"Whaune Adam dalf and Eve span,Who was thane a gentilman?"[1]
"Whaune Adam dalf and Eve span,Who was thane a gentilman?"[1]
"Whaune Adam dalf and Eve span,
Who was thane a gentilman?"[1]
at least, so it is reported of him in theChronicon Angliae, the work of an unknown monk of St. Albans (Roll Series, 1874, London, p. 321). Froissart, that picturesque journalist, who naturally, as a friend of the Court, detested the levelling doctrines of this political rebel, gives what he calls one of John Ball's customary sermons. He is evidently not attempting to report any actual sermon, but rather to give a general summary of what was supposed to be Ball's opinions. As such, it is worth quoting in full.
"My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill have they used us! and for what reason do they thus hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents—Adam and Eve? And what can they show, and what reason give, why they should be more the masters than ourselves? Except, perhaps, in making us labour and work for them to spend." Froissart goes on to say that for speeches of this nature the Archbishop of Canterbury put Ball in prison, and adds that for himself he considers that "it would have been better if he had been confined there all his life, or had been put to death." However, the Archbishop "set him at liberty, for he could not forconscience sake have put him to death" (Froissart'sChronicle, 1848, London, book ii. cap. 73, pp. 652-653).
From this extract all that can be gathered with certainty is the popular idea of the opinions John Ball held; and it is instructive to find that in the Primate's eyes there was nothing in the doctrine to warrant the extreme penalty of the law. But in reality we have no certainty as to what Ball actually taught, for in another account we find that, preaching on Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381, during the last days of the revolt, far fiercer words are ascribed to him. He is made to appeal to the people to destroy the evil lords and unjust judges, who lurked like tares among the wheat. "For when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom—all will have common nobility, rank, and power." Of course it may be that the war-fever of the revolt had affected his language; but the sudden change of tone imputed in the later speeches makes the reader somewhat suspicious of the authenticity.
The same difficulty which is experienced in discovering the real mind of Ball is encountered when dealing with Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, who were, with him, the leaders of the revolt. The confession of Jack Straw quoted in theChronicon Angliae, like nearly all mediaeval "confessions," cannot be taken seriously. His accusers and judges readily supplied what they considered he should have himself admitted. Without any better evidence we cannot with safety say along what lines he pushed his theories, or whether, indeed, he had any theories at all. Again, Wat Tyler is reported to have spoken threateningly to the King on the morning of his murder by Lord Mayor Walworth; but the evidence is once more entirely one-sided, contributed by thosewho were only too anxious to produce information which should blacken the rebels in the minds of the educated classes. As a matter of fact, the purely official documents, in which we can probably put much more reliance (such as the petitions that poured in from all parts of the country on behalf of the peasants, and the proclamations issued by Richard II, in which all their demands were granted on condition of their immediate withdrawal from the capital), do not leave the impression that the people really advocated any communistic doctrines; oppression is complained of, the lawyers execrated, the labour laws are denounced, and that is practically all.
It may be, indeed, that the traditional view of Ball and his followers, which makes them one with the contemporaneous revolts of the Jacquerie in France, the Ciompi in Florence, &c., has some basis in fact. But at present we have no means of gauging the precise amount of truth it contains.
But even better known than John Ball is one who is commonly connected with the Peasant Revolt, and whose social opinions are often grouped under the same heading as that of the "Mad Priest of Kent,"—John Wycliff, Master of Balliol, and parson of Lutterworth. This Oxford professor has left us a number of works from which to quarry materials to build up afresh the edifice he intended to erect. His chief contribution is contained in hisDe Civili Dominio, but its composition extended over a long period of years, during which time his views were evidently changing; so that the precise meaning of his famous theory on the Dominion of Grace is therefore difficult to ascertain.
But in the opening of his treatise he lays down the two main "truths" upon which his whole system rests:
I. No one in mortal sin has any right to the gifts of God;II. Whoever is in a state of grace has a right, not indeed to possess the good things of God, but to use them.
I. No one in mortal sin has any right to the gifts of God;
II. Whoever is in a state of grace has a right, not indeed to possess the good things of God, but to use them.
He seems to look upon the whole question from a feudal point of view. Sin is treason, involving therefore the forfeiture of all that is held of God. Grace, on the other hand, makes us the liegemen of God, and gives us the only possible right to all His good gifts. But, he would seem to argue, it is incontestable that property and power are from God, for so Scripture plainly assures us. Therefore, he concludes, by grace, and grace alone, are we put in dominion over all things; once we are in loyal subjection to God, we own all things, and hold them by the only sure title. "Dominion by grace" is thus made to lead direct to communism. His conclusion is quite clear:Omnia debent esse communia.
In one of his sermons (Oxford, 1869, vol. i. p. 260), when he has proved this point with much complacent argumentation, he poses himself with the obvious difficulty that in point of fact this is not true; for many who are apparently in mortal sin do possess property and have dominion. What, then, is to be done, for "they be commonly mighty, and no man dare take from them"? His answer is not very cheerful, for he has to console his questioner with the barren scholastic comfort that "nevertheless, he hath them not, but occupieth things that be not his." Emboldened by the virtue of this dry logic, he breaks out into his gospel of plain assertion that "the saints have now all things that they would have." His whole argument, accordingly, does not get very far, for he is still speaking really (though he does not at times very clearly distinguish between the two) much more about the right to a thing than its actual possession. He does not really defend the despoiling of the evil rich at all—in his own graphic phrase, "God must serve the Devil"; and all that the blameless poor can do is to say to themselves that though the rich "possess" or "occupy," the poor "have." It seems a strange sort of "having"; but he is careful to note that, "as philosophers say, 'having is in many manners.'"
Wycliff himself, perhaps, had not definitely made up his mind as to the real significance of his teaching; for the system which he sketches does not seem to have been clearly thought out. His words certainly appear to bear a communistic sense; but it is quite plain that this was not the intention of the writer. He defends Plato at some length against the criticism of Aristotle, but only on the ground that the disciple misunderstood the master: "for I do not think Socrates to have so intended, but only to have had the true catholic idea that each should have the use of what belongs to his brother" (De Civili Dominio, London, 1884-1904, vol. i. p. 99). And just a few lines farther on he adds, "But whether Socrates understood this or not, I shall not further question. This only I know, that by the law of charity every Christian ought to have the just use of what belongs to his neighbour." What else is this really but the teaching of Aristotle that there should be "private property and common use"? It is, in fact, the very antithesis of communism.
Some have thought that he was fettered in his language by his academic position; but no Oxford don has ever said such hard things about his Alma Mater as did this master of Balliol. "Universities," says he, "houses of study, colleges, as well as degrees andmasterships in them, are vanities introduced by the heathen, and profit the Church as little and as much as does Satan himself." Surely it were impossible to accuse such a man of economy of language, and of being cowed by any University fetish.
