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• Rationalism In Europe.
• Chapter IV. ( Continued ).: On Persecution. Part II. The Ghistory of Persecution
• Chapter V.: The Secularisation of Politics.
• Chapter VI.: The Industrial History of Rationalism.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF RATIONALISM.

THE history of labour is only second in importance to the history of knowledge. The estimate in which industry is Leld, the principles by which it is regulated, and the channels in which it is directed, not merely determine the material prosperity of nations, but also invariably contribute to the formation of a type of character, and in consequence to a modification of opinions. In the course of the present work I have more than once had occasion to refer to the influence of the industrial spirit upon Rationalism, but I have thought it advisable to reserve its full discussion for a separate chapter, in which the relation between the two evolutions will be clearly manifested, and the importance of commerce both as a disintegrating and constructive agent will be established.

If we examine from an industrial point of view the old civilisation, which was sinking rapidly into dissolution when Christianity arose, we shall at once perceive that slavery was the central fact upon which it rested. Whenever, in a highly-organised society, this institution is prominent, it will impart a special cast to the national character, and will in some respects invert the normal conditions of development. For labour, being identified with ignominy, will become distasteful to all classes, and wealth will be speedily accumulated in the hands of a few. “Where slavery exists there is no middle class, little or no manufacturing or commercial enterprise. The slaveowner possesses the means of rapidly amassing wealth, while the freeman who is not a slaveowner, being shut out from nearly every path of industry, and being convinced that labour is a degradation, will be both demoralised and impoverished. At the same time a strong military spirit will usually be encouraged, both because the energies of men find no other sphere of action, and because in such a condition of society conquest is the chief path to wealth. In some respects the consequences of all this will appear very fascinating. A high military enthusiasm being engendered, the nation which cherishes slavery will usually prove victorious in its conflicts with the commercial communities around it. It will produce many great warriors, many splendid examples of military devotion. A combination of the high mettle of the soldier and of a chivalrous contempt for trade and the trading spirit will impart an aristocratic and refined tone to the national manners, while the national intellect will be diverted from utilitarian inventions and pursuits, and will be concentrated on sublime speculations and works of beauty. But as soon as the first energy of the conquering spirit has passed away, the hollowness of such a civilisation becomes apparent. The increase of wealth, which in a free nation strengthens the middle classes and gives a new impulse to commercial enterprise, in a slave nation produces only luxury and vice; and the habit of regarding multitudes as totally destitute of rights, combined with the military spirit that is general, gives that vice a character of the most odious ferocity.1

It is of course possible that the intervention of other in fluences may modify this type of character, and may retard and in some degree prevent the downfall it produces; but in as far as slavery is predominant, in so far will these tendencies be displayed. In the ancient civilisation they were developed to the full extent. From a very early period the existence of slavery had produced, both in Greece and Rome, a strong contempt for commerce and for manual labour, which was openly professed by the ablest men, and which harmonised well with their disdain for the more utilitarian aspects of science. Among the Bœotians those who had defiled themselves with commerce were excluded for ten years from all offices in the State. Plato pronounced the trade of a shopkeeper to be a degradation to a freeman, and he wished it to be punished as a crime. Aristotle, who asserted so strongly the political claims of the middle classes, declared, nevertheless, that in a perfect State no citizen should exercise any mechanical art. Xenophon and Cicero were both of the same opinion. Augustus condemned a senator to death because he had debased his rank by taking part in a manufacture. The single form of labour that was held in honour was agriculture; and in the earlier and simpler periods of the national history, while slaves were still few and luxury was unknown, this pursuit proved a sufficient vent for the pacific energies of the people. But when the number and wealth of the population had been multiplied, when a long series of victories had greatly increased the multitude of slaves, and when the political privileges of a Roman citizen had been widely extended, all classes flocked within the walls the surrounding country fell entirely into the hands of the aristocracy, and either remained uncultivated or was cultivated only by slaves,1 and the task of supplying the overgrown city with corn devolved chiefly upon the colonies. Within the city a vast half-military population, sufficiently powerful to control the government, and intent only upon enjoyment, paralysed the energies of the empire, and destroyed every trace of its ancient purity. ‘Bread and the games of the circus’ was the constant demand; every other consideration was sacrificed to grant it; and industry, in all its departments, was relinquished to the slaves.

If we compare the condition of the ancient with that of the modern slaves, we shall find that they were in some respects profoundly different. The modern slave-trade was an atrocity unknown to the ancients, nor was there then the difference of race and colour that now prevents a fusion of the free and the enslaved classes. Aristotle, the greatest of all the advocates of slavery, recommended masters to hold out the prospect of future emancipation to their slaves; and we know that in the latter days of the Roman Empire the manumission of old slaves was very general, and of those who were not old, by no means rare. Besides this, the great development of commerce enabling the modern slaveowners to command every description of luxury in exchange for the produce of unskilled slave-labour, they have usually, in order to guard against rebellion, adopted the policy of brutalising their slaves by enforced ignorance—to such an extent that it is actually penal, in the majority of the Slave States of America, to teach a slave to read. In the ancient civilisations, on the other hand, the slave produced all the articles of refinement and luxury, conducted the most difficult forms of labour, and often exercised the most important professions. His mind was therefore very frequently cultivated to the highest point, and his value was proportioned to his intelligence. Terence, Epictetus, Publius Syrus, and many other writers were slaves, as were also some of the leading physicians, and many of the most distinguished sculptors. It should be remembered, too, that while modern slavery was from the beginning an evil, slavery among the ancients was at first an unmingled blessing—an important conquest of the spirit of humanity. When men were altogether barbarous they killed their prisoners; when they became more merci ful they preserved them as slaves.1

Still, in the latter days of the republic, and during the empire, the sufferings of the slaves were such that it is impossible to read them without a shudder. The full ferocity of the national character was directed against them. They were exposed to wild beasts, or compelled to fight as gladiators; they were often mutilated with atrocious cruelty; they were tortured on the slightest suspicion, they were crucified for the most trivial offences. If a master was murdered all his slaves were tortured; if the perpetrator remained undiscovered all were put to death, and Tacitus relates a case in which no less than 400 suffered for a single undiscovered criminal. We read of one slave who was crucified for having stolen a quail, and of another who was condemned to be thrown to the fish for having broken a crystal vase. Juvenal describes a lady of fashion gratifying a momentary caprice by ordering a slave to be crucified.2

It was in this manner that the old civilisation, which rested on conquest and on slavery, had passed into complete dissolution, the free classes being altogether demoralised, and the slave classes exposed to the most horrible cruelties. At last the spirit of Christianity moved over this chaotic society, and not merely alleviated the evils that convulsed it, but also reorganised it on a new basis. It did this in three ways; it abolished slavery, it created charity, it inculcated self-sacrifice.

In the first of these tasks Christianity was powerfully assisted by two other agents. It is never possible for the moral sense to be entirely extinguished; and, by a law which is constantly manifested in history, we find that those who have emancipated themselves from the tendencies of an evil age often attain a degree of moral excellence that had not been attained in ages that were comparatively pure. The latter days of pagan Rome exhibit a constant decay of religious reverence and of common morality; but they also exhibit a feverish aspiration towards a new religion, and a finer sense of the requirements of a high morality than had been displayed in the best days of the republic. We have a striking instance of the first of these tendencies in that sudden diffusion of the worship of Mithra, which was one of the most remarkable of the antecedents of Christianity. About seventy years before the Christian era this worship was introduced into Italy, as Plutarch tells us, by some Cilician pirates; and at a time when universal scepticism seemed the dominant characteristic of the Roman intellect, it took such firm root that for 200 years it continued to flourish, to excite the warmest enthusiasm, and to produce a religious revival in the centre of a population that appeared entirely depraved. In the same way, about the time when Nero ascended the throne and when the humanity of the masses had sunk to the lowest ebb, there appeared in the centre of paganism a powerful reaction in favour of the suffering classes, of which Seneca was the principal exponent, but which was more or less reflected in the whole of the literature of the time. Seneca recurred to the subject again and again, and for the first time in Rome he very clearly and emphatically enforced the duties of masters to their slaves, and the existence of a bond of fraternity that no accidental difference of position could cancel. Nor was the movement confined to the writings of moralists. A long series of enactments by Nero, Claudius, Antonine, and Adrian gave the servile class a legal position, took the power of life and death out of the hands of the masters, prevented the exposure of slaves when old and infirm on an island of the Tiber (where they had often been left to die), forbade their mutilation or their employment as gladiators, and appointed special magistrates to receive their complaints. What was done was, no doubt, very imperfect and inadequate, but it represented a tendency of which Christianity was the continuation.1

A second influence favourable to the slaves came into action at a later period: I mean the invasion of the barbarians, who have been justly described as the representatives of the principle of personal liberty in Europe.2 Slavery was not, indeed, absolutely unknown among them, but it was altogether exceptional and entirely uncongenial with their habits. Prisoners of war, criminals, or men who had gambled away their liberty, were the only slaves, and there is no reason to believe that servitude was hereditary. Whenever, therefore, these tribes obtained an ascendency, they contributed to the destruction of slavery.

But when the fullest allowance has been made for these influences, it will remain an undoubted fact that the reconstruction of society was mainly the work of Christianity. Other influences could produce the manumission of many slaves, but Christianity alone could effect the profound change of character that rendered possible the abolition of slavery. There are few subjects more striking, and at the same time more instructive, than the history of that great transition. The Christians did not preach a revolutionary doctrine. They did not proclaim slavery altogether unlawful, or, at least, not until the bull of Alexander III. in the twelfth century; but they steadily sapped it at its basis, by opposing to it the doctrine of universal brotherhood, and by infusing a spirit of humanity into all the relations of society. Under Constantine, the old laws for the protection of slaves were reënacted with additional provisions, and the separation of the family of the slave was forbidden. At the same time the servile punishment of crucifixion was abolished; but not so much from motives of humanity as on account of the sacred character it had acquired. Very soon a disposition was manifested on all sides to emancipate slaves, and that emancipation was invariably associated with religion. Sunday was especially recommended as the most appropriate day for the emancipation, and the ceremony almost invariably took place in the church. Gregory the Great set the example of freeing a number of his slaves as an act of devotion; and it soon became customary for sovereigns to do the same thing at seasons of great public rejoicing. Under Jus-tinian the restrictions that had been placed upon emancipation by testament were removed. For a short time the mere resolution to enter a monastery gave liberty to the slave; and the monks, being for the most part recruited from the servile caste, were always ready to facilitate the deliverance of their brethren. Even in religious persecutions this object was remembered. The Jews were early noted as slave-dealers, and among the first and most frequent measures directed against them was the manumission of their Christian slaves In all the rites of religion the difference between bond and free was studiously ignored, and the clergy invariably proclaimed the act of enfranchisement to be meritorious.1

By these means an impulse favourable to liberty was imparted to all who were within the influence of the Church. Slavery began rapidly to disappear, or to fade into serfdom. At the same time the Church exerted her powers, with no less effect, to alleviate the sufferings of those who still continued in bondage. In England, especially, all the civil laws for the protection of the theows, or Saxon slaves, appear to have been preceded by, and based upon, the canon law. When, as far as can be ascertained, the power of the master was by law unlimited, we find the Church assuming a jurisdiction on the subject, and directing special penances ‘against masters who took from their theows the money they had lawfully earned; against those who slew their theows without judgment or good cause; against mistresses who beat their female theows so that they die within three days; and against freemen who, by order of the lord, kill a theow.’ Above all, the whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was put in motion to shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slave.1 That Church which often seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its dealings with kings and nobles, never failed to listen to the poor and to the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection was the foremost of all the objects of its policy.

Yet as long as the old antipathy to labour continued, nothing of any lasting value had been effected. But here, again, the influence of the Church was exerted with unwavering beneficence and success. The Fathers employed all their eloquence in favour of labour;2 but it is to the monks, and especially to the Benedictine monks, that the change is preëminently due. At a time when religious enthusiasm was all directed towards the monastic life as towards the ideal of perfection, they made labour an essential part of their discipline. Wherever they went, they revived the traditions of old Roman agriculture, and large tracts of France and Belgium were drained and planted by their hands. And though agriculture and gardening were the forms of labour in which they especially excelled, they indirectly became the authors of every other. For when a monastery was planted, it soon became the nucleus around which the inhabitants of the neighbourhood clustered. A town was thus gradually formed, civilised by Christian teaching, stimulated to indus try by the example of the monks, and protected by the reverence that attached to them. At the same time the ornamentation of the church gave the first impulse to art. The monks of the order of St. Basil devoted themselves especially to painting, and all the mediæval architects whose names have come down to us are said to have been ecclesiastics, till the rise of those great lay companies who designed or built the cathedrals of the twelfth century. A great number of the towns of Belgium trace their origin in this manner tc the monks.1 For a long time the most eminent prelates did not disdain manual labour; and it is related of no less a personage than Becket that he was in the habit of labouring during harvest time in the fields with the monks at the monasteries which he visited.2

By these means the contempt for labour which had been produced by slavery was corrected, and the path was opened for the rise of the industrial classes which followed the Crusades. The ferocity of character that had preceded Chris. tianity was combated with equal zeal, though not quite equal success, by the organisation of Christian charity.

There is certainly no other feature of the old civilisation so repulsive as the indifference to suffering that it displayed. It is indeed true that in this respect there was a considerable difference between the Greeks and the Romans. In their armaments, in their wars, above all, in the extreme solicitude to guard the interests of orphans and minors that characterised their legislation,1 the former displayed a spirit of humanity for which we look in vain among the latter. Besides this, the political systems of Greece and, in its latter days, of Rome, were so framed that the state in a great measure supplied the material wants of the people, and a poor law of the heaviest kind was, to a certain extent, a substitute for private beneficence. Still there, as elsewhere, purely charitable institutions were absolutely unknown. Except as far as the law interposed, there was no public refuge for the sick or for the destitute. The infant was entirely unprotected; and infanticide having been—at least in the case of deformed children—expressly authorised by both Plato and Aristotle, was seldom regarded as a crime.2 The practice of bringing up orphans avowedly for prostitution was equally common. The constant association of human suffering with popular entertainments rendered the popular mind continually more callous.

Very different was the aspect presented by the early Church. Long before the era of persecution had closed, the hospital and the Xenodochion, or refuge for strangers, was known among the Christians. The epitaphs in the catacombs abandantly prove the multitude of foundlings that were sustained by their charity; and when Christianity became the dominant religion, the protection of infants was one of the first changes that was manifested in the laws.1 The frequent famines and the frightful distress caused by the invasion of the barbarians, and by the transition from slavery to freedom, were met by the most boundless, the most lavish benevolence. The Fathers were ceaselessly exhorting to charity, and in language so emphatic that it seemed sometimes almost to ignore the rights of property, and to verge upon absolute communism.2 The gladiatorial games were ceaselessly denounced; but the affection with which they were regarded by the people long resisted the efforts of philanthropists, till, in the midst of the spectacle, the monk Telemachus rushed between the combatants, and his blood was the last that stained the arena. But perhaps the noblest testimony to the extent and the catholicity of Christian charity was furnished by an adversary. Julian exerted all his energies to produce a charitable movement among the Pagans; ‘for it is a scandal,’ he said, ‘that the Galileans should support the destitute, not only of their religion, but of ours.’

In reading the history of that noble efflorescence of charity which marked the first ages of Christianity, it is impossible to avoid reflecting upon the strange destiny that has consigned almost all its authors to obscurity, while the names of those who took any conspicuous part in sectarian history have become household words among mankind. We hear much of martyrs, who sealed their testimony with blood; of courageous missionaries, who planted the standard of the Cross among savage nations and in pestilential climes; but we hear little of that heroism of charity, which, with no precedent to guide it, and with every early habit to oppose it, confronted the most loathsome forms of suffering, and, for the first time in the history of humanity, made pain and hideous disease the objects of a reverential affection. In the intellectual condition of bygone centuries, it was impossible that these things should be appreciated as they deserved. Charity was practised, indeed, nobly and constantly, but it did not strike the imagination, it did not elicit the homage of man-kind. It was regarded by the masses as an entirely subordinate department of virtue; and the noblest efforts of philanthropy excited far less admiration than the macerations of an anchorite or the proselytising zeal of a sectarian. Fabiola, that Roman lady who seems to have done more than any other single individual in the erection of the first hospitals; St. Landry, the great apostle of charity in France; even Telemachus himself, are all obscure names in history. The men who organised that vast network of hospitals that over spread Europe after the Crusades have passed altogether from recollection. It was not till the seventeenth century, when modern habits of thought were widely diffused, that St. Vincent de Paul arose and furnished an example of a saint who is profoundly and universally revered, and who owes that reverence to the splendour of his charity. But although it is true that during many centuries the philanthropist was placed upon a far lower level than at present, it is not the less true that charity was one of the earliest, as it was one of the noblest, creations of Christianity; and that, independently of the incalculable mass of suffering it has assuaged, the influence it has exercised in softening and purifying the character, in restraining the passions, and enlarging the sympathies of mankind, has made it one of the most important elements of our civilisation. The precepts and examples of the Gospel struck a chord of pathos which the noblest philosophies of antiquity had never reached. For the first time the aureole of sanctity encircled the brow of sorrow and invested it with a mysterious charm. It is related of an old Catholic saint that, at the evening of a laborious and well-spent life, Christ appeared to him as a man of sorrows, and, commending his past exertions, asked him what reward he would desire. Fame, and wealth, and earthly pleasures had no attraction to one who had long been weaned from the things of sense; yet the prospect of other and spiritual blessings for a moment thrilled the saint with joy; but when he looked upon that sacred brow, still shadowed as with the anguish of Gethsemane, every selfish wish was forgotten, and, with a voice of ineffable love, he answered, ‘Lord, that I might suffer most!’1

The third principle that Christianity employed to correct the evils of a decayed society was the principle of self-sacrifice. We have already seen some of the evils that resulted from the monastic system; but, considered in its proper place, it is not difficult to perceive its use. For the manner in which society attains that moderate and tempered excellence which is most congenial to its welfare is by imperfectly aspiring towards an heroic ideal. In an age, therefore, when the government of force had produced universal anarchy, theologians taught the doctrine of passive obedience. In an age when unbridled luxury had produced an unbridled corruption, they elevated voluntary poverty as a virtue. In an age when the facility of divorce had almost legalised polygamy, they proclaimed, with St. Jerome, that ‘marriage peoples earth, but virginity heaven.’

The earlier portion of the middle ages presents the almost unique spectacle of a society that was in all its parts moulded and coloured by theological ideas, and it was natural that when the progress of knowledge destroyed the ascendency of those ideas a universal modification should ensue. But besides this, it is not, I think, difficult to perceive that the industrial condition of Europe at this time contained elements of dissolution. The true incitements to industry must ever be found in its own rewards. The desire of wealth, the multiplied wants and aims of an elaborated civilisation, the rivalry and the ambition of commerce, are the chief causes of its progress. Labour performed as a duty, associated with the worship of voluntary poverty, and with the condemnation of luxury, was altogether abnormal. It was only by the emancipation and development of some of the towns of Italy and Belgium that the industrial spirit became entirely secular, and, assuming a new prominence and energy, introduced an order of tendencies into Europe which gradually encroached upon the domain of theology, and contributed largely towards the Reformation, and towards the rationalism that followed it. But before examining the nature of those tendencies it may be necessary to say a few words concerning the circumstances that gave them birth.

Although the old Roman slavery received its death-blow under the influences I have noticed, some lingering remains of it continued till the twelfth or thirteenth century;1 and the serfdom that followed not only continued much later, but even for a long time absorbed great numbers of the free peasants. The rapacity of the nobles, and the famines that were so frequent during the middle ages, induced the poor to exchange their liberty for protection and for bread; and the custom of punishing all crimes by fines, with the alternative of servitude in case of non-payment, still further increased the evil. At the same time the mildness of the ecclesiastical rule, and also the desire to obtain the advantage of the prayers of the monks, induced many to attach themselves as serfs to the monasteries.1 Although it would be unfair to accuse the Church of abandoning the cause of emancipation, it is probable that this last fact in some degree lessened her zeal.2 The bulk of the population of Europe was emancipated between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; but the remains of serfdom have even now scarcely disappeared. In the towns, however, personal and political liberty was attained much earlier. Something of the old Roman municipal government had lingered faintly in the south of France during the whole of the middle ages; but the complete emancipation was chiefly due to the necessities of sovereigns, who, in their conflicts with the nobles or with other nations, gladly purchased by privileges the assistance of the towns. It is probable that the fact of many of the English kings being usurpers contributed in this way to the emancipation of the English citizens;4 and the struggle between the king and nobles in France, and between the Popes and the emperors in Italy, had a similar effect. Whenever a town was emancipated an impulse was given to industry. The Crusades at last gave the municipal and industrial element an extraordinary prominence. The great sums for which kings and nobles became indebted to the middle classes, the rapid development of navigation, the inventions that were imported into Europe from the East, and, above all, the happy fortune that made the Italian towns the centre of the stream of wealth, had all, in different ways, increased the influence of the towns. In the course of the twelfth century, nearly all which carried on commercial intercourse with Italy had obtained municipal government, and some of those of Belgium, and along the shores of the Baltic, almost equalled the Italian ones in commercial activity.1 At the same time the creation of guilds and corporations of different trades consolidated the advantages that had been gained. For although it is undoubtedly true that in a normal condition of society the system of protection and monopoly, of which the corporations were the very ideal, is extremely unfavourable to production, in the anarchy of the middle ages it was of great use in giving the trading classes a union which protected them from plunder, and enabled them to incline legislation in their favour. Commerce, under their influence, became a great power. A new and secular civilisation was called into being, which gradually encroached upon the ascendency of theological ideas, and introduced a new phase in the development of Europe.

It may be observed, however, that the opposition that at last arose between the theological and the commercial spirits is not exactly what we might at first sight have expected; for in the earlier stages of society they have striking points of affinity. Missionary enterprises and commercial enter prises are the two main agents for the diffusion of civilisation; they commonly advance together, and each has very frequently proved the pioneer of the other. Besides this, the Crusades, which were the chief expression of the religious sentiments of the middle ages, owed their partial success in a great measure to the commercial communities. It was the merchants of Amalfi who, by their traffic, first opened the path for Christians to Jerusalem, and, in conjunction with the other Italian republics, supplied the chief wants of the Crusaders. The spirit that made the Venetian merchants of the thirteenth century stamp the image of Christ upon their coins, and the merchants of Florence impose a tax upon their rich woollen manufactures, in order, with the produce, to erect that noble cathedral which is even now among the wonders of the world, seemed to augur well for their alliance with the Church. Yet the event shows that these expectations were unfounded, and that wherever the type of civilisation was formed mainly by commercial enterprise, there arose a conflict with the theologians.

