power ceased to be recognized as an inheritance after the accession to the throne of Arnuld, the illegitimate son of Carlman: thereafter the Emperors were elected. In 911 Conrad of Franconia was chosen by the nobles under the lead of Otto, duke of Saxony. From that time down to the final separation of Austria and Germany in recent times the office was filled by election, but the number of electors was very limited. It was the choosing of an Emperor by princes who exercised more real power than he. The local rulers under the titles of graf, herzog, Margrave, landgrave, king, elector and other designations of lay rulers, and the bishops, archbishops, abbots and other ecclesiastical rulers, were each subjected to restraining influences of varying potency according to times and circumstances. The kings and grand dukes, who acquired authority over considerable districts, were dependent for their military following on their feudatories. The ancient German idea of determining questions of war and peace in assemblies of freemen was never wholly obliterated, although at times and in places disused. Local assemblies of the inferior nobility were often convoked in all parts of Germany, and exercised the power at times of choosing their overlords and of deposing distasteful rulers. Feudalism effected the exclusion from the assemblies of the great mass of the people, but the nobility, of whom Germany has been at all times most prolific, never became accustomed to submit to hereditary arbitrary power.

While in other countries it is possible to trace a governmental system maintained by changing dynasties through long periods of time, in Germany we trace the development of the civilization of a race of people maintaining the possession of their ancient home and often sending out conquering hordes. to assume mastery of other lands, but never themselves at any time subjected either to a single foreign ruler or a firmly established government of their own with general power over the whole German people. In the earliest times of which we have any account, free German tribes occupied substantially all of modern Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. The Romans succeeded in imposing their authority on the southern

and a little of the western part of this territory, but it was always a precarious dominion, and the crumbling of the empire first began where it came in contact with Germans. Except for a brief period while the Romans held Dacia-including modern Hungary-the empire was bounded by the Danube and the Rhine, beyond which the Germanic tribes maintained their freedom and defended their possessions against all comers. They have been attacked from every quarter, from the west in the early days by the Romans and later by the French and Spanish; from the north by their kinsmen the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians; from the east by Poles and Russians in the north and the later swarms from Asia in the south-Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tartars and Turks. In the southeast Goths, classed as of German stock, and Avars, Huns and Turks have established successively their authority over Hungary and part of Austria, but the German stock has never been rooted out, and only in Hungary, where the Magyars became the dominant race, have they been forced to give way and allow an alien people to impose enduring dominion over them. On the other hand the German Franks established their dominion over Gaul. The Goths, Vandals and Suevi overran Spain. Wave after wave of German conquest swept over Italy under the names of Goths, Lombards, Franks and Germans. Even Britain was colonized and mastered by the Angles and Saxons.

The preservation of the German race and the maintenance of its possession of central Europe have not been due to any strong centralized government, nor to harmonious or concerted action of the different states. The system of dividing inheritances equally among males has, during much of the time, been applied to those estates which carried also hereditary rulership, and has resulted in repeated divisions of states among heirs, who frequently fought with each other for the whole. The Franks under the Merovings suffered for centuries from the contests of the heirs of their kings for the inheritance. The rights of rulers great and small were the only rights considered, and the people were constantly called on to give up their lives in the struggles of vicious and cruel

nobles for mastery over the land. Nothing can be more sad and dreary than the records of the bloody struggles brought on by the ambition, malice, cupidity and other evil passions of those invested with authority. If the accounts of wars great and petty, with which the pages of German history are so completely filled, were in fact the records of all that has been done by the princes and rulers, a sweeping judgment, utterly condemning the whole and denying all value in such governments, might safely be pronounced, but war has always been the favorite topic of historians, and the doings of peace are mostly left without other record than their impresses on society and the face of the earth. Most prominent among the characteristics of German society, the good effects of which can be discerned in all periods of history, are the relative purity of domestic life, the respect accorded women and the equal treatment of children. No cruel theory of slavery to a father or husband was ever adopted. Purity and warmth of attachment of husbands and wives to each other and to their children without distinction have in all ages been eminently characteristic of the Germans. Though the Rhine was for centuries infested by its robber barons, and though wrong and robbery abode securely in the castles all over the land, in no country and among no people has there developed a more general and sturdy honesty than among the Germans. The performance of promises and the payment of debts imply industry, without which the ability is wanting. So the German people are noted for industry and thrift. This is especially true of the low countries, Holland and Belgium, where the manufacturing of fabrics and attendant foreign trade early developed. The strength of the German people has been and is moral strength. They have not until very recent times exhibited marked capacity for great combination for military supremacy, but have on countless fields exhibited a tenacity and obstinate courage which has preserved the integrity of their homes, where other people would have been crushed or enslaved. German development has been many sided. Henry III 1039-56 sought to reform the church, which had fallen into great corruption, and in 1046 he entered Rome, deposed

