If, in all that has just been said, it is evident that the legislation

of that period and of our own had the same conception of the function

of government and only differed in method and efficiency, there was one

very large class of laws spread upon the statute-books of medieval

Europe that has almost vanished now. A paternal statesmanship sought

to regulate the private lives of a citizen in every respect: the

fashion of his clothes, the number of courses at his meals, how many

guests he might have at wedding, dinner or dance, how long he should be

permitted to haunt the tavern, and how much he should drink, how he

{483} should spend Sunday, how he should become engaged, how dance, how

part his hair and with how thick a stick he should be indulged in the

luxury of beating his wife.

The "blue laws," as such regulations on their moral side came to be

called, were no Protestant innovation. The Lutherans hardly made any

change whatever in this respect, but Calvin did give a new and biting

intensity to the medieval spirit. His followers, the Puritans, in the

next century, almost succeeded in reducing the staple of a Christian

man's legitimate recreation to "seasonable meditation and prayer." But

the idea originated long before the evolution of "the non-conformist

conscience."

The fundamental cause of all this legislation was sheer conservatism.

[Sidenote: Spirit of conservatism] Primitive men and savages have so

strong a feeling of the sanction of custom that they have, as Bagehot

expresses it, fairly screwed themselves down by their unreasoning

demands for conformity. A good deal of this spirit has survived

throughout history and far more of it, naturally, was found four

centuries ago than at present, when reason has proved a solvent for so

many social institutions. There are a good many laws of the period

under survey--such as that of Nuremberg against citizens parting their

hair--for which no discoverable basis can be found save the idea that

new-fangled fashions should not be allowed.

Economic reasons also played their part in the regulation of the habits

of the people. Thus a law of Edward VI, after a preamble setting forth

that divers kinds of food are indifferent before God, nevertheless

commands all men to eat fish as heretofore on fast days, not as a

religious duty but to encourage fishermen, give them a livelihood and

thus train men for the navy.

A third very strong motive in the mind of the {484} sixteenth-century

statesmen, was that of differentiating the classes of citizens. The

blue laws, if they may be so called in this case, were secretions of

the blue blood. To make the vulgar know their places it was essential

to make them dress according to their rank. The intention of An Act

for the Reformation of excess in Apparel, [Sidenote: Apparel according

to rank] passed by the English Parliament in 1532, was stated to be,

the necessary repressing and avoiding and expelling of

the excess daily more used in the sumptuous and costly

apparel and array accustomably worn in this Realm,

whereof hath ensued and daily do chance such sundry

high and notorious detriments of the common weal, the

subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and

distinction of people according to their estates,

pre-eminences, dignities and degrees to the utter

impoverishment and undoing of many inexpert and light

persons inclined to pride, mother of all vices.

The tenor of the act prescribes the garb appropriate to the royal

family, to nobles of different degree, to citizens according to their

income, to servants and husbandmen, to the clergy, doctors of divinity,

soldiers, lawyers and players. Such laws were common in all countries.

A Scotch act provides "that it be lauchful to na wemen to weir

[clothes] abone [above] their estait except howries." This law was not

only "apprevit" by King James VI, but endorsed with his own royal hand,

"This acte is verray gude."

Excessive fare at feasts was provided against for similar reasons and

with almost equal frequency. By an English proclamation [Sidenote:

1517] the number of dishes served was to be regulated according to the

rank of the highest person present. Thus, if a cardinal was guest or

host, there might be nine courses, if a lord of Parliament six, for a

citizen with an income of five hundred pounds a year, three. Elsewhere

the number of guests at all {485} ordinary functions as well as the

number and price of gifts at weddings, christenings and like occasions,

was prescribed.

[Sidenote: 1526]

Games of chance were frequently forbidden. Francis I ordered a

lieutenant with twenty archers to visit taverns and gaming houses and

arrest all players of cards, dice and other unlawful games. This did

not prevent the establishment of a public lottery, [Sidenote: 1539] a

practice justified by alleging the examples of Italian cities in

raising revenue by this means. Henry III forbade all games of chance

"to minors and other debauched persons," [Sidenote: 1577] and this was

followed six years later by a crushing impost on cards and dice,

interesting as one of the first attempts to suppress the instruments of

vice through the taxing power. Merry England also had many laws

forbidding "tennis, bowles, dicing and cards," the object being to

encourage the practice of archery.

Tippling was the subject of occasional animadversion by the various

governments, though there seemed to be little sentiment against it

until the opening of the following century. The regulation of the

number of taverns and of the amount of wine that might be kept in a

gentleman's cellar, as prescribed in an English law, [Sidenote: 1553]

mentions not the moral but the economic aspect of drinking. The

purchase of French wines was said to drain England of money.

Though the theater also did not suffer much until the time of Cromwell,

plays were forbidden in the precincts of the city of London. The Book

of Discipline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. [Sidenote:

1574] Calvin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther

considered them "fools' work" and at times dangerous.

Commendable efforts to suppress the practice of duelling were led by

the Catholic church. Clement {486} VII forbade it in a bull,

[Sidenote: 1524] confirmed by a decree of Council of Trent. [Sidenote:

1563] An extraordinarily worded French proclamation of 1566 forbade

"all gentlemen and others to give each other the lie and, if they do

give each other the lie, to fight a duel about it." Other governments

took the matter up very sluggishly. Scotland forbade "the great

liberty that sundry persons take in provoking each other to singular

combats upon sudden and frivol occasions," without license from his

majesty.

Two matters on which the Puritans felt very keenly, [Sidenote: 1551]

blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking, were but scantily looked after in the

century of the Reformation. Scotland forbade "grievous and abominable

oaths, swearing, execrations and blasphemation," and somewhat similar

laws can be found in other countries. Scotland was also a pioneer in

forbidding on the Sabbath all work, "gaming, playing, passing to

taverns and ale-houses and wilful remaining away from the parish kirk

in time of sermon."

[Sidenote: Mail]

Government has other functions than the enforcement of the civil and

criminal law. Almost contemporary with the opening of the century was

the establishment of post offices for the forwarding of letters. After

Maximilian had made a start in the Netherlands other countries were not

slow to follow his example. Though under special government

supervision at first these letter-carriers were private men.

[Sidenote: Sanitation]

In the Middle Ages there had been efforts to safeguard public

sanitation. The sixteenth century did not greatly improve on them.

Thus, Geneva passed a law that garbage and other refuse should not be

allowed to lie in the streets for more than three days in summer or

eight days in winter. In extreme cases quarantine was adopted as a

precaution against epidemics.

{487} [Sidenote: War]

It is the most heart-breaking or the most absurd fact in human history,

according as the elements involved are focused in a humane or in a

cynical light, that the chief energies of government as well as the

most zealous forces of peoples, have been dedicated since civilization

began to the practice of wholesale homicide. As we look back from the

experience of the Great War to the conflicts of other times, they seem

to our jaded imaginations almost as childish as they were vicious. In

the sixteenth century, far more than in the nineteenth, the nations

boiled and bubbled with spleen and jealousy, hurled Thrasonical threats

and hyperbolic boasts in each other's teeth, breathing out mutual

extermination with no compunctious visitings of nature to stay their

hungry swords--but when they came to blows they had not the power of

boys. The great nations were always fighting but never fought to a

finish. In the whole century no national capital west of Hungary, save

Rome and Edinburgh, was captured by an enemy. The real harm was not

done on the battlefield, where the carnage was incredibly small, but in

the raids and looting of town and country by the professional assassins

who filled the ranks of the hireling troops. Then, indeed, cities were

burned, wealth was plundered and destroyed, men were subjected to

nameless tortures and women to indescribable outrages, and children

were tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then to shock the public

conscience, as it has at last succeeded in doing. The people saw

nothing but dazzling glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken

field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder of the captains

and the shouting. Soldiers, said Luther, founding his opinion on the

canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as

eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and

Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay

of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always

declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in

thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war.

Elsewhere he admitted that wars of self-defence were necessary.

[Sidenote: Arms]

Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy in the period of

Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late as 1596 an English soldier

lamented that his countrymen neglected the bow for the gun.

Halberdiers with pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes

inflicted very little damage, as at Flodden, sometimes considerable, as

at Marignano, where, with the French cavalry, it struck down the till

then almost invincible Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and

musketeers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon of a large type

gave way to smaller field-guns; even the idea of the machine-gun

emerged in the fifteenth century. The name of them, "organs," was

taken from their appearance with numerous barrels from which as many as

fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. Cannon were transported

to the field on carts. Rifles were invented by a German in 1520, but

not much used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia--whence the

name--about 1540. Bombs were first used in 1588.

The arts of fortification and of siege were improved together, many

ingenious devices being called into being by the technically difficult

war of the Spaniards against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as

they afterwards became and of strategy there was no consistent theory.

Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, based his ideas on the practice

of Rome and therefore despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to

cavalry. Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstanding

which there were sporadic and often very annoying {489} mutinies.

Punishments were terrible, as in civil life. Blasphemy, cards, dicing,

duelling and women were forbidden in most regular armies, but in time

of war the soldiers were allowed an incredible license in pillaging and

in foraging. Rings and other decorations were given as rewards of

valor. Uniforms began first to be introduced in England by Henry VIII.

[Sidenote: Personnel of the armies]

The personnel of the armies was extremely bad. Not counting the small

number of criminals who were allowed to expiate their misdeeds by

military service, the rank and file consisted of mercenaries who only

too rapidly became criminals under the tutelage of Mars. There were a

few conscripts, but no universal training such as Machiavelli

recommended. The officers were nobles or gentlemen who served for the

prestige and glory of the profession of arms, as well as for the good

pay.

[Sidenote: Size of armies compared]

But the most striking difference between armies then and now is not in

their armament nor in their quality but in the size. Great battles

were fought and whole campaigns decided with twenty or thirty thousand

troops. The French standing army was fixed by the ordinance of 1534 at

seven legions of six thousand men each, besides which were the

mercenaries, the whole amounting to a maximum, under Francis I, of

about 100,000 men. The English official figures about 1588 gave the

army 90,000 foot soldiers and 9000 horse, but these figures were

grossly exaggerated. In fact only 22,000 men were serviceable at the

crisis of England's war with Spain. Other armies were proportionately

small. The janizaries, whose intervention often decided battles,

numbered in 1520 only 12,000. They were perhaps the best troops in

Europe, as the Turkish artillery was the most powerful known. What all

these figures show, in short, is that the phenomenon of nations with

every man physically fit in {490} the army, engaging in a death grapple

until one goes down in complete exhaustion, is a modern development.

[Sidenote: Sea power]

The influence of sea power upon history has become proverbial, if,

indeed, it has not been overestimated since Admiral Mahan first wrote.

It may be pointed out that this influence is far from a constant

factor. Sea power had a considerable importance in the wars of Greece

and of Rome, but in the Middle Ages it became negligible. Only with

the opening of the seven seas to navigation was the command of the

waves found to secure the avenues to wealth and colonial expansion. In

Portugal, Spain, and England, "the blue water school" of mariners

speedily created navies whose strife was apparently more decisive for

the future of history than were the battles of armies on land.

When the trade routes of the Atlantic superseded those of the

Mediterranean in importance, naturally methods of navigation changed,

and this involved a revolution in naval warfare greater than that

caused by steam or by the submarine. From the time that Helen's beauty

launched a thousand ships until the battle of Lepanto, the oar had been

the chief instrument of locomotion, though supplemented, even from

Homeric times, by the sail. Naval battles were like those on land; the

enemy keels approached and the soldiers on each strove to board and

master the other's crew. The only distinctly naval tactic was that of

"ramming," as it was called in a once vivid metaphor.