The first point in which the commercial civilisation came into collision with the Church was the lawfulness of lending money at interest, or, as it was then called, of practising usury.

In the present day, when political economy has been raised to a science, nothing can appear more simple than the position that interest occupies in pecuniary arrangements. We know that, in a society in which great works of industry or public utility are carried on, immense sums will necessarily be borrowed at interest, and that such transactions are usually advantageous both to the lender and the borrower The first lends his money for the purpose of increasing his wealth by the interest he receives; the second obtains the advantage of disposing of a sum which is sufficient to set in motion a lucrative business, and this advantage more than compensates him for the interest he pays. We know, too, that this interest is not capricious in its amount, but is governed by fixed laws. It usually consists of two distinct elements—the interest which is the price of money, and what has been termed1 the ‘interest of assurance.’ The price of money, like the price of most other commodities, is determined by the law of supply and demand.2 It depends upon the proportion between the amount of money that is to be lent and the demands of the borrowers, which proportion is itself influenced by many considerations, but is chiefly regulated in a normal state of society by the amount of wealth and the amount of enterprise. The second kind of interest arises in those cases in which there is some danger that the creditor may lose what he has lent, or in which some penalty, inflicted by law or by public opinion, attaches to the loan. For it is manifest that men will not divert their capital from secure to insecure enterprises unless there is a possibility that they may obtain a larger gain in the latter than in the former, and it is equally manifest that no one will voluntarily take a course that exposes him to legal penalties or to public reproach unless he has some pressing motive for doing so.

If, then, when the law of supply and demand has regulated the rate of interest, the government of the country interposes, and either prohibits all interest or endeavours to fix it at a lower rate; if public opinion stigmatises the lender at interest as infamous, and if religion brands his act as a crime, it is easy from the foregoing principles to perceive what must be the consequence. As long as there are persons who urgently desire to borrow, and persons who possess capital, it is quite certain that the relation of debtor and creditor will continue; but the former will find that the terms have greatly altered to his disadvantage. For the capitalist will certainly not lend without exacting interest, and such interest as is at least equivalent to the profits he would derive if he employed his money in other ways. If the law forbids this, he must either not lend, or lend in a manner that exposes him to legal penalties. A great number, overcome by their scruples or their fears, will adopt the former course, and consequently the amount of money in the community which is to be lent, and which is one of the great regulators of the price of money, will be diminished; while those who venture to incur the risk of infringing human, and, as they believe, Divine laws, and of incurring the infamy attached by public opinion to the act, must be bribed by additional interest. At the same time the furtive character given to the transaction is eminently favourable to imposition. The more therefore law, public opinion, and religion endeavour to lower the cur rent rate of interest, the more that rate will be raised.

But these principles, simple as they may now appear were entirely unknown to the ancients, and from an extremely early period the exaction of interest was looked upon with disfavour. The origin of this prejudice is probably to be found in the utter ignorance of all uncivilised men about the laws that regulate the increase of wealth, and also in that early and universal sentiment which exalts prodigality above parsimony. At all times and in all nations this preference has been shown, and there is no literature in which it has not been reflected. From the time of Thespis downwards, as Bentham reminds us, there is scarcely an instance in which a lender and a borrower have appeared upon the stage without the sympathies of the audience being claimed for the latter. The more ignorant the people, the more strong will be this prejudice; and it is therefore not surprising that those who were the preëminent representatives of parsimony, who were constantly increasing their wealth in a way that was so different from the ordinary forms of industry, and who often appeared in the odious light of oppressors of the poor, should have been from the earliest times regarded with dislike. Aristotle and many other of the Greek philosophers cordially adopted the popular view; but at the same time money-lending among the Greeks was a common though a despised profession, and was little or not at all molested by authority, Among the Gauls it was placed under the special patronage of Mercury. In Rome also it was authorised by law, though the legislators constantly sought to regulate its terms, and though both the philosophers and the people at large branded the money-lenders as the main cause of the decline of the empire. The immense advantages that capital possesses in a slave-country, and the craving for luxury that was universal, combined with the insecurity produced by general maladministration and corruption, and by frequent tumults created with the express object of freeing the plebeians from their debts, had raised the ordinary rate of interest to an enormous extent; and this, which was in truth a symptom of the diseased condition of society, was usually regarded as the cause. At the same time the extreme severity with which Roman legislation treated insolvent debtors exasperated the people to the highest point against the exacting creditor, while, for the reasons I have already stated, the popular hatred of the usurers and the interference of legislators with their trade still further aggravated the evil. Besides this, it should be observed that when public opinion stigmatises money-lending as criminal, great industrial enterprises that rest upon it will be unknown. Those who borrow will therefore for the most part borrow on account of some urgent necessity, and the fact that interest is wealth made from the poverty of others will increase the prejudice against it.

When the subject came under the notice of the Fathers and of the mediæval writers, it was treated with unhesitating emphasis. All the pagan notions of the iniquity of money-lending were unanimously adopted, strengthened by the hostility to wealth which early Christianity constantly incul cated, and enforced with such a degree of authority and of persistence that they soon passed into nearly every legislative code. Turgot and some other writers of the eighteenth century have endeavoured to establish a distinction between more or less rigorous theologians on this subject. In fact, however, as any one who glances over the authorities that have been collected by the old controversialists on the subject may convince himself, there was a perfect unanimity on the general principles connected with usury till the casuists of the seventeenth century, although there were many controversies about their special applications.1 A radical misconception of the nature of interest ran through all the writings of the Fathers, of the mediæval theologians, and of the theologians of the time of the Reformation, and produced a code of commercial morality that appears with equal clearness in the Patristic invectives, in the decrees of the Councils, and in nearly every book that has ever been written on the Canon Law. The difference between theologians was not in what they taught, but in the degree of emphasis with which they taught it. There were no doubt times in which the doctrine of the Church fell into comparative desuetude: there were times when usury was very generally practised, and not very generally condemned. There are even a few examples of Councils which, without in any degree justifying usury, contented themselves with expressly censuring priests who had practised it.2 But at the same time there is a long unbroken chain of unequivocal condemnations, extending from the period of the Fathers to the period of the Reformation

The doctrine of the Church has been involved in some little obscurity on account of the total change that has taken place during the last three centuries in the meaning of the word usury, and also on account of the many subtleties with which the casuists surrounded it; but if the reader will pardon a somewhat pedantic array of definitions, it will be easy in a few words to disentangle it from all ambiguity.

Usury, then, according to the unanimous teaching of the old theologians, consisted of any interest that was exacted by the lender from the borrower solely as the price of the loan.1 Its nature was, therefore, entirely independent of the amount that was asked, and of the civil laws upon the subject. Those who lent money at three per cent, were committing usury quite as really as those who lent it at forty per cent.,1 and those who lent money at interest in a country where there was no law upon the subject as those who lent it in defiance of the most stringent prohibitions.2 It is not, however, to be inferred from this that everything of the nature of interest was forbidden. In the first place, there was the case of permanent alienation of capital. A man might deprive himself for ever of a certain sum, and receive instead an annual revenue; for in this case he was not receiving the price of a loan, as a loan implies the ultimate restitution of that which had been lent. There is some reason to believe that this modification was introduced at a late period, when the rise of industrial enterprises had begun to show the ruinous character of the doctrine of usury; but at all events the distinction was generally adopted, and became the cornerstone of a large amount of legislation.3 In the next place, there were certain cases in which a lender might claim interest from his debtor—not as the price of the loan, not as a rent exacted for the use of money—but on other grounds which were defined by theologians, and which were, or were at least believed to be, entirely distinct.1 Such were the cases known among the schoolmen under the titles of ‘damnum emergens’ and ‘lucrum cessans.’ If a man was so situated that, by withdrawing a portion of his capital from the business in which he was engaged, he would suffer a palpable and unquestionable loss, and if for the purpose of assisting his neighbour he consented to withdraw a certain sum, he might stipulate a compensation for the loss he thus incurred. He was not lending money for the purpose of gaining money by the transaction, and the interest he exacted was solely a compensation for a loss he had actually sustained. In the same way, if a man was able to apply money to a purpose that would bring a certain gain, and if he consented to divert a certain sum from this channel in order to lend it to a friend, it was generally (but by no means always2 ) believed that he might receive an exact equivalent for the sacrifice he had unquestionably made. The question, too, of insurances was early raised, and created a cloud of the most subtle distinctions: so, too, did those great lending societies, which were founded in Italy by Bernardin de Feltre, under the title of ‘Monti di Pietà,’ for the purpose of counteracting the usury of the Jews. Their object was to lend money to the poor without interest, but very soon a small sum was exacted in return, in addition to what had been lent. This was very naturally stigmatised as usury, because, as we have seen, usury was entirely irrespective of the amount that was asked; but some theologians maintained, and Leo X. at last decided by a bull, that this exaction was not usurious, because it was simply a fee for the payment of the officials connected with the establishments, and not the price of the loan.1

These examples will serve to show the general character that controversies on usury assumed. Above all the complications and subtleties with which the subject was surrounded, one plain intelligible principle remained—the loan of money was an illicit way of acquiring wealth. In other words, any one who engaged in any speculation in which the increase of his capital by interest was the object had committed usury, and was therefore condemned by the Church. It is said that after the twelfth century the lawfulness of usury was a popular tenet among the Greeks;2 but before this time the teaching of theologians on the subject seems to have been perfectly unanimous, and with this exception it continued to be so till the Reformation. Usury was not only regarded as an ecclesiastical crime, but was also, as far as the Church could influence the legislators, a civil one, and it was especially singled out as one that should be investigated with torture.3

Such then was the doctrine of theologians. It remains to examine for a moment the arguments on which it was based. The first of these in the present day appears very startling. It was said that usury, however moderate, is one of those crimes, like murder or robbery, that are palpably contrary to the law of nature. This was shown by the general consent of all nations against it, and also by a consideration of the nature of money; for ‘all money is sterile by nature,’1 and therefore to expect profit from it is absurd. The essence of every equitable loan is, that precisely that which was lent should be returned; and therefore, as Lactantius maintained, and as the mediæval moralists unanimously repeated, to exact interest is a species of robbery. It is true that it might naturally occur to the minds even of mediæval theologians that houses or horses were sometimes lent at a fixed rent, which was paid notwithstanding their restitution. But this difficulty was answered by a very subtle distinction, which if it was not originated was at least chiefly developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. The use of a horse may be distinguished, at least by the intellect, from the horse itself. Men borrow a horse and afterwards restore it, but the usage of the horse has been a distinct advantage, for which they may lawfully pay; but in the case of money, which is consumed in the usage, the thing itself has no value distinct from its usage. When therefore a man restores the exact sum he has borrowed, he has done all that can be required of him, because to make him pay for the usage of this money is to make him pay for a thing that does not exist, or, perhaps more correctly, to make him pay twice for the same thing, and is therefore, said St. Thomas, dishonest.1

This was one branch of the argument; the other was derived from authority. The political economy of the Fathers was received with implicit faith, and a long series of passages of Scripture were cited which were universally regarded as condemnatory of usury.2 As it is quite certain that commercial and industrial enterprise cannot be carried on on a large scale without borrowing, and as it is equally certain that these loans can only be effected by paying for them in the shape of interest, it is no exaggeration to say that the Church had cursed the material development of civilisation. As long as her doctrine of usury was believed and acted on, the arm of industry was paralysed, the expansion of commerce was arrested, and all the countless blessings that have flowed from them were withheld.1 As, however, it is impossible for a society that is even moderately civilised to continue without usury, we find, from a very early period, a certain antagonism existing on this subject between the civil law and the Church. The denunciations of the Fathers were soon succeeded by a long series of Councils which unanimously condemned usurers, and the canonical law is crowded with enactments against them; but at the same time kings found it constantly necessary to borrow for the equipment of their armies, and they very naturally shrank from suppressing a class to which they had recourse. Edward the Confessor indeed in England, St. Lewis in France,2 and a few other sovereigns of remarkable piety, took this extreme step; but generally usury, though not altogether recognised, was in some degree connived at. Besides, to lend was esteemed much more sinful than to borrow,1 and in the earlier part of the middle ages the usurers were almost exclusively Jews, who had no scruples on the subject, and who had adopted this profession partly because of the great profits they could derive from it, and partly because it was almost the only one open to them. It was not till the close of the eleventh century that Christian money-lenders became numerous, and the rise of this class was the immediate consequence of the commercial development of the Italian republics. The Lombards soon became the rivals of the Jews;2 the merchants of Florence carried on usury to a still greater extent,3 and for the first time this was done openly, with the full sanction both of law and public opinion. From Italy usury passed to France and England;4 and the Third Council of the Lateran,5 which was convened by Alexander III., in 1179, complained that it had so increased that it was almost everywhere practised. The same Council endeavoured to arrest it by decreeing that no notorious and impenitent usurer should be admitted to the altar should be absolved at the hour of death, or should receive Christian burial.1 All this, however, was in vain: the expansion of commercial enterprise became every year more marked, and the increase of usury was its necessary consequence.

In this manner the rise of an industrial civilisation produced a distinct opposition between the practice of Christendom and the teaching of the Church. On the one hand, to lend money at interest became a constant and recognised transaction, and the more the laws of wealth were understood, the more evident it became that it was both necessary and innocent. On the other hand, there was no subject in the whole compass of Catholic theology on which the teaching of the Church was more unequivocal.2 Usury had always been defined as any sum that was exacted as the price of a loan, and it had been condemned with unqualified severity by the Fathers, by a long series of Popes and Councils, by the most eminent of the mediæval theologians, and by the unanimous voice of the Church. The result of this conflict evidently depended on the comparative prevalence of dogmatic and rationalistic modes of thought. As long as men derived their notions of duty from authority and tradition, they would adopt one conclusion; when they began to interrogate their own sense of right, they would soon arrive at another.

The sequel of the history of usury is soon told. The Reformation, which was in a great measure effected by the trading classes, speedily dispelled the illusions on the subject, although the opinions of the Reformers were at first somewhat divided. Melanchthon, Brentius, and (perhaps) Bucer adopted the old Catholic view;1 but Calvin maintained that usury was only wrong when it was exacted in an oppressive manner from the poor,2 and, with admirable good sense, he refused to listen to those who exhorted him to check it by law. In England money-lending was first formally permitted under Henry VIII.3 Somewhat later Grotius discussed it in a liberal though rather hesitating tone, maintaining strongly that it was at least not contrary to the law of nature.4 Two or three other Protestant writers, who are now almost forgotten, appear to have gone still further; but the author to whom the first unequivocal assertion of the modern doctrine of interest is due seems to be Saumaise,5 who, between 1638 and 1640, published three books in its defence. His view was speedily but almost silently adopted by most Protestants, and the change produced no difficulty or hostility to Christianity.

Among the Catholics, on the other hand, the difficulty of discarding the past was very considerable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the modern distinction between asury and interest had been introduced among laymen, to the great indignation of theologians,1 in order to evade the censure of the canonical law. The casuistry of the Jesuits was soon applied to the subject, and two or three circuitous ways of obtaining interest became popular, which gave rise to long and virulent controversies.2 Early in the eighteenth century three professors of the University of Ingolstadt, named Pichler, Tanner, and Hannold, took a further step, and contended that some forms of undoubted usury might be safely practised if the civil law permitted them;3 and in 1743 a writer named Broedersen wrote a book which seems to have embodied and combined nearly all the leading sentiments of the different schools of laxer theologians. The subject had by this time excited so much agitation that Benedict XIV. deemed it necessary to interpose. He accordingly as the head of the Catholic Church, issued an encyclical letter, in which he acknowledged that there were occasions when a lender, on special grounds, might claim a sum additional to what he had lent, but refused to pronounce in detail on the merits of the controversies that had been raised concerning particular kinds of loans, and contented himself with laying down authoritatively the doctrine of the Church. That doctrine was that usury is always a sin; that it consists of any sum that is exacted beyond what had been lent, solely on account of the loan;1 and that the fact of this interest being moderate, or being exacted only from a rich man, or in order to further a commercial undertaking, in no degree alters its character.2 This appears to have been the last official utterance of the Church upon the subject, and although isolated theologians for some time attempted to stem the tide, their voices soon died away before the advancing spirit of Rationalism. Year by year what the old theologians had termed usury became more general. The creation of national debts made it the very pillar of the political system. Every great enterprise that was undertaken received its impulse from it, and the immense majority of the wealthy were concerned in it. Yet though it had long been branded as a mortal sin, and though mortal sin implied eternal separation from the Deity and the endurance of eternal and excruciating sufferings, the voice of the Church was silent. The decrees of the Councils remained indeed unchanged; the passages from Scripture and from the Fathers that had so long been triumphantly adduced continued precisely the same; but the old superstition faded steadily and almost silently away, till every vestige of it had disappeared. Laws, indeed, against usury still continued upon the statute book, but they were intended not to prohibit interest, but only to regulate its rate; and as the principles of political economy were elucidated, this too began to pass away. At the close of the seventeenth century, Locke protested strongly against the attempt to reduce interest by law;1 but the full investigation of the subject was reserved for the following century. It was remarked that Catharine of Russia having endeavoured to lower the general rate of interest from six to five per cent., her enactment had the effect of raising it to seven; and that Louis XV., in the same manner, raised it from five to six when intending to reduce it to four.2 In England both Adam Smith and Hume threw a flood of light upon the subject, though neither of them fully perceived the evil of the laws, which the first, indeed, expressly applauded.1 In France, nine years before the ‘Wealth of Nations,’ Turgot had disclosed most of those evils; and he appears to have clearly seen that interest is not capricious, but bears a fixed relation to the general condition of society.2 At last Bentham, in his famous ‘Letters on Usury,’ gave what will probably prove a deathblow to a legislative folly that has been in existence for 3,000 years. It has been observed by a Russian political economist that the Starovertsis, and some other dissenters from the Russian Church, still maintain that it is sinful to lend money at interest3 —perhaps the last representatives of what was for many centuries the unanimous teaching of the Christian Church.

The importance of this episode depends not so much on the question that was immediately at issue—though that question, as we have seen, was far from being insignificant— as upon its influence in breaking the authority of the Church. A second way in which the rise of the industrial classes that followed the Crusades tended towards the same object was by uniting nations of different religions in commercial relations. Before this time the intervention of the Pope had been the most effectual agent in regulating national differences, and General Councils formed the highest, and indeed almost the solitary, expression of a European federation. The benign influence of Catholicism was continually exercised in correcting the egotism of a restricted patriotism; and although this benefit was purchased by the creation of an intense animosity towards those who were without, and also by an excessive predominance of ecclesiastical influence, it would be unfair to forget its inestimable value. After the Crusades, however, a new bond of cohesion was called into existence, and nations were grouped upon a new principle. The appointment of consuls in the Syrian towns, to superintend the commercial interests of the Western nations, gave the first great impulse to international diplomacy1 —an influence which for many centuries occupied an extremely important place in civilisation, but appears now to be steadily waning before the doctrine of the rights of nationalities and before the increasing publicity of politics. The social and intellectual consequences of commercial intercourse were still greater. For while an intense sectarian spirit is compatible with the most transcendent abilities and with the most profound learning, provided those abilities and that learning are directed in a single channel, it can very rarely survive close contact with members of different creeds. When men have once realised the truth that no single sect possesses a monopoly either of virtue or of abilities—when they have watched the supporters of the most various opinions dogmatising with the same profound conviction, defending their belief with the same energy, and irradiating it with the same spotless purity—when they have learnt in some degree to assume the standing-point of different sects, to perceive the aspect from which what they had once deemed incongruous and absurd seems harmonious and coherent, and to observe how all the features of the intellectual landscape take their colour from the prejudice of education, and shift and vary according to the point of view from which they are regarded—when, above all, they have begun to revere and love for their moral qualities those from whom they are separated by their creed, their sense both of the certainty and the importance of their distinctive tenets will usually be impaired, and their intolerance towards others proportionately diminished. The spectacle of the contradictions around them, of the manifest attraction which different classes of opinions possess to different minds, will make them suspect that their own opinions may possibly be false, and even that no one system of belief can be adapted to the requirements of all men; while, at the same time, their growing sense of the moral excellence that may be associated with the most superstitious creed will withdraw their minds from dogmatic considerations. For human nature is so constituted, that, although men may persuade themselves intellectually that error is a damnable crime, the voice of conscience protests so strongly against this doctrine, that it can only be silenced by the persuasion that the personal character of the heretic is as repulsive as his creed. Calumny is the homage which dogmatism has ever paid to conscience. Even in the periods when the guilt of heresy was universally believed, the spirit of intolerance was only sustained by the diffusion of countless libels against the misbeliever, and by the systematic concealment of his virtues. How sedulously theologians at that time laboured in this task, how unscrupulously they maligned and blackened every leading opponent of their views, how eagerly they fanned the flame of sectarian animosity, how uniformly they prohibited those whom they could influence from studying the writings or frequenting the society of men of different opinions from their own, is well known to all who are acquainted with ecclesiastical history. The first great blow to this policy was given by the rise of the commercial classes that followed the Crusades. Orthodox Catholics came into close and amicable connection both with Greeks and with Mohammedans, while their new pursuit made them, for the first time, look with favour upon the Jews. It was these last who in the middle ages were the special objects of persecution, and it was also towards them that the tolerant character of commerce was first manifested.

The persecution of the Jewish race dates from the very earliest period in which Christianity obtained the direction of the civil power;1 and, although it varied greatly in its character and its intensity, it can scarcely be said to have definitively ceased till the French Revolution. Alexander II., indeed, and three or four other Popes,1 made noble efforts to arrest it, and more than once interposed with great courage, as well as great humanity, to censure the massacres; but the priests were usually unwearied in inciting the passions of the people, and hatred of the Jew was for many centuries a faithful index of the piety of the Christians. Massacred by thousands during the enthusiasm of the Crusades and of the War of the Shepherds, the Jews found every ecclesiastical revival, and the accession of every sovereign of more than usual devotion, occasions for fresh legislative restrictions. Theodosius, St. Lewis, and Isabella the Catholic—who were probably the three most devout sovereigns before the Reformation—the Council of the Lateran, which led the religious revival of the thirteenth century, Paul IV., who led that of the sixteenth century, and above all the religious orders, were among their most ardent persecutors. Everything was done to separate them from their fellow-men, to mark them out as the objects of undying hatred, and to stifle all compassion for their sufferings. They were compelled to wear a peculiar dress, and to live in a separate quarter. A Christian might not enter into any partnership with them; he might not eat with them; he might not use the same bath; he might not employ them as physicians; he might not even purchase their drugs.1 Intermarriage with them was deemed a horrible pollution, and in the time of St. Lewis any Christian who had chosen a Jewess for his mistress was burnt alive.2 Even in their executions they were separated from other criminals, and, till the fourteenth century, they were hung between two dogs, and with the head downwards.3 According to St. Thomas Aquinas, all they possessed, being derived from the practice of usury, might be justly confiscated,1 and if they were ever permitted to pursue that practice unmolested, it was only because they were already so hopelessly damned, that no crime could aggravate their condition.2

Insulted, plundered, hated, and despised by all Christian nations, banished from England by Edward I., and from France by Charles VI., they found in the Spanish Moors rulers who, in addition to that measure of tolerance which is always produced by a high intellectual culture, were probably not without a special sympathy for a race whose pure monotheism formed a marked contrast to the scarcely disguised polytheism of the Spanish Catholics; and Jewish learning and Jewish genius contributed very largely to that bright but transient civilisation which radiated from Toledo and Cordova, and exercised so salutary an influence upon the belief of Europe. But when, in an ill-omened hour, the Cross supplanted the Crescent on the heights of the Alhambra, this solitary refuge was destroyed, the last gleam of tolerance vanished from Spain, and the expulsion of the Jews was determined.