His words, we have noted above, certainly can bear the interpretation of a very levelling philosophy. Even in his own generation he was accused through his followers of having had a hand in instigating the revolt. His reply was an angry expostulation (Trevelyan'sEngland in the Age of Wycliff, 1909, London, p. 201). Indeed, considering that John of Gaunt was his best friend and protector, it would be foolish to connect Wycliff with the Peasant Rising. The insurgents, in their hatred of Gaunt, whom they looked upon as the cause of their oppression, made all whom they met swear to have no king named John (Chronicon Angliae, p. 286). And John Ball, whom the author of theFasciculi Zizaniorum(p. 273, Roll Series, 1856, London) calls the "darling follower" of Wycliff, can only be considered as such in his doctrinal teaching on the dogma of the Real Presence. It must be remembered that to contemporary England Wycliff's fame came from two of his opinions, viz. his denial of a real objective Presence in the Mass (for Christ was there only by "ghostly wit"), and his advice to King and Parliament to confiscate Church lands. But whenever Ball or anyone else is accused of being a follower of Wycliff, nothing else is probably referred to than the professor's well-known opinion on the sacrament of the Eucharist. Hence it is that theChronicon Angliaespeaks of John Ball as having been imprisoned earlier in life for his Wycliffite errors, which it calls simplyperversa dogmata. The "Morning Star of the Reformation" being thereforedeclared innocent of complicity with the Peasant Revolt, it is interesting to note to whom it is that he ascribes the whole force of the rebellion. For him the head and front of all offending was the hated friars.
Against this imputation the four Orders of friars (the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites) issued a protest. Fortunately in their spirited reply they give the reasons on account of which they are supposed to have shared in the rising. These were principally negative. Thus it was stated that their influence with the people was so great that had they ventured to oppose the spirit of revolt their words would have been listened to (Fasciculi Zizaniorum, p. 293). The chronicler of St. Albans is equally convinced of their weakness in not preventing it, and declares that the flattery which they used alike on rich and poor had also no mean share in producing the social unrest (Chronicon Angliae, p. 312). Langland also, in his "Vision of Piers Plowman," goes out of his way to denounce them for their levelling doctrines:
"Envy heard this and bade friars go to school,And learn logic and law and eke contemplation,And preach men of Plato and prove it by SenecaThat all things under Heaven ought to be in common,And yet he lieth, as I live, and to the lewd so preachethFor God made to men a law and Moses it taught—Non concupisces rem proximi tui"(Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods).
"Envy heard this and bade friars go to school,And learn logic and law and eke contemplation,And preach men of Plato and prove it by SenecaThat all things under Heaven ought to be in common,And yet he lieth, as I live, and to the lewd so preachethFor God made to men a law and Moses it taught—
"Envy heard this and bade friars go to school,
And learn logic and law and eke contemplation,
And preach men of Plato and prove it by Seneca
That all things under Heaven ought to be in common,
And yet he lieth, as I live, and to the lewd so preacheth
For God made to men a law and Moses it taught—
Non concupisces rem proximi tui"(Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods).
Non concupisces rem proximi tui"
(Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods).
Here then it is distinctly asserted that the spread of communistic doctrines was due to the friars. Moreover, the same popular opinion is reflected in the fabricated confession of Jack Straw, for he is made to declare that had the rebels been successful, all the monastic orders, as well as the secular clergy, would have been put todeath, and only the friars would have been allowed to continue. Their numbers would have sufficed for the spiritual needs of the whole kingdom (Chronicon Angliae, p. 309). Moreover, it has been noticed that not a few of them actually took part in the revolt, heading some of the bands of countrymen who marched on London.
It will have been seen, therefore, that Communism was a favourite rallying-cry throughout the Middle Ages for all those on whom the oppression of the feudal yoke bore heavily. It was partly also a religious ideal for some of the strange gnostic sects which flourished at that era. Moreover, it was an efficient weapon when used as an accusation, for Wycliff and the friars alike both dreaded its imputation. Perhaps of all that period, John Ball alone held it consistently and without shame. Eloquent in the way of popular appeal, he manifestly endeavoured to force it as a social reform on the peasantry, who were suffering under the intolerable grievance of the Statutes of Labourers. But though he roused the countryside to his following, and made the people for the first time a thing of dread to nobles and King, it does not appear that his ideas spread much beyond his immediate lieutenants. Just as in their petitions the rebels made no doctrinal statements against Church teaching, nor any capital out of heretical attacks (except, singularly enough, to accuse the Primate, whom they subsequently put to death, of overmuch leniency to Lollards), so, too, they made no reference to the central idea of Ball's social theories. In fact, little abstract matter could well have appealed to them. Concrete oppression was all they knew, and were this done away with, it is evident that they would have been well content.
The case of the friars is curious. For though theirsuperiors made many attempts to prove their hostility to the rebels, it is evident that their actual teaching was suspected by those in high places. It is the exact reversal of the case of Wycliff. His views, which sounded so favourable to communism, are found on examination to be really nothing but a plea to leave things alone, "for the saints have now all they would have"; while on the other hand the theories of the friars, in themselves so logical and consistent, and in appearance obviously conservative to the fullest extent, turn out to contain the germ of revolution.
Said Lord Acton with his sober wit: "Not the devil, but St. Thomas Aquinas, was the first Whig."
FOOTNOTE:[1]This rhyme is of course much older than John Ball;cf.Richard Rolle (1300-1349), i. 73, London, 1895.
[1]This rhyme is of course much older than John Ball;cf.Richard Rolle (1300-1349), i. 73, London, 1895.
[1]This rhyme is of course much older than John Ball;cf.Richard Rolle (1300-1349), i. 73, London, 1895.
The schoolmen in their adventurous quest after a complete harmony of all philosophic learning could not neglect the great outstanding problems of social and economic life. They flourished at the very period of European history when commerce and manufacture were coming back to the West, and their rise synchronises with the origin of the great houses of the Italian and Jewish bankers. Yet there was very little in the past learning of Christian teachers to guide them in these matters, for the patristic theories, which we have already described, and a few isolated passages cited in the Decretals of Gratian, formed as yet almost the only contribution to the study of these sciences. However, this absence of any organised body of knowledge was for them but one more stimulus towards theelaboration of a thorough synthesis of the moral aspect of wealth. A few of the earlier masters made reference, detached and personal, to the subject of dispute, but it was rather in the form of a disorderly comment than the definite statement of a theory.