But the wild winds and boisterous waves of the Atlantic broke the oar

in the galley-slave's hand and the muscles in his back. Once again man

harnessed the hostile forces of nature; the free breezes were broken to

the yoke and new types of sailing ships were driven at racing speed

across the broad back of the sea. Swift, yare vessels were built, at

first smaller than the {491} old galleons but infinitely more

manageable. And the new boats, armed with thunder as they were clad

with wings, no longer sought to sink or capture enemies at close

quarters, but hurled destruction from afar. Heavy guns took the place

of small weapons and of armed prow.

It was England's genius for the sea that enabled her to master the new

conditions first and most completely and that placed the trident in her

hands so firmly that no enemy has ever been able to wrest it from her.

Henry VIII paid great attention to the navy. He had fifty-three

vessels with an aggregate of 11,268 tons, an average of 200 tons each,

carrying 1750 soldiers, 1250 sailors and 2085 guns. Under Elizabeth

the number of vessels had sunk to 42, but the tonnage had risen to

17,055, and the crews numbered 5534 seamen, 804 gunners and 2008

soldiers. The largest ships of the Tudor navy were of 1000 tons; the

flagship of the Spanish Armada was 1150 tons, carrying 46 guns and 422

men. How tiny are these figures! A single cruiser of today has a

larger tonnage than the whole of Elizabeth's fleet; a large submarine

is greater than the monsters of Philip.

SECTION 4. PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS

Of all the forces making for equality among men probably the education

of the masses by means of cheap books and papers has been the

strongest. But this force has been slow to ripen; at the close of the

Middle Ages the common man was still helpless. The old privileged

orders were indeed weakened and despoiled of part of their

prerogatives, but it was chiefly by the rise of a new aristocracy, that

of wealth.

[Sidenote: Nobility]

The decay of feudalism and of ecclesiastical privilege took the form of

a changed and not of an abolished position for peer and priest. They

were not cashiered, {492} but they were retained on cheaper terms. The

feudal baron had been a petty king; his descendant had the option of

becoming either a highwayman or a courtier. As the former alternative

became less and less rewarding, the greater part of the old nobles

abandoned their pretensions to independence and found a congenial

sphere as satellities of a monarch, "le roi soleil," as a typical king

was aptly called, whose beams they reflected and around whom they

circled.

As titles of nobility began now to be quite commonly given to men of

wealth and also to politicians, the old blood was renewed at the

expense of the ancient pride. Not, indeed, that the latter showed any

signs of diminishing. The arrogance of the noble was past all

toleration. Men of rank treated the common citizens like dirt beneath

their feet, and even regarded artists and other geniuses as menials.

Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, wrote to Raphael in terms that no king would

now use to a photographer, calling him a liar and chiding him for

disrespect to his superior. The same duke required Ariosto to

prostitute his genius by writing an apology for a fratricide committed

by his grace. The duke of Mayenne poniarded one of his most devoted

followers for having aspired to the hand of the duke's widowed

daughter-in-law. So difficult was it to conceive of a "gentleman"

without gentle blood that Castiglione, the arbiter of manners, lays

down as the first prerequisite to a perfect courtier that he shall be

of high birth. And of course those who had not this advantage

pretended to it. An Italian in London noticed in 1557 that all

gentlemen without other title insisted on being called "mister."

[Sidenote: Professions]

One sign of the break-up of the old medieval castes was the new

classification of men by calling, or profession. It is true that two

of the professions, the {493} higher offices in army and church, became

apanages of the nobility, and the other liberal vocations were almost

as completely monopolized by the children of the moneyed middle class;

nevertheless it is significant that there were new roads by which men

might rise. No class has profited more by the evolution of ideas than

has the intelligentsia. From a subordinate, semi-menial position,

lawyers, physicians, educators and journalists, not to mention artists

and writers, have become the leading, almost the ruling, body of our

western democracies.

[Sidenote: Clergy]

Half way between a medieval estate and a modern calling stood the

clergy. In Catholic countries they remained very numerous; there were

136 episcopal or archiepiscopal sees in France; there were 40,000

parish priests, with an equal number of secular clergy in subordinate

positions, 24,000 canons, 34,000 friars, 2500 Jesuits (in 1600), 12,000

monks and 80,000 nuns. Though there were doubtless many worthy men

among them, it cannot honestly be said that the average were fitted

either morally or intellectually for their positions. Grossly ignorant

of the meaning of the Latin in which they recited their masses and of

the main articles of their faith, many priests made up for these

defects by proficiency in a variety of superstitious charms. The

public was accustomed to see nuns dancing at bridals and priests

haunting taverns and worse resorts. Some attempts, serious and

partially successful, at reform, have been already described. Profane

and amatory plays were forbidden in nunneries, bullfights were banished

from the Vatican and the dangers of the confessional were diminished by

the invention of the closed box in which the priest should sit and hear

his penitent through a small aperture instead of having her kneeling at

his knees. So depraved was public opinion on the subject of the

confession that a {494} prolonged controversy took place in Spain as to

whether minor acts of impurity perpetrated by the priest while

confessing women were permissible or not.

[Sidenote: Conditions of the Protestant clergy]

Neither was the average Protestant clergyman a shining and a burning

light. So little was the calling regarded that it was hard to fill it.

At one time a third of the parishes of England were said to lack

incumbents. The stipends were wretched; the social position obscure.

The wives of the new clergy had an especially hard lot, being regarded

by the people as little better than concubines, and by Parliament

called "necessary evils." The English government had to issue

injunctions in 1559 stating that because of the offence that has come

from the type of women commonly selected as helpmates by parsons, no

manner of priest or deacon should presume to marry without consent of

the bishop, of the girl's parents, "or of her master or mistress where

she serveth." Many clergymen, nevertheless, afterwards married

domestics.

Very little was done to secure a properly trained ministry. Less than

half of the 2000 clergymen ordained at Wittenberg from 1537-60 were

university men; the majority were drapers, tailors and cobblers,

"common idiots and laymen" as they were called--though the word "idiot"

did not have quite the same disparaging sense that it has now. Nor

were the reverend gentlemen of unusually high character. As nothing

was demanded of them but purity of doctrine, purity of life sank into

the background. It is really amazing to see how an acquaintance of

Luther's succeeded in getting one church after he had been dismissed

from another on well-founded charges of seduction, and how he was

thereafter convicted of rape. This was perhaps an extreme case, but

that the majority of clergymen were morally unworthy is the {495}

melancholy conviction borne in by contemporary records.

[Sidenote: Character of sermons]

Sermons were long, doctrinal and political. Cranmer advised Latimer

not to preach more than an hour and a half lest the king grow weary.

How the popular preacher--in this case a Catholic--appealed to his

audience, is worth quoting from a sermon delivered at Landau in 1550.

The Lutherans [began the reverend gentleman] are

opposed to the worship of Mary and the saints. Now, my

friends, be good enough to listen to me. The soul of a

man who had died got to the door of heaven and Peter

shut it in his face. Luckily, the Mother of God was

taking a stroll outside with her sweet Son. The deceased

addresses her and reminds her of the Paters and Aves he

has recited in her glory and the candles he has burnt

before her images. Thereupon Mary says to Jesus: "It's

the honest truth, my Son." The Lord, however, objected

and addressed the suppliant: "Hast thou never heard

that I am the way and the door to life everlasting?" he

asks. "If thou art the door, I am the window," retorted

Mary, taking the "soul" by the hair and flinging it

through the open casement. And now I ask you whether

it is not the same whether you enter Paradise by the door

or by the window?

There was a naïve familiarity with sacred things in our ancestors that

cannot be imitated. Who would now name a ship "Jesus," as Hawkins's

buccaneering slaver was named? What serious clergyman would now

compare three of his friends to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,

as did Luther? The Reformer also wrote a satire on the calling of a

council, in the form of a letter from the Holy Ghost signed by Gabriel

as notary and witnessed by Michael the Provost of Paradise and Raphael,

God's Court Physician. At another time he made a lampoon on the

collection of {496} relics made by his enemy the Archbishop of Mayence,

stating that they contained such things as "a fair piece of Moses' left

horn, a whole pound of the wind that blew for Elijah in the cave on

Mount Horeb and two feathers and an egg of the Holy Ghost" as a dove.

All this, of course, not in ribald profanity, but in works intended for

edification. . . .

[Sidenote: The city]

Though beautiful, the city of our ancestors was far from admirable in

other ways. Filth was hidden under its comely garments, so that it

resembled a Cossack prince--all ermine and vermin. Its narrow streets,

huddled between strong walls, were over-run with pigs and chickens and

filled with refuse. They were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and

slush in winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at night,

infested with princes and young nobles on a spree and with other

criminals.

[Sidenote: The house]

Like the exterior, the interior of the house of a substantial citizen

was more pretty than clean or sweet smelling. The high wainscoting and

the furniture, in various styles, but frequently resembling what is now

known as "mission," was lovely, as were the ornaments--tapestries,

clocks, pictures and flowers. But the place of carpets was supplied by

rushes renewed from time to time without disturbing the underlying mass

of rubbish beneath. Windows were fewer than they are now, and fires

still fewer. Sometimes there was an open hearth, sometimes a huge tile

stove. Most houses had only one or two rooms heated, sometimes, as in

the case of the Augustinian friary at Wittenberg, only the bathroom,

but usually also the living room.

[Sidenote: Dress]

The dress of the people was far more various and picturesque than

nowadays. Both sexes dressed in gaudy colors and delighted in strange

fashions, so that, {497} is Roger Ascham said, "he thought himself most

brave that was most monstrous in misorder." For women the fashion of

decolleté was just coming in, as so many fashions do, from the

demi-monde. To Catharine de' Medici is attributed the invention of the

corset, an atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need of one.

[Sidenote: Food]

The day began at five in summer and at seven in winter. A heavy

breakfast was followed by a heavier dinner at ten, and supper at five,

and there were between times two or three other tiffins or "drinkings."

The staple food was meat and cereal; very few of our vegetables were

known, though some were just beginning to be cultivated. [Sidenote:

1585-6] The most valuable article of food introduced from the new

world was the potato. Another importation that did not become

thoroughly acclimatized in Europe was the turkey. Even now they are

rare, but there are several interesting allusions to them in the

literature of that time, one of the year 1533 in Luther's table talk.

Poultry of other sorts was common, as were eggs, game and fish. The

cooking relied for its highest effects on sugar and spices. The

ordinary fruits--apples, cherries and oranges--furnished a wholesome

and pleasing variety to the table. Knives and spoons were used in

eating, but forks were unknown, at least in northern Europe.

[Sidenote: Drink]

All the victuals were washed down with copious potations. A

water-drinker, like Sir Thomas More, was the rarest of exceptions. The

poor drank chiefly beer and ale; the mildest sort, known as "small

beer," was recommended to the man suffering from too strong drink of

the night before. Wine was more prized, and there were a number of

varieties. There being no champagne, Burgundy was held in high esteem,

as were some of the strong, sweet, Spanish and Portuguese {498} wines.

The most harmless drinks were claret and Rhine wine. There were some

"mixed drinks," such as sack or hippocras, in which beer or wine was

sophisticated with eggs, spices and sugar. The quantities habitually

drunk were large. Roger Ascham records that Charles V drank the best

he ever saw, never less than a quart at a draft. The breakfast table

of an English nobleman was set out with a quart of wine and a quart of

beer, liquor then taking the place of tea, coffee, chocolate and all

the "soft" beverages that now furnish stimulation and sociability.

[Sidenote: Tobacco, 1573]

"In these times," wrote Harrison, "the taking-in of the smoke of an

Indian herb called 'Tobaco' by an instrument formed like a little ladle

. . . is greatly taken up and used in England against rewmes [colds]

and some other diseases." Like other drugs, tobacco soon came to be

used as a narcotic for its own sake, and was presently celebrated as

"divine tobacco" and "our holy herb nicotian" by the poets. What,

indeed, are smoking, drinking, and other wooings of pure sensation at

the sacrifice of power and reason, but a sort of pragmatized poetry?

