Charles, too, showed no willingness to deal radically with the customary laws of succession of the Frankish people, and in this sphere he was far more conservative than the Lombards or the Ostrogoths. The principle of division among the heirs rather than unity of territory, meant in itself a great danger. It would have caused trouble to Charles himself had not his brother been removed by death early in the reign. Yet the Emperor set a strong precedent for its recognition in his own disposition of the Empire among his three sons. The position of Louis was due to an accident, and the old question was bound to emerge again when the rights of his various children, as his heirs, came to be considered. Nothing was done to prescribe how the exercise of sole rule as Emperor was to be carried out when the subordinate rulers of his own house proved reluctant to obey their head. The Empire plainly was only secure if its various rulers could consent to work harmoniously together; a division among them, a break between the Church and the State, the exaltation of the idea of nationality and race, were all possibilities which would surely destroy the integrity of Charles’ imperial construction. The history of the century after his death shows the weak sides of the Emperor’s benevolent optimism. He contemplated a great Christian republic directed by a family united in its members and guided by patriarchal instinct. In working out this program, Charles was an opportunist as well as an optimist; he took the component political factors as he found them, and introduced them as the stones of a mosaic, thinking more of the whole than of the parts, seemingly oblivious of the disparity of the elements he was introducing into the fabric. The distinctions of race were certain to become accentuated the moment the central power showed weakness and proved itself unable to be an effectual protection against anarchy within or attacks from the outside. In its political creativeness the Emperor’s work was framed on a smaller scale than he contemplated. He proposed an Empire, but he really founded kingdoms--the historic kingdoms of Western Europe. The inheritors of his system were the territorial monarchs, who took from him the conception of a supreme secular power closely united with the Church. The actual central authority established by Charles soon passed away, but the peoples included within it, endowed with the energy proceeding from him, as a source, survived and developed. The ground prepared by him was the foundation for the national kingdoms with whose vicissitudes and progress the course of civilization has been unalterably connected. He has been well named, therefore, the Patriarch of Europe, the Abraham in whose seed the political world has been blessed.