Then came the translation of Aristotle'sPolitics, with the keen criticism they contain of the views Plato had advocated. Here at once the intellect of Europe found an exact exposition of principles, and began immediately to debate their excellence and their defect. St. Thomas Aquinas set to work on a literal commentary, and at his express desire an accurate translation was made direct from the Greek by his fellow-Dominican, William of Moerbeke. Later on, when all this had had time to settle and find its place, St. Thomas worked out his own theory of private property in two short articles in his famousSumma Theologica. In his treatise on Justice, which occupies a large proportion of theSecund Secundaeof theSumma, he found himself forced to discuss the moral evil of theft; and to do this adequately he had first to explain what he meant by private possessions. Without these, of course, there could be no theft at all.
He began, therefore, by a preliminary article on the actual state of created things—that is, the material, so to say, out of which private property is evolved. Here he notes that the nature of things, their constituent essence, is in the hands of God, not man. The worker can change the form, and, in consequence, the value of a thing, but the substance which lies beneath all the outward show is too subtle for him to affect it in any way. To the Supreme Being alone can belong the power of creation, annihilation, and absolute mutation. But besides this tremendous force which God holds incommunicably, there is another which He has given to man, namely, the use of created things. For when man was made, he was endowed with the lordship of the earth. This lordship is obviously one without which he could not live. The air, and the forces of nature, the beasts of the field, the birds and fishes, the vegetation in fruit and root, and the stretches of corn are necessary for man's continued existence on the earth. Over them, therefore, he has this limited dominion.
Moreover, St. Thomas goes on, man has not merely the present moment to consider. He is a being possessed of intelligence and will, powers which demand and necessitate their own constant activity. Instinct, the gift of brute creation, ensures the preservation of life by its blind preparation for the morrow. Man has no such ready-made and spontaneous faculty. His powers depend for their effectiveness on their deliberative and strenuous exertions. And because life is a sacred thing, a lamp of which the once extinguished light cannot be here re-enkindled, it carries with it, when it is intelligent and volitional, the duty of self-preservation. Accordingly the human animal is bound by the law of his own being to provide against the necessities of the future. He has, therefore, the right to acquire not merely what will suffice for the instant, but to look forward and arrange against the time when his power of work shall have lessened, or the objects which suffice for his personal needs become scarcer or more difficult of attainment. Property, therefore, of some kind or other, says Aquinas, is required by the very nature of man. Individual possessions are not a mere adventitious luxury which time has accustomed him to imagine as something he can hardly do without, nor are they the result of civilised culture, which by thelaw of its own development creates fresh needs for each fresh demand supplied; but in some form or other they are an absolute and dire necessity, without which life could not be lived at all. Not simply for his "well-being," but for his very existence, man finds them to be a sacred need. Thus as they follow directly from the nature of creation, we can term them "natural."
St. Thomas then proceeds in his second article to enter into the question of the rights of private property. The logical result of his previous argument is only to affirm the need man has of some property; the practice of actually dividing goods among individuals requires further elaboration if it is to be reasonably defended. Man must have the use of the fruits of the earth, but why these rather than those should belong to him is an entirely different problem. It is the problem of Socialism. For every socialist must demand for each member of the human race the right to some possessions, food and other such necessities. But why he should have this particular thing, and why that other thing should belong to someone else, is the question which lies at the basis of all attempts to preserve or destroy the present fabric of society. Now, the argument which we have so far cited from St. Thomas is simply based on the indefeasible right of the individual to the maintenance of his life. Personality implies the right of the individual to whatever is needful to him in achieving his earthly purpose, but does not in itself justify the right to private property.
"Two offices pertain to man with regard to exterior things" (thus he continues). "The first is the power of procuring and dispensing, and in respect to this, it is lawful for man to hold things as his own." Here it is well to note that St. Thomas in this single sentenceteaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "La Propriété c'est le vol." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of justice, whether natural or divine.
But in the rest of the article St. Thomas goes farther still. Not merely does he hold the moral proposition that private property is lawful, but he adds to it the social proposition that private property is necessary. "It is even necessary," says he, "for human life, and that for three reasons. Firstly, because everyone is more solicitous about procuring what belongs to himself alone than that which is common to all or many, since each shunning labour leaves to another what is the common burden of all, as happens with a multitude of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in a more orderly fashion if each has his own duty of procuring a certain thing, while there would be confusion if each should procure things haphazard. Thirdly, because in this way the peace of men is better preserved, for each is content with his own. Whence we see that strife more frequently arises among those who hold a thing in common and individually. The other office which is man's concerning exterior things, is the use of them; and with regard to this a man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out to others readily in time of need." (The translation is taken fromNew Things and Old, by H. C. O'Neill, 1909, London, pp. 253-4.) The wording and argument of this will bear, and is well worth, careful analysis. For St. Thomaswas a man, as Huxley witnesses, of unique intellectual power, and, moreover, his theories on private property were immediately accepted by all the schoolmen. Each succeeding writer did little else than make more clear and defined the outlines of the reasoning here elaborated. We shall, therefore, make no further apology for an attempt to set out the lines of thought sketched by Aquinas.
It will be noticed at once that the principles on which private property are here based are of an entirely different nature from those by which the need of property itself was defended. For the latter we were led back to the very nature of man himself and confronted with his right and duty to preserve his own life. From this necessity of procuring supply against the needs of the morrow, and the needs of the actual hour, was deduced immediately the conclusion that property of some kind (i.e.the possession of some material things) was demanded by the law of man's nature. It was intended as an absolute justification of a sacred right. But in this second article a completely different process is observed. We are no longer considering man's essential nature in the abstract, but are becoming involved in arguments of concrete experience. The first was declared to be a sacred right, as it followed from a law of nature; the second is merely conditioned by the reasons brought forward to support it. To repeat the whole problem as it is put in theSumma, we can epitomise the reasoning of St. Thomas in this easier way. The question of property implies two main propositions: (a) the right to property,i.e.to the use of material creation; (b) the right to private property,i.e.to the actual division of material things among the determined individuals of a social group. The former is a sacred,inalienable right, which can never be destroyed, for it springs from the roots of man's nature. If man exists, and is responsible for his existence, then he must necessarily have the right to the means without which his existence is made impossible. But the second proposition must be determined quite differently. The kind of property here spoken of is simply a matter not of right, but of experienced necessity, and is to be argued for on the distinct grounds that without it worse things would follow: "it is even necessary for human life, and that for three reasons." This is a purely conditional necessity, and depends entirely on the practical effect of the three reasons cited. Were a state of society to exist in which the three reasons could no longer be urged seriously, then the necessity which they occasioned would also cease to hold. In point of fact, St. Thomas was perfectly familiar with a social group in which these conditions did not exist, and the law of individual possession did not therefore hold, namely, the religious orders. As a Dominican, he had defended his own Order against the attacks of those who would have suppressed it altogether; and in his reply to William of St. Amour he had been driven to uphold the right to common life, and consequently to deny that private property was inalienable.