Some ages, and those the most poetical, like that of Pericles and that

of Rabelais, have deified intoxication and sensuality; others, markedly

our own, have preferred the accumulation of wealth and knowledge to

sensual indulgence. It is a psychological contrast of importance.

Could we be suddenly transported on Mr. Wells's time machine four

hundred years back we should be less struck by what our ancestors had

than by what they lacked. Quills took the place of fountain pens,

pencils, typewriters and dictaphones. Not only was postage dearer but

there were no telephones or telegrams to supplement it. The world's

news of yesterday, which we imbibe with our morning cup, then sifted

down slowly through various media of {499} communication, mostly oral.

It was two months after the battle before Philip of Spain knew the fate

of his own Armada. The houses had no steam heat, no elevators; the

busy housewife was aided by no vacuum cleaner, sewing machine and gas

ranges; the business man could not ride to his office, nor the farmer

to his market, in automobiles. There were neither railways nor

steamships to make travel rapid and luxurious.

[Sidenote: Travel]

Nevertheless, journeys for purposes of piety, pleasure and business

were common. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella, Loretto,

Walsingham and many other shrines were frequent in Catholic countries.

Students were perpetually wandering from one university to another:

merchants were on the road, and gentlemen felt the attractions of

sight-seeing. The cheap and common mode of locomotion was on foot.

Boats on the rivers and horses on land furnished the alternatives. The

roads were so poor that the horses were sometimes "almost shipwrecked."

The trip from Worms to Rome commonly took twelve days, but could be

made in seven. Xavier's voyage from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen

months. Inns were good in France and England; less pleasant elsewhere.

Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, where a large living

and dining room would be heated to a high temperature by a stove around

which travelers would dry their steaming garments. The smells caused

by those operations, together with the fleas and mice with which the

poorer inns were infested, made the stay anything but luxurious. Any

complaint was met by the retort, "If you don't like it, go somewhere

else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the traveller was

escorted to his bedroom, he found it very cold in winter, though the

featherbeds kept him warm enough. He would see his chamber filled with

other beds occupied by his travelling companions of both {500} sexes,

and he himself was often forced to share his bed with a stranger. The

custom of the time was to take one bath a week. For this there were

public bath-houses, [Sidenote: Baths] frequented by both sexes. A

common form of entertainment was the "bath-party."

[Sidenote: Sports]

With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed in other matters the

contemporaries of Luther and Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never

has the theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear-baiting and

bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also much relished, though

humane men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful

beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were

250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in

that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden

balls and "bats"--as racquets are still called in England--were much

harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called

"triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played

nearly as now.

Young people loved dances and some older people shook their heads over

them, then as now. Melanchthon danced, at the age of forty-four, and

Luther approved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a means of

bringing young people together. On the other hand dances were

regulated in many states and prohibited in others, like Zurich and

Geneva. Some of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others

were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, embraced and

whirled around giddily by their partners. The Scotch ambassador's

comment that Queen Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an impression of

agility that would hardly now be considered in the best taste.

[Sidenote: Manners]

The veneer of courtesy was thin. True, humanists, {501} publicists and

authors composed for each other eulogies that would have been

hyperboles if addressed to the morning stars singing at the dawn of

creation, but once a quarrel had been started among the touchy race of

writers and a spouting geyser of inconceivable scurrility burst forth.

No imagery was too nasty, no epithet too strong, no charge too base to

bring against an opponent. The heroic examples of Greek and Roman

invective paled before the inexhaustible resources of learned

billingsgate stored in the minds of the humanists and theologians. To

accuse an enemy of atheism and heresy was a matter of course; to add

charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories of suicide and

of the devils hovering greedily over his deathbed, was extremely

common. Even crowned heads exchanged similar amenities.

Withal, there was growing up a strong appreciation of the merits of

courtesy. Was not Bayard, the captain in the army of Francis I a

"knight without fear and without reproach"? Did not Sir Philip Sidney

do one of the perfect deeds of gentleness when, dying on the battle

field and tortured with thirst, he passed his cup of water to a common

soldier with the simple words, "Thy need is greater than mine"? One of

the most justly famous and most popular books of the sixteenth century

was Baldessare Castiglione's _Book of the Courtier_, called by Dr.

Johnson the best treatise on good breeding ever written. Published in

Italian in 1528, it was translated into Spanish in 1534, into French in

1537, into English and Latin in 1561, and finally into German in 1566.

There have been of it more than 140 editions. It sets forth an ideal

of a Prince Charming, a man of noble birth, expert in games and in war,

brave, modest, unaffected, witty, an elegant speaker, a good dancer,

familiar with literature and accomplished in music, as well as a man of

honor {502} and courtesy. It is significant that this ideal appealed

to the time, though it must be confessed it was rarely reached.

Ariosto, to whom the first book was dedicated by the author, depicts,

as his ideals, knights in whom the sense of honor has completely

replaced all Christian virtues. They were always fighting each other

about their loves, much like the bulls, lions, rams and dogs to whom

the poet continually compares them. Even the women were hardly safe in

their company.

Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character as no long

description will do. The following are typical of the manners of our

forbears:

One winter morning a stately matron was ascending the steps of the

church of St. Gudule at Brussels. They were covered with ice; she

slipped and took a precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of

the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped her lips. When

the laughing bystanders, among whom was Erasmus, helped her to her

feet, she beat a hasty retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do

not have such a vocabulary at their tongue's end.

The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at Rome calling on

Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, though of the demi-monde, lived like a

princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as

many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet

rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with

costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat

copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly

startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the

splendor he saw around him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate

and successful flattery.

[Sidenote: 1538]

Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain Simon Lemchen, or

Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser {503} sort who published two

volumes of scurrilous epigrams bringing unfounded and nasty charges

against Luther, Melanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives.

When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Luther revenged

himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, partly by composing, for

circulation among his friends, some verses about Lemnius in which the

scurrility and obscenity of the offending youth were well over-trumped.

One would be surprised at similar measures taken by a professor of

divinity today.

[Sidenote: Morals]

In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics are not applicable;

or, at any rate, it is probably true that the general impression one

gets of the moral tone of any period is more trustworthy than would be

got from carefully compiled figures. And that one does get such an

impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his

mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient

Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Puritan

Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age.

The sixteenth century was a time when morals were perhaps not much

worse than they are now, but when vice and crime were more flaunted and

talked about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done their best to

conceal the corruption and indecency beneath the surface. But our

ancestors had no such delicacy. The naïve frankness of the age, both

when it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives a

full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking now. The large

average consumption of alcohol--a certain irritant to moral

maladies--and the unequal administration of justice, with laws at once

savage and corruptly dispensed, must have had bad consequences.

The Reformation had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral

standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for

righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of

conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of

character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English

Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said

that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other

devils entered to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was

considered quite a saint who could say that he had not broken the first

commandment, but only the other nine. Much of this complaint must be

set down to disappointment at not reaching perfection, and over against

it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits assured by the

reform.

[Sidenote: Violence]

It was an age of violence. Murder was common everywhere. On the

slightest provocation a man of spirit was expected to whip out a rapier

or dagger and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of unfaithful

wives was an especial point of honor. Benvenuto Cellini boasts of

several assassinations and numerous assaults, and he himself got off

without a scratch from the law, Pope Paul III graciously protesting

that "men unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, were not subject

to the laws." The number of unique men must have been large in the

Holy City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen more than a

hundred bodies of persons foully done to death thrown into the Tiber,

and no one bothered about it.

[Sidenote: Brigandage]

Brigandage stalked unabashed through the whole of Europe. By 1585 the

number of bandits in the papal states alone had risen to 27,000.

Sixtus V took energetic means to repress them. One of his stratagems

is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had a train of mules

loaded with poisoned food and then {505} drove them along a road he

knew to be infested by highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually

took them and ate of the food, of which many died.

Other countries were perhaps less scourged by robbers, but none was

free. Erasmus's praise of Henry VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his

realm of free-booters, was premature. In the wilder parts, especially

on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 1529 the Armstrongs of

Lidderdale, just over the border, could boast that they had burned 52

churches, besides making heavy depredations on private property. When

James V took stern measures to suppress them, [Sidenote: 1532] and

instituted a College of Justice for that purpose, the good law was

unpopular.

Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered through France, Spain

and the Netherlands. The worst robbers in Germany were the free

knights. From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage

peaceful villages and trains of merchandise going from one walled city

to another. In doing so they inflicted wanton mutilations on the

unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even

the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to

"let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it

was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do

merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of

horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt

courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a

proclamation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until he was

given compensation for his loss. For six years [Sidenote: 1534-40] he

maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally taken and executed

in Brandenburg.

[Sidenote: Fraud]

Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than force. When

Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned {506} theory the practice of all

hypocrisy and guile, the courts of Europe were only too ready to listen

to his advice. In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at

deception to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but

ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to debase the

currency of good faith in every possible way. There was also much

untruth in private life. Unfortunately, lying in the interests of

piety was justified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting

art of equivocation.

[Sidenote: Unchastity]

The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a reaction against the

asceticism of the Middle Ages. Luther proclaimed that chastity was

impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion

was not scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally debated

whether fornication was a sin, and the Italians now began to call a

harlot a "courteous woman" [Sidenote: c. 1500] (courtesan) as they

called an assassin a "brave man" (bravo). Augustine had said that

harlots were remedies against worse things, and the church had not only

winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them herself. Bastardy was

no bar to hereditary right in Italy.

The Reformers tried to make a clean sweep of the "social evil." Under

Luther's direction brothels were closed in the reformed cities. When

this was done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, stating that

they had pursued their profession not from liking but only to earn

bread, and asked for honest work. Serious attempts were made to give

it to them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some other cities

the brothels were left open, but were put under the supervision of an

officer who was to see that no married men frequented them. The

reformers had a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases.

Other countries followed Germany in their war on the prostitute. In

London the public houses of ill fame {507} were closed in 1546, in

Paris in 1560. An edict of July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to

leave Rome, but when 25,000 persons, including the women and their

dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue induced the pope

to allow them to return on August 17 of the same year.

[Sidenote: Polygamy]

One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth century, as it seems

to us, was the persistent advocacy of polygamy as, if not desirable in

itself, at least preferable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of

marriage was not hard to obtain by people of influence, whether

Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult matter than it is

in America now. In Scotland there was indeed a sort of trial marriage,

known as "handfasting," by which the parties might live together for a

year and a day and then continue as married or separate. But,

beginning with Luther, many of the Reformers thought polygamy less

wrong than divorce, on the biblical ground that whereas the former had

been practised in the Old Testament times and was not clearly forbidden

by the New Testament, divorce was prohibited save for adultery. Luther

advanced this thesis as early as 1520, when it was purely theoretical,

but he did not shrink from applying it on occasion. It is

extraordinary what a large body of reputable opinion was prepared to

tolerate polygamy, at least in exceptional cases. Popes, theologians,

humanists like Erasmus, and philosophers like Bruno, all thought a

plurality of wives a natural condition.

[Sidenote: Marriage]

But all the while the instincts of the masses were sounder in this

respect than the precepts of their guides. While polygamy remained a

freakish and exceptional practice, the passions of the age were

absorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. Matrimony having

been just restored to its proper dignity as the best estate for man,

its praises were {508} sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained

true to her preference for celibacy, but the Inquisition found much

business in suppressing the then common opinion that marriage was

better than virginity. To the Reformers marriage was not only the

necessary condition of happiness to mankind, but the typically holy

estate in which God's service could best be done. From all sides

paeans arose celebrating matrimony as the true remedy for sin and also

as the happiest estate. The delights of wedded love are celebrated

equally in Luther's table talk and letters and in the poems of the

Italian humanist Pontano. "I have always been of the opinion," writes

Ariosto, "that without a wife at his side no man can attain perfect

goodness or live without sin." "In marriage there is one mind in two

bodies," says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, "one harmony, the same sorrows,

the same joys, an identical will, common riches, poverty and honors,

the same bed and the same table. . . . Only a husband and wife can

love each other infinitely and serve each other as long as both do

live, for no love is either so vehement or so holy as theirs."

