The Roman law which everywhere perfected civil society tended everywhere to degrade political society, inasmuch as it was chiefly the production of a highly civilised but much enslaved people. The kings of Europe accordingly adopted it with eagerness, and established it wherever they were the masters. Throughout Europe the interpreters of this law became their ministers or their chief agents. When called on to do so the legists even gave them the support of the law against the law itself, and they have frequently done so since. Wherever there was a sovereign who violated the laws we shall generally find at his side a legist who assured him that nothing was more lawful, and who proved most learnedly that his violence was just, and that the oppressed party was in the wrong. Note (II.)--Page 13, line 37. THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDAL TO DEMOCRATIC MONARCHY. As all monarchies had become absolute about the same period, it is scarcely probable that this change of constitution was owing to any particular circumstance which accidentally occurred at the same time in every State, and we are led to the belief that all these similar and contemporary events must have been produced by some general cause, which simultaneously acted everywhere in the same manner. This general cause was the transition from one state of society to another, from feudal inequality to democratic equality. The nobility was already depressed, and the people were not yet raised; the former were brought too low, and the latter were not sufficiently high to restrain the action of the ruling power. For a hundred and fifty years kings and princes enjoyed a sort of golden age, during which they possessed at once stability and unlimited power, two things which are usually incompatible; they were as sacred as the hereditary chiefs of a feudal monarchy, and as absolute as the rulers of a democratic society. Note (III.)--Page 14, line 25. DECAY OF THE FREE TOWNS OF GERMANY.--IMPERIAL TOWNS (REICHSTÄDTE). According to the German historians the period of the greatest splendour of these towns was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They were then the abode of wealth, of the arts and sciences--masters of the commerce of Europe--the most powerful centres of civilisation. In the north and in the south of Germany especially, they had ended by forming independent confederations with the surrounding nobles, as the towns in Switzerland had done with the peasants. In the sixteenth century they still enjoyed the same prosperity, but the period of their decay was come. The Thirty-years’ War hastened their fall, and scarcely one of them escaped destruction and ruin during that period.