RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. pp. 464. 8^o. $3.75.
THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1921. pp. 242. 8^o. $1.50.
STUDIES IN THE MINIMUM WAGE
1. The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-making Industry. G. Bell &
Sons. 1914. pp. 157. 8^o. 1/6.
2. The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Industry. 1915. pp. 274.
8^o. 3/6.
A DISCOURSE UPON USURY BY THOMAS WILSON.
Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1925. pp. 392. 8^o. $5.00.
_With A. E. BLAND and P. A. BROWN_
ENGLISH ECONOMIC HISTORY: SELECT DOCUMENTS
Harcourt, Brace & Co. pp. 730. 1914. 8^o. $2.75.
_With DR. E. POWER_
TUDOR ECONOMIC DOCUMENTS
Longmans, Green & Co. 1924. 3 vols. 8^o. $5.00 each.
RELIGION
AND THE
RISE OF CAPITALISM
A HISTORICAL STUDY
(HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922)
BY R. H. TAWNEY
READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON; SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL
COLLEGE, OXFORD
[Illustration]
NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC. RAHWAY, N. J.
TO
DR. CHARLES GORE
WITH
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE
“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human
mind, and the _summum bonum_, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will
most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.”
BISHOP BERKELEY, _Siris_, 350.
INTRODUCTION
The object of this book is to trace some strands in the development of religious
thought on social and economic questions in the period which saw the transition
from medieval to modern theories of social organization. It does not carry the
subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it makes no pretense
of dealing with the history either of economic theory or of economic practice,
except in so far as theory and practice were related to changes in religious
opinion. In reality, however, the connection between them was intimate and
vital. The revolutions, at once religious, political and social, which herald
the transition from the medieval to the modern world, were hardly less decisive
for the economic character of the new civilization than for its ecclesiastical
organization and religious doctrines. The economic categories of modern society
have their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions which
accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The history of religious thought on questions of social ethics is a topic which
has been treated in England by the late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley,
whose essay on _The Canonist Doctrine_ first interested me in the subject, by
Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O’Brien. But it is no reflection
on their work to say that the most important contributions of recent years have
come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart,
Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max Weber, whose celebrated essay on _Die
Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus_ gave a new turn to the
discussion. No one can work, on however humble a scale, in the same field,
without being conscious of the heavy obligation under which these scholars have
laid him. While I have not always been able to accept their conclusions, I am
glad to have this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret
that Mr. Coulton’s _The Mediæval Village_ appeared too late for me to make use
of its abundant stores of learning and insight.
It only remains for me to thank the friends whose assistance has enabled me to
make this book somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr. J.
L. Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have been kind enough to read,
and to improve, the manuscript. Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading
the proofs, has helped me most generously throughout with advice and criticism.
I am deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task
of correcting the proofs and making an index, and to the London School of
Economics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for enabling me to
make use of her services. My obligation to the help given by my wife is beyond
acknowledgment.
R. H. TAWNEY.
CONTENTS PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
CHAPTER
I. THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 1
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 14
THE SIN OF AVARICE 36
THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 55
II. THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 63
THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 66
LUTHER 79
CALVIN 102
III. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 133
THE LAND QUESTION 137
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 150
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 175
IV. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 195
PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 198
A GODLY DISCIPLINE VERSUS THE RELIGION OF TRADE 211
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 227
THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 253
V. CONCLUSION 275
NOTES 289
INDEX 327
CHAPTER I
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
“La miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera même un riche.”
ANATOLE FRANCE, _Le Puits de Sainte Claire_.
CHAPTER I
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
“Que pourrions-nous gagner,” once wrote a celebrated economist, “à recueillir
des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décriées, et qui méritent de l’être? Il
serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les exhumer.”[I-1] One who studies the
development of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the criticism which is
brought against those who disturb the dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he
seeks an excuse beyond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the
reflection that the past reveals to the present what the present is capable of
seeing, and that the face which to one age is a blank may to another be pregnant
with meaning. Writing when economic science was in the first flush of its
dogmatic youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an unprofitable
dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages unillumined by the radiance
of the new Gospel. But to determine the significance of opinion is, perhaps, not
altogether so simple a matter as he supposed. Since the brave days when Torrens
could say of Political Economy, “Twenty years hence there will scarcely exist a
doubt respecting any of its fundamental principles,”[I-2] how many confident
certainties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dismissed as the
emptiest of superstitions have revealed an unsuspected vitality!
The attempt to judge economic activity and social organization by ethical
criteria raises problems which are eternal, and it is possible that a study of
the thought of an age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at
least with conviction and persistence, may prove, even today, not wholly without
instruction. In the present century, the old issues seem, indeed, to have
acquired a new actuality. The philosophy which would keep economic interests and
ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate compartments finds that each
of the prisoners is increasingly restive. On the one hand, it is evident that
the whole body of regulations, by which modern societies set limits to the free
play of economic self-interest, implies the acceptance, whether deliberate or
unconscious, of moral standards, by reference to which certain kinds of economic
conduct are pronounced illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indications
that religious thought is no longer content to dismiss the transactions of
business and the institutions of society as matters irrelevant to the life of
the spirit.
Silently, but unmistakably, the conception of the scope and content of Christian
ethics which was generally, though not universally, accepted in the nineteenth
century, is undergoing a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the
experience of mankind, which is history, has played some part, and will play a
larger one. There have been periods in which a tacit agreement, accepted in
practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic activities and social
institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. A statesman
of the early nineteenth century, whose conception of the relations of Church and
State appears to have been modeled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with the protest, “Things
have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life”;
and a more recent occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which
must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlying
provinces of the spirit from the secular capital of public affairs.[I-3]
Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident today that the line of
division between the spheres of religion and secular business, which they assume
as self-evident, is shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has
lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of which Froude, no
romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretensions, could write, with perhaps
exaggerated severity, that the spokesmen of religion “leave the present world to
the men of business and the devil,”[I-4] shows some signs of drawing to a close.
Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite, not only in England but on
the Continent and in America, not only in one denomination but among Roman
Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate
the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a
form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the
collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of
international politics and of social organization. It is being made today. It
has been made in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether
in the future at some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical
affairs men will say,
Here nature first begins
Her farthest verge,
and chaos to retire As from her outmost works, a broken foe,
will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the
analogous problem of the relations between Church and State, issues which were
thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own
day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which they have
assumed and the phases through which they have passed, even in the narrow field
of a single country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. It is to
summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from a new angle the
problems of our own age, by widening the experience brought to their
consideration.
In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are obviously a
critical period. Dr. Figgis[I-5] has described the secularization of political
theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the
modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it was only gradually
that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before
the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The
political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theological mould
which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is
broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology
at best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the
criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority.
Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a
department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.
The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institution, armed with a novel
doctrine. If the Church of the Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the
Tudors had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was precisely the
impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of conceiving a society which
treated religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent, which in
England made irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the monarchy.
When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil War, its component
parts were ready to be disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth
century the secular State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to
it, has emerged from the theory which had regarded both as dual aspects of a
single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do
not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is
the concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually ends with
the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The age of the wars of economic nationalism
virtually begins with the war between England and Holland under the Commonwealth
and Charles II. The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds
its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to
establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of
mutual assistance. It appeals to no supernatural commission, but exists to
protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which were vested
in them by the immutable laws of nature. “The great and chief end of men uniting
into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation
of their property.”[I-6]
While the political significance of this development has often been described,
the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less
attention. They were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The
emergence of an objective and passionless economic science took place more
slowly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the State, because the
issues were less absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the
open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. It was not
till a century after Machiavelli had emancipated the State from religion, that
the doctrine of the self-contained department with laws of its own begins
generally to be applied to the world of business relations, and even in the
England of the early seventeenth century, to discuss questions of economic
organization purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of
not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, not only
political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of
ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal
conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in
terms of mechanism.
Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is between
those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained, and those which
appeal to a supernatural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern political
theory, develops only when society is given a naturalistic instead of a
religious explanation, and a capital fact which presides at the birth of both is
a change in the conception held of the nature and functions of a Church. The
crucial period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most important
arena (apart from Holland) is England, because it is in England, with its new
geographical position as the entrepôt between Europe and America, its
achievement of internal economic unity two centuries before France and two and a
half centuries before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful
_bourgeoisie_ of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of
the structure of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its essence
is the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is
resolved into its elements--politics, business, and spiritual exercises; each
assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own being.
The social functions matured within the Church, and long identified with it, are
transferred to the State, which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of
prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of
values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which the
apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel
compartments, between which a due balance should be maintained, but which have
no vital connection with each other.
The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, and is compatible with
both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its general character. It
is easy to detect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later Middle
Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very end of the seventeenth
century. Oresme in the fourteenth century can anticipate the monetary theory
associated with the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Laurentius de
Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance bills, and St. Antonino
describe the significance of capital; while Baxter in 1673 can write a
_Christian Directory_ in the style of a medieval _Summa_, and Bunyan in 1680 can
dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Badman, who ground the poor with high
prices and usury, in the manner of a medieval friar.[I-7] But the distance
traversed in the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense.
At the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the
typical economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the typical popular
teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as _Dives et Pauper_; the
typical appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers,
the canon law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in
terms of morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries
later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.
It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell
had nothing to learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties of political
intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness in high
places is not incompatible with a general belief in the validity of moral
standards which are contradicted by it. No one can read the discussions which
took place between 1500 and 1550 on three burning issues--the rise in prices,
capital and interest, and the land question in England--without being struck by
the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to
the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the
relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority. It is
because it is regarded as the final authority that the officers of the Church
claim to be heard on questions of social policy, and that, however Catholics,
Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or ecclesiastical
government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim
Fathers are agreed that social morality is the province of the Church, and are
prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable
discipline.
By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the
Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as well as of political,
thought. The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of
good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the destruction of
Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and with the failure of the work of
the Westminster Assembly. After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the
theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible,
not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches
made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by
ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration economists,[I-8] that,
as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together,
had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without
large concessions to individualism.
The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly occupied by
theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years is not
with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circumstances, the
conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in their economic
transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserts,
at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the
letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress
of mathematics and physics, it handles economic phenomena, not as a casuist,
concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new
calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are
accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular
conclusions continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent,
before the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester.
Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later. But
that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral conversion
which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar
intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be refuted by insisting
that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the
appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A
medieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, remarked that “he who
takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse.”[I-9] Mr.
Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding
principles were compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which has
as its subject social thought, not the history of business organization, it is
not necessary to elaborate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned
will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or darkness with light,
or yield to the temper which finds romantic virtues in every age except its own.
To appraise the merits of different theories of social organization must be left
to those who feel confident that they possess an adequate criterion. All that
can be attempted in these pages is to endeavor to understand a few among them.
For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to
examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men should have thought as they
did is sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as they did, and
not least significant when thought and practice are at variance. It may be true
that “theory is a criticism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a
criticism of a bad one.” But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and
values is not arbitrary, but is itself an interpretation, and, if his answers
are to be discounted, his questions are none the less evidence as to the
assumptions of the period in which they were asked. It would be paradoxical to
dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the
political practice of their age, merely on the ground that mankind has still to
wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not
less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated economic and social theories in
the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century merely because, behind canon law and
_summæ_ and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind
statutes and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable
appetites of the economic man.
There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of
civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on the
transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits,
knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year
by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited
dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded
history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a
succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not
change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it
which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was
hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of
wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has
been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance,
to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it
bequeaths it to its successors.
There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment, which sets
its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the
effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic
categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and
competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political
conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent
force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a
community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end,
and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of
economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man
must not take advantage of his neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that
“man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a
religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards
expediency as the final criterion--there is a chasm which no theory of the
permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge, and which deserves at
least to be explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace
the change, from a view of economic activity which regarded it as one among
other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal and
almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of individualism, in the face
of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by the Church and of public
policy by the State, first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly
justified in the name of economic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastical authority
strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it had claimed and finally
abdicates them--to do this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at
the sources of rivulets which are now a flood.
Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social organization and
economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or has it endeavored
not only to christianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization?
Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal morality
and the practices which are permissible in business? Does the idea of a Church
involve the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and, if so,
ought a Church to endeavor to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on
its members? Such are a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on
which a more competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might
throw at any rate an oblique and wavering light.
I. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though
in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace
that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in
the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in
agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law
and tradition, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new
forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences,
moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a re-affirmation of the
traditional doctrines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained
and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty,
but an established fact, these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of
the Reformation developed, different churches produced characteristic
differences of social opinion.
But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new
economic world was not accepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists,
the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social
theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in
complete unconsciousness that innovations in doctrine and church government
involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition
of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between
different schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic
environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place
oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily,
the historical background.
That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit,
which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from
the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its
commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The
informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social
institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice
truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when
he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has
assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic conditions
that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded.
The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common
characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed
system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic
and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was
open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coast-line
from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any
naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military
power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea.
While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade
should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive
economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents
started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the
greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic
civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the
contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites
on which a complex economic structure rose were far removed from those of later
generations, it flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In
spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between
the life of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or
a center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral
society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as
there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from
English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic squalor, or
basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life
of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the
Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally
various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body
of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical
of it the _Summæ_ of the Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of
development. The economic teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for
example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the
thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and
most characteristic parts of the system--for example, the theory of prices and
of usury--so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.
There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward
the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one
side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of
unrighteousness, from which men _may_ escape--from which, if they consider their
souls, they _will_ escape--but which they can conquer only by flight. It may
take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a
world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking
problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to
require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular
reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final
revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at
once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human
appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit
must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To
such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but
none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their
different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It
finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is
everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the
same degree.”
Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of the
Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and
personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper
predominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the
struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be
saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.[I-10] It is monasticism, with
its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is
_par excellence_ the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and
affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to
evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his
followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for
indifferentism--what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s
teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all” and that “in this world God
must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial
happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical
immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must
expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as
an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution?
If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the
Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist,
Froissart, who accused them--the phrase has a long history--of stirring up class
hatred.
To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the
specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net, and to label them
“medieval thought,” is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if
realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed
when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern Christianity has its
root in medieval religion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism as
well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr.
Manning has pointed out in his excellent book,[I-11] Gregory VII and Boniface
VIII have their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and
political thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines. The social
theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century
Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter,
Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the
children of medieval parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not
yet emerged from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been
engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the
surrounding barbarism, the work of conversion and of social construction had
been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the
intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions.
For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its
unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged
from it endeavored, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate
the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the
zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the
external order and the religion of the spirit--all alike, in one form or
another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of the Middle
Ages.
All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of the
four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic. The
first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is
that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is religion. The
architectonics of the system had been worked out in the _Summæ_ of the
Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination
for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, medieval religious
thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression,
into the service of a single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and,
since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory, no
room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is
set by the divine plan of the universe. “The perfect happiness of man cannot be
other than the vision of the divine essence.”[I-12]
Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with
different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive
their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the Christian
Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense it
is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpretation; in both it
embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is
perpetually at variance with theory, there is no absolute division between the
inner and personal life, which is “the sphere of religion,” and the practical
interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some
modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant.
There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There are--to
use a modern phrase--degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of medieval
thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable
antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and that the world
of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by
insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the
necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a natural
creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an inclination to the life of the
intellect and of society--“to know the truth about God and to live in
communities.”[I-13] These activities, which form his life according to the law
of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or
hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different.
It is that of a synthesis.
The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and interests and
religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the
spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace
works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to transform it.
And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to
give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known
by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull: “The way of
religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things which are higher
through the things which are intermediate. According to the law of the universe
all things are not reduced to order equally and immediately; but the lowest
through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.”[I-14] Thus
social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental,
for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual
reality. Ideally conceived, society is an organism of different grades, and
human activities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in
significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it
is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the
celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because
it is straining upwards:
Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,
Per ch’una fansi nostre voglie stesse.
Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the
Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of
commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all
this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas
cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of medieval speculation
colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in
the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the
first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of
religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed
naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time.
They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and
the doctrine of economic ethics.
From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s secretary
in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which
society is described--an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace--is the
same.[I-15] Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension
with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the
rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is
that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted in all
their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and,
except on rare occasions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they
include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal
society--class privilege, class oppression, exploitation, serfdom. But these
things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for
religion is all-comprehensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be
shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning given them is
simple. The facts of class status and inequality were rationalized in the Middle
Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were
rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and the
former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in
social organization as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of
human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the
human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its
own function, prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must
receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes
there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his
neighbor will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise
a class cannot perform its function, or--a strange thought to us--enjoy its
rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil
peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their
calling, and no more.
As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and protective.
“There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that men do their
devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings
is damnable.”[I-16] As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the
material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and
transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere money-making was
recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the
ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essense of which seemed to be,
not service, but a mere _appetitus divitiarum infinitus_, were not easily
interpreted in terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a world
dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never
fitted harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew
to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of
the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of
the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the
spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into
service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was
designed to emphasize that they had undergone a re-dedication at the hands of
religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.
That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church
often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its
tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of
a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it
was something that they should be told that their true function was “to defend
God’s law by power of the world.”[I-17] Craftsmen--the burden of endless
sermons--worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that
they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that
the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those
exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and
villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles
with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and
economic power must alike give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will
be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower
answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every
other.”[I-18]
If the medieval moralist was often too naïve in expecting sound practice as the
result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not
unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from
their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out
to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it
self-evident that they would have been more likely to be honest, if they had
been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by
Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty. Society was
interpreted, in short, not as the expression of economic self-interest, but as
held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social
well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its
functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. “The Church is divided in
these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and ... laborers.... As she is our
mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part
of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained
it.... Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his
foot his body ... and thus should it be in parts of the Church.... As divers
parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left
his own proper work, so divers parts of the Church have proper works to serve
God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of
another part, sinful wonder is in the Church.... Surely the Church shall never
be whole before proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech
and [by] medicine of men.”[I-19]
Speculation does not develop _in vacuo_. It echoes, however radical it is, the
established order. Clearly this patriarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of
the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic
ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval industry. A religious
philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers
of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic
relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion. But the facts
may be difficult to moralize, or they may be relatively easy. Over a great part
of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less
intractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than it is today. In
the great commercial centers there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as
inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class
wars between artisans and merchants.[I-20] But outside them trade, industry, the
money-market, all that we call the economic system, was not a system, but a mass
of individual trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a
fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition.
There was very little large-scale organization. With some important exceptions,
such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth
century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval artisan, especially in
backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary
organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on in London even
before the end of the thirteenth century,[I-21] and the growth of journeymen’s
associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which
produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like
Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to
have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000
journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800
journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters.[I-22]
In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and their
strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small
enough for each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly
impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the most
characteristic of medieval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To
suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of a
craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than nine-tenths were
peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there
was naturally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a
question whether there was not a considerable population of casual
workers--consider only the number of unskilled workers that must have been
required as laborers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before
mechanical cranes--who were rarely organized in permanent societies. To invest
the craft gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They
were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested
interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his
almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society over-riding
particular interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against
corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion
of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time
to time more than a little justification for his complaint that “all new
fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse [against
false conspirators],” because “they conspire to bear up each other, yea, in
wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power.”[I-23] It is
significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social
reconstruction produced in Germany in the century before the Reformation
proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and
tyrannical.[I-24]
There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which combinations
are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to remember that the
characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from
economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests,
as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably
intertwined. “Tout ce petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French
gilds, “était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le
juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des
convoitises; mais une règle puissante s’imposait à tous et d’une manière
générale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par l’Evangile.”[I-25]
The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good men of the mistery,” to
check economic egotism by insisting that every brother shall share his good
fortune with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist the
encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve professional
standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate
discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself
to the injury of all--whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative
methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer
in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both
the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted
by the problems of a common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then
personal, intimate and direct, and there was little room for organization on a
scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the
doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of
economic expediency.
Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not unfavorable
field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task
the tremendous claim to mediate between even the humblest activity and the
divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in
practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which
promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of
economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the
middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity
of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” At Rome,
everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the gospel, not according to St.
Mark, but according to the marks of silver.[I-26]
Cum ad papam veneris,
habe pro constanti, Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.
* * * * *
Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,
Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;
Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,
_‘Payez, payez,’ dit le mot_, si vis impetrare.[I-27]
The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center of the most highly
organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances from all over
Europe, and receiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other
Governments still included personal services and payments in kind, it could not
dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope
gave them the title of “peculiar sons of the Roman Church.”[I-28] Grosstête
rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London expelled them, but papal
protection brought them back.[I-29] Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had
to implore Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunication, intended
to compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian money-lenders,
though, as the archbishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special mandate,
it would be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders.”[I-30] The
Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest financial institution of the Middle Ages,
and, as its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse.
The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the
fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can
hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained,
engage in trade and take usury.[I-31] Cathedral chapters lend money at high
rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have been
refused by churchmen, as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted
by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging restitution,
recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the building of
Notre-Dame.[I-32] “Thus,” exclaimed St. Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of
Gothic architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth
money.... O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The Church is
resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold,
and leaves her sons naked.”[I-33]
The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M. Luchaire
and Mr. Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of vices implies
that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is not less
one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the halo has vanished from
practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued, and what standards they
erected. The economic doctrines elaborated in the _Summæ_ of the Schoolmen, in
which that question receives its most systematic answer, have not infrequently
been dismissed as the fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from
throwing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with
those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions,
both the occasion and the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic
questions were eminently practical. The movement which prompted them was the
growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose
social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal
hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which such
developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new contractual relations, which
sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded by the
Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who damned the currents of
economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers,
in their own age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual movement. By
lifting the weight of antiquated formulæ they cleared a space within the stiff
framework of religious authority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus
supplied an intellectual justification for developments which earlier
generations would have condemned.
The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to
scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific
contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were less
significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of which
were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the
real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one
aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of
morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have a secondary
importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one
another; the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,[I-34] will consider in founding his
State the natural resources of the country. But economic motives are suspect.
Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough
to applaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is
not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for
economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of
society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant
and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an
inevitable and self-evident _datum_, would have appeared to the medieval thinker
as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social
philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as
pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the sake of the
inner; economic goods are instrumental--_sicut quædam adminicula, quibus
adjuvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem_. “It is lawful to desire temporal
blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in
them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our
corporal life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.”[I-35] Riches, as St.
Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches.
At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against
allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a
man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek
more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is
legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was
intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that
he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are
no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary
institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when
goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a
concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal--if
only man’s nature could rise to it--is communism. “Communis enim,” wrote Gratian
in his _decretum_, “usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse
debuit.”[I-36] At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be
legitimately acquired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It
must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be
common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they
are not in actual destitution. Such were the conditions which commended
themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century
Europe.[I-37] There have been ages in which they would have been described, not
as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to
defend the property of the peasant and small master is necessarily to attack
that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.
The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that
the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to the
prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labor--the common lot
of mankind--is necessary and honorable; trade is necessary, but perilous to the
soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This
curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed
in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified
tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention
derived from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State
which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the
produce of its own soil; had not the Philosopher himself praised _αὐτάρκεια_?
But it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in medieval social
theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is
not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements
the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no
private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully
guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are
legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the
trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.[I-38]
The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why should a defence be
required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that
the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the
eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. _Summe periculosa est venditionis et
emptionis negotiatio._[I-39] The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the
facts of contemporary economic organization. The economy of the medieval
borough--consider only its treatment of food supplies and prices--was one in
which consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the
undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to
profits. The merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown, for whom
he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as
monasteries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an
alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence
extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which
medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public
indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed the
middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.
Apart, however, from the color which it took from its environment, medieval
social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as distinct from
labor, required some special justification. The suspicion of economic motives
had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and
was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new
sanctification. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned
all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was softened by a recognition of
practical necessities, but it was not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn,
it was insistent to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a
position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites; and towards those
appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social
dynamic, the attitude of the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf
by the ears. The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to
support him, and no more. The merchant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at
profit. The traditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian:
“Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that
it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man
who buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he
bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s
temple.”[I-40] By very definition a man who “buys in order that he may sell
dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary
interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He
turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is
justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain.”[I-41]
The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the soul and
essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly propounded for
it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the
qualification that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the
merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehensible as _turpe lucrum_. The
condition of the trader’s exoneration is that “he seeks gain, not as an end, but
as the wages of his labor.”[I-42] Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was
difficult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance of what the
sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as “an affectation not very
common among merchants.” But the motives which prompted it were characteristic.
The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a
continuous and unlimited increase in material wealth which modern societies
applaud as a quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most merciless
denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues. “He who
has enough to satisfy his wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century,
“and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to
obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live
without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance--all
such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.”[I-43] Two and a
half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual
environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the
same.[I-44] The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be
demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport
them, for both labor in their vocation and serve the common need. The
unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches
private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of
the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen
was Karl Marx.
II. THE SIN OF AVARICE
If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated
into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and
property acquired. Their practical expression was the body of economic
casuistry, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with regard to the
just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines sprang as much from the
popular consciousness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from the
theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fables of the usurer who was
prematurely carried to hell, or whose money turned to withered leaves in his
strong box, or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks), “about the year 1240,”
on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from
the porch, which proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer
and his money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than
the refinements of lawyers.[I-45]
On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of national
governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted, and to dismiss
its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moralists
is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were accepted in circles
which could not be suspected of any unnatural squeamishness as to the arts by
which men grow rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury
and prices is the secular legislation on similar subjects, for, down at least to
the middle of the sixteenth century, their leading ideas were reflected in it.
Plain men might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and
boroughs might forbid their members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but
the rules which they themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a
flavor of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe;
but even at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for
usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first
prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a
business forbidden to Christians.[I-46] Cologne was one of the greatest of
commercial entrepôts; but, when its successful business man came to make his
will, he remembered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly
sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make
restitution and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the
merchant.[I-47] The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of
common rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that
thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and
decreed that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the
gild.[I-48] It was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that
the Church was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through
a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated as
a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed themselves
irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision between the
doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business--its
individual practice was, of course, another matter--because both were formed by
the same environment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social
expediency.
The economic background of it all was very simple. The medieval consumer--we can
sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914--is like a traveller
condemned to spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and is
at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a
great part of medieval industry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed
with a public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that they
do not abuse their powers. It is a society of small masters and peasant farmers.
Wages are not a burning question, for, except in the great industrial centers of
Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it
is today in similar circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption,
not for production. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the
artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw materials, and
his distress is the money-lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate
popular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the
monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the
money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbor’s necessities to get a lien on
their land and foreclose. “The usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if
he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more than
this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more than other sin.”[I-49]
No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the later Middle
Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the
possibilities of commercial immorality.[I-50] Among the peasants and small
masters who composed the mass of the population in medieval England, borrowing
and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions,
not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the
money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that “Juetta [who] is a
usuress and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation,” and John the Chaplain,
_qui est usurarius maximus_,[I-51] should be regarded as figures at once too
scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient to be
altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a
religious significance, and crystallizes it in a system, in which economic
morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and
enforced, in the last resource, through the courts.
The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. “Every law
framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is
derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the
law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of
law.”[I-52] The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the long run, of the
self-correcting mechanism, has not yet been invented. The idea of a law of
nature--of natural justice which ought to find expression in positive law, but
which is not exhausted in it--supplies an ideal standard by which the equity of
particular relations can be measured. The most fundamental difference between
medieval and modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas
the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it may be
interpreted, for the justification of any particular action, policy, or system
of organization, the former starts from the position that there is a moral
authority to which considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated.
The practical application of this conception is the attempt to try every
transaction by a rule of right, which is largely, though not wholly, independent
of the fortuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more
than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing that, by common
estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their
rigor, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of
changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or
individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a
temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the
man who, as Wyclif says, _must_ be wicked, or he could not have been poor
yesterday and rich today.[I-53]
The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through a considerable
development. The dominant conception of Aquinas--that prices, though they will
vary with the varying conditions of different markets, should correspond with
the labor and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the _communis
estimatio_, conformity with which was the safeguard against extortion--was
qualified by subsequent writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century
emphasized the subjective element in the common estimation, insisted that the
essence of value was utility, and drew the conclusion that a fair price was most
likely to be reached under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a
bargain had been struck showed that both parties were satisfied.[I-54] In the
fifteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote with a highly developed commercial
civilization beneath his eyes, endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the
principle of the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the necessary
play should be left to economic motives. After a subtle analysis of the
conditions affecting value, he concluded that the fairness of a price could at
best be a matter only of “probability and conjecture,” since it would vary with
places, periods and persons. His practical contribution was to introduce a new
elasticity into the whole conception by distinguishing three grades of prices--a
_gradus pius_, _discretus_, and _rigidus_. A seller who exceeded the price fixed
by more than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitution, and even a
smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in the shape of
alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within
which prices might move without involving sin.[I-55]
This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal forces of the market,
was the natural outcome of the intense economic activity of the later Middle
Ages, and evidently contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact
that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the middle of the
fourteenth century is a reminder that the economic thought of Schoolmen
contained elements much more various and much more modern than is sometimes
suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was different. It was that which
insisted on the just price as the safeguard against extortion. “To leave the
prices of goods at the discretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity
which goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.” Prices must be such, and
no more than such, as will enable each man to “have the necessaries of life
suitable for his station.” The most desirable course is that they should be
fixed by public officials, after making an enquiry into the supplies available
and framing an estimate of the requirements of different classes. Failing that,
the individual must fix prices for himself, guided by a consideration of “what
he must charge in order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably
in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and labor.”[I-56] If the
latter recommendation was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a
platitude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry out before
breakfast.
No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits
of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a
rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from
man. He may demand compensation--_interesse_--if he is not repaid the principal
at the time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs
or gain he foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent
and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John Deveneys, who has
borrowed £19 16s., binds himself to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure
to restore the principal, for this is compensation for damages incurred; or when
Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Burwode three marks of silver in return for
an annual rent of six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not
a loan; or when James le Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of
Dublin, merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for this is a
partnership; or when the priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital sum
paid down.[I-57] What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in
modern economic text-books as “pure interest”--interest as a fixed payment
stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender.
“Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum ... quidquid sorti accedit,
subaudi per pactum vel exactionem, usura est, quodcunque nomen sibi
imponat.”[I-58] The emphasis was on _pactum_. The essence of usury was that it
was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his
pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or profits,
provided that they are reasonable--for is not every one in a small way a
profit-maker?--has no mercy for the debenture-holder. His crime is that he takes
a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury.
The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more subtle than a bald summary
suggests. With the growth of the habit of investment, of a market for capital,
and of new forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange business,
theory became steadily more elaborate, and schools more sharply divided. The
precise meaning and scope of the indulgence extended to the purchase of
rent-charges produced one controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the
development of _Monts de Piété_ a third. Even before the end of the fourteenth
century there had been writers who argued that interest was the remuneration of
the services rendered by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they
did not draw the modern corollary) that present are more valuable than future
goods.[I-59] But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lending,
theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its
modern interpreter,[I-60] who sees in its indulgence to _interesse_ the
condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in theological circles in
any age before that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is
contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without
labor; it is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked
men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it
profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, for the benefit
of the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent
him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money is
made, the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and why should the
creditor demand payment from a man who is merely using what is now his own?
The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There were the texts in
Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35--apparently a mistranslation; there
was a passage in the _Politics_, which some now say was mistranslated
also.[I-61] But practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine than
is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it in an age in which most
loans were not part of a credit system, but an exceptional expedient, and in
which it could be said that “he who borrows is always under stress of
necessity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men would not give thought to
the cultivation of their land, except when they could do nought else, and so
there would be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger; for even
if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts
and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have
them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their
money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments.”[I-62] The
man who used these arguments was not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a
consummate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in _Realpolitik_, and
one of the ablest statesmen of his day.
True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in high places.
It was too convenient. The distinction between pawnbroking, which is
disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honorable, was as familiar in
the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no reasonable judgment of the
medieval denunciation of usury is possible, unless it is remembered that whole
ranges of financial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was rarely
applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal magnates, bishops and
abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or
rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of
financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more
rarely applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international
banking-houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently
complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under their
special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of
excommunication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the international
money-market escaped from it; in the fourteenth century Italy was full of
banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in every commercial center from
Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a
special period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of loans and the
settlement of debts.[I-63]
It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the
contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists. Nor
was it mere hypocrisy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by
writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce nor government could
be carried on without credit. It was that the whole body of intellectual
assumptions and practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was
based, had reference to a quite different order of economic activities from that
represented by loans from great banking-houses to the merchants and potentates
who were their clients. Its object was simple and direct--to prevent the
well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the
craftsman; its categories, which were quite appropriate to that type of
transaction, were those of personal morality. It was in these commonplace
dealings among small men that oppression was easiest and its results most
pitiable. It was for them that the Church’s scheme of economic ethics had been
worked out, and with reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it
was meant to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.
It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the rivalry
of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of ecclesiastical
discipline. The ecclesiastical legislation on the subject of usury has been so
often analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude to it. Early Councils
had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.[I-64] The Councils of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down
rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons in need, take
their possessions in pawn, and receive profits beyond the capital sum lent, are
to be deprived of their office.[I-65] Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to
communion or Christian burial; their offerings are not to be accepted; and
ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to be suspended until they make
satisfaction to their bishop.[I-66] The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical
attack on usury was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons
(1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re-enacted the measures laid down by the
third Lateran Council (1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually
made the money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of
excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to usurers, but was to expel
them (had they been admitted) within three months. They were to be refused
confession, absolution and Christian burial until they had made restitution, and
their wills were to be invalid.[I-67] The legislation of the Council of Vienne
was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned with dismay that there are
communities which, contrary to human and divine law, sanction usury and compel
debtors to observe usurious contracts, it declares that all rulers and
magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws are to incur excommunication, and
requires the legislation in question to be revoked within three months. Since
the true nature of usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various
specious devices, money-lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical
authorities to submit their accounts to examination. Any person obstinately
declaring that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and
inquisitors are to proceed against him _tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos
de hæresi_.[I-68]
It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either of ecclesiastical
sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the superiority of the moral law to
economic expediency, than the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that
all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But, for an
understanding of the way in which the system was intended to work, the
enactments of Councils are perhaps less illuminating than the correspondence
between the papal _Curia_ and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on specific
cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those who have made
money by usury bound to make restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be
applied to them as to the original offenders. The pious object of ransoming
prisoners is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to be
accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, but if he allows for the
element of time in a bargain, by asking a higher price when he sells on credit.
Even when debtors have sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ecclesiastical
authorities are to compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses
are terrorized by the protection given to usurers by the powerful, punishment
can be imposed without their evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of
common notoriety. An archbishop of Canterbury is reminded that usury is
perilous, not only for the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to
use ecclesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the deduction of
interest, of property which has been pawned. Usurers, says a papal letter to the
archbishop of Salerno, object to restoring gains, or say that they have not the
means; he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to those from
whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course is possible,
they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, _non remittitur
peccatum, nisi restituitur ablatum_. At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a practice
obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given term, a higher price for
wares than they were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not
clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the sellers
run into sin, unless there is a probability that the wares will have changed in
value by the time that payment is made; “and therefore your fellow-citizens
would show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making contracts of
the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed from Almighty
God.”[I-69]
It is evident from the number of doubtful cases referred to Rome for decision
that the law with regard to usury was not easily administered. It is evident,
also, that efforts were made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and
technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in the thirteenth
century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing with hard cases,
precedents were inserted to show how usurers should be handled.[I-70] About the
same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the duties of an archdeacon, which
contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visitation, covering every
conceivable kind of extortion, and designed to expose the various illusory
contracts--fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive
deposits against advances--by which the offence was concealed.[I-71]
Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the procedure to be followed.