The passion for marriage in itself is witnessed by the practice of

widows and widowers of remarrying as soon and as often as possible.

[Sidenote: Remarriage common] Luther's friend, Justus Jonas, married

thrice, each time with a remark to the effect that it was better to

marry than to burn. The English Bishop Richard Cox excused his second

marriage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lamenting that he had

not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis Rosenblatt married in

succession Louis Keller, Oecolampadius, Capito and Bucer, the

ecclesiastical eminence of her last three husbands giving her, one

would think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More married a

second wife just one month after his first wife's death.

{509} [Sidenote: Treatment of wives]

Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's happiness were

frequently ill treated after they were won. In the sixteenth century

women were still treated as minors; if married they could make no will;

their husbands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was no cause

for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life is lauded by Erasmus as a

very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes

and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of

these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor

young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir

Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be

useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he

assures us, husbands chastise their wives.

[Sidenote: Position of woman]

In the position of women various currents crossed each other. The old

horror of the temptress, inherited from the early church, the lofty

scorn exhibited by the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of

chivalry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity of woman

and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated women like spoiled children;

the humanists delighted to rake up the old jibes at them in musty

authors; the divines were hardest of all in their judgment. "Nature

doth paint them forth," says John Knox of women, "to be weak, frail,

impatient, feeble and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be

unconstant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council and

regimen." "If women bear children until they become sick and

eventually die," preaches Luther, "that does no harm. Let them bear

children till they die of it; that is what they are for." In 1595 the

question was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women were human

beings. The general tone was one of disparagement. An anthology might

be made of the {510} proverbs recommending (à la Nietzsche) the whip as

the best treatment for the sex.

But withal there was a certain chivalry that revolted against all this

brutality. Castiglione champions courtesy and kindness to women on the

highest and most beautiful ground, the spiritual value of woman's love.

Ariosto sings:

No doubt they are accurst and past all grace

That dare to strike a damsel in the face,

Or of her head to minish but a hair.

Certain works like T. Elyot's _Defence of Good Women_ and like

Cornelius Agrippa's _Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex_,

witness a genuine appreciation of woman's worth. Some critics have

seen in the last named work a paradox, like the _Praise of Folly_, such

as was dear to the humanists. To me it seems absolutely sincere, even

when it goes so far as to proclaim that woman is as superior to man as

man is to beast and to celebrate her as the last and supreme work of

the creation.

[Sidenote: Children]

The family was far larger, on the average, in the sixteenth century

than it is now. One can hardly think of any man in this generation

with as many as a dozen children; it is possible to mention several of

that time with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nuremberg

printer had twenty-five children, eight by his first and seventeen by

his second wife. Albert Dürer was the third of eighteen children of

the same couple, of whom apparently only three reached maturity. John

Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two brothers and sisters

of whom by 1499 he was the only survivor. Of course these families

were exceptional, but not glaringly so. A brood of six to twelve was a

very common occurrence.

Children were brought up harshly in many families, {511} strictly in

almost all. They were not expected to sit in the presence of their

parents, unless asked, or to speak unless spoken to. They must needs

bow and crave a blessing twice a day. Lady Jane Grey complained that

if she did not do everything as perfectly as God made the world, she

was bitterly taunted and presently so nipped and pinched by her noble

parents that she thought herself in hell. The rod was much resorted

to. And yet there was a good deal of natural affection. Few fathers

have even been better to their babies than was Luther, and he humanely

advised others to rely as much on reward as on punishment--on the apple

as on the switch--and above all not to chastise the little ones so

harshly as to make them fear or hate their parents.

The _patria potestas_ was supposed to extend, as it did in Rome, during

the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion

insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents.

Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course,

not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn

thing, amounting to a definite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed

the engaged couple, by law in Sweden and by custom in many other

countries. All the more necessary, in the opinion of the time, to

prevent youths and maidens betrothing themselves without their parents'

consent.

[Sidenote: Health]

Probably the standard of health is now higher than it was then, and the

average longevity greater. It is true that few epidemics have ever

been more fatal than the recent influenza; and on the other hand one

can point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men who reached a

crude and green old age. Statistics were then few and unreliable. In

1905 the death-rate in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years

1861-1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been {512} calculated

that this is just what the death-rate was in London in a healthy year

under Elizabeth, but it must be remembered that a year without some

sort of epidemic was almost exceptional.

[Sidenote: Epidemics]

Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and horribly fatal. Many of

the figures given--as that 200,000 people perished in Moscow in 1570,

50,000 at Lyons in 1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7,

must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea of the popular

idea of the prevalent mortality. Another scourge was the sweating

sickness, first noticed as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507,

1517, 1528 and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread in the

sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but it figured less

prominently on account of worse diseases and because it was seldom

recognized until the last stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it

was by vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of zymotic

diseases, such as measles, which only began to be recognized as

different in the course of the sixteenth century. One disease almost

characteristic of former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them,

due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the stone.

Venereal diseases became so prominent in the sixteenth century that it

has often been thought that the syphilis was imported from America.

This, however, has been denied by authorities who believe that it came

down from classical antiquity, but that it was not differentiated from

other scourges. The Latin name variola, like the English pox, was

applied indiscriminately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc.

Gonorrhea was also common. The spread of these diseases was assisted

by many causes besides the prevalent moral looseness; by lack of

cleanliness in public baths, for example.

{513} Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice

it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to

cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our

ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the

evils of which were so little understood that it was actually

prescribed for many disorders of which it is a certain irritant. Add

to this the lack of sanitary measures, not only of disinfection but of

common cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satisfactorily

accounted for.

[Sidenote: Medicine]

If even now medicine as a science and an art seems backward compared

with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it

began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely

dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of

the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked

Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries,

and they were bitter, were between the Greek and the Arabian schools.

[Sidenote: c. 1550] Galenism finally triumphed just before the

beginnings of experiment and research were made. The greatest name in

the first half of the century was that of Theophrastus Paracelsus,

[Sidenote: Paracelsus, 1493-1541] as arrant a quack as ever lived, but

one who did something to break up the strangle-hold of tradition. He

worked out his system _a priori_ from a fantastic postulate of the

parallelism between man and the universe, the microcosm and the

macrocosm. He held that the Bible gave valuable prescriptions, as in

the treatment of wounds by oil and wine.

[Sidenote: Surgery]

Under the leadership of Ambroise Paré [Sidenote: Paré, 1510-90] surgery

improved rather more than medicine. Without anaesthetics, indeed,

operations were difficult, but a good deal was accomplished. Paré

first made amputation on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature

for {514} large arteries that effectively controlled hemorrhage. This

barber's apprentice, who despised the schools and wrote in the

vernacular, made other important improvements in the surgeon's

technique. It is noteworthy that each discovery was treated as a trade

secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practitioners and not

given freely to the good of mankind.

In obstetrics Paré also made discoveries that need not be detailed

here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended

in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was

the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal

tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The

admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a considerable

improvement in method.

[Sidenote: Lunacy]

The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or

otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania.

Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and

made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of

the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and

which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings

before whom the plays were first produced.

[Sidenote: Hospitals]

As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals at Florence. He tells

how beautiful they were, how clean and well served by honorable matrons

tending the poor freely all day without making known their names and at

night returning home. Such institutions were the glory of Italy, for

they were sadly to seek in other lands. When they were finally

established elsewhere, they were too often left to the care of ignorant

and evil menials. The stories one may read of the Hôtel-Dieu, at

Paris, are fairly hair-raising.

{515}

CHAPTER XI

THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION

SECTION 1. THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY

[Sidenote: Reformation and economic revolution]

Parallel with the Reformation was taking place an economic revolution

even deeper and more enduring in its consequences. Both Reformation

and Revolution were manifestations of the individualistic spirit of the

age; the substitution, in the latter case, of private enterprise and

competition for common effort as a method of producing wealth and of

distributing it. Both were prepared for long before they actually

upset the existing order; both have taken several centuries to unfold

their full consequences, and in each the truly decisive steps were

taken in the sixteenth century.

It is doubtless incorrect to see either in the Reformation or in the

economic revolution a direct and simple cause of the other. They

interacted and to a certain extent joined forces; but to a greater

degree each sought to use the other, and each has at times been

credited, or blamed, with the results of the other's operations.

Contemporaries noticed the effects, mostly the bad effects, of the rise

of capitalism, and often mistakenly attributed them to the Reformation;

and the new kings of commerce were only too ready to hide behind the

mask of Protestantism while despoiling the church. Like other

historical forces, while easily separable in thought, the two movements

were usually inextricably interwoven in action.

[Sidenote: Rise of capitalism]

Capitalism supplanted gild-production because of its fitness as a

social instrument for the production and {516} storing of wealth. In

competition with capital the medieval communism succumbed in one line

of business after another--in banking, in trade, in mining, in industry

and finally in agriculture--because it was unable to produce the

results that capital produced. By the vast reward that the newer

system gave to individual enterprise, to technical improvement and to

investment, capitalism proved the aptest tool for the creation and

preservation of wealth ever devised. It is true that the manifold

multiplication of riches in the last four centuries is due primarily to

inventions for the exploitation of natural resources, but the

capitalistic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these new

discoveries and for laying up of their increment for ultimate social

use. And this is an inestimable service to any society. Only a fairly

rich people can afford the luxuries of beauty, knowledge, and power,

that enhance the value of life and allow it to climb to ever greater

heights. To balance this service, it must be taken into account that

capitalism has lamentably failed justly to distribute rewards. Its

tendency is to intercept the greater part of the wealth it creates for

the benefit of a single class, and thereby to rob the rest of the

community of their due dividend.

[Sidenote: Primary cause of the capitalistic revolution]

So delicate is the adjustment of society that an apparently trivial new

factor will often upset the whole equilibrium and produce the most

incalculable results. Thus, the primary cause of the capitalistic

revolution appears to have been a purely mechanical one, the increase

in the production of the precious metals. Wealth could not be stored

at all in the Middle Ages save in the form of specie; nor without it

could large commerce be developed, nor large industry financed, nor was

investment possible. Moreover the rise of prices consequent on the

increase of the precious metals gave a powerful stimulus to manufacture

and a {517} fillip to the merchant and to the entrepreneur such as they

have rarely received before or since. It was, in short, the

development of the power of money that gave rise to the money power.

In the earlier Middle Ages there prevailed a "natural economy," or

system in which payments were made chiefly in the form of services and

by barter; this gave place very gradually to our modern "money economy"

in which gold and silver are both the normal standards of value and the

sole instruments of exchange. Already in the twelfth century money was

being used in the towns of Western Europe; not until the late

fourteenth or fifteenth did it become a dominant factor in rural life.

This change was not the great revolution itself, but was the

indispensable prerequisite of it, and in large part its direct cause.

[Sidenote: Money-making kings]

Gold and silver could now be hoarded in the form of money, and so the

first step was taken in the formation of large fortunes, known to the

ancient world, but almost absent in the Middle Ages. The first great

fortunes were made by kings, by nobles with large landed estates, and

by officers in government service. Henry VII left a large fortune to

his son. Some of the popes and some of the princes of Germany and

Italy hoarded money even when they were paying interest on a debt,--a

testimony to the increasing estimate of the value of hard cash. The

chief nobles were scarcely behind the kings in accumulating treasure.

Their vast revenues from land were much more like government imposts

than like rents. Thus Montmorency in France gave his daughter a dowry

amounting to $420,000. The duke of Gandia in Spain owned estates

peopled by 60,000 Moriscos and yielding a princely revenue. Vast

ransoms were exacted in war, and fines, confiscation and pillage filled

the coffers of the lords. After the atrocious war against the

Moriscos, the duke of {518} Lerma sold their houses on his estates for

500,000 ducats.