This edict was immediately due to the exertions of Torquemada, who, if he did not suggest it, at least by a singular act of audacity overcame the irresolution of the Queen;1 but its ultimate cause is to be found in that steadily increasing popular fanaticism which made it impossible for the two races to exist together. In 1390, about a hundred years before the conquest of Granada, the Catholics of Seville, being excited by the eloquence of a great preacher, named Hernando Martinez, had attacked the Jews’ quarter, and murdered 4,000 Jews,2 Martinez himself presiding over the massacre. About a year later, and partly through the influence of the same eminent divine, similar scenes took place at Valentia, Cordova, Burgos, Toledo, and Barcelona.3 St. Vincent Ferrier, who was then stirring all Spain with his preaching, devoted himself especially to the Jews; and as the people zealously seconded the reasoning of the saint by massacring those who hesitated, many thousands were converted,1 and if they relapsed into Judaism were imprisoned or burned. Scenes of this kind took place more than once during the fifteenth century, and they naturally intensified the traditional hatred, which was still further aggravated by the fact that most of the tax-gatherers were Jews. At last the Moorish war, which had always been regarded as a crusade, was drawing to a close, the religious fervour of the Spanish rose to the highest point, and the Inquisition was established as its expression. Numbers of converted Jews were massacred; others, who had been baptised during past explosions of popular fury, fled to the Moors, in order to practise their rites, and at last, after a desperate resistance, were captured and burnt alive.2 The clergy exerted all their energies to produce the expulsion of the entire race, and to effect this object all the old calumnies were revived, and two or three miracles invented.1

When we take into consideration all these circumstances, and the condition of public feeling they evince, we can perhaps hardly blame Isabella for issuing the decree of banishment against the Jews; but at the same time it must be acknowledged that history relates very few measures that produced so vast an amount of calamity—calamities so frightful, that an old historian has scarcely exaggerated them when he describes the sufferings of the Spanish Jews as equal to those of their ancestors after the destruction of Jerusalem.2 In three short months, all unconverted Jews were obliged, under pain of death, to abandon the Spanish soil.3 Although they were permitted to dispose of their goods, they were for bidden to carry either gold or silver from Spain, and this measure made them almost helpless before the rapacity of their persecutors. Multitudes, falling into the hands of the pirates who swarmed around the coast, were plundered of all they possessed, and reduced to slavery; multitudes died of famine or of plague, or were murdered or tortured with horrible cruelty by the African savages, or were cast back by tempests on the Spanish coast. Weak women, driven from luxurious homes among the orange groves of Seville or Granada, children fresh from their mothers’ arms, the aged, the sick, and the infirm, perished by thousands. About 80,000 took refuge in Portugal, relying on the promise of the king; but even there the hatred of the Spaniards pursued them. A mission was organised. Spanish priests lashed the Portuguese into fury, and the king was persuaded to issue an edict which threw even that of Isabella into the shade. All the adult Jews were banished from Portugal; but first of all their children below the age of fourteen were taken from them to be educated as Christians. Then, indeed, the cup of bitterness was filled to the brim. The serene fortitude with which the exiled people had borne so many and such grievous calamities gave way, and was replaced by the wildest paroxysms of despair. Piercing shrieks of anguish filled the land. Women were known to fling their children into deep wells, or to tear them limb from limb, rather than resign them to the Christians. When at last, childless and broken-hearted, they sought to leave the land, they found that the ships had been purposely detained, and the allotted time having expired, they were reduced to slavery, and baptised by force. By the merciful intervention of Rome most of them at last regained their liberty, but their children were separated from them forever. A great peal of rejoicing filled the Peninsula, and proclaimed that the triumph of the Spanish priests was complete.1

Certainly the heroism of the defenders of every other creed fades into insignificance before this martyr people, who for thirteen centuries confronted all the evils that the fiercest fanaticism could devise, enduring obloquy and spoliation and the violation of the dearest ties, and the infliction of the most hideous sufferings, rather than abandon their faith. For these were no ascetic monks, dead to all the hopes and passions of life, but were men who appreciated intensely the worldly advantages they relinquished, and whose affections had become all the more lively on account of the narrow circle in which they were confined. Enthusiasm and the strange phenomena of ecstasy, which have exercised so large an influence in the history of persecution, which have nerved so many martyrs with superhuman courage, and have dead ened or destroyed the anguish of so many fearful tortures, were here almost unknown. Persecution came to the Jewish nation in its most horrible forms, yet surrounded by every circumstance of petty annoyance that could destroy its grandeur, and it continued for centuries their abiding portion. But above all this the genius of that wonderful people rose supreme. While those around them were grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling miracles and lying relics were the themes on which almost all Europe was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by countless superstitions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all love of enquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and stimulating progress with the same unflinching constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they were only second to the Moors in the cultivation of natural science. They were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.1 But their most important service, and that with which we are now most especially concerned, was in sustaining commercial activity For centuries they were almost its only representatives. By travelling from land to land till they had become intimately acquainted both with the wants and the productions of each, by practising money-lending on a large scale and with con summate skill, by keeping up a constant and secret correspondence and organising a system of exchange that was then unparalleled in Europe,1 the Jews succeeded in making themselves absolutely indispensable to the Christian community, and in accumulating immense wealth and acquiring immense influence in the midst of their sufferings. When the Italian republics rose to power, they soon became the centres to which the Jews flocked; and under the merchant governments of Leghorn, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, a degree of toleration was accorded that was indeed far from perfect, but was at least immeasurably greater than elsewhere. The Jews were protected from injury, and permitted to practise medicine and money-lending unmolested, and public opinion, as well as the law, looked upon them with tolerance.1

The tolerant spirit the commercial classes manifested towards the Jews before the Reformation was displayed with equal clearness towards both Catholics and Protestants in the convulsions that followed it. In addition to the reasons I have already given, there were two causes actively sustaining the predisposition.

In the first place, the industrial character is eminently practical. The habit of mind that distinguishes it leads men to care very little about principles, and very much about results; and this habit has at least a tendency to act upon theological judgments.

In the second place, religious wars and persecutions have always proved extremely detrimental to industry. The expulsions of the Jews and Moors from Spain, and of the Huguenots from France, were perhaps the most severe blows ever directed against the industry of either country; while the nations which on these or similar occasions were wise enough to receive the fugitives, reaped an immediate and an enormous advantage. The commercial genius of the Jewish exiles was one of the elements in the development of Leghorn, Pisa, and Ancona. Amsterdam owes a very large part of its prosperity to the concourse of heretics who had been driven from Bruges and from the surrounding country. The linen manufacture in Ireland, as well as many branches of English industry, were greatly stimulated by the skill and capital of the French refugees. French commerce received a powerful and long-sustained impulse from the good relations Francis I. had established with the Turks. It was not there fore surprising that Amsterdam, and in a less degree the other centres of commercial enterprise, should have been from an early period conspicuous for their tolerance, or that the diffusion of the industrial spirit should have everywhere prepared the way for the establishment of religious liberty.

Another consequence of the rise of the industrial spirit was the decay of the theological ideal of voluntary poverty which had created the monastic system. Immediately after the Crusades we find nearly all Europe rushing with extreme and long-sustained violence into habits of luxury. The return of peace, the contact with the luxurious civilisations of the East, the sudden increase of wealth that followed the first impetus of commerce, had all contributed to the movement. An extraordinary richness of dress was one of its first signs, and was encountered by a long succession of sumptuary laws. At the end of the thirteenth century we find Philip the Fair regulating with the most severe minuteness the number and quality of the dresses of the different classes of his subjects.1 About the middle of the fourteenth century a parliament of Edward III. passed no less than eight laws against French fashions.2 Even in Florence, among the officers of the republic, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, was one especially appointed ‘to repress the luxury of women.’1 Bruges, which had then risen to great wealth, became very famous in this respect; and the French king and queen having visited it early in the fourteenth century, it is related that the latter was unable to restrain her tears; for, as she complained, she ‘found herself in presence of 600 ladies more queenly than herself.’2 The fearful depopulation that was produced by the black death greatly strengthened the tendency. The wages, and consequently the prosperity, of the working classes rose to an unexampled height, which the legislators vainly tried to repress by fixing the maximum of wages by law;3 while the immense fortunes resulting from the innumerable inheritances, and also that frenzy of enjoyment which is the natural reaction after a great catastrophe, impelled the upper classes to unprecedented excesses of luxury. This new passion was but part of a great change in the social habits of Europe, which was everywhere destroying the old rude simplicity, rendering the interiors of houses more richly and elaborately furnished, creating indoor life, increasing the difference between different ranks, producing a violent thirst for wealth, and making its display one of the principal signs of dignity.

There are few things more difficult to judge than those great outbursts of luxury that meet us from time to time in history, and which, whenever they have appeared, have proved the precursors of intellectual or political change. A sober appreciation of their effects will probably be equally removed from those Spartan, Stoical, or monastic declamations which found their last great representative in Rousseau, and from the unqualified eulogy of luxury in which Voltaire and some of his contemporaries indulged. Political economy, by establishing clearly the distinction between productive and unproductive expenditure, and by its doctrine of the accumulation of capital, has dispelled forever the old illusion that the rich man who lavishes his income in feasts or pageants is contributing involuntarily to the wealth of the community; and history unrolls a long catalogue of nations that have been emasculated or corrupted by increasing riches. But, on the other hand, if luxury be regarded as including all those comforts which are not necessary to the support of life, its introduction is the very sign and measure of civilisation; and even if we regard it in its more common but less definite sense, its increase has frequently marked the transition from a lower to a higher stage. It represents the substitution of new, intellectual, domestic, and pacific tastes for the rude warlike habits of semi-barbarism. It is the parent of art, the pledge of peace, the creator of those refined tastes and delicate susceptibilities that have done so much to soften the friction of life. Besides this, what in one sense is a luxury, soon becomes in another sense a necessary. Society, in a highly civilised condition, is broken up into numerous sections, and each rank, except the very lowest, maintains its position chiefly by the display of a certain amount of luxury. To rise to a higher level in the social scale, or at least to avoid the discomfort and degradation of falling below his original rank, becomes the ambition of every man; and these motives, by producing abstinence from marriage, form one of the principal checks upon population. However exaggerated may have been the apprehensions of Malthus, the controversy which he raised has at least abundantly proved that, when the multiplication of the species is checked by no stronger motive than the natural disinclination of some men to marriage, when the habitual condition of a large proportion of the inhabitants of a country that is already thickly inhabited is so low that they marry fearlessly, under the belief that their children can fare no worse than themselves, when poor-laws have provided a refuge for the destitute, and when no strong religious motive elevates celibacy into a virtue, the most fearful calamities must ensue.1 Looking at things upon a large scale, there seem to be two, and but two adequate, checks to the excessive multiplication of the species: the first consists of physical and moral evils, such as wars, famines, pestilence, and vice, and those early deaths which are so frequent among the poor; the second is abstinence from marriage. In the middle ages, the monastic system, by dooming many thousands to perpetual celibacy, produced this abstinence, and consequently contributed greatly to avert the impending evil.2 It is true that the remedy by itself was very inadequate. It is also true that, considered in its economical aspect, it was one of the worst that could be conceived; for it greatly diminished the productive energies of society, by consigning immense numbers to idleness, and by diffusing a respect for idleness through the whole community But still the monastic system was in some measure a remedy; and, as it appears to me, the increased elaboration of social life, rendering the passion for wealth more absorbing, was one of the necessary preliminaries of its safe abolition. That elaboration was effected after the Crusades, and the change it has produced is very remarkable. The repressive influence upon population that was once exercised by a religious system resting on the glorification of voluntary poverty, and designed to mortify the natural tendencies of mankind, is now exercised by that increased love of wealth which grows out of the multiplication of secular aims, or, in other words, out of the normal development of society.

But, putting aside the incidental effects of luxury upon population, there can be no doubt that its effects in stimulating the energies of mankind, by investing material advantages with a new attraction, have sometimes been very great and very beneficial. For the love of wealth and the love of knowledge are the two main agents of human progress; and, although the former is a far less noble passion than the latter, although, in addition to the innumerable crimes it has produced, it exercises, when carried to excess, a more than common influence in contracting and indurating the character, it may well be doubted whether it is not, on the whole, the more beneficial of the two. It has produced all trade, all industry, and all the material luxuries of civilisation, and has at the same time proved the most powerful incentive to intellectual pursuits. Whoever will soberly examine the history of inventions, of art, or of the learned professions, may soon convince himself of this. At all events, the two pursuits will usually rise together. The great majority of mankind always desire material prosperity, and a small minority always desire knowledge; but in nations that are undeveloped, or are declining, these desires are unable to over some the listlessness that is general. There is then no buoyancy in the national character. All lively curiosity, all the fire and energy of enterprise, are unknown. Men may love wealth, and even sacrifice moral principles to attain it, but they are unable to emancipate themselves from the empire of routine, and their languid minds recoil with the same antipathy from novelty, whether it comes to them in the form of industrial enterprise, or of intellectual innovation. This is even now very much the condition of Spain and of some other nations, and during the greater part of the middle ages it was the general condition of Christendom. In such a state of society, the creation of a spirit of enterprise is the very first condition of mental as of material progress; and when it is called into existence in one department, it will soon be communicated to all. The ardent passion for luxury that followed the Crusades—the new tastes, new ideas, and new fields of enterprise that were suddenly made popular—produced it in Europe; and the impulse that began in industry was soon felt in knowledge. In the Roman empire, which rested on slavery, luxury produced idleness. In the fourteenth century it stimulated industry, and aroused a strong feeling of opposition to that monastic system, which, by its enormous development, was a serious impediment to progress.

This opposition, which was at first created by the increased energy of laymen, was intensified by the deterioration of the monks. At one time, as I have already observed, they had been the great directors of labour. But when their numbers and their wealth had immensely increased, their first enthusiasm passed away, and multitudes thronged the monasteries simply to escape the burdens of life. Besides this, the priesthood had become intimately allied with the nobles, who are always opposed to the industrial classes. The alliance was in part the result of special circumstances, for the Crusades were directed conjointly by priests and nobles; and it was during the Crusades that the aristocracy obtained its distinct and complete organisation. It was also in part the consequence of a certain harmony which exists between the theological and the aristocratic spirit. Both, raising the past far above the present, regard innovation with extreme dislike, and both measure excellence by a different rule from personal merit.

If I have been fortunate enough to carry the reader with me through the foregoing arguments, the importance of industry in influencing theological developement will have become apparent. We have seen that a great religious change is effected not by direct arguments, but by a predisposition to receive them, or, in other words, by a change of sympathies and bias. We have also seen that the industrial spirit which became prominent early in the fourteenth century produced such a change. It did so in three ways. It arose in a society in which the laity were crouching in abject submission to the priesthood, and it developed and raised to honour the practice of money-lending, which the priesthood had invariably anathematised. It arose in a society in which the duty of religious intolerance was regarded as an axiom, and it produced a tendency towards toleration by uniting men of different creeds in amicable intercourse, by elevating to honour on account of their commercial merits the people who were most persecuted on account of their creed, by making men concentrate their attention mainly on practice rather than on theory, and by calling into existence an order of interests which persecution seriously endangered. It, in the last place, made men look with aversion upon the monastic deal which was the very centre of the prevailing theology. In all these ways it proved the precursor of the Reformation, and an all these ways it harmonised with the spirit of Rationalism.

Commercial enterprise, bearing in its train these intellectual consequences, spread rapidly over Europe. The accidental discovery at Amalfi of a manuscript of Roman laws is said to have produced the navigation laws;1 the invention of the compass rendered long voyages comparatively secure; and every shore, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, was soon fringed with harbours. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find the first mercantile companies established in England.2 At a still earlier period Belgium had entered into relations with more than thirty kingdoms or states.3 The consular system, which emanated from the commercial republics, and which was designed for the special protection of merchants, advanced rapidly in importance.4 As early as the thirteenth century the consuls of Italy, Spain, and France had in most countries acquired an extended and recognised authority. England, in the fourteenth century, followed the example,5 and about the same time the jurisdiction which had formerly been confined to seaports was extended to the towns in the interior. From these consulships, or perhaps from the papal legations which were already known, arose at last the institution of resident ambassadors, which completed the organisation of diplomacy, though its influence was not fully acquired till much later, in the coalitions resulting from the rivalry of Francis and Charles V.1 The Hanseatic League repressed piracy, associated commerce with the first efflorescence of political liberty, and by the treaty of Stralsund, in 1370, made commercial interests preëminent in the North; while in the South the Venetians, anticipating in some measure the doctrines of later economists, sketched the first faint outlines of the laws that govern them.2 At last the Medici appeared, and surrounded industry with the aureoles of genius and of art. For the first time the intellectual capital of Italy was displaced, and Rome itself paled before that new Athens which had arisen upon the banks of the Arno. An aristocracy, formed exclusively from the trading and mercantile classes,3 furnished the most munificent and discerning patrons art had ever found; almost every great intellectual movement was coloured by its influence, and its glory was reflected upon the class from which it sprang.

It may here be advisable to rise for a moment above the industrial movement with which we have hitherto been occupied, and to endeavour to obtain a general conception of the different streams of thought which were at this time shooting across Europe. Such a review, which will be in part a summary of conclusions I have established in previous chapters, will help to show how admirably the industrial movement harmonised with the other tendencies of the age, and also how completely the Reformation was the normal consequence of the new condition of society.

While, then, the development of industry was producing an innovating, tolerant, and anti-monastic spirit, two great revivals of learning were vivifying the intellectual energies of Christendom.

The first consisted of that resuscitation of the classical writings which began about the twelfth century and culminated in the labours of Erasmus and the Scaligers. This revival broke the intellectual unity which had characterised the middle ages. It introduced a new standard of judgment, a new ideal of perfection, a new order of sympathies. Men began to expatiate in an atmosphere of thought where religious fanaticism had never entered, and where the threatenings of the dogmatist were unknown. The spell that had bound their intellects was broken, and the old type of character gradually destroyed. The influence of the movement passed from speculative philosophy to art, which was then the chief organ of religious sentiments, and, under the patronage of the Medici, a profound change took place in both painting and architecture, which intensified the tendency that produced it.

The second revival was produced by the action of Moorish civilisation. It was shown chiefly in an increased passion for natural science, which gradually substituted the conception of harmonious and unchanging law for the conception of a universe governed by perpetual miracles. With this passion for science, astrology rose into extraordinary repute and it necessarily involved a system of fatalism, which, in its turn, led the way to a philosophy of history. From the same quarter arose many of those pantheistic speculations about the all-pervasive soul of the universe, to which the writers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were so passionately addicted.1 In all these ways, Moorish influence contributed to shake the old faith, to produce new predispositions, and thus to prepare the way for the coming change. Roger Bacon, who was probably the greatest natural philosopher of the middle ages, was profoundly versed in Arabian learning, and derived from it many of the germs of his philosophy.2 The fatalism of the astrologers and the pantheism of Averroes tinged some of the most eminent Christian writings long after the dawn of the Reformation. In one respect, Mahometan influence had somewhat anticipated the classical revival. The Mahometan philosophers were intense admirers of Aristotle; and it was chiefly through translations made by the Jews from the Arabic versions, that the knowledge of that philosopher penetrated to Europe.

There was another influence, growing partly out of the industrial development, and partly out of the revival of classical learning, at this time acting upon Europe, which I have not yet had occasion to mention, which many readers will deem far too trivial for notice, but which, nevertheless, appears to me so extremely important, both as a symptom and a cause, that I shall venture, at the risk of being accused of unpardonable digression, to trace some of the leading stages of its progress. I mean that change in the character of public amusements, produced chiefly by the habits of luxury, which took place about the fifteenth century, and which produced the revival of the theatre.

No one can question the immense importance in the intellectual history of mankind of an institution which elicited the dramas of Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and which has invari ably appeared as one of the most conspicuous signs and causes of a rising civilisation. Combining the three great influences of eloquence, of poetry, and of painting, it has probably done more than any other single agent to produce that craving after the ideal, that passionate enthusiasm of intellect, out of which all great works of imagination have sprung. It has been the seed-plot of poetry and romance, and it has exercised a considerable though less direct influence over eloquence. The age of Demosthenes and Æschines was also the age in which the theatre of Athens was the object of such a passionate devotion, that no politician was permitted even to propose the abolition of its subsidy.1 The golden age of Roman eloquence was also the golden age of the Roman theatre, and the connection between acting and eloquence was one of the favourite subjects of the discussions of the time.2 In modern days, Burke declared, in an assembly in no degree inferior to any of Greece or of Rome, that there was probably no orator among those he addressed, who did not owe something of his skill to the acting of Garrick.1 And this amusement, which has ever proved one of the chief delights, and one of the most powerful incentives of genius, had, at the same time, the rare privilege of acting with equal power upon the opposite extreme of intellect, and is even now almost the only link connecting thousands with intellectual pursuits.

But the aspect in which the history of the theatre is most remarkable, is perhaps to be found in its influence upon national tastes. Every one who considers the world as it really exists, and not as it appears in the writings of ascetics or sentimentalists, must have convinced himself that in great towns, where multitudes of men of all classes and characters are massed together, and where there are innumerable strangers separated from all domestic ties and occupations, public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary; and that, while they are often the vehicle and the occasion of evil, to suppress them, as was done by the Puritans of the Commonwealth, is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice. National tastes, however, vary with the different stages of civilisation, and national amusements undergo a corresponding modification; combats of men and animals being, for the most part, the favourite type in the earlier stages, and dramatic representations in the later ones. The history of amusements is thus important, as a reflection of the history of civilisation, and it becomes still more so when we remember that institutions which are called into existence by a certain intellectual tendency, usually react upon and intensify their cause.

