common in the Middle Ages, of the holy hands of monks being extended to labours always before regarded as degrading. Thus, the condition of the country appears to have been at that time less miserable than that of the towns, except in the case of some few centres, which were of great importance as points of support for future efforts. There can be no doubt of the tendency of the medieval system to distribute the population uniformly, even in the most unfavourable localities, by an interior influence, analogous to the exterior, which, interdicting invasion, established settled populations in the most barren countries of Europe. We must unquestionably refer to this period the systems of great public works undertaken to improve places of abode, whose inconveniences could not longer be escaped from by a hostile emigration; for it was now that the miraculous existence of Venice, and yet more, of Holland, began to become possible, by means of obstinate and thoroughly organized efforts, beside which the most laborious of ancient operations appear but secondary affairs. Here then was a beginning of popular emancipation, which must necessarily precede and prepare for a total abolition of personal slavery of every kind. The next period, of three centuries, from the beginning of the eighth to that of the eleventh, was the season of a final preparation for the industrial life, which must succeed to the abolition of popular servitude. Of the two great objects of the institution of personal bondage, one had been accomplished under the period of conquest ;-the leaving scope to military activity for the accomplishment of its ends. The other,—the providing industrial training to the mass of men, to whose nature toil was repugnant,—was fulfilled when there was a cessation of the influx of new slaves, and when, under the feudal system, the chiefs were dispersed among submissive populations, and their inferiors were initiated into industrial life by a regular organization. A starting-point was fixed for each serf, whence he might proceed, by extremely slow degrees, towards individual independence, the principle of which was universally sanctioned by Catholic morality. The conditions of ransom, usually very moderate, affixed to such liberation, besides regulating a just and useful indemnification, furnished a significant safeguard of such progress, by showing that the freedman was capable of such moderation and foresight as rendered him fit for self-government. For this indispensable preparation the slave of a more ancient time was unfit, while the serf of the Middle Ages was more and more disposed to it, both in town and country, by the influences of the corresponding social state. Such was the temporal influence of the period immediately preceding personal emancipation. The spiritual influence is obvious enough. The serfs had the same religion with their superiors, and the same fundamental education which was derived from it; and not only did religion afford them rights by prescribing reciprocal COUNTRY AND TOWN. 309 duties, but it steadily proclaimed voluntary emancipation to be a Christian duty, whenever the labouring class showed its inclination and its fitness for liberty. The famous bull of Alexander III., on the general abolition of slavery in Christendom, was merely a systematic sanction, and a rather late one, of a custom which had been extending for some centuries. From the sixth century, the temporal chiefs, who were under the fresh influences of Catholicism, had conferred personal freedom, sometimes on the inhabitants of a considerable district; and the practice spread so rapidly that history relates some few cases in which the boon came too early for the needs and the desires of the recipients. The influence which thus wrought, was not that of moral doctrine alone. The morality was enforced by the persevering action of a priesthood which was opposed to the institution of caste, and open to be recruited from every social class, and which relied mainly for the permanence of its organization on the labouring classes, whose rise it therefore constantly favoured. I have said that at the beginning of the change, the condition of the agricultural labourers was less burdensome than that of the artificers in the towns: but the emancipation proceeded faster in the towns than in the country. The diffusion of the agricultural population, and the more empirical nature of their daily employment, must have retarded the tendency to entire emancipation, and the fitness both to obtain and to use it; the residence of their chiefs in the midst of them would generally relax the desire, and increase the difficulty of enfranchisement; and the spiritual influence itself would be at its weakest in that case. Whereas, the town populations which had obtained, as organized communities, full industrial. development, reacted upon the country; so that during the twelfth, and yet more the thirteenth century, the cultivators gradually obtained freedom in almost all important parts of Western Europe, as Adam Smith and Hume have shown us in expositions which are luminous, in spite of the injurious influence of the philosophy of their day. If we look at the process from the other end, we shall see why personal liberty must have been first obtained in the cities and towns. The servitude was more onerous there, from the absence of the master, who delivered over the multitude to the despotism of his agent. The wish for liberation, which must thence arise, was aided by the concentration of numbers, which made its fulfilment the easier. A far more important reason was that the labour of the townsmen, whether manufacturing or commercial, was of a more abstract and indirect nature, requiring a more special training than that of tilling the soil: it required a smaller number of agents, a more easy and habitual concert, and a greater freedom of operative action; a concurrence of qualities which easily explains the earlier emancipation of the manufacturers and traders. If my space permitted further analysis, I could easily show that the traders, concerned in the more abstract and indirect employment, were enfranchised before the manufacturers; and that the first class of traders who obtained their freedom were those who were concerned in the most abstract and indirect kind of commerce,-that of money exchanges. The money-changers rose to be opulent bankers, the first of whom were usually Jews; and, as Jews, outside of a servitude which would have incorporated them with Christians, however otherwise oppressed. But they were systematically encouraged by the polity of the time, and always more free in Rome than in any other part of Christendom. In precocious Italy, the most special precocity was in the commercial genius which made Venice the wonder of the civilized world; and Genoa and Pisa, even before Florence. The same kind of importance distinguished the commercial elements of the Hanseatic League and cities of Flanders: and the nascent industrial prosperity of France and England was attributable to the establishments, in the thirteenth century, of the Italian and Hanseatic traders, which, from being mere countinghouses, became magazines, and were at length transformed into great centres of manufacture. tical liberty. In inquiries of a different nature from this, it is usual to present Birth of poli- the phase of political struggle as beginning with the enfranchisement of communities, without inquiring whether that enfranchisement had any other origin than accident, or some evidently insufficient cause. I must avoid any such fatal