[Sidenote: Officials]

In the monarchies of Europe the only avenue to wealth at first open to

private men was the government service. Offices, benefices, naval and

military commands, were bought with the expectation, often justified,

of making money out of them. The farmed revenues yielded immense

profit to the collectors. No small fortunes were reaped by Empson and

Dudley, the tools of Henry VII, but they were far surpassed by the

hoards of Wolsey and of Cromwell. Such was the great fortune made in

France by Semblançay, the son of a plain merchant of Tours, who turned

the offices of treasurer and superintendent of finances to such good

account that he bought himself large estates and baronies. Fortunes on

a proportionately smaller scale were made by the servants of the German

princes, as by John Schenitz, a minion of the Archbishop Elector Albert

of Mayence. So insecure was the tenure of riches accumulated in royal

or princely service that most of the men who did so, including all

those mentioned in this paragraph, ended on the scaffold, save, indeed,

Wolsey, who would have done so had he not died while awaiting trial.

It is to be noted that, though land was the principal form of wealth in

the Middle Ages, no great fortunes were made from it at the beginning

of the capitalistic era, save by the titled holders of enormous

domains. The small landlords suffered at the expense of the burghers

in Germany, and not until these burghers turned to the country and

bought up landed estates did agriculture become thoroughly profitable.

[Sidenote: Banking]

The intimate connection of government and capitalism is demonstrated by

the fact that, next to officials, government concessionaires and

bankers were the first to make great fortunes. At this time banking

was {519} closely dependent on public loans and was therefore the first

great business to be established on the capitalistic basis. The first

"trust" was the money trust. Though banking had been well started in

the Middle Ages, it was still in an imperfect state of development.

Jews and goldsmiths made a considerable number of commercial loans but

these loans were always regarded by the borrower as temporary

expedients; the habitual conduct of business on borrowed capital was

unknown. But, just as the new output of the German mines was

increasing the supply of precious metals, the greater costliness of

war, due to the substitution of mercenaries and fire-arms for feudal

levies equipped with bows and pikes, made the governments of Europe

need money more than ever before. They made great loans at home and

abroad, and it was the interest on these that expanded the banking

business until it became an international power. Well before the

sixteenth century men had made a fine art of receiving deposits,

loaning capital and performing other financial operations, but it was

not until the late fifteenth century that the bankers reaped the full

reward of their skill and of the new opportunities. The three balls in

the arms of the Medici testify to the heights to which a profession,

once humble, might raise its experts. In Italy the science of

accounting, [Sidenote: Science of accounting] or of double-entry

bookkeeping, originated; it was slowly adopted in other lands. The

first English work on the subject is that by John Gouge in 1543,

entitled: "A Profitable Treatyce called the Instrument or Boke to learn

to know the good order of the keeping of the famouse reconnynge, called

in Latin, Dare et Habere, and, in Englyshe, Debitor and Creditor." It

was in Italy that modern technique of clearing bills was developed; the

simple system by which balances are settled not by full payment of each

debt in money, but by comparing {520} the paper certificates of

indebtedness. This immense saving, as developed by the Genoese, was

soon extended from their own city to the whole of Northern Italy, so

that the bankers would meet several times a year in the first

international clearing-house. From Genoa the same system was then

applied to distant cities, with great profit, even more in security

than in saving of capital. If bills payable at Antwerp were bought at

Genoa, they were paid at Antwerp by selling bills on Lisbon, perhaps,

and these in turn by selling exchange on Genoa. These processes seem

simple and are now universal, but how vastly they facilitated the

development of banking and business when first discovered can hardly be

over-estimated.

From the improvement of exchange the Genoese soon proceeded to

arbitrage, a transaction more profitable and more socially useful at

that time when poor communications made the differences in prices

between bills of exchange, bullion, coins, stocks and bonds in distant

markets more considerable than they are now. The Genoese bankers also

invented the first substitutes for money in the form of circulating

notes. In all this, and in other ways, they made enormous profits that

soon induced others to copy them.

[Sidenote: Great firms]

Though the Italians invented modern banking they were eventually

surpassed by the Germans, if not in technique at least in the size of

the firms established. The largest Florentine bank in 1529 was that of

Thomas Guadegni with a capital of 520,000 florins ($1,170,000). The

capital of the house of Fugger at Augsburg, distinct from the personal

fortunes of its members, was in 1546, 4,700,000 gold gulden

($11,500,000). The average annual profits of the Fuggers during the

years 1511-27 were 54.5 per cent.; from 1534-6, 2.2 per cent.; from

1540-46, 19 per cent.; from 1547-53, 5.6 per cent. Another Augsburg

firm, the Welsers, averaged 9 per {521} cent. for the fifteen years

1502-17. Dividends were not declared annually, but a general casting

up of accounts was made every few years and a new balance struck, each

partner withdrawing as much as he wished, or leaving it to be credited

to his account as new capital.

[Sidenote: Risks of banking]

Though the Fuggers and other firms soon went into large business of all

sorts, they remained primarily bankers. As such they enjoyed boundless

credit with the public from whom they received deposits at regular

interest. The proportion of these deposits to the capital continually

rose. This general tendency, together with the habit of changing the

amount of capital every few years, is evident from the following table

of the liabilities of the Fuggers in gold gulden at several different

periods:

Year Capital Deposits

1527 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 290,000

1536 . . . . . . . 1,500,000 900,000

1546 . . . . . . . 4,700,000 1,300,000

1563 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 3,100,000

1577 . . . . . . . 1,300,000 4,000,000

A smaller Augsburg firm, the Haugs, had in 1560, a capital of 140,000

florins and deposits of 648,000. As all these deposits were subject to

be withdrawn at sight, and as the firms usually kept a very small

reserve of specie, it would seem that banking was subject to great

risks. The unsoundness of the method was counterbalanced by the fact

that most of the deposits were made by members of the banker's family,

or by friends, who harbored a strong sentiment against embarrassing the

bank by withdrawing at inconvenient seasons. Doubtless the almost

uniformly profitable career of most firms for many years concealed many

dangers.

The crash came finally as the result of the bankruptcy {522} of the

Spanish and French governments. [Sidenote: Bankruptcy of France and

Spain, 1557] Spain's repudiation of her debt was partial, taking the

form of consolidation and conversion; France, however, simply stopped

all payments of interest and amortization. Many banks throughout

Europe failed, and drew down with them their creditors. The years

1557-64 saw the first of these characteristically modern phenomena,

international financial crises. There were hard times everywhere.

Other states followed the example of the French and Spanish

governments, England constituting the fortunate exception. Recovery

followed at length, however, and speculation boomed; but a second

Spanish state bankruptcy [Sidenote: 1575] brought on another crisis,

and there was a third, following the defeat of the Armada. The failure

of many of the great private companies was followed by the institution

of state banks. The first to be erected was the Banco di Rialto in

Venice. [Sidenote: 1587]

The banks were the agencies for the spread of the capitalistic system

to other fields. The great firms either bought up, or obtained as

concessions from some government, the natural resources requisite for

the production of wealth. One of the very first things seized by them

were the mines. [Sidenote: Mining] Indeed, the profitable

exploitation of the German mines especially dates from their

acquisition by the Fuggers and other bankers late in the fifteenth

century. Partly by the development of new methods of refining ore, but

chiefly by driving large numbers of laborers to their maximum effort,

the new mine-owners increased the production of metal almost at a

bound, and thereby poured untold wealth into their own coffers. The

total value of metals produced in Germany in 1525 amounted to

$4,800,000 per annum, and employed over 100,000 men. Until 1545 the

German production of silver was greater than the American, and copper

was almost as valuable {523} a product. Notwithstanding its increased

production, its value doubled between 1527 and 1557. The shares in

these great companies were, like the "Fugger letters," or certificates

of interest-bearing deposits in banks, assignable and were actively

traded in on various bourses. Each share was a certificate of

partnership which then carried with it unlimited liability for the

debts of the company. One of the favorite speculative issues was found

in the shares of the Mansfeld Copper Co., established in 1524 with a

capital of 70,000 gulden, which was increased to 120,000 gulden in 1528.

[Sidenote: Commerce]

Whereas, in banking and in mining, capital had almost created the

opportunities for its employment, in commerce it partly supplanted the

older system and partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages

domestic, and to some extent international, commerce was carried on by

fairs adapted to bring producer and consumer together and hence reduce

the functions of middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the

annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart at

Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in Lyons, Antwerp, and

many other cities. Only in the larger towns was a market perpetually

open. Foreign commerce was also carried on by companies formed on the

analogy of the medieval gilds.

New conditions called for fresh means of meeting them. The great

change in sea-borne trade effected by the discovery of the new routes

to India and America, was not so much in the quantity of goods carried

as in the paths by which they traveled. The commerce of the two inland

seas, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, relatively declined, while that

of the Atlantic seaboard grew by leaps and bounds. New and large

companies came into existence, formed on the joint-stock principle.

Over them the various governments exercised a large control, giving

them a semi-political character.

{524} [Sidenote: Portugal]

As Portugal was the first to tap the wealth of the gorgeous East, into

her lap fell the stream of gold from that quarter. The secret of her

windfall was the small bulk and enormous value of her cargoes. From

Malabar she fetched pepper and ginger, from Ceylon cinnamon and pearls,

from Bengal opium, the only known conqueror of pain, and with it

frankincense and indigo. Borneo supplied camphor, Amboyna nutmegs and

mace, and two small islands, Temote and Tidor, offered cloves. These

products sold for forty times as much in London or in Antwerp as they

cost in the Orient. No wonder that wealth came in a gale of perfume to

Lisbon. The cost of the ship and of the voyage, averaging two years

from departure to return, was $20,000, and any ship might bring back a

cargo worth $750,000. But the risks were great. Of the 104 ships that

sailed from 1497-1506 only 72 returned. In the following century of

about 800 Portuguese vessels engaged in the India trade nearly

one-eighth were lost. Even the risk of loss in sailing from Lisbon to

the ports of northern Europe was appreciable. The king of Portugal

insured ships on a voyage from Lisbon to Antwerp for a premium of six

per cent.

[Sidenote: Spain]

Spain found the path towards the setting sun as golden as Portugal had

found the reflection of his rising beams. At her height she had a

thousand merchant galleons. The chief imports were the precious

metals, but they were not the only ones. Cochineal, selling at $370 a

hundredweight in London, surpassed in value any spice from Celebes.

Dye-wood, ebony, some drugs, nuts and a few other articles richly

repaid importation. There was also a very considerable export trade.

Cadiz and Seville sent to the Indies annually 2,240,000 gallons of

wine, with quantities of oil, clothes and other necessities. Many

ships, not {525} only Spanish but Portuguese and English, were weighted

with human flesh from Africa as heavily as Christian with his black

load of sin, and in the case of Portugal, at least, the load almost

sent its bearer to the City of Destruction.

But Spanish keels made other wakes than westward. To Flanders oil and

wool were sent to be exchanged for manufactured wares, tapestries and

books. Italy asked hides and dyes in return for her brocades, pearls

and linen. The undoubtedly great extent of Spanish commerce even in

places where it had no monopoly, is all the more remarkable in that it

was at the first burdened by what in the end choked it, government

regulation. Cadiz had the best harbor, but Seville was favored by the

king; even ships allowed to unload at Cadiz could do so only on

condition that their cargoes be transported directly to Seville. A

particularly crushing tax was the alcabala, or 10 per cent. impost on

all sales. Other import duties, royalties on metals, excise on food,

monopolies, and petty regulations finally handicapped Spain's merchants

so effectually that they fell behind those of other countries in the

race for supremacy.