the claimants to the papal throne and placed on it a man of his own selection. In 1075 Gregory III assumed powers never before conceded to the Pope and issued a decree forbidding the clergy to marry and against investiture in clerical offices by laymen. In Germany half the land is said to have been held by the clergy, to whom it had been given by the sovereign, and the principal strength of the emperor was derived from the support of the churchmen attached to his interests by the feudal tie. Henry IV resisted and denied the power of the Pope. In return he was excommunicated and his subjects declared absolved from their allegiance by a papal bull. A long continued struggle, known as the war of the investitures, followed, which did not end till the concordat of Worms, by which as a compromise it was agreed that the right of electing the prelate should be vested in the clergy in the presence of the emperor or his representative, and that he should invest them with the sceptre, and he resigned the right of investing them with ring and staff. With Henry V the Franconian House ended, and Lothair duke of Saxony was chosen. The termination of the Hohenstaufen dynasty found the imperial authority reduced to a shadow. Frederick Barbarossa and his successors expended so much of their time in foreign wars, the crusade and in Italy, that the rulership in Germany was left almost wholly to the local princes. The great duchies were broken up, and the number of lords holding directly from the Emperor had been greatly increased. The imperial cities had developed into free republics. The ruling class in the country consisted of a large number of prelates, dukes, palsgraves, margraves, landgraves and counts, inferior in authority to the Emperor only and denying obedience to him. Beneath these immediate nobles were the mediate feudal barons with their inferior holdings. These looked down upon the simple freemen, who held allodial lands, whom they frequently robbed and oppressed. The great bulk of the population outside the cities consisted of the peasants and serfs, without any share in the government and wholly at the mercy of the nobility. Besides the free imperial cities there were mediate cities, acknowledging the supremacy of the lord of

the district. The election of the emperors, though in fact dictated by a few great princes, in theory required the action of the whole body of nobles who held by a tenure immediate from the Emperor. On the occurrence of the interregnum following the death of Conrad IV in 1254, through the influence of Pope Urban IV the electoral college was definitely constituted of the archbishops of Mentz, Cologne and Treves, the houses of Mittelsbach and Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the King of Bohemia. Prior to this time the territories governed by the princes were not divided among the heirs, as were private inheritances. This principle was now changed and divisions were made of the principal duchies.

The divisions of the states resulted in that bewildering multitude of petty sovereignties, which baffles all attempt at clear description. Contemporaneous with this splitting of states the free cities evidenced some capacity for organization and combination for the common good. The Rhenish Confederation founded by Mainz and Worms within a year included seventy cities. Even more important was the Hanseatic League, originating with Lubeck and Hamburg, which ultimately took in over eighty cities and became one of the great commercial powers of Europe. In 1273 Rudolph of Hapsburg, a petty Swabian noble, was elected Emperor and obtained the grant of the fiefs of Austria, Styria and Carinthia to his son Albert. In this manner the rule of the Hapsburgs in Austria was inaugurated and thereafter many Hapsburgs were recipients of the imperial title.

In 1356 Charles IV promulgated what is termed the Golden Bull, defining the rights of the imperial electors in certain particulars as to which there had been uncertainty. It had not been settled whether all the princes of each electoral house were entitled to vote, nor by what rule a selection of an elector should be made from different branches of a family. This was definitely settled on the principle of primogeniture and a single vote to each house, thereby limiting the number of electors to seven, the three archbishops before mentioned, the King of Bohemia, the Rhenish palsgrave, the Duke of Saxony and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The electors