In this, as in most other respects, we find a strong contrast existing between the two leading nations of antiquity. The Athenians, who for a long period repelled gladiatorial spectacles with disgust, were passionately devoted to the drama, which they carried to the very highest point of perfection, and from which they derived no small amount of their intellectual culture. The Romans, on the other hand, who regarded every subject from a military point of view had long prohibited theatrical representations, except those which formed part of the worship of the gods. The first public theatre was erected by Pompey, and he only evaded the censure of the severe moralists of his time by making it a single story of a building that was ostensibly a temple of Venus. The Stoics, and the representatives of the old republican spirit, denounced the new amusement as calculated to enervate the national character. Public opinion branded actors as infamous, and, as a necessary consequence, they speedily became so. The civilisation of the Empire made the theatre at last extremely popular; but that civilisation was the most corrupt the world had ever seen, and the drama partook of the full measure of its corruption. A few rays of genius from the pens of Seneca, Plautus, or Terence flashed across the gloom; but Rome never produced any dramatists comparable to those of Greece, or any audience at all resembling that which made the theatre ring with indignation because Euripides had inserted an apology for mental reservation into his ‘Hippolytus,’ or had placed a too ardent panegyric of wealth in the mouth of Bellerophon, After a time the position of an actor became so degraded, that it was made a form of perpetual servitude,1 and no one who had embraced that profession was permitted at any future time to abandon it. The undisguised sensuality reached a point which we can scarcely conceive. Women were sometimes brought naked upon the stage.2 Occasionally an attempt was made to amalgamate theatrical amusements with those bloody spectacles to which the people were so passionately devoted, and the tragedy was closed by the burning of a criminal, who was compelled to personate Hercules.3 At the same time, by a curious association of ideas, the theatre was still intimately connected with religious observances; the temple was often the scene of its orgies, and the achievements of the gods the subject of representation.

It is certainly not surprising that the early writers of Christianity should have directed all their eloquence against such an institution as this. They inveighed against it as the school of profligacy, and a centre of idolatry; and they dwelt, in language which it is impossible to read without emotion, upon the duty of those who might be called, at any moment, to endure for their faith the most horrible forms of torture and of death, abstaining from whatever could enervate their courage or damp their zeal. Mingled with these noble exhortations we find no small amount of that monastio spirit which regards pleasure as essentially evil, and also two or three arguments which perhaps represent the extreme limits of human puerility. Tertullian, having enumerated with great force and eloquence many of the most horrible vices of the theatre, adds that at least the Almighty can never pardon an actor who, in defiance of the evangelical assertion, endeavours, by high-heeled boots, to add a cubit to his stature, and who habitually falsifies his face.1

The position of public amusements in the early history of Christianity is extremely important. On the one hand, the austerity with which the Christians condemned them was probably one of the chief causes of the hatred and consequent persecution of which the early Church was the victim, and which contrasts so remarkably with the usually tolerant character of polytheism. On the other hand, when Christianity had attained its triumph, when the intellectual and moral basis of paganism was completely sapped, and when the victorious Church had begun to exhibit something of the spirit from which it had suffered, the theatre and the circus became the last strongholds of the dying faith. Partly because they had actually emanated from the pagan worship, and partly because the Christian Councils and Fathers denounced them with an absolute and unqualified severity, they were soon regarded as the chief expression of paganism; and the people, who endured with scarcely a murmur the destruction of their temples and the suppression of their sacrifices, flew to arms whenever their amusements were menaced. The servitude, indeed, by which the actor was enchained for life to the theatre, was soon abrogated in the case of those who desired to become Christians;1 and the bishops refused to baptise any actor who persisted in his profession, and excommunicated any Christian who adopted it;2 but the theatres were still thronged with eager spectators. Indeed, one curious enactment of the Theodosian Code provides that some of the temples should be saved from the general destruction, because they were associated with public games.3 When the bishops were manifestly unable to suppress the public games, they directed all their energies to restricting them to days that were not sacred. St. Ambrose succeeded in obtaining the abolition of Sunday representations at Milan, and a similar rule was at last raised to a general law of the empire.4

It is remarkable, however, when considering the relations of Christianity and Paganism to the theatre, that Julian, who was by far the most distinguished champion of the latter, formed in this respect a complete exception to his co-religionists. His character was formed after the antique model, and his antipathy to public amusements was almost worthy of a bishop. Libanius, it is true, has left a long disquisition in praise of pantomimic dances, which, he maintained, were of a far higher artistic merit than sculpture, as no sculptor could rival the grace and beauty of the dancers; but on this subject he received no encouragement from his master. It has been ingeniously, and, I think, justly remarked, that this austerity of Julian, by placing him in direct opposition to that portion of the population which was opposed to Christianity, was one of the causes of the failure of his attempts to rally the broken forces of paganism.

After a time the Roman theatre languished and passed away. The decline was partly the result of the ceaseless opposition of the clergy, who during the middle ages were too powerful for any institution to resist their anathema, but still more, I think, of the invasion of the barbarians, which dissolved the old civilisation, and therefore destroyed the old tastes. The theatre soon lost its attraction; it lingered, indeed, faintly for many centuries, but its importance had passed away, and about the end of the thirteenth century most antiquaries seem to think the last public theatres were destroyed. The amusements of men were of an entirely different, and, for the most part, of a warlike character. Battle and the imitations of battle, boisterous revels, the chase, and after the Crusades, the gaming-table, became the delight of the upper classes; while the poor found congenial recreation in bear-baiting, bull-fighting, and countless similar amusements—in fairs, dances perambulant musicians, sham fights, and rude games.1 Besides these, there were numerous mountebanks, who were accustomed to exhibit feats of mingled agility and buffoonery, which were probably the origin of the modern pantomime, and in which, as it has been shown by a high authority,2 there is reason to believe a dress very similar to that of our harlequins was employed. It is probably to these mountebanks, or possibly to the troubadours or wandering minstrels, who had then become common, that St. Thomas Aquinas referred in a passage which excited a fierce controversy in the seventeenth century. In discussing the subject of amusement, the saint suggested the question whether the profession of an ‘actor’ was essentially sinful; and, having enumerated some special circumstances that might make it so, he answers the question in the negative,3 because,’ as he says, ‘recreation is necessary to mankind,’ and also because ‘it had been revealed to the blessed Paph nutius that a clown1 was to be his companion in heaven.’

Such, then, was the character of public amusements before the revival of learning. The time, however, was at hand when a profound change, fraught with momentous consequences to the Church, was manifested; and it is worthy of notice, that while that change was ultimately caused by the advance of civilisation, the Church itself was its pioneer. The first revival of the theatre is undoubtedly to be found in the religious plays. From the earliest times men seem to have been accustomed to throw into dramatic forms the objects of their belief; and the pagan mysteries, which were essentially dramatic,2 retained their authority over the popular mind long after every other portion of the ancient worship was despised. The first biblical play on record is on Moses, and is the composition of a Jew named Ezekiel, who lived in the second century. The second is a Greek tragedy on the Passion, by St. Gregory Nazianzen. The religious ceremonies, and especially those for Christmas, Epiphany, and Holy Week, became continually more dramatic, and the monks and nuns after a time began to relieve the monotony of the cloister by private representations. The earliest known instance of this is of the tenth century, when a German abbess named Hroswitha composed two or three dramas, with a religious object, but imitated, it is said, in part from Terence, which were acted by the nuns. The subject of one of them is curious. A hermit had brought up in the ways of piety a beautiful girl, but she rebelled against his authority, neglected his counsels, and fled to a house of ill fame. The hermit, having discovered the place of her resort, assumed the dress and the manners of a soldier, penetrated to her retreat, supported his character so skilfully that he deceived its inmates, and at last found an opportunity of reclaiming his ward.1

In the extreme weariness of the conventual life, amusements of this kind were welcomed with delight, and, though often and severely censured, they continued in some monasteries till far into the eighteenth century.2 The form, however, which they generally assumed was not that of secular dramas with a religious tendency, but of mysteries or direct representations of scenes from Scripture or from the lives of the saints. Until the latter part of the thirteenth century they were exclusively Latin, and were usually acted by priests in the churches; but after this time they assumed a popular form, their religious character speedily declined, and they became at last one of the most powerful agents in bringing the Church, and indeed all religion, into disrepute.3 The evidence of this is not to be found in the representations of the Almighty that were so frequent upon the stage;1 for these, though inexpressibly shocking in our eyes, were perfectly in harmony with the intellectual condition of the time; but rather in the gross indecency which the worst days of the Roman theatre had scarcely surpassed,2 and perhaps still more in the strange position that was assigned to Satan. At first the mysteries had probably contributed much to the religious terrorism. The glare and smoke of the fire of hell were constantly exhibited, and piercing shrieks of agony broke upon the ear. Very soon, however, Satan was made to act the part of a clown. His appearance was greeted with shouts of laughter. He became at once the most prominent and most popular character of the piece, and was emancipated by virtue of his character from all restraints of decorum. One of the most impressive doctrines of the Church was thus indissolubly associated in the popular mind with the ridiculous, and a spirit of mockery and of satire began to play around the whole teaching of authority.

It is difficult, indeed, to say how far these rude dramatic representations contributed to that disruption of old religious ties that preceded and prepared the Reformation. At a very early period those strange festivals, the Feast of Fools and the Feast of Asses,1 had introduced into the churches indecent dances, caricatures of the priesthood, and even a parody of the Mass; and the mysteries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries carried the same spirit far and wide. But what I desire especially to notice is, that their popularity was mainly due to that material prosperity which was itself a consequence of the industrial development we are considering. This growing passion for an order of amusements in some degree intellectual, this keen relish for spectacles that addressed themselves especially to the imagination, was the beginning of that inevitable transition from the rude, simple, warlike, unartistic, unimaginative tastes of barbarism, to the luxurious, refined, and meditative tastes of civilisation. Coarse and corrupt as they were, these early plays reflected the condition of a society that was struggling feebly into a new phase of civilisation, and which at the same time, though still deriving its conceptions from the Church, was tending surely and rapidly towards secularisation.

The change was first effected in Italy and France. In those countries, which were then the centres of material prosperity, the dramatic tastes had naturally been most developed, and the mysteries had attained an extraordinary popularity. A modern Italian bibliographer has been able even now to collect more than one hundred different pieces of this kind, which were represented in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.2 About the middle of the fifteenth century the exhibitions of the mountebanks began to be thrown into a systematic form. A complete story was exhibited, and the harlequin rose to great prominence as chief actor.1 We find, too, a few representations of Pagan fables, and also some plays that were termed impromptus, in which the outline of a plot was sketched by the author, but the dialogue left to the ingenuity of the actor. Besides these, dialogues, or discussions of the nature of farces,2 became common; and having passed from Italy to France, they there assumed the dimensions of regular dramas, sometimes of very considerable merit. One of them, the famous farce of ‘Patelin,’ which was probably composed about 1468 by Peter Blanchet, an advocate of Poitiers, still holds its position upon the French stage.3 The directors of the religious plays attempted to meet these new rivals by the invention of semi-religious ‘moralities,’ which were properly representations of allegorical figures of virtues and vices,4 and were intended to act the part of a compromise; but the farces soon became the dominating form, and all other performances sank into secondary importance.1 Latin plays were also sometimes acted by the scholars in the colleges, a practice which was afterwards made very popular by the Jesuits.

This was the first stage of the movement. The second was the creation of secular plays of a higher order of merit, which completely superseded and destroyed the mysteries.2 Like the former, this advance emanated chiefly from the commercial civilisation of Florence, but it is extremely remarkable that the leaders of the Church in Italy were among its most ardent supporters. The first regular Italian comedy appears to have been the ‘Calandra,’ and its author was the Cardinal Bibbiena, who had long been secretary to Lorenzo de’ Medici.1 The play was probably written in the last few years of the fifteenth century, when the author was still young, but it at all events did not impede his advancement in the Church. The two first Italian tragedies were the ‘Sophonisba’ of Trissino, which was imitated from Euripides, and the ‘Rosimunda’ of Ruccellai, which was imitated from Seneca. The ‘Sophonisba’ was acted for the first time at Vicenza, about 1514, and was soon afterwards represented at Rome under the special patronage of Leo X., who appointed its author ambassador at the court of the Emperor Maximilian. The ‘Rosimunda’ was first acted, in the presence of the same Pope, at Florence, in 1515.2 The earliest instance of a secular musical drama is the ‘Orpheus’ of Politiano, which was composed for the amusement and acted in the presence of the Cardinal Gonzaga of Mantua.3 A few years later we find Clement VII. present with the Emperor Charles V., at Bologna, at the representation of the comedy of ‘The Three Tyrants,’ by Ricci.4 As a natural consequence of this patronage, the Italian theatre at its commencement does not appear to have been very hostile to the Church, and in this respect forms a marked contrast to the theatre of France. The ‘Eugénie’ of Jodelle, which was the first regular comedy acted on the French stage, was throughout what many of the older farces had been, a bitter satire upon the clergy.1

One of the most important consequences of this revival of the theatre was the partial secularisation of music. This art, to which the old Greeks had ascribed so great a power over both mind and body, and which some of their states had even made an essential element of the civil polity,2 had for many centuries been entirely in the hands of the Church. Almost all the music that really deserved the name was ecclesiastical, and all the great names in musical history had been ecclesiastics. St. Ignatius having, according to the legend, heard the angels singing psalms in alternate strains before the throne of God, introduced the practice of antiphons. St. Ambrose regulated the church music for the diocese of Milan, and St. Gregory the Great for the remainder of Christendom. St. Wilfrid and St. Dunstan were the apostles of music in England. In the eleventh century, the monk Guido of Arezzo invented the present system of musical notation. Nearly at the same time, the practice of singing in parts, and combining several distinct notes in a single strain,3 which is the basis of modern harmonies, first appeared in the services of the Church. From a very early period music had been employed to enhance the effect of the sacred plays, and as it continued to occupy the same position when the drama had been secularised, St. Philip Neri, in 1540, in order to counteract the new attraction, originated at Rome the oratorio. About twenty years later, Palestrina, a chaplain of the Vatican, reformed the whole system of Church music. These exertions would perhaps have retained for it something at least of its ancient ascendency, but for the invention in 1600 of recitative, which, by rendering possible complete musical dramas, immediately created the opera, withdrew the sceptre of music from the Church, and profoundly altered the prevailing taste. From this time the star of St. Cecilia began to wane, and that of Apollo to shine anew. Those ‘Lydian and Ionic strains’ which Plato so jealously excluded from his republic, and which Milton so keenly appreciated, were heard again, and all Italy thrilled with passion beneath their power. Venice especially found in them the most faithful expression of her character, and no less than three hundred and fifty different operas were represented there between 1637 and 1680. In France the opera was introduced at the desire of Cardinal Mazarin; and it is remarkable that Perrin, who wrote the first French operas, was a priest; that Cambert, who assisted him in composing the music, was a church organist; and that nearly all the first actors had been choristers in the cathedrals. From this time the best singers began to desert the churches for the theatre. In England the musical dramas known under the name of masques elicited some of the noblest poetry of Ben Jonson and of Milton.1

Another way in which the Church exercised, I think, an indirect influence upon the stage, is not quite so obvious as the preceding one. Whatever opinion may be held on the general question of the comparative merits of the classical and the Gothic architecture, it is at least certain that the latter was immeasurably superior in suggesting the effects of immense distances—in acting, not simply on the taste, but also on the emotions, by a skilful employment of all the means of illusion which an admirable sense of the laws of perspective can furnish. The Greek temple might satisfy the taste, but it never struck any chord of deeper emotion, or created any illusion, or suggested any conception of the Infinite. The eye and the mind soon grasped its proportions, and realised the full measure of its grandeur. Very different is the sentiment produced by the Gothic cathedral, with its almost endless vistas of receding arches, with its high altar rising conspicuous by a hundred lights amid the gloom of the painted windows, while farther and farther back the eye loses itself in the undefined distance amid the tracery of the gorgeous chancel, or the dim columns of Our Lady's chapel. The visible there leads the imagination to the invisible. The sense of finiteness is vanquished. An illusion of vastness and awe presses irresistibly on the mind. And this illusion, which the architecture and the obscurity of the temple produce, has always been skilfully sustained in Catholicism by ceremonies which are preëminently calculated to act upon the emotions through the eye.

Now it is surely a remarkable coincidence, that while Christian architecture is thus indisputably superior to pagan architecture in creating the illusion of distance, the modern theatre should be distinguished by precisely the same superiority from the ancient one. A fundamental rule of the modern theatre is, that the stage should be at least twice as deep as it is broad. In the theatres of antiquity, the stage was five or six times as broad as it was deep.1 It resembled the portion which is now exhibited when the curtain is down. The wall that closed it in, instead of being concealed, was brought prominently before the spectator by rich sculptures, and illusion was neither sought nor obtained. In the modern theatre, our present system of decoration only advanced by slow degrees from the rude representations of heaven and hell, that were exhibited in the mysteries, to the elaborate scenery of our own day; but still the constant progress in this direction exhibits a conception of the nature of the spectacle, which is essentially different from that of the Greeks, and is probably in a great measure due to the influence of ecclesiastical ceremonies upon the taste.

It is not difficult to perceive the cause of the favour which Leo and his contemporaries manifested to the theatre. They belonged to a generation of ecclesiastics who were far removed from the austere traditions of the Church, who had thrown themselves cordially into all the new tastes that luxury and revived learning had produced, and who shrank with an undisguised aversion from all religious enthusiasm, from all intolerance of the beautiful. Their lives were one long dream of art and poetry. Their imaginations, matured and disciplined by constant study of the noblest works of Grecian genius, cast a new colouring upon their profession, and adorned with a pagan beauty every creation of the Church. Such men as these were but little likely to repress the intellectual passion that arose almost simultaneously in Italy, France, and Spain,1 and created the modern theatre. But when the teaching of Luther had thrilled through Europe, a new spirit was infused into the Vatican. The intellectualist and the art critic were replaced by men of saintly lives but of persecuting zeal, and a fierce contest between the Church and the theatre began, which continued till near the close of the eighteenth century, and ended in the complete victory of the latter.

The doctrine of the Church on this subject was clear and decisive. The theatre was unequivocally condemned, and all professional actors were pronounced to be in a condition of mortal sin, and were, therefore, doomed, if they died in their profession, to eternal perdition.2 This frightful proposition was enunciated with the most emphatic clearness by countless bishops and theologians, and was even embodied in the canon law and the rituals of many dioceses.3 The Ritual of Paris, with several others, distinctly pronounced that actors were by their very employment necessarily excommunicated.1 This was the sentence of the Church upon those whose lives were spent in adding to the sum of human enjoyments, in scattering the clouds of despondency, and charming away the weariness of the jaded mind. None can tell how many hearts it has wrung with anguish, or how many noble natures it has plunged into the depths of vice. As a necessary consequence of this teaching, the sacraments were denied to actors who refused to repudiate their profession, and, in France at least, their burial was as the burial of a dog.2 Among those who were thus refused a place in con secrated ground was the beautiful and gifted Le Couvreur, who had been perhaps the brightest ornament of the French stage. She died without having abjured the profession she had adorned, and she was buried in a field for cattle upon the banks of the Seine. An ode by Voltaire, burning with the deep fire of an indignant pathos, has at once avenged and consecrated her memory.

It is hard for those who are acquainted with the habits of modern Roman Catholic countries to realise the intense bitterness which theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries manifested towards the theatre. Molière, whose plays were continually cited as among the most signal instances of its depravity, was the object of especial denunciation, and when he died it was only with extreme difficulty that permission could be obtained to bury him in consecrated ground.1 The religious mind of Racine recoiled before the censure. He ceased to write for the stage when in the zenith of his powers, and an extraordinary epitaph, while recording his virtues, acknowledges that there was one stain upon his memory—he had been a dramatic poet.2 In 1696, and again in 1701, on the occasion of the jubilee, the actors entreated the pope to relieve them from the censures of the canon law, but their request was unavailing; and when, upon the recovery of Louis XIV. from a serious illness, every other corporation at Paris offered up a Te Deum, they were especially excluded.3 At least one archbishop distinctly prohibited his clergy from marrying them;4 and when a lawyer, named Huerne de la Mothe, ventured, in 1761, to denounce this act as a scandal, and to defend the profession of an actor, his work was burned by the hand of the executioner, and his name erased from the list of advocates.1 Lulli, the first great musical composer of France, could only obtain absolution by burning an opera he had just composed.2

Yet in spite of all this the theatre steadily advanced, and as the opposition was absolute and unequivocal its progress was a measure of the defeat of the Church. In France, although the law pronounced actors infamous, and consequently excluded them from every form of public honour and employment, and although till far into the eighteenth century custom prohibited those who occupied any magisterial appointment from attending the theatre, the drama retained an undiminished popularity. In Spain it appears to have secured a certain measure of toleration by throwing itself into the arms of the Church. Calderon infused into it the very spirit of the Inquisition. The sacred plays continued after they had been abolished in almost every other country; and although Mariana and some other leading theologians denounced all dramatic entertainments, they were unable to procure their final suppression.3 The opera, it is true, was somewhat severely treated, for some divines having ascribed to it a period of pestilence and of drought, it was for a time abolished;1 but it at last secured its position in Spain. The Italians at all times thronged the theatre with delight. Even the Romans exhibited such a marked passion for this form of amusement, that the popes were obliged to yield. At first dramatic entertainments were only permitted at Rome during the carnival, and Benedict XIV., while according this permission, addressed a pastoral to the bishops of his kingdom to assure them that he did it with extreme reluctance to avoid greater evils, and that this permission was not to be construed as an approval.2 Gradually, however, these amusements were extended to other seasons of the year; and even the opera, in obedience to the wishes of the people, was introduced. At last, in 1671, a public opera-house was built at Rome; but female performers were long strictly prohibited, and their places supplied by eunuchs—an unfortunate race, which came in consequence into great request in the Holy City.3

The man who did more than any other to remove the stigma that rested upon actors, was unquestionably Voltaire. There is, indeed, something singularly noble in the untiring zeal with which he directed poetry and eloquence, the keenest wit and the closest reasoning, to the defence of those who had so long been friendless and despised. He cast over them the ægis of his own mighty name, and the result of his advocacy was shown in the enactment by which the French Revolutionists, at a single stroke, removed all the disqualifications under which they laboured. The position actors have since conquered in almost every country, and the extent to which the theatre has become a recognised institution, must be manifest to every one. Among the many illustrations of the impotence of modern ecclesiastical efforts to arrest the natural current of society, there are few more curious than is furnished on the opening night of the Roman theatre, when the cardinal-governor of Rome appears, as the representative of the pope, to sanction the entertainment by his presence, to listen to the sweet songs of the opera sung by female singers, and to watch the wreathings of the dance.