[Sidenote: France]

As the mariners of the Iberian peninsula drooped under the shackles of

unwise laws, hardy sailors sprang into their places. Neither of the

other Latin nations, however, was able to do so. The once proud

supremacy of Venice and of Genoa was gone; the former sank as Lisbon

rose and the latter, who held her own at least as a money market until

1540, was about that time surpassed, though she was never wholly

superseded, by Antwerp. Italy exported wheat, flax, woad and other

products, but chiefly by land routes or in foreign keels. Nor was

France able to take any great part in maritime trade. Content with the

freight brought her by other nations, she sent out few {526}

expeditions, and those few, like that of James Cartier, had no present

result either in commerce or in colonies. Her greatest mart was Lyons,

the fairs there being carefully fostered by the kings and being

naturally favored by the growth of manufacture, while the maritime

harbors either declined or at least gained nothing. For a few years La

Rochelle battened on religious piracy, but that was all.

[Sidenote: Germany]

In no country is the struggle for existence between the medieval and

the modern commercial methods plainer than in Germany. The trade of

the Hanse towns failed to grow, partly for the reason that their

merchants had not command of the fluid wealth that raised to

pre-eminence the southern cities. There were, indeed, other causes for

the decline of the Hanseatic Baltic trade. The discovery of new

routes, especially the opening of Archangel on the White Sea,

short-circuited the current that had previously flowed through the

Kattegat and the Skager Rak. Moreover, the development of both

wheat-growing and of commerce in the Netherlands and in England proved

disastrous to the Hanse. The shores of the Baltic had at one time been

the granary of Europe, but they suffered somewhat by the greater yield

of the more intensive agriculture introduced at that time elsewhere.

Even then their export continued to be considerable, though diverted

from the northern to the southern ports of Europe. In 1563, for

example, 6630 loads of grain were exported from Königsberg, and in 1573

7730 loads.

The Hanse towns lost their English trade in competition with the new

companies there formed. A bitter diplomatic struggle was carried on by

Henry VIII. The privileges to the Germans of the Steelyard confirmed

and extended by him were abridged by his son, partly restored by Mary

and again taken {527} away by Elizabeth. The emperor, in agreement

with the cities' senates, started retaliatory measures against English

merchants, endeavoring to assure the Hanse towns that they should at

least "continue the ancient concord of their dear native country and

the good Dutches that now presently inhabit it." He therefore ordered

English merchants banished, against which Elizabeth protested.

While the North of Germany was suffering from its failure to adapt

itself to new conditions, a power was rising in the South capable of

levying tribute not only from the whole Empire but from the habitable

earth. Among the merchant princes who, in Augsburg, in Nuremberg, in

Strassburg, placed on their own brows the golden crown of riches, the

Fuggers were both typical and supreme. James Fugger "the Rich,"

[Sidenote: James Fugger, 1459-1525] springing from a family already

opulent, was one of those geniuses of finance that turn everything

touched into gold. He carried on a large banking business, he loaned

money to emperors and princes, he bought up mines and fitted out

fleets, he re-organized great industries, he speculated in politics and

religion. For the princes of the empire he farmed taxes; for the pope

he sold indulgences at a 33 1/3 per cent. commission, and collected

annates and other dues. In Hungary, in Spain, in Italy, in the New

World, his agents were delving for money and skilfully diverting it

into his coffers. He was also a pillar of the church and a

philanthropist, founding a library at Augsburg and building model

tenements for poor workers. He became the incarnation of a new Great

Power, that of international finance. A contemporary chronicler says:

"emperors, kings, princes and governors have sent ambassage unto him;

the pope hath greeted him as his beloved son and hath embraced him;

cardinals have risen before him. . . . He hath become the glory {528}

of the whole German land." His sons, Raymond, Anthony and Jerome, were

raised by Charles V to the rank and privileges of counts, bannerets and

barons.

Throughout the century corporations became less and less family

partnerships and more and more impersonal or "soulless." They were

semi-public, semi-private affairs, resting on special charters and

actively promoted, not only in Germany but in England and other

countries, by the emperor, king, or territorial prince. On the other

hand the capital was largely subscribed by private business men and the

direction of the companies' affairs was left in their hands. Liability

was unlimited.

[Sidenote: Monopolies]

In their methods many of the sixteenth century corporations were

surprisingly "modern." Monopolies, corners, trusts and agreements to

keep up prices flourished, notwithstanding constant legislation against

them, as that against secret schedules of prices passed by the Diet of

Nuremberg. [Sidenote: 1522-33] Particularly noteworthy were the

number of agreements to create a monopoly price in metals. [Sidenote:

1524] Thus a ring of German mine-owners was formed artificially to

raise the price of silver, a measure defended publicly on the ground

that it enriched Germany at the expense of the foreigner. Another

example was the formation of a tinning company under the patronage of

Duke George of Saxony. [Sidenote: 1518] It proposed agreements with

its Bohemian rivals to fix the price of tin, [Sidenote: 1549] but these

usually failed even after a monopoly of Bohemian tin had been granted

by Ferdinand to Conrad Mayr of Augsburg.

[Sidenote: Corners]

The immense difficulty of cornering any of the larger articles of

commerce was not so well appreciated in the earlier time as it is now.

Nothing is more instructive than the history of the mercury "trusts" of

those years. [Sidenote: 1523] When the competing companies owning

mines at Idria in Carniola amalgamated for the purpose of {529}

enhancing the price of quicksilver, the attempt broke down by reason of

the Spanish mines. Accordingly, one Ambrose Höchstetter of Augsburg

[Sidenote: 1528] conceived the ambitious project of cornering the whole

supply of the world. As has happened so often since, the higher price

brought forth a much larger quantity of the article than had been

reckoned with, the so-called "invisible supply"; the corner broke down

and Höchstetter failed with enormous liabilities of 800,000 gulden, and

died in prison. The crash shook the financial world, but was

nevertheless followed by still better planned and better financed

efforts of the Fuggers to put the whole quicksilver product of the

world into an international trust. These final attempts were more or

less successful. Another ambitious scheme, which failed, was that of

Conrad Rott of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1570 ff.] to get a monopoly of

pepper. He agreed to buy six hundred tons of pepper from the king of

Portugal one year and one thousand tons the next, at the rate of 680

ducats the ton, but even this failed to give him the desired monopoly.

[Sidenote: Regulation of monopolies]

Just as in our own memory the trusts have aroused popular hatred and

have brought down on their heads many attempts, usually unsuccessful,

of governments to deal with them, so at the beginning of the

capitalistic era, intense unpopularity was the lot of the new

commercial methods and their exponents. Monopolies were fiercely

denounced in the contemporary German tracts and every Diet made some

effort to deal with them. First of all the merchants had to meet not

only the envy and prejudices of the old order, but the positive

teachings of the church. The prohibition of usury, and the doctrine

that every article had a just or natural price, barred the road of the

early entrepreneur. Aquinas believed that no one should be allowed to

make more money than he needed and that profits on {530} commerce

should be scaled down to such a point that they would give only a

reasonable return. This idea was shared by Catholic and Protestant

alike in the first years of the Reformation; it can be found in Geiler

of Kaiserberg and in Luther. In the Reformer's influential tract, _To

the German Nobility_, [Sidenote: 1520] usury and "Fuggerei" are

denounced as the greatest misfortunes of Germany. Ulrich von Hutten

said that of the four classes of robbers, free-booting knights,

lawyers, priests and merchants, the merchants were the worst.

The imperial Diets reflected popular opinion faithfully enough to try

their best to bridle the great companies. The Diet of Trèves-Cologne

[Sidenote: 1512] asked that monopolies and artificial enhancement of

the prices of spice, copper and woolen cloth be prohibited. To effect

this acts were passed intended to insure competition. [Sidenote: 1523]

This law against monopolies, however, was not vigorously enforced until

the Imperial Treasurer cited before his tribunal many merchants of

Augsburg accused of violating it. The panic-stricken offenders

feverishly hastened to make interest with the princes and city

magistrates. But their main support was the emperor, who intervened

energetically in their favor. From this time the bankers and great

merchants labored hard at each Diet to place the control of monopolies

in the hands of the monarch. In return for his constant support he was

made a large sharer in the profits of the great houses.

In the struggle with the Diets, at last the capitalists were thoroughly

successful. The Imperial Council of Regency passed an epoch-making

ordinance, [Sidenote: 1525] kept secret for fear of the people,

expressly allowing merchants to sell at the highest prices they could

get and recognizing certain monopolies said to be in the national

interest as against other countries, and justified for the wages they

provided for labor. About this {531} time, for some reason, the

agitation gradually died down. It is probable that the religious

controversy took the public's mind off economic questions and the

Peasant's War, like all unsuccessful but dangerous risings of the poor,

was followed by a strong reaction in favor of the conservative rich.

Moreover, it is evident that the currents of the time were too strong

to be resisted by the feeble methods proposed by the reformers. When

we remember that the chief practical measure recommended by Luther was

the total prohibition of trading in spices and other foreign wares that

took money out of the country, it is easy to see that the regulation of

a complex industry was beyond the scope of his ability. And little, if

any, enlightenment came from other quarters.

[Sidenote: The Netherlands]

While the towns of southern Germany were becoming the world's banking

and industrial centers, the cities of the Netherlands became its chief

staple ports. For generations Antwerp had had two fairs a year, but in

1484 it started a perpetual market, open to all merchants, even to

foreigners, the whole year round, and in addition to this it increased

its fairs to four. Later a new Merchants' Exchange or Bourse was built

[Sidenote: 1531] in which almost all the transactions now seen on our

stock or produce exchanges took place. There was wild speculation,

partly on borrowed money, especially in pepper, the price of which

furnished a sort of barometer of bourse feeling. Bets on prices and on

events were made, and from this practice various forms of insurance

took their rise.

[Sidenote: Antwerp]

The discovery of the new world brought an era of prosperity to Antwerp

that doubtless put her at the head of all commercial cities until the

Spanish sword cut her down. In 1560 there were commonly 2500 ships

anchored in her harbor, as against 500 at Amsterdam, her chief rival

and eventual heir. Of these not {532} uncommonly as many as 500 sailed

in one day, and, it is said, 12,000 carriages came in daily, 2000 with

passengers and 10,000 with wares. Even if these statements are

considerable exaggerations, a reliable account of the exports in the

single year 1560 shows the real greatness of the town. The total

imports in that year amounted to 31,870,000 gulden ($17,848,000),

divided as follows: Italian silks, satins and ornaments 6,000,000

gulden; German dimities 1,200,000; German wines 3,000,000; Northern

wheat 3,360,000; French wine 2,000,000; French dyes 600,000; French

salt 360,000; Spanish wool 1,250,000; Spanish wine 1,600,000;

Portuguese spices 2,000,000; English wool 500,000; English cloth

10,000,000. The last named article indicates the decay of Flemish

weaving due to English competition. For a time there had been war to

the knife with English merchants, following the great commercial treaty

popularly called the _Malus Intercursus_. [Sidenote: 1506] According

to the theory then held that one nation's loss was another's gain,

[Sidenote: Commercial policy] this treaty was considered a masterpiece

of policy in England and the foundation of her commercial greatness.

It and its predecessor, the _Magnus Intercursus_, [Sidenote: 1496]

marked the new policy, characteristic of modern times, that made

commercial advantages a chief object of diplomacy and of legislation.

Protective tariffs were enacted, the export of gold and silver

prohibited, and sumptuary laws passed to encourage domestic industries.

The policy as to export varied throughout the century and according to

the article. The value of ships was highly appreciated. Sir Walter

Raleigh opined that command of the sea meant command of the world's

riches and ultimately of the world itself. Sir Humphrey Gilbert drew

up a report advocating the acquisition of colonies as means of

providing markets for home products. So little were the rights of the

natives {533} considered that Sir Humphrey stated that the savages

would be amply rewarded for all that could be taken from them by the

inestimable gift of Christianity.

