Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached. To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law. For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability) certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in the “Boul’ Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city” on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away, behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century, when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been “minished and brought low.”