I trust the reader will pardon the great length to which this disquisition on the drama has extended. It is not altogether of the nature of a digression, because, although an institution like the theatre cannot be regarded as entirely the creation of any one nation, it certainly owes its first impulse and some of its leading characteristics to that union of an industrial and intellectual civilisation which attained its culmination under the Medici. Nor is it without an important bearing on the subject of my work, because the successive transformations I have reviewed furnish one of the most striking examples of that process of gradual secularisation which, under the influence of the rationalistic spirit, is displayed in turn in each department of thought and action. Besides this, there are few more powerfully destructive agents than customs or institutions, no matter how little aggressive, which a Church claiming supreme authority endeavours to suppress, and which have nevertheless secured their position in the world. By the simple fact of their existence, they at first divide the allegiance of mankind, and at last render obsolete a certain portion of ecclesiastical teaching, and thereby impart a character of mobility and flexibility to the whole. In this respect Protestantism has been far less affected by the change than her rival, for Protestantism does not claim the same coercive authority, and can, therefore, in a measure assimilate with the developments of society, and purify and temper when it cannot altogether control. It must be acknowledged also, that while the Calvinistic section of the Reformed Churches has ever displayed a bigotry on the subject of amusements, which is at least equal to that of the Church of Rome,1 Anglicanism has always been singularly free from the taint of fanaticism;2 nor is it, I believe, too much to add, that her forbearance has received its reward, and that, if we except the period of depravity that elapsed between the Restoration and the publication of the work of Jeremy Collier in 1698, and which may be justly ascribed in a great measure to the reaction against Puritanism, the English theatre has been that in which the moralist can find least to condemn.

The creation of the secular theatre was one of the last results of the industrial supremacy of Italy. A succession of causes, into which it is not now necessary to enter, had corroded that political system, to which the world is so deeply indebted; and the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope by Gama, and of America by Columbus, together with some other causes, directed the stream of commerce in new channels. By the time when the effects of these discoveries began first to be felt, the Reformation had divided Christendom into two opposing sections, and the important question arose, to which of these sections the sceptre of industry would fall.

It must, I think, be acknowledged, that to a spectator of the sixteenth century no proposition could seem more clear than that the commercial supremacy of Europe was destined to be exercised by Catholicism. The two great discoveries I have mentioned had both fallen to the lot of the intensely Catholic nations of the Spanish peninsula. Spain especially exhibited a combination of advantages which it would be very difficult to parallel in history. Her magnificent colonies opened out a boundless prospect of wealth, and she seemed to possess all those qualities and capacities that were requisite for their development. The nation was in the zenith of its power. The glories of Granada still rested upon it. Charles V. had united the imperial sceptre with that of Spain, had organised a vast navy, had constituted himself the recognised head of the Catholic interests, had humbled that French power which alone could imperil his ascendency, and had acquired the reputation of the most consummate politician of the age. If we add to this, that the passion for wealth had never been more strongly exhibited than by the Spaniards, it would seem as though no element of commercial greatness was wanting. Reasoning à priori, it would appear natural to conclude that Spain was about to embark in a long and glorious career of commerce, that she would incline the balance of material prosperity decisively to the side of the religion of which she was the champion, but that the commercial spirit would at last act upon and modify her religious fanaticism.

None of these results followed. Although for a few years the Spanish Catholics were the arbiters and the directors of commerce, and although the effects of their ascendency have not even yet passed away, the prosperity of Spain was speedily eclipsed. At a time when she seemed on the highway to an almost boundless wealth, she sank into the most abject poverty. Her glory was withered, her power was shattered, her fanaticism alone remained.

There are several considerations that explain this apparent anomaly. The first is, I think, to be found in the erroneous economical doctrine which became the mainspring of Spanish legislation.

Although it would undoubtedly be a gross exaggeration to regard the Italian republics as having arrived at the knowledge of the true laws that govern wealth, there can be no question that their policy was far more in conformity with the principles of political economy than that of any of their successors till after the time of Quesnay and Smith. The exquisite practical skill they possessed, and also the peculiarity of their position, which made most of them entirely dependent upon commerce, and consequently the natural enemies of protective privileges, saved them from the worst egislative errors of the age; and, indeed, it has been the just boast of Italian economists, that, if we except Serra, Genovesi, and perhaps one or two others, even their speculative writers have always been singularly free from the errors of that mercantile system’ which in other countries was so long supreme. It was not until Spain had risen to power, and the stream of American gold had begun to inundate Europe, that the doctrine upon which that fatal system rests became the centre of commercial legislation.

To state this doctrine in the simplest form, it was believed that all wealth consisted of the precious metals, and that therefore a country was necessarily impoverished by every transaction which diminished its metallic riches, no matter how much it may have added to its other possessions. If, therefore, two nations exchanged their commodities with a view of increasing their wealth, the single object of each was to regulate the transaction in such a manner that it might obtain a larger amount of money than it before possessed, or, in other words, that the value of its non-metallic exports should be greater than of its imports. But as the excess of exports over imports on one side implied a corresponding excess of imports over exports on the other, it followed that the interests of the two nations were diametrically opposed, that the loss of one was the condition and measure of the gain of the other, and that to the nation which was unable to incline what was termed the ‘balance of commerce’ in its favour, the entire transaction was an evil. It followed also that the importance of native productions was altogether subordinate to that of the export or import of gold.

From these principles three important practical consequences were drawn which contributed greatly to the down fall of Spain. In the first place, the whole energy both of the government and people was concentrated upon the gold mines, and manufactures and almost all forms of industry sank into neglect. In the next place, the colonies were speedily ruined by an elaborate system of commercial restrictions and monopolies, devised with the vain hope of enriching the mother-country, and some of them were at length goaded into successful rebellion. In the last place, an undue amount of gold was introduced into Spain, which had the very natural, but, to the Spaniards, the very astonishing effect of convulsing the whole financial system of the country. For the value of gold, like the value of other commodities, is governed by the law of supply and demand; and the fact that this metal has been selected as the general instrument of exchange, while it makes any sudden alteration in its value peculiarly dangerous, does not in any degree remove it from the law. When it suddenly becomes too common, its value—that is to say, its purchasing power—is depreciated; or, in other words, the price of all other articles is raised. After a time things adjust themselves to the new standard, and many political economists, considering the sudden stimulus that is given to industry, the particular class of enterprises the change in the value of money specially favours, and still more its effect in lightening the pressure of national debts, have regarded it as ultimately a benefit; but, at all events, the confusion, insecurity, and uncertainty of the transition constitute a grave danger to the community, and the loss inflicted on certain classes1 is extremely serious. In our own day, although the influx of Australian and Californian gold has told very sensibly upon prices, the immense area of enterprise over which it has been diffused, the counteracting influence of machinery in cheapening commodoties, and also a few exceptional causes of demand,1 have materially deadened the shock. But the stream of gold that was directed to Spain after the discovery of America produced nearly the full measure of evil, while the economical error of the age deprived the Spamards of nearly all the good that might have been expected. The temporary evil of a violent change in prices could only have been abated, and the permanent evil of the decay of national industry could only have been in some degree compensated, by the free employment of American gold to purchase the industry of foreign nations; but this would involve the export of the precious metal, which the government under the severest penalties prohibited. It is true that, as no prohibition can finally arrest the natural flow of affairs, the gold did issue forth,2 but it was in the manner that was least advantageous to Spain. Onarles V. and Philip II. employed it in their wars; but wars are almost always detrimental to industry; many of these were disastrous in their conclusions, and those of Charles were undertaken much more in the interests of the empire than of Spain, while Philip sacrificed every other consideration to the advantage of the Church. The only other mode of egress was by infringing the law. After a few years, the full effects of this policy1 were manifested Manufactures had languished. Prices were immensely raised. Confusion and insecurity characterised every financial undertaking. The Spaniards, to adopt the image of a great political economist, realising the curse of Midas, found all the necessaries of life transmuted into gold, while, to crown all, the government prohibited its export under pain of death.

These economical causes will help to show why it was that the material prosperity of the great Catholic power was so transient, and also why no strong industrial spirit was evoked to counteract the prevailing fanaticism. This last fact will be still further elucidated, if we consider the social and religious institutions which Spanish Catholicity encouraged. The monasteries, in numbers and wealth, had reached a point that had scarcely ever been equalled; and besides subtracting many thousand men and a vast amount of wealth from the productive resources of the country, they produced habits of mind that are altogether incompatible with industry. The spirit that makes men devote themselves in vast numbers to a monotonous life of asceticism and poverty is so essentially opposed to the spirit that creates the energy and enthusiasm of industry, that their continued coexistence may be regarded as impossible. Besides this, that aristocratic system which harmonises so well with a theological society revived. A warlike and idle nobility took the place of the old merchant nobles of Italy, and a stigma was in consequence attached to labour,1 which was still further increased by the revival of slavery.

The resurrection of this last institution is usually ascribed to Las Casas, the only really eminent philanthropist Spain ever produced. In this statement there is, however, some exaggeration. Las Casas only landed in America in 1513, and he does not appear to have taken any step on the subject of slavery till some years later; but negroes had been employed as slaves by the Portuguese in their colonies in the very beginning of the century,2 and a certain number were introduced into the Spanish colonies as early as 1511. They do not, however, appear to have been fully recognised by the government, and further imports were discouraged till 1516, when the monks of St. Jerome, who then administered affairs in the West Indies, recommended their employment. In the following year, Las Casas pronounced energetically in the same sense. Strange as it may now appear, there can be no doubt that in doing so he was actuated by the purest benevolence. Perceiving that the wretched Indians, to whose service he had devoted his life, perished by thousands beneath the hard labour of the mines, while the negroes employed by the Portuguese bore the fatigue without the slightest injury, he imagined that by introducing the latter he was performing an act of undoubted philanthropy; and thus it came to pass, that one whose character presents an almost ideal type of beneficence became a leading promoter of negro slavery.1

The traffic once organised, and encouraged by the government, spread rapidly. Its monopoly was granted to the Belgians, who sold it to the Genoese; but merchants of Venice, Barcelona, and England had all an early share in the adventure. The first Englishman who took part in it was a certain John Hawkins, who made an expedition to the African coast in 1562.2 Scarcely any one seems to have regarded the trade as wrong. Theologians had so successfully laboured to produce a sense of the amazing, I might almost say generical, difference between those who were Christians and those who were not, that to apply to the latter the principles that were applied to the former, would have been deemed a glaring paradox. If the condition of the negroes in this world was altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next were greatly improved. Besides, it was remembered that, shortly after the deluge, Ham had behaved disrespectfully to his drunken father, and it was believed by many that the Almighty had, in consequence, ordained negro slavery. The Spanish were not in general bad masters. On the contrary, when the gold fever had begun to subside, they were in this respect distinguished for their humanity;1 and their laws on the subject still present, in some points, a favourable contrast to those of America; but the effect of slavery upon the national character was not the less great.

Besides these considerations, we must take into account the great acts of religious intolerance of which Spain was guilty, and which recoiled with fatal effect upon her industrial system. Never did a people verify more fully the great truth, that industry and fanaticism are deadly foes. Four times the Spanish nation directed all its energies in the cause of the Church, and four times its prosperity received a wound from which it has never recovered. By the expulsion of the Jews, Spain was deprived of all her greatest financiers, and of almost all her most enterprising merchants. By the expulsion of the Moors, she lost her best agriculturists; vast plains were left uninhabited, except by banditti, and some of the most important trades were paralysed forever. By the expedition of the Armada, that naval supremacy which, since the discoveries of the Cape passage and of America had made commerce exclusively maritime, implied commercial supremacy, passed from her hands, and was soon divided between the Protestant nations of England and Holland. By her persecutions in the Netherlands, she produced a spirit of resistance that baffled her armies, destroyed her prestige, and resulted in the establishment of another State, distinguished alike for its commercial genius, its bravery, and its Protestantism.

There were, of course, other circumstances which accelerated or aggravated the downfall of Spain; but the really dominating causes are all, I think, to be found under the economical or theological heads I have noticed. It is well worthy of attention how they conspired, acting and reacting upon one another, to destroy that political structure which was once so powerful, and which appeared to possess so many elements of stability. Nor can we question that that destruction was an almost unmingled benefit to mankind. Blind folly, ignoble selfishness, crushing tyranny, and hideous cruelty, mark every page of the history of the domination of Spain, whether we turn to the New World or to the Netherlands, or to those glorious Italian cities which she blasted by her rule. During the period of her ascendency, and especially during the reigns of Charles V. and Philip II., who were the most faithful representatives of her spirit, she was guilty of an amount of persecution before which all the enormities of Roman emperors fade into insignificance. She reorganised the accursed institution of slavery on a gigantic scale, and in a form that was in some respects worse than any that had before existed; she was the true author of the mercantile theory and of the colonial policy which have been the sources of disastrous wars to every European nation; she replaced municipal independence by a centralised despotism, and the aristocracy of industry by the aristocracy of war;1 and she uniformly exerted the whole stress of her authority to check on all subjects and in all forms the progress of enquiry and of knowledge. Had she long continued to exercise the assimilating, absorbing, and controlling influence of a great Power, the advancement of Europe might have been indefinitely retarded. Happily, however, Providence, in the laws of history as in the laws of matter, tends ever to perfection, and, annexing fatal penalties to the resistance of those laws, destroys every obstacle, confounds those who seek to arrest the progress, and, by the concurrence of many agencies, effects the objects it designs.

Before leaving the subject of Spanish industry, I may notice one article that was at this time brought into Europe, not because it was itself very important, but because it was the beginning of a great social change that was fully accomplished about a century afterwards—I mean the introduction of hot drinks. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards imported chocolate from Mexico. Rather more than half a century later, tea was introduced from China and Japan. It had been noticed by Marco Polo as early as the thirteenth century, but it was probably first brought to Europe by the Jesuit missionaries in the first years of the seventeenth century, and it was soon after largely imported by the Dutch. In 1636 we find it in usage in France, and enthusiastically patronised by the Chancellor Séguier. The earliest notice of it in England is in an Act of Parliament of 1660. The discovery of the circulation of blood, which produced an exaggerated estimate of the medical value of bleeding and of hot drinks, and the writings of two physicians named Tulpius and Bontekoe, gave a great impulse to its popularity. In a letter written in 1680, Madame de Sévigné observes that the Marchioness de la Sablière had just introduced the custom of drinking it with milk. About the middle of the same century, coffee began to pour in from Turkey. The properties of this berry had been noticed in 1591 by the Venetiat physician Alpinus, and soon afterwards by Bacon in his ‘Natural History,’ and the drink was introduced into England in 1652 by an English Turkey merchant named Edwards. In France the first coffee-house was established at Marseilles in 1664. A few years later, Soliman Aga, the ambassador of Mahomet IV., made the new beverage very fashionable in Paris; and in 1672 an Armenian named Pascal established a coffee-house in that city. He had soon count less imitators; and it was observed that this new taste gave a serious and almost instantaneous check to drunkenness, which had been very prevalent in France. Coffee-houses were the true precursors of the clubs of the eighteenth century. They became the most important centres of society, and they gave a new tone to the national manners. In England, though they were once even more popular than in France, and though they are indissolubly associated with one of the most brilliant periods of literary history, they have not taken root; but the effect of hot drinks upon domestic life has probably been even greater than on the Continent. Checking the boisterous revels that had once been universal, and raising woman to a new position in the domestic circle, they have contributed very largely to refine manners, to introduce a new order of tastes, and to soften and improve the character of men. They are therefore, I think, not unworthy of a passing notice in a sketch of the moral and intellectual consequences of commerce.1

When the Spanish supremacy was destroyed, what may be termed the commercial antagonism of the two religions ceased. England and Holland were long the leaders of commerce; and if Catholic nations have since distinguished themselves in that course, it has been when their zeal had grown languid and their system of policy been secularised. The general superiority in industry of Protestant countries has been constantly noticed and often explained. The suppression of monasteries, the discouragement of mendicity, and the construction of churches that were in no degree formed upon the ascetic principle, contributed to the progress; but perhaps the principal cause was the intellectual impulse communicated by the Reformation, which was felt in every field both of speculation and of action.1

Put while the relative interests of Protestantism and Catholicism have not been very seriously involved in the history of industry since the seventeenth century, there is another form of antagonism which long after made that history a faithful mirror of theological progress. I mean the conflict between town and country, between the manufacturing and the agricultural interests. The question which of these two spheres of existence is most conducive to the happiness and the morality of mankind will, no doubt, always be contested; but the fact that they produce entirely different intellectual tendencies, both in religion and politics, will scarcely be disputed. The country is always the representative of stability, immobility, and reaction. The towns are the representatives of progress, innovation, and revolution. The inhabitants of the country may be very vicious; but even in the midst of their vice they will be extremely superstitious, extremely tenacious of the customs of religions that have elsewhere passed away, and especially addicted to that aspect of those religions which is most opposed to the spirit of Rationalism. All the old superstitions concerning witches, fairies, hereditary curses, prophetical dreams, magical virtues, lucky or unlucky days, places, or events, still linger among the poor; while even the educated are distinguished for the retrospective character of their minds, and for their extreme antipathy to innovation. The general character of great towns, and especially of manufacturing towns, is entirely different.1 It is indeed true that the great subdivision of labour, while it is eminently favourable to the increase of wealth, is for a time unfavourable to the intellectual development of the labourer; for the mind that is concentrated exclusively upon the manufacture of a single portion of a single object is far less happily circumstanced than if it were occupied with a complex subject which demands the exercise of all its faculties. But this disadvantage is more than compensated by the intellectual stimulus of association, and by the increased opportunities which greater rewards and steady progress produce. Certain it is that neither the virtues nor vices of great towns take the form of reaction in politics, or of superstition in religion. The past rests lightly, often too lightly, upon them. Novelty is welcomed, progress is eagerly pursued. Vague traditions are keenly criticised, old doctrines are disintegrated and moulded afresh by the individual judgment. Besides this, the manufacturing is also the commercial interest; and the great intellectual importance of commerce we have already seen. Such, then, being the opposite predispositions evoked by agricultural and manufacturing occupations, it becomes a matter of considerable interest and importance to trace the history of their comparative development; and in order to do so it will be necessary to give a brief outline of the progress of economical opinion on the subject.

Before the dawn of a correct political economy in the eighteenth century, Europe was for the most part divided between two doctrines on the subject of commerce. Both schools regarded money as the single form of wealth; but, according to one of them, commerce should be altogether discouraged, as at best a dangerous and a gambling speculation; while, according to the other, it should be pursued as the chief method of acquiring wealth, but only on the condition of the exports exceeding the imports. The first of these schools usually discouraged manufactures, and concentrated its attention upon agriculture; the other was eminently favourable to manufactures. Before the sixteenth century, the notions of the first school, without being systematised or formally stated, were very generally diffused; politicians la boured to make each nation entirely self-subsisting; and their was an antipathy, or at least a disinclination, to any speculation that involved an export of gold, even with the eventual object of obtaining a larger supply in return.1 Besides this, the rude simplicity of manners which made the demand for manufactured goods very small, the superstitions about usury which fell with crushing weight on industrial enterprise, the imperfection of the means of communication, the zeal with which the monks pursued agriculture, the especial adaptation of that pursuit, on account of its comparative facility, to an early stage of civilisation, and the recollection of the peculiar honour in which it had been held by the ancients,—all tended in the same direction. With the exception of the Italian republics and the cities of the Hanseatic League, which had little or no land to cultivate, and were almost forced by their circumstances into commerce, agriculture was everywhere the dominant form of labour, and the habits of mind it created contributed much to colour, intensify, and perpetuate the mediæval superstitions.

When, however, the great discoveries of gold in America created in all nations an eager desire to obtain it, industry began to assume a new form and more gigantic proportions; and although, owing to causes which I have already traced, it languished in Spain, it was rapidly developed in other countries, and the opinions of statesmen on the subject were steadily modified. Sully was probably the last minister of very considerable abilities who systematically opposed manufactures as an evil. The opposite opinion, which regarded them as the most efficient magnet of foreign gold, found its greatest representative in Colbert;1 and although the ruinous wars of Louis XIV., and still more the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in a great measure counteracted his efforts; although, too, the ultimate effects of the protective system have been extremely detrimental to industry; there can be little doubt that this minister did more than any preceding statesman to make manufactures a prominent form of European industry. He removed many of the impositions under which they suffered, protected their interests whenever they were menaced, and did all that lay in his power to encourage their development.

Indeed, at first sight, the school which followed that of Colbert, though in reality an immense step in advance, might appear less favourable to the manufacturing interests. The economists—as Quesnay, and those very able writers and statesmen who adopted his opinions, were termed—were not simply the precursors of political economy; they were the actual founders of many parts of it; and though their system, as a whole, has perished, and their fame been eclipsed by the great thinker of Scotland, they will always form one of the most important links in the history of the science. Perhaps their principal achievement was the repudiation of the old doctrine that all wealth consisted of gold—a doctrine which, having lighted up the labours of the alchemists, and inspired all the Eldorado dreams of the middle ages, had become the cardinal principle of commercial legislation.1 Almost at the same time, and about twenty-five years before the publication of ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ this doctrine was assailed, and the possibility of the increase of wealth being in inverse proportion to the increase of gold was asserted, by Hume in England, and by Quesnay in France. But while the French economists perceived very clearly the mistake of their predecessors, when they came to establish their own doctrine they fell into an error which is a striking illustration of the difficulty with which, in one stage of progress, even the most acute minds rise to truths which in another stage appear perfectly self-evident. Nothing, according to their view, can really add to the national wealth which does not call new matter into existence, or at least introduce it to the service of men. Mines, fisheries, and agriculture fulfil these conditions, and consequently add to the national wealth. Manufactures, simply giving matter a new form, though they are extremely useful to the community, and though they may enable an individual to augment his portion of the national wealth, can never increase the great total. Practically, therefore, for the great majority of nations, agriculture is the single source of wealth; all manufactures are ultimately salaried by it, and its encouragement should be the main object of judicious policy. Raynal, it is true, in this matter separate I from the rest of the school. He saw that manufactures invested the raw material with new qualities, and making it the object of new demand increased its value; but at this point he stopped.1 Agriculture and industry he regarded as both sources of national wealth, but not so commerce. For getting that an article may be far more valuable in a country into which it is imported than in that in which it is indigenous, and that when the costs incident upon transport have been deducted from this excess, the remainder is a pure gain, he maintained that commerce, being simply displacement, could not increase the general wealth.