[Sidenote: Buccaneering]

As little regard was shown for the property of Catholics as for that of

heathens. Merry England drew her dividends from slave-trading and from

buccaneering as well as from honest exchange of goods. There is

something fascinating about the career of a man like Sir John Hawking

whose character was as infamous as his daring was serviceable. He

early learned that "negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola

and that they might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea," and so,

financed by the British aristocracy and blessed by Protestant patriots,

he chartered the _Jesus of Lübeck_ and went burning, stealing and

body-snatching in West African villages, crowded his hold full of

blacks and sold those of them who survived at $800 a head in the

Indies. Quite fittingly he received as a crest "a demi-Moor, proper,

in chains." He then went preying on the Spanish galleons, and at one

time swindled Philip out of $200,000 by pretending to be a traitor and

a renegade; thus he rose from slaver to pirate and from pirate to

admiral.

[Sidenote: English commerce]

So pious, patriotic and profitable a business as buccaneering absorbed

a greater portion of England's energies than did ordinary maritime

commerce. A list of all ships engaged in foreign trade in 1572 shows

that they amounted to an aggregate of only 51,000 tons burden, less

than that of a single steamer of the largest size today. The largest

ship that could reach London was of 240 tons, but some twice as large

anchored at other harbors. Throughout the century trade multiplied,

that of London, which profited the most, ten-fold. If the customs'

dues furnish an accurate barometer for the volume of trade, while

London was increasing the other ports were falling behind not only

{534} relatively but positively. In the years 1506-9 London yielded to

the treasury $60,000 and other ports $75,000; in 1581-2 London paid

$175,000 and other ports only $25,000.

As she grew in size and wealth London, like Antwerp, felt the need of

permanent fairs. From the continental city Sir Thomas Gresham, the

English financial agent in the Netherlands, brought architect and

materials [Sidenote: 1568] and erected the Royal Exchange on the north

side of Cornhill in London, where the same institution stands today.

Built by Gresham at his own expense, it was lined by a hundred small

shops rented by him. As the new was rung in, the old passed away. The

ancient restrictions on the fluidity of capital were almost broken down

[Sidenote: 1542 and 1571] by the end of Elizabeth's reign. The

statutes of bankruptcy, giving new and strong securities to creditors,

marked the advent to power of the commercial class. Capitalism took

form in the chartering of large companies. The first of these, "the

mistery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of

regions, dominions, islands and places unknown," [Sidenote: 1553]

commonly called the Russia Company, was a joint-stock corporation with

240 members, each with a share valued at $125. It traded principally

with Russia, but, before the century was out, was followed by the

Levant Company, the East India Company, and others, for the

exploitation of other regions.

To northern Spain England sent coarse cloth, cottons, sheepskins,

wheat, butter and cheese, and brought back wine, oranges, lemons and

timber. To France went wax, tallow, butter, cheese, wheat, rye,

"Manchester cloth," beans and biscuit in exchange for pitch, rosin,

feathers, prunes and "great ynnions that be xii or xiiii ynches

aboute," iron and wine. To the Russian Baltic ports, Riga, Reval and

Narva went coarse cloth, "corrupt" (_i.e._, adulterated) wine,

cony-skins, {535} salt and brandy, and from the same came flax, hemp,

pitch, tar, tallow, wax and furs. Salmon from Ireland and other fish

from Scotland and Denmark were paid for by "corrupt" wines. To the

Italian ports of Leghorn, Barcelona, Civita Vecchia and Venice, and to

the Balearic Isles went lead, fine cloth, hides, Newfoundland fish and

lime, and from them came oil, silk and fine porcelain. To Barbary went

fine cloth, ordnance and artillery, armor and timber for oars, though,

as a memorandum of 1580 says, "if the Spaniards catch you trading with

them, you shall die for it." Probably what they objected to most was

the sale of arms to the infidel. From Barbary came sugar, saltpetre,

dates, molasses and carpets. Andalusia demanded fine cloth and cambric

in return for wines called "seckes," sweet oil, raisins, salt,

cochineal, indigo, sumac, silk and soap. Portugal took butter, cheese,

fine cloth "light green or sad blue," lead, tin and hides in exchange

for salt, oil, soap, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, pepper and all other

Indian wares.

While the English drove practically no trade with the East Indies, to

the West Indies they sent directly oil, looking-glasses, knives,

shears, scissors, linen, and wine which, to be salable, must be

"singular good." From thence came gold, pearls "very orient and big

withall," sugar and molasses. To Syria went colored cloth of the

finest quality, and for it currants and sweet oil were taken. The

establishment of an English factor in Turkey [Sidenote: 1582] with the

express purpose of furthering trade with that country is an interesting

landmark in commercial history.

Even as late as the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all

"artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were

called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles,

[Sidenote: _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, c. 1559] the whole household being

turned upside down to look for {536} the one lost by Gammer Gurton.

These articles, as well as knives, nails, pins, buttons, dolls,

tennis-balls, tape, thread, glass, and laces, were imported from the

Netherlands and Germany. From the same quarter came "small wares for

grocers,"--by which may be meant cabbages, turnips and lettuce,--and

also hops, copper and brass ware.

[Sidenote: Manufacture]

Having swept all before it in the domains of banking, mining and trade,

capitalism, flushed with victory, sought for new worlds to conquer and

found them in manufacture. Here also a great struggle was necessary.

Hitherto the opposition to the new companies had been mainly on the

part of the consumer; now the hostility of the laborer was aroused.

The grapple of the two classes, in which the wage-earner went down,

partly before the arquebus of the mercenary, partly under the lash and

branding-iron of pitiless laws, will be described in the next section.

Here it is not the strife of the classes, but of the two economic

systems, that is considered. Capitalism won economically before it

imposed its yoke on the vanquished by the harsh means of soldier and

police. It won, in the final analysis, not because of the inherent

power of concentrated wealth, though it used and abused this

recklessly, but because, in the struggle for existence, it proved

itself the form of life better fitted to survive in the conditions of

modern society. It called forth technical improvements, it stimulated

individual effort, it put an immense premium on thrift and investment,

it cheapened production by the application of initially expensive but

ultimately repaying, apparatus, it effected enormous economies in

wholesale production and distribution. Before the new methods of

business the old gilds stood as helpless, as unready, as bowmen in the

face of cannon.

{537} [Sidenote: Gilds]

Each medieval "craft" or "mistery" [1] was in the hands of a gild, all

the members of which were theoretically equal. Each passed through the

ranks of apprentice and other lower grades until he normally became a

master-workman and as such entitled to a full and equal share in the

management. The gild managed its property almost like that of an

endowment in the hands of trustees; it supervised the whole life of

each member, took care of him when sick, buried him when dead and

pensioned his widow. In these respects it was like some mutual benefit

societies of our day. Almost inevitably in that age, it was under the

protection of a patron saint and discharged various religious duties.

It acted as a corporate whole in the government of the city and marched

and acted as one on festive occasions.

As typical of the organization of industry at the turning-point may be

given the list of gilds at Antwerp drawn up by Albert Dürer: [Sidenote:

1520] There were goldsmiths, painters, stone-cutters, embroiderers,

sculptors, joiners, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers,

cloth-weavers, bakers, cobblers, "and all sorts of artisans and many

laborers and merchants of provisions." The list is fully as

significant for what it omits as for what it includes. Be it noted

that there was no gild of printers, for that art had grown up since the

crafts had begun to decline, and, though in some places found as a

gild, was usually a combination of a learned profession and a

capitalistic venture. Again, in this great banking and trading port,

there is no mention of gilds of wholesale merchants (for the "merchants

of provisions" were certainly not this) nor of bankers. These were two

fully capitalized businesses. Finally, observe that there were many

skilled and unskilled laborers {538} not included in a special gild.

Here we have the beginning of the proletariat. A century earlier there

would have been no special class of laborers, a century later no gilds

worth mentioning.

The gilds were handicapped by their own petty regulations.

Notwithstanding the fact that their high standards of craftsmanship

produced an excellent grade of goods, they were over-regulated and

hide-bound, averse to new methods. There was as great a contrast

between their meticulous traditions and the freer paths of the new

capitalism as there was between scholasticism and science. They could

neither raise nor administer the funds needed for foreign commerce and

for export industries. Presently new technical methods were adopted by

the capitalists, a finer way of smelting ores, and a new way of making

brass, invented by Peter von Hoffberg, that saved 50 per cent. of the

fuel previously used. In the textile industries came first the

spinning-wheel, then the stocking-frame. So in other manufactures, new

machinery required novel organization. Significant was the growth of

new towns. The old cities were often so gild-ridden that they decayed,

while places like Manchester sprang up suddenly at the call of

employment. The constant effort of the gild had been to suppress

competition and to organize a completely stationary society. In a

dynamic world that which refuses to change, perishes. So the gilds,

while charging all their woes to the government, really choked

themselves to death in their own bands.

[Sidenote: Capitalistic production]

There is perhaps some analogy between the progress of capitalism in the

sixteenth century and the process by which the trusts have come to

dominate production in our own memory. The larger industries, and

especially those connected with export trade, were seized and

reorganized first; for a long time, indeed throughout {539} the

century, the gilds kept their hold on small, local industries. For a

long time both systems went on side by side; the encroachment was

steady, but gradual. The exact method of the change was two-fold. In

the first place the constitution of the gild became more oligarchical.

The older members tended to restrict the administration more and more;

they increased the number of apprentices by lengthening the years of

apprenticeship and reduced the poorer members to the rank of journeymen

who were expected to work, not as before for a limited term of years,

but for life, as wage-earners. When the journeymen rebelled, they were

put down. The English Clothworkers' Court Book, for example, enacted

the rule in 1538 that journeymen who would not work on conditions

imposed by the masters should be imprisoned for the first offence and

whipped and branded for the second. Nevertheless, to some extent, the

master's calling was kept open to the more enterprising and intelligent

laborers. It is this opportunity to rise that has always broken up the

solidarity of the working class more than anything else.

[Sidenote: Great commercial companies]

But a second transforming influence worked faster from without than did

the internal decay of the gild. This was the extension of the

commercial system to manufacture. The gilds soon found themselves at

the mercy of the great new companies that wanted wares in large

quantities for export. Thus the commercial company came either to

absorb or to dominate the industries that supplied it. An example of

this is supplied by the Paris mercers, who, from being mainly dealers

in foreign goods, gradually became employers of the crafts. Similarly

the London haberdashers absorbed the crafts of the hatters and cappers.

The middle man, who commanded the market, soon found the strategic

value of his position for controlling {540} the supply of articles.

Commercial capital rapidly became industrial. One by one the great

gilds fell under the control of commercial companies. One of the last

instances was the formation of the Stationers' Company by which the

printers were reduced to the rank of an industry subordinate to that of

booksellers.

[Sidenote: Legislation on gilds]

Finally came the legislative attack on the gilds, that broke what

little power they had left. There is now a tendency to minimise the

result of legislation in this field, but the impression that one gets

by perusing the statutes not only of England but of Continental

countries is that, while perhaps the governments would not have

admitted any hostility to the gilds as such, they were strongly opposed

to many features of them, and were determined to change them in

accordance with the interests of the now dominant class. The policy of

the moneyed men was not to destroy the crafts, but to exploit them;

indeed they often found their old franchises extremely useful in

arrogating to themselves the powers that had once belonged to the gild

as a whole. The town governments were elected by the wealthy burghers;

Parliaments soon came to side with them, and the monarch had already

been bribed into an ally.

To give specific examples of the new trend is easy. When the great

tapestry manufacture of Brussels was reorganized [Sidenote: 1544] on a

basis very favorable to the capitalists, the law sanctioning this step

spoke contemptuously of the mutual benefit and religious functions of

the gild as "petty details." [Sidenote: 1515] Brandenburg now

regulated the terms on which entrance to a gild should be allowed

instead of leaving the matter as of old to the members themselves.