The confessor, states a series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry
concerning merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and
covetousness.” Barons and knights are to be requested to state whether they have
made ordinances contrary to the liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any
man seeking it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or
services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers (_ministrales_) the
priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury,
barratry, false and lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and
craft. Concerning cultivators (_agricolas_) he is to inquire as to theft and
detention of the property of others, especially with regard to tithes ... also
as to the removing of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land....
Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of
simony ... an unjust judge ... a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious
man, a gambler, a remover of landmarks in fields ... a false merchant, an
oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards and others in misery, for
the sake of unjust and greedy gain?” Those guilty of avarice are to do penance
by giving large alms, on the principle that “contraries are to be cured with
contraries.” But there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible
until restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be
noted, includes, not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of
those who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for
practical reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to
require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot
be found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is
large and of the priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the
poor.”[I-72]
The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use
in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given
in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century,
Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the Scriptures were buried
beneath a mass of interpretation, by taking as his illustration the books which
had been written on the text, “Lend, hoping for nothing again,” and arguing that
all this teaching upon usury was little enough “to answer ... all the hard,
scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s
bargains and chafferings together.”[I-73] A century later there were regions in
which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552
the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But
the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year,
shows no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his
fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous
merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants,
and in general--a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment--“all wretches that
will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep their neighbor from
poverty and mischance and do it not.”[I-74]
On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice with
these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an unworked
field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare
war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular authorities,
to whom the money-lender is too convenient to be victimized by any one but
themselves.[I-75] At the end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges
makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,[I-76] and seventy years
later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two years from usurers
and blasphemers.[I-77] In England commercial morality was a debatable land, in
which ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to time for
jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of
contract in general, on the ground that they involved _læsio fidei_, and with
usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by
the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies.
The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon,[I-78] had expressly reserved
proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down
more than once in the course of the next century. The latter again and again
forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those
who disregarded the prohibition.[I-79] Both, in spite of repeated protests from
the clergy,[I-80] made good their pretension to handle usurious contracts in
secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church.
The question at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished--a point as
to which there was only one opinion--but who should have the lucrative business
of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local
authorities, from the City of London to the humblest manorial court, make
by-laws against “unlawful chevisance” and present offenders against them.[I-81]
The Commons pray that Lombard brokers may be banished, and that the ordinances
of London concerning them may be made of general application.[I-82] The justices
in eyre hear indictments of usurers,[I-83] and the Court of Chancery handles
petitions from victims who can get no redress at common law.[I-84] And Holy
Church, though there seems to be only one example of legislation on the subject
by an English Church Council,[I-85] continues to deal with the usurer after her
own manner.
For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment against
the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of the later
Middle Ages, it is evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at
least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the
fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by the
secular authorities. A statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before)
the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers
living. The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated when the
question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an
antiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty capitalism under
Elizabeth and James I.[I-86]
That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of enforcing the canon law
in connection with money-lending is improbable. It was naturally in the
commercial towns that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns did
not look with favor on the interference of churchmen in matters of business. In
London, collisions between the courts of the Official, the Mayor and the King
were frequent in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceedings before the
first, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired, or when their case was of a
kind which secular courts were not likely to regard with favor. Thus craftsmen,
to give one curious example out of many, were evidently using the courts
christian as a means of giving effect to trade union regulations, which were
more likely to be punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the
simple device of imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for
breach of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a “confederacy,” supported by an
oath, with the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was
alleged in court, of preventing any but members of their organization from
working at the trade, and summoned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts.
The spurriers forbade any one to work between sunset and sunrise, and haled an
offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the result that “the said
Richard, after being three times warned by the Official, had been expelled from
the Church and excommunicated, until he would swear to keep the
ordinance.”[I-87]
Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the activities of the
ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show that it was not wholly a dead
letter. Priests accused of usury undergo correction at the hands of their
bishops.[I-88] Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the
ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of bishops or
archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or usury have been begun before
“spiritual men.”[I-89] The records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though
sometimes commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the secular
courts, cases of breach of contract and usury continued, nevertheless, to be
settled by them.[I-90] The disreputable family of Marcroft--William the father
was a common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pentecost, and Edward his
son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day--is punished by the ecclesiastical court of
Whalley as it deserves.[I-91] At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to
settle the case out of court.[I-92] The Commissary of London cites Thomas Hall
_super crimine usurariæ pravitatis_, on the ground that, having advanced four
shillings on the security of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence
over and above the principal, and suspends him when he does not appear in
court.[I-93] Nor did business of this kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of
usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a
great commercial center like the City of London it was still possible in the
reign of James I for the Bishop’s Commissary to be trying tradesmen for “lending
upon pawnes for an excessive gain.”[I-94]
It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an attempt was made to raise a
defensive barrier against the exactions of the money-lender. From a very early
date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the various
stratagems by which usurious contracts could be “colored,” direct prohibition
was almost necessarily impotent, and which favored the policy of providing
facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be obtained from
the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn the flank of the usurer by
establishing institutions where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes,
religious fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps monasteries lend corn,
cattle and money.[I-95] In England, bishops are organizing such loans with papal
approval in the middle of the thirteenth century,[I-96] and two centuries later,
about 1462, the Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of _Monts de
Piété_, which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of the sixteenth
century to France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and, though never taken up in
England--for the Reformation intervened--supplied a topic of frequent comment
and eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.[I-97] The canon law on the
subject of money-lending underwent a steady development, caused by the necessity
of adapting it to the increasing complexity of business organization, down at
least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with which professional
opinion elaborated the code was itself a proof that considerable business--and
fees--were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught. The
canonists, who had a bad reputation with the laity, were not, to put it mildly,
more innocent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making business. The
Italians, in particular, as was natural in the financial capital of Europe, made
the pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In
England, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were unusually virtuous,
or, as a foreigner unkindly said, because “they do not fear to make contracts on
usury,”[I-98] or, most probably, because English business was a conservative and
slow-going affair, the English canonist Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence
from an English archbishop of the thirteenth century and to leave it at
that.[I-99]
But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the essential facts were
simple. The Church sees buying and selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple
case of neighborly or unneighborly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop
Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hateful to God,[I-100] it has
a traditional prejudice against the arts by which men--or at least
laymen--acquire riches, and is apt to lump them together under the ugly name of
avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lenders who grind the poor, it
regards, not as business strategists, but as _nefandæ belluæ_--monsters of
iniquity. As for grocers and victualers “who conspire wickedly together that
none shall sell better cheap than another,” and speculators “who buy up corn,
meat and wine ... to amass money at the cost of others,” they are “according to
the laws of the Church no better than common criminals.”[I-101] So, when the
price of bread rises, or when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold
spirit that they are “all poor and caitiffs on account of their own simplicity,
and if they would act on his advice they would be rich and powerful,”[I-102]
form a combine, to the great loss and hardship of the people, burgesses and
peasants do not console themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply
and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in the approval of all good
Christians, they stand the miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers
in the court of the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the sixth
commandment, choosing as his text the words of the Book of Proverbs, “Give me
neither riches nor poverty, but enough for my sustenance.”
III. THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY
Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the
sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering changes in
land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made the
age a watershed in economic development. It is evident that the whole
implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely conservative. There
was no question of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In
the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations were
often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. The official Church, to which independence of thought among the lower
orders was but little less abhorrent when it related to their temporal
well-being than when it was concerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon
these dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as
relentless as the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown
to the most formidable of insurrections.
Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view, which
regarded the social order as a thing unalterable, to be accepted, not to be
improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional
doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labor, the hands to fight,
and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore, they denounced agitations, like the
communal movement,[I-103] designed to overturn that natural order, though the
rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of medieval Europe and the germ
of almost every subsequent advance in civilization. They referred to questions
of economic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote reforms, but
because they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional standards of
personal morality, of which economic conduct formed an important part.
Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt
in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure.
Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal
structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners
today, can lead a crusade against royalties. The persecution of the Spiritual
Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St.
Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines impugning the
sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable
to the princes of the Christian Church.
The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under which, except in Italy
and Flanders, more than nine-tenths of the population consisted of
agriculturists, had been serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth
century with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, conservative
reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished age, which “knyt
suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the
Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and
obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father.”[I-104] Their
idealization of the past is as misleading, as an account of the conditions of
previous centuries, as it is illuminating as a comment upon those of their own.
In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the bulk of medieval
agriculturists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant prosperity is, except
here and there, a romantic myth, at which no one would have been more surprised
than the peasants themselves. The very essence of feudal property was
exploitation in its most naked and shameless form, compulsory labor, additional
_corvées_ at the very moments when the peasant’s labor was most urgently needed
on his own holding, innumerable dues and payments, the obligation to grind at
the lord’s mill and bake at the lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s
court. The custom of the manor, the scarcity of labor, and, in England, the
steadily advancing encroachments of the royal courts, blunted the edge of the
system, and in fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeomanry was rising on its
ruins. But, during the greater part of the Middle Ages, its cumulative weight
had been, nevertheless, immense. Those who lived under it had no illusions as to
its harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money
took was to buy himself out of the obligation to work on the lord’s demesne. The
Peasants’ Revolt in England, the _Jacquerie_ in France and the repeated risings
of the German peasantry reveal a state of social exasperation which has been
surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent movements.
It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval economics refrain from
asking) what the attitude of religious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is
hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few
exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the Church
condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be treated with
humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like
gifts to the poor. For serfs are not “living tools,” but men; in the eyes of God
all men are serfs together, _conservi_, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus is
before Dives.[I-105] True, villeinage was a legal, not an economic, category; in
the England of the fourteenth century there were serfs who were rich men. But to
release the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever “mad priests”
might say and do, the official Church, whose wealth consisted largely of
villeins, walked with circumspection.
The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom.[I-106] Few
prominent ecclesiastics made any pronouncement against it. Aquinas explains it
as the result of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on economic
grounds.[I-107] Almost all medieval writers appear to assume it or excuse it.
Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more conservative in their
methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other
landlords. _Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens_, was a sentiment which
sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the children of light concerned with
rent rolls and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, with
whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled.
When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who
may be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot
of St. Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the
estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in
plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants
in Germany and England, who appealed to the fact that “Christ has made all men
free”;[I-108] and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed
small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom--and, after all, it did not
disappear from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till
the nineteenth--was part of a general economic movement, with which the Church
had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes
resisted. It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of
the French Revolution.
The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth. The Church
of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien
civilization, might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed
with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as _a_ society, but as society
itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was
a compromise--a compromise of which the critic can say, “How much that was
intolerable was accepted!” and the eulogist, “How much that was intolerable was
softened!”
Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opinion acquiesced in much,
it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the medieval Church
almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land system
was precisely that which made it strong, at least in theory, in dealing with the
economic transactions of the individual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood
for the protection of peaceful labor, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate
and the oppressed--for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity against the
naked force of violence and oppression. With the growing complexity of economic
civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily handled by its
traditional categories. But, if applied capriciously, they were not renounced,
and the world of economic morality, which baffles us today, was in its turn
converted by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity. Whatever emphasis
may be laid--and emphasis can hardly be too strong--upon the gulf between theory
and practice, the qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by
which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the
endeavor to draw the most commonplace of human activities and the least
tractable of human appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal
system still glows through it all with a certain tarnished splendor. When the
distinction between that which is permissible in private life and that which is
permissible in business offers so plausible an escape from the judgment
pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted that the law of
charity is binding on the second not less than on the first. When the austerity
of principles can be evaded by treating them as applicable only to those
relations of life in which their application is least exacting, it is something
to have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand against commercial
unscrupulousness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate
transaction. If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in
high places, it is not less important to observe that men called these vices by
their right names, and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was
enterprise and avarice economy.
Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should
have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and
disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the
verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism,
which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it
was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory
of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the
thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth
century, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and
of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its
rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are,
perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of
economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the
medieval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the
engrosser, than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers
in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.
The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to over-emphasize
it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in medieval thought
which were most characteristic. The significance of its contribution consists,
not in its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur in all
ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and
borrower to extortion, but in its insistence that society is a spiritual
organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one
subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled
and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material
means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to
self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which
confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of
civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are
a permanent element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today
as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the
criterion of economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and
mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and
temporary exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by “natural
law.”
When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the
problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment
may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the
notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation
and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to
ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its
practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to subordinate
economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt
among reformers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an
abomination and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its
breakdown became too obvious to be contested.
CHAPTER II
THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate
such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their
neighbours.”
BUCER, _De Regno Christi_.
CHAPTER II
THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his _Inaugural Lecture on the Study
of History_, has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline
and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of
masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for
untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of
incalculable change.”[II-1] His reference was to the new world revealed by
learning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text
for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between
religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its
inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and
intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines
of economic thought.
The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which associates the
Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation.
Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction.
The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a
body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected
by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel
forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source
of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of
ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the
arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the effect of the
Reformation to say that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from
which new streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does
not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled
to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency. The sixteenth
century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early
nineteenth--because it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of
conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph of
Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average
conscience which had been made by an older social order. The practical
implications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in
the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated with the
emphasis of a creed which is menaced.
I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the vastest
economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and
scientific curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the
scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the
future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine of the new
civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects
there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had
met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon
was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire,
in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labors quarried the stones
which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the
foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.
For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of
the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this
mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic
efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored spots, had been fragmentary
and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and
disciplined; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand
struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the
Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. The
general who marshaled the host and launched the attack was economic power.
Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a thousand creeks and
inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with the climax of the great
Discoveries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a judgment on
the politics of the fifteenth century, the conventional verdict on its futility
does scanty justice to its economic significance. It was in an age of political
anarchy that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The
era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labor of Italian
cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and
Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors.
The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to solve was
material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the
twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the
growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; and, while the latter,
having drawn the whole globe into a single economic system, has no space left
for fresh expansion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemorial
pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the
narrow apertures in the Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits
imposed on its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.
As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic in its external,
Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal, relations. Its primary unit had
been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian shareholders
fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the
disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine with the evil whose
name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater, more privileged, village
called the borough, and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the
foreign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above both were the slowly
waking nations. Nationalism was an economic force before nationality was a
political fact, and it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was
a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony with its depôt, the
Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans,
the Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a
wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried
on under capitulations.
This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth century it was felt to
be a prison. Expanding energies pressed against the walls; restless appetites
gnawed and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion.
Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last of the great routes
from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before the
plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the
mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still slender,
streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst.[II-2] It
was not the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, who in
England first nibbled at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind
which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been accumulated. It was not
great capitalists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of
the fraternity the basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled,
precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they
might grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the
Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and
east to north and west. The records of German and English trade suggest that the
powers of northern Europe had for a century before the Discoveries been growing
in wealth and civilization,[II-3] and for a century after them English economic
development was to be as closely wedded to its continental connections as though
Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to
the shores of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the
Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the
flank of the Turk, as his strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the
Discoveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested
curiosity of science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient
economic effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine.
The result was not the less sensational because it had been long prepared.
Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three
centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from
the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nineteenth
century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade,
a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid
fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph
of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter.
It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensations, which were
recorded in the letter-books[II-4] of business men as well as in the state
papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German cities
which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which henceforward
must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or break out to the sea,
as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism
of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise in mining and
textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no longer local but international,
and based, not merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed
capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors; a revolution in prices
which shattered all customary relationships; the collapse of medieval rural
society in a nightmare of peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate
industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power; the triumph of
the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church--all were
crowded into less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of
Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of
the English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly
passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian
Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three-quarters of a century
the whole framework of European civilization had been transformed.
Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the Low
Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its stagnant
shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When
Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed
but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years
and sin, some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the
advent of steam-power and machinery could already, though faintly, be descried.
The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years
later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun.
The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start into apparent
opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth
was not discerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador
of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary wisdom the new
plutocrats of the West were meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines
of the Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the
water-logged Netherlands.[II-5] The justice of the criticism was revealed when
Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal and progressive community
of the age, completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more
than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long
agony, in which the powerhouse of European enterprise was to be struck with
paralysis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked
back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a golden
age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political
and religious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic
problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand years
of unresting struggle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her own
waste places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to
the task of colonizing the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a
phase of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years,
and which only in the twentieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its
close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year
she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of mere
experiment over, and the new connections firmly established, she appeared to be
in sight of an economic stability based on broader foundations than ever before.
Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of East and West. But it
was not Portugal, with her tiny population, and her empire that was little more
than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries
an army on the march, and now staggering beneath the responsibilities of her
vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity for
economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the material harvest
of the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient toil, the other
by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which
slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the political agents
of minds more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace. Every
period and society has some particular center, or institution, or social class,
in which the characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be fixed and
embodied. In the Europe of the early Renaissance the heart of the movement had
been Italy. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The
economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The institution which best
symbolized its eager economic energies was the international money-market and
produce-exchange. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the
international financier.
Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of the
Netherlands found its purest incarnation in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth
and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of
whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a pattern scrawled to amuse
the childish malice of princes. Of that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the
refuge of the international idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe,
Antwerp, “a home common to all nations,” was the most cosmopolitan city. Made
famous as a center of learning by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in
a country where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the
shrine to which masters like Cranach, Dürer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of
devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a
haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp out heresy. In the
exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its material
prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found a spiritual home, where the
energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of happiness
and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe, chose as the least
incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at Antwerp.
The economic preëminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial region behind
it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the
tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the munitions of
the Black Country round Liége, poured in an unceasing stream on to its
quays.[II-6] But Antwerp was a European, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long
the competitor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of trade
from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Countries, by the
last quarter of the fifteenth century she had crushed her rival. The Hanse
League maintained a depôt at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increasing
numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it the
entrepôt through which English cloth, long its principal import, was distributed
to northern Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the
nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap
the wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of
unchallenged preëminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads
which ran east and west met and ended in its harbors. The Portuguese Government
made it in 1503 the depôt of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of
Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite of
protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American
silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought finance in
its train. The commercial companies and banking-houses of south Germany turned
from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for financial
operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.[II-7]
In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of society, like new
religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Professor Pirenne has contrasted the
outlook of the medieval middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate
and local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the sixteenth century,
with its international ramifications, its independence of merely local
interests, its triumphant vindication of the power of the capitalist to dispense
with the artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own
career.[II-8] “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants at Antwerp to
Philip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere with the liberty of
exchange transactions, “that the cause of the prosperity of this city is the
freedom granted to those who trade there.”[II-9] Swept into wealth on the crest
of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before would have
seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal _bourgeoisie_ of Antwerp pursued,
in the teeth of all precedents, a policy of practical individualism, which would
have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling
encroachments of the Burgundian monarchy, which were fought by their more
conservative neighbors, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls,
welcoming the technical improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the
turbulent independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen
alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedication: _Ad usum mercatorum
cuiusque gentis ac linguae._
For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe,
the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism
as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capitalism was to
be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in the mere expansion in the
scale of commercial enterprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance
the movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern
spice crop--above all pepper, which the impecunious Portuguese Government sold
in bulk, while it was still on the water, to German syndicates--copper, alum,
the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers.
The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking
investment; the growth of an international banking system mobilized immense
resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the
European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of
international currency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great
financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in
Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish
peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested by the
general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank,
Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the
century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a financial
technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They
formed together the departments of an international clearing-house, where bills
could be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be obtained, and
the paper of merchants of almost every nationality changed hands.[II-10]
Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the
age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes.
Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an
accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its
labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility
the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources
commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have
done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise
the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular
and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were
ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reëstablished them by
political art.
The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous
wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle
alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty--not beautiful, not musical,
not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all,
and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing
it.”[II-11] The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For
approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth
centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the
spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath
the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and
futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in
the most despairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth
century the English Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation,
was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern
Netherlands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including the
financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the
seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it
the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from which they
had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared
their position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on
their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been, had
there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace.
It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done
less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the mobilization of
economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age
with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon. The centralized States
which were rising in the age of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a
desperate financial situation. It sprang from the combination of modern
administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance. They
entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as
an incident of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They
were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of
masses of professional infantry and artillery--which Rabelais said was invented
by the inspiration of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of printing
inspired by God--was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized industry.
Government after Government, undeterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters
of its neighbors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which was more
disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations
of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a
Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold offices, or
established monopolies, and crushed the taxpayer beneath a load of indirect
taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property
which should have been treated as capital. They parted with Crown estates, and
left an insoluble problem to their successors.
These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained, when they
were exhausted, was the money-market, and to the rulers of the money-market
sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the financier was that of
an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disastrous. Naturally, the
City interest was one of the great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that
the new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But
behind Prince and Pope alike, financing impartially Henry VIII, Edward VI and
Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German
banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of
finance the part of the _condottieri_ in war, and represented in the economic
sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince.
Compared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were
puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were
irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.
The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which
still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making
Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German
banking-houses were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had invested in the
Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East Indies, financed an expedition, half
commercial, half military, to Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade
between Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in silver and copper
mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had establishments, not only at Lisbon and
Antwerp, but in the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The
careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Imhofs were much the same. The
Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous
concessions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by
the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in Spain,
and controlled banking and commercial businesses in Italy, and, above all, at
Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Brandenburg archbishop
of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tetzel on his
campaign to raise money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds; provided
the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial crown, after an election
conducted with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling hell;
browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a
necessitous client; and found the money with which Charles raised troops to
fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed
an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the
odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his
firm pay 54 per cent. for the preceding sixteen years.[II-12]
II. LUTHER
Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic
revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to
speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of
pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercantilist thinkers
resharpened an old economic weapon for the armory of princes. Objective economic
analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of
practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign exchanges.
The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume towards these
new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as
an instrument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the
rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse into a pagan
immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a shudder from the material
triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own
conception of man’s spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had stretched old
formulæ to cover the new forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore
them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to
emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages.
The most systematic treatment of economic questions was still that contained in
the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems
of property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology.
Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its conclusions. But
it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that questions of
economic conduct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist.
Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable complexity of the
problems of economic casuistry which pious merchants propounded in the
confessional. The Spanish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly
prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical
authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to consult the theologians
of the University as to the compatibility of speculative exchange business with
the canon law.[II-13] When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords
with Luther, travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the University of Bologna
authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could lawfully
be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists
than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance an expedition
undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.[II-14]
Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce
and finance, rather than of industry, and offering opportunities of speculative
gain on a scale unknown before, the new economic civilization inevitably gave
rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the friends and the
enemies of the Reformation identified it with social change, the leaders in the
religious struggle were the protagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social
revolution had been fermenting for half a century, it seemed at last to have
come. The rise in prices, an enigma which baffled contemporaries till Bodin
published his celebrated tract in 1569,[II-15] produced a storm of indignation
against monopolists. Since the rising led by Hans Böheim in 1476, hardly a
decade had passed without a peasants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with
craftsman and peasant, had become a battle-cry. From city after city municipal
authorities, terrified by popular demands for the repression of the extortioner,
consulted universities and divines as to the legitimacy of interest, and
universities and divines gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response.
Melanchthon expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending and
prices.[II-16] Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on
the same subject.[II-17] Bucer sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a
Christian prince.[II-18] Bullinger produced a classical exposition of social
ethics in the _Decades_ which he dedicated to Edward VI.[II-19] Luther preached
and pamphleteered against extortioners,[II-20] and said that it was time “to put
a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers.”[II-21] Zwingli and
Œcolampadius devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief.[II-22] Above
all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightful
catastrophe, not only terrified Luther into his outburst: “Whoso can, strike,
smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are
these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with
prayer”;[II-23] it also helped to stamp on Lutheranism an almost servile
reliance on the secular authorities. In England there was less violence, but
hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writing and preaching. Latimer,
Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel--to mention but the best-known
names--all contributed to the debate.[II-24] Whatever the social practice of the
sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching
on the part of men of religion. If the world could be saved by sermons and
pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise.
That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst
on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than
ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its
history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of
religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in
Germany and in England, is its conservatism. Where questions of social morality
were involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with
hardly an exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to medieval authorities, and
reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.
A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found acceptance
in certain quarters has represented the Reformation as the triumph of the
commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something
like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to Oziander
protesting against the embarrassment caused to reformers in England by the
indulgence to moral laxity, in the matter alike of economic transactions and of
marriage, alleged to be given by reformers in Germany.[II-25] By the seventeenth
century the hints had become a theory and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin
and Bucer with being the first theologians to defend extortion,[II-26] and it
only remained for a pamphleteer to adapt the indictment to popular consumption,
by writing bluntly that “it grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of
heresy.”[II-27] That the revolt from Rome synchronized, both in Germany and in
England, with a period of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long
argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it had its seamy side.
What is sometimes suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of religious
and economic movements, but a logical connection between changes in economic
organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad
social practice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious
innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly teach a
conscienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary
of their teaching. In the eighteenth century, which had as little love for the
commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as for their
political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our own day, the wheel
seems almost to have come full circle. What was then a matter for congratulation
is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by whom the
Reformation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of unscrupulous commercialism,
which had previously been held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the
Church.
These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the grand religious
struggles of the age have their significance. But the _obiter dicta_ of an
acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants than on
the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex to be
adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to partisans. If
capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of capital for their
own pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which establish themselves
between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom they control, then capitalism
had existed on a grand scale both in medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If
by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to sacrifice all
moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too familiar to the
saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic
Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the
Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was
predominantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and
Catholic bankers who were its leading financiers.
Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence on the
temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better founded. If it is
true that the Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the
traditional attitude of religious thought to social and economic issues, it did
so without design, and against the intention of most reformers. In reality,
however sensational the innovations in economic practice which accompanied the
expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the development of
doctrine on the subject of economic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely
it is examined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the
stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To
think of the abdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economic
activity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is
to antedate a movement which was not finally accomplished for another century
and a half, and which owed as much to changes in economic and political
organization, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious thought. In
the sixteenth century religious teachers of all shades of opinion still searched
the Bible, the Fathers and the _Corpus Juris Canonici_ for light on practical
questions of social morality, and, as far as the first generation of reformers
was concerned, there was no intention, among either Lutherans, or Calvinists, or
Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good conscience, which were supposed to
control economic transactions and social relations. If anything, indeed, their
tendency was to interpret them with a more rigorous severity, as a protest
against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, in particular, against the
avarice which was thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the passion for
regeneration and purification, which was one element in the Reformation, was
directed against the corruptions of society as well as of the Church. Princes
and nobles and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and fished
eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct,
not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but conduct and institutions,
on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive Christianity.
The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine
innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression in
the writings of the German reformers. Like the return to nature in the
eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society
disillusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The
prosperity of Augsburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of
lesser cities like Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all
observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down the Rhine,
they had held a central position, which they were to lose when the spice trade
moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a
railway system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepôt between
western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the near East. But the expansion
of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer _bourgeoisie_, had been
accompanied by the growth of an acute social _malaise_, which left its mark on
literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Germany
from a highway into a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the
rise to a position of overwhelming preëminence of the new interests based on the
control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle Ages capital had been the
adjunct and ally of the personal labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany
of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be a servant
and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it
claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organization in
accordance with its own exacting requirements.
Under the impact of these new forces, while the institutions of earlier ages
survived in form, their spirit and operation were transformed. In the larger
cities the gild organization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the
capitalist, became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate his
power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the brethren into a
plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind barriers which none but the wealthy
craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their
livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and alternately
rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding morass of hopeless
pauperism.[II-28] The peasantry suffered equally from the spread of a commercial
civilization into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian
servitudes. As in England, the _nouveaux riches_ of the towns invested money in
land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and fines by their competition.
But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous
obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to the royal
courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to
last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found _corvées_ redoubled,
money-payments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the benefit of an
impoverished _noblesse_, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only
means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth
of the _bourgeoisie_, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an
instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest exactions.[II-29]
On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the commercial
revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to open a seemingly
limitless field to economic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social
problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the wealth of the East, the
leading commercial houses of south Germany either withdrew from the trade across
the Alps, to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized
themselves into companies, which handled at Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too
distant and too expensive to be undertaken by individual merchants using only
their own resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of
combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A
somewhat similar movement took place on the narrower stage of European commerce
in the generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany, and it was
defended and attacked by arguments almost identical with those which are
familiar today. The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in bulk,
drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great pike swallows up a lot of
little fishes,” and plundered the consumer, were the commonplaces of the social
reformer.[II-30] The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger of
interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by the companies. The problem
was on several occasions brought before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of
the sage who observed that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had already
been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the
interests concerned, do not seem to have been more effective than modern
legislation on the same subject.
The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such conditions produced found
expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the so-called
_Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund_ in the thirties of the fifteenth century,
to the _Twelve Articles_ of the peasants in 1525.[II-31] In the age of the
Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his _Divine Evangelical
Reformation_, urged that all merchants’ companies, such as those of the Fuggers,
Hochstetters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed merchants
with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public robbers; by Geiler von
Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and
should be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.[II-32]
Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a
capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke
and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine.
Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St. Antonino,
his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as
of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous
embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the
inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness.
It was partly that they were _pièces de circonstance_, thrown off in the storm
of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic
which Luther detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and
financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like
a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and
angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage
him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians
will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity. But there is a method in his fury.
It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but
from a conception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial or
mischievous.
“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, “constitutes treasure, and
he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of
rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of
Paradise.”[II-33] It was this doctrine that all things have their price--future
salvation as much as present felicity--which scandalized men who could not be
suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful
argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in common with
their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was the arraignment of a
degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that
revolutionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism of the
age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme example. His attitude to
the conquest of society by the merchant and financier is the same as his
attitude towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church
in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which flows to the new Babylon.
When he looks at German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless
money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the
Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church
by the Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the
capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both
are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the
religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and become a
congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the
heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in
patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the
descendants of Adam.
The children of the mind are like the children of the body. Once born, they grow
by a law of their own being, and, if their parents could foresee their future
development, it would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has earned
eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would have been horrified,
could he have anticipated the remoter deductions to be derived from his
argument. Wamba said that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all,
and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded by Luther imposed
more social restraints than it removed would have more affinity with the thought
of Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his teaching a plea for
treating questions of economic conduct and social organization as spiritually
indifferent. Luther’s revolt against authority was an attack, not on its rigor,
but on its laxity and its corruption. His individualism was not the greed of the
plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness of public authority an opportunity
for personal gain. It was the ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers
for a society in which order and fraternity will reign without “the tedious,
stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute,” because they well up in all
their native purity from the heart.
Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not less than Catholics,
emphasized the idea of a Church-civilization, in which all departments of life,
the State and society, education and science, law, commerce and industry, were
to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.[II-34] That conception
dominates all the utterances of Luther on social issues. So far from accepting
the view which was afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed
compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious teacher exceeds his
commission when he lays down rules for the moral conduct of secular affairs, he
reserves for that plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those
directed against Rome. The text of his admonitions is always, “Unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from
a formal, legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not
need to be organized by law, because it is the spontaneous expression of a habit
of love. To restore is to destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the
simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of
ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder of revolution. It
was the declaration of the peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised
Messiah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and concord,” was
incompatible with serfdom, _corvées_, and enclosures.[II-35]
The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of society more
medieval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed
the commercial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into
paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a vague conception
of a state of nature in which men had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly
the popular protests against a commercial civilization which were everywhere in
the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed and reproduced with
astonishing naïveté, even while he denounced the practical measures proposed to
give effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the
twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a
vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated
commerce and capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive
State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.
For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for the anxious provision
which accumulates for the future, Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a
monk. Christians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow, take no
thought for the morrow, marry young and trust Heaven to provide for its own.
Like Melanchthon, Luther thought that the most admirable life was that of the
peasant, for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commercial
calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the lesson to be derived from
the example of the patriarchs.[II-36] The labor of the craftsman is honorable,
for he serves the community in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a
priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined to the exchange of
necessaries, and that the seller demands no more than will compensate him for
his labor and risk. The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for
they destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are members. The grand
author and maintainer of both is Rome. For, having ruined Italy, the successor
of St. Peter, who lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has
fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders, mischievous alike in
their practice and by their example, cover the land with a horde of beggars.
Pilgrimages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must be
suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or compelled to labor, and each
town must organize charity for the support of the honest poor.[II-37]
Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and
subordination, though he knocked away the ecclesiastical rungs in the ladder.
The combination of religious radicalism and economic conservatism is not
uncommon, and in the traditional conception of society, as an organism of
unequal classes with different rights and functions, the father of all later
revolutions found an arsenal of arguments against change, which he launched with
almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping monopolists. His
vindication of the spiritual freedom of common men, and his outspoken abuse of
the German princes, had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs
groaning under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising came, the rage
of Luther, like that of Burke in another age, was sharpened by embarrassment at
what seemed to him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and his
own. As fully convinced as any medieval writer that serfdom was the necessary
foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by
a political theory which exalted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a
religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis between the external order and
the life of the spirit. The demand of the peasants that villeinage should end,
because “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the
great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood,”[II-38]
horrified him, partly as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because it was
likely to be confused with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation
movement, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gospel by turning a
spiritual message into a program of social reconstruction. “This article would
make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an
external worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom cannot exist without
inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others
subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are
one.’”[II-39] After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty
establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated.
A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence. Where the peasants
battered, the capitalist mined; and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal
ethics of a world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as
little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as for the bludgeon of
revolt. No contrast could be more striking than that between his social theory
and the outlook of Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main
institutions of a commercial civilization, and supplied a creed to the classes
which were to dominate the future. The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw
no room in a Christian society for those middle classes whom an English
statesman once described as the natural representatives of the human race.
International trade, banking and credit, capitalist industry, the whole complex
of economic forces, which, next to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest
solvent of the medieval world, seem to him to belong in their very essence to
the kingdom of darkness which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority
of the canon law, only to reaffirm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it
had been used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions at length, as in
his _Long Sermon on Usury_ in 1520, or his tract _On Trade and Usury_ in 1524,
his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical
jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists themselves
had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical life.
In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional doctrines. “A man should
not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my
wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is
within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a
God, bounden to no one. But because thy selling is a work that thou performest
to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and conscience that
thou mayest practice it without harm or injury to him.”[II-40] If a price is
fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it. If it is not, he must
follow the price of common estimation. If he has to determine it himself, he
must consider the income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his
labor, and his risk, and must settle it accordingly. He must not take advantage
of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in
futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments.
On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox teaching. He
denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the canonists. “The
greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in interest....
The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done
untold evil throughout the world.”[II-41] Not content with insisting that
lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compensation
for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which the canon
law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and
Christian burial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the
characteristic developments of his generation--the luxury trade with the East,
international finance, speculation on the exchanges, combinations and
monopolies--shocking beyond measure. “Foreign merchandise which brings from
Calicut and India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels
and spices ... and drain the land and people of their money, should not be
permitted.... Of combinations I ought really to say much, but the matter is
endless and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong.... Who is so stupid as not
to see that combinations are mere outright monopolies, which even heathen civil
laws--I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law--condemn as a plainly
harmful thing in all the world?”[II-42]
So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected to be the champion of
law. It might have been supposed that Luther, with his hatred of the economic
appetites, would have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in
theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of course, his attitude
towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical jurisprudence and discipline was the
opposite. It was one, not merely of indifference, but of repugnance. The prophet
who scourged with whips the cupidity of the individual chastised with scorpions
the restrictions imposed upon it by society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of
Christian love turned a shattering dialectic on the corporate organization of
the Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of human hopes are human
institutions, there have been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost
everything that men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived at a
time when the contrast between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long
been intolerable, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he
recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to
give it a concrete expression. He reiterates the content of medieval economic
teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers of the later
Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received a
positive, if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but abhorrence. God
speaks to the soul, not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social
institutions built up by man, but _solus cum solo_, as a voice in the heart and
in the heart alone. Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of sense
are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men, that it may enter
into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely bestowed upon it may
overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of
spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the primeval
confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a
chaos of brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and
incapable of contributing to sanctification. “It is certain that absolutely none
among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any
influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty.... One thing, and one
alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is
the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.”[II-43]
The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning
to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight, appear
profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a
sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not
carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only good
works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the
religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the
intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for
theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is
bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole
fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and
its Maker--divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate
institutions--drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of
works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a
highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees
to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been
distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to
each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s
actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a
child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even
remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they
could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct--a Christian casuistry--are
needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and
in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the
religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men
stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which
contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else
seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than
ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone
which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil,
light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute;
no human effort could span the chasm.