These doctrines were undoubtedly in some respects very unfavourable to manufactures, yet their consequences were not as evil as might have been expected. In the first place, the economists were unwittingly guilty of a grievous injustice to their favourite pursuit. All taxation, they believed, should be levied upon the net gains of the country; and as those gains were exclusively due to agriculture, they concluded, as Locke on somewhat different grounds had concluded in the preceding century, that the proprietors of the soil should bear the entire burden. Besides this, the economists, as the first great opponents of the mercantile theory, were on all occasions the advocates of free trade, the subverters of every form of monopoly, the reformers of all the neans of communication. By the ministry of Turgot and by the legislation of the revolutionary parliaments, such countless abuses of detail were swept away, and so many useful measures recommended, that it may be truly said that manufactures owe more to them than to any preceding legislators.

At last Adam Smith appeared; and while he effectually destroyed all that part of the doctrine of the economists which was hostile to manufactures, he established upon the firm basis of demonstration, and developed and irradiated with matchless skill, all that was most favourable to their progress. Proving that labour was the basis of value, that money is but a single form of merchandise which has been selected as the instrument of exchange, and that the goods of foreign countries are eventually purchased by native pro ductions—unravelling by a chain of the clearest but most subtle reasoning the functions of capital, the manner in which it is created by the combination of parsimony with industry, and the special facilities which manufactures and the division of labour of which they admit offer for its increase—giving, too, a fatal blow to the system of restrictions by which statesmen had long imagined that they could promote the interests of wealth,—Adam Smith performed the double service of dispelling the notion that manufactures are useless or pernicious, and unfolding the true laws that regulate their prosperity. Generation after generation, and almost year by year, his principles have penetrated more deeply into the policy of Europe; and generation after generation, manufactures, freed from their old shackles, acquire a greater expansion, and the habits of thought which they produce a corresponding importance.

It is, however, an extremely remarkable fact, as showing the tenacity with which the doctrines of the ‘economists’ clung to the mind, that even Adam Smith thought it necessary, in classifying the sources of wealth, to reserve for agriculture a position of special prominence, as the most abundant of these sources.1 He arrived at this conclusion, not from any observation of what had actually taken place, but from two general considerations. In manufactures, he contended, wealth is produced by the unaided toil of man, whereas in agriculture nature cooperates with human exertions. Besides this, agriculture, unlike other pursuits, in addition to wages and profit, can furnish a rent. The first of these statements, as has often been observed, is palpably inaccurate, for nature is in many instances extremely serviceable to the manufacturer; as, for example, when steam or water puts his machinery in motion. The second argument lost its force when Ricardo discovered the true cause of rent, proving that it is a sign of the limited productivity of the soil, and not of its superiority to other sources of wealth.1

But while this steady modification of economical opinions in favour of manufactures is one great cause of the progress of the latter, it would probably have been insufficient, but for the cooperation of two other influences. The first of these was the system of credit. This remarkable agency, which has long proved one of the great moralising influences of society, by the immense importance it has bestowed upon character, and one of the great pledges of peace, by the union it has established between different nations, and, at the same time, the most powerful of all the engines of warfare, is chiefly due to the industrial genius of Holland; for though some traces of it may be found among the Jews and the Italian republics of the middle ages, the system was not duly organised till the establishment of the bank of Amsterdam in 1609. The immediate object was to increase the amount of money in circulation, and thus give a new impetus to industry; and within certain limits, and subject to certain dangers, which we have not now to consider, it has fully answered its end.

The second influence is the rapid development of mechanical contrivances. Strictly speaking, machinery dates from the rudest instrument by which men tilled the soil; but its higher and more elaborate achievements are always the product of civilisation, upon which, in turn, they powerfully react. The most important machine invented, or at least introduced into Europe, in the middle ages, was probably the windmill,1 which was an agent in the agricultural interests. In the fifteenth century, a machine for printing transformed the intellectual condition of Europe. In the nineteenth century, the machines of Watt, Arkwright, and Stephenson, and the many minor inventions that are subsid iary to them, have given an impulse both to commerce and manufactures which is altogether unparalleled in the history of mankind. In addition to the necessary difficulties connected with the introduction of a new form of industry, every step of the progress of machines was met by a fierce opposition, directed at one time by the ablest statesmen,1 and long afterwards sustained by the lower classes, who very qaturally regarded these inventions as prejudicial to their interests. And, certainly, the first result of machinery, by economising the labour of production, is to throw a vast number of the poor out of employment, and to reduce, by nereased concurrence, the wages of the remainder. The second is to diminish the price of the article of manufacture, to the benefit of the consumer; and in most cases this depreciation leads to an immense extension of demand, which necessitates a multiplication of machines, and usually continues till the number of persons employed is immeasurably greater than before the machinery had been introduced. At the same time, this increased facility of production and this increased demand produce an accumulation of capital fai more rapid than had previously taken place; which, as the rate of wages depends entirely upon the proportion national capital bears to the labouring classes, among whom it is to be divided, is a main condition of the material prosperity of the latter. Even in those instances in which, from the nature of the case, the demand for the manufactured article cannot be so extended as to compensate for the loss of employment which the introduction of machinery occasions, although the passing evils are very great, the change is usually an advantage; for economical production implies increasing wealth, and the capital gained in one department finds its outlet in others.

There are, no doubt, other effects of machinery which are serious drawbacks to these advantages—some of them inherent in this mode of production, but many of them partly or altogether due to the process of transition. Such are the great increase of the inequalities of fortune which results from the absorption of all production by colossal manufactures, the unnatural multiplication and agglomeration of population they occasion, the sudden and disastrous fluctuations to which manufacturing industry is peculiarly liable, the evil effects it frequently exercises upon health, and the temptation to employ young children in its service. All these points have given rise to much animated discussion, which it does not fall within the province of the present work to review; but at all events it is unquestionable that, for good or for evil, the invariable effect of modern machinery has been to increase the prominence of manufactures, to multiply the number of those engaged in them, and, therefore, in the opposition of tendencies that exists between the agricultural and manufacturing classes, to incline the balance in favour of the latter.

Beyond all other nations, England has been in this respect distinguished. Both in the intellectual and in the mechanical influences I have reviewed, she stands without a rival; for with, I think, the exception of Say, France has not produced any political economist of great original powers since Turgot; and America, not withstanding her rare mechanical genius, is as yet unable to boast of a Watt or a Stephenson. It is not surprising that a land which has attained this double supremacy, and which possesses at the same time unlimited coal-mines, an unrivalled navy, and a government that can never long resist the natural tendency of affairs, should be preeminently the land of manufactures. In no other country are the intellectual influences connected with them so powerful; and the constant increase of the manu facturing population is rapidly verifying, in a sense that should not be restricted to politics, the prediction of Mr. Cobden, that eventually ‘the towns must govern England.’1

In the preceding examination of the ways in which the successive evolutions of European industry have reflected on influenced the history of belief, I have often had occasion to refer to the different branches of political economy in their relation to different aspects of industrial progress. It remains for me now to consider in a more general point of view the theological consequences of this great science, which has probably done more than any other to reveal the true physiology of society. For although political economists, and especially those of England, have often endeavoured to isolate the phenomena of wealth, all such attempts have proved entirely futile. Even Adam Smith lighted up an immense series of moral and social interests by his science. Malthus, opening out the great question of population, immensely increased its range; and it is now impossible to be imbued with the leading writings on the subject without forming certain criteria of excellence, certain general conceptions of the aim and laws of human progress, that cannot be restricted to material interests. I shall endeavour, without entering into any minute details, to sketch the general outlines of these conceptions, and to show in what respects they harmonise or clash with theological notions.

The first important consequence of political ceonomy I bave in some degree anticipated in the last chapter. It is to contribute largely towards the realisation of the great Christian conception of universal peace. The history of the fortunes of that conception in the hands of theologians is profoundly melancholy. Though peace upon earth was at first proclaimed as a main object of Christianity, and though for about three centuries the Christian disciples displayed unwearied zeal and amazing heroism in advocating it, the sublime conception of a moral unity gradually faded away before the conception of a unity of ecclesiastical organisation; and for many centuries theologians were so far from contributing to the suppression of war, that they may be justly regarded as its chief fomenters. Certain it is, that the period when the Catholic Church exercised a supreme ascendency, was also the period in which Europe was most distracted by wars; and that the very few instances in which the clergy exerted their gigantic influence to suppress them, are more than counterbalanced by those in which they were the direct causes of the bloodshed. Indeed, they almost consecrated war by teaching that its issue was not the result of natural agencies, but of supernatural interposition. As the special sphere of Providential action, it assumed a holy character, and success became a proof, or at least a strong presumption, of right. Hence arose that union between the sacerdotal and the military spirit which meets us in every page of history; the countless religious rites that were interwoven with military proceedings; the legends of visible miracles deciding the battle; the trial by combat, which the clergy often wished to suppress, but which nevertheless continued for centuries, because all classes regarded the issue as the judicial decision of the Deity. When these superstitions in some measure decayed, the religious wars began. The bond of Catholic unity, which was entirely insufficient to prevent wars between Catholic nations, proved powerful enough to cause frightful convulsions when it was assailed; and one of the most faithful measures of the decay of theological influences has been the gradual cessation of the wars they produced.

The inadequacy of theological systems as a basis of European tranquillity having been clearly proved by the experience of many centuries, there arose in the eighteenth century a school which attempted to establish this tranquillity by a purely intellectual process—by giving intellectual pursuits and political principles a decisive predommance over the military spirit. I allude to the French philosophers, who in this as in many other respects were simply endeavouring to realise in their own way one of the great ideal conceptions of Christianity. They arose at a period well suited to the enterprise. France was wearied, exhausted, and almost ruined by the long wars of Louis XIV. The prestige that Conde and Turenne had cast upon the French arms had perished beneath the still greater genius of Marl-borough. An intense intellectual life had arisen, accompanied by all the sanguine dreams of youth. Voltaire, after coquetting for a short time with the military spirit, threw himself cordially into the cause of peace. He employed all his amazing abilities and all his unrivalled influence to discredit war, and, with the assistance of his followers, succeeded in establishing the closest union between the intellects of France and England, and in replacing the old theological and military antipathy by the sympathy of common aspirations.

But a few years passed away, and all this was changed. The iniquitous war against the French Revolution into which Pitt suffered his country to plunge, and the pernicious genius of Napoleon, evoked all the reactionary influences in Europe, revived the military spirit in its full intensity, and plunged the greater part of the civilised world into the agonies of a deadly struggle.

There can, I think, be little doubt that there is a ten-dency in civilisation to approximate towards the ideal of the French philosophers. It can hardly be questioned that the advance of intellectual culture produces a decline of the military spirit, and that the cohesion resulting from a community of principles and intellectual tendencies is rapidly superseding artificial political combinations. But at the same time it is no less certain that the bond of intellectual sympathy alone is far too weak to restrain the action of colliding passions, and it was reserved for political economy to supply a stronger and more permanent principle of unity.

This principle is an enlightened self-interest. Formerly, as I have said, the interests of nations were supposed to be diametrically opposed. The wealth that was added to one was necessarily taken from another; and all commerce was a kind of balance, in which a gain on one side implied a corresponding loss on the opposite one. Every blow that was struck to the prosperity of one nation was of advantage to the rest, for it diminished the number of those among whom the wealth of the world was to be divided. Religion might indeed interpose and tell men that they ought not to rejoice in the misfortunes of others, and that they should subordinate their interests to higher considerations; but still each people, as far as it followed its selfish interests, was hostile to its neighbour;1 and even in the best ages the guiding principles of large bodies of men are almost always selfish. Independently of the many wars that were directly occasioned by a desire to alter commerical relations, there was a constant smouldering ill-feeling created by the sense of habitual antagonism, which the slightest difference kindled into a flame.

For this great evil political economy is the only corrective. It teaches, in the first place, that the notion that a commercial nation can only prosper by the loss of its neighbour, is essentially false. It teaches still further that each nation has a direct interest in the prosperity of that with which it trades, just as a shopman has an interest in the wealth of his customers.’ It teaches too that the different markets of the world are so closely connected, that it is quite impossible for a serious derangement to take place in any one of them without its evil effects vibrating through all; and that, in the present condition of Europe, commercial ties are so numerous, and the interests of nations so closely interwoven, that war is usually an evil even to the victor. Each successive development of political economy has brought these truths into clearer relief, and in proportion to their diffusion must be the antipathy to war; the desire to restrict it, when it does break out, as far as possible to those who are actually engaged; and the hostility to all who have provoked it. Every fresh commercial enterprise is therefore an additional guarantee of peace.

I know that, in the present day, when Europe is suffering to an almost unexampled extent from the disquietude resulting from the conflict between opposing principles and unequal civilisations, speculations of this kind must appear to many unreal and utopian. Most assuredly, as long as nations tolerate monarchs who, resting upon the traditions of an effete theocracy, regard their authority as of divine rigl t, and esteem it their main duty to arrest by force the political developments of civilisation, so long must standing armies and wars of opinion continue. Nor would the most sanguine political economist venture to predict a time in which the sword would be altogether unknown. The explosions of passion are not always restrained by the most evident ties of interest; exceptional circumstances counteract general tendencies; and commerce, which links civilised communities in a bond of unity, has ever forced her way among bar barians by bloodshed and by tyranny. But in order to justify the prospect of a great and profound change in the relations of European nations, it is only necessary to make two postulates. The first is, that the industrial element, which, in spite of legislative restrictions and military perturbations, is advancing every year with accelerated rapidity, is destined one day to become the dominant influence in politics. The second is, that those principles of political economy which are now acknowledged to be true by every one who has studied them, will one day be realised as axioms by the masses. Amid the complications and elaborations of civilisation, the deranging influence of passion, whether for good or for evil, becomes continually less, and interest becomes more and more the guiding influence, not perhaps of individuals, but of communities. In proportion to the commercial and industrial advancement of a nation, its interests become favourable to peace, and the love of war is in consequence diminished. When therefore the different states of Europe are closely interwoven by commercial interests, when the classes who represent those interests have become the guiding power of the state, and when they are fully penetrated with the truth that war in any quarter is detrimental to their prosperity, a guarantee for the peace of Europe will have been attained, if not perfect, at least far stronger than any which either religion or philanthropy has yet realised. In such a condition of commercial activity, and in such a condition of public knowledge, a political transformation would necessaily ensue, and the principal causes of present perturbations would be eliminated. At the same time two kindred movements which I have already noticed—the recognition of the principle of the rights of nationalities as the basis of political morality, and the growing ascendency of intellectual pursuits diminishing the admiration of military glory—would consolidate the interests of peace. Many years must undoubtedly elapse before such a condition of society can be attained torrents of blood must yet be shed before the political obstacles shall have been removed, before the nationalities which are still writhing beneath a foreign yoke shall have been relieved, and before advancing knowledge shall have finally destroyed those theological doctrines concerning the relations between sovereigns and nations which are the basis of many of the worst tyrannies1 that are cursing mankind; but as surely as civilization advances, so surely must the triumph come. Liberty, industry, and peace are in modern societies indissolubly connected, and their ultimate ascendency depends upon a movement which may be retarded, but cannot possibly be arrested.

It should be observed, too, that while the nations which are most devoted to industrial enterprise are the most wealthy and the most pacific, they are also, as a general rule, those which are most likely to wield the greatest power in war. This, as Adam Smith has acutely observed, is one of the most important differences between ancient and modern societies. Formerly, when war depended almost entirely upon unaided valour, the military position of a rich nation was usually unfavourable; for while its wealth enervated its character and attracted the cupidity of its neighbours, it did not in the hour of strife furnish it with advantages at all commensurate with these evils. Hence the ruin of Carthage Corinth, and Tyre, the great centres of commercial activity among the ancients. Since, however, the invention of gunpowder and the elaboration of military machinery, war has become in a great measure dependent upon mechanical genius, and above all upon financial prosperity, and the tendency of the balance of power is therefore to incline steadily to the nations that are most interested in the preservation of peace.

The influence political economy exercises in uniting different communities by the bond of a common interest, is also felt in the relations between the different classes of the same community. It is indeed no exaggeration to say, that a wide diffusion of the principles of the science is absolutely essential, if democracy is to be other than a fearful evil. For when the masses of the poor emerge from the torpor of ignorance, and begin keenly to examine their position in the gradations of society, property is almost certain to strike them as an anomaly and an injustice. From the notion that all men are born free and equal, they will very speedily pass to the conviction that all men are born with the same title to the goods that are in the world. Paley may have been wrong in regarding general utility as the ultimate basis of the rights of property, but most assuredly no other will obtain the respect of those who, themselves struggling with poverty, have obtained a supreme authority in the state. The long series of measures directly or indirectly infringing on the rights of property that have disgraced the democracy of France,1 and the notion of the natural hostility of capital and labour which is so general among the labouring classes on the Continent, are sufficient to cause a profound disquietude to those who have convinced themselves that democracy is the ultimate form of political development. Political economy, and political economy alone, can remedy the evil. It does not indeed teach the optimism or the fatalism that some have imagined, and there can be little question that its ascendency must give in many respects new directions to the channel of wealth, repressing forms of expenditure which have long been regarded as peculiarly honourable, and which will be regarded in a very different light when they are universally acknowledged to be useless or detrimental to society.2 Nor does it teach that the interests of rich and poor are identical in such a sense that the wages of the workman and the profits of his employer must rise and fall together, the fact being rather the reverse. Nor, again, that a government is altogether impotent in regulating the distribution of wealth, for the laws of succession and the direction given to taxation have in this respect a gigantic influence. What, however, it does prove is, that the wages of the labourer depend so necessarily upon the proportion between the sum that is provided for the payment of labour, and the number of those among whom it is divided, that all direct efforts of the government to cause the permanent elevation of wages are, in the end, prejudicial to the very class they are intended to benefit. It proves that the material prosperity of the working classes depends upon the increase of capital being more rapid than that of population, and that this can only be ensured, on the one hand, by the continence of the labourer guarding against excessive multiplication, and, on the other hand, by the fullest encouragement of production, which implies the perfect protection of capitalists; for he who has no assurance that he may retain what he has accumulated, will either never accumulate, or will conceal his property unpro-ductively. In other words, political economy demonstrates, beyond the possibility of doubt, that if the property of the rich were confiscated and divided among the poor, the measure would in the end be the most fearful catastrophe that could befall the latter.

This great truth, that, in a financial point of view, with a very few exceptions, each nation, trade, or profession is interested in the prosperity of every other, has been growing clearer and clearer with each new development of political economy,1 and cannot fail to exercise a vast moral influence upon society. For though concurrence of action based solely upon community of interests, considered in itself, has no moral value, its effect in destroying some of the principal causes of dissension is extremely important. And, indeed, human nature is so constituted, that it is impossible for bodies of men to work together under the sense of a common interest without a warm feeling of amity arising between them. Common aims and hopes knit them together by a bond of sympathy. Each man becomes accustomed so act with a view to the welfare of others, and a union of affections usually replaces or consecrates the union of interests. The sentiment thus evoked is undoubtedly a moral sentiment; and if it is not so powerful as that which is elicited by agencies appealing directly to enthusiasm, it is more general, more uniform, and perhaps, on the whole, not less beneficial to mankind.

It would be easy to show that political economy, by revealing the true causes of national prosperity, has effected, or is effecting, a considerable alteration in many of our moral judgments. Such, for example, is the change in the relative position in the moral scale of prodigality and avarice, of youthful indiscretions, and of imprudent marriages; and such too are the important modifications introduced into the conception of charity by the writings of Defoe, of Ricci, and of Malthus. It will, however, be sufficient for my present purpose, to indicate the predominating bias which these speculations produce, in order to ascertain the class of opinions and the tone of philosophy they are most likely to favour. On this point there can be little doubt. It has been again and again recognised that political economy represents the extreme negation of asceticism.

What may be termed the ascetic and the industrial philosophies have at all times formed two of the most important divisions of human opinions; and as each brings with it a vast train of moral and intellectual consequences, their history touches almost every branch of intellectual progress. The watchword of the first philosophy is mortification; the watchword of the second is development. The first seeks to diminish, and the second to multiply, desires; the first, acknowledging happiness as a condition of the mind, endeavours to attain it by acting directly on the mind, the second by acting on surrounding circumstances. The first, giving a greater intensity to the emotions, produces the most devoted men; the second, regulating the combined action of society, produces the highest social level. The first has proved most congenial to the Asiatic and Egyptian civilisations, and the second to the civilisations of Europe.

From the beginning of the fourth century, when the monastic system was first introduced from Egypt into Christendom,1 until near the Reformation, the ascetic theory was everywhere predominant. The movement that was provoked by the examples of St. Anthony and St. Pachomius, and by the writings of St. Jerome and St. Basil, received its full organisation about two centuries later from St. Benedict. The Crusades and St. Bernard produced the military orders; the teaching of St. Bruno, the Carthusians; the religious struggle of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites;1 the conflict of the Reformation, the Theatines and the Jesuits. With the exception of the last century, during which some opposition had arisen to the monks, this long space of time represents the continuous elevation of the ascetic principle as the supreme type with which all forms of heroism naturally assimilated or coalesced.

If we compare this period with the last three centuries the contrast is very evident. Formerly, asceticism represented the highest point of moral dignity, and in exact proportion as a society was stimulated towards its conception of excellence the monasteries were multiplied. At present, the abolition of monasteries is an invariable concomitant of an advancing civilisation, the immediate consequence of every important movement of national progress. Protestantism was the first great protest against asceticism; but the process of confiscation which it initiated in the sixteenth century, and which was then regarded as the most horrible sacrilege, has since been imitated by almost every Catholic government in Europe. Not only France, at a time when she had repudiated Catholicism, but even Austria and Spain have pursued this course. No less than 184 monasteries were suppressed, and ecclesiastical property to the value of more than two millions of florins confiscated, by Joseph II. of Austria: 3,000 monasteries are said to have been suppressed in Europe between 1830 and 1835; 187 in Poland, in 1841.1 And these acts, as well as those which have recently taken place in Italy, have been, for the most part, elicited by no scandals on the part of the monks, but were simply the expression of a public opinion which regarded the monastic life as essentially contemptible and disgraceful.

