany had been left to take her own course is matter of speculation, though the example of every European state except England and Norway may incline the balance in favour of the crown. But the strife had scarcely begun when a new influence was interposed: the German king became Roman Emperor. No two systems can be more unlike than those whose headship became thus vested in one person: the one centralized, the other local; the one resting on a sublime theory, the other the rude offspring of anarchy; the one gathering all power into the hands of an irresponsible monarch, the other limiting his rights and authorizing resistance to his commands; the one demanding the equality of all citizens as creatures equal before Heaven, the other bound up with an aristocracy the proudest, and in its gradations of rank the most exact, that Europe had ever seen. Characters so repugnant could not, it might be thought, meet in one person, or if they met must strive till one swallowed up the other. It was not so. In the fusion which began from the first, though it was for a time imperceptible, each of the two characters gave and each lost some of its attributes: the king became more than German, the Emperor less than Roman, till, at the end of six centuries, the monarch in whom two 'persons' had been united, appeared as a third different from either of the former, and might not inappropriately be entitled 'German Emperor[150].' The nature and progress of this change will appear in the after history of Germany, and cannot be described here without in some measure anticipating subsequent events. A word or two may indicate how the process of fusion began. [Sidenote: Results of this union in one person.]