The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by subsequent
generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that it was possible
to maintain the content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its
sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of salvation as
vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its attainment. In his
writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is
combined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional framework, and in
the tragic struggle which results between spirit and letter, form and matter,
grace and works, his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good
conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of
simplification. His denunciation of medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant
orders, festivals and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical
abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit could be
acquired by the operation of some special machinery beyond the conscientious
discharge of the ordinary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of
the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an
all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline
altogether, he is impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate
mechanism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the
Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to _them_. “There can be no
better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal goods than that every
man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments:
‘What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and ‘Love
thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything would
instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions
would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for
every one’s heart and conscience would guide him.”[II-44]
“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. But how if it does not? Is
emotion really an adequate substitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it
possible to solve the problem which social duties present to the individual by
informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the inner life is the
sphere of religion, does it necessarily follow that the external order is simply
irrelevant to it? To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien to
that of the spirit--is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task of
making Christian morality prevail, for which medieval writers, with their
conception of a hierarchy of values related to a common end, had attempted,
however inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist had answered
by anticipation Luther’s contemptuous dismissal of law and learning, when he
urged that it was useless for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was
prepared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the transactions to
which the prohibition applied.[II-45] It was a pity that Pecock’s douche of
common sense was not of a kind which could be appreciated by Luther. He
denounced covetousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of
invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on the specific question
whether the authorities of Dantzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the
clouds. “The preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to each
man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it; he
cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom
the spirit of God urges forward.”[II-46]
Luther’s impotence was not accidental. It sprang directly from his fundamental
conception that to externalize religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade
it. He attacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching
with regard to which his criticism was justified were only too numerous. But the
remedy for bad law is good law, not lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the
application of general principles to particular cases, which is involved in any
living system of jurisprudence, whether ecclesiastical or secular. If the
principles are not to be applied, on the ground that they are too sublime to be
soiled by contact with the gross world of business and politics, what remains of
them? Denunciations such as Luther launched against the Fuggers and the
peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as
he advanced in his tract _On Trade and Usury_. Pious rhetoric may be edifying,
but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul.
“As the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified
by faith alone, and not by any works.... Therefore the first care of every
Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his
faith alone more and more.”[II-47] The logic of Luther’s religious premises was
more potent for posterity than his attachment to the social ethics of the past,
and evolved its own inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously
deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new freedoms,
abhorrent to Luther, were to spring. But it riveted on the social thought of
Protestantism a dualism which, as its implications were developed, emptied
religion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between light and
darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb upwards plane by plane, man
must choose between salvation and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the
austere heights where alone true faith is found, no human institution can avail
to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many.
He himself was conscious that he had left the world of secular activities
perilously divorced from spiritual restraints. He met the difficulty, partly
with an admission that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the
majestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees might not be
broken, but could not, save by a few, be obeyed; partly with an appeal to the
State to occupy the province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could
find no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked, ‘Who then can be saved, and
where shall we find Christians? For in this fashion no merchandising would
remain on earth.’... You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people on
earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world
become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No
one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall
and must be red and bloody.”[II-48]
Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, expelled from the
altar, finds a new and securer home upon the throne. The maintenance of
Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical
authorities to the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns
and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its
credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.
III. CALVIN
The most characteristic and influential form of Protestantism in the two
centuries following the Reformation is that which descends, by one path or
another, from the teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it
sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in different countries, became an
international movement, which brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of
which was strewn with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had been socially
conservative, deferential to established political authorities, the exponent of
a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism was an active and radical
force. It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to
reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every
department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion.
Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is not the place to
enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of society, it possessed from the
beginning one characteristic which was both novel and important. It assumed an
economic organization which was relatively advanced, and expounded its social
ethics on the basis of it. In this respect the teaching of the Puritan moralists
who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of
medieval theologians and of Luther. The difference is not merely one of the
conclusions reached, but of the plane on which the discussion is conducted. The
background, not only of most medieval social theory, but also of Luther and his
English contemporaries, is the traditional stratification of rural society. It
is a natural, rather than a money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of
peasants and craftsmen in the small market-town, where industry is carried on
for the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard
upon the production of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional
incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole system in motion. When
they criticize economic abuses, it is precisely against departures from that
natural state of things--against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless
competition, which disturb the stability of the existing order with clamorous
economic appetites--that their criticism is directed.
These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of unscrupulous
commercialism, and they left some trace on the writings of the Swiss reformers.
Zwingli, for example, who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between
Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that private property
originates in sin; warns the rich that they can hardly enter the Kingdom of
Heaven; denounces the Councils of Constance and Basel--“assembled, forsooth, at
the bidding of the Holy Ghost”--for showing indulgence to the mortgaging of land
on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when
the State sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of
God.[II-49] Of the attempts made at Zürich and Geneva to repress extortion
something is said below. But these full-blooded denunciations of capitalism were
not intended by their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was
the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation by which
interest was permitted, and already, when they were uttered, they had ceased to
represent the conclusion of the left wing of the Reformed Churches.
For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began their voyage lower down
the stream. Unlike Luther, who saw economic life with the eyes of a peasant and
a mystic, they approached it as men of affairs, disposed neither to idealize the
patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to regard with suspicion the
mere fact of capitalist enterprise in commerce and finance. Like early
Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban movement; like
them, in its earlier days, it was carried from country to country partly by
emigrant traders and workmen; and its stronghold was precisely in those social
groups to which the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its treatment of
economic interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs, must have seemed
irrelevant or artificial. As was to be expected in the exponents of a faith
which had its headquarters at Geneva, and later its most influential adherents
in great business centers, like Antwerp with its industrial hinterland, London,
and Amsterdam, its leaders addressed their teaching, not of course exclusively,
but none the less primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and industry, who
formed the most modern and progressive elements in the life of the age.
In doing so they naturally started from a frank recognition of the necessity of
capital, credit and banking, large-scale commerce and finance, and the other
practical facts of business life. They thus broke with the tradition which,
regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond what is necessary for
subsistence” as reprehensible, had stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and
the usurer as a thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to the
medieval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty escaped censure as _turpe
lucrum_, on the same level of respectability as the earnings of the laborer and
the rents of the landlord. “What reason is there,” wrote Calvin to a
correspondent, “why the income from business should not be larger than that from
land-owning? Whence do the merchant’s profits come, except from his own
diligence and industry?”[II-50] It was quite in accordance with the spirit of
those words that Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of
merchants, should urge the English Government to undertake the development of
the woollen industry on mercantilist lines.[II-51]
Since it is the environment of the industrial and commercial classes which is
foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and his followers, they have to make terms
with its practical necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of
religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are concerned
to moralize is one in which the main features of a commercial civilization are
taken for granted, and that it is for application to such conditions that their
teaching is designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has its own rule, and a
rigorous rule, for the conduct of economic affairs. But it no longer suspects
the whole world of economic motives as alien to the life of the spirit, or
distrusts the capitalist as one who has necessarily grown rich on the
misfortunes of his neighbor, or regards poverty as in itself meritorious, and it
is perhaps the first systematic body of religious teaching which can be said to
recognize and applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy is not the accumulation of
riches, but their misuse for purposes of self-indulgence or ostentation. Its
ideal is a society which seeks wealth with the sober gravity of men who are
conscious at once of disciplining their own characters by patient labor, and of
devoting themselves to a service acceptable to God.
It is in the light of that change of social perspective that the doctrine of
usury associated with the name of Calvin is to be interpreted. Its significance
consisted, not in the phase which it marked in the technique of economic
analysis, but in its admission to a new position of respectability of a powerful
and growing body of social interests, which, however irrepressible in practice,
had hitherto been regarded by religious theory as, at best, of dubious
propriety, and, at worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous
pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor than by its
indulgence. “Calvin,” wrote an English divine a generation after his death,
“deals with usurie as the apothecarie doth with poyson.”[II-52] The apologetic
was just, for neither his letter to Œcolampadius, nor his sermon on the same
subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of the financier. That
interest is lawful, provided that it does not exceed an official maximum, that,
even when a maximum is fixed, loans must be made _gratis_ to the poor, that the
borrower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that excessive security must
not be exacted, that what is venial as an occasional expedient is reprehensible
when carried on as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic gain
for himself to the injury of his neighbor--a condonation of usury protected by
such embarrassing entanglements can have offered but tepid consolation to the
devout money-lender.
Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor might properly be
asked to concede some small part of his profits to the creditor with whose
capital they had been earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it
meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the debtor, and the debtor
does not reap the reward of his labor.” There have been ages in which such
doctrines would have been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather
than as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin’s specific contributions to the theory
of usury strikingly original. As a hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the
incoherence and from the idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably
regarded by himself merely as one additional step in the long series of
developments through which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on the subject had
already gone. In emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from the
necessities of the poor and the interest which a prosperous merchant could earn
with borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a
moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already
assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the
organizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a
legend. Like the author of another revolution in economic theory, he might have
turned on his popularizers with the protest: “I am not a Calvinist.”
Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as they are wrong in
detail, and both its critics and its defenders were correct in regarding
Calvin’s treatment of capital as a watershed. What he did was to change the
plane on which the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of
money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal to a special body of
doctrine on the subject of usury, but as a particular case of the general
problem of the social relations of a Christian community, which must be solved
in the light of existing circumstances. The significant feature in his
discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and
inevitable incident in the life of society. He therefore dismisses the
oft-quoted passages from the Old Testament and the Fathers as irrelevant,
because designed for conditions which no longer exist, argues that the payment
of interest for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent for land, and
throws on the conscience of the individual the obligation of seeing that it does
not exceed the amount dictated by natural justice and the golden rule. He makes,
in short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the rule “_non
fœnerabis_,” _but_ “_l’équité et la droiture_,” and appeals from Christian
tradition to commercial common sense, which he is sanguine enough to hope will
be Christian. On such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians. But
capital and credit are indispensable; the financier is not a pariah, but a
useful member of society; and lending at interest, provided that the rate is
reasonable and that loans are made freely to the poor, is not _per se_ more
extortionate than any other of the economic transactions without which human
affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the realities of commercial
practice as a starting-point was of momentous importance. It meant that
Calvinism and its off-shoots took their stand on the side of the activities
which were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted that it was not
by renouncing them, but by untiring concentration on the task of using for the
glory of God the opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could
and must be lived.
It was on this practical basis of urban industry and commercial enterprise that
the structure of Calvinistic social ethics was erected. Upon their theological
background it would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be pardoned,
if he feels that there have been few systems in which the practical conclusions
flow by so inevitable a logic from the theological premises. “God not only
foresaw,” Calvin wrote, “the fall of the first man, ... but also arranged all by
the determination of his own will.”[II-53] Certain individuals he chose as his
elect, predestined to salvation from eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally
irrespective of human merit”; the remainder have been consigned to eternal
damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible,
judgment.”[II-54] Deliverance, in short, is the work, not of man himself, who
can contribute nothing to it, but of an objective Power. Human effort, social
institutions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at
worst mischievous. They distract man from the true aim of his existence and
encourage reliance upon broken reeds.
That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of God, to be sought,
not by prayer only, but by action--the sanctification of the world by strife and
labor. For Calvinism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely
practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but they are
indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained. The central paradox
of religious ethics--that only those are nerved with the courage needed to turn
the world upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is
disposed for the best by a Power of which they are the humble instruments--finds
in it a special exemplification. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show
forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live for that end.
His task is at once to discipline his individual life, and to create a
sanctified society. The Church, the State, the community in which he lives, must
not merely be a means of personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs.
It must be a “Kingdom of Christ,” in which individual duties are performed by
men conscious that they are “ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye,” and the
whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing
discipline.
The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age from the realization of
the contrast between the external order of society and the moral standards
recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And naturally
it is in periods of swift material progress, such as the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely felt. The men who
made the Reformation had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which,
amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures of
Nürnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Æneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Dürer. And
already a new dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was
splendid, but it had been accompanied by a cynical materialism which seemed a
denial of all that had been meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the
more horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian Church that it
reached its height. Shocked by the gulf between theory and practice, men turned
this way and that to find some solution of the tension which racked them. The
German reformers followed one road and preached a return to primitive
simplicity. But who could obliterate the achievements of two centuries, or blot
out the new worlds which science had revealed? The Humanists took another, which
should lead to the gradual regeneration of mankind by the victory of reason over
superstition and brutality and avarice. But who could wait for so distant a
consummation? Might there not be a third? Was it not possible that, purified and
disciplined, the very qualities which economic success demanded--thrift,
diligence, sobriety, frugality--were themselves, after all, the foundation, at
least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not conceivable that the gulf which
yawned between a luxurious world and the life of the spirit could be bridged,
not by eschewing material interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by
dedicating them to the service of God?
It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical values which the
Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was that new type of Christian character
that they labored to create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as
elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the aptitudes
cultivated by the life of business and affairs, stamped on them a new
sanctification, and used them as the warp of a society in which a more than
Roman discipline should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that
fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held, through the
example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation: the members of the
Reformed Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned the spurious
charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true Christian must repress mendicancy
and insist on the virtues of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to
believe that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the savorless
formality of individual good works reduced to a commercial system, as though man
could keep a profit and loss account with his Creator: the true Christian must
organize his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had rebuked the
pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion, even while it took bribes
from those who pursued gain with success: the Christian must conduct his
business with a high seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion.
Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, was admirably
designed to liberate economic energies, and to weld into a disciplined social
force the rising _bourgeoisie_, conscious of the contrast between its own
standards and those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the
standard-bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate an open
road for its own way of life by the use of every weapon, including political
revolution and war, because the issue which was at stake was not merely
convenience or self-interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short,
not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical government, but for a
new scale of moral values and a new ideal of social conduct. Its practical
message, it might perhaps be said, was _la carrière ouverte_--not _aux talents_,
but _au caractère_.
Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded
themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of
the principle of order. While their victories were still to win, they were
everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful to say that,
on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the
_bourgeoisie_ of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the
nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger for
an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was
to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of historical materialism. He
set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the
established order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a chosen
people, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and
resolute to realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; it not
merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Compared with the quarrelsome,
self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with the extravagant and
half-bankrupt monarchies, the middle classes in whom Calvinism took root most
deeply, were a race of iron. It was not surprising that they made several
revolutions, and imprinted their conceptions of political and social expediency
on the public life of half a dozen different States in the Old World and in the
New.
The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence on personal
responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the call to fashion for the
Christian character an objective embodiment in social institutions. Though
logically connected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of
Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle of
Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was
accepted where Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between
Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to whom the whole
idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing
inspiration from the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one
of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially to be fulfilled.”[II-55]
Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian Socialism could be
deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on
differences of political environment and of social class. It depended, above
all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a
majority, who could stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a
minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile
Government.
In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the English upper classes in
the seventeenth century, individualism in social affairs was, on the whole, the
prevalent philosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who drew
inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending on England’s green and
pleasant land, and the troopers of Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the
theology of Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception of society, diluted by
the practical necessities of a commercial age, and softened to suit the
conventions of a territorial aristocracy, was poles apart from that of the
master who founded a discipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud
himself dryly observed,[II-56] was a thing of shreds and patches. As both the
teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice of some Calvinist communities,
suggest, the social ethics of the heroic age of Calvinism savored more of a
collectivist dictatorship than of individualism. The expression of a revolt
against the medieval ecclesiastical system, it stood itself, where circumstances
favored it, for a discipline far more stringent and comprehensive than that of
the Middle Ages. If, as some historians have argued, the philosophy of _laissez
faire_ emerged as a result of the spread of Calvinism among the middle classes,
it did so, like tolerance, by a route which was indirect. It was accepted, less
because it was esteemed for its own sake, than as a compromise forced upon
Calvinism at a comparatively late stage in its history, as a result of its
modification by the pressure of commercial interests, or of a balance of power
between conflicting authorities.
The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the burning question
of Pauperism. The reform of traditional methods of poor relief was in the
air--Vives had written his celebrated book in 1526[II-57]--and, prompted both by
Humanists and by men of religion, the secular authorities all over Europe were
beginning to bestir themselves to cope with what was, at best, a menace to
social order, and, at worst, a moral scandal. The question was naturally one
which appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reformation. The
characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much concerned with it, was that
they saw the situation not, like the statesman, as a problem of police, nor,
like the more intelligent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, but as
a question of character. Calvin quoted with approval the words of St. Paul, “If
a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” condemned indiscriminate almsgiving
as vehemently as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities
should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether its members were idle,
or drunken, or otherwise undesirable.[II-58] Œcolampadius wrote two tracts on
the relief of the poor.[II-59] Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced
by monastic charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a dissolved abbey for
the maintenance of a school and the assistance of the destitute.[II-60] In the
plan for the reorganization of poor relief at Zürich, which was drafted by
Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to be
relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to be made
for the sick and aged in special institutions; no inhabitant was to be entitled
to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to attend church,
or who played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme
was the duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive to work. “With
labor,” he wrote, “will no man now support himself.... And yet labor is a thing
so good and godlike ... that makes the body hale and strong and cures the
sicknesses produced by idleness.... In the things of this life, the laborer is
most like to God.”[II-61]
In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives were not distinguished.
The idleness of the mendicant was both a sin against God and a social evil; the
enterprise of the thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and a
benefit to the community. The same combination of religious zeal and practical
shrewdness prompted the attacks on gambling, swearing, excess in apparel and
self-indulgence in eating and drinking. The essence of the system was not
preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the attempt to
crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible society, which should
be at once a Church and a State. Having overthrown monasticism, its aim was to
turn the secular world into a gigantic monastery, and at Geneva, for a short
time, it almost succeeded. “In other places,” wrote Knox of that devoted city,
“I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely
reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.”[II-62] Manners and morals
were regulated, because it is through the _minutiæ_ of conduct that the enemy of
mankind finds his way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be revealed
by pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793 those guilty of another kind of
_incivisme_ were betrayed by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant legislation,
and, still more, administration. The word in which both were summarized was
Discipline.
Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of religion,[II-63] and the
common observation that he assigned to it the same primacy as Luther had given
to faith is just. As organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed
primarily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censorship of morals, and
thus differed in scope and purpose from the canon law of the Church of Rome, as
the rules of a private society may differ from the code of a State. Its
establishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the last half of the
sixteenth century, was the result of nearly twenty years of struggle between the
Council of the city and the Consistory, composed of ministers and laymen. It was
only in 1555 that the latter finally vindicated its right to excommunicate, and
only in the edition of the _Institutes_ which appeared in 1559 that a scheme of
church organization and discipline was set out. But, while the answer to the
question of the constitution of the authority by whom discipline was to be
exercised depended on political conditions, and thus differed in different
places and periods, the necessity of enforcing a rule of life, which was the
practical aspect of discipline, was from the start of the very essence of
Calvinism. Its importance was the theme of a characteristic letter addressed by
Calvin to Somerset in October 1548, the moment of social convulsion for which
Bucer wrote his book, _De Regno Christi_. The Protector is reminded that it is
not from lack of preaching, but from failure to enforce compliance with it, that
the troubles of England have sprung. Though crimes of violence are punished, the
licentious are spared, and the licentious have no part in the Kingdom of God. He
is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et honneste
discipline,” and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de l’Evangile
s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.”[II-64]
“Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life”--the words might be taken as
the motto of the Swiss reformers, and their projects of social reconstruction
are a commentary on the sense in which “holiness of life” was understood. It was
in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in forming at Zürich a board of
moral discipline, to be composed of the clergy, the magistrates and two elders;
emphasized the importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian morals;
and drew up a list of sins to be punished by excommunication, which included, in
addition to murder and theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it
discovers itself in usury and fraud.”[II-65] It was in that spirit that Calvin
composed in the _Institutes_ a Protestant _Summa_ and manual of moral casuistry,
in which the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a
universal rule. It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a
comprehensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whole range of civic
administration, from the regulations to be made for markets, crafts, buildings
and fairs to the control of prices, interest and rents.[II-66] It was in that
spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived its
life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a generation
Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the former excommunicating
drunkards, dancers and contemners of religion, the latter punishing the
dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death. “Having
considered,” ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576, which mark the maturity
of the Genevese Church, “that it is a thing worthy of commendation above all
others, that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be
preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly maintained by good
government and policy, and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully
instructed, and the Hospital well-ordered for the support of the poor: Which
things can only be if there be established a certain rule and order of living,
by which each man may be able to understand the duties of his
position....”[II-67] The object of it all was so simple. “Each man to understand
the duties of his position”--what could be more desirable, at Geneva or
elsewhere? It is sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end
involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking
its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty
years.[II-68] _Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum._
Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Governments which affected no
excessive zeal for righteousness. The characteristic which was distinctive of
Geneva--“the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days
of the Apostles”[II-69]--was not its merciless intolerance, for no one yet
dreamed that tolerance was possible. It was the attempt to make the law of God
prevail even in those matters of pecuniary gain and loss which mankind, to judge
by its history, is disposed to regard more seriously than wounds and deaths. “No
member [of the Christian body],” wrote Calvin in his _Institutes_, “holds his
gifts to himself, or for his private use, but shares them among his fellow
members, nor does he derive benefit save from those things which proceed from
the common profit of the body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his
brethren all that it is in his power to give.”[II-70] It was natural that so
remorseless an attempt to claim the totality of human interests for religion
should not hesitate to engage even the economic appetites, before which the
Churches of a later generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism welcomed
the world of business to its fold with an eagerness unknown before, it did so in
the spirit of a conqueror organizing a new province, not of a suppliant
arranging a compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code
of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testament. Samuel and Agag, King of the
Amalekites, Jonah and Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of Baal,
Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of the Lord, and Jeroboam the
son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, worked on the tense imagination of the
Calvinist as did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793. The first half-century
of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a prolonged effort to organize an economic
order worthy of the Kingdom of Christ, in which the ministers played the part of
Old Testament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the fleshpots of
Egypt.
Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism made few innovations
in the details of social policy, and the contents of the program were thoroughly
medieval. The novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into its
application. The organ of administration before which offenders were brought was
the Consistory, a mixed body of laymen and ministers. It censures harsh
creditors, punishes usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands or fines the
merchant who defrauds his clients, the cloth-maker whose stuff is an inch too
narrow, the dealer who provides short measure of coal, the butcher who sells
meat above the rates fixed by authority, the tailor who charges strangers
excessive prices, the surgeon who demands an excessive fee for an
operation.[II-71] In the Consistory the ministers appear to have carried all
before them, and they are constantly pressing for greater stringency. From the
election of Beza in place of Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year
passes without a new demand for legislation from the clergy, a new censure on
economic unrighteousness, a new protest against one form or another of the
ancient sin of avarice. At one moment, it is excessive indulgence to debtors
which rouses their indignation; at another, the advance of prices and rents
caused by the influx of distressed brethren from the persecutions in France; at
a third, the multiplication of taverns and the excessive charges demanded by the
sellers of wine. Throughout there is a prolonged warfare against the twin evils
of extortionate interest and extortionate prices.
Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for the same reasons which
made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth
century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars of
religion, the city was a financial center of some importance. It might be
involved in war at any moment. In order to secure command of the necessary
funds, it had borrowed heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the
capital to do exchange business and make advances, the rate of interest being
fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To the establishment of a bank the
ministers, who had been consulted, agreed; against the profitable business of
advancing money at high rates of interest to private persons they protested,
especially when the loans were made to spendthrifts who used them to ruin
themselves. When, ten years later, in 1580, the Council approved the project
advanced by some company promoters of establishing a second bank in the city,
the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the danger of covetousness as
revealed by the moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and
Lyons, and succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however, the
commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist who borrowed in order to
invest and make a profit could take care of himself, and the ministers explained
that they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur argent aux marchands pour
emploier en marchandise.” The crucial issue was that of the money-lender who
makes advances “simplement à un qui aura besoin,” and who thereby exploits the
necessities of his poorer neighbors.[II-72]
Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They denounce
them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in language drawn
principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as _larrons, brigands,
loups et tigres_, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to death. “The
poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but what they are heaping up for
themselves is the wrath of God.... One has cried in the market-place, ‘a curse
on those who bring us dearth.’... The Lord has heard that cry ... and yet we are
asking the cause of the pestilence!... A cut-purse shall be punished, but the
Lord declares by his prophet Amos ... ‘Famine is come upon my people of Israel,
O ye who devour the poor.’ The threats there uttered have been executed against
his people.”[II-73] They demand that for his second offense the usurer shall be
excommunicated, or that, if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at
least be required to testify his repentance publicly in church, before being
admitted to the sacrament. They remind their fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre
and Sidon, and, momentarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly,
they propose to deprive him of his victims by removing the causes which create
them. _Pour tarir les ruisseaux il faut escouper la source._ Men borrow because
of “idleness, foolish extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be
established at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among rich as well as
among poor, how each household earns its livelihood, to see that all children of
ten to twelve are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litigation,
and to “bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such wretches that they
seek to enrich themselves by the necessities of their poor neighbors.”[II-74]
The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they were not sanguine that it
would be carried out, and they concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers
the pious hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of your honorable
fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their apprehensions were
justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things at the hands of its
preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were
limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they
were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question the right of the
clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and
platform in one; ministers had the public behind them, and, conscious of their
power, would in the last resort compel submission by threatening to resign _en
masse_. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon
balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yielding down of official
procrastination, and its first reply was normally _qu’on y pense un peu_. To the
clergy its inactivity was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did
not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached
a sermon in which he accused members of the Council of having intelligence with
speculators who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were
reproaching the Council with laxity in administration, and they finally
denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In
1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral
discipline and social reform.
The prosperous _bourgeoisie_ who governed Geneva had no objection to
discouraging extravagance in dress, or to exhorting the public to attend sermons
and to send their children to catechism. But they heard denunciations of
covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were obdurate. They
refused to check, as the ministers concerned to lower prices had demanded, the
export of wine, on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of
wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do creditors, they would make no
concession to the complaint that debtors were subjected to a “double usury,”
since they were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell
as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the
ordinance now criticized had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to
such lengths. Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. They
informed the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding
up supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons against avarice, with
appropriate topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by
accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich.[II-75]
The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. One of the magistrates,
who regarded Beza’s remarks as a personal reflection, was rash enough to demand
to be heard before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty,
condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty crowns which he had lent
at 10 per cent. interest. Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as
this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The Council
and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective
functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of
the local hospital. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were
interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied politely that they would
be well advised to mind their own business.
So monstrous a suggestion--as though there were any human activity which was not
the business of the Church!--evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the
ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in
all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having cited before the
Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and for refusing the
sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps his corn
in time of scarcity”? To the charge of intemperate language Chauvet replied that
the Council had better begin by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had
done no more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should be silent,”
said Beza, “what would the people say? That they are dumb dogs.... As to the
question of causing scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing
talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been
punished.... It is notorious everywhere that the city is full of usurers, and
that the ordinary rate is 10 per cent. or more.”[II-76] The magistrates renewed
their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to
be hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to scourging through the
town, followed by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.[II-77] But at the godly
proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched.
Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, “most men
are debtors.” If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury
will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not
venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed the
ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when rebuked
by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied in the language of
Nathan, we are not informed.
Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the omnicompetent
State. The principle on which the collectivism of Geneva rested may be described
as that of the omnicompetent Church.[II-78] The religious community formed a
closely organized society, which, while using the secular authorities as police
officers to enforce its mandates, not only instructed them as to the policy to
be pursued, but was itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation
the standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting down offences
against public order and public morals, providing for the education of youth and
for the relief of the poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical
and secular authorities, which for a short time made the system possible at
Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of
a single city, but of a minority in a national State organized on principles
quite different from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion,
civil war or the abandonment of the pretension to control society was the
inevitable consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth
century, whatever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches
is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of
their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in
the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious
temptations to a lapse into immorality.
The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Reformed Churches of
France. At their first Synod, held in 1559 at Paris, where a scheme of
discipline was adopted, certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were
discussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention at subsequent
Synods for the next half-century, until, as the historian of French Calvinism
remarks, “they began to lax the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the
time.”[II-79] Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves
compliance with a standard of economic morality which the Church must enforce,
the problems of interpretation which arise are innumerable, and the religious
community finds itself committed to developing something like a system of case
law, by the application of its general principles to a succession of varying
situations. The elaboration of such a system was undertaken; but it was limited
in the sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the economic
structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva, being concerned
not to reform society, but merely to repress the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt
only with matters on which specific guidance was demanded by the Churches.
Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to be the
attitude of the Churches towards those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth?
May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord’s Supper? May the
brethren trade with such persons, or do they share their sin if they buy their
goods? The law of the State allows moderate interest: what is to be the attitude
of the Church? What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the consumer
with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are
lotteries permissible? Is it legitimate to invest at interest monies bequeathed
for the benefit of the poor? The answers which the French Synods made to such
questions show the persistence of the idea that the transactions of business are
the province of the Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an
impracticable rigor. All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others must
make restitution before they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be
bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the
civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and tradesmen
are to seek only “indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the same division
of opinion is visible in the French Reformed Church as existed at the same time
in England and Holland, and Calvin’s advice on the subject was requested. The
stricter school would not hear of confining the prohibition of usury to
“excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of raising money for the poor by
interest on capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these heroic
rigors had passed, and the common-sense view prevailed. The brethren were
required to demand no more than the law allowed and than was consistent with
charity. Within these limits interest was not to be condemned.[II-80]
Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism something is
said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the views of the reformers as to
economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the Church before the
Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline denounced covetousness with the
same vehemence as did the “accursed Popery” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen
are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches are required to
make provision for the poor. “Oppression of the poor by exactions,” it is
declared, “[and] deceiving of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure
... do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God’s word
commandeth.”[II-81] The interpretation given to these offences is shown by the
punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of
St. Andrews.[II-82] The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statutory duty
of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven years after it had in England
been finally transferred to the State. The arrangement under which in rural
districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and
deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State in Scotland had been
represented, not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox.
Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social discipline of the
Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the Puritan
theocracy of New England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of
Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contemporary English
Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden, where men desired only to worship
God “according to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of
God’s word,”[II-83] not only were “tobacco and immodest fashions and costly
apparel,” and “that vain custom of drinking one to another,” forbidden to true
professors, but the Fathers adopted towards that “notorious evil ... whereby
most men walked in all their commerce--to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they
can,”[II-84] an attitude which possibly would not be wholly congenial to their
more business-like descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachusetts
a minister had called attention to the recrudescence of the old Adam--“profit
being the chief aim and not the propagation of religion”--and Governor Bradford,
observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward estates,” remarked that the
increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New England, at least of
the Churches of God there.”[II-85] Sometimes Providence smote the exploiter. The
immigrant who organized the first American Trust--he owned the only milch cow on
board and sold the milk at 2_d._ a quart--“being after at a sermon wherein
oppression was complained of ... fell distracted.”[II-86] Those who escaped the
judgment of Heaven had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which, in
the infancy of the colony, were the same thing.
Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate of interest, fixed
a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible idlers; for these things had been done
even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive of
the children of light was their attempt to apply the same wholesome discipline
to the elusive category of business profits. The price of cattle, the
Massachusetts authorities decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the
buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return to the seller.[II-87]
Against those who charged more, their wrath was that of Moses descending to find
the chosen people worshipping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to
spare from their rage against religious freedom, they turned against economic
license. Roger Williams touched a real affinity when, in his moving plea for
tolerance, he argued that, though extortion was an evil, it was an evil the
treatment of which should be left to the discretion of the civil
authorities.[II-88]
Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by general consent, was
black. He kept a shop in Boston, in which he took “in some ... above 6_d._ in
the shilling profit; in some above 8_d._; and in some small things above two for
one”; and this, though he was “an ancient professor of the gospel, a man of
eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having come over for
conscience’ sake and for the advancement of the gospel.” The scandal was
terrible. Profiteers were unpopular--“the cry of the country was great against
oppression”--and the grave elders reflected that a reputation for greed would
injure the infant community, lying as it did “under the curious observation of
all Churches and civil States in the world.” In spite of all, the magistrates
were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in force limiting
profits; it was not easy to determine what profits were fair; the sin of
charging what the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after
all, the law of God required no more than double restitution. So they treated
him mercifully, and fined him only £200.
Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop. But, like
some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably by his
excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all “did with tears
acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” and then was rash enough
to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that the tradesman must live,
and how could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one article by
additional profit on another? Here was a text on which no faithful pastor could
refrain from enlarging. The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and
took occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error
of such false principles, and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some
false principles were these:--
“1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.
“2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may
raise the price of the rest.
“3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, and though the
commodity be fallen, etc.
“4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he
may of another’s ignorance or necessity.
“5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompence of one as
of another.”
The rules for trading were not less explicit:--
“1. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual
in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity)
would give for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money
which every man will take, etc.
“2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at
it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another.
“3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself
by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another;
for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he
should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men
may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not
the person.
“4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as
Ephron to Abraham: the land is worth thus much.”
It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not remembered in the case of
transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might have appeared
peculiarly appropriate. In negotiating with these children of the devil,
however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with Gibeon a more
appropriate precedent.
The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It was moved,
amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That
he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of
the text, was doubted as little as that he had recently given a pitiable
exhibition of covetousness. The question was only whether he had erred through
ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his conscience or the
very light of nature”--whether, in short, his sin was accidental or a trade. In
the end he escaped with his fine and admonition.[II-89]
If the only Christian documents which survived were the New Testament and the
records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a
connection between them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would
appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical,
without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius,
Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That
it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin
Club was than the _ancien régime_, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its
zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and
writings, but thoughts.
The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by
its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty and authority,
Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm. For the
Calvinist Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered
once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the
Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of
laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of
the ministry appeared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the
Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the
proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where
Calvin’s discipline was accepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual
range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott
shocked at last even the savage superstition of New England, that result was
only to be expected.
The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism
is that they were consistent. Most tyrannies have contented themselves with
tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted
wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the
fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did
its best to make life unbearable for the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly
comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and
Aaron.[II-90]
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he
is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in
vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in
the body of the Church.”
LAUD, _Sermon before His Majesty_, June 19, 1621.
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth
century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the
discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the
relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without
significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic
realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the
Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doctrines with an
almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of
new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion,
and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious
antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down
to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.
Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote
from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centers of Italy
and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a
new age began. After the first outburst of curiosity, interest in explorations
which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more
than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all
Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in
the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and
the East began in earnest.
In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life was in
process of swift transformation. Foreign trade increased largely in the first
half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced
wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went the growth of the
financial organization on which commerce depends, and English capital poured
into the growing London money-market, which had previously been dominated by
Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of internal trade which followed
the Tudor peace, opportunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of
middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was that of
the commercial capitalist, bent on securing the freedom to grow to what stature
he could, and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive
machinery of the gilds, with their corporate discipline, their organized torpor
restricting individual enterprise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he
quietly evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within
which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be made effective, or he
accepted the gild organization, captured its government, and by means of it
developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was in
effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture, the customary organization of
the village was being sapped from below and battered down from above. For a
prosperous peasantry, who had commuted the labor services that were still the
rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or
agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were
leasing their demesnes to capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits to be
won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal
restrictions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry and
agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the
century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected
potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all
customary relationships.