Of this industrial civilisation, political economy is the intellectual expression; and it is not too much to say, that it furnishes a complete theory of human progress directly opposed to the theory of asceticism. According to its point of view, the basis of all intellectual and social development is wealth; for as long as men are so situated that all are obliged to labour for their sustenance, progress is impossible. An accumulation of capital is therefore the first step of civilisation, and this accumulation depends mainly on the multiplication of wants. When the inhabitants of any country are contented with what is barely sufficient for the support of life, they will only perform the minimum of labour; they will make no steady and sustained efforts to ameliorate their condition, and, as they will place little or no restraint upon multiplication, their numbers increasing more rapidly than the means of sustenance, the most frightful suffering must ensue. To raise that people from its barbarism, the first essential is to make it discontented with its condition. As soon as the standard of its necessities is raised, as soon as men come to regard as necessaries a certain measure of the comforts of life, habits of parsimony and self-restraint will be formed, and material progress will begin. But it is impossible for men by these means to satisfy their wants. The horizon of their ambition continually recedes. Each desire that is accomplished produces many others, and thus new exertions are elicited, and the constant development of society secured. In the atmosphere of luxury that increased wealth produces, refined tastes, perceptions of beauty, intellectual aspirations appear. Faculties that were before dormant are evoked, new directions are given to human energies, and, under the impulse of the desire for wealth, men arise to supply each new want that wealth has produced. Hence, for the most part, arise art, and literature, and science, and all the refinements and elaborations of civilisation, and all the inventions that have alleviated the sufferings or multiplied the enjoyments of mankind. And the same principle that creates civilisation creates liberty, and regulates and sustains morals. The poorer classes, as wealth, and consequently the demand for their labour, have increased, cease to be the helpless tools of their masters. Slavery, condemned by political economy, gradually disappears. The stigma that attached to labour is removed. War is repressed as a folly, and despotism as an invasion of the rights of property. The sense of common interests unites the different sections of mankind, and the conviction that each nation should direct its energies to that form of produce for which it is naturally most suited, effects a division of labour which renders each dependent upon the others. Under the influence of industrial occupations, passions are repressed, the old warlike habits are destroyed, a respect for law, a consideration for the interests of others, a sobriety and perseverance of character are inculcated. Integrity acquires a new value, and dissipation a new danger. The taste is formed to appreciate the less intense but more equable enjoyments, and the standard of excellence being rectified by the measure of utility, a crowd of imaginary virtues and vices which ignorance had engendered pass silently away.

This, or something like this, is the scheme of progress which political economy reveals. It differs essentially from the schemes of most moralists in the fact that its success depends not upon any radical change in the nature of mankind, not upon any of those movements of enthusiasm which are always transient in their duration and restricted in their sphere, but simply upon the diffusion of knowledge. Taking human nature with all its defects, the influence of an enlightened self-interest, first of all upon the actions and afterwards upon the character of mankind, is shown to be sufficient to construct the whole edifice of civilisation; and if that principle were withdrawn, all would crumble in the dust. The emulations, the jealousies, the conflicting sentiments, the insatiable desires of mankind, have all their place in the economy of life, and each successive development of human progress is evolved from their play and from their collision. When therefore the ascetic, proclaiming the utter depravity of mankind, seeks to extirpate his most natural passions, to crush the expansion of his faculties, to destroy the versatility of his tastes, and to arrest the flow and impulse of his nature, he is striking at the very force and energy of civilisation. Hence the dreary, sterile torpor that characterised those ages in which the ascetic principle has been supreme, while the civilisations which have attained the highest perfection have been those of ancient Greece and modern Europe, which were most opposed to it.

It is curious to observe by what very different processes the antipathy to asceticism was arrived at in these two periods. In the first it is to be ascribed mainly to the sense of the harmony of complete development, and above all to the passionate admiration of physical beauty which art contributed largely to sustain. The statues of the most lovely were then placed among the statues of the goddesses, and the athletic games made the symmetry and beauty of the manly frame the highest type of perfection. ‘A perfect mind in a perfect body’ was the ideal of the philosopher, and the latter was considered almost a condition of the former. Harmonious sustained manhood, without disproportion, or anomaly, or eccentricity—that godlike type in which the same divine energy seems to thrill with equal force through every faculty of mind and body, the majesty of a single power never deranging the balance or impairing the symmetry of the whole, was probably more keenly appreciated and more frequently exhibited in ancient Greece than in any succeeding civilisation.

Among the moderns, on the other hand, the law of development has been much more social than individual, and depends, as we have seen, on the growth of the industrial element. If we examine the history of the last few centuries, since the Italian republics revived commerce on a large scale, or since the Portuguese for the first time founded a great colonial empire in the interests of industrial enterprise,1 we find that these interests have been steadily becoming supreme in all war, legislation, and diplomacy, and that the philosophy of utility, which is the most faithful expression of the industrial spirit, has attained a corresponding place in the sphere of thought. It is supported by the ascendency of the inductive philosophy, which has always concentrated its efforts chiefly on material advantages. It is supported by the rapid diffusion through all classes of habits of thought derived from political life, which is the consequence of the extension of political liberty. It is supported too by the investigations of those great moralists who since Cumberland have been mainly employed in proving that virtue is a condition of happiness, from which men have illogically, but not unnaturally, inferred, that that which has no utility can have no moral value.1

The immense importance of utilitarianism in correcting the evils of fanaticism, in calling into action the faculties which asceticism had petrified, and in furnishing a simple, universal principle of life, has been clearly shown. Its capability of coalescing with received theological doctrines can hardly be doubtful to those who remember that Paley made it the corner-stone of his moral philosophy, maintaining that a hope of future reward was the natural principle of virtue. Indeed, one of the few political economists who have endeavoured to give their science a theological complexion, has argued that the laws of economical and of religious progress are identical, being self-denial for an end.1 At the same time, the defects of such a system are sufficiently manifest, and they are in a great measure also the defects of rationalism. Utility is, perhaps, the highest motive to which reason can attain. The sacrifice of enjoyments and the endurance of sufferings become rational only when some compensating advantage can be expected. The conduct of that Turkish atheist,2 who, beliving that death was an eternal sleep, refused at the stake to utter the recantation which would save his life, replying to every remonstrance, ‘Although there is no recompense to be looked for, yet the love of truth constraineth me to die in its defence,’ in the eye of reason is an inexplicable folly; and it is only by appealing to a far higher faculty that it appears in its true light as one of the loftiest forms of virtue. It is from the moral or religious faculty alone that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. This is, indeed, the noblest thing we possess, the celestial spark that is within us, the impress of the divine image, the principle of every heroism. Where it is not developed, the civilisation, however high may be its general average, is maimed and mutilated.

In the long series of transformations we have reviewed, there are two which have been eminently favourable to this, the heroic side of human nature. The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth, for its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of the spirit of rationalism into politics, has produced, and is producing, some of the most splendid instances of self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, it can hardly be doubted, that the general tendency of these influences is unfavourable to enthusiasm, and that both in actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible. With a far higher level of average excellence than in former times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice during the last 1800 years, has been mainly the history of the action of Christianity upon the world. Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conceptions and persuasive power of the Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently sustained. The power of Christianity in this respect can only cease with the annihilation of the moral nature of mankind; but there are periods in which it is comparatively low. The decay of the old spirit of loyalty, the destruction of asceticism, and the restriction of the sphere of charity, which has necessarily resulted from the increased elaboration of material civilisation, represent successive encroachments on the field of self sacrifice which have been very imperfectly compensated, and have given our age a mercenary, venal, and unheroic character, that is deeply to be deplored. A healthy civilisation implies a double action—the action of great bodies of men moving with the broad stream of their age, and eventually governing their leaders; and the action of men of genius or heroism upon the masses, raising them to a higher level, supplying them with nobler motives or more comprehensive principles, and modifying, though not altogether directing, the general current. The first of these forms of action is now exhibited in great perfection. The second has but little influence in practice, and is almost ignored in speculation. The gradual evolution of societies, the organised action of great communities under the impulse of utilitarian motives, is admirably manifested; but great individualities act seldom and feebly upon the world. At the same time, the history of speculative philosophy exhibits a corresponding tone. There has always been an intimate connection between utilitarianism and those systems of metaphysies which greatly restrict and curtail the original powers of our nature, regarding the human mind as capable only of receiving, arranging, and transforming ideas that come to it from without. Those who hold that all our ideas are derived from sensation, will always, if they are consistent, make utility the ultimate principle of virtue, because by their system they can never rise to the conception of the disinterested;1 and, on the other hand, it will be usually found that the sensual school and the materialism which it has produced, have arisen in periods when the standard of motives was low, and when heroism and pure enthusiasm had but little influence. In our present absolute ignorance of the immediate causes of life, and of the nature and limits of mind and matter, this consideration furnishes perhaps the most satisfactory arguments in favour of spiritualism; and it is as an index of the moral condition of the age that the prevalence of either spiritualism or materialism is especially important. At pres ent, the tendency towards the latter is too manifest to escape the notice of any attentive observer. That great reaction against the materialism of the last century, which was represented by the ascendency of German and Scotch philosophies in England, and by the revival of Cartesianism in France, which produced in art a renewed admiration for Gothic architecture; in literature, the substitution of a school of poetry appealing powerfully to the passions and the imagination, for the frigid intellectualism of Pope or of Voltaire; and in religion, the deep sense of sin, displayed in different forms both by the early Evangelicals and by the early Tractarians, is everywhere disappearing. In England, the philosophy of experience, pushed to the extremes of Hume, and represented by the ablest living philosopher in Europe, has been rising with startling rapidity to authority and has now almost acquired an ascendency in speculation. In France, the reaction against spiritualism and the tendency towards avowed materialism, as represented by the writings of Comte,1 of Renan, and of Taine, are scarcely less powerful than at the close of the last century; while, under the guidance of Schoppenhauer and of Buchner, even Germany itself, so long the chosen seat of metaphysics, is advancing with no faltering steps in the same career.

This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecution, the decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punish ments, which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered the character of mankind, the emancipation of suffering nationalities, the abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, which paralysed the intellectual, and of the asceticism which paralysed the material, progress of mankind, may be justly regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilisation; but when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual interests to what they believed to be right, and when we realise the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost something in our progress.

5 Speaking of his youth, Libanius says: ‘Plus apud Deos quam apud homines in terra convresabatur, tametsi lex prohiberet, quam audenti violare capitis pœna fuit. Verumtamen cum illis ipsis vitam agens et imquam legem et impium legislatorem deridebat.’ (De Vita sua, Libanii Opera [ed. 1627], vol. ii. p. 11.) However in his oration Pro Templis, Libanius says distinctly that Constantine did not disturb the worship of the temples. It is hard to reconcile these two passages and the last with the statements of Eusebius, but I suppose the fact is that the law was made, but was generally suffered to be inoperative

1Vide St. Jerome, passim.

1 Bayle, who was a great coward about his books, published this under the title ‘Contrains-les d’ entrer, traduit de l’ Anglois du Sieur Jean Fox de Bruggs, par M. J. F.: à Cantorberry, chez Thomas Litwel.’

1 ‘Qui votis publicis favens eum perimere tentarit, haudquaquam inquecum fecisse existimabo.’ (p. 77.)

[1]The effects of slavery upon character have lately been treated with very remarkable ability in Cairnes’ Slave Power. See also Storch, Econ Politique, tom. v., and Ch. Comte, Traité de Législation, lib. v.

[1]See on this subject Plutarch, Lives of the Gracchi; Dionysius, Halicarnassus, lib. ii cap. 28; Columella, De Re Rusticâ. This whole subject has been very ably treated by M. Comte, Traité de Législation. See also Blanqui, Histoire d'Eccnomie Politique; Dureau de la Malle, Economie Politique des Romains

[1]The distinctions have been fully developed by Cairnes and De Tocque ville.

[2]See much horrible evidence of the atrocities practised on Roman slaves an Loiseleur, Élude sur les Crimes et les Peines dans l'Antiquité et les Temps Modernes (Paris, 1863), pp. 83–98; and in Comte, Traité de Législation, liv. v. There is an extremely good essay on the condition of the ancient slaves—one of the best ever written on the subject—in Bodin's Republic, lib i. c. 5.

[1]This movement has been well noticed by Grotius, De Jure, lib. iii. c. 14

[2]Guizot.

[1]Cod. Theod. lib. ii. tit. 8, lex 1, and iv. 7, 1. For the history of the action of Christianity upon slavery, see A. Comte, Philosophie Positive, tom vi. pp. 43–47; Storch, Economic Politique, tom. v. pp. 306–310; Troplong, Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit Civil. The measures against Jew slave-owners have been noticed by Bédarride, Du Lac, and many other writers. It must be acknowledged, however, that the Christian Emperor Gratian made one law which may rank with the most atrocious of Paganism. It provides that if a slave accused his master of any crime except high treason, the justice of the charge was not to be examined, but the slave was to be committed to the flames: ‘Cum accusatores servi dominis intonent, nemo judiciorum expectet eventum, nihil quæri, nihil discuti placet, sed cum ipsis delationum libellis, cum omni scripturarum et meditati criminis apparatu, nefandarum accusationum crementur auctores: excepto tamen adpetitæ majestatis crimine, in quo etiam servis honesta proditio est. Nam et hoc ‘acinus tendit in dominos.’—Cod. Theod. ix. 6, 2. Honorius accorded slaves the liberty of accusing their masters in cases of heresy, and Theodosius in cases of paganism.

[1]Wright, Letter on the Political Condition of the English Peasantry during the Middle Ages. London, 1843.

[2]Champagny, La Charité Chrétienne, pp. 275–289.

[1]See on this subject Périn, Ia Richesse dans les Sociétés Chrétiennes, tom i. pp. 345–361; Van Bruyssel, Hist. du Commerce Belge, tom. i. pp. 58, 59.

[2]Eden, History of the Labouring Classes in England, vol. i. p. 50.

[1]Grote, Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. p. 123.

[2]Hume has very ingeniously suggested, and Malthus has adopted the suggestion, that the ancient permission of infanticide had on the whole a tendency to multiply rather than to diminish population; for, by removing the fear of a numerous family, it induced the poor to marry recklessly; while, once the children were born, natural affection would struggle to the last to sustain them.

[1]It is worthy of notice that deserted children in the early Church appear to have been supported mainly by private charity, and those foundling hospitals, to which political economists so strongly object, were unknown. In the time of Justinian, however, we find notices of Brephotrophia, or asylums for children; and foundations, intended especially for foundlings, are said to have existed in the seventh and eighth centuries (Labourt, Recher-ches sur les Enfants trouvés, Paris, 1848, pp. 32, 33). A foundling hospital was established by Innocent III. at Rome. The objections to these institutions, on account of their encouragement of vice, as well as the frightful mortality prevailing among them, are well known. M'Culloch states that between 1792 and 1797 the admissions into foundling hospitals in Dublm were 12, 786, and the deaths 12,561 (Pol. Econ. part i. ch. viü.). Magdalen asylums, which M. Ch. Comte and other economists have vehemently denounced, were also unknown in the early Church. The first erected in France was early in the thirteenth century; the famous institution of the Bon Pasteur was founded by a Dutch lady converted to Catholicism in 1698. A full History of these institutions is given in Parent-Duchatelet's singularly intcresting work on Prostitution in the City of Paris. The admirable societies for the succour of indigent mothers, which complete the measures for the protection of infancy, were chiefly the work of the French freethinkers of the last century. Beaumarchais dedicated part of the profits of the Mariage de Figaro to that of Lyons (Ducellier, Hist. des Classes Laborieuses en France, p. 296).

[2]See some very striking instances of this in Champagny's Charité Chrétienne

[1]This is, I believe, related of St. John of the Cross. There is a some what similar legend of a Spanish saint of the thirteenth century named Ramon Monat. The Virgin appeared to him and offered him a crown of roses, which he refused, and Christ then gave him His own crown of thorns.

[1]In 1102 a Council of Westminster found it necessary to prohibit the sare of slaves in England (Eden, Hist. of Labouring Classes, vol. i. p. 10); and still later the English were accustomed to sell slaves to the Irish, and Giraldus Cambrensis tells us that the emancipation of their slaves as an act of devotion was enjoined by the Irish bishops on the occasion of Strong-bow's invasion. Bodin has noticed some passages from the bulls of the Popes relative to slaves in Italy as late as the thirteenth century (République, p. 43). Religion, which so powerfully contributed to the emancipation, in some cases had an opposite influence, for Christians enslaved without scruple Jews and Mohammedans, who naturally retaliated. The number of Christian slaves bought up by the Jews had been one of the complaints of Agobard in the ninth contury.

[1]See on all these causes Hallam's Middle Ages, vol. i. pp. 217, 218.

[2]‘The clergy, and especially several Popes, enforced manumission as a duty upon laymen, and inveighed against the scandal of keeping Christians in bondage; but they were not, it is said, as ready in performing their own parts. The villeins upon the Church lands were among the last who were emancipated.’—Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 221.

[4]‘It wants not probability, though it manifestly appears not, that William Rufus, Henry I., and King Stephen, being all usurpers, granted large hamunities to burghs to secure them to their party, and by the time that Glanvil wrote, which was in the reign of Henry II., burghs had so great privileges as that, if a bondsman or servant remained in a burgh as a burgess or member of it a year and a day, he was by that very residence made free; and so it was in Scotland: he was always free, and enjoyed the liberty of the burgh if he were able to buy a burgage, and his lord claimed him not within a year and a day.’—Brady, Historical Treatise on Cities (1690), p. 18.

3 The decline of serfdom has been treated by Hallam, Hist. of Middle Ages, vol. i. pp. 222, 223. As late as 1775, colliers in Scotland were bound to perpetual service in the works to which they belonged. Upon the sale ol those works the purchasers had a right to their services, nor could they be elsewhere received into service except by permission of the owner of the collieries. See a note by M'Culloch, in his edition of the Wealth of Nations, vol. ii. p. 186.

[1]Thierry, Hist. du Tiers Etat, pp. 24, 25. It is scarcely necessary to refer to the admirable sketch of the history of towns in the Wealth of Nations.

[1]By J. B. Say, in his Traité d'Economie Politique, where the subject of usury is admirably discussed. The term, ‘interest of assurance,’ however, is defective, because it does not comprise the opprobrium cast upon the lender, which is one great cause of the extraordinary rise of interest.

[2]As this is not a treatise of Political Economy, the reader will, I trust, pardon my adopting this old and simple formulary, without entering at length into the controversy created by the new formulary of Ricardo—that price is regulated by the cost of production. In the vast majority of cases these two formularies lead to exactly the same result, and the principal advantage of that of Ricardo seems to be, first, that in some cases it gives greater precision than the other, and secondly, that it supplements the other, meeting a few cases to which the old formulary will not apply. In determining the value of the precious metals as measurea by other things—that is to say, as reflected in prices—the rule of Ricardo seems most satisfactory: in determining the normal rate of interest, the old rule is, I think, perfectly adequate. There are some good remarks on this in Chevallier, Econ Polit. sec v. c. l.

[1]All the old Catholic works on the Canon Law and on Moral Philosophy show this, but I may especially indicate Concina, Adversus Usuram (Romæ, 1746); Concina, Usura Contractus trini (Romæ, 1748); Leotardus, De Usuris (Lugduni, 1649); Lamet et Fromageau, Dictionnaire des Cas de Conscience (a collection of the decisions of the doctors of the Sorbonne), art. Usure (Paris, 1733); and Conferences Ecclésiastiques de Paris sur l'Usure (Paris, 1748). This last work was published under the direction or, at all events, patronage of Cardinal de Noailles, and contains a very large amount of information on the subject. It went through several editions: the first was published in 1697. See too Liégeois, Essai sur l'Histoire et la Lêgisla’ turn de l'Usure.

[2]This appears to have been the case in England, where the laxity on the subject was considerable, In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see Anderson, Hist. of Commerce, vol. i. pp. 79–113). Only a month before the Council of Nice, Constantine had confirmed the old Roman law which legalised an interest of 12 per cent.; and it was probably the desire to avoid collision with the civil power that dictated the language of a curious decree of the Council, in which usury is condemned only when practised by clergymen, but at the same time is condemned on grounds that are equally applicable to laymen: ‘Quoniam multi sub regula constituti avaritiam et turpia lucra sectantur, oblitique divinæ Scripturæ dicentis, “Qui pecuniam suam non dedit ad usuram,” mutuum dantes centesimas exigunt; juste censuit sancta et magna synodus ut si quis inventus fuerit post hanc definitionem usuras accipiens … dejiciatur a clero et alienus existat a regula.’ (See Troplong, Mémoire sur le Prêt à l’ Intérêt, read before the Institute in 1844.) But the Council of Eliberis, in the beginning of the fourth century, and the Third and Fourth Councils of Carthage, expressly condemned usury in laymen.

[1]The following were the principal definitions of usury employed by the writers on Canon Law:—1. Usura est pretium usus pecuniæ mutuatæ. 2. Lucrum immediate ex mutuo proveniens. 3. Usura est cum quis plus exigat in pecuniâ aut in aliquâ re quam dederit. 4. Ultra sortem lucrum aliquodipsius ratione mutui exactum.—This last is the definition of Benedict XIV. Melanchthon defined usury nearly in the same way: ‘Usura est lucrum suprn sortem exactum tantum propter officium mutuationis.’ To this I may add the description given by St. Augustine of the sin: ‘Si fœneraveris homini, id est mutuam pecuniam dederis, a quo aliquid plus quam dedisti expectas accipere, non pecuniam solam sed aliquid plus quam dedisti, sive illud triticum sit, sive vinum, sive oleum, sive quodlibet aliud, si plus quam dedisti expectas accipere fœnerator es et in hoc improbandus non laudandus’ (Sermon iii. on Psalm xxxvi.).—See Concina, Adversus Usuram, pp. 32, 33.

[1]In 1677, when much casuistry had been already applied to the subject, some one submitted this point to the doctors of the Sorbonne. Their decision was: ‘Que Titius ne seroit pas exempt d'usure en ne prenant que trois pourcent d'intérêt, parceque tout profit et tout gain tiré du prêt, si petit qu'il puisse être, fait l'usure. l'Ézéchiel au ch. xviii. ne fait point de distinction du plus ou du moins.’—Lamet et Fromageau, Dict, des Cas de Conscience (Art. Usure).

[2]Thus Innocent XI. condemned the proposition, ‘Usura non est dumultra sortem aliquid exigitur tanquam ex benevolentia et gratitudine debitum, sed solum si exigatur tanquam ex justitia debitum.’—See Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 100.

