There was no province from which the barbarians effaced all traces of
Roman occupation. Even in Britain, the cherry trees and quickset hedges,
the wheat and the cattle, suggest the tradition of Roman agriculture; while
the roads, canals, and buildings afforded models that were followed in subse-
quent times The physical relics of Roman civilization remained

throughout the greater part of the West; and in some cities vestiges of Roman
civilization were maintained. There was a great heritage of manual skill
and mechanical arts which had been slowly built up in Egypt, Phoenicia, *
Greece, and Carthage, and which was incorporated in the culture which
the Romans diffused; and it may be doubted if any of the industrial arts as
known and practiced by the Romans was wholly lost in the West. There
were, besides, forms of economic life which reappeared when circumstances
admitted of the revival; there was no need to invent them anew. The organ-
ization of the mediaeval estate has its analogue in the Roman villa; the medi-
aeval city, with its gilds, is the reproduction of the Roman town and its
collegia. 1

Much was* lost beyond recovery in the first confusion; but many
of the methods were carried over by the industrial classes, and
upon them the new lords had to depend for what they could not
themselves produce. "Civilization" in all of its known aspects
was an ideal. It could not at once be realized, but there was an
unconscious movement toward its realization at particular points.