It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions and haunted by new
terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their meaning. Except in
the turbulent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his
call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment.
The prosperous merchant, once content to win a position of dignity and power in
fraternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to
solitary preëminence, unaided by the artificial protection of gild or city. To
the immemorial poverty of peasant and craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present
threat of famine, their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added the
haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small, proletariat, detached from
their narrow niche in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they
could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control.
I. THE LAND QUESTION
The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high
debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron
seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the material on which
agitation fed had been accumulating for three generations, and of the grievances
which exploded in the middle of the century, with the exception of the
depreciation of the currency, there was not one--neither enclosures and pasture
farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor
the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, nor the extortions of the
engrosser--which had not evoked popular protests, been denounced by publicists,
and produced legislation and administrative action, long before the Reformation
Parliament met. The floods were already running high, when the religious
revolution swelled them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect
on the social situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution
of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of
violence, intimidation and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested
misgovernment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every
problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant and
craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing on questions not only of
religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the
changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head in a sweeping
indictment of the new economic forces and an eloquent restatement of the
traditional theory of social obligations. The center of both was the land
question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity of
the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground of social
agitation.
The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century
before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had been written
by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.[III-1] Then had come the
legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal Commission in 1517, and more
legislation in 1534.[III-2] Throughout, a steady stream of criticism had flowed
from men of the Renaissance, like More, Starkey and a host of less well-known
writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles
to be performed by a Prince who would take counsel of philosophers.
If, however, the problem was acute long before the confiscation of the monastic
estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and
Cromwell is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the
last days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The monks, after all,
were business men, and the lay agents whom they often employed to manage their
property naturally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world around
them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more frequent or more bitter than on the
estates of ecclesiastical landowners.[III-3] In England a glance at the
proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show that
holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copyholders into tenants at will, and, as
More complained, converted arable land to pasture.[III-4]
In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part of the monks, or of
more than ordinary harshness on the part of the new proprietors, is not needed
in order to explain the part which the rapid transference of great masses of
property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side of all such sudden
and sweeping redistributions is that the individual is more or less at the mercy
of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Estates with a
capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed
hands.[III-5] To the abbey lands which came into the market after 1536 were
added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial necessities of the
Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in its own possession and
drawing the rents; nor, in any case, would that have been the course dictated by
prudence to a Government which required a party to carry through a revolution.
What it did, therefore, was to alienate most of the land almost immediately, and
to spend the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of land
speculation. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers, at a
ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business men, who brought to
bear on its management the methods learned in the financial school of the City;
the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was acquired by
middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and
disposed of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, groups of
tradesmen--cloth-workers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors, brewers,
tallow-chandlers--formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting,
evictions, and the conversions of arable to pasture were the natural result, for
surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser
squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay.[III-6]
Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? “Do ye not
know,” said the grantee of one of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in
answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their commons, “that the
King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore
now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor
knaves as ye be.”[III-7] Such arguments, if inconsequent, were too convenient
not to be common. The protests of contemporaries receive detailed confirmation
from the bitter struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and some of
the new landlords--the Herberts, who enclosed a whole village to make the park
at Washerne, in which, according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write
his _Arcadia_, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, third in the
line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Abbey, whose tenants found their
rents raised from £29 to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging
the Government with petitions for redress.[III-8] The legend, still repeated
late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of monastic estates died out
in three generations, though unveracious, is not surprising. The wish was father
to the thought.
It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser
found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition
which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of
economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.
In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with
social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from
the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the
Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of
the laxity and license which had degraded the purity of religion, and who
understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive
Church, no less than to its government and doctrine. The touching words[III-9]
in which the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the
dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the
denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and
Ponet.
Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry,
and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the
bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The
movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with
several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a
political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of
religion.[III-10] In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of
a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church.
The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of
learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring
into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival
inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel--such, not without judicious
encouragement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the vision
which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.
It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic crisis,
Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated
the social program of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian
politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil how the Kingdom of
Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened,
and its details elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of
Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by
the State. The Government, a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen
industry, to introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under
the plow. It is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For, though
trade in itself is honorable, most traders are rogues--indeed “next to the sham
priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth”; their works
are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to overlook both.
Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices--“a very
necessary but an easy matter.” Only “pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth
more than to their own interests,” are to be allowed to engage in trade at all.
In every village and town a school is to be established under a master eminent
for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all things strive that men
of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God.... Neither the Church of
Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private
gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbors.”[III-11]
The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The
classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had
sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social
disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass,
and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon. The
Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in
fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of
restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for
the schools, what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away
wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were
probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the
fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These
endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the
descendants of the statesmen of the day.”[III-12] “King Edward VI’s Grammar
Schools” are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.
The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should
ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which
were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of
Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new bishoprics,
lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon
law, the reform of doctrine and ritual--side by side with these good things had
come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessation of
much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the
House of Commons,[III-13] and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating
of an immense land syndicate, with favorable terms for all sufficiently rich, or
influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in
the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the
security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical
reverence for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the
_nouveaux riches_.[III-14] The men whose religion was not money said what they
thought of the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable
congregations spluttering with fury.
Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick begged in the
street because rich men had seized the endowments of hospitals, and did not
conceal his sympathy with the peasants who rose under Ket.[III-15] Becon told
the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only difference
between them and the monks was that they were more greedy and more useless, more
harsh in wringing the last penny from the tenants, more selfish in spending the
whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.[III-16] “In suppressing
of abbies, cloisters, colleges and chantries,” preached Lever in St. Paul’s,
“the intent of the King’s Majesty that dead is, was, and of this our king now
is, very godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other wondrous goodly:
that thereby such abundance of goods as was superstitiously spent upon vain
ceremonies, or voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to
bear his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth, or partly
unto other men’s hands, for the better relief of the poor, the maintenance of
learning, and the setting forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers have
so used this matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the
poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in
the common wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous
ambition.... You which have gotten these goods into your own hands, to turn them
from evil to worse, and other goods more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is
even you that have offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the
poor, and brought a common wealth into a common misery.”[III-17]
This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies as the “Commonwealth men”
from their advocacy of social reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the
prophet and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge of stirring up
class hatred, which is normally brought against all who call attention to its
causes. The result of their activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission
to inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the conversion of arable to
pasture, the introduction of legislation requiring the maintenance of tillage
and rebuilding of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken
the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The gentry were furious.
Paget, the secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror,
provided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German
Peasants’ War was to be reënacted in England; the Council, most of whose members
held abbey lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the personification of the predatory
property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely for carrying out, as chairman of
the Midland committee of the Depopulation Commission, the duties laid upon him
by the Government. “Sir,” wrote a plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, “be plain with
my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretense of simplicity and poverty there may
[not] rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Common
Wealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I
mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they are in such doubt,
that almost they dare touch none of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they
are afraid of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away
without punishment, and that Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon
of others.”[III-18]
The “Common Wealth called Latimer” was unrepentant. Combining gifts of humor and
invective which are not very common among bishops, his fury at oppression did
not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious laughter, as
of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the sinner ridiculous in this world
before he is damned in the next. So he was delighted when he provoked one of his
audience into the exclamation, “Mary, a seditious fellow!” used the episode as
comic relief in his next sermon,[III-19] and then, suddenly serious, redoubled
his denunciations of step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the
covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself?
You thoughte that I woulde not requyre
The bloode of all suche at your hande,
But be you sure, eternall fyre
Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande.
Both for the housynge and the lande
That you have taken from the pore
Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.[III-20]
On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the authors of such outbursts
spoke without authority, and, thanks to Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, modern
research has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their story.
At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large impersonal causes which were
hurrying forward the reorganization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what
shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, but its repudiation
of the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished
from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or
Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation or
tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both. That creed was that the
individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive
law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained
by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors,
or to give account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the
theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.
The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant had never, at least
within recent centuries, arisen in so acute a form, for, as long as the
customary tenants were part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the
interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been changed, at
any rate in the south and midlands, by the expansion of the woollen industry and
the devaluation of money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced labor, if it had
not gone, was fast going. The psychology of landowning had been revolutionized,
and for two generations the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial
right to fine or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been hunting for
flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and,
when he dared, turning copyholds into leases. The official opposition to
depopulation, which had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640,
infuriated him, as an intolerable interference with the rights of property. In
their attacks on the restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the
Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding
depopulation, and in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and
Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian
revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of
ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a
doctrine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title,
it was not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eighteenth century
to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social
duties save that of submission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis
on its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a flattering, but
innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected,
the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.
A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines
which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To
the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the
felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing
the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally
attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of
mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal
goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that
of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for “the
glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” To a temper nurtured on
such ideas, the new agrarian _régime_, with its sacrifice of the village--a
fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, “a little
commonwealth”--to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor, who made a
desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but
of God. It was the work of “men that live as thoughe there were no God at all,
men that would have all in their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for
others, men that would be alone on the earth, men that bee never
satisfied.”[III-21] Its essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while
repudiating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry
of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the
divines of the Reformation called down fire from heaven.
Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which the most
elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while
justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was
limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of
charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order,
which was vanishing before the advance of more business-like and impersonal
forms of landownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation, was now
hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of
competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce
the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of
economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its _raison d’être_ is not only
income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such
means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labor on the land, or
labor in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds
in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both.
He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at
once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has
“every man’s living and does no man’s duty.”[III-22]
The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he
performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to
the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him.
Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think
most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the
crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his
neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to
forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure
his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand
increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less
essential than his own. He is, in short, not a _rentier_, but an officer, and it
is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to
the greed for personal gain. “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into
the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of
the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and
stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines
and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings ... but so behave
themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this
life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[III-23] Thus, while
the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their
liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in the Book of
Private Prayer issued in 1553.
II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY
If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and
realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude
which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized appeal to
traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious.
Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent,
defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval
social theory, to which the most representative minds of the English Church
still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by
the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks
seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the
new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by
churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the
modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit,
money-lending and prices. The center of the controversy--the mystery of iniquity
in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately,
epitomized--was the problem which contemporaries described by the word usury.
“Treasure doth then advance greatness,” wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of
the social ideal of the age, “when the wealth of the subject be rather in many
hands than few.”[III-24] In spite of the growing concentration of property,
Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phase, a Distributive State.
It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used
in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a
society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a
small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and
prosperity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed beggars” of
France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the
interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of
peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at
worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position
_vis-à-vis_ their employers. The special economic _malaise_ of an age is
naturally the obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of
the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation,
which evoked programs of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and
administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning
proletariat by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the
landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local
capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The
farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the
interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials on
credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must
scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager,
who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to “give
day.” Almost every one, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the
money-lender. And the lender is often a monopolist--“a money master,” a malster
or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is the solitary capitalist in a community
of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.[III-25]
In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a popular
outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found an ally,
eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the
ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval Popes and
interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the
sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety
to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in
commerce and agriculture had, not softened, but accentuated, the problems of
conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular
case of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the moralist directed
their arrows. The essence of the medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its
insistence on equity in bargaining--a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said,
when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the
kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only
species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most
conspicuous species, of extortion.
In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word
usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modern
profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most unpopular
characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost any
form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be classed as usurious. The
interpretation placed on the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories
of usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan, but
the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down of prices by a keen
bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a
tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the
paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor, the
insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the excessive profits of a
middleman--all these had been denounced as usury in the very practical
thirteenth-century manual of St. Raymond;[III-26] all these were among the
“unlawful chaffer,” the “sublety and sleight,” which was what the plain man who
sat on juries and listened to sermons in parish churches meant by usury three
centuries later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he would probably
have answered with a quotation from Scripture. If he had been asked for a
definition of usury, he would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the
words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the bill introduced in 1571: “It
standeth doubtful what usury is; we have no true definition of it.”[III-27] The
truth is, indeed, that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more
advantage than the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded as
usurious. The description which best sums up alike popular sentiment and
ecclesiastical teaching is contained in the comprehensive indictment applied by
his parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling--the
cry of all poor men since the world began--Dr. Bennet “is a great taker of
advantages.”[III-28]
It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of the sixteenth
century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one
subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave
its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the center. The passion
which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned by the conviction that the issue at
stake was not merely a legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme
of medieval thought, which had attempted to treat economic affairs as part of a
hierarchy of values, embracing all interests and activities, of which the apex
was religion.
If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution which left almost
intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiastical organization and the traditional
scheme of social thought. The villager who, resisting the temptations of the
alehouse, morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from 1530 to 1560,
must have been bewildered by a succession of changes in the appearance of the
building and the form of the services. But there was little to make him
conscious of any alteration in the social system of which the church was the
center, or in the duties which that system imposed upon himself. After, as
before, the Reformation, the parish continued to be a community in which
religious and social obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a
parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority, that he bore his
share of public burdens and performed such public functions as fell to his lot.
The officers of whom he saw most in the routine of his daily life were the
churchwardens. The place where most public business was transacted, and where
news of the doings of the great world came to him, was the parish church. The
contributions levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such
education as was available for his children was often given by the curate or
parish schoolmaster. Such training in coöperation with his fellows as he
received sprang from common undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned
property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made
large profits by church ales, and occasionally engaged in trade.[III-29]
Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally
compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish
for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political and economic
aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit
was the channel through which official information was conveyed to the public
and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy and the parochial
organization that the State turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597
collectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with the
parson.
Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the religious thought of the
age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization. Both in
their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of
the particular social obligations which religion involved, the most
representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of breaking
with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic motives which
caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic
enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insistence that
the criteria of economic relations and of the social order were to be sought,
not in practical expediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guardian
and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth,
in spite of the revolution which had intervened, had more affinity with the
doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after
the Restoration.
The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic power to drive
an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant denunciation down to the
Civil War. The exactions of middlemen--“merchants of mischief ... [who] do make
all things dear to the buyers, and yet wonderful vile and of small price to many
that must needs set or sell that which is their own honestly come by”--were
pilloried by Lever.[III-30] Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on _The Lawful Use
of Riches_ became something like a standard work, expounded the doctrine of the
just price, and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded freedom of
contract as an excuse for covetousness: “Cloake the same by what title you
liste, your synne is excedyng greate.... He which hurteth but one man is in a
damnable case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest whole householdes
to their graves, or at the leaste art a meanes of their extreame miserie? Thou
maiest finde shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte not
escape the judgemente of God.”[III-31] Men eminent among Anglican divines, such
as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the controversy on the subject of usury. A
bishop of Salisbury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of
Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp _Arraignment_ to be dedicated to himself; and a
clerical pamphleteer in the seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six
bishops and ten doctors of divinity--not to mention numberless humbler
clergy--who had written in the course of the last hundred years on different
aspects of the sin of extortion in all its manifold varieties.[III-32] The
subject was still a favorite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century
preacher was untrammeled by the convention which in a more fastidious age was to
preclude as an impropriety the discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the
market-place. “As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote Heming, “so
it is the parte of the preachers to reprove usurie.... First, they should
earnestly inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked contractes.... Let them ...
amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline.... Then,
if they cannot reforme all abuses which they shall finde in bargaines, let them
take heede that they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende the cause
unto God ... Last of all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche men, that
they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches.”[III-33]
“This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ecclesiastical condemnation
of usury, “hath been the generall judgment of the Church for above this fifteene
hundred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church of Christ,
that could never finde a lawfull usurie before this golden age wherein we
live.”[III-34] The first fact which strikes the modern student of this body of
teaching is its continuity with the past. In its insistence that buying and
selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled by a
moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, religious opinion after the
Reformation did not differ from religious opinion before it. The reformers
themselves were conscious, neither of the emancipation from the economic follies
of the age of medieval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth century, nor
of the repudiation of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which
some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The
relation in which they conceived themselves to stand to the social theory of the
medieval Church is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed. “Therefore I
would not,” wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and for a short time
Secretary of State, “have men altogether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to
condempne every thinge there written, because the Popes were aucthours of them,
as though no good lawe coulde bee made by them.... Nay, I will saye playnely,
that there are some suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, saye
others what they list.”[III-35] From the lips of a Tudor official, such
sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain piquancy. But, in their appeal to the
traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson’s words represented the
starting-point from which the discussions of social questions still commonly set
out.
The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, church councils, and
commentators on the canon law--all these, and not only the first, continued to
be quoted as decisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the
theology and government of the medieval Church were an abomination. What use
Wilson made of them, a glance at his book will show. The writer who, after him,
produced the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of the
century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reformation authorities running
into several pages.[III-36] The author of a practical memorandum on the
amendment of the law with regard to money-lending--a memorandum which appears to
have had some effect upon policy--thought it necessary to drag into a paper
concerned with the chicanery of financiers and the depreciation of sterling by
speculative exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and
Hostiensis.[III-37] Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever to “the
decrees of the Pope” did so only the more strongly to emphasize the prohibition
of uncharitable dealing contained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings
of godlie Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.”[III-38] Objective economic
science was developing in the hands of the experts who wrote on agriculture,
trade, and, above all, on currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines,
if they read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intrusion of
Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their obstinate obscurantism
helped to prepare an intellectual nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent
rhetoric as the voice of a musty superstition. For one who examined present
economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted quotations from tomes of past
economic casuistry. Sermon was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise.
The assumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church as to
social ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after the Reformation as it had
been before it.
Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which no one commits or with
sins that every one commits, and the literary evidence is not to be dismissed
merely as pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not, however, stand alone.
Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation in the political and social
position of the Church it is not necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one
arm of the State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast losing
what little terrors it still retained; a clergy three-quarters of whom, as a
result of the enormous transference of ecclesiastical property, were
henceforward presented by lay patrons, were not likely to display any excessive
independence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished; the assumption
of most churchmen throughout the sixteenth century was that it was to be
administered; and the canon law included the whole body of legislation as to
equity in contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages. True, it was
administered no longer by the clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by
civilians acting under the authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibition
of the study of canon law--after the estimable Dr. Layton had “set Dunce in
Bocardo” at Oxford--it languished at the universities. True, for the seven years
from 1545 to 1552, and again, and on this occasion for good, after 1571,
parliamentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided that
it did not exceed a statutory maximum. But the convulsion which changed the
source of canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its
scope. Its validity was not the less because it was now enforced in the name,
not of the Pope, but of the King.
As Maitland has pointed out,[III-39] there was a moment towards the middle of
the century when the civil law was pressing the common law hard. The civil law,
as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising
career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical courts.[III-40] Though it
did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say about it; it was a doctor of the
civil law under Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate treatise on the subject was
compiled.[III-41] By an argument made familiar by a modern controversy on which
lay and ecclesiastical opinion have diverged, it is argued that the laxity of
the State does not excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not only
of the State, but of the Church. “The permission of the Prince,” it was urged,
“is no absolution from the authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be
unlawfull ... yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this
case the Canons are to be preferred.... By the laws no man is compelled to be an
usurer; and therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is
otherwise due to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their
souls.”[III-42]
It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical writers who
dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the
words of a pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of England ... usury is
simply and generally prohibited.”[III-43] When the lower House of Convocation
petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of their privileges, they
urged, among other matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon lawes as
in tymes past has been used.”[III-44] In the abortive scheme for the
reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe,
usury was included in the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts
were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been
somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it was not to be taken
as including the profits derived from objects which yielded increase by the
natural process of growth.[III-45] Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to the laity
of the Province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to
the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever
the guise under which the transaction may be concealed.[III-46] Bishops’
articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the presentation of
uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and
sorcerers.[III-47] The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent
promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of
the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be
subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.[III-48]
The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation,
and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important,
if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In
addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing
the man who refused to “pay to the poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for
being an uncharitable person and for not giving to the poor and
impotent,”[III-49] they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended
against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church
in these matters was expressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical
lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued
to claim certain economic misdemeanors as their province. That, in spite of the
rising tide of opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles
of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the
protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by
the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be
brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to
outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. “Thomas
Wilkoxe,” complained his fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and disquieteth
the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, taking 1_d._
and sometimes 2_d._ for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed by his own
father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy
Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Communion,
then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not
tarry the end of divine service thrice in the year.”[III-50] Whether the
archdeacon corrected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical
discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the
court of the archdeacon of Essex.[III-51] Twenty-two years later, a usurer is
presented with other offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some
Yorkshire parishes.[III-52] Even in 1619 two instances occur in which
money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary of the Bishop of
London, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly
reported and cried out of.” One is excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both
are admonished to amend their ways.[III-53]
There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly
exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever more
discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application
of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical
discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious
opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High
Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts
christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines
expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the
laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics
were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the
sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A
century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for
it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be
told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this
matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two generations which followed
the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an
obscurity where the glittering armor of theologians
made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.
In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not
yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from
that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with
a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the
cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a
vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.
As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen
differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines,
than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it
among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial
interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and
the humbler _bourgeoisie_, whose conception of social expediency was the defence
of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this
new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the
economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive
movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the
independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its
cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first
to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies--incredible nightmare--a
_régime_ of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have
been merged in a propertyless proletariat, and “the riches of the city of
London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a
few men having unmerciful hearts.”[III-54]
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and
rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government,
was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional
machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as
best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by
advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on
occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to
make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and
extortioners.” The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of
a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar
motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite
victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” without which
he could not set up in business.[III-55]
The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more complicated, and
its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in
wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of
economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if
it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the
divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder
caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in
its own mission as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a
hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable
financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing
all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.
In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public
policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from
considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of
the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the
State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been,
at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private
morality, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its decrees. In
the sixteenth century, the Church became the ecclesiastical department of the
State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy.
But the religious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a single
society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon
law became “the King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both
inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself,
the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to
maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil
called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Ecclesiastics, in their
turn, were public officers--under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a
justice of the peace--and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only
religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a
society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely
disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote Hooker, “that
society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true
religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the
matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.”[III-56]
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of
Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a
nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a
commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous expansion is
taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and
the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the
number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is
strictly limited; movement means disturbance, for, as one man rises, another is
thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual
initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor
Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial
organization. Except when they were diverted by financial interests, or lured
into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic
development, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were
disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment
of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic
individualism for reasons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of
religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by
submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a
paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the
established order, and alert to suppress them.
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!...
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
And, last, eat up himself.
In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part of the century,
the words of Ulysses continued for long to express the official attitude.
The practical application of such conceptions was an elaborate system of what
might be called, to use a modern analogy, “controls.” Wages, the movement of
labor, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of
cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business, rates of
interest--all are controlled, partly by Statute, but still more by the
administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too
great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advantage
of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the law to enclose commons
or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to
hinder him from asserting his rights at common law, will intervene to stop gross
cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being made the victims of legal
chicanery and intimidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral
pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound “rather to consider what is
agreeable ... to the use of this State and for the good of the comon wealthe,
than to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit
maie take amonge his tenaunts.”[III-57] Have prices been raised by a bad
harvest? The Council will issue a solemn denunciation of the covetousness of
speculators, “in conditions more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural
men,”[III-58] who take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessities;
will instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and
will order justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel farmers to
sell surplus stocks at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental
market threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council will put pressure
on clothiers to find work for the operatives, “this being the rule by which the
wool-grower, the clothier and merchant must be governed, that whosoever had a
part of the gaine in profitable times ... must now, in the decay of trade ...
beare a part of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of the
publicke and the maintenance of the generall trade.”[III-59] Has the value of
sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the
exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business by
prohibiting private transactions altogether.[III-60] Are local authorities
negligent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists on
regular reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the impotent,
and the steps taken to provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied,
inundates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with threats of severer
proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difficulties? The Council, which
keeps sufficiently in touch with business conditions to know when the
difficulties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a moderating
influence by making an example of persons guilty of flagrant extortion, or by
inducing the parties to accept a compromise. A mortgagee accused of “hard and
unchristianly dealing” is ordered to restore the land which he has seized, or to
appear before the Council. A creditor who has been similarly “hard and
unconscionable” is committed to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are
instructed to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken “very unjust and
immoderate advantage by way of usury.” The bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a
usurer in his diocese to show “a more Christian and charitable consideration of
these his neighbors.” A nobleman has released two offenders imprisoned by the
High Commission for the Province of York for having “taken usury contrary to the
laws of God and of the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit them. No
Government can face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of
respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual
depression, the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their
claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like
an informal moratorium.[III-61]
The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the first two Stuarts, were
masters of the art of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives
beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty
declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the social
policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it was grandiose
in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its
ostensible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional interests, and by
the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental conception,
however--the philosophy of the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above
immediate exigencies to consider the significance of the system in its
totality--had a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended themselves
to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class
performed its allotted function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more
than such a livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,”
wrote one who had labored much, amid grave personal dangers, for the welfare of
his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge we have, but to doe services
therfore amonge our neighbours abroade.”[III-62] The divines who fulminated
against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middleman, the
grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw in the measures by which
the Government endeavored to suppress the greed of individuals or the collision
of classes a much needed cement of social solidarity, and appealed to Cæsar to
redouble his penalties upon an economic license which was hateful to God. The
statesmen concerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of
order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threatened to destroy
it, and reënforced the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would
not have been out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned
with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties
and the spiritual manifestation of the corporate life of a complex, yet united,
society. To both the State is something more than an institution created by
material necessities or political convenience. It is the temporal expression of
spiritual obligations. It is a link between the individual soul and that
supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests
not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.
Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic, the
most reasonable and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it meant to
one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet not
without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea,
however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in the sermons and the
activity of Laud. Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need no
emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most powerful forces of his
own age, his virtues were not of a kind to commend him to those of its
successor, and history has been hardly more merciful to him than were his
political opponents. But an intense conviction of the fundamental solidarity of
all the manifold elements in a great community, a grand sense of the dignity of
public duties, a passionate hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal
cupidities and sectional interests--these qualities are not among the weaknesses
against which the human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its
guard, and these qualities Laud possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess.
His worship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a superstition.
Church and State are one Jerusalem: “Both Commonwealth and Church are collective
bodies, made up of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the
Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Commonwealth; nay, so near, that
the same men, which in a temporal respect make the Commonwealth, do in a
spiritual make the Church.”[III-63] Private and public interests are
inextricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The foundation of
unity is justice: “God will not bless the State, if kings and magistrates do not
execute judgment, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out against
the ‘thrones of justice.’”[III-64]
To a temper so permeated with the conception that society is an organism compact
of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is to maintain their
coöperation, every social movement or personal motive which sets group against
group, or individual against individual, appears, not the irrepressible energy
of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The first demon to be exorcised is party,
for Governments must “entertain no private business,” and “parties are ever
private ends.”[III-65] The second is the self-interest which leads the
individual to struggle for riches and advancement. “There is no private end, but
in something or other it will be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come
in, though it be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’ it is no matter with them though
Ephesus be in an uproar for it.”[III-66] For Laud, the political virtues, by
which he understands subordination, obedience, a willingness to sacrifice
personal interests for the good of the community, are as much part of the
Christian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of
those who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready to chastise the rich and
powerful, who thwart the attainment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the
humble. To talk of holiness and to practice injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is
born a member of a society and is dedicated by religion to the service of his
fellows. To repudiate the obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political
atheism.
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he
is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in
vain. For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in
the body of the Church.”[III-67] To one holding such a creed economic
individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious nonconformity, and its
repression was a not less obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the
stability of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural,
therefore, that Laud’s utterances and activities in the matter of social policy
should have shown a strong bias in favor of the control of economic relations by
an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal
government. It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional
policy of protecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for
less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active
in harrying the depopulating landlord. The Council gave sympathetic
consideration to petitions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and
in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland counties to
remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the ground that they
resulted in depopulation and were particularly harmful in times of dearth. In
1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed and special instructions
against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In parts of the
country, at any rate, land which had been laid down to grass was plowed up in
obedience to the Government’s orders. In the four years from 1635 to 1638 a list
of some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about £50,000 was imposed
upon them in fines.[III-68] With this policy Laud was whole-heartedly in
sympathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in which he expresses his
detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon’s gentle
complaint that the archbishop made himself unpopular by his inclination “a
little too much to countenance the Commission for Depopulation.”[III-69] Laud
was himself an active member of the Commission, and dismissed with impatient
contempt the squirearchy’s appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin he
was reminded by his enemies of the needlessly sharp censures with which he
barbed the fine imposed upon an enclosing landlord.[III-70]
The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element in a general
policy, by which a benevolent Government, unhampered by what Laud had called
“that noise” of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor by even-handed pressure to
enforce social obligations on great and small, and to prevent the public
interest being sacrificed to an unconscionable appetite for private gain. The
preoccupation of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies
and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions
of wages, has been described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect
craftsmen against exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor
Unwin.[III-71] In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Elizabethan Book of
Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see that markets were served
and prices controlled, appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as
Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book of
Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again
in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in East
Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the Fleet an employer
notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the North,
Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested interests were threatened by the
drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavored to insist on the stricter
administration of the code regulating the woollen industry.[III-72]
Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious interest of the Government,
which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing popular discontent,
was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference to the opinion of the
wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the divine mission of the House of
David to teach an obedient people “to lay down the private for the public sake.”
It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser of
corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark that the defendant has
been “guilty of a most foule offence, which the Prophet hath [called] in a very
energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore,” and that the dearth has
been caused, not by God, but by “cruell men”;[III-73] or taking part in the
proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when it is pressing justices,
apparently not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise
the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee
of the Commission on the Relief of the Poor, which was appointed in January
1631.[III-74]
“A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of Lord Saye and Sele, “may
preach the Gospel more publicly and to far greater edification in a court of
judicature, or at a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw
things to an issue, than many preachers in their several charges can.”[III-75]
The Church, which had abandoned the pretension itself to control society, found
some compensation in the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without
influence in impressing the principles which were applied by the State. The
history of the rise of individual liberty--to use a question-begging phrase--in
economic affairs follows somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more
important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it. The conception of
religion as a thing private and individual does not emerge until after a century
in which religious freedom normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe
religion, not the freedom of the individual to worship God as he pleases. The
assertion of economic liberty as a natural right comes at the close of a period
in which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a religious
interpretation of social institutions was often sincerely held, the supernatural
sanction had been increasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and
public expediency. “Jerusalem ... stands not for the City and the State only ...
nor for the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both.”[III-76] In
identifying the maintenance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of
an incompetent Government, the Church had built its house upon the sand. It did
not require prophetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be
followed by the destruction of the Temple.
III. THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM
Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by
one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was
increasingly the voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The
expression of a theory of society which had made religion supreme over all
secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had been an element,
and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism
the idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of ecclesiastical
discipline by bishops and archdeacons was becoming to its religion. The
collision between the prevalent practice, and what still purported to be the
teaching of the Church, is almost the commonest theme of the economic literature
of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, indeed, it is the occasion.
Whatever the Church might say, men had asked interest for loans, and charged
what prices the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But
then, except in the great commercial centers and in the high finance of the
Papacy and of secular Governments, their transactions had been petty and
individual, an occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an opportunity.
The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century was that devices that had
formerly been occasional were now woven into the very texture of the industrial
and commercial civilization which was developing in the later years of
Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion was to give English society
its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty years later, Harrington, in a famous
passage, described how the ruin of the feudal nobility by the Tudors, by
democratizing the ownership of land, had prepared the way for the _bourgeois_
republic.[III-77] His hint of the economic changes which preceded the Civil War
might be given a wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of
capitalism in textiles and mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an
outburst of joint-stock enterprise in connection with it, the beginnings of
something like deposit banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the growth,
aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s own financial necessities, of
a money-market with an almost modern technique--speculation, futures and
arbitrage transactions--in London. The future lay with the classes who sprang to
wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the
century, and whose religious and political aspirations were, two generations
later, to overthrow the monarchy.
An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social
ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being essentially impersonal, a
matter of opportunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a
solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church and the
decencies of social intercourse among neighbors, which regarded keen bargaining
as “sharp practice.” In the half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks
to the collapse of sterling on the international market, as a result of a
depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the
state of the foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians.
Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more readily than most economic
questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long
debate provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges, that
the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists
as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered out.
“We see,” wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in
a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the
next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument
that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the
foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that
followeth him.”[III-78] The spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly
described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless
individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as futile as they
were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of the village
dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred
quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that “the devices of
men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.” To a great clothier, or to a
capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the
Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious
interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a
world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an
unfortunate neighbor, but as a profitable investment on the part of not too
scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and expected others to do
the same, they had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of
mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the
ordinary village or borough in rural England.
It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation
of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw their weight against
the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular
movements to apply doctrines of charity and “good conscience” to the impersonal
mechanism of large-scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into
accordance with their economic practice. The opposition to the Statutes against
depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in
the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons,
and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid
down to pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest.[III-79] From at any rate
the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by
the Government was regarded with skepticism by the more advanced economic
theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since
it weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise
opposite of those intended.[III-80] As markets widened, the control of the
middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory,
showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the
prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who subscribed on
his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal
proceedings.[III-81] Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of
the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: “What man is so madde to
deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for naughte? or whoe is he that
will not make of his owne the best he can?”[III-82] With such a wind of doctrine
in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract.
Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the
political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to prove that
the State which interferes with property and business destroys its own title to
exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House of Commons in
1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of
their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they
are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of
greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right
and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some
few.”[III-83] The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in
positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which
might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the
rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of
economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a
moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a
significant revolution had taken place. “Nature” had come to connote, not divine
ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the
individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free
play.
The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was seen in a
reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had
prohibited all interest as “a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers
places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had been repealed,
after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain man against
the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that
the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.[III-84] The exaction
of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, provided that the rate did not
exceed ten per cent., though it still remained open to a debtor, in the
improbable event of his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future
advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment made in excess of the
principal. This qualified condonation of usury on the part of the State
naturally reacted upon religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the
Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more fastidious
than its head. Moderate interest, if without legal protection, was at any rate
not unlawful, and it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the
degrees have been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament. Objective
economic science was beginning its disillusioning career, in the form of
discussions on the rise in prices, the mechanism of the money-market, and the
balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to analyze
forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation. Since
Calvin’s indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue
that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice.
Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which the discussion of
economic ethics was carried on by the divines, and even before the end of the
sixteenth century, though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation of
unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with qualifications. The
_Decades_ of Bullinger, of which three English translations were made in the ten
years following his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained
and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a _via media_. As
uncompromising as any medieval writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness,
he denounces with all the old fervor oppressive contracts which grind the poor.
But he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of his predecessors, and
concedes, with Calvin, that, before interest is condemned as usury, it is
necessary to consider both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower
and lender.
The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the traditional
theory down to the Civil War. Conservative divines took advantage of the section
in the Act of 1571 declaring that “all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of God
is synne and detestable,” to argue that the Statute had in reality altered
nothing, and that the State left it to the Church to prevent bargains which, for
reasons of practical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it
did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obedience to such doctrines
that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure until he is assured that the money which
will be paid to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on
capital.[III-85] But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson of Kingham
bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is “set to hire for a year or two
for four shillings a year,” the money being used for their assistance. But the
arrangement has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is
“very like to have perished through casualty and ill-keeping.”[III-86] Will not
the poor be surer of their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it
is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor
instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to invest money in business in order to
provide an income for those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it
themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits,
what is the particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a
creditor, who may himself be poor, make a loan _gratis_, in order to put money
into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool
crop or to speculate on the exchanges?