break in the history of society by pointing out how and when any collective liberty was acquired by communities. The interval between the obtaining of personal and collective liberty was short; for the latter was not only a necessary consequence of the former, because without it there could be no great industrial progress, but it was obtained more and more rapidly as the forces of opposition relaxed before growing success. Independence was obtained more easily than personal liberty, because it was known that the one could not long be withheld when the other was granted; and it can scarcely be said that the interval between the completion of the first movement and the beginning of the other was longer than the earlier half of the eleventh century. The feudal organism, dispersive in its nature, and foreseeing nothing of the future struggles which must ensue, made no difficulty of admitting industrial communities among the elements of which it was composed. The Catholic organism was even more favourable to such a progression, not only from Christian principle, but from the support that the sacerdotal polity expected to derive from the elevation of the new classes, whose mental emancipation was as yet dreamed of by nobody. With regard to the dates, the entire movement of personal emancipation, from the end of slavery to the end of serfage, coincided with that of defensive warfare, beginning with Charles Martel, and ending with the establishment of the Normans in the West: and the next phase,—that of the establishment of industrial com BIRTH OF POLITICAL LIBERTY. 311 munities, with its resulting operation on rural enfranchisement,was coincident with the crusading struggle against the invasion of Mussulman monotheism. As for the area, it was precisely that of the Catholic and feudal system,-the movement taking place universally within the limits of that system, and nowhere outside of it, either under the Mohammedan or the Byzantine monotheism; and it was easy and rapid above all in Italy, where the Catholic and feudal organism manifested its greatest vigour. The Catholic influence showed itself in the permanent anxiety of the popes to accommodate the differences which impeded the nascent coalition of the industrial communities, whose polity was for a long time habitually directed by the religious orders. And the feudal influence was seen at the western limit of the area, where the Hanse Towns arose under the protection of the Empire, corresponding with the Italian cities by the natural intervention of the Flemish towns, and completing the general constitution of the great industrial movement of the Middle Ages, which spread, by the Mediterranean basin, to the furthest parts of the East, and by the Northern seas to the northern extremities of Europe; an area of European relations far more vast than the Roman dominion could boast in its proudest days. It is for philosophical minds to feel how great is our obligation to the régime which gave its first impulse to our existing civilization, however incompatible with further human progress that system may have become. Our next step must be to ascertain the natural characteristics of this new moving power, and to point out the vices which have equally distinguished it, up to this time. Characteristics trial move- There can be no doubt that the change we have been examining constitutes the greatest temporal revolution ever experienced by mankind, since its direct effect was to change irrevocably the natural mode of existence. If the Greek philosophers of twelve centuries before had been told that slavery would be abolished, and that the freemen of a great and powerful population would subject themselves to labours then considered servile, the boldest and most generous thinkers would have called out upon a Utopia so absurd and utterly baseless: for the world was yet too young for men to have learned that, in matters of social change, spontaneous and gradual evolutions always end in far transcending the most audacious original speculation. By this vast regeneration, the race closed its preliminary period, and entered upon its definitive state, in regard to practical life, which was thenceforth brought into agreement with our general nature; for a life of labour is, when become habitual, the fittest to develop all our chief dispositions of every kind, as well as to stimulate to co-operation; whereas military life exercises the faculties very partially, and makes the activity of some depend on the repression of others. By the highest and truest test that we can apply,-the gradual Personal effect. ascendency of the faculties of humanity over those of animality, the substitution of the industrial for the military life has raised, by one degree, the primitive type of Social Man. The use of the understanding in practical matters is more marked in the industrial life of the moderns than in the military life of the ancients, if we compare two organisms of the same rank in the two situations, and discard all reference to modern. military life, which requires a special mechanical character in the common soldier. Industrial pursuit is suitable to the intellectual mediocrity of the vast majority of the race, which can best deal with clear, concrete, limited questions, requiring steady but easy attention, admitting of a direct or proximate solution, relating to the practical interests of civilized life, and bringing after them a pretty certain reward of ease and independence, in return for sense and industry. The next test,-the influence of the social on the personal instinct,-shows us that industrial life favours a universal goodwill, because every man's daily toil may be regarded as concerning others quite as much as himself; whereas the military life encouraged the most malignant passions, in the midst of the noblest devotedness. If it is objected that minds are restricted, and that selfishness is encouraged, by such extreme division of labour and care for private interest as we every day witness, the explanation is that the industrial expansion has thus far been merely spontaneous, not having been systematized by rational principles, as it is destined to be. Till it is organized to the same extent as the military system was in its best days, it would be unjust to compare the social qualities of the two. If war, with its barbarous origin and temper, could be organized into an instrument of social service, there is every reason to hope that the vices which are involved in industrial pursuit may be, in like manner, neutralized by a similar method. In the absence of such discipline, the industrial life has unquestionably developed new intellectual and sympathetic power in the very lowest class of the population, from the Middle Ages to this day. The influence of the change on domestic life has been vast; for Domestic it opened that mode of existence for the first time to effect. the most numerous class,—there being nothing in the condition of slaves or serfs which is worthy the name of family life. Even free men were not before aware of the destination of mankind at large for domestic life, and were perpetually drawn from it by the tumultuous emotions of the city and the battle-field. Again, the two great family relations were improved by the change which brought the occupations, and therefore the manners, of the two sexes into more resemblance, and which lessened the absolute dependence of children upon their parents. Much of the benefit is lost by the absence of organization: but the industrial and the Catholic system worked well together in favour of domestic |