[Sidenote: 1540] The Polish nobility, jealous of the cities' monopoly

of trade, demanded the total abolition of the gilds. [Sidenote: 1503

ff.] A series of measures in England weakened the power of the gilds;

under Edward VI [Sidenote: 1547] their endowments for religious

purposes were {541} attacked, and this hurt them far more than would

appear on the surface. The important Act Touching Weavers [Sidenote:

1555] both witnessed the unhappy condition of the misteries and,

without seeming to do so, still further put them in the power of their

masters. The workmen, it seems, had complained "that the rich and

wealthy clothiers oppress them" by building up factories, or workshops

in which many looms were installed, instead of keeping to the old

commission or sweat-shop system, by which piece work was given out and

done by each man at home. The gild-workmen preferred this method,

because their great rival was the newly developed proletariat, masses

of men who could only be accommodated in large buildings. The act,

under the guise of redressing the grievance, in reality confirmed the

powers of the capitalists, for, while forbidding the use of factories

outside of cities, it allowed them within towns and in the four

northern counties, thus fortifying the monopolists in those places

where they were strong, and hitting their rivals elsewhere. Further

legislation, like the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, [Sidenote:

1563] strengthened the hands of the masters at the expense of the

journeymen. Such examples are only typical; similar laws were enacted

throughout Europe. By act after act the employers were favored at the

expense of the laborers.

[Sidenote: Agriculture]

There remained agriculture, at that time by far the largest and most

important of all the means by which man wrings his sustenance from

nature. Even now the greater part of the population in most civilized

countries--and still more in semi-civilized--is rural, but four hundred

years ago the proportion was much larger. England was a predominantly

agricultural country until the eighteenth century,--England, the most

commercial and industrial of nations! Though {542} the last field to

be attacked by capital, agriculture was as thoroughly renovated in the

sixteenth century by this irrigating force as the other manners of

livelihood had been transformed before it.

Medieval agriculture was carried on by peasants holding small amounts

of land which would correspond to the small shops and slender capital

of the handicraftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or a

manor, was made up of different kinds of land,--arable, commons for

pasturing sheep and cattle, forests for gathering firewood and for

herding swine and meadows for growing hay. The arable land was divided

into three so-called "fields," or sections, each field partitioned into

smaller portions called in England "shots," and these in turn were

subdivided into acre strips. Each peasant possessed a certain number

of these tiny lots, generally about thirty, ten in each field.

Normally, one field would be left fallow each year in turn, one field

would be sown with winter wheat or rye (the bread crop), and one field

with barley for beer and oats for feeding the horses and cattle. Into

this system it was impossible to introduce individualism. Each man had

to plow and sow when the village decided it should be done. And the

commons and woodlands were free for all, with certain regulations.[2]

[Sidenote: Medieval farming methods]

The art of farming was not quite primitive, but it had changed less

since the dawn of history than it has changed since 1600. Instead of

great steam-plows and all sorts of machinery for harrowing and

harvesting, small plows were pulled by oxen, and hoes and rakes were

plied by hand. Lime, marl and manure were used for fertilizing, but

scantily. The cattle were {543} small and thin, and after a hard

winter were sometimes so weak that they had to be dragged out to

pasture. Sheep were more profitable, and in the summer season good

returns were secured from chickens, geese, swine and bees. Diseases of

cattle were rife and deadly. The principles of breeding were hardly

understood. Fitzherbert, who wrote on husbandry in the early sixteenth

century, along with some sensible advice makes remarks, on the

influence of the moon on horse-breeding, worthy of Hesiod. Indeed, the

matter was left almost to itself until a statute of Henry VIII provided

that no stallions above two years old and under fifteen hands high be

allowed to run loose on the commons, and no mares of less than thirteen

hands, lest the breed of horses deteriorate. It was to meet the same

situation that the habit of castrating horses arose and became common

about 1580.

[Sidenote: Capitalistic change]

The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture took two principal

forms. In some countries, like Germany, it was the consequence of the

change from natural economy to money economy. The new commercial men

bought up the estates of the nobles and subjected them to a more

intense cultivation, at the same time using all the resources of law

and government to make them as lucrative as possible.

[Sidenote: Inclosures]

But in two countries, England and Spain, and to some small extent in

others, a profitable opportunity for investment was found in

sheep-farming on a large scale. In England this manifested itself in

"inclosures," by which was primarily meant the fencing in for private

use of the commons, but secondarily came to be applied to the

conversion of arable land into pasture[3] and the substitution of large

holdings for small. The cause of the movement was the demand for wool

in cloth-weaving, largely for export trade.

{544} [Sidenote: Complaint against inclosures]

Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the operations of this economic

change. A cry went up that sheep were eating men, that England was

being turned into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich,

while the land needed for grain was abandoned and tenants forcibly

ejected. The outcry became loudest about the years 1516-8, when a

commission was appointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It

was found that in the past thirty years the amount of land in the eight

counties most affected was 22,500 acres. This was not all for grazing;

in Yorkshire it was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, in

the south for pasture.

The acreage would seem extremely small to account for the complaint it

excited. Doubtless it was only the chief and most typical of the

hardships caused to a certain class by the introduction of new methods.

One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduction of

machinery in the nineteenth century, when the vast gain in wealth to

the community as a whole, being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at

the cost of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt

themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always hard on a certain

class and the sufferers quite naturally vociferate their woes without

regard to the real causes of the change or to the larger interests of

society.

Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted throughout the

century, in spite of legislative attempts to stop them. Indeed, they

could hardly help continuing, when they were so immensely profitable.

Land that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for every three

pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep multiplied accordingly. The

law of 1534 spoke of some men owning as many as 24,000 sheep, and

unwittingly gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, {545}

namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. The law limited

the number of sheep allowed to one man to 2000. The people arose and

slaughtered sheep wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not

unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the proletariat now and then

seeks to destroy the wealth that accentuates their poverty. Then as

always, the only causes for unwelcome alterations of their manner of

life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of a ring of men, or

of the government. The deeper economic forces escaped detection, or at

least, attention.

During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 2 3/4 per cent.

of the total area of England had been inclosed. The counties most

affected were the Midlands, in some of which the amount of land

affected was 8 per cent. to 9 per cent. of the total area. But though

the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger proportion, in the then

thinly settled state of the realm, of the total arable land,--of this

it was probably one-fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the

improved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was under the plow.

[Sidenote: Spain: the Mesta]

In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for commercial purposes

manifested itself in a slightly different form. There, not by the

inclosure of commons, but by the establishment of a monopoly by the

Castilian "sheep-trust," the Mesta, did a large corporation come to

prevail over the scattered and peasant agricultural interests. The

Mesta, which existed from 1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its

power in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. [Sidenote:

1568] When it took over from the government the appointment of the

officer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the Alcalde

Entregador, it may be said to have won a decisive victory for

capitalism. At that time it owned {546} as many as seven million

sheep, and exported wool to the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value

of $560,000, per annum.

[Sidenote: Wheat growing]

Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by wool-growing, the

capitalists next turned to arable land and by their transformation of

it took the last step in the commercializing of life. Even now, in

England, land is not regarded as quite the same kind of investment as a

factory or railroad; there is still the vestige of a tradition that the

tenant has customary privileges against the right of the owner of the

land to exploit it for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint

ghost of the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the profit of

the landlord entirely secondary. The longest step away from the

medieval to the modern system was taken in the sixteenth century, and

its outward and visible sign was the substitution of the leasehold for

the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the nature of a vested

right or interest; the former was but a contract for a limited, often

for a short, term, at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the

rent raised, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine (i.e., fee)

exacted for renewal of the lease.

The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part consist of,

the acquisition of the land by the new commercial class, resulting in

increased productivity. New and better methods of tillage were

introduced. The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were

consolidated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used as the

owner thought best. One year a field would be under a cereal crop; the

next year converted into pasture. This improved method, known as

"convertible husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser extent on

the Continent, was a big step in the direction of scientific

agriculture. Regular rotation of crops {547} was hardly a common

practice before the eighteenth century, but there was something like it

in places where hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals.

Capitalists in the Netherlands built dykes, drained marshes and dug

expensive canals. Elsewhere also swamps were drained and irrigation

begun. But perhaps no single improvement in technique accounted for

the greater yield of the land so much as the careful and watchful

self-interest of the private owner, as against the previous

semi-communistic carelessness. Several popular proverbs then gained

currency in the sense that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like

that put on by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in

Elizabeth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as an acre and

a half of common, is borne out by the English statistics of the grain

trade. From 1500 to 1534, while the process of inclosure was at its

height, the export of corn more than doubled; it then diminished until

it almost ceased in 1563, after which it rapidly increased until 1600.

During the whole century the population was growing, and it is

therefore reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was

considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500.

[Sidenote: Export of grain after 1559]

It must, however, be admitted that the increase in exports was in part

caused by and in part symptomatic of a change in the policy of the

government. When commerce became king he looked out for his own

interests first, and identified these interests with the dividends of

small groups of his chief ministers. Trade was regulated, by tariff

and bounty, no longer in the interests of the consumer but in those of

the manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nineteenth-century

England have their counterpart in the Elizabethan policy of encouraging

the export of grain that was needed at home. As soon as the land and

the Parliament both fell into the hands of the new {548} capitalistic

landlords, they used the one to enhance to profits of the other. Nor

was England alone in this. France favored the towns, that is the

industrial centers, by forcing the rural population to sell at very low

rates, and by encouraging export of grain. Perhaps this same policy

was most glaring of all in Sixtine Rome, where the Papal States were

taxed, as the provinces of the Empire had been before, to keep bread

cheap in the city.

[1] From the Latin _ministerium_, French _métier_, not connected with

"mystery."

[2] For the substance of this paragraph, as well as for numerous

suggestions on the rest of the chapter, I am indebted to Professor N.

S. B. Gras, of Minneapolis.

[3] Although some of the inclosed land was tilled; see below.

SECTION 2. THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER

[Sidenote: Money crowned king]

In modern times, Money has been king. Perhaps at a certain period in

the ancient world wealth had as much power as it has now, but in the

Middle Ages it was not so. Money was then ignored by the tenant or

serf who paid his dues in feudal service or in kind; it was despised by

the noble as the vulgar possession of Jews or of men without gentle

breeding, and it was hated by the church as filthy lucre, the root of

all evil and, together with sex, as one of the chief instruments of

Satan. The "religious" man would vow poverty as well as celibacy.

But money now became too powerful to be neglected or despised, and too

desirable to be hated. In the age of transition the medieval and

modern conceptions of riches are found side by side. When Holbein came

to London the Hanse merchants there employed him to design a pageant

for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. In their hall he painted two

allegorical pictures, The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Wealth.

The choice of subjects was representative of the time of transition.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

The economic innovation sketched in the last few pages was followed by

a social readjustment sufficiently violent and sufficiently rapid to

merit the name of revolution. The wave struck different countries at

{549} different times, but when it did come in each, it came with a

rush, chiefly in the twenties in Germany and Spain, in the thirties and

forties in England, a little later, with the civil wars, in France. It

submerged all classes but the bourgeoisie; or, rather, it subjugated

them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman triumph, the

conquering car of Wealth.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie uses monarchy]

The one other power in the state that was visibly aggrandized at the

expense of other classes, besides the plutocracy, was that of the

prince. This is sometimes spoken of as the result of a new political

theory, an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther and

Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. But in truth their

theories were but an expression of the accomplished, or easily

foreseen, fact; and this fact was due in largest measure to the need of

the commercial class for stable and for strong government. Riches,

which at the dawn of the twentieth century seemed, momentarily, to have

assumed a cosmopolitan character, were then bound up closely with the

power of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to secure

concessions and markets, a mercantile society needed a strong

executive, and this they could find only in the person of the prince.

Luther says that kings are only God's gaolers and hangmen, high-born

and splendid because the meanest of God's servants must be thus

accoutred. It would be a little truer to say that they were the

gaolers and hangmen hired by the bourgeoisie to over-awe the masses and

that their quaint trappings and titles were kept as an ornament to the

gay world of snobbery.

[Sidenote: And other agencies]