To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not
the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but the
observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their
opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued
that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which,
like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not
extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as
“whatever is taken for a loan above the principal.” The literature of the
subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For,
whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest,
as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption implied in their very
disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to a province of which,
in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic transactions were one
department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by
spiritual criteria; that, whatever concessions the State might see fit to make
to human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in
membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical
authorities, whoever they might be, to take the action needed to bring home to
men their social obligations--such doctrines were still common ground to all
sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a
social theory based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While
rival authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics,
the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion,
which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the
whole controversy over “good conscience” in bargaining came to a head, and such
questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise
of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still
professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of
books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were
written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But
it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but
their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was
held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral
law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been
forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of
commercial England in the seventeenth century.
The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which
turns on the difference between public and private morality. The problem which
it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its
essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard to decisions which
affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved,
it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon
as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary
producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one
rule for business and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of
unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no
difference at all is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the
difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable application,
and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by
subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of
sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of
_Realpolitik_.
With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century,
it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my
neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale
organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely _is_ my neighbor? and, How
exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions
the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even
realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations by
treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal
responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and a capitalist
organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to
offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should
have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living
terms. It had endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the
oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a
wage-earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless
iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and
servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not
occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which
was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English
merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or the
American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from
whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet
learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral
principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of
economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the
association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be
increasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines advanced from the
pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical
ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.
They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned. The
social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had
ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic
thought--these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when
once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with
the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shriveled
mass of desiccated formulæ, it will choose the former, though the energy be
brutal and the intelligence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting
with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of
economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political
Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the
practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been
as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been
formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It was neglected because it had
become negligible.
The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries where there was no
Reformation, no Puritan movement, no common law jealous of its rights and eager
to prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were all three, and,
from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical
authorities who attempted to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a
temper which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all,
any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It was not merely that there
was the familiar objection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of
business--that “it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawful and
what is not.”[III-87] More important, there was the opposition of the common
lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline.
Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were
endeavoring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to
testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred
prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the
accession of Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.[III-88]
“As things are,” wrote two years later the author of a treatise on the civil and
ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one
snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two
kingdomes.”[III-89] The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commission suffered in
the same way. In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went
either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth
century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from
time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by
prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example,
they released on a writ of _Habeas Corpus_ a prisoner committed by the High
Commission on a charge of usury.[III-90]
Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the Church, which
denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons.
The acquiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had been
accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before the Reformation.
With the growth under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its
stronghold among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to
a considerable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their
dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional
interference in matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable
result that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of the traditional
ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It
was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the
contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter
discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in his
pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which such
discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being
discussed in the House of Commons, reference to the canon law was met by the
protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abolished, and that
“they should be no more remembered than they are followed.”[III-91] Feeling
against the system rose steadily during the next two generations;
excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely
disregarded;[III-92] and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the
influence of Laud’s _régime_, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane.
Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the
interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the
Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal
jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away
altogether.
“Not many good days,” wrote Penn, “since ministers meddled so much in laymen’s
business.”[III-93] That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration,
both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon
the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had long been feeble, but
on the whole conception of religion which regarded it as involving the control
of economic self-interest by what Laud had called “the body of the Church.” The
works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor, continuing an earlier tradition,
reasserted with force and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his
faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in
works of mercy to his neighbors.[III-94] But the conception that the Church
possessed, of its own authority, an independent standard of social values, which
it could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world,
grew steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended, but
inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions
of business and in the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of
religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude
became itself the most tyrannical and paralyzing of theories. It may be called
Indifferentism.
The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the
Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it
is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to
social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few
eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority,
whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been
abandoned.
An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that
which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the
eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to
maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great
age of English natural science--the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal
Society--drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics
and physics. It was still more the political theory associated with the name of
Locke, but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a
community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual
obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock
company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are
strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in
them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of
supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills
its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full
scope for their unfettered exercise.
The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights
attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men,
who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do not subscribe
to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a
moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology
which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders as “the
poor”--and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,”
who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who work for themselves. Hence
the unending discussions as to whether “the laboring poor” are to be classed
among the “productive” or “unproductive” classes--whether they are, or are not,
really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that
any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of
public policy. “It would be easier, where property was well secured, to live
without money than without poor, ... who, as they ought to be kept from
starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving”; the poor “have nothing
to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to
relieve, but folly to cure”; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great
numbers should be wretched as well as poor.”[III-95] Such sentences from a work
printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is
blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and
enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error
in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not
merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the
Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it
reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed
too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and
social position, which, after more than half a century of political democracy,
is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant
was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted
the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which
political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which
religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil.
Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea
that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s
sermon on _The Use of Money_, merely heighten the impression of a general
acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might
not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on
occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural
counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which
substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and
pulleys of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an
organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a
spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparently
conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for
the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial
capitalism--consider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated in
1720--were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not
over-sensitive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the
Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the
men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In
reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional
scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial
England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was
called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly
dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the
popular manual called _The Whole Duty of Man_,[III-96] first published in 1658,
and widely read during the following century, extortion and oppression still
figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If
preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the
natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, “trade is
one thing and religion is another,” they imply a not very different conclusion
by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The
characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious
teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later
epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which
saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. “National
commerce, good morals and good government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton
unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, “are but part
of one general scheme, in the designs of Providence.”
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on
commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The
existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments
interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature
was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the
century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of
institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of
life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell
outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of
self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. It was,
therefore, in the sphere of providing succor for the non-combatants and for the
wounded, not in inspiring the main army, that the social work of the Church was
conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eighteenth century were
the relief of the poor, the care of the sick, and the establishment of schools.
In spite of the genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual
welfare of the poorer classes, which inspired the Evangelical revival, religion
abandoned the fundamental brain-work of criticism and construction to the
rationalist and the humanitarian.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church should not have been more
effective in giving inspiration and guidance during the immense economic
reorganization to which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name of
the “Industrial Revolution.” It did not give it, because it did not possess it.
There were, no doubt, special conditions to account for its silence--mere
ignorance and inefficiency, the supposed teachings of political economy, and,
after 1790, the terror of all humanitarian movements inspired by France. But the
explanation of its attitude is to be sought, less in the peculiar circumstances
of the moment, than in the prevalence of a temper which accepted the established
order of class relations as needing no vindication before any higher tribunal,
and which made religion, not its critic or its accuser, but its anodyne, its
apologist, and its drudge. It was not that there was any relapse into abnormal
inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an independent
standard of values, to which social institutions were amenable, had been
abandoned. The surrender had been made long before the battle began. The
spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors
of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century.
CHAPTER IV
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
“And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”
_Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale’s translation)._
CHAPTER IV
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between religious theory and
economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom
of religious theory itself, a new system of ideas was being matured, which was
destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to turn on the whole field
of social obligations a new and penetrating light. On a world heaving with
expanding energies, and on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two
generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous storm of the Puritan
movement. The forest bent; the oaks snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a
gale, neither all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving,
pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and contrition, as of
voices wrung from a people dwelling in Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in
Kedar, which signifies Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the
clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to God
and haughty to man, the soldier-saints swept over battlefield and scaffold their
garments rolled in blood.
In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned to dust, in the
Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a voice was heard to observe that
religious liberty was a considerable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial
view.”[IV-1] A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this new world, born
of the vision of the mystic, the passion of the prophet, the sweat and agony of
heroes famous and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and commonplace
cupidities, was one in which, since “Thorough” was no more, since property was
secure, and contracts inviolable, and the executive tamed, the judicious
investments of business men were likely to yield a profitable return. So the
epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success, mocks the dreams in
which youth hungered, not for success, but for the glorious failure of the
martyr or the saint.
I. PURITANISM AND SOCIETY
The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching of Calvin
were three--Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of
God and man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, more pervasive
and more potent than either. Of these three off-shoots from the parent stem, the
first and eldest, which had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was
hoped, with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into a State Church,
was to produce a credal statement carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least
in its original guise, but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the
right of every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom of all Churches
from the interference of the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in
the New, an imperishable legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was
Puritanism. Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican Church
hardly, if at all, less fully than in those which afterwards separated from it,
it determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but
political aspirations, business relations, family life and the _minutiæ_ of
personal behavior.
The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan spirit was the most
fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor
secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its
struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably modern
emerges. But, immense as were its accomplishments on the high stage of public
affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but the
squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the
traveller by its towering majesty only because sustained by a vaster mass which
escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was
less than that which it worked in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it
thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned
in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a
blessing before he fled.
We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence.
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and glowing
energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken,
unseduced, unterrified,” amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are
depths of light and darkness which posterity can observe with reverence or with
horror, but which its small fathom-line cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant
colors are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If the
inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and
visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-place and
counting-house and camp than in the student’s chamber and the gathering of the
elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of
sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man who
strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the
effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above or in
the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he remakes, not
only his own character and habits and way of life, but family and church,
industry and city, political institutions and social order. Conscious that he is
but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to
come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into an
awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with
anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and damnation.
“It made the world seem to me,” said a Puritan of his conversion, “as a carkass
that had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires
after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood.... It set me upon that
method of my studies which since then I have found the benefit of.... It caused
me first to seek God’s Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One
thing needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End.”[IV-2]
Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puritan cannot rest,
nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which the
greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness
too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by
their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. “The way to the
Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and
he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out
of the world.”[IV-3] For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with
fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon.
Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast
aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed than having
two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and
Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his
ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and warning.
Prophesyings--that most revealing episode in early Puritanism--were the cry of a
famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the
intellect; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying
causes devotion”[IV-4] that the powers of this world raised their parchment
shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines,
rationalizes, systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century
before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail
of the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to
labor.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing God than all
the world,”[IV-5] he is a natural republican, for there is none on earth that he
can own as master. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if
not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect may build the
Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these--prayer, and toil, and discipline,
mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and death--may be too little for
the salvation of a single soul. “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even
from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction”[IV-6]--those
dreadful words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart.
More often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they nerve his will.
For it is will--will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in
rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will--which is the
essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of will
every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.
The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters
every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its
imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every social grade had felt
their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen to
weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie
one another.”[IV-7] But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm are not
straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income, experience proves,
nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn
more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so
different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of
different social and economic _milieux_. To contemporaries the chosen seat of
the Puritan spirit seemed to be those classes in society which combined economic
independence, education and a certain decent pride in their status, revealed at
once in a determination to live their own lives, without truckling to earthly
superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through
weakness of character or through economic helplessness, were less resolute, less
vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such, where the feudal spirit had been
weakened by contact with town life and new intellectual currents, were some of
the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, “mounted on a high spirit, as
being slaves to none,”[IV-8] especially in the freeholding counties of the east.
Such, above all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those rural
districts which had been partially industrialized by the decentralization of the
textile and iron industries.
“The King’s cause and party,” wrote one who described the situation in Bristol
in 1645, “were favored by two extremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and
powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by the
middle rank, the true and best citizens.”[IV-9] That it was everywhere these
classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism is suggested by Professor
Usher’s statistical estimate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the
first decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 ministers
whose names are known, 35 belonged to London and Middlesex, 96 to the three
manufacturing counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17
to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the country.[IV-10] The
phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed
in matters of profounder spiritual import than sociological generalization.
“Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,” wrote Baxter, “and also most of the
poorest of the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry,
and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the
smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and
freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and
counties which depend on cloathing and such manufactures.” He explained the fact
by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with the greater centers
of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was “the merchants and
middle sort of men that were Protestants.”[IV-11]
The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had financed the
Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the Revolution to be _par
excellence_ “the rebellious city,” returning four Dissenters to the Royalist
Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to accompany Lord Russell
when he carried the Exclusion Bill from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing
Presbyterian ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing the
Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering the Whig leaders against
the storm which broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be
observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by meanes of
the City of London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by
reason of its universall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities
conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and corporations,
and thereby poysoning whole counties.”[IV-12] In Lancashire, the clothing
towns--“the Genevas of Lancashire”--rose like Puritan islands from the
surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax;
in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the west, Gloucester, Taunton and
Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile industry, were all centers of
Puritanism.
The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious
radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and Royalists, who found
in the vices of each an additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon
commented bitterly on the “factious humor which possessed most corporations, and
the pride of their wealth”;[IV-13] and, after the Civil War, both the politics
and the religion of the boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop of
Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against showing them any favor, on the
ground that “trading combinations” were “so many nests of faction and sedition,”
and that “our late miserable distractions” were “chiefly hatched in the shops of
tradesmen.”[IV-14] Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the
Anglican clergy as they returned to their City churches. It was even alleged
that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a providential
instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.[IV-15]
When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fashion, its practitioners
were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of
Holland--the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe--to inquire, in
the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations between economic
progress and other aspects of the national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very
weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle
irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced from it different
conclusions. The question which gave a topical point to their analysis was the
rising issue of religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual
significance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the fact that
the classes who were in the van of the Puritan movement, and in whom the
Clarendon Code found its most prominent victims, were also those who led
commercial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple.
A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already
homogeneous in the simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided
business community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it
were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if
each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and--in that age
the same thing--to practice its own religion.
Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented nothing, and
English economic organization had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish
weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the traditional
ecclesiastical system was not equally accommodating. It found not only the alien
refugee, but its home-bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy
of Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of
trades more important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of
foreign artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury,[IV-16] and the problem
recurred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. “The gaols were
crowded with the most substantial tradesmen and inhabitants, the clothiers were
forced from their houses, and thousands of workmen and women whom they employed
set to starving.”[IV-17] The Whig indictment of the disastrous effects of Tory
policy recalls the picture drawn by French _intendants_ of the widespread
distress which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[IV-18]
When the collision between economic interests and the policy of compulsory
conformity was so flagrant, it is not surprising that the economists of the age
should have enunciated the healing principle that persecution was incompatible
with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic progress that
persecution principally fell. “Every law of this nature,” wrote the author of a
pamphlet on the subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles and
rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but is also “destructive to the trade and
well-being of our nation by oppressing and driving away the most industrious
working hands, and depopulating, and thereby impoverishes our country, which is
capable of employing ten times the number of people we now have.”[IV-19]
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, found one reason
of their success in the fact that, Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might
practise what religion he pleased.[IV-20] De la Court, whose striking book
passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same.[IV-21] Petty, after
pointing out that in England the most thriving towns were those where there was
most nonconformity, cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the
Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is compatible with any
religion, the class which is its vehicle will always consist of the heterodox
minority, who “profess opinions different from what are publicly
established.”[IV-22] “There is a kind of natural unaptness,” wrote a pamphleteer
in 1671, “in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the contrary among the
Reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and
industry, as holding idleness unlawful.... The domestic interest of England
lieth in the advancement of trade by removing all obstructions both in city and
country, and providing such laws as may help it, and make it most easy,
especially in giving liberty of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and
denying it to Papists.”[IV-23]
If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good for trade, the Tory
distrust of the commercial classes was aggravated by the fact that it was they
who were most vocal in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of the
same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought to make no distinction between
Protestants” and the policy “of preferring, on all occasions, the monied
interests before the landed.”[IV-24] Even later in the eighteenth century, the
stale gibe of “the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other corporations” still
figured in the pamphlets of the statesman whom Lord Morley describes as the
prince of political charlatans, Bolingbroke.[IV-25]
“The middle ranks,” “the middle class of men,” “the middle sort”--such social
strata included, of course, the widest variety of economic interest and personal
position. But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil War, two
causes prevented the phrase from being merely the vapid substitute for thought
which it is today. In the first place, outside certain exceptional industries
and districts, there was little large-scale production and no massed proletariat
of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typical workman was still
normally a small master, who continued himself to work at the loom or at the
forge, and whose position was that described in Baxter’s Kidderminster, where
“there were none of the tradesmen very rich ... the magistrates of the town were
few of them worth £40 _per annum_, and most not half so much; three or four of
the richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to £600 in twenty
years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by an ill debtor.”[IV-26] Differing
in wealth from the prosperous merchant or clothier, such men resembled them in
economic and social habits, and the distinction between them was one of degree,
not of kind. In the world of industry vertical divisions between district and
district still cut deeper than horizontal fissures between class and class. The
number of those who could reasonably be described as independent, since they
owned their own tools and controlled their own businesses, formed a far larger
proportion of the population than is the case in capitalist societies.
The second fact was even more decisive. The business classes, as a power in the
State, were still sufficiently young to be conscious of themselves as something
like a separate order, with an outlook on religion and politics peculiarly their
own, distinguished, not merely by birth and breeding, but by their social
habits, their business discipline, the whole bracing atmosphere of their moral
life, from a Court which they believed to be godless and an aristocracy which
they knew to be spendthrift. The estrangement--for it was no more--was of
shorter duration in England than in any other European country, except
Switzerland and Holland. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, partly
as a result of the common struggles which made the Revolution, still more
perhaps through the redistribution of wealth by commerce and finance, the former
rivals were on the way to be compounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy
embracing both. The landed gentry were increasingly sending their sons into
business; “the tradesman meek and much a liar” looked forward, as a matter of
course, to buying an estate from a bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to
astonish foreign observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the Paradise of
the _bourgeoisie_, in which the prosperous merchant shouldered easily aside the
impoverished bearers of aristocratic names.[IV-27]
That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great divide of the Civil War,
and, in the main, to the tamer glories of the Revolution. In the germinating
period of Puritanism, the commercial classes, though powerful, were not yet the
dominant force which a century later they were to become. They could look back
on a not distant past, in which their swift rise to prosperity had been regarded
with suspicion, as the emergence of an alien interest, which applied sordid
means to the pursuit of anti-social ends--an interest for which in a
well-ordered commonwealth there was little room, and which had been rapped on
the knuckles by conservative statesmen. They lived in a present, where a
Government, at once interfering, inefficient and extravagant, cultivated, with
an intolerable iteration of grandiloquent principles, every shift and artifice
most repugnant to the sober prudence of plain-dealing men. The less reputable
courtiers and the more feather-pated provincial gentry, while courting them to
raise a mortgage or renew a loan, reviled them as _parvenus_, usurers and
blood-suckers. Even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the influence
of the _rentier_ and of the financier still continued to cause apprehension and
jealousy, both for political and for economic reasons. “By this single
stratagem,” wrote an indignant pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who
specialized in money-lending, “they avoyd all contributions of tithes and taxes
to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to tender consciences); they
decline all services and offices of burthen incident to visible estates; they
escape all oaths and ties of publick allegiance or private fealty.... They enjoy
both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and withal the spiritual comfort
of thriving easily and devoutly ... leaving their adversaries the censures of
improvidence, together with the misery of decay. They keep many of the nobility
and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copyholders), which eclipses
honour, enervates justice and oft-times protects them in their boldest
conceptions. By engrossing cash and credit, they in effect give the price to
land and law to markets. By commanding ready money, they likewise command such
offices as they widely affect ... they feather and enlarge their own nests, the
corporations.”[IV-28]
Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity against equestrian upstarts
or of the _noblesse_ against the _roturier_, were natural in a conservative
aristocracy, which for a century had felt authority and prestige slipping from
its grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them by resigning itself,
as ultimately it did, to sharing them with its rival. In return, the business
world, which had its own religious and political ideology, steadily gathered the
realities of power into its own hands; asked with a sneer, “how would merchants
thrive if gentlemen would not be unthriftes”;[IV-29] and vented the indignant
contempt felt by an energetic, successful and, according to its lights, not too
unscrupulous, generation for a class of _fainéants_, unversed in the new
learning of the City and incompetent to the verge of immorality in the
management of business affairs. Their triumphs in the past, their strength in
the present, their confidence in the future, their faith in themselves, and
their difference from their feebler neighbours--a difference as of an iron wedge
in a lump of clay--made them, to use a modern phrase, class-conscious. Like the
modern proletarian, who feels that, whatever his personal misery and his present
disappointments, the Cause is rolled forward to victory by the irresistible
force of an inevitable evolution, the Puritan _bourgeoisie_ knew that against
the chosen people the gates of hell could not prevail. The Lord prospered their
doings.
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as the
consciousness of its character and destiny dawns upon it, looks for a moment,
before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In
that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with ravishing
allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes of mankind
and of its own heart it would be. The feudal _noblesse_ had looked, and had
caught a glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and honor. The monarchy
looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for it; they saw a nation drinking the
blessings of material prosperity and spiritual edification from the cornucopia
of a sage and paternal monarchy--a nation “fortified and adorned ... the country
rich ... the Church flourishing ... trade increased to that degree that we were
the exchange of Christendom ... all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as
their own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this Kingdom.”[IV-30] In a
far-off day the craftsman and laborer were to look, and see a band of comrades,
where fellowship should be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. For
the middle classes of the early seventeenth century, rising but not yet
triumphant, that enchanted mirror was Puritanism. What it showed was a picture
grave to sternness, yet not untouched with a sober exaltation--an earnest,
zealous, godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in labor, constant in
prayer, thrifty and thriving, filled with a decent pride in themselves and their
calling, assured that strenuous toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like
those Dutch Calvinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their iron
Protestantism--“thinking, sober, and patient men, and such as believe that labor
and industry is their duty towards God.”[IV-31] Then an air stirred and the
glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.
II. A GODLY DISCIPLINE _versus_ THE RELIGION OF TRADE
Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle classes. It heightened
their virtues, sanctified, without eradicating, their convenient vices, and gave
them an inexpugnable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the
majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence, without whose
foreknowledge not a hammer could beat upon the forge, not a figure could be
added to the ledger. But it is a strange school which does not teach more than
one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism, trenchant, permanent and
profound, are not to be summarized in the simple formula that it fostered
individualism. Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that
Calvinism, in its English version, was the parent of capitalism, and Troeltsch,
Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have lent to the same interpretation the
weight of their considerable authority.[IV-32] But the heart of man holds
mysteries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility together. When
the shriveled tissues lie in our hand, the spiritual bond still eludes us.
In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian
and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The
same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common
action. There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and
traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary; a collectivism which
grasped at an iron discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savorless
mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this
world, and a divine recklessness which would make all things new. For long
nourished together, their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil War
they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Independent, aristocrat and Leveller,
politician and merchant and utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange
monsters with whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendors and illusions
vanished; the force of common things prevailed; the metal cooled in the mould;
and the Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendors and its illusions, settled
finally into its decent bed of equable respectability. But each element in its
social philosophy had once been as vital as the other, and the battle was
fought, not between a Puritanism solid for one view and a State committed to
another, but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself. The
problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the reasons which caused
this to wax and that to wane.
“The triumph of Puritanism,” it has been said, “swept away all traces of any
restriction or guidance in the employment of money.”[IV-33] That it swept away
the restrictions imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither
ecclesiastical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber, could function
after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of the Church of Laud and the State
of Strafford, it did so but as a step towards erecting a more rigorous
discipline of its own. It would have been scandalized by economic individualism
as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad outlines of its scheme of
organization favored unrestricted liberty in matters of business as little as in
the things of the spirit. To the Puritan of any period in the century between
the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion that he was the
friend of economic or social license would have seemed as wildly inappropriate
as it would have appeared to most of his critics, who taunted him, except in the
single matter of usury, with an intolerable meticulousness.
A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan covenant. Delivered
in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its vital necessity had been the theme of the
Joshuas of Scotland, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition of it;
Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises expounding it. Bancroft exposed
its perils for the established ecclesiastical order.[IV-34] The word
“discipline” implied essentially “a directory of Church government,” established
in order that “the wicked may be corrected with ecclesiastical censures,
according to the quality of the fault”;[IV-35] and the proceedings of Puritan
_classes_ in the sixteenth century show that the conception of a rule of life,
to be enforced by the pressure of the common conscience, and in the last resort
by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of their system. When, at the beginning
of Elizabeth’s reign, the sectaries in London described their objects as not
merely the “free and pure” preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of
the sacraments, but “to have, not the fylthye cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye
and altogether agreeable to the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good
Lorde Jesus Chryste,”[IV-36] the antithesis suggests that something more than
verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that it was the practice, when a
sin was committed by one of the faithful, for the elders to apply first
admonishment and then excommunication. The minute-book of one of the few
_classes_ whose records survive confirms his statement.[IV-37]
All this early movement had almost flickered out before the end of the sixteenth
century. But the conception lay at the very root of Presbyterianism, and it
reëmerged in the system of church government which the supercilious Scotch
Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to inconclusive victory,
between Erastians on the right and Independents on the left. The destruction of
the Court of High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all persons in
Holy Orders, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, of the
ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a vacuum. “Mr. Henderson,” wrote the
insufferable Baillie, “has ready now a short treatise, much called for, of our
church discipline.”[IV-38] In June 1646 an unenthusiastic Parliament accepted
the ordinance which, after a three years’ debate of intolerable tedium, emerged
from the Assembly’s Committee on the Discipline and Government of the Church,
and which provided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of
scandalous offences. Detested by the Independents and cold-shouldered by
Parliament, which had no intention of admitting the divine right of
presbyteries, the system never took deep root, and in London, at least, there
appears to be no evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or
_classes_. In parts of Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems to have been
actively at work, down, at any rate, to 1649. The change in the political
situation, in particular the triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks,
from functioning longer.[IV-39]
“Discipline” included all questions of moral conduct, and of these, in an age
when a great mass of economic relations were not the almost automatic reactions
of an impersonal mechanism, but a matter of human kindliness or meanness between
neighbors in village or borough, economic conduct was naturally part. Calvin and
Beza, perpetuating with a new intensity the medieval idea of a
Church-civilization, had sought to make Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal
purity, but of social righteousness and commercial morality. Those who had drunk
from their spring continued, in even less promising environments, the same
tradition. Bucer, who wrote when something more fundamental than a politician’s
reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with their eyes on Geneva, had urged
the reconstruction of every side of the economic life of a society which was to
be Church and State in one.[IV-40] English Puritanism, while accepting after
some hesitation Calvin’s much qualified condonation of moderate interest, did
not intend in other respects to countenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings.
Knewstub appealed to the teaching of “that worthy instrument of God, Mr.
Calvin,” to prove that the habitual usurer ought to be “thrust out of the
society of men.” Smith embroidered the same theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost
him his professorship, denounced the “usual practice amongst rich men, and some
of the greater sort, who by lending, or by giving out their money to usury, are
wont to snare and oppress the poor and needier sort.” Cartwright, the most
famous leader of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as “a hainous offence
against God and his Church,” and laid down that the offender should be excluded
from the sacraments until he satisfied the congregation of his penitence.[IV-41]
The ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be content
with a modest competence and to shun the allurements of riches. “Every Christian
man is bound in conscience before God,” wrote Stubbes, “to provide for his
household and family, but yet so as his immoderate care surpasse not the bands,
nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes.... So farre from covetousnes and
from immoderate care would the Lord have us, that we ought not this day to care
for tomorrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day is the travail of the
same.”[IV-42]
The most influential work on social ethics written in the first half of the
seventeenth century from the Puritan standpoint was Ames’ _De Conscientia_, a
manual of Christian conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with the
practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle Ages by such works as
_Dives et Pauper_. It became a standard authority, quoted again and again by
subsequent writers. Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent more
than twenty years in Holland, where he held a chair of theology at the
University of Franeker, and his experience of social life in the country which
was then the business capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigor of his
social doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was inevitable,
the impossibility of distinguishing between interest on capital invested in
business, and interest on capital invested in land, since men put money
indifferently into both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden
in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin, he surrounds his
indulgence with qualifications; he requires that no interest shall be charged on
loans to the needy, and describes as the ideal investment for Christians one in
which the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands only “a fair share
of the profits, according to the degree in which God has blessed him by whom the
money is used.” His teaching with regard to prices is not less conservative. “To
wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as Augustine observes), but it is
a common vice.” Men must not sell above the maximum fixed by public authority,
though they may sell below it, since it is fixed to protect the buyer; when
there is no legal maximum, they must follow the market price and “the judgment
of prudent and good men.” They must not take advantage of the necessities of
individual buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not sell them dearer
merely because they have cost them much to get.[IV-43] Puritan utterances on the
subject of enclosing were equally trenchant.[IV-44]
Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the pulpit. It found some
echo in contrite spirits; it left some imprint on the conduct of congregations.
If D’Ewes was the unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive
conscience, he was also a man of the world who played a not inconspicuous part
in public affairs; and D’Ewes not only ascribed the fire which destroyed his
father’s house to the judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly
prescribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the accursed thing,
provision should be made for his daughters, not by investing his capital at a
fixed--and therefore usurious--rate of interest, but by the purchase either of
land or of annuities.[IV-45] The _classis_ which met at Dedham in the eighties
of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with questions of ceremony, of
church government, of the right use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems
whether boys of sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what marks one
might detect a witch. But it discussed also what provision could be made to
check vagrancy; advised the brethren to confine their dealings to “the godliest
of that trade” (of cloth making); recommended the establishment in the township
of a scheme of universal education, that of children of parents too poor to meet
the cost being defrayed from collections made in church; and urged that each
well-to-do householder should provide in his home for two (or, if less able,
one) of his impoverished neighbors who “walke christianly and honestlie in their
callinges.”[IV-46] In the ever-lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins
to be punished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elaborated by the
Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not only for drunkards, swearers, and
blasphemers, worshippers and makers of images, senders or carriers of
challenges, persons dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord’s day, or
resorting to witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers, but for the more vulgar
vices of those who fell into extortion, barratry and bribery.[IV-47] The
_classis_ of Bury in Lancashire (_quantum mutatus!_) took these economic lapses
seriously. It decided in 1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a
scandalous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy.”[IV-48]
It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the money-changers from the
temple and to make straight the way of the Lord. “God hath honnored you in
callinge you to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you should bee
faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the grave every day; you dwell
uppon the borders of eternity; your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble
and treble your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge.... How dreadfull
will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate! What is the reward of a
slothfull servant? Is it not to bee punished with everlastinge destruction from
the presence of the Lord?”[IV-49] Such, in that singular age, was the language
in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices of Wiltshire to close
four public-houses. Apparently they closed them.
The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective discipline was
possible only in a theocracy; and, still eloquent in speech, theocracy had
abdicated in fact, even before the sons of Belial returned to cut down its
groves and lay waste its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent from
the State Church was still not fully established, its defeat was fortunate, for
it was the victory of tolerance. It meant, however, that the discipline of the
Church gave place to the attempt to promote reform through the action of the
State, which reached its height in the Barebones Parliament. Projects for law
reform, marriage reform and financial reform, the reform of prisons and the
relief of debtors, jostled each other on its committees; while outside it there
were murmurs among radicals against social and economic privilege, which were
not to be heard again till the days of the Chartists, and which to the
conservative mind of Cromwell seemed to portend mere anarchy. The transition
from the idea of a moral code enforced by the Church, which had been
characteristic of early Calvinism, to the economic individualism of the later
Puritan movement took place, in fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the
Independents. Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline and
compulsory conformity, they endeavored to achieve the same social and ethical
ends by political action.
The change was momentous. If the English Social Democratic movement has any
single source, that source is to be found in the New Model Army. But the
conception implied in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic ethics--the
theory that every department of life falls beneath the same all-encompassing
arch of religion--was too deeply rooted to be exorcised merely by political
changes, or even by the more corroding march of economic development. Expelled
from the world of fact, where it had always been a stranger and a sojourner, it
survived in the world of ideas, and its champions in the last half of the
century labored it the more, precisely because they knew that it must be
conveyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not at all. Of those
champions the most learned, the most practical, and the most persuasive was
Richard Baxter.
How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to his congregation at
Kidderminster, he himself has told us. “Every Thursday evening my neighbours
that were most desirous and had opportunity met at my house, and there one of
them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they proposed what doubts any of them
had about the sermon, or any other case of conscience, and I resolved their
doubts.”[IV-50] Both in form and in matter, his _Christian Directory, or a Summ
of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience_[IV-51] is a remarkable book. It
is, in essence, a Puritan _Summa Theologica_ and _Summa Moralis_ in one; its
method of treatment descends directly from that of the medieval _Summæ_, and it
is, perhaps, the last important English specimen of a famous _genus_. Its
object, as Baxter explains in his introduction, is “the resolving of practical
cases of conscience, and the reducing of theoretical knowledge into serious
Christian practice.” Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics, Ecclesiastics,
and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the rules of a Christian
casuistry, which may be sufficiently detailed and precise to afford practical
guidance to the proper conduct of men in the different relations of life, as
lawyer, physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and servant, buyer and seller,
landlord and tenant, lender and borrower, ruler and subject. Part of its
material is derived from the treatment of similar questions by previous writers,
both before and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of continuing a
great tradition. But it is, above all things, realistic, and its method lends
plausibility to the suggestion that it originated in an attempt to answer
practical questions put to its author by members of his congregation. Its aim is
not to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal to the enlightened
common sense of the Christian reader. It does not overlook, therefore, the
practical facts of a world in which commerce is carried on by the East India
Company in distant markets, trade is universally conducted on credit, the iron
manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding abundant supplies of capital and
offering a profitable opening to the judicious investor, and the relations of
landlords and tenants have been thrown into confusion by the fire of London. Nor
does it ignore the moral qualities for the cultivation of which an opportunity
is offered by the life of business. It takes as its starting-point the
commercial environment of the Restoration, and its teaching is designed for
“Rome or London, not Fools’ Paradise.”
Baxter’s acceptance of the realities of his age makes the content of his
teaching the more impressive. The attempt to formulate a casuistry of economic
conduct obviously implies that economic relations are to be regarded merely as
one department of human behavior, for which each man is morally responsible, not
as the result of an impersonal mechanism, to which ethical judgments are
irrelevant. Baxter declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism, which
exonerates the individual by representing his actions as the outcome of
uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists, is committed by his faith to
the acceptance of certain ethical standards, and these standards are as
obligatory in the sphere of economic transactions as in any other province of
human activity. To the conventional objection that religion has nothing to do
with business--that “every man will get as much as he can have and that _caveat
emptor_ is the only security”--he answers bluntly that this way of dealing does
not hold among Christians. Whatever the laxity of the law, the Christian is
bound to consider first the golden rule and the public good. Naturally,
therefore, he is debarred from making money at the expense of other persons, and
certain profitable avenues of commerce are closed to him at the outset. “It is
not lawful to take up or keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends
to enrich you by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.”
But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious extortion practiced by the
monopolist, the engrosser, the organizer of a corner or a combine. He must carry
on his business in the spirit of one who is conducting a public service; he must
order it for the advantage of his neighbor as much as, and, if his neighbor be
poor, more than, for his own. He must not desire “to get another’s goods or
labour for less than it is worth.” He must not secure a good price for his own
wares “by extortion working upon men’s ignorance, error, or necessity.” When
prices are fixed by law, he must strictly observe the legal maximum; when they
are not, he must follow the price fixed by common estimation. If he finds a
buyer who is willing to give more, he “must not make too great an advantage of
his convenience or desire, but be glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal,
fair, and honest terms,” for “it is a false rule of them that think their
commodity is worth as much as any one will give.” If the seller foresees that in
the future prices are likely to fall, he must not make profit out of his
neighbour’s ignorance, but must tell him so. If he foresees that they will rise,
he may hold his wares back, but only--a somewhat embarrassing exception--if it
be not “to the hurt of the Commonwealth, as if ... keeping it in be the cause of
the dearth, and ... bringing it forth would help to prevent it.” If he is buying
from the poor, “charity must be exercised as well as justice”; the buyer must
pay the full price that the goods are worth to himself, and, rather than let the
seller suffer because he cannot stand out for his price, should offer him a loan
or persuade some one else to do so. In no case may a man doctor his wares in
order to get for them a higher price than they are really worth, and in no case
may he conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to have bought an
inferior article, he “may not repair [his] loss by doing as [he] was done by,
... no more than [he] may cut another’s purse because [his] was cut.” Rivalry in
trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian must not snatch a good
bargain “out of greedy covetousness, nor to the injury of the poor ... nor ...
so as to disturb that due and civil order which should be among moderate men in
trading.” On the contrary, if “a covetous oppressor” offer a poor man less than
his goods are worth, “it may be a duty to offer the poor man the worth of his
commodity and save him from the oppressor.”
