In France the course of events has brought about very different results. I shall defer to my next lecture the consideration of the vicissitudes of local self-government under the Roman Empire, because that point is really incident upon the study of the formation of vast national aggregates. Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons overcame Gaul, they became rulers over a population which had been subjected for five centuries to that slow but mighty process of trituration which the Empire everywhere brought to bear upon local self-government. While the Teutons in Britain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized subjects and gave little heed to their language, religion, or customs; the Teutons in Gaul, on the other hand, quickly adopted the language and religion of their intensely romanized subjects and acquired to some extent their way of looking at things. Hence in the early history of France there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan liberties to be dealt with as in the early history of England. Nor was there any powerful middle class distributed through the country to defend such liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent throng of Teutonic nobles, among whom the king was only the most exalted and not always the strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population which had so long been accustomed to be ruled without representation by a distant government exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic rank and file as there was became absorbed into this population; and except in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like a social stratum interposed between the nobles and the common people.