Of course it was perfectly obvious that for St. Thomas himself the idea of the Commune or the State owning all the land and capital, and allowing to the individual citizens simply the use of these common commodities, was no doubt impracticable; and the three reasons which he gives are his sincere justification of the need of individual ownership. Without this division of property, he considered that national life would become even more full of contention than it was already. Accordingly, it was for its effectiveness in preventing a great number of quarrels that he defended the individual ownership of property.
Besides this article, there are many other expressions and broken phrases in which Aquinas uses the same phrase, asserting that the actual division of property was due to human nature. "Each field considered in itself cannot be looked upon as naturally belonging to one rather than to another" (2, 2, 57, 3); "distinction of property is not inculcated by nature" (1a, 2ae, 94, 5); but again he is equally clear in insisting on the other proposition, that there is no moral law which forbids the possession of land in severalty. "The common claim upon things is traceable to the natural law, not because the natural law dictates that all things should be held in common, and nothing as belonging to any individual person, but because according to the natural law there is no distinction of possessions which comes by human convention" (2a, 2ae, 66, 2ad1m.).
To apprehend the full significance of this last remark, reference must be made to the theories of the Roman legal writers, which have been already explained. The law of nature was looked upon as some primitive determination of universal acceptance, and of venerable sanction, which sprang from the roots of man's being. This in its absolute form could never be altered or changed; but there was besides another law which had no such compelling power, but which rested simply on the experience of the human race. This was reversible, for it depended on specific conditions and stages of development. Thus nature dictated no division of property, though it implied the necessity of some property; the need of the division was only discovered when men set to work to live in social intercourse. Then it was found that unless divisions were made, existence was intolerable; and so by human convention, as St. Thomas sometimes says, or by the law of nature, as he elsewhere expresses it, the division into private property was agreed upon and took place.
This elaborate statement of St. Thomas was widely accepted through all the Middle Ages. Wycliff alone, and a few like him, ventured to oppose it; but otherwise this extremely logical and moderate defence of existing institutions received general adhesion. Even Scotus, like Ockham, a brilliant Oxford scholar whose hidden tomb at Cologne finds such few pilgrims kneeling in its shade, so hardy in his thought and so eager to find a flaw in the arguments of Aquinas, has no alternative to offer. Franciscan though he was, and therefore, perhaps, more likely to favour communistic teaching, his own theory is but a repetition of what his rival had already propounded. Thus, for example, he writes in a typical passage: "Even supposing it as a principle of positive law that 'life must be lived peaceably in a state of polity,' it does not straightway follow 'Therefore everyone must have separate possessions.' For peace could be observed even if all things were in common. Nor even if we presuppose the wickedness of those who live together is it a necessary consequence. Still a distinction of property is decidedly in accord with a peaceful social life. For the wicked rather take care of their private possessions, and rather seek to appropriate to themselves than to the community common goods. Whence come strife and contention. Hence we find it (division of property) admitted in almost every positive law. And although there is a fundamental principle from which all other laws and rights spring,still from that fundamental principle positive human laws do not follow absolutely or immediately. Rather it is as declarations or explanations in detail of that general principle that they come into being, and must be considered as evidently in accord with the universal law of nature." (Super Sententias Quaestiones, Bk. 4, Dist. 15, q. 2. Venice, 1580.)
Here again, then, are the same salient points we have already noticed in theSumma. There is the idea clearly insisted on that the division of property is not a first principle nor an immediate deduction from a first principle, that in itself it is not dictated by the natural law which leaves all things in common, that it is, however, not contrary to natural law, but evidently in accord with it, that its necessity and its introduction were due entirely to the actual experience of the race.
Again, to follow the theory chronologically still farther forward, St. Antonino, whose charitable institutions in Florence have stamped deeply with his personality that scene of his life's labours, does little more than repeat the words of St. Thomas, though the actual phrase in which he here compresses many pages of argument is reproduced from a work by the famous Franciscan moralist John de Ripa. "It is by no means right that here upon earth fallen humanity should have all things in common, for the world would be turned into a desert, the way to fraud and all manner of evils would be opened, and the good would have always the worse, and the bad always the better, and the most effective means of destroying all peace would be established" (Summa Moralis, 3, 3, 2, 1). Hence he concludes that "such a community of goods never could benefit the State." These are none other arguments than those already advanced by St. Thomas. His articles, already quoted, are indeed theLocus Classicusfor allmediaeval theorists, and, though references in every mediaeval work on social and economic questions are freely made to Aristotle'sPolitics, it is evident that it is really Aquinas who is intended.
Distinction of property, therefore, though declared so necessary for peaceable social life, does not, for these thinkers, rest on natural law, nor a divine law, but on positive human law under the guidance of prudence and authority. Communism is not something evil, but rather an ideal too lofty to be ever here realised. It implied so much generosity, and such a vigour of public spirit, as to be utterly beyond the reach of fallen nature. The Apostles alone could venture to live so high a life, "for their state transcended that of every other mode of living" (Ptolomeo of Lucca,De Regimine Principio, book iv., cap. 4, Parma, 1864, p. 273). However, that form of communism which entailed an absolutely even division of all wealth among all members of the group, though it had come to them on the authority of Phileas and Lycurgus, was indeed to be reprobated, for it contradicted the prime feature of all creation. God made all things in their proper number, weight, and measure. Yet in spite of all this it must be insisted on at the risk of repetition that the socialist theory of State ownership is never considered unjust, never in itself contrary to the moral law. Albertus Magnus, the master of Aquinas, and the leader in commenting on Aristotle'sPolitics, freely asserts that community of goods "is not impossible, especially among those who are well disciplined by the virtue of philanthropy—that is, the common love of all; for love, of its own nature, is generous." But to arrange it, the power of the State must be called into play; it cannot rest on any private authority. "This is the proper task of the legislator, for it is the duty of the legislator to arrangeeverything for the best advantage of the citizens" (In Politicis, ii. 2, p. 70, Lyons, 1651). Such, too, is the teaching of St. Antonino, who even goes so far as to assert that "just as the division of property at the beginning of historic time was made by the authority of the State, it is evident that the same authority is equally competent to reverse its decision and return to its earlier social organisation" (Summa Moralis, ii. 3, 2, Verona, 1740, p. 182). He lays down, indeed, a principle so broad that it is difficult to understand where it could well end: "That can be justly determined by the prince which is necessary for the peaceful intercourse of the citizens." And in defence he points triumphantly to the fact that the prince can set aside a just claim to property, and transfer it to another who happens to hold it by prescription, on the ground of the numerous disputes which might otherwise be occasioned. That is to say, that the law of his time already admitted that in certain circumstances the State could take what belonged to one and give it to another, without there being any fault on the part of the previous owner to justify its forfeiture; and he defends this proceeding on the axiom just cited (ibid., pp. 182-3), namely, its necessity "for the peaceful intercourse of the citizens."
The Schoolmen can therefore be regarded as a consistent and logical school. They had an extreme dislike to any broad generalisation, and preferred rather, whenever the occasion could be discovered, to distinguish rather than to concede or deny. Hence, confronted by the communistic theory of State ownership which had been advanced by Plato, and by a curious group of strange, heterodox teachers, and which had, moreover, the actual support of many patristic sayings,and the strong bias of monastic life, they set out joyfully to resolve it into the simplest and most unassailable series of propositions. They began, therefore, by admitting that nature made no division of property, and in that sense held all things in common; that in the early stages of human history, when man, as yet unfallen, was conceived as living in the Garden of Eden in perfect innocency, common property amply satisfied his sinless and unselfish moral character; that by the Fall lust and greed overthrew this idyllic state, and led to a continued condition of internecine strife, and the supremacy of might; that experience gradually brought men to realise that their only hope towards peaceful intercourse lay in the actual division of property, and the establishment of a system of private ownership; that this could only be set aside by men who were themselves perfect, or had vowed themselves to pursue perfection, namely, Our Lord, His Apostles, and the members of religious orders. To this list of what they held to be historic events they added another which contained the moral deductions to be made from these facts. This began by the assertion that private property in itself was not in any sense contrary to the virtue of justice; that it was entirely lawful; that it was even necessary on account of certain evil conditions which otherwise would prevail; that the State, however, had the right in extreme cases and for a just cause to transfer private property from one to another; that it could, when the needs of its citizens so demanded, reverse its primitive decision, and re-establish its earlier form of common ownership; that this last system, however possible, and however much it might be regretted as a vanished and lost ideal, was decidedly now a violent and impracticable proceeding.
These theories, it is evident, though they furnish the only arguments which are still in use among us to support the present social organisation, are also patent of an interpretation which might equally lead to the very opposite conclusion. In his fear of any general contradiction to communism which should be open to dispute, and in his ever-constant memory of his own religious life as a Dominican friar, Aquinas had to mark with precision to what extent and in what sense private property could be justified. But at the same time he was forced by the honesty of his logical training to concede what he could in favour of the other side. He took up in this question, as in every other, a middle course, in which neither extreme was admitted, but both declared to contain an element of truth. It is clear, too, that his scholastic followers, even to our own date, in their elaborate commentaries can find no escape from the relentless logic of his conclusions. Down the channel that he dug flowed the whole torrent of mediaeval and modern scholasticism.[2]But for those whose minds were practical rather than abstract, one or other proposition he advanced, isolated from the context of his thought, could be quoted as of moment, and backed by the greatness of his name. His assertion of the absolute impracticable nature of socialistic organisation, as he knew it in his own age, was too good a weapon to be neglected by those who sought about for means of defence for their own individualistic theories; whereas others, like the friars of whom Wycliff and Langland spoke, and who headed bands of luckless peasants in the revolt of 1381 against the oppression of an over-legalised feudalism, were blind to this remarkable expression of Aquinas' opinion, and quoted him only when he declared that "by nature all things were in common," and when he protested that the socialist theory of itself contained nothing contrary to the teaching of the gospel or the doctrines of the Church.
Truth is blinding in its brilliance. Half-truths are easy to see, and still easier to explain. Hence the full and detailed theory elaborated by the Schoolmen has been tortured to fit first one and then another scheme of political reform. Yet all the while its perfect adjustment of every step in the argument remains a wonderful monument of the intellectual delicacy and hardihood of the Schoolmen.
FOOTNOTE:[2]Cf.Coutenson,Theologia Mentis et Cordis, iii. 388-389, Paris, 1875; and Billnart,De Justitia, i. 123-124, Liège, 1746.
[2]Cf.Coutenson,Theologia Mentis et Cordis, iii. 388-389, Paris, 1875; and Billnart,De Justitia, i. 123-124, Liège, 1746.
[2]Cf.Coutenson,Theologia Mentis et Cordis, iii. 388-389, Paris, 1875; and Billnart,De Justitia, i. 123-124, Liège, 1746.
Besides the Schoolmen, by whom the problems of life were viewed in the refracted light of theology and philosophy, there was another important class in mediaeval times which exercised itself over the same social questions, but visaged them from an entirely different angle. This was the great brotherhood of the law, which, whether as civil or canonical, had its own theories of the rights of private ownership. It must be remembered, too, that just as the theologians supported their views by an appeal to what were considered historic facts in the origin of property, so, too, the legalists depended for the material of their judgment on circumstances which the common opinion of the time admitted as authentic.
When the West drifted out from the clouds of barbaric invasion, and had come into calm waters, society was found to be organised on a basis of what has been calledfeudalism. That is to say, the natural and universal result of an era of conquest by a wandering people is that the new settlers hold their possessions from the conqueror on terms essentially contractual. The actual agreements have varied constantly in detail, but the main principle has always been one of reciprocal rights and duties. So at the early dawn of the Middle Ages, after the period picturesquely styled the Wanderings of the Nations, we find the subjugating races have encamped in Europe, and hold it by a series of fiefs. The action, for example, of William the Norman, as plainly shown in Domesday Book, is typical of what had for some three or four centuries been happening here and on the Continent. Large tracts of land were parcelled out among the invading host, and handed over to individual barons to hold from the King on definite terms of furnishing him with men in times of war, of administering justice within their domains, and of assisting at his Council Board when he should stand in need of their advice. The barons, to suit their own convenience, divided up these territories among their own retainers on terms similar to those by which they held their own. And thus the whole organisation of the country was graduated from the King through the greater barons to tenants who held their possessions, whether a castle, or a farm, or a single hut, from another to whom they owed suit and service.
This roughly (constantly varying, and never actually quite so absolutely carried out) is the leading principle of feudalism. It is clearly based upon a contract between each man and his immediate lord; but, and this is of importance in the consideration of the feudal theory of private property, whatever rights and duties held good were not public, but private. There was not atthe first, and in the days of what we may call "pure feudalism," any concept of a national law or natural right, but only a bundle of individual rights. Appeal from injustice was not made at a supreme law-court, but only to the courts of the barons to whom both litigants owed allegiance. The action of the King was quite naturally always directed towards breaking open this enclosed sphere of influence, and endeavouring to multiply the occasions on which his officials might interfere in the courts of his subjects. Thus the idea gradually grew up (and its growth is perhaps the most important matter of remark in mediaeval history), by which the King's law and the King's rights were looked upon as dominating those of individuals or groups. The courts baron and customary, and the sokes of privileged townships were steadily emptied of their more serious cases, and shorn of their primitive powers. This, too, was undoubtedly the reason for the royal interference in the courts Christian (the feudal name for the clerical criminal court). The King looked on the Church, as he looked on his barons and his exempted townships, as outside his royal supremacy, and, in consequence, quarrelled over investiture and criminous clerks, and every other point in which he had not as yet secured that his writs and judgments should prevail. There was a whole series of courts of law which were absolutely independent of his officers and his decision. His restless energy throughout this period had, therefore, no other aim than to bring all these into a line with his own, and either to capture them for himself, or to reduce them to sheer impotence. But at the beginning there was little notion of a royal judge who should have power to determine cases in which barons not immediately holding their fiefs of the King were implicated.The concern of each was only with the lord next above him. And the whole conception of legal rights was, therefore, considered simply as private rights.
The growth of royal power consequently acted most curiously on contemporary thinkers. It meant centralisation, the setting up of a definite force which should control the whole kingdom. It resulted in absolutism increasing, with an ever-widening sphere of royal control. It culminated in the Reformation, which added religion to the other departments of State in which royal interference held predominance. Till then the Papacy, as in some sort "a foreign power," world-wide and many-weaponed, could treat on more than equal terms with any European monarch, and secure independence for the clergy. With the lopping off of the national churches from the parent stem, this energising force from a distant centre of life ceased. Each separate clerical organisation could now depend only on its own intrinsic efficiency. For most this meant absolute surrender.
The civil law therefore which supplanted feudalism entailed two seemingly contradicting principles which are of importance in considering the ownership of land. On the one hand, the supremacy of the King was assured. The people became more and more heavily taxed, their lands were subjected to closer inspection, their criminal actions were viewed less as offences against individuals than as against the peace of the King. It is an era in which, therefore, as we have already stated, the power of the individual sinks gradually more and more into insignificance in comparison with the rising force of the King's dominion. Private rights are superseded by public rights.
Yet, on the other hand, and by the development ofidentically the same principles, the individual gains. His tenure of land becomes far less a matter of contract. He himself escapes from his feudal chief, and his inferior tenants slip also from his control. He is no longer one in a pyramid of grouped social organisation, but stands now as an individual answerable only to the head of the State. He has duties still; but no longer a personal relationship to his lord. It is the King and that vague abstraction called the State which now claim him as a subject; and by so doing are obliged to recognise his individual status. This new and startling prominence of the individual disturbed the whole concept of ownership. Originally under the influence of that pure feudalism which nowhere existed in its absolute form, the two great forces in the life of each member of the social group were his own and that of his immediate lord. These fitted together into an almost indissoluble union; and therefore absolute ownership of the soil was theoretically impossible. Now, however, the individual was emancipated from his lord. He was still, it is true, subject to the King, whose power might be a great deal more oppressive than the barons' had been. But the King was far off, whereas the baron had been near, and nearly always in full evidence. Hence the result was the emphasis of the individual's absolute dominion. Not, indeed, as though it excluded the dominion of the King, but precisely because the royal predominance could only be recognised by the effective shutting out of the interference of the lord. To exclude the "middle-man," the King was driven to recognise the absolute dominion of the individual over his own possessions.
This is brought out in English law by Bracton and his school. Favourers as they were of the royal prerogative, they were driven to take up the paradoxical ground that the King was not the sole owner of property. To defend the King they were obliged to dispossess him. To put his control on its most effective basis, they had no other alternative left them than to admit the fullest rights of the individual against the King. For only if the individual had complete ownership, could there be no interference on the part of the lord; only if the possessions of the tenants were his own, were they prevented from falling under the baronial jurisdiction. Therefore by apparently denying the royal prerogative the civil lawyers were in effect, as they perfectly well recognised, really extending it and enabling it to find its way into cases and courts where it could not else well have entered.
Seemingly, therefore, all idea of socialism or nationalisation of land (at that date the great means of production) was now excluded. The individualistic theory of property had suddenly appeared; and simultaneously the old group forms, which implied collectivism in some shape or other, ceased any longer to be recognised as systems of tenure. Yet, at the same time, by a paradox as evident as that by which the civilians exalted the royal prerogative apparently at its own expense, or as that by which Wycliff's communism is found to be in reality a justification of the policy of leaving things as they are, while St. Thomas's theory of property is discovered as far less oppressive and more adaptable to progressive developments of national wealth, it is noticed that, from the point of view of the socialist, monarchical absolutism is the most favourable form of a State's constitution. For wherever a very strictly centralised system of government exists, it is clear that a machinery, which needs little to turn it to theadvantage of the absolute rule of a rebellious minority, has been already constructed. In a country where, on the other hand, local government has been enormously encouraged, it is obviously far more difficult for socialism to force an entrance into each little group. There are all sorts of local conditions to be squared, vagaries of law and administration to be reduced to order, connecting bridges to be thrown from one portion of the nation to the next, so as to form of it one single whole. Were the socialists of to-day to seize on the machinery of government in Germany and Russia, they could attain their purposes easily and smoothly, and little difference in constitutional forms would be observed in these countries, for already the theory of State ownership and State interference actually obtains. They would only have to substitute ablocfor a man. But in France and England, where the centralisation is far less complete, the success of the socialistic party and its achievement of supreme power would mean an almost entire subversal of all established methods of administration, for all the threads would have first to be gathered into a single hand.
Consequently feudalism, which turned the landowners into petty sovereigns and insisted on local courts, &c., though seemingly communistic or socialistic, was really, from its intense local colouring, far less easy of capture by those who favoured State interference. It was individualistic, based on private rights. But the new royal prerogative led the way to the consideration of the evident ease by which, once the machine was possessed, the rest of the system could without difficulty be brought into harmony with the new theories. To make use of comparison, it was Cardinal Wolsey's assumption of full legatine power by permission of the Pope which first suggested to Henry VIII that he coulddispense with His Holiness altogether. He saw that the Cardinal wielded both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. He coveted his minister's position, and eventually achieved it by ousting both Clement and Wolsey, who had unwittingly shown him in which way more power lay.
So, similarly, the royal despotism itself, by centralising all power into the hands of a single prince, accustomed men to the idea of the absolute supremacy of national law, drove out of the field every defender of the rights of minorities, and thus paved the way for the substitution of the people for itself. The French Revolution was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Louis XIV. It needed only the fire of Rousseau to burn out the adventitious ornamentation which in the shape of that monarch's personal glorification still prevented the naked structure from being seen in all its clearness.L'Etat c'est moican be as aptly the watchword of a despotic oligarchy, or a levelling socialism, as of a kingly tyranny, according as it passes from the lips of the one to the few or the many. It is true that the last phase was not completed till long after the Middle Ages had closed, but the tendency towards it is evident in the teachings of the civil lawyers.
Thus, for example, State absolutism is visible in the various suggestions made by men like Pierre du Bois and Wycliff (who, in the expression of their thoughts, are both rather lawyers than schoolmen) to dispossess the clergy of their temporalities. The principles urged, for instance, by these two in justification of this spoliation could be applied equally well to the estates of laymen. For the same principles put into the King's hand the undetermined power of doing what wasnecessary for the well-being of the State. It is true that Pierre du Bois (De Recuperatione Terre Sancte, pp. 39-41, 115-8) asserted that the royal authority was limited to deal in this way with Church lands, and could not touch what belonged to others. But this proviso was obviously inserted so arbitrarily that its logical force could not have had any effect. Political necessity alone prevented it from being used against the nobility and gentry.
Ockham, however, the clever Oxford Franciscan, who formed one of the group of pamphleteers that defended Louis of Bavaria against Pope John XXII, quite clearly enlarged the grounds for Church disendowment so as to include the taking over by the State of all individual property. He was a thinker whose theories were strangely compounded of absolutism and democracy. The Emperor was to be supported because his autocracy came from the people. Hence, when Ockham is arguing about ecclesiastical wealth, and the way in which it could be quite fairly confiscated by the Government, he enters into a discussion about the origin of the imperial dignity. This, he declares, was deliberately handed over by the people to the Emperor. To escape making the Pope the original donor of the imperial title, Ockham concedes that privilege to the people. It was they, the people, who had handed over to the Caesars of the Holy Roman Empire all their own rights and powers. Hence Louis was a monarch whose absolutism rested on a popular basis. Then he proceeds in his argument to say that the human positive law by which private property was introduced was made by the people themselves, and that the right or power by which this was done was transferred by them to the Emperor along with the imperial dignity.
Louis, therefore, had the same right to undo what they had done, for in him all their powers now resided. This, of course, formed an excellent principle from which to argue to his right to dispossess the Church of its superfluous wealth—indeed of all its wealth. But it could prove equally effectual against the holding by the individual of any property whatever. It made, in effect, private ownership rest on the will of the prince.
Curiously, too, in quite another direction the same form of argument had been already worked out by Nicole Oresme, a famous Bishop of Lisieux, who first translated into French thePoliticsof Aristotle, and who helped so largely in the reforms of Charles V of France. His great work was in connection with the revision of the coinage, on which he composed a celebrated treatise. He held that the change of the value of money, either by its deliberate depreciation, or by its being brought back to its earlier standard of face value, carried such widespread consequences that the people should most certainly be consulted on it. It was not fair to them to take such a step without their willing co-operation. Yet he admits fully that, though this is the wiser and juster way of acting, there was no absolute need for so doing, since all possession and all property sprang from the King. And this last conclusion was advocated by his rival, Philip de Meziers, whose advice Charles ultimately followed. Philip taught that the king was sole judge of whatever was for public use.
But there was a further point in the same question which afforded matter for an interesting discussion among the lawyers. Pope Innocent IV, who had first been famous as a canonist, and retained as Pontiff his old love for disputations of this kind, developed a theory of his own on the relation between the right ofthe individual to possess and the right of the State over that possession. He distinguished carefully between two entirely different concepts, namely, the right and its exercise. The first he admitted to be sacred and inviolable, because it sprang from the very nature of man. It could not be disturbed or in any way molested; the State had therefore no power to interfere with the right. But he suggested that the exercise of that right, or, to use his actual phrase, the "actions in accord with that right," rested on the basis of civil, positive law, and could therefore be controlled by legal decisions. The right was sacred, its exercise was purely conventional. Thus every man has a right to property; he can never by any possible means divest himself of it, for it is rooted in the depths of his being, and supported by his human nature. But this right appears especially to be something internal, intrinsic. For him to exercise it—that is to say, to hold this land or that, or indeed any land at all—the State's intervention must be secured. At least the State can control his action in buying, selling, or otherwise obtaining it. His right cannot be denied, but for reasons of social importance its exercise well may be. Nor did this then appear as a merely unmeaning distinction; he would not admit that a right which could not be exercised was hardly worth consideration. And, in point of fact, the Pope's private theory found very many supporters.
There were others, however, who judged it altogether too fantastical. The most interesting of his opponents was a certain Antonio Roselli, a very judiciously-minded civil lawyer, who goes very thoroughly into the point at issue. He gives Innocent's views, and quotes what authority he can find for them in the Digest and Decretals. But for himself he would prefer to admitthat the right to private property is not at all sacred or natural in the sense of being inviolable. He willingly concedes to the State the right to judge all claims of possession. This is the more startling since ordinarily his views are extremely moderate, and throughout the controversy between Pope and Emperor he succeeded in steering a very careful, delicate course. To him, however, all rights to property were purely civil and arguable only on principles of positive law. There was no need, therefore, to discriminate between the right and its exercise, for both equally could be controlled by the State. There are evidences to show that he admitted the right of each man to the support of his own life, and, therefore, to private property in the form of actual food, &c., necessary for the immediate moment; but he distinctly asserts as his own personal idea that "the prince could take away my right to a thing, and any exercise of that right," adding only that for this there must be some cause. The prince cannot arbitrarily confiscate property; he must have some reasonable motive of sufficient gravity to outweigh the social inconveniences which confiscation would necessarily produce. Not every cause is a sufficient one, but those only which concern "public liberty or utility." Hence he decides that the Pope cannot alienate Church lands without some justifying reason, nor hand them over to the prince unless there happens to be an urgent need, springing from national circumstances. It does not follow, however, that he wishes to make over to the State absolute right to individual property under normal conditions. The individual has the sole dominion over his own possessions; that dominion reverts to the State only in some extreme instance. His treatise, therefore (Goldast,De Monarchia, 1611-1614, Hanover,p. 462, &c.), may be looked upon as summing up the controversy as it then stood. The legal distinction suggested by Innocent IV had been given up by the lawyers as insufficient. The theories of Du Bois, Wycliff, Ockham, and the others had ceased to have much significance, because they gave the royal power far too absolute a jurisdiction over the possessions of its subjects. The feudal contractual system, which these suggested reforms had intended to drive out, had failed for entirely different reasons, and could evidently be brought back only at the price of a complete and probably unsuccessful disturbance of the social and economic organisation. The centralisation which had risen on the ruins of the older local sovereignties and immunities, had brought with it an emphasised recognition of the public rights and duties of all subjects, and had at the same time confirmed the individual in the ownership of his little property, and given him at the last not a conditional, but an absolute possession. To safeguard this, and to prevent it from becoming a block in public life, a factor of discontent, the lawyers were engaged in framing an additional clause which should give to the State an ultimate jurisdiction, and would enable it to overrule any objections on the part of the individual to a national policy or law. The suggested distinction that the word "right" should be emptied of its deeper meaning, by refusing it the further significance of "exercise," was too subtle and too legal to obtain much public support. So that the lawyers were driven to admit that for a just cause the very right itself could be set aside, and every private possession (when public utility and liberty demanded it) confiscated or transferred to another.
Even the right to compensation for such confiscation was with equal cleverness explained away. For it washeld that, when an individual had lost his property through State action, and without his having done anything to deserve it as a punishment, compensation could be claimed. But whenever a whole people or nation was dispossessed by the State, there was no such right at all to any indemnity.
Thus was the wholesale adoption of land-nationalism to be justified. Thus could the State capture all private possessions without any fear of being guilty of robbery. It was considered that it was only the oppression of the individual and class spoliation which really contravened the moral law.
The legal theories, therefore, which supplanted the old feudal concepts were based on the extension of royal authority, and the establishment of public rights. Individualistic possession was emphasised; yet the simultaneous setting up of the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century really made their ultimate capture by the Socialist party more possible.
It may seem strange to class social reforms under the wider heading of Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely, that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be spoken of as socialistic.
Of course there have been reformers in every agewho came to bring to society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning. The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on natural science. For them a university was a place where each student learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois.
This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England (De Recuperatione Sancte Terre), has several most interesting and refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward in his scheme of education. Heinsists on having only lay-mistresses, and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry, and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation. Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such a fashion as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The spirit of freedom which is felt working through all his papers makes him the apostle of what would now be called the "new woman."
After him, there comes a lull in reforming ideas. But half a century later occurs a very curious and sudden outburst of rebellion all over Europe. From about the middle of the fourteenth century to the early fifteenth there seemed to be an epidemic of severe social unrest. There were at Paris, which has always been the nursery of revolutions, four separate risings. Etienne Marcel, who, however, was rather a tribune of the people than arevolutionary leader, came into prominence in 1355; he was followed by the Jacquerie in 1358, by the Maillotins in 1382, and the Cabochiens in 1411. In Rome we know of Rienzi in 1347, who eventually became hardly more than a popular demagogue; in Florence there was the outbreak of Ciompi in 1378; in Bohemia the excesses of Taborites in 1409; in England the Peasant Revolt of 1381.
It is perfectly obvious that a series of social disturbances of this nature could not leave the economic literature of the succeeding period quite as placid as it had found it. We notice now that, putting away questions of mere academic character, the thinkers and writers concern themselves with the actual state of the people. Parliament has its answer to the problem in a long list of statutes intended to muzzle the turbulent and restless revolutionaries. But this could not satisfy men who set their thought to study the lives and circumstances of their fellow-citizens. Consequently, as a result, we can notice the rise of a school of writers who interest themselves above all things in the economic conditions of labour. Of this school the easiest exponent to describe is Antonino of Florence, Archbishop and canonised saint. His four great volumes on the exposition of the moral law are fascinating as much for the quotations of other moralists which they contain, as for the actual theories of the saint himself. For the Archbishop cites on almost every page contemporary after contemporary who had had his say on the same problems. He openly asserts that he has read widely, taken notes of all his reading, has deliberately formed his opinions on the judgments, reasoned or merely expressed, of his authors. To read his books, then, is to realise that Antonino is summing up the wholeexperience of his generation. Indeed he was particularly well placed for one who wished for information. Florence, then at the height of its renown under the brilliant despotism of Cosimo dei Medici, was the scene where the great events of the life of Antonino took place. There he had seen within the city walls, three Popes, a Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperors of East and West, and the most eminent men of both civilisations. He had taken part in a General Council of the Church, and knew thinkers as widely divergent as Giovanni Dominici and Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was, therefore, more likely than most to have heard whatever theories were proposed by the various great political statesmen of Europe, whether they were churchmen or lawyers. Consequently, his schemes, as we might well expect, are startlingly advanced.
He begins by attacking the growing spirit of usury, and the resulting idleness. Men were finding out that under the new conditions which governed the money market it was possible to make a fortune without having done a day's work. The sons of the aristocracy of Florence, which was built up of merchant princes, and which had amassed its own fortunes in honest trading, had been tempted by the bankers to put their wealth out to interest, and to live on the surplus profit. The ease and security with which this could be done made it a popular investment, especially among the young men of fashion who came in, simply by inheritance, for large sums of money. As a consequence Florence found itself, for the first time in its history, beginning to possess a wealthy class of men who had never themselves engaged in any profession. The old reverence, therefore, which had always existed in the city for the man who laboured in his art or guild, began to slacken.No longer was there the same eagerness noticeable which used to boast openly that its rewards consisted in the consciousness of work well done. Instead, idleness became the badge of gentility, and trade a slur upon a man's reputation. No city can long survive so listless and languid an ideal. The Archbishop, therefore, denounced this new method of usurious traffic, and hinted further that to it was due the fierce rebellion which had for a while plunged Florence into the horrors of the Jacquerie. Wealth, he taught, should not of itself breed wealth, but only through the toil of honest labour, and that labour should be the labour of oneself, not of another.
Then he proceeded to argue that as upon the husband lies the labour of trade, the greater portion of his day must necessarily be passed outside the circle of family life. The breadwinner can attend neither to works of piety nor of charity in the way he should, and, consequently, to his wife it must be left to supply for his defects. She must take his place in the church, and amid the slums of the poor; she must for him and his lift her hands in prayer, and dispense his superfluous wealth in succouring the poverty-stricken. For the Archbishop will have none of the soothing doctrine which the millionaire preaches to the mob. He asserts that poverty is not a good thing; in itself it is an evil, and can be considered to lead only accidentally to any good. When, therefore, it assumes the form of destitution, every effort must be made to banish it from the State. For if it were to become at all prevalent in a nation, then would that people be on the pathway to its ruin. The politicians should therefore make it the end of their endeavours—though this, it may be, is an ideal which can never be fully brought to realisation—to leave each man in a state of sufficiency. No one,for whatever reason, should be allowed to become destitute. Even should it be by his own fault that he were brought low, he must be provided for by the State, which has, however, in these circumstances, at the same time, the duty of punishing him.