The State: Its Historic Role

Scandinavian Soyas sing their exploits. The devotion of sworn brothei-s is the theme of the most beautiful of these epical songs; whereat the Church and the rising kings, representatives of Byzantine or Roman law which reappears, hurl against them their anathemas and decrees, which happily remain a dead letter. The whole history of that period loses its significance, and becomes absolutely incomprehensible, if we do not take the fraternities into account— these unions of brothers and sisters that spring up everywhere to satisfy the multiple needs of both economic and emotional life of man. Nevertheless, black spots accumulate on the horizon. Other unions — those of ruling minorities — are also formed ; and they endeavour, little by little, to transform these free men into serfs, into subjects. Rome is dead, but its tradition revives; and the Christian Church, haunted by Oriental theocratic visions, gives its powerful support to the new powers that are seeking to constitute themselves, Far from being the sanguinary beast that he is represented to be, in order to prove the necessity of ruling over him, man has always loved tranquility and peace. He fights rather by necessity than by ferocity, and prefers his cattle and his land to the profession of arms. Therefore, hardly had the great migration of barbarians begun to abate, hardly had hordes and tribes more or less cantoned themselves on their respective lands than we sec the care of the defence of territory: "against new waves of immigrants rniitidi'd to a man who i-n^igcs ft smn1. /•*" 12 The State : Its Historic Role.