Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle. Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete