Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements. One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.