The principles which should determine the contract between buyer and seller are
applied equally to all other economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment
for a loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes so, when
the lender does not allow the borrower “such a proportion of the gain as his
labour, hazard, or poverty doth require, but ... will live at ease upon his
labours”; or when, in spite of the borrower’s misfortune, he rigorously exacts
his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for a loan which charity would
require to be free. Masters must discipline their servants for their good; but
it is “an odious oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of
his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deserveth.” As the descendant of a
family of yeomen, “free,” as he says, “from the temptations of poverty and
riches,”[IV-52] Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of
landowning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under the general rubric of
“Cases of oppression, especially of tenants,” oppression being defined as the
“injuring of inferiors who are unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is
too common a sort of oppression for the rich in all places to domineer too
insolently over the poor, and force them to follow their wills and to serve
their interest, be it right or wrong.... Especially unmerciful landlords are the
common and sore oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get money
enough to purchase all the land in a county, they think that they may do with
their own as they list, and set such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that
they are all but as their servants.... An oppressor is an Anti-Christ and an
Anti-God ... not only the agent of the Devil, but his image.” As in his
discussion of prices, the gist of Baxter’s analysis of the cases of conscience
which arise in the relations of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure
pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his neighbor. Except in unusual
circumstances, a landlord must not let his land at the full competitive rent
which it would fetch in the market: “Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in
England should have so much abated of the fullest worth that they may
comfortably live on it, and follow their labours with cheerfulness of mind and
liberty to serve God in their families, and to mind the matters of their
salvation, and not to be necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want as
shall make them liker slaves than free men.” He must not improve (i.e., enclose)
his land without considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants
without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation; nor must
a newcomer take a holding over the sitting tenant’s head by offering “a greater
rent than he can give or than the landlord hath just cause to require of him.”
The Christian, in short, while eschewing “causeless, perplexing, melancholy
scruples, which would stop a man in the course of his duty,” must so manage his
business as to “avoid sin rather than loss,” and seek first to keep his
conscience in peace.
The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all this teaching is its
conservatism. In spite of the economic and political revolutions of the past two
centuries, how small, after all, the change in the presentation of the social
ethics of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance of the
_Christian Directory_, the Stop of the Exchequer tore a hole in the already
intricate web of London finance, and sent a shiver through the money-markets of
Europe. But Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of equity in
bargaining, of just prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of usury, in the
same tone, if not with quite the same conclusions, as a medieval Schoolman, and
he differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than
St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven years later Bunyan
published _The Life and Death of Mr. Badman_. Among the vices which it pilloried
were the sin of extortion, “most commonly committed by men of trade, who without
all conscience, when they have an advantage, will make a prey of their
neighbour,” the covetousness of “hucksters, that buy up the poor man’s victual
wholesale and sell it to him again for unreasonable gains,” the avarice of
usurers, who watch till “the poor fall into their mouths,” and “of those vile
wretches called pawnbrokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who are
by necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or
another the interest of what they so lend amount to thirty and forty, yea,
sometimes fifty pounds by the year.” As Christian and Christiana watched Mr.
Badman thus bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, before they took
staff and scrip for their journey to a more distant City, they remembered that
the Lord himself will plead the cause of the afflicted against them that oppress
them, and reflected, taught by the dealings of Ephron the son of Zohar, and of
David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there is a “wickedness, as in selling too
dear, so in buying too cheap.”[IV-53] Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said
the same four centuries before in his racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of
the idea that “business is business,” and that the world of commercial
transactions is a closed compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than
is often supposed, did not win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested.
Puritan as well as Catholic accepted without demur the view which set all human
interests and activities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as
Catholics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian casuistry of
economic conduct.
They essayed it. But they succeeded even less than the Popes and Doctors whose
teaching, not always unwittingly, they repeated. And their failure had its
roots, not merely in the obstacles offered by the ever more recalcitrant
opposition of a commercial environment, but, like all failures which are
significant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Virtues are often conquered by
vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues,
more militant, more efficient, or more congenial, and it is not only tares which
choke the ground where the good seed is sown. The fundamental question, after
all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins, but what type of character it
esteems and cultivates. To the scheme of Christian ethics which offered
admonitions against the numberless disguises assumed by the sin which sticketh
fast between buying and selling, the Puritan character offered, not direct
opposition, but a polished surface on which these ghostly admonitions could find
no enduring foothold. The rules of Christian morality elaborated by Baxter were
subtle and sincere. But they were like seeds carried by birds from a distant and
fertile plain, and dropped upon a glacier. They were at once embalmed and
sterilized in a river of ice.
“The capitalist spirit” is as old as history, and was not, as has sometimes been
said, the offspring of Puritanism. But it found in certain aspects of later
Puritanism a tonic which braced its energies and fortified its already vigorous
temper. At first sight, no contrast could be more violent than that between the
iron collectivism, the almost military discipline, the remorseless and violent
rigors practiced in Calvin’s Geneva, and preached elsewhere, if in a milder
form, by his disciples, and the impatient rejection of all traditional
restrictions on economic enterprise which was the temper of the English business
world after the Civil War. In reality, the same ingredients were present
throughout, but they were mixed in changing proportions, and exposed to
different temperatures at different times. Like traits of individual character
which are suppressed till the approach of maturity releases them, the tendencies
in Puritanism, which were to make it later a potent ally of the movement against
the control of economic relations in the name either of social morality or of
the public interest, did not reveal themselves till political and economic
changes had prepared a congenial environment for their growth. Nor, once those
conditions were created, was it only England which witnessed the transformation.
In all countries alike, in Holland, in America, in Scotland, in Geneva itself,
the social theory of Calvinism went through the same process of development. It
had begun by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. It ended by
being the vehicle of an almost Utilitarian individualism. While social reformers
in the sixteenth century could praise Calvin for his economic rigor, their
successors in Restoration England, if of one persuasion, denounced him as the
parent of economic license, if of another, applauded Calvinist communities for
their commercial enterprise and for their freedom from antiquated prejudices on
the subject of economic morality. So little do those who shoot the arrows of the
spirit know where they will light.
III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES
“One beam in a dark place,” wrote one who knew the travail of the spirit, “hath
exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a
heart as mine.”[IV-54] While the revelation of God to the individual soul is the
center of all religion, the essence of Puritan theology was that it made it, not
only the center, but the whole circumference and substance, dismissing as dross
and vanity all else but this secret and solitary communion. Grace alone can
save, and this grace is the direct gift of God, unmediated by any earthly
institution. The elect cannot by any act of their own evoke it; but they can
prepare their hearts to receive it, and cherish it when received. They will
prepare them best, if they empty them of all that may disturb the intentness of
their lonely vigil. Like an engineer, who, to canalize the rush of the oncoming
tide, dams all channels save that through which it is to pour, like a painter
who makes light visible by plunging all that is not light in gloom, the Puritan
attunes his heart to the voice from Heaven by an immense effort of concentration
and abnegation. To win all, he renounces all. When earthly props have been cast
down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God. Infinity is attained by a
process of subtraction.
To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, not only religious and
ecclesiastical systems, but the entire world of human relations, the whole
fabric of social institutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism
and their greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal themselves in a new
and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns brightly on the hearth; but
through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on
a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding and
frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues towards the grave--a
wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he
must take his way, alone. No aid can avail him: no preacher, for only the elect
can apprehend with the spirit the word of God; no Church, for to the visible
Church even reprobates belong; no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to
increase the glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourishment to man; hardly
God himself, for Christ died for the elect, and it may well be that the majesty
of the Creator is revealed by the eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the
created.[IV-55]
His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suffers in spirit the
perils which the first settlers in America endured in body, the sea behind, the
untamed desert in front, a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand. Where
Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering like a
consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching its muddy vesture with
the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a
lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society as a
mystical body, compact of members varying in order and degree, but dignified by
participation in the common life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis
between the spirit which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or hostile world.
Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby past was knit to present, and
man to man, and man to God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festival
and fast, in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with horror
from the filthy rags of human righteousness. Where they, in short, had found
comfort in a sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his soul.
We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live.
Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he made it, and
ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.
Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, unless trebly armed for
the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose
countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own. The moral
self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his sense of
social solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny hangs on a private
transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is left for human
intervention? A servant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a
Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved less by compassion for
his erring brethren than by impatient indignation at the blindness of vessels of
wrath who “sinned their mercies.” A spiritual aristocrat, who sacrificed
fraternity to liberty, he drew from his idealization of personal responsibility
a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and generalized, was to be
among the most potent explosives that the world has known. He drew from it also
a scale of ethical values, in which the traditional scheme of Christian virtues
was almost exactly reversed, and which, since he was above all things practical,
he carried as a dynamic into the routine of business and political life.
For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to attain the free gift
of salvation, are a proof that the gift has been accorded, what is rejected as a
means is resumed as a consequence, and the Puritan flings himself into practical
activities with the dæmonic energy of one who, all doubts allayed, is conscious
that he is a sealed and chosen vessel. Once engaged in affairs, he brings to
them both the qualities and limitations of his creed in all their remorseless
logic. Called by God to labor in his vineyard, he has within himself a principle
at once of energy and of order, which makes him irresistible both in war and in
the struggles of commerce. Convinced that character is all and circumstances
nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune
to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches,
not an object of suspicion--though like other gifts they may be abused--but the
blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will. Tempered by
self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic,
whose victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the
counting-house, and in the market.
This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality and emphasis, found
its social organ in those middle and commercial classes who were the citadel of
the Puritan spirit, and whom, “ennobled by their own industry and
virtue,”[IV-56] Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress and
enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think of England as _par excellence_ the
pioneer of economic progress, that we are apt to forget how recently that rôle
has been assumed. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in the
sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the Spanish Empire, in the
seventeenth to the United Provinces and, above all, to the Dutch.
The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely medieval in its economic
organization and social outlook, more interested in maintaining customary
standards of consumption than in accumulating capital for future production,
with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic virtues, a peasantry farming
for subsistence amid the organized confusion of the open-field village, and a
small, if growing, body of jealously conservative craftsmen. In such a society
Puritanism worked like the yeast which sets the whole mass fermenting. It went
through its slack and loosely knit texture like a troop of Cromwell’s Ironsides
through the disorderly cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in Ireland, the elements
were so alien that assimilation was out of the question, the result was a wound
that festered for three centuries. In England the effect was that at once of an
irritant and of a tonic. Puritanism had its own standards of social conduct,
derived partly from the obvious interests of the commercial classes, partly from
its conception of the nature of God and the destiny of man. These standards were
in sharp antithesis, both to the considerable surviving elements of feudalism in
English society, and to the policy of the authoritarian State, with its ideal of
an ordered and graded society, whose different members were to be maintained in
their traditional status by the pressure and protection of a paternal monarchy.
Sapping the former by its influence and overthrowing the latter by direct
attack, Puritanism became a potent force in preparing the way for the commercial
civilization which finally triumphed at the Revolution.
The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at upsetting the government
of the Church, went hand in hand with an economic radicalism, which resented the
restraints on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion or of
social policy, was being made by the stricter school of religious opinion quite
early in the reign of Elizabeth.[IV-57] Seventeenth-century writers repeated the
charge that the Puritan conscience lost its delicacy where matters of business
were concerned, and some of them were sufficiently struck by the phenomenon to
attempt an historical explanation of it. The example on which they usually
seized--the symbol of a supposed general disposition to laxity--was the
indulgence shown by Puritan divines in the particular matter of moderate
interest. It was the effect, so the picturesque story ran,[IV-58] of the Marian
persecution. The refugees who fled to the Continent could not start business in
a foreign country. If, driven by necessity, they invested their capital and
lived on the proceeds, who could quarrel with so venial a lapse in so good a
cause? Subsequent writers embellished the picture. The redistribution of
property at the time of the Dissolution, and the expansion of trade in the
middle of the century, had led, one of them argued, to a great increase in the
volume of credit transactions. The opprobrium which attached to loans at
interest--“a sly and forbid practice”--not only among Romanists and Anglicans,
but among honest Puritans, played into the hands of the less scrupulous members
of “the faction.” Disappointed in politics, they took to money-lending, and,
without venturing to justify usury in theory, defended it in practice. “Without
the scandal of a recantation, they contrived an expedient, by maintaining that,
though usury for the name were stark naught, yet for widows, orphans and other
impotents (therein principally comprising the saints under persecution) it was
very tolerable, because profitable, and in a manner necessary.” Naturally,
Calvin’s doctrine as to the legitimacy of moderate interest was hailed by these
hypocrites with a shout of glee. “It took with the brethren like polygamy with
the Turks, recommended by the example of divers zealous ministers, who
themselves desired to pass for orphans of the first rank.”[IV-59] Nor was it
only as the apologist of moderate interest that Puritanism was alleged to reveal
the cloven hoof. Puritans themselves complained of a mercilessness in driving
hard bargains, and of a harshness to the poor, which contrasted unfavorably with
the practice of followers of the unreformed religion. “The Papists,” wrote a
Puritan in 1653, “may rise up against many of this generation. It is a sad thing
that they should be more forward upon a bad principle than a Christian upon a
good one.”[IV-60]
Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pamphleteer. The real
story was less dramatic, but more significant. From the very beginning,
Calvinism had comprised two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which
contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given a whole-hearted
_imprimatur_ to the life of business enterprise, which most earlier moralists
had regarded with suspicion, and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an
inquisitorial discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was the creed of a small
and homogeneous city, the second aspect had predominated; in the many-sided life
of England, where there were numerous conflicting interests to balance it, and
where it was long politically weak, the first. Then, in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, had come the wave of commercial and financial
expansion--companies, colonies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining,
capitalism in finance--on the crest of which the English commercial classes, in
Calvin’s day still held in leading-strings by conservative statesmen, had
climbed to a position of dignity and affluence.
Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, these two elements flew
apart. The collectivist, half-communistic aspect, which had never been
acclimatized in England, quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more,
and for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant and landowner, in
the popular agitation under the Commonwealth. The individualism congenial to the
world of business became the distinctive characteristic of a Puritanism which
had arrived, and which, in becoming a political force, was at once secularized
and committed to a career of compromise. Its note was not the attempt to
establish on earth a “Kingdom of Christ,” but an ideal of personal character and
conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and private
duties. Its theory had been discipline; its practical result was liberty.
Given the social and political conditions of England, the transformation was
inevitable. The incompatibility of Presbyterianism with the stratified
arrangement of English society had been remarked by Hooker.[IV-61] If the City
Fathers of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the seventeenth century the
religious collectivism of Calvin’s régime, it was not to be expected that the
landowners and _bourgeoisie_ of an aristocratic and increasingly commercial
nation, however much Calvinist theology might appeal to them, would view with
favor the social doctrines implied in Calvinist discipline. In the reign of the
first two Stuarts, both economic interests and political theory pulled them hard
in the opposite direction. “Merchants’ doings,” the man of business in Wilson’s
_Discourse upon Usury_ had observed, “must not thus be overthwarted by preachers
and others that cannot skill of their dealings.”[IV-62] Behind the elaborate
façade of Tudor State control, which has attracted the attention of historians,
an individualist movement had been steadily developing, which found expression
in opposition to the traditional policy of stereotyping economic relations by
checking enclosure, controlling food supplies and prices, interfering with the
money-market, and regulating the conditions of the wage contract and of
apprenticeship. In the first forty years of the seventeenth century, on grounds
both of expediency and of principle, the commercial and propertied classes were
becoming increasingly restive under the whole system, at once ambitious and
inefficient, of economic paternalism. It was in the same sections of the
community that both religious and economic dissatisfaction were most acute.
Puritanism, with its idealization of the spiritual energies which found
expression in the activities of business and industry, drew the isolated
rivulets of discontent together, and swept them forward with the dignity and
momentum of a religious and a social philosophy.
For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as to theology and
church government, but as the champion of interests and opinions embracing every
side of the life of society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with
the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ideologies, the social
and religious aspects of Puritanism were not disentangled; they presented
themselves, both to supporters and opponents, as different facets of a single
scheme. “All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud
encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry ...
whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything
good--all these were Puritans.”[IV-63] The clash was not one of theories--a
systematic and theoretical individualism did not develop till after the
Restoration--but of contradictory economic interests and incompatible
conceptions of social expediency.
The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Government of Charles I bore some
resemblance to the system of which a more uncompromising version was developed
between 1661 and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was one which favored an
artificial and State-promoted capitalism--a capitalism resting on the grant of
privileges and concessions to company promoters who would pay for them, and
accompanied by an elaborate system of State control, which again, if partly
inspired by a genuine solicitude for the public interest, was too often smeared
with an odious trail of finance. It found its characteristic expression in the
grant of patents, in the revival of the royal monopoly of exchange business,
against which the City had fought under Elizabeth, in attempts to enforce by
administrative action compliance with the elaborate and impracticable code
controlling the textile trades and to put down speculation in foodstuffs, and in
raids on enclosing landlords, on employers who paid in truck or evaded the rates
fixed by assessment, and on justices who were negligent in the administration of
the Poor Laws. Such measures were combined with occasional plunges into even
more grandiose schemes for the establishment of county granaries, for taking
certain industries into the hands of the Crown, and even for the virtual
nationalization of the cloth manufacture.[IV-64]
“The very genius of that nation of people,” wrote Strafford to Laud of the
Puritans, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all
that ever authority ordains for them.”[IV-65] Against this whole attempt to
convert economic activity into an instrument of profit for the Government and
its hangers-on--against, no less, the spasmodic attempts of the State to protect
peasants against landlords, craftsmen against merchants, and consumers against
middlemen--the interests which it thwarted and curbed revolted with increasing
pertinacity. Questions of taxation, on which attention has usually been
concentrated, were in reality merely one element in a quarrel which had its
deeper cause in the collision of incompatible social philosophies. The Puritan
tradesman had seen his business ruined by a monopoly granted to a needy
courtier, and cursed Laud and his Popish soap. The Puritan goldsmith or
financier had found his trade as a bullion-broker hampered by the
reëstablishment of the ancient office of Royal Exchanger, and secured a
resolution from the House of Commons, declaring that the patent vesting it in
Lord Holland and the proclamation forbidding the exchanging of gold and silver
by unauthorized persons were a grievance. The Puritan money-lender had been
punished by the Court of High Commission, and railed at the interference of
bishops in temporal affairs. The Puritan clothier, who had suffered many things
at the hands of interfering busy-bodies despatched from Whitehall to teach him
his business, averted discreet eyes when the Wiltshire workmen threw a more than
usually obnoxious Royal Commissioner into the Avon, and, when the Civil War
came, rallied to the Parliament. The Puritan country gentleman had been harried
by Depopulation Commissions, and took his revenge with the meeting of the Long
Parliament. The Puritan merchant had seen the Crown both squeeze money out of
his company, and threaten its monopoly by encouraging courtly interlopers to
infringe its charter. The Puritan member of Parliament had invested in colonial
enterprises, and had ideas as to commercial policy which were not those of the
Government. Confident in their own energy and acumen, proud of their success,
and regarding with profound distrust the interference both of Church and of
State with matters of business and property rights, the commercial classes, in
spite of their attachment to a militant mercantilism in matters of trade, were,
even before the Civil War, more than half converted to the administrative
nihilism which was to be the rule of social policy in the century following it.
Their demand was the one which is usual in such circumstances. It was that
business affairs should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the
intrusions of an antiquated morality or by misconceived arguments of public
policy.[IV-66]
The separation of economic from ethical interests, which was the note of all
this movement, was in sharp opposition to religious tradition, and it did not
establish itself without a struggle. Even in the very capital of European
commerce and finance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by the refusal to
admit usurers to communion or to confer degrees upon them; it was only after a
storm of pamphleteering, in which the theological faculty of the University of
Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity, that the States of Holland
and West Friesland closed the agitation by declaring that the Church had no
concern with questions of banking.[IV-67] In the French Calvinist Churches, the
decline of discipline had caused lamentations a generation earlier.[IV-68] In
America, the theocracy of Massachusetts, merciless alike to religious liberty
and to economic license, was about to be undermined by the rise of new States
like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and
utilitarian temper was destined to find its greatest representative in the
golden common sense of Benjamin Franklin.[IV-69] “The sin of our too great
fondness for trade, to the neglecting of our more valuable interests,” wrote a
Scottish divine in 1709, when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant outburst of
commercial enterprise, “I humbly think will be written upon our judgment.... I
am sure the Lord is remarkably frowning upon our trade ... since it was put in
the room of religion.”[IV-70]
In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively economic standards to
social relations evoked from Puritan writers and divines vigorous protests
against usurious interest, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by
landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only too literally the
doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by works, but by faith. Usury, “in time
of Popery an odious thing,”[IV-71] had become a scandal. Professors, by their
covetousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to blaspheme.[IV-72]
The exactions of the forestaller and regrater were never so monstrous or so
immune from interference. The hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the
necessities of the poor so neglected. “The poor able to work are suffered to
beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently provided for, but almost
starved with the allowance of 3_d._ and 4_d._ a piece a week.... These are the
last times indeed. Men generally are all for themselves. And some would set up
such, having a form of religion, without the power of it.”[IV-73]
These utterances came, however, from that part of the Puritan mind which looked
backward. That which looked forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of
economic enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, and went out to
welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to
practical exigencies appeared in some of his later followers as a frank
idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the
training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which
had been as characteristic of the reformers as of medieval theologians,
Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the
appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of
religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an
unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen pointed out, it is true, the peril
to the soul involved in a single-minded concentration on economic interests. The
enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits sometimes associated with
them, and its warnings against an excessive preoccupation with the pursuit of
gain wore more and more the air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching the main
tendency and emphasis of which were little affected by these incidental
qualifications. It insisted, in short, that money-making, if not free from
spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and
ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God.
The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf sprang from the very
heart of Puritan theology. It was that expressed in the characteristic and
oft-used phrase, “a Calling.”[IV-74] The rational order of the universe is the
work of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labor for God’s
glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a temporal calling. It is the first
duty of the Christian to know and believe in God; it is by faith that he will be
saved. But faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of Prating
Row, whose “religion is to make a noise.” The only genuine faith is the faith
which produces works. “At the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their
fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you doers, or
talkers only?”[IV-75] The second duty of the Christian is to labor in the
affairs of practical life, and this second duty is subordinate only to the
first. “God,” wrote a Puritan divine, “doth call every man and woman ... to
serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the
common good.... The Great Governour of the world hath appointed to every man his
proper post and province, and let him be never so active out of his sphere, he
will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own
business.”[IV-76]
From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as imposed by the divine
will, it follows that, not withdrawal from the world, but the conscientious
discharge of the duties of business, is among the loftiest of religious and
moral virtues. “The begging friars and such monks as live only to themselves and
to their formal devotion, but do employ themselves in no one thing to further
their own subsistence or the good of mankind ... yet have the confidence to
boast of this their course as a state of perfection; which in very deed, as to
the worthiness of it, falls short of the poorest cobbler, for his is a calling
of God, and theirs is none.”[IV-77] The idea was not a new one. Luther had
advanced it as a weapon against monasticism. But for Luther, with his
patriarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling means normally that state
of life in which the individual has been set by Heaven, and against which it is
impiety to rebel. On the lips of Puritan divines, it is not an invitation to
resignation, but the bugle-call which summons the elect to the long battle which
will end only with their death. “The world is all before them.” They are to
hammer out their salvation, not merely _in vocatione_, but _per vocationem_. The
calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous and
exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the guidance of Providence,
but to be chosen by each man for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn
responsibilities. “God hath given to man reason for this use, that he should
first consider, then choose, then put in execution; and it is a preposterous and
brutish thing to fix or fall upon any weighty business, such as a calling or
condition of life, without a careful pondering it in the balance of sound
reason.”[IV-78]
_Laborare est orare._ By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with
a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a
requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself
a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of
mendicants--a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in
solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an
economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is
a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be
continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material
necessity. Work thus conceived stands at the very opposite pole from “good
works,” as they were understood, or misunderstood, by Protestants. They, it was
thought, had been a series of single transactions, performed as compensation for
particular sins, or out of anxiety to acquire merit. What is required of the
Puritan is not individual meritorious acts, but a holy life--a system in which
every element is grouped round a central idea, the service of God, from which
all disturbing irrelevances have been pruned, and to which all minor interests
are subordinated.
His conception of that life was expressed in the words, “Be wholly taken up in
diligent business of your lawful callings, when you are not exercised in the
more immediate service of God.”[IV-79] In order to deepen his spiritual life,
the Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He “is blind in no man’s cause, but
best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs
and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires.... He sees the falseness of it
[the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to
be damaged by their disappointment.”[IV-80] There must be no idle leisure:
“those that are prodigal of their time despise their own souls.”[IV-81] Religion
must be active, not merely contemplative. Contemplation is, indeed, a kind of
self-indulgence. “To neglect this [i.e., bodily employment and mental labor] and
say, ‘I will pray and meditate,’ is as if your servant should refuse your
greatest work, and tye himself to some lesser, easie part.... God hath commanded
you some way or other to labour for your daily bread.”[IV-82] The rich are no
more excused from work than the poor, though they may rightly use their riches
to select some occupation specially serviceable to others. Covetousness is a
danger to the soul, but it is not so grave a danger as sloth. “The standing pool
is prone to putrefaction: and it were better to beat down the body and to keep
it in subjection by a laborious calling, than through luxury to become a
cast-away.”[IV-83] So far from poverty being meritorious, it is a duty to choose
the more profitable occupation. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully
get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if
you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of
your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.” Luxury, unrestrained
pleasure, personal extravagance, can have no place in a Christian’s conduct, for
“every penny which is laid out ... must be done as by God’s own appointment.”
Even excessive devotion to friends and relations is to be avoided. “It is an
irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational creature, to love any one
farther than reason will allow us.... It very often taketh up men’s minds so as
to hinder their love to God.”[IV-84] The Christian life, in short, must be
systematic and organized, the work of an iron will and a cool intelligence.
Those who have read Mill’s account of his father must have been struck by the
extent to which Utilitarianism was not merely a political doctrine, but a moral
attitude. Some of the links in the Utilitarian coat of mail were forged, it may
be suggested, by the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century.
The practical application of these generalities to business is set out in the
numerous works composed to expound the rules of Christian conduct in the varied
relations of life. If one may judge by their titles--_Navigation Spiritualized_,
_Husbandry Spiritualized_, _The Religious Weaver_[IV-85]--there must have been a
considerable demand for books conducive to professional edification. A
characteristic specimen is _The Tradesman’s Calling_,[IV-86] by Richard Steele.
The author, after being deprived of a country living under the Act of
Uniformity, spent his declining years as minister of a congregation at Armourers
Hall in London, and may be presumed to have understood the spiritual
requirements of the City in his day, when the heroic age of Puritanism was
almost over and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue. No one who was writing a
treatise on economic ethics today would address himself primarily to the
independent shopkeeper, as the figure most representative of the business
community, and Steele’s book throws a flood of light on the problems and outlook
of the _bourgeoisie_, in an age before the center of economic gravity had
shifted from the substantial tradesman to the exporting merchant, the industrial
capitalist and the financier.
Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier authorities as to
equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, however, of its practical utility. Obvious
frauds in matters of quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman
ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or three callings merely to
increase his riches,” or oppress the poor; nor should he seek more than “a
reasonable proportion of gain,” or “lie on the catch to make [his] markets of
others’ straits.” But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various
objective standards of a reasonable profit--cost of production, standard of
life, customary prices--which had been suggested in earlier ages, and concludes
that the individual must judge for himself. “Here, as in many other cases, an
upright conscience must be the clerk of the market.”
In reality, however, the characteristic of _The Tradesman’s Calling_, as of the
age in which it was written, is not the relics of medieval doctrine which linger
embalmed in its guileless pages, but the robust common sense, which carries the
author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial, if Philistine,
optimism. For his main thesis is a comfortable one--that there is no necessary
conflict between religion and business. “Prudence and Piety were always very
good friends.... You may gain enough of both worlds if you would mind each in
its place.” His object is to show how that agreeable result may be produced by
dedicating business--with due reservations--to the service of God, and he has
naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of economic conduct, because he
is permeated by the idea that trade itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman’s
first duty is to get a full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to
improve it. “He that hath lent you talents hath also said, ‘Occupy till I come!’
Your strength is a talent, your parts are talents, and so is your time. How is
it that ye stand all the day idle?... Your trade is your proper province....
Your own vineyard you should keep.... Your fancies, your understandings, your
memories ... are all to be laid out therein.” So far from their being an
inevitable collision between the requirements of business and the claims of
religion, they walk hand in hand. By a fortunate dispensation, the virtues
enjoined on Christians--diligence, moderation, sobriety, thrift--are the very
qualities most conducive to commercial success. The foundation of all is
prudence; and prudence is merely another name for the “godly wisdom [which]
comes in and puts due bounds” to his expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to
live rather somewhat below than at all above his income.” Industry comes next,
and industry is at once expedient and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman
from “frequent and needless frequenting of taverns,” and pin him to his shop,
“where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.”
If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company, speculation, gambling,
politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in religion--it is these things which are
the ruin of tradesmen. Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the
contrary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy ejaculations.” What
is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike habit of “neglecting a man’s
necessary affairs upon pretence of religious worship.” But these faults, common
and uncommon alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the sincere Christian,
who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress his neighbor, but need not fly to the
other extreme, be righteous over-much, or refuse to “take the advantage which
the Providence of God puts into his hands.” By a kind of happy, preëstablished
harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the
self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign
of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has labored faithfully in his
vocation, and that “God has blessed his trade.” “Nothing will pass in any man’s
account except it be done in the way of his calling.... Next to the saving his
soul, [the tradesman’s] care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to
drive it as far as it will go.”
When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be a duty? Thus argued the
honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in
the county of Coveting in the north.[IV-87] The inference was illogical, but how
attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as to preach at St. Mary
Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon against usury on the text, “The Pharisees
who were covetous heard all these things and they derided Christ,” his career in
London was brought to an abrupt conclusion.[IV-88]
The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely penetrated by moralists,
and to suggest a direct reaction of theory on practice would be paradoxical.
But, if the circumstances which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall be
profitable are economic, those which decide that they shall be the object of
general approval are primarily moral and intellectual. For conventions to be
adopted with whole-hearted enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but
applauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admiration of its
philosophers, the second condition must be present as well as the first. The
insistence among men of pecuniary motives, the strength of economic egotism, the
appetite for gain--these are the commonplaces of every age and need no emphasis.
What is significant is the change of standards which converted a natural frailty
into a resounding virtue. After all, it appears, a man can serve two masters,
for--so happily is the world disposed--he may be paid by one, while he works for
the other. Between the old-fashioned denunciation of uncharitable covetousness
and the new-fashioned applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the
argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge of a duty imposed
by God.
In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled _A Discourse of Trade, by N. B.,
M.D._[IV-89] Notable for its enlightened discussion of conventional theories of
the balance of trade, it is a good specimen of an indifferent _genus_. But its
authorship was more significant than its argument. For N. B. was Dr. Nicholas
Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency expert, pioneer of insurance, and
enthusiast for land-banks, was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the
parody of whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its verdict on the
brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction
from Puritan rigor to Restoration license is the most familiar of platitudes.
The reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more general, and
ultimately of greater significance. The profligacy of the courtier had its
decorous counterpart in the economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant.
Votaries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more profitable divinity,
they celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by
plunging with redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing
money.
The transition from the anabaptist to the company promoter was less abrupt than
might at first sight be supposed. It had been prepared, however unintentionally,
by Puritan moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring activity,
on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and extravagance, on
foresight and thrift, on moderation and self-discipline and rational
calculation, they had created an ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as
an ethical principle the efficiency which economic theorists were preaching as a
specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as it was novel. To
countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian
social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy:
“Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is
the root of all evil.” Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a
new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison
had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy,
but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase
and expansion, became the goal of the Christian’s efforts. Not consumption, on
which the eyes of earlier sages had been turned, but production, became the
pivot of his argument. Not an easy-going and open-handed charity, but a
systematic and methodical accumulation, won the meed of praise that belongs to
the good and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries
all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot
rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love
of social power and hunger for economic gain--these irrepressible appetites had
evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages.
Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less
enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They
emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to
be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a
philosophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries no sting. In
winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.
The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously sought, while ever
receding, had been unfamiliar to most earlier generations of Englishmen, in
which the theme of moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and the
main aim of public policy had been the stability of traditional relationships.
It found a new sanction in the identification of labor and enterprise with the
service of God. The magnificent energy which changed in a century the face of
material civilization was to draw nourishment from that temper. The worship of
production and ever greater production--the slavish drudgery of the millionaire
and his unhappy servants--was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same
compelling creed.
Social development moves with a logic whose inferences are long delayed, and the
day of these remoter applications had not yet dawned. The version of Christian
ethics expounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still only in its
vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a flowing tide. It had an unconscious
ally in the preoccupation with economic interests which found expression in the
enthusiasm of business politicians for a commercial _Machtpolitik_. The youthful
Commonwealth, a rival of Holland “for the fairest mistress in the
world--trade,”[IV-90] was not two years old when it made its own essay in
economic imperialism. “A bare-faced war” for commerce, got up by the Royal
African Company, was Clarendon’s verdict[IV-91] on the Dutch war of 1665-7. Five
years later, Shaftesbury hounded the City against Holland with the cry of
_Delenda est Carthago_. The war finance of the Protectorate had made it
necessary for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native,
capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Restoration was in the hands
of those syndicates of goldsmiths whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from
the age before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart
plutocracy, found not a little disgusting.[IV-92]
The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified no less the mood which
glorified the economic virtues. Economic science developed in England, not, as
in Germany, as the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in France, through
the speculations of philosophers and men of letters, but as the interpreter of
the practical interests of the City. With the exception of Petty and Locke, its
most eminent practitioners were business men, and the questions which excited
them were those, neither of production nor of social organization, but of
commerce and finance--the balance of trade, tariffs, interest, currency and
credit. The rise of Political Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly
influenced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by the progress of
natural science, stamped their spontaneous and doctrineless individualism with
the seal of theoretical orthodoxy. “Knowledge,” wrote the author of the preface
to a work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new science, “in great
measure is become mechanical.”[IV-93] The exact analysis of natural conditions,
the calculations of forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the
operation of simple, constant and measurable forces, was the natural bias of an
age interested primarily in mathematics and physics. Its object was “to express
itself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense,
and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving
those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites and passions of
particular men to the consideration of others.”[IV-94]
In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had occupied so large a place
in the earlier treatment of social and economic subjects, seemed the voice of an
antiquated superstition. Moreover, the main economic dogma of the mercantilist
had an affinity with the main ethical dogma of the Puritan, which was the more
striking because the coincidence was undesigned. To the former, production, not
consumption, was the pivot of the economic system, and, by what seems to the
modern reader a curious perversion, consumption is applauded only because it
offers a new market for productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal virtues
are precisely those which find in the strenuous toils of industry and commerce
their most natural expression. The typical qualities of the successful business
life, in the days before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and
earnestness of labor, concentration, system and method, the initiative which
broke with routine and the foresight which postponed the present to the future.
Advice like that of the Reverend Mr. Steele to his City congregation was
admirably calculated to give these arduous excellences a heightened status and
justification. The lean goddess, Abstinence, whom Mr. Keynes, in a passage of
brilliant indiscretion, has revealed as the tutelary divinity of Victorian
England, was inducted to the austere splendors of her ascetic shrine by the
pious hands of Puritan moralists.
Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legislation from a direct
participation in public affairs, Dissenters of means and social position threw
themselves into the alternative career offered by commerce and finance, and did
so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their choice. If they
conformed, the character given them by their critics--“opinionating, relying
much upon their own judgment ... ungrateful, as not holding themselves beholden
to any man ... proud, as thinking themselves the only favorites of God, and the
only wise or virtuous among men”[IV-95]--disposed them to the left in questions
of Church and State. The names of the commercial magnates of the day lend some
confirmation to the suggestion of that affinity between religious radicalism and
business acumen which envious contemporaries expressed in their sneers at the
“Presbyterian old usurer,” “devout misers,” and “extorting Ishban.”[IV-96] The
four London members elected in 1661 had not only filled the ordinary civic
offices, but had held between them the governorship of the East India Company,
the deputy-governorship of the Levant Company, and the masterships of the
Salters and Drapers Companies; two of them were said to be Presbyterians, and
two Independents.[IV-97] Of the committee of leading business men who advised
Charles II’s Government on questions of commercial policy, some, like Sir
Patience Ward and Michael Godfrey, represented the ultra-Protestantism of the
City, while others, like Thomas Papillon and the two Houblons, were members of
the French Huguenot church in London.[IV-98] In spite of the bitter commercial
rivalry with Holland, both Dutch capital and Dutch ideas found an enthusiastic
welcome in London.[IV-99] Sir George Downing, Charles II’s envoy at the Hague,
who endeavored to acclimatize Dutch banking methods in England, and who,
according to Clarendon, was one of the intriguers who prepared the war of
1665-7, had been reared in the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and had
been a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey.[IV-100] Paterson, who supplied
the idea of a joint-stock banking corporation, which Michael Godfrey popularized
in the City and Montagu piloted through Parliament, was, like the magnificent
Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had haunted the Hague in the days when it
was the home of disconsolate Whigs.[IV-101] Yarranton, most ingenious of
projectors, had been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and his book was a
long sermon on the virtues of the Dutch.[IV-102] Defoe, who wrote the idyll of
the _bourgeoisie_ in his _Complete English Tradesman_, was born of nonconformist
parents, and was intended for the ministry before, having failed in trade, he
took up politics and literature.[IV-103] In his admirable study of the iron
industry, Mr. Ashton has shown that the most eminent iron-masters of the
eighteenth century belonged as a rule to the Puritan connection.[IV-104] They
had their prototype in the seventeenth century in Baxter’s friend, Thomas Foley,
“who from almost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum or more by iron
works.”[IV-105]
To such a generation, a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a
drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not
that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it
a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of economic enterprise, the
ethics of the Puritan bore some resemblance to those associated later with the
name of Smiles. The good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic
man.
IV. THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY
To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits and
institutions which appear to conflict with them. The recognition accorded by
Puritan ethics to the economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer
than they are today, gave a timely stimulus to economic efficiency. But it
naturally, if unintentionally, modified the traditional attitude towards social
obligations. For the spontaneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the
rule of English public life a century before the philosophy of it was propounded
by Adam Smith, no single cause was responsible. But, simultaneously with the
obvious movements in the world of affairs--the discrediting of the ideal of a
paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of central control over local
administration, the dislocation caused by the Civil War, the expansion of trade
and the shifting of industry from its accustomed seats--it is perhaps not
fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force contributing to the
change in social policy which is noticeable after the middle of the century.
The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow. To urge that the
Christian life must be lived in a zealous discharge of private duties--how
necessary! Yet how readily perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital
social obligations beyond and above them! To insist that the individual is
responsible, that no man can save his brother, that the essence of religion is
the contact of the soul with its Maker, how true and indispensable! But how easy
to slip from that truth into the suggestion that society is without
responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the social order and its
consequences are not even the scaffolding by which men may climb to greater
heights, but something external, alien and irrelevant--something, at best,
indifferent to the life of the spirit, and, at worse, the sphere of the letter
which killeth and of the reliance on works which ensnares the soul into the
slumber of death! In emphasizing that God’s Kingdom is not of this world,
Puritanism did not always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of
God’s Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false antithesis between the social
mechanism and the life of the spirit, which was to tyrannize over English
religious thought for the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the
privacy of the individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satisfaction at
its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has commented on the manner in
which “the appeal of the Evangelicals to personal religion corresponds with the
appeal of Benthamite Liberals to individual energy.”[IV-106] The same affinity
between religious and social interests found an even clearer expression in the
Puritan movement of the seventeenth century. Individualism in religion led
insensibly, if not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an
individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social
fabric as compared with personal character.
A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by the treatment
accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of Pauperism. For a century and a
half the progress of enclosing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time
to time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of that period, from
Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in the thirties of the
seventeenth, the attitude of religious teachers had been one of condemnation.
Sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet--not to mention Statutes and
Royal Commissions--had been launched against depopulation. The appeal had been,
not merely to public policy, but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their
different degrees, are members of one Christian commonwealth, within which the
law of charity must bridle the corroding appetite for economic gain. In such a
mystical corporation, knit together by mutual obligations, no man may press his
advantage to the full, for no man may seek to live “outside the body of the
Church.”
Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentlemen, who had been the
obstructive agents of local administration, the practical application of such
doctrines had always been intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament struck the
weapon of administrative law from the hands of the Crown, it had ceased
altogether. But the politics of Westminster were not those of village and
borough. The events which seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to close the
revolution seemed to the left wing of the victorious army only to begin it. In
that earliest and most turbulent of English democracies, where buff-coat taught
scripture politics to his general, the talk was not merely of political, but of
social, reconstruction. The program of the Levellers, who more than any other
party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes,
included a demand, not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood
suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the
abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, but also that “you would have laid
open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or
chiefly for the benefit of the poor.”[IV-107] Theoretical communism, repudiated
by the leading Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers,
on whose behalf Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common people of England, by
joynt consent of person and purse, have caste out Charles, our Norman oppressour
... the land now is to returne into the joynt hands of those who have conquered,
that is the commonours,” and that the victory over the King was incomplete, as
long as “wee ... remayne slaves still to the kingly power in the hands of lords
of manors.”[IV-108]
Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the pressure for redress
proceeded. When the shattering of traditional authority seemed for a moment to
make all things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull
oppression, started to life, and in several Midland counties the peasants rose
to pull down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in 1649 there were rumors of
a popular movement to throw down the enclosures of the neighboring forest, the
City Council took the matter up. A petition was drafted, setting out the
economic and social evils attending enclosure, and proposing the establishment
of machinery to check it, consisting of a committee without whose assent
enclosing was not to be permitted. A local minister was instructed to submit the
petition to Parliament, “which hath still a watchful eye and open ear to redress
the common grievances of the nation.”[IV-109] The agent selected to present the
city’s case was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamphleteer, who for several
years attacked the depopulating landlord with all the fervor of Latimer, though
with even less than Latimer’s success.
Half a century before, such commotions would have been followed by the passing
of Depopulation Acts and the issue of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years
since the meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of public policy
towards the movement had begun to change. Confiscations, compositions and war
taxation had effected a revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on
a smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reformation. As land
changed hands, customary relations were shaken and new interests were created.
Enclosure, as Moore complained,[IV-110] was being pushed forward by means of law
suits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that City merchants
and members of the Committee for Compounding, some of whom had found land
speculation a profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal to
revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State interference, at which
the gentry had grumbled for more than a century.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers should have found
the open ear of Parliament impenetrably closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was
it only the political and economic environment which had changed. The revolution
in thought was equally profound. The theoretical basis of the policy of
protecting the peasant by preventing enclosure had been a conception of
landownership which regarded its rights and its duties as inextricably
interwoven. Property was not merely a source of income, but a public function,
and its use was limited by social obligations and necessities of State. With
such a doctrine the classes who had taken the lead in the struggle against the
monarchy could make no truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared when the
Restoration Parliament swept away military tenures, and imposed on the nation,
in the shape of an excise, the financial burden previously borne by themselves.
The theory which took its place, and which was to become in the eighteenth
century almost a religion, was that expressed by Locke, when he described
property as a right anterior to the existence of the State, and argued that “the
supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own
consent.” But Locke merely poured into a philosophical mould ideas which had
been hammered out in the stress of political struggles, and which were already
the commonplace of landowner and merchant. The view of society held by that part
of the Puritan movement which was socially and politically influential had been
expressed by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in the army.
It was that only the freeholders really constituted the body politic, and that
they could use their property as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to
any superior, or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere
tenants at will, with no fixed interest or share in the land of the
kingdom.[IV-111] Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on
agrarian policy. Formerly a course commending itself to all public-spirited
persons, the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the program of a
sect of religious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656
introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons, framed,
apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities of Leicester, there was an
instant outcry from members that it would “destroy property,” and the bill was
refused a second reading.[IV-112] After the Restoration the tide began to run
more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had already become the hobby of
the country gentleman. Experts advocated it on economic grounds, and legislation
to facilitate it was introduced into Parliament. Though its technique still
remained to be elaborated, the attitude which was to be decisive in the
eighteenth century had already been crystallized.
The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was not merely that
political conditions made the landed gentry omnipotent, and that the Royalist
squirearchy, who streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no
mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, of the
administrative interference with the rights of property which had infuriated
them in the Government of Charles I. It was that opinion as to social policy had
changed, and changed not least among men of religion themselves. The pursuit of
economic self-interest, which is the law of nature, is already coming to be
identified by the pious with the operation of the providential plan, which is
the law of God. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man
knows best what his land is suited to produce, and the general interest will be
best served by leaving him free to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim that
every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his
greatest advantage.... The advancement of private persons will be the advantage
of the public.”[IV-113]
It is significant that such considerations were adduced, not by an economist,
but by a minister. For the argument was ethical as well as economic, and, when
Moore appealed to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary
interests, he provoked the retort that a judicious attention to pecuniary
interests was an essential part of an enlightened morality. What the poor need
for their spiritual health is--to use the favorite catchword of the
age--“regulation,” and regulation is possible only if they work under the eye of
an employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Restoration, the first,
and most neglected, virtue of the poor is industry. Common rights encourage
idleness by offering a precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought
to be at work for a master. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
admonitions of religious teachers against the wickedness of joining house to
house and field to field should almost entirely cease. Long the typical example
of uncharitable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not merely
economically expedient, but morally beneficial. Baxter, with all his
scrupulousness--partly, perhaps, because of his scrupulousness--differs from
most earlier divines in giving a qualified approval to enclosure “done in
moderation by a pious man,” for the characteristic reason that a master can
establish a moral discipline among his employees, which they would miss if they
worked for themselves. What matters, in short, is not their circumstances, but
their character. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians.
Opportunities for spiritual edification are more important than the mere
material environment. If only the material environment were not itself among the
forces determining men’s capacity to be edified!
The temper which deplored that the open-field village was not a school of the
severer virtues turned on pauperism and poor relief an even more shattering
criticism. There is no province of social life in which the fashioning of a new
scale of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly revealed. In the
little communities of peasants and craftsmen which composed medieval England,
all, when Heaven sent a bad harvest, had starved together, and the misery of the
sick, the orphan and the aged had appeared as a personal calamity, not as a
social problem. Apart from a few precocious theorists, who hinted at the need
for a universal and secular system of provision for distress, the teaching most
characteristic of medieval writers had been that the relief of the needy was a
primary obligation on those who had means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is
typical, quotes with approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those who
cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that property is
stewardship, and concludes--a conclusion not always drawn from that well-worn
phrase--that to withhold alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is
mortal sin.[IV-114] Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical glamour both to
poverty and to the compassion by which poverty was relieved, for poor men were
God’s friends. At best, the poor were thought to represent our Lord in a
peculiarly intimate way--“in that sect,” as Langland said, “our Saviour saved
all mankind”--and it was necessary for the author of a religious manual to
explain that the rich, as such, were not necessarily hateful to God.[IV-115] At
worst, men reflected that the prayers of the poor availed much, and that the
sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf of bread to a beggar, even
though a curse went with it. The alms bestowed today would be repaid a
thousandfold, when the soul took its dreadful journey amid rending briars and
scorching flames.
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
Sit thee down and put them on,
_And Christe receive thy saule_.
If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
_And Christe receive thy saule_.
* * * * *
If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
The fire shall never make thee shrinke,
_And Christe receive thy saule_.
If meate or drinke thou gavest nane,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
The fire will burne thee to the bare bane,
_And Christe receive thy saule_.
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte,
_And Christe receive thy saule_.[IV-116]
The social character of wealth, which had been the essence of the medieval
doctrine, was asserted by English divines in the sixteenth century with
redoubled emphasis, precisely because the growing individualism of the age
menaced the traditional conception. “The poor man,” preached Latimer, “hath
title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let the poor man
have part of his riches to help and to comfort him withal.”[IV-117] Nor had that
sovereign indifference to the rigors of the economic calculus disappeared, when,
under the influence partly of humanitarian representatives of the Renaissance
like Vives, partly of religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to
gather all the threads of social administration into their own hands, the
statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organize a secular system
of poor relief. In England, after three generations in which the attempt was
made to stamp out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the
momentous admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely
personal idleness, and that the whip had no terrors for the man who must either
tramp or starve. The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory
poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on work. The Privy
Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove lethargic justices hard, and down to
the Civil War the system was administered with fair regularity. But the
Elizabethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with disastrous results, it
became in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sole measure for
coping with economic distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last
link in a chain of measures--the prevention of evictions, the control of food
supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employment and to check
unnecessary dismissals of workmen--intended to mitigate the forces which made
relief necessary. Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the
seventeenth century were prolific in the private charity which founded
alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to provide employment or to aid
struggling tradesmen. The appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a
kind of reverence.
It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.[IV-118]
“What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar on his death-bed to one
who commended his charities. “It would have been but a suitable return for me to
have given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms here and
there.”[IV-119]
It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, both private charity
and public relief should fall on evil days. In London, charitable endowments
seem to have suffered from more than ordinary malversation, and there were
complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the Hospitals was seriously
reduced.[IV-120] In the country, the records of Quarter Sessions paint a picture
of confusion, in which the machinery of presentment by constables to justices
has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves are multiplied, the poor
are neglected, and vagrants wander to and fro at their will.[IV-121] The
administrative collapse of the Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the
Restoration, and twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that the
sections in it relating to the provision of employment were a dead
letter.[IV-122] Always unpopular with the local authorities, whom they involved
in considerable trouble and expense, it is not surprising that, with the
cessation of pressure by the Central Government, they should, except here and
there, have been neglected. What is more significant, however, than the
practical deficiencies in the administration of relief, was the rise of a new
school of opinion, which regarded with repugnance the whole body of social
theory of which both private charity and public relief had been the expression.
“The generall rule of all England,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1646, “is to whip and
punish the wandring beggars ... and so many justices execute one branch of that
good Statute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of charitie,
they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses and convenient places to set
the poore to work.”[IV-123] The House of Commons appears to have been conscious
that the complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the county
justices should be required to see that stocks of material were provided as the
law required,[IV-124] and the question of preparing new legislation to ensure
that persons in distress should be found employment was on several occasions
referred to committees of the House.[IV-125] Nothing seems, however, to have
come of these proposals, nor was the Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on
work” that which was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the
admission that distress was the result, not of personal deficiencies, but of
economic causes, with its corollary that its victims had a legal right to be
maintained by society, the growing individualism of the age turned the same
frigid scepticism as was later directed against the Speenhamland policy by the
reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it saw in misfortune, not the
chastisement of love, but the punishment for sin. The result was that, while the
penalties on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less emphasis on
the obligation of charity than upon the duty of work, and that the admonitions
which had formerly been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed
against improvidence and idleness. The characteristic sentiment was that of
Milton’s friend, Hartlib: “The law of God saith, ‘he that will not work, let him
not eat.’ This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if ...
none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for it.”[IV-126]
The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of public activity provoked
by the growth of pauperism between 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on
sound business principles, by means of a corporation which would combine profit
with philanthropy, was being sedulously preached by a small group of
reformers.[IV-127] Parliament took it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the
relief and employment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under which a
company was to be established with power to apprehend vagrants, to offer them
the choice between work and whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other
poor persons, including children without means of maintenance.[IV-128] Eight
years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an Act of such extreme severity
as almost to recall the suggestion made a generation later by Fletcher of
Saltoun, that vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since
offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who failed to satisfy
the justices that he had a good reason for being on the roads should be arrested
and punished as a sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.[IV-129]
The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the parade of a spurious
religion, which sacrificed character to a formal piety, was older than the
Reformation, but it had been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had
denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the Swiss reformers had
stamped out the remnants of monastic charity, as a bribe ministered by Popery to
dissoluteness and demoralization. “I conclude that all the large givings of the
papists,” preached an English divine in the reign of Elizabeth, “of which at
this day many make so great brags, because they be not done in a reverent regard
of the commandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being touched with the
calamities of the needy, but for to be well reported of before men whilst they
are alive, and to be prayed for after they are dead ... are indeed no alms, but
pharisaical trumpets.”[IV-130] The rise of a commercial civilization, the
reaction against the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors, and the progress
of Puritanism among the middle classes, all combined in the next half-century to
sharpen the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which made the
discipline of character by industry and self-denial the center of its ethical
scheme, the Puritan moralist was undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even
the seed of the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to beg its bread,
and met the taunt that the repudiation of good works was the cloak for a
conscienceless egoism with the retort that the easy-going open-handedness of the
sentimentalist was not less selfish in its motives and was more corrupting to
its objects. “As for idle beggars,” wrote Steele, “happy for them if fewer
people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies, and if more shewed some wise
compassion upon their souls.”[IV-131] That the greatest of evils is idleness,
that the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own “idle,
irregular and wicked courses,” that the truest charity is not to enervate them
by relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be
unnecessary--such doctrines turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze
the impulse of natural pity with the assurance that, if indulged, it would
perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay.
Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve
psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided
efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous
support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.
That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of
Puritan moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of
ethical superiority. “No question,” argued a Puritan pamphleteer, “but it
[riches] should be the portion rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it
good for them; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the
life to come.”[IV-132] The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit,
though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has
always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the
Restoration, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not find it
elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause.
A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will
naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to
justify itself for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of religion
as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was
hailed by the rising school of Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for
the ills of society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy-going
indulgence undermined character, the theme of the economist was that it was
economically disastrous and financially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of
idleness, “men and women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but
lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for maintenance.” It discourages thrift;
“if shame or fear of punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no
more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old age his recess from
labour or care.” It keeps up wages, since “it encourages wilful and
evil-disposed persons to impose what wages they please upon their labours; and
herein they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation that, when
corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work for less wages than when they
were dear.”[IV-133] To the landowner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier
who grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of religious thought now
brought the comforting assurance that morality itself would be favored by a
reduction of both.
As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century was to prove, there is
no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true
character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it
regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way. Such
utterances on the subject of poverty were merely one example of a general
attitude, which appeared at times to consign to collective perdition almost the
whole of the wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age which
worshiped property as the foundation of the social order, the mere laborer
seemed something less than a full citizen. It was partly the result of the
greatly increased influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the
Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless materialism,
determined at all costs to conquer world-markets from France and Holland, and
prepared to sacrifice every other consideration to their economic ambitions. It
was partly that, in spite of a century of large-scale production in textiles,
the problems of capitalist industry and of a propertyless proletariat were still
too novel for their essential features to be appreciated. Even those writers,
like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wickedness of
extortionate prices and unconscionable interest, rarely thought of applying
their principles to the subject of wages. Their social theory had been designed
for an age of petty agriculture and industry, in which personal relations had
not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and the craftsman or peasant farmer
was but little removed in economic status from the half-dozen journeymen or
laborers whom he employed. In a world increasingly dominated by great clothiers,
iron-masters and mine-owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of
master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to economic realities
as leads the twentieth century to talk of employers and employed, long after the
individual employer has been converted into an impersonal corporation.
In a famous passage of the _Communist Manifesto_, Marx observes that “the
_bourgeoisie_, wherever it got the upper hand, put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations, pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties
that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other bond
between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment.”[IV-134]
An interesting illustration of his thesis might be found in the discussions of
the economics of employment by English writers of the period between 1660 and
1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards the new industrial
proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in the first half of the
seventeenth century, and which has no modern parallel except in the behavior of
the less reputable of white colonists towards colored labor. The denunciations
of the “luxury, pride and sloth”[IV-135] of the English wage-earners of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, indeed, almost exactly identical with
those directed against African natives today. It is complained that, compared
with the Dutch, they are self-indulgent and idle; that they want no more than a
bare subsistence, and will cease work the moment they obtain it; that, the
higher their wages, the more--“so licentious are they”[IV-136]--they spend upon
drink; that high prices, therefore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since
they compel the wage-earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not
a blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely conduce to “weekly debauches.”
When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the rigors of economic
exploitation should be preached as a public duty, and, with a few exceptions,
the writers of the period differed only as to the methods by which severity
could most advantageously be organized. Pollexfen and Walter Harris thought that
salvation might be found by reducing the number of days kept as holidays. Bishop
Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes, suggested that “sturdy
beggars should ... be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of
years.” Thomas Alcock, who was shocked at the workman’s taste for snuff, tea and
ribbons, proposed the revival of sumptuary legislation.[IV-137] The writers who
advanced schemes for reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of
punishment and of training, were innumerable. All were agreed that, on moral no
less than on economic grounds, it was vital that wages should be reduced. The
doctrine afterwards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote, “every one but an
idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be
industrious,”[IV-138] was the tritest commonplace of Restoration economists. It
was not argued; it was accepted as self-evident.
When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not be desirable to
reëstablish slavery, it was not to be expected that the sufferings of the
destitute would wring their hearts with social compunction. The most curious
feature in the whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in contrast with
the long debate on pauperism carried on in the sixteenth century, was the
resolute refusal to admit that society had any responsibility for the causes of
distress. Tudor divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle rogues. But the
former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded pauperism primarily as a
social phenomenon produced by economic dislocation, and the embarrassing
question put by the genial Harrison--“at whose handes shall the bloude of these
men be required?”[IV-139]--was never far from the minds even of the most
cynical. Their successors after the Restoration were apparently quite
unconscious that it was even conceivable that there might be any other cause of
poverty than the moral failings of the poor. The practical conclusion to be
drawn from so comfortable a creed was at once extremely simple and extremely
agreeable. It was not to find employment under the Act of 1601, for to do that
was only “to render the poor more bold.” It was to surround the right to relief
with obstacles such as those contained in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it
could not be avoided, in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest,
to increase the demand for labor by reducing wages.
The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might be so administered as
not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be made by
Utilitarian philosophers. But the theory that distress was due, not to economic
circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 called “individual
improvidence and vice,” was firmly established, and the criticism on the
Elizabethan system which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been
formulated. The essence of that system was admirably expressed a century later
by a Scottish divine as “the principle that each man, simply because he exists,
holds a right on other men or on society for existence.”[IV-140] Dr. Chalmers’
attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puritan moralists. And the
views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed themselves on Nassau Senior,[IV-141] before
he set his hand to that brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report,
which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the north of England, was
to be one of the pillars of the social policy of the nineteenth century.
It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of Puritan ethics without
emphasizing the enormous contribution of Puritanism to political freedom and
social progress. The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual
independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of
this world, and in England, where squire and parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows
at the insolence of the lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a
menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable that democracy owes
more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement. The virtues of
enterprise, diligence and thrift are the indispensable foundation of any complex
and vigorous civilization. It was Puritanism which, by investing them with a
supernatural sanction, turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit
and a religion. Nor would it be difficult to find notable representatives of the
Puritan spirit in whom the personal austerity, which was the noblest aspect of
the new ideal, was combined with a profound consciousness of social solidarity,
which was the noblest aspect of that which it displaced. Firmin the
philanthropist, and Bellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a century later
hailed as the father of his doctrines, were pioneers of Poor Law reform. The
Society of Friends, in an age when the divorce between religion and social
ethics was almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine, that it was permissible
to take such gain as the market offered, by insisting on the obligation of good
conscience and forbearance in economic transactions, and on the duty to make the
honorable maintenance of the brother in distress a common charge.[IV-142]
The general climate and character of a country are not altered, however, by the
fact that here and there it has peaks which rise into an ampler air. The
distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different. It was individual
responsibility, not social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery of
others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown of glory the qualities
which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary contest with a hostile world,
and dismissed concern with the social order as the prop of weaklings and the
Capua of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects of that attitude were
momentous for the future. It is sometimes suggested that the astonishing
outburst of industrial activity which took place after 1760 created a new type
of economic character, as well as a new system of economic organization. In
reality, the ideal which was later to carry all before it, in the person of the
inventor and engineer and captain of industry, was well established among
Englishmen before the end of the seventeenth century. Among the numerous forces
which had gone to form it, some not inconsiderable part may reasonably be
ascribed to the emphasis on the life of business enterprise as the appropriate
field for Christian endeavor, and on the qualities needed for success in it,
which was characteristic of Puritanism. These qualities, and the admiration of
them, remained, when the religious reference, and the restraints which it
imposed, had weakened or disappeared.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
“Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sermon, beynge asked if he
had bene at the sermon that day, answered, yea. I praye you, said he, how lyked
you hym? Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked hym alwayes--a sedicious fellow.”
LATIMER, _Seven Sermons before King Edward VI_.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Societies, like individuals, have their moral crises and their spiritual
revolutions. The student can observe the results which these cataclysms produce,
but he can hardly without presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the
fire which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit. The rise of a
naturalistic science of society, with all its magnificent promise of fruitful
action and of intellectual light; the abdication of the Christian Churches from
departments of economic conduct and social theory long claimed as their
province; the general acceptance by thinkers of a scale of ethical values, which
turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a perilous, if natural, frailty into
the idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society--such movements are
written large over the history of the tempestuous age which lies between the
Reformation and the full light of the eighteenth century. Their consequences
have been worked into the very tissue of modern civilization. Posterity still
stands too near their source to discern the ocean into which these streams will
flow.
In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is the tritest of
commonplaces. But social psychology continues too often to be discussed in
serene indifference to the categories of time and place, and economic interests
are still popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over which the
_Zeitgeist_ bears no sway. In reality, though inherited dispositions may be
constant from generation to generation, the system of valuations, preferences
and ideals--the social environment within which individual character
functions--is in process of continuous change, and it is in the conception of
the place to be assigned to economic interests in the life of society that
change has in recent centuries been most comprehensive in its scope, and most
sensational in its consequences. The isolation of economic aims as a specialized
object of concentrated and systematic effort, the erection of economic criteria
into an independent and authoritative standard of social expediency, are
phenomena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity, appear, at least
on a grand scale, only at a comparatively recent date in the history of later
civilizations. The conflict between the economic outlook of East and West, which
impresses the traveller today, finds a parallel in the contrast between medieval
and modern economic ideas, which strikes the historian.
The elements which combined to produce that revolution are too numerous to be
summarized in any neat formula. But, side by side with the expansion of trade
and the rise of new classes to political power, there was a further cause,
which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least fundamental. It was the
contraction of the territory within which the spirit of religion was conceived
to run. The criticism which dismisses the concern of Churches with economic
relations and social organization as a modern innovation finds little support in
past history. What requires explanation is not the view that these matters are
part of the province of religion, but the view that they are not. When the age
of the Reformation begins, economics is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of
theology; all human activities are treated as falling within a single scheme,
whose character is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; the appeal of
theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic
transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to
moral standards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian Church;
the Church itself is regarded as a society wielding theoretical, and sometimes
practical, authority in social affairs. The secularization of political thought,
which was to be the work of the next two centuries, had profound reactions on
social speculation, and by the Restoration the whole perspective, at least in
England, has been revolutionized. Religion has been converted from the keystone
which holds together the social edifice into one department within it, and the
idea of a rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of
policy and the criterion of conduct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to
survive, must devote a reasonable attention to economic interest, man seems
sometimes to have become an economic animal, who will be prudent, nevertheless,
if he takes due precautions to assure his spiritual well-being.
The result is an attitude which forms so fundamental a part of modern political
thought, that both its precarious philosophical basis, and the contrast which it
offers with the conceptions of earlier generations, are commonly forgotten. Its
essence is a dualism which regards the secular and the religious aspects of
life, not as successive stages within a larger unity, but as parallel and
independent provinces, governed by different laws, judged by different
standards, and amenable to different authorities. To the most representative
minds of the Reformation, as of the Middle Ages, a philosophy which treated the
transactions of commerce and the institutions of society as indifferent to
religion would have appeared, not merely morally reprehensible, but
intellectually absurd. Holding as their first assumption that the ultimate
social authority is the will of God, and that temporal interests are a
transitory episode in the life of spirits which are eternal, they state the
rules to which the social conduct of the Christian must conform, and, when
circumstances allow, organize the discipline by which those rules may be
enforced. By their successors in the eighteenth century the philosophy of
Indifferentism, though rarely formulated as a matter of theory, is held in
practice as a truism which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to
question, since it is in the heart of the individual that religion has its
throne, and to externalize it in rules and institutions is to tarnish its purity
and to degrade its appeal. Naturally, therefore, they formulate the ethical
principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely
indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the
ownership of property. Thus the conflict between religion and those natural
economic ambitions which the thought of an earlier age had regarded with
suspicion is suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind between
them. The former takes as its province the individual soul, the latter the
intercourse of man with his fellows in the activities of business and the
affairs of society. Provided that each keeps to its own territory, peace is
assured. They cannot collide, for they can never meet.
History is a stage where forces which are within human control contend and
coöperate with forces which are not. The change of opinion described in these
pages drew nourishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan revolution
had been followed by a dazzling outburst of economic enterprise, and the
transformation of the material environment prepared an atmosphere in which a
judicious moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom and the
sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion as well as the outer. The
march of external progress woke sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to
applaud its triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute tension between
the claims of religion and the glittering allurements of a commercial
civilization, such as had tormented the age of the Reformation.
It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, diffidence of men who were
conscious that traditional doctrines of social ethics, with their impracticable
distrust of economic motives, belonged to the conditions of a vanished age, but
who lacked the creative energy to state them anew, in a form applicable to the
needs of a more complex and mobile social order. It was partly that political
changes had gone far to identify the Church of England with the ruling
aristocracy, so that, while in France, when the crash came, many of the lower
clergy threw in their lot with the _tiers état_, in England it was rarely that
the officers of the Church did not echo the views of society which commended
themselves to the rulers of the State. It was partly that, to one important body
of opinion, the very heart of religion was a spirit which made indifference to
the gross world of external circumstances appear, not a defect, but an ornament
of the soul. Untrammelled by the silken chains which bound the Establishment,
and with a great tradition of discipline behind them, the Nonconformist Churches
might seem to have possessed opportunities of reasserting the social obligations
of religion with a vigor denied to the Church of England. What impeded their
utterance was less a weakness than the most essential and distinctive of their
virtues. Founded on the repudiation of the idea that human effort could avail to
win salvation, or human aid to assist the pilgrim in his lonely quest, they saw
the world of business and society as a battlefield, across which character could
march triumphant to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the architect’s
hand to set them in their place as the foundations of the Kingdom of Heaven. It
did not occur to them that character is social, and society, since it is the
expression of character, spiritual. Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light
itself.
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next. Few will refuse their
admiration to the magnificent conception of a community penetrated from apex to
foundation by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great reformers,
not less than of the better minds of the Middle Ages. But, in order to subdue
the tough world of material interests, it is necessary to have at least so much
sympathy with its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them. The Prince of
Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing and a fair trial, and those who will
not give him his due are wont to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables
by taking his due and something over. Common sense and a respect for realities
are not less graces of the spirit than moral zeal. The paroxysms of virtuous
fury, with which the children of light denounced each new victory of economic
enterprise as yet another stratagem of Mammon, disabled them for the staff-work
of their campaign, which needs a cool head as well as a stout heart. Their
obstinate refusal to revise old formulæ in the light of new facts exposed them
helpless to a counter-attack, in which the whole fabric of their philosophy,
truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed together. They despised knowledge, and
knowledge destroyed them.
Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of
practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the
seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of
which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If, however,
economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters. Harnessed to a
social purpose, they will turn the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to
what end the wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the naïve and
uncritical worship of economic power, which is the mood of unreason too often
engendered in those whom that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws
no light. Its result is not seldom a world in which men commands a mechanism
that they cannot fully use, and an organization which has every perfection
except that of motion.
_Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein,_
_Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein._
The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from the armor of Reason,
pierces the lazy caricature which masquerades beneath that sacred name, to
flatter its followers with the smiling illusion of progress won from the mastery
of the material environment by a race too selfish and superficial to determine
the purpose to which its triumphs shall be applied. Mankind may wring her
secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy themselves; they may
command the Ariels of heat and motion, and bind their wings in helpless
frustration, while they wrangle over the question of the master whom the
imprisoned genii shall serve. Whether the chemist shall provide them with the
means of life or with tri-nitro-toluol and poison gas, whether industry shall
straighten the bent back or crush it beneath heavier burdens, depends on an act
of choice between incompatible ideals, for which no increase in the apparatus of
civilization at man’s disposal is in itself a substitute. Economic efficiency is
a necessary element in the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the
incorrigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to convert
efficiency from an instrument into a primary object is to destroy efficiency
itself. For the condition of effective action in a complex civilization is
coöperation. And the condition of coöperation is agreement, both as to the ends
to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to
be judged.
Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard of values, by which
the position to be assigned to different objects may be determined. In a world
of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and
systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic
possibilities. But it cannot itself be merely economic, since the comparative
importance of economic and of other interests--the sacrifice, for example, of
material goods worth incurring in order to extend leisure, or develop education,
or humanize toil--is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light.
It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature as a
whole, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which
demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its
activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension of
their relative significance. “Whatever the world thinks,” wrote Bishop Berkeley,
“he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind and the _summum bonum_
may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry
patriot and a sorry statesman.” The philosopher of today, who bids us base our
hopes of progress on knowledge inspired by love, does not differ from the Bishop
so much, perhaps, as he would wish. The most obvious facts are the most easily
forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects
advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism
that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth
will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair
their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the
fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part
of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely
economic. A reasonable view of its possible modifications must recognize that
natural appetites may be purified or restrained, as, in fact, in some
considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control
of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of
classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupations, the medieval
insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous
outburst, “there is no wealth but life,” the argument of the Socialist who urges
that production should be organized for service, not for profit, are but
different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic
activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of
man.
Of that nature and its possibilities the Christian Church was thought, during
the greater part of the period discussed in these pages, to hold by definition a
conception distinctively its own. It was therefore committed to the formulation
of a social theory, not as a philanthropic gloss upon the main body of its
teaching, but as a vital element in a creed concerned with the destiny of men
whose character is formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or
starved, by the commerce of the market-place and the institutions of society.
Stripped of the eccentricities of period and place, its philosophy had as its
center a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over
economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human
scheme, but which, like other natural appetites, when flattered and pampered and
overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an
attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical ethics,
sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of warehouse and farm. Its
discipline was an effort, too often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but
not ignoble in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted
texture of individual character and social conduct. That practice was often a
sorry parody on theory is a truism which should need no emphasis. But in a world
where principles and conduct are unequally mated, men are to be judged by their
reach as well as by their grasp--by the ends at which they aim as well as by the
success with which they attain them. The prudent critic will try himself by his
achievement rather than by his ideals, and his neighbors, living and dead alike,
by their ideals not less than by their achievement.
Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral
principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of
social history will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the
powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing
systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and
resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most
communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies
which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the
Christian Faith lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies
against which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in the
assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less _naïveté_ than by the
defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is
the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success.
Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed,
to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain
is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except
by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between
the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion
of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of
the Roman Empire.
“Modern capitalism,” writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without
internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere
congeries of possessors and pursuers.” It is that whole system of appetites and
values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to
snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd
still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on
their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a
civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment
resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master
itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating
youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and
while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of
earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in
which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of
covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their
precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem
an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than
cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent
than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the
whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression as from
the sober respectability of the judicious Paley--who himself, since there are
depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.
NOTES
CHAPTER I
[I-1] J. B. Say, _Cours complet d’Economie politique pratique_, vol. vi, 1829,
pp. 351-2.
[I-2] R. Torrens, _An Essay on the Production of Wealth_, 1821, Preface, p.
xiii.
[I-3] Lloyd George at Portmadoc (_Times_, June 16, 1921).
[I-4] J. A. Froude, _Revival of Romanism_, in _Short Studies on Great Subjects_,
3rd ser., 1877, p. 108.
[I-5] J. N. Figgis, _From Gerson to Grotius_, 1916, pp. 21 _seqq._
[I-6] Locke, _Two Treatises of Government_, bk. ii, chap. ix, § 124.
[I-7] Nicholas Oresme, _c._ 1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377. His _Tractatus
de origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum_ was probably written about
1360. The Latin and French texts have been edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and
extracts are translated by A. E. Monroe, _Early Economic Thought_, 1924, pp.
81-102. Its significance is discussed shortly by Cunningham, _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages_ (4th ed., 1905, pp. 354-9), and by
Wolowski in his introduction. The date of the _De Usuris_ of Laurentius de
Rodolfis was 1403; a short account of his theories as to the exchanges will be
found in E. Schreiber, _Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik
seit Thomas v. Aquin_, 1913, pp. 211-17. The most important works of St.
Antonino (1389-1459, Archbishop of Florence, 1446) are the _Summa Theologica_,
_Summa Confessionalis_, and _De Usuris_. Some account of his teaching is given
by Carl Ilgner, _Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz_,
1904; Schreiber, _op. cit._, pp. 217-23; and Bede Jarrett, _St. Antonino and
Mediæval Economics_, 1914. The full title of Baxter’s work is _A Christian
Directory: a Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience_.
[I-8] See Chap. IV, p. 206.
[I-9] Benvenuto da Imola, _Comentum super Dantis Comœdiam_ (ed. Lacaita), vol.
i, p. 579: “Qui facit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui non facit vadit ad inopiam”
(quoted by G. G. Coulton, _Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the
Reformation_, 1919, p. 342).
[I-10] Lanfranc, _Elucidarium_, lib. ii, p. 18 (in _Opera_, ed. J. A. Giles).
See also _Vita Sancti Guidonis_ (_Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum_, September, vol.
iv, p. 43): “Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine crimine exerceri
potuit.”
[I-11] B. L. Manning, _The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif_, 1919, p. 186.
[I-12] Aquinas, _Summa Theologica_, 2^a 2^æ, div. 1, Q. iii, art. viii.
[I-13] _Ibid._, 1^a 2^æ, div. i, Q. xciv, art. ii.
[I-14] The Bull _Unam Sanctam_ of Boniface VIII.
[I-15] John of Salisbury, _Polycraticus_ (ed. C. C. I. Webb), lib. v, cap. ii
(“Est autem res publica, sicut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam quod divini
muneris beneficio animatur”), and lib. vi, cap. x, where the analogy is worked
out in detail. For Henry VIII’s chaplain see Starkey, _A Dialogue between
Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset_ (Early English Text Society, Extra Ser., no.
xxxii, 1878).
[I-16] Chaucer, _The Persone’s Tale_, § 66.
[I-17] _On the Seven Deadly Sins_, chap. xix (_Select English Works of John
Wyclif_, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, 1871, p. 145).
[I-18] John of Salisbury, _op. cit._, lib. vi, cap. x: “Tunc autem totius rei
publicæ salus incolumis præclaraque erit, si superiora membra se impendant
inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respondeant, ut singula sint
quasi aliorum ad invicem membra.”
[I-19] Wyclif, _op. cit._, chaps. ix, x, xi, xvii, _passim_ (_Works of Wyclif_,
ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 130, 131, 132, 134, 143).
[I-20] See, _e.g._, A. Doren, _Studien aus der Florentiner
Wirthschaftsgeschichte_, 1901, vol. i, chaps. v, vii. His final verdict (p. 458)
is: “Man kann es getrost aussprechen: es gibt wohl keine Periode in der
Weltgeschichte, in der die natürliche Uebermacht des Kapitals über die besitz-
und kapitallose Handarbeit rücksichtsloser, freier von sittlichen und
rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer selbstverständlichen Konsequenz gewaltet
hätte, und bis in die entferntesten Folgen zur Geltung gebracht worden wäre, als
in der Blütezeit der Florentiner Tuchindustrie.” The picture drawn by Pirenne of
the textile industry in Flanders (_Belgian Democracy: Its Early History_, trans.
by J. V. Saunders, 1915, pp. 128-34) is somewhat similar.
[I-21] In Jan. 1298/9 there was held a “parliament of carpenters at Milehende,
where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to observe a certain
ordinance or provision made by the Mayor and Aldermen touching their craft,” and
in the following March a “parliament of smiths” was formed, with a common chest
(_Calendar of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, 1298-1307_, ed.
A. H. Thomas, 1924, pp. 25, 33-4).
[I-22] The figures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Léon (_Histoire
des Corporations de Métiers_, 3rd ed., 1922, pp. 219-20, 224, 226); those for
Frankfurt are given by Bücher (_Die Bevölkerung von Frankfurt am Main im XIV und
XV Jahrhundert_, 1886, pp. 103, 146, 605). They do not include apprentices, and
must not be pressed too far. The conclusion of Martin Saint-Léon is: “Il est
certain qu’au moyen âge (abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n’existait
pas encore un prolétariat, le nombre des ouvriers ne dépassant guère ou
n’atteignant même pas celui des maîtres” (_op. cit._, p. 227 n.). The towns of
Italy should be added, as an exception, to those of Flanders, and in any case
the statement is not generally true of the later Middle Ages, when there was
certainly a wage-earning proletariat in Germany also (see Lamprecht, _Zum
Verständnis der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14.
zum 16. Jahrhundert_, in the _Zeitschrift für Sozial- und
Wirthschaftsgeschichte_, vol. i, 1893, pp. 191-263), and even, though on a
smaller scale, in England.
[I-23] _The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned_, chap. xxviii (_Select English
Works of Wyclif_, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, p. 333). The passage contains
comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in particular, gilds,
“men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere,” and “marchauntis, groceris, and
vitileris” who “conspiren wickidly togidre that noon of hem schal bie over a
certeyn pris, though the thing that thei bien be moche more worthi” (_ibid._,
pp. 333, 334).
Wyclif’s argument is of great interest and importance. It is (1), that such
associations for mutual aid are unnecessary. No special institutions are needed
to promote fraternity, since, quite apart from them, all members of the
community are bound to help each other: “Alle the goodnes that is in thes gildes
eche man owith for to do bi comyn fraternyte of Cristendom, by Goddis
comaundement.” (2) That combinations are a conspiracy against the public. Both
doctrines were points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitary State, and
both were to play a large part in subsequent history. They were used by the
absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century as an argument for State control
over industry, in place of the obstructive torpor of gilds and boroughs, and by
the individualists of the eighteenth century as an argument for free
competition. The line of thought as to the relation of minor associations to the
State runs from Wyclif to Turgot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the Act of the
Legislative Assembly in 1792 forbidding trade unions (“Les citoyens de même état
ou profession, les ouvriers et compagnons d’un art quelconque ne pourront ...
former des règlements sur leurs prétendus intérêts communs”), and the English
Combination Acts.
[I-24] _Kayser Sigmunds Reformation aller Ständen des Heiligen Römischen
Reichs_, printed by Goldast, _Collectio Constitutionum Imperialium_, 1713, vol.
iv, pp. 170-200. Its probable date appears to be about 1437. It is discussed
shortly by J. S. Schapiro, _Social Reform and the Reformation_, 1909, pp. 93-9.
[I-25] Martin Saint-Léon, _op. cit._, p. 187. The author’s remark is made _à
propos_ of a ruling of 1270, fixing minimum rates for textile workers in Paris.
It appears, however, to be unduly optimistic. The fact that minimum rates were
fixed for textile workers must not be taken as evidence that that policy was
common, for in England, and probably in France, the textile trades received
special treatment, and minimum rates were fixed for them, while maximum rates
were fixed for other, and much more numerous, bodies of workers. What is true is
that the medieval assumption with regard to wages, as with regard to the much
more important question of prices, was that it was possible to bring them into
an agreement with an objective standard of equity, which did not reflect the
mere play of economic forces.
[I-26] “The Cardinals’ Gospel,” translated from the _Carmina Burana_ by G. G.
Coulton, in _A Mediæval Garner_, 1910, p. 347.
[I-27] Printed from the _Carmina Burana_ by S. Gaselee, _An Anthology of
Medieval Latin_, 1925, pp. 58-9.
[I-28] Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of “Romanæ ecclesiæ filii
speciales” (Ehrenberg, _Das Zeitalter der Fugger_, 1896, vol. ii, p. 66).
[I-29] For Grosstête see Matthew Paris, _Chronica Majora_, vol. v, pp. 404-5
(where he is reported as denouncing the Cahorsines, “whom in our time the holy
fathers and teachers ... had driven out of France, but who have been encouraged
and protected by the Pope in England, which did not formerly suffer from this
pestilence”), and F. S. Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_,
1899, pp. 101-4. For the bishop of London and the Cahorsines see Matthew Paris,
_Chron. Maj._, vol. iii, pp. 331-2. A useful collection of references on the
whole subject is given by Ehrenberg, _op. cit._, vol. ii, pp. 64-8.
[I-30] _Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham_, vol. i, p. 18, July 1279 (translated
by Coulton, _Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation_, p.
345).
[I-31] For cases of clerical usury see Selden Society, vol. v, 1891, _Leet
Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich_, ed. W. Hudson, p. 35; _Hist. MSS. Comm.,
MSS. of the Marquis of Lothian_, 1905, p. 26; and Th. Bonnin, _Regestrum
Visitationum Odonis Rigaldi_, 1852, p. 35. See also note 88 (below).
[I-32] The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at interest to the
citizens of Paris (A. Luchaire, _Social France at the time of Philip Augustus_,
translated by E. B. Krehbiel, 1912, p. 130). For the bishop’s advice to the
usurer see _ibid._, p. 166.
[I-33] From a letter of St. Bernard, _c._1125, printed by Coulton, _A Mediæval
Garner_, pp. 68-73.
[I-34] Aquinas, _De Regimine Principum_, lib. ii, cap. i-vii, where the economic
foundations of a State are discussed.
[I-35] Aquinas, _Summa Theol._, 2^a 2^æ, Q. lxxxiii, art. vi. For St. Antonino’s
remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, _St. Antonino and Mediæval Economics_,
p. 59.
[I-36] Gratian, _Decretum_, pt. ii, causa xii, Q. i, c. ii, § 1.
[I-37] A good account of St. Antonino’s theory of property is given by Ilgner,
_Die Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz_, chap. x.
[I-38] “Sed si esset bonus legislator in patria indigente, deberet locare pro
pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores ... et non tantum eis et familiæ
sustentationem necessariam invenire, sed etiam industriam, peritiam, et pericula
omnia locare; ergo etiam hoc possunt ipsi in vendendo” (quoted Schreiber, _Die
volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin_, p.
154).
[I-39] Henry of Ghent, _Aurea Quodlibeta_, p. 42_b_ (quoted Schreiber, _op.
cit._, p. 135).
[I-40] Gratian, _Decretum_, pt. 1, dist. lxxxviii, cap. xi.
[I-41] Aquinas, _Summa Theol._, 2^a 2^æ, Q. lxxvii, art. iv.
[I-42] _Ibid._ Trade is unobjectionable, “cum aliquis negotiationi intendit
propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessariæ ad vitam patriæ desint,
et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium laboris.”
[I-43] Henry of Langenstein, _Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emptionis et
venditionis_, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, _op. cit._, p. 197).
[I-44] See Chap. II, § ii.
[I-45] Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, _A Mediæval Garner_,
1910, pp. 212-15, 298, and _Social Life in England from the Conquest to the
Reformation_, 1919, p. 346.
[I-46] The facts are given by Arturo Segre, _Storia del Commercio_, vol. i, p.
223. For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in Florence, see Doren,
_Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsgeschichte_, vol. i, pp. 173-209.
[I-47] Bruno Kuske, _Quellen zur Geschichte des Kölner Handels und Verkehrs im
Mittelalter_, vol. iii, 1923, pp. 197-8.
[I-48] Early English Text Society, _The Coventry Leet Book_, ed. M. D. Harris,
1907-13, p. 544.
[I-49] Wyclif, _On the Seven Deadly Sins_, chap. xxiv (_Works of Wyclif_, ed. T.
Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 154-5). The word rendered “loan” is “leeve” [? leene] in
the text.
[I-50] For examples of such cases see _Early Chancery Proceedings_, Bdle. lxiv,
nos. 291 and 1089; Bdle. xxxvii, no. 38; Bdle. xlvi, no. 307. They are discussed
in some detail in my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s _Discourse upon Usury_,
1925, pp. 28-9.
[I-51] _Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian_, p. 27; Selden Soc., _Leet
Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich_, p. 35.
[I-52] Aquinas, _Summa Theol._, 1^a 2^æ, Q. xcv, art. ii.
[I-53] _On the Seven Deadly Sins_, chap. xxiv (_Works of Wyclif_, ed. T. Arnold,
vol. iii, p. 153): “Bot men of lawe and marchauntis and chapmen and vitelers
synnen more in avarice then done pore laboreres. And this token hereof; for now
ben thei pore, and now ben thei ful riche, for wronges that thei done.”
[I-54] _E.g._, Ægidius Lessinus, _De Usuris_, cap. ix, pt. i: “Tantum res
estimatur juste, quantum ad utilitatem possidentis refertur, et tantum juste
valet, quantum sine fraude vendi potest.... Omnis translatio facta libera
voluntate dominorum juste fit;” Johannes Buridanus, _Quæstiones super decem
libros Ethicorum Aristotelis_, v, 23: “Si igitur rem suam sic alienat, ipse
secundum suam estimationem non damnificatur, sed lucratur; igitur non injustum
patitur.” Both writers are discussed by Schreiber (_op. cit._, pp. 161-71 and
177-91). The theory of Buridanus appears extraordinarily modern; but he is
careful to emphasize that prices should be fixed “secundum utilitatem et
necessitatem totius communitatis,” not “penes necessitatem ementis vel
vendentis.”
[I-55] St. Antonino, _Summa Theologica_, pars ii, tit. i, cap. viii, § 1, and
cap. xvi, § iii. An account of St. Antonino’s theory of prices is given by
Ilgner, _Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz_, chap.
iv; Jarrett, _St. Antonino and Mediæval Economics_; and Schreiber, _op. cit._,
pp. 217-23. Its interest consists in the attempts to maintain the principle of
the just price, while making allowance for practical necessities.
[I-56] Henry of Langenstein, _Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emptionis et
venditionis_, i, 11, 12 (quoted Schreiber, _op. cit._, pp. 198-200).
[I-57] For these examples see _Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of
London_, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 259-60; _Records of the City of Norwich_, ed. W.
Hudson and J. C. Tingey, vol. i, 1906, p. 227; _Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court
Rolls_, p. 132; J. M. Wilson, _The Worcester Liber Albus_, 1920, pp. 199-200,
212-13. The question of the legitimacy of rent-charges and of the profits of
partnership has been fully discussed by Max Neumann, _Geschichte des Wuchers in
Deutschland_ (1865), and by Ashley, _Economic History_. See also G. O’Brien, _An
Essay on Mediæval Economic Teaching_ (1920), and G. G. Coulton, _An Episode in
Canon Law_ (in _History_, July 1921), where the difficult question raised by the
Decretal _Naviganti_ is discussed.
[I-58] _Bernardi Papiensis Summa Decretalium_ (ed. E. A. D. Laspeyres, 1860);
lib. v, tit. xv.
[I-59] _E.g._, Ægidius Lessinus, _De Usuris_, cap. ix, pt. ii: “Etiam res futuræ
per tempora non sunt tantæ estimationis, sicut eædem collectæ in instanti, nec
tantam utilitatem inferunt possidentibus, propter quod oportet, quod sint
minoris estimationis secundum justitiam.”
[I-60] O’Brien (_op. cit._) appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take this
view.
[I-61] _Politics_, I, iii, _ad. fin._ 1258^b. See _Who said “Barren Metal”?_ by
E. Cannan, W. D. Ross, etc., in _Economica_, June 1922, pp. 105-7.
[I-62] Innocent IV, _Apparatus_, lib. v, _De Usuris_.
[I-63] For Italy, see Arturo Segre, _Storia del Commercio_, vol. i, pp. 179-91,
and for France, P. Boissonade, _Le Travail dans l’Europe chrétienne au Moyen
Age_, 1921, pp. 206-9, 212-13. Both emphasize the financial relations of the
Papacy.
[I-64] _E.g._, Council of Arles, 314; Nicæa, 325; Laodicea, 372; and many
others.
[I-65] _Corpus Juris Canonici_, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. i.
[I-66] _Ibid._, cap. iii.
[I-67] _Ibid._, Sexti Decretal, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i, ii.
[I-68] _Ibid._, Clementinarum, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i.
[I-69] The passages referred to in this paragraph are as follows: _Corp. Jur.
Can._, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. ix, iv, x, xiii, xv, ii, v,
vi.
[I-70] _A Formulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century_, ed. H.
C. Lea, 1892, Nos. xcii, clxxviii (2), clxxix.
[I-71] _Raimundi de Penna-forti Summa Pastoralis_ (Ravaisson, _Catalogue Général
des MSS. des Bibliothèques publiques des Departements_, 1849, vol. i, pp. 592
_seqq._). The archdeacon is to inquire: “Whether [the priest] feeds his flock,
assisting those who are in need and above all those who are sick. Works of mercy
also are to be suggested by the archdeacon, to be done by him for their
assistance. If he cannot fully accomplish them out of his own resources, he
ought, according to his power, to use his personal influence to get from others
the means of carrying them out.... Inquiries concerning the parishioners are to
be made, both from the priest and from others among them worthy of credence,
who, if necessary, are to be summoned for the purpose to the presence of the
archdeacon, as well as from the neighbours, with regard to matters which appear
to need correction. First, inquiry is to be made whether there are notorious
usurers, or persons reputed to be usurers, and what sort of usury they practise,
whether any one, that is to say, lends money or anything else ... on condition
that he receive anything above the principal, or holds any pledge and takes
profits from it in excess of the principal, or receives pledges and uses them in
the meantime for his own gain; ... whether he holds horses in pledge and reckons
in the cost of their fodder more than they can eat ... or whether he buys
anything at a much lower price than it is worth, on condition that the seller
can take it back at a fixed term on paying the price, though the buyer knows
that he (the seller) will not be able to do so; or whether he buys anything for
a less price than it is worth, because he pays before receiving the article, for
example, standing corn; or whether any one, as a matter of custom and without
express contract, is wont to take payment above the principal, as the Cahorsines
do.... Further, it is to be inquired whether he practises usury cloaked under
the guise of a partnership (_nomine societatis palliatam_), as when a man lends
money to a merchant, on condition that he be a partner in the gains, but not in
the losses.... Further, whether he practises usury cloaked under the guise of a
penalty, that is to say, when his intention in imposing a penalty [for
non-payment at a given date] is not that he may be paid more quickly, but that
he may be paid more. Further, whether he practises usury in kind, as when a rich
man, who has lent money, will not receive from a poor man any money above the
principal, but agrees that he shall work two days in his vineyard, or something
of the kind. Further, whether he practises usury cloaked by reference to a third
party, as when a man will not lend himself, but has a friend whom he induces to
lend. When it has been ascertained how many persons in that parish are notorious
for usury of this kind, their names are to be reduced to writing, and the
archdeacon is to proceed against them in virtue of his office, causing them to
be cited to his court on a day fixed, either before himself or his responsible
official, even if there is no accuser, on the ground that they are accused by
common report. If they are convicted, either because their offence is evident,
or by their own confession, or by witnesses, he is to punish them as he thinks
best.... If they cannot be directly convicted, by reason of their manifold
shifts and stratagems, nevertheless their ill fame as usurers can easily be
established.... If the archdeacon proceed with caution and diligence against
their wicked doings, they will hardly be able to hold their own or to
escape--if, that is ... he vex them with trouble and expense, and humiliate
them, by frequently serving citations on them and assigning several different
days for their trial, so that by trouble, expense, loss of time, and all manner
of confusion they may be induced to repent and submit themselves to the
discipline of the Church.”
[I-72] E. Martène and U. Durand, _Thesaurus novus Anecdotorum_, 1717, vol. iv,
pp. 696 _seqq._
[I-73] Pecock, _The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy_, ed. C.
Babington, 1860, pt. i, chap. iii, pp. 15-16. His words show both the
difficulties which confronted ecclesiastical teaching and the attempts to
overcome them. “I preie thee ... seie to me where in Holi Scripture is yoven the
hundrid parti of the teching upon matrimonie which y teche in a book mad upon
_Matrimonie_, and in the firste partie of _Cristen religioun_.... Seie to me
also where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hundrid part of the teching which is
yoven upon usure in the thridde parti of the book yclepid _The filling of the
iiij tables_; and yit al thilk hool teching yoven upon usure in the now named
book is litil ynough or ouer litle for to leerne, knowe and have sufficientli
into mannis behove and into Goddis trewe service and lawe keping what is to be
leerned and kunnen aboute usure, as to reeders and studiers ther yn it muste
needis be open. Is ther eny more writen of usure in al the Newe Testament save
this, Luke vi, ‘Geve ye loone, hoping no thing ther of,’ and al that is of usure
writen in the Oold Testament favourith rather usure than it reproveth. How
evere, therfore, schulde eny man seie that the sufficient leernyng and kunnyng
of usure or of the vertu contrarie to usure is groundid in Holi Scripture? Howe
evere schal thilk litil now rehercid clausul, Luke vi, be sufficient for to
answere and assoile alle the harde scrupulose doutis and questiouns which al dai
han neede to be assoiled in mennis bargenyngis and cheffaringis togidere? Ech
man having to do with suche questiouns mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth litil
or noon light thereto at al. Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he
forbedith usure, and therfore al that mai be take therbi is this, that usure is
unleeful; but though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful, how schal y wite
herbi what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it, and whanne in a bargeyn is
usure, though to summen seemeth noon, and how in a bargeyn is noon usure though
to summen ther semeth to be?”
Pecock’s defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching of Scripture
was the real answer to the statement afterwards made by Luther that the text,
“Love thy neighbour as thyself,” was an all-sufficient guide to action (see
Chap. II, p. 99). Examples of teaching as to usury contained in books such as
Pecock had in mind will be found in Myrc’s _Instructions for Parish Priests_
(Early English Text Society, ed. E. Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, 1902), the
_Pupilla Oculi_, and _Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt_ (Early English Text
Society, ed. R. Morris, 1866).
[I-74] _The Catechism of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews_, 1552, ed. T.
G. Law, 1884, pp. 97-9. Under the seventh commandment are denounced: “Fyftlie,
al thay that defraudis or spoulyeis the common geir, aganis the common weill for
lufe of their awin pryvate and singulare weill. Saxtlie, all usuraris and
ockiraris synnis aganis this command, that wil nocht len thair geir frelie, bot
makis conditione of ockir, aganis the command of Christe. Sevintlie, all thay
quhilk hais servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair fee or waige,
accordyng to conditioun and thair deservyng, quilk syn, as sanct James sayis,
cryis vengeance before God. Auchtlie, all thai that strykis cowyne of unlauchful
metall, quhair throuch the common weil is hurt and skaithit. The nynte, all
Merchandis that sellis corruppit and evyll stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony
uther in bying or sellyng use desait, falsate, parjurie, wrang mettis or
weychtis, to the skaith of thair nychtbour, thay committ gret syn agane this
command. Nother can we clenge fra breakyng of this command all kyndis of craftis
men quhilk usis nocht thair awin craft leillalie and trewlie as thai suld do....
All wrechis that wyl be ground ryche incontynent, quhay be fraud, falset, and
gyle twynnis men and thair geir, quhay may keip thair nychbour fra povertie and
myschance and dois it nocht. Quhay takis ouer sair mail, ouer mekle ferme or ony
blake maillis fra thair tennands, or puttis thair cottaris to ouir sair
labouris, quhair throw the tenentis and cottaris is put to herschip. Quha invies
his nychbouris gud fortune, ouir byis him or takis his geir out of his handis
with fair hechtis, or prevenis him, or begyles him at his marchandis hand.” The
detail in which different forms of commercial sharp practice are denounced is
noticeable.
[I-75] See _e.g._ Matt. Paris, _Chron. Maj._, vol. iii, pp. 191-2, for the case
of a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excommunicate
usurer, is seized by order of the Count of Brittany and buried alive, bound to
the dead man. See also _Materials for the History of Thomas Becket_, vol. v, p.
38.
[I-76] Harduin, _Acta Conciliorum_, vol. vii, pp. 1017-20; “Anno prædicto
[1485], diebus Mercurii et Jovis prædictis, scilicet ante Ramos Palmarum, ibidem
apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesiæ de Vicano; coram domino archiepiscopo, et
mandato suo, personæ infrascriptæ, parochiani de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria
pravitate erant quam plurimum diffamati; coram domino propter hoc vocati
abjuraverunt: et per mandatum domini summas infrascriptas, quas se confessi
fuerunt habuisse per usurariam pravitatem, per juramentum suum restituere
promiserunt, et stare juri super his coram eo. Bertrandus de Faveriis abjuratus
usuras, ut præmittitur, promisit restituere centum solidos monetæ antiquæ: quos,
prout ipse confessus est, habuerat per usurariam pravitatem....” Thirty-six more
cases were treated in this way.
[I-77] Villani, _Cronica_, book xii, chap. lviii (ed. 1823, vol. vi, p. 142):
Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor: “Ma per attignere danari,
d’ogni piccola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per iniquità contra Iddio, o
dicesse che usura non fosse peccato mortale, o simili parole, condannava in
grossa somma di danari, secondo che l’uomo era ricco.”
[I-78] Constitutions of Clarendon, cap. 15: “Placita de debitis, quæ fide
interposita debentur, vel absque interpositione fidei, sint in justitia regis.”
On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, 2nd
ed., 1898, vol. ii, pp. 197-202, and F. Makower, _Constitutional History of the
Church of England_, 1895, § 60.
[I-79] _Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London_, ed. A. H.
Thomas, pp. 44, 88, 156, 235; Selden Soc., _Borough Customs_, ed. M. Bateson,
vol. ii, 1906, pp. 161 (London) and 209-10 (Dublin); _Records of Leicester_, ed.
M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1901, p. 49. For similar prohibitions by manorial courts,
see _Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian_, p. 28, and G. P. Scrope,
_History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, 1852, p. 238.
[I-80] _Annales de Burton_, p. 256; Wilkins, _Concilia_, vol. ii, p. 115; _Rot.
Parl._, vol. ii, p. 129_b_.
[I-81] _Cal. of Letter Books of the City of London_, ed. R. R. Sharpe, vol. H,
pp. 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200, 206-7, 261-2, 365; _Liber Albus_, bk. iii, pt. ii,
pp. 77, 315, 394-401, 683; Selden Soc., _Leet Jurisdiction in the City of
Norwich_, p. 35; _Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian_, pp. 26, 27.
[I-82] _Rot. Parl._, vol. ii, pp. 332_a_, 350_b_.
[I-83] R. H. Morris, _Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns_, 1894 (?), p.
190.
[I-84] Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xi, no. 307; Bdle. xxix, nos. 193-5;
Bdle. xxxi, nos. 96-100, 527; Bdle. lx, no. 20; Bdle. lxiv, no. 1089. See also
_Year Books and Plea Rolls as Sources of Historical Information_, by H. G.
Richardson, in _Trans. Royal Historical Society_, 4th series, vol. v, 1922, pp.
47-8.
[I-85] Ed. Gibson, _Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani_, 2nd ed., 1761, p.
1026.
[I-86] 15 Ed. III, st. 1, c. 5; 3 Hen. VII, c. 5; 11 Hen. VII, c. 8; 13 Eliz. c.
8; 21 Jac. I, c. 17.
[I-87] _Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of City of London_, ed. A. H. Thomas,
pp. 1, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, 156, 226, 235, 251. The cases of the
smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In the fifteenth century a gild
still occasionally tried to enforce its rules by proceedings in an
ecclesiastical court (see Wm. H. Hale, _A Series of Precedents and Proceedings
in Criminal Causes_, 1847, nos. xxxvi and lxviii, where persons breaking gild
rules are cited before the Commissary’s court).
[I-88] Canterbury and York Soc., _Registrum Thome Spofford_, ed. A. T.
Bannister, 1919, p. 52 (1424); and Surtees Society, vol. cxxxviii, _The Register
of Thomas of Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York_, ed. Wm. Brown, 1925, vol. i,
pp. 187-8: “6 kal. Maii, 1303. Wilton.’ Littera testimonialis super purgacione
domini Johannis de Multhorp, vicarii ecclesie de Garton’, de usura sibi
imposita. Universis Christi fidelibus, ad quos presentes littere pervenerint,
pateat per easdem quod, cum dominus Johannes de Multhorp’, vicarius ecclesie de
Garton’, nostre diocesis, coram nobis Thoma, Dei gracia, etc., in visitacione
nostra super usura fuisset notatus, videlicet, quod mutuavit cuidam Jollano de
Briddale, ut dicebatur, xxxiij s. iiij d., eo pacto quod idem vicarius ab eo
reciperet per x annos annis singulis x s. pro eisdem, de quibus eciam dictum
fuit quod prefatus Jollanus dicto vicario pro octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et
solvit predicto; eundem vicarium super hoc vocari fecimus coram nobis et ei
objecimus supradicta, que ipse inficians constancius atque negans se optulit in
forma juris super hiis legitime purgaturum. Nos autem eidem vicario purgacionem
suam cum sua sexta manu vicariorum et aliorum presbiterorum sui ordinis
indiximus faciendam, quam die Veneris proxima ante festum apostolorum Philippi
et Jacobi (April 26), anno gracie mºcccº tercio, ad hoc sibi prefixo, in manerio
nostro de Wilton’ super articulo recipimus supradicto, idemque vicarius unacum
dominis Johanne, rectore ecclesie B.M. juxta portam castri de Eboraco, Johanne
et Johanne, de Wharrum et de Wyverthorp’ ecclesiarum vicariis ac Roberto,
Johanne, Alano, Stepheno et Willelmo, de Nafferton’, Driffeld’, Wetewang’,
Foston’ et Wintringham ecclesiarum presbiteris parochialibus fidedignis, de
memorato articulo legitime se purgavit; propter quod ipsum vicarium sic purgatum
pronunciamus et inmunem sentencialiter declaramus, restituentes eundem ad suam
pristinam bonam famam. In cujus rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est
appensum.”
[I-89] _Early Chancery Proceedings_, Bdle. xviii, no. 137; Bdle. xix, no. 2155;
Bdle. xxiv, no. 255; Bdle. xxxi, no. 348. See also A. Abram, _Social England in
the Fifteenth Century_, 1909, pp. 215-17. In view of these examples, it seems
probable that a more thorough examination of the _Early Chancery Proceedings_
would show that, even in the fifteenth century, the jurisdiction of the
ecclesiastical courts in matters of contract and usury was of greater practical
importance than has sometimes been supposed.
[I-90] Surtees Soc., vol. lxiv, 1875 (_Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate Church
of Ripon_) contains more than 100 cases in which the court deals with questions
of contract, debt, etc. The case which is dismissed “propter civilitatem causæ”
occurs in 1532 (Surtees Soc., vol. xxi, 1845, _Ecclesiastical Proceedings from
the Courts of Durham_, p. 49).
[I-91] Chetham Soc., vol. xliv, 1901, _Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court of
Whalley_, pp. 15-16.
[I-92] Surtees Soc., vol. lxiv, 1875, _Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate Church
of Ripon_, p. 26.
[I-93] Hale, _op. cit._ (note 87 above), no. ccxxxviii.
[I-94] See Chap. III, p. 161.
[I-95] For parishes, see S. O. Addy, _Church and Manor_, 1913, chap. xv, where
numerous examples are given. For a gild which appears to have acted as a bank,
see _Hist. MSS. Com._, 11th Report, 1887, Appx., pt. iii, p. 228 (_MSS. of the
Borough of King’s Lynn_), and for other examples of loans, H. F. Westlake, _The
Parish Gilds of Mediæval England_, 1919, pp. 61-3, _Records of the City of
Oxford_, ed. Wm. H. Turner, 1880, p. 8, _Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral_, ed. C.
Wordsworth, pt. ii, 1897, pp. 616-17, and G. Unwin, _The Gilds and Companies of
London_, 1908, p. 121. For a hospital, see _Hist. MSS. Com._, 14th Report,
Appx., pt. viii, 1895, p. 129 (_MSS. of the Corporation of Bury St. Edmunds_),
where 20_d._ is lent (or given) to a poor man to buy seed for his land. A
statement (made half a century after the Dissolution) as to loans by monasteries
is quoted by F. A. Gasquet, _Henry VIII and the English Monasteries_, 7th ed.,
1920, p. 463; specific examples are not known to me.
[I-96] W. H. Bliss, _Cal. of Papal Letters_, vol. i, pp. 267-8.
[I-97] For the early history of the _Monts de Piété_ see Holzapfel, _Die Anfänge
der Montes Pietatis_ (1903), and for their development in the Low Countries, A.
Henne, _Histoire du Règne de Charles-quint en Belgique_, 1859, vol. v, pp.
220-3. For proposals to establish them in England see S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cx, no.
57 (printed in Tawney and Power, _Tudor Economic Documents_, vol. iii, sect.
iii, no. 6), and my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s _Discourse upon Usury_,
1925, pp. 125-7.
[I-98] Camden Soc., _A Relation of the Island of England about the Year 1500_
(translated from the Italian), 1847, p. 23.
[I-99] Lyndwood, _Provinciale_, sub. tit. _Usura_, and Gibson, _Codex Jur. Eccl.
Angl._, vol. ii, p. 1026.
[I-100] Pecock, _The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy_, pt. iii,
chap. iv, pp. 296-7: “Also Crist seide here in this present proces, that ‘at
God’ it is possible a riche man to entre into the kingdom of heuen; that is to
seie, with grace which God profrith and geueth ... though he abide stille riche,
and though withoute such grace it is ouer hard to him being riche to entre.
Wherfore folewith herof openli, that it is not forbodun of God eny man to be
riche; for thanne noon such man schulde euere entre heuen.... And if it be not
forbode eny man to be riche, certis thanne it is leeful ynough ech man to be
riche; in lasse than he vowe the contrarie or that he knowith bi assay and
experience him silf so miche indisposid anentis richessis, that he schal not
mowe rewle him silf aright anentis tho richessis: for in thilk caas he is bonde
to holde him silf in poverte.” The embarrassing qualification at the end--which
suggests the question, who then dare be rich?--is the more striking because of
the common-sense rationalism of the rest of the passage.
[I-101] Trithemius, quoted by J. Janssen, _History of the German People at the
close of the Middle Ages_, vol. ii, 1896, p. 102.
[I-102] _Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London_, ed. A. H.
Thomas, pp. 157-8.
[I-103] See A. Luchaire, _Social France at the time of Philip Augustus_
(translated by E. B. Krehbiel), pp. 391-2, where an eloquent denunciation by
Jacques de Vitry is quoted.
[I-104] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is a
surveyor, one Humberstone.)
[I-105] See e.g. Chaucer, _The Persone’s Tale_, §§ 64-6. The parson expresses
the orthodox view that “the condicioun of thraldom and the firste cause of
thraldom is for sinne.” But he insists that serfs and lords are spiritually
equal: “Thilke that thou clepest thy thralles been goddes peple; for humble folk
been Cristes freendes.”
[I-106] Gratian, _Decretum_, pt. ii, causa x, Q. ii, c. iii, and causa xii, Q.
ii, c. xxxix.
[I-107] _Summa Theol._, 1^{a} 2^{ae}, Q. xciv, art. v, § 3.
[I-108] An article of the German Peasants’ program in 1525 declared: “For men to
hold us as their own property ... is pitiable enough, considering that Christ
has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without
exception, by the shedding of His precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent
with Scripture that we should be free.” (The program is printed in J. S.
Schapiro, _Social Reform and the Reformation_, 1909, pp. 137-42.) The rebels
under Ket prayed “that all bondmen may be made free, for God freed them all with
His precious blood-shedding” (printed in Bland, Brown, and Tawney, _English
Economic History, Select Documents_, pt. ii, sect. i, no. 8).