[3]‘Tandis que le cri des peuples contre le prêt à intérêt le faisait pros-entre, l'impossibilité de l'abolir entièrement fit imaginer la subtilité de l'aliénation du capital; et c'est ce système qui étant devenu presque général parmi les théologiens a été adopté aussi par les jurisconsultes, à raison de l'influence beaucoup trop grande qu'ont eue sur notre jurisprudence et notre législation les principes du droit canon.’ (Turgot, Mém. sur les Prêts d’ Argent, 8 29.) Some seem to have tried to justify usury on the condition of the lender obliging himself not to demand his money till a certain period, for we find Alexander VII. condemning the proposition, ‘Quod sit licitum mutuanti aliquid ultra sortem exigere, modo se obliget ad non repetendum sortem naque ad certum tempus.’ (Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 100.)

[1]These cases, of which I have only noticed the principal, and which were many of them very complicated, were discussed with much detail by the doctors of the Sorbonne. See Lamet et Fromageau; see also the Mémoire of Troplong.

[2]St Thomas Aquinas was believed to be hostile to this indulgence.

[1]Besides Lamet and Fromageau, there is a discussion as to ‘Monti di Pietà’ in Escobar's Moral Philosophy.

[2]Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 23. Salelles, De Materiis Tribunalium Inquisitionis (Romæ, 1651), tom. ii. p. 156. According to Cibrario (Economia Politica del Medio Evo, vol. ii. p. 52), a heretic named Bech, who was burnt in Piedmont in 1388, was accused among other things of having maintained that ‘incest and usury are not sins.’

[3]Chartario, Praxis Interrogandarum Rerum (Romæ, 1618), p. 201

[1]This is an absurdity of Aristotle, and the number of centuries during which it was incessantly asserted without being (as far as we know) once questioned is a curious illustration of the longevity of a sophism when expressed in a terse form and sheltered by a great name. It is enough to make one ashamed of one's species to think that Bentham was the first to bring into notice the simple consideration that if the borrower employs the borrowed money in buying bulls and cows, and if these produce calves to ten times the value of the interest, the money borrowed can scarcely be said to be sterile or the borrower a loser. The Greek word for interest (TÓKOS, from TĹKTW, I beget) was probably connected with this delusion. Besides a host of theologians, the notion that usury was contrary to the law of nature was maintained by Domat, one of the greatest names in French jurisprudence. Leo X. condemned usury on the following grounds: ‘Dominus noster, Lucâ attestante, aperte nos præcepto adstrinxit ne ex dato mutuo quidquam ultra sortem speraremus; est enim propria usurarum interpretatio quando videlicet ex usurâ rei quæ non germinat de nullo labore, nullo sumptu, nullo peri culo, lucrum fœnusque conquiri studetur.’ (Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 100.)

[1]The views of St. Thomas (who was one of the chief authorities on the subject) are in the Summa, Pars ii. Quæst. 78. At the end of the eighteenth century they were drawn up with great elaboration by a writer named Pothier, and torn to pieces by Turgot (Mém. sur les Prêts d’ Argent, § 26, 27). The argument as I have stated it is, I know, very obscure, but I venture to think that is chiefly the fault of St. Thomas.

[2]The chief passages cited were—Lev. xxv. 36, Deut xxiii. 19, Ps. xv. 5, Ezek. xviii., and (from the New Testament) Luke vi. 35. As Turgot notices, the popular interpretation of this last passage was peculiarly inexcusable in Catholics, who always interpret the injunctions that surround it as ‘counsels of perfection,’ not obligatory on every man. Yet Bossuet was able to say, ‘La tradition constante des conciles, à commencer par les plus anciens, celle des Papes, des pères, des interprètes et de l'Eglise Romaine, est d'interpréter ce verset, “Mutuum date nihil inde sperantes,” comme prohibitif du profit qu'on tire du prét; “inde” c'est à dire de l'usure.’ (2nde Pastorale, contres la Version de Richard Simon.)

[1]Montesquieu, speaking of the scholastic writings on usury, says, with a little exaggeration, ‘Ainsi nous devons aux spéculations des Scholastiques touts les malheurs qui ont accompagné la destruction du commerce’ (Esprit des Lois, lib. xxi. c. 20); and Turgot, ‘L'observation rigoureuse de ces lois serait destructive de tout commerce; aussi ne sont-elles pas observées rigou-reusement. Elles interdisent toute stipulation d'intérêt sans aliénation du capital…. Et c'est une chose notoire qu'il n'y a pas sur la terre une place de commerce où la plus grande partie du commerce ne roule sur l'argent emprunté sans aliénation du capital’ (Mém. sur les Prêts d’ Argent, § xiv.). M. Sismondi has justly observed (Nouveaux Principes d'Economie Politique) that the prohibition of usury in Catholic countries has also done very much to promote a passion for luxury, and to discourage economy—the rich who were not engaged in business finding no easy way of employing their savings productively.

[2]Confirming in this respect a French law of the eighth and ninth century which provided that ‘Usuram non solum clerici, sed nec laici Christiani, ex-agere debent.’ Some think Justinian prohibited usury, but there is a good deal of dispute about this. Richard I. of England ‘Christianum fœneratorem fieri prohibuit aut quacunque conventionis occasione aliquid recipere ultra id quod mutuo concessit’ (Bromton Chronicon). Some governors made it a law that the property of those who had been usurers might be confiscated by the crown after their death (Cibrario, Economia Politica del Medio Evo, vol. iii. p. 319). This arrangement had a double advantage: the government might borrow money from the usurer while he was living, and rob his children when he was dead.

[1]According to the doctors of the Sorbonne, it was sinful to borrow at usury except under extreme necessity, but the whole stress of the denunciations was directed against the lenders.

[2]Bédarride, Hist. des Juifs, pp. 186–189.

[3]Muratori, Antiq. Italicœ, dissert. xvi.—a good history of the rise of Christian usurers.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid. This Council is reckoned a general one by the Catholica

[1]Ibid. The Council of Vienne, presided over by Clement V., pronounced it to be heretical to justify usury: ‘Sane si quis in istum errorem inciderit, ut pertinaciter affirmare præsumat exercere usuras non esse peccatum, decernimus eum velut hæreticum puniendum.’ (Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 93.)

[2]According to Concina, usury has been condemned by twenty-eight Councils (six of them regarded by the Church of Rome as general), and by seventeen popes (Adversus Usuram, pp. 112, 113).

[1]See the passages in Concina, Usura trini ContractÛs, pp. 250, 251.

[2]Concina, Adversus Usuram, p. 2. This view was also adopted by Molinæus: ‘Carolus Molinæus contendit aĉerrime usuram, nisi fraus adsit ant debitor nimium opprimatur, licitam esse. Doctores omnes a sexcentis annis contrarium docuerunt’ (Leotardus, De Usuris, p. 15). Calvin was one of the very first who exposed the folly of the old notion about the sterility of money: see a remarkable passage in one of his letters quoted by M'Culloch, Pol. Econ., pt. iii. ch. viii.

[3]Anderson, Hist. of Commerce, vol. i. p. 304.

[4]De Jure Belli et Pacis, lib. ii. cap. 12.

[5]Better known as Salmasius, the author of the Defensio Regis to which Milton replied.

[1]Le Fevre, who was tutor to Louis XIII., mentions that in his time the term interest had been substituted for usury, and he added: ‘C'est là pro-prement ce qu'on peut appeler l'art de chicaner avec Dieu.’ Marot also, who wrote in the first half of the sixteenth century, made this change the object of a sarcasm:—

• ‘On ne prête plus à l'usure,
• Mais tant qu'on veut à l'intérêt.’

(See Conférences sur l’ Usure, tom. i. p. 25.)

According to Concina, the first, or nearly the first (fere primus), Catholic theologian who cavilled at the old definitions of usury was Le Coreur, who wrote a treatise in 1682, in which he maintained that moderate interest might be exacted on commercial loans, but not on those which had their origin in the necessities of poverty (Adversus Usuram, p. 3). The Catholic writers at this period nearly always spoke of the modern doctrine as a Protestant heresy—the heresy of Calvin, Molinæus, and Salmasius.

[2]One of these was elaborately discussed by Concina in a treatise called De Usura trini ContractÛs (Romæ, 1748). Owners, which arose especially in the commercial communities of Belgium, are noticed in Lamet and Fromageau, and also by Troplong.

[3]Pichler was a Jesuit, and his views on usury—a perfect cloud of subtleties—are contained in his Jus Canonicum (Venetiis, 1730), lib. iii. tit. 19. Tanner was also a Jesuit. Of Hannold I know nothing except from the brief notice of his opinions in Concina, De Usura trini ContractÛs, pp 152–155.

[1]‘Peccati genus illud quod usura vocatur, quodque in contractu mutui propriam suam sedem et locum habet, in eo est repositum quod quis ex ipsomet mutuo, quod suapte natura tantundem duntaxat reddi postulat quantum receptum est, plus sibi reddi velit quam est receptum.’—Epistola Bened. XIV., in Concina, Adversus Usuram, p. 14.

[2]‘Neque vero ad istam labem purgandam ullum arcessiri subsidium poterit, vel ex eo quod id lucrum non excedens et nimium sed moderatum, non magnum sed exiguum sit; vel ex eo quod is a quo id lucrum solius caused mutui deposcitur non pauper sed dives existat; nec datam sibi mutuo sum mam relicturus otiosam, sed ad fortunas suas amplificandas vel novis coemen dis prædiis vel questuosis agitandis negotiis utilissime sit impensurus.’—Ibid.

[1]See his Considerations on the Lowering of Interest, published in 1691—a tract which is, unfortunately, deeply tinged with the errors of the mercantile theory, but is full of shrewd guesses on the laws of money. Locke perceived that interest depended upon supply and demand, and that all attempts to reduce it below the natural level were pernicious or abortive. He thought, however, that the maximum should be fixed by law to prevent imposition, but that that maximum should be fixed above the natural rate. At a still earlier period Harrington saw the necessity of usury, but involved himself in great obscurity, and almost absurdity, when discussing it: see his Prerogative of Popular Government, c. 3.

[2]Storch, Economie Politique, tom. iii. p. 187.

[1]Adam Smith wished the legal interest to be fixed a very little above the current rate of interest, as a check upon prodigality and rash speculation. This is still done in many countries, but Bentham showed decisively (Letter xiii., On Usury) that such a law is extremely detrimental to industrial progress, as each new enterprise is almost necessarily more hazardous than old-established ones, and therefore capitalists will only direct their capital to the former if the interest to be obtained from them is considerably higher than could be obtained from the latter. To which it may be added that any attempt to dictate by law the terms on which a man may lend his money is an infringement of the rights of property, and that the borrower is much more likely to know at what rate he may profitably borrow than the legislator.

[2]Besides the Mémoire, Turgot noticed the subject in a very striking manner in his Réflexions sur la Formation des Richesses. Like nearly every one in his time, he fell into the error of believing that the abundance of the precious metals told upon the rate of interest; but this did not affect his main argument, and on the whole there is not much in Bentham that was not anticipated by Turgot. In Italy Genovesi, who was a contemporary of Turgot, advocated the abolition of usury laws. (Pecchio, Storia della Economia Pubblica in Italia, p. 114.)

[3]Storch, Economie Politique, tom. iii p 175.

[1]I use this expression because that obscure subject which Papebrochius and Mabillon have investigated, and which they have called Diplomacy, is much more what we should now term the History of Charters. The rise and influence of consulships has been traced in English by Warden, in French by Borel, and in Latin by Steck. The subject has been also well noticed by Van Bruyssel, Hist. du Commerce Belge, tom. i. p. 140; and the influence of diplomacy as superseding General Councils, by Littré, Révolution, Conservation et Positivisme, one of the ablest books the Positive School has ever produced The distinction between the old and new sense of diplomacy is expressed respectively in the words ‘la diplomatique’ and ‘la diplomatie,’ the last of which is less than a century old. (See De Plassan, Hist. de la Diplomatie Française, Introd.) I may add that one of the first systems of navigation law depended upon an institution called the ‘Consulship of the Sea,’ which consisted of a tribunal of leading merchants authorised to determine disputes.

[1]As their latest historian says, ‘Le Christianisme ne prit une véritable consistance que sous la règne de Constantin; et c'est à dater de cette époque que commence, à proprement parler, pour les Juifs l'ère des persécutions religiouses.’ (Bédarride, Hist. des Juifs, p. 16.) In this, however, as in other persecutions, the Arians were quite as bad as the orthodox. Constantius persecuted at least as much as Constantine, and the Spanish Visigoths more than either.

[1]On the liberality of several Popes to the Jews, see Bédarride, p. 260, on Alexander II., pp. 114–123. St. Bernard also laboured to assuage the persecution. Alexander VI. was especially generous to the Jews, and made great efforts to alleviate their sufferings—a fact that should be remembered in favour of a Pope for whom there is not much else to be said.

[1]For a long list of these prohibitions see a curious book, De Judœis (Turin, 1717), by Joseph Sessa (one of the judges appointed in Piedmont to regulate the affairs of the Jews), p. 10. As early as the reign of Constantine a Council of Elvira forbade Christians holding any communication with Jews. The Council of the Lateran compelled Jews to wear a separate dress; and this very simple provision, by bringing them prominently before the people in an intensely fanatical age, contributed greatly to rouse the passions of the Catholics, and to facilitate the massacres that ensued (see Rios, Études sur les Juifs d'Espagne [trad. Maynabel], p. 109). St. Vincent Ferrier persuaded the Spanish Government to enforce this decree against both Jews and Moors. (Paramo, De Orig. Inq p. 164.)

[2]Œuvres de St. Foix, tom. iv. pp. 88, 89. A similar enactment was made in Spain (Rios, pp. 88, 89). It was also a popular belief that the blood of Jews was black and putrid, and the bad smell for which they were unhappily notorious innate. There is a long discussion on this in Sessa. But perhaps the most curious instance of this order of superstitions is a statute of Queen Joanna I., in 1347, regulating the houses of all-fame at Avignon, in which after providing with great detail for the accommodation of the Christians, it is enacted that no Jew shall be admitted under severe penalties (Sabatier, Hist. de la Législation sur les Fenimes Publiques, p. 103). The authenticity of this statute has been questioned, but M. Sabatier seems to have succeeded in defending it, and he has shown that in 1408 a Jew was actually flogged at Avignon for the offence in question (pp. 105, 106). This extreme horror of Jews furnished Ulrich von Hutten with the subject of one of the happiest pieces of irony he ever wrote—the exquisite description of the mental agonies of a student of Frankfort, who, mistaking a Jew for a magistrate of the city, took off his hat to him, and on discovering his error was unable to decide whether he had committed a mortal or only a venial sin. (Epistol. Obscurorum Virorum, ep. 2.)

[3]Michelet, Origines de Droit, p. 368

[1]The Duchess of Brabant, having some scruples of conscience about tolerating the Jews, submitted the case to St. Thomas. He replied, among other things, that the Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude, and that all their property being derived from usury may be lawfully taken from them, to be restored to those who paid the usury, or, if this is impossible, to be applied to some pious purpose. (See this curious letter, given at length in Van Bruyssel, Hist, du Commerce Belge, tom. i. pp. 239, 240.) On the general doctrine that property derived from usury may be confiscated by the civil power, see Paramo, De Orig. Inquisit. p. 167.

[2]There was a good deal of controversy in the middle ages about whether the Jews should be permitted to practise usury. The liberty seems to have been first openly granted in the commercial towns of Italy, but it gradually spread, and was admitted by some Popes. Sessa gives the reasons that were avowed by theologians: ‘Usuræ Judaicæ tolerantur quidem ex permissione Principum et summorum Pontificum in Hebræis ut de gente deperditâ, et quorum salus est desperata, et ad eum finem ne Christiani fœnoris exercitio strangulentur a Christianis’ (De Judœis, p. 9). The permission was granted in Piedmont in 1603. St. Lewis refused to permit the Jews to exercise usury (Troplong), and the Spanish rulers seem to have vacillated on the subject (Bédarride, pp. 192–194). There can be no doubt the monopoly of usury which the Jews possessed did more to enrich than all their persecutions to impoverish them. For although, as Adam Smith observes, the current rate of interest should represent approximately the average of profits, this is only when it is free, and the exertions of divines and legislators in the middle ages had raised it far above the high rate it would then naturally have borne. It seems to have usually ranged between 25 and 40 per cent. In 1430 we find the Florentines, in order to reduce the current rate, admitting the Jews into their city, whence they had previously been excluded, on the condition of their lending money as low as 20 per cent. (Cibrario, vol. iii. p. 318). It is curious to observe how, while persecution prevented the Jews from ever amalgamating with other nations, the system of usury prevented them from ever perishing or sinking into insignificance.

[1]The Jews offered 30,000 ducats to remain. The Queen, it is said, for a time hesitated, but Torquemada, confronting her on the threshold of the palace with a crucifix in his Land, exclaimed, ‘Judas sold his God for thirty pieces of silver—you are about to sell him for thirty thousand’ (Bédarride and Prescott). The anecdote is related by Paramo, p. 144, only he does not specify the sum.

[2]Rios, Etudes sur les Juifs d'Espagne, p. 77. Rios says that the contemporary writers are unanimous about the number.

[3]Ibid. pp. 79–82. Llorente, Hist, de l'Inquisition, tom. i. p. 141.

[1]Rios gives a delightful Spanish complexion to all this: ‘L'apparition de Saint Vincent Ferrier devant le peuple Juif avait été un fait véritablement prodigieux. Il avait apparu à leurs yeux comme un ange sauveur, et cette circonstance ne pouvait qu'être favorable à sa haute mission évangélique. Le 8 juin 1391, les rues de Valence se remplissaient du sang des Juifs, les boutiques étaient brÛlées, les maisons de la Juiverie saccagées par une multitude affrénée, les malheureux Juifs conraient aux églises demandant le baptême, et ils étaient repoussés de toutes parts et ne rencontraient que la mort, quard au milieu de la populace St. Vincent Ferrier se présente et élevant sa voix inspirée, il met un terme à cette horrible carnage. La multitude se ‘ait. Les Juifs appelés par ce nouveau apôtre, qui se donna plus tard à lui-même le nom d'ange de l'Apocalypse, écoutent la parole divine et se convertissent. . Tout cela contribua puissamment au merveilleux ré'sultats de sa prédication’ (pp. 89, 90). St. Vincent was a Dominican, a very great preacher, and so very good that he always undressed in the dark lest he should see himself naked. For his miracles, his virtues, and the multitudes he converted, see his life in Spanish by Vincent Justiniano (Valentia, 1575). Paramo says that the Inquisitors discovered that no less than 17,000 of the converts of St Vincent returned to Judaism (De Orig. Inq. p. 167).

[2]Twelve, however, who were captured at Malaga during the siege in 1486 were impaled by Ferdinand.

[1]They are detailed by Paramo.

[2]Picus Mirandola.

[3]It seems impossible to ascertain the number of the exiles with accuracy, for the Spanish historians vary greatly, from Cardoso who estimates it at 120,000, to Mariana who states it at 800,000 Paramo says some place it at more than 170,000, and others at more than 400,000 (p. 167). Justiniano says 420,000. Great numbers of the Jews avoided banishment by baptism.

[1]Bédarride, pp. 291–301, Paramo, 235. Paramo says the Portuguese decree of banishment was simply changed for one of compulsory baptism.

[1]The very extensive Jewish literature of the middle ages is fully reviewed by Bédarride and Rios. Maimonides is of course the greatest name. M Renan, in his essay on Averroes, has shown that nearly all the first translation into Latin of the works of Averroes were by Jews (chiefly by those of Mont pellier, who were especially famous for their learning), and that Averroism took deep root in Jewish teaching. Maimonides wrote a letter on the vanit, of astrology, which two popes applauded (Bédarride, p. 151). He was also distinguished for his liberal views about inspiration (Lee, On Inspiration, pp. 454–459). The controversial literature of the Jews directed against Christianity was extremely voluminous. A catalogue of these works, and a de scription of many of them, is given in a little book, called Bibliotheca Judaica Antichristiana, by John Bernard de Rossi (Parmæ, 1800).

[1]A very old and general tradition ascribes the invention of the letter of exchange to Jews who, having been banished from France, had taken refuge in Lombardy. Nor does there seem to be anything of much weight to oppose to it, though some have contended that the Italians were the real inventors. At all events, the Jews appear to have been among the first to employ it. The earliest notice of letters of exchange is said to be in a statute of Avignon of 1243. In 1272 there was a Venetian law ‘De Litteris Cambin.’ Compare on this subject Villeneuve-Bargemont, Hist. d'Economie Politique, tom. i. pp. 277–279; Blanqui, Hist. d'Econ. Pol., tom. i. p. 183; Moutes quieu, Esprit des Lois, liv. xxi. c. 20; and the tractate of Jules Thieurry, la Lettre de Change (Paris, 1862).

[1]Bédarride, pp. 258, 259. The magnificent synagogue at Leghorn (probably the finest in existence) was erected by the Spanish Jews who took refuge in that city.

[1]See this ordinance (which was issued in 1294) in Blanqui, Hist. d'Economie Politique, tom. i. pp. 225, 226. It provided, among other things, that lakes, counts, and barons, who have 6,000 livres rent, may have four robes a year, and their wives as many. Knights with 3,000 livres rent may have three. No member of the middle class may wear any ornament of gold or precious stones, or any dress that was green or gray. As M. Blanqui observes, articles of luxury would have been imported necessarily from foreign countries into France, which would necessitate an export of French gold—according to the current notions the greatest evil that could befall the country.

[2]Anderson, Hist, of Commerce, vol. i. p. 193. See, too, p. 179. More than a century after the passion for dress reached Scotland, when the alarmed and indignant legislators enacted (in 1457) that the wives and daughters of merchants should ‘be abuilzied [‘dressed,’ from ‘habiller’] gangand and cor respondent for their estate, that is to say, on their heads short curches [a kind of cap] with little hudes as are used in Flanders, England, and other countries, … and that na women weare tailes unfit in length, nor furred under but on the hailie daie.’ (Ibid. vol. iii. pp. 280, 281.)

[1]Blanqui. tom, i. p. 250.

[2]Anderson, vol. i. p. 144.

[3]Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes.

[1]Besides the great work of Malthus, there is an admirable exposition of this doctrine in Senior's Political Economy. Perhaps the most enthusiastic champion of luxury is Filangieri.

[2]This has been noticed in a very forcible, but, of course, one-sided manner, by De Maistre, who recurs to the subject again and again in his works; also by Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie Politique Chrétienne.

[1]Pecchio, Storia della Economia Pubblica in Italia (Lugano, 1849), p. 11.

[2]Anderson, Hist, of Commerce, vol. i. p. 117. The first English commercial companies were ‘the Merchants of the Staple’ and ‘the Merchants of St. Thomas à Becket.’

[3]Van Bruyssel, Hist, du Commerce Belge, tom. i. p. 234.

[4]See the stages of its development in Warden, On Consular Establishments.

[5]The earliest notice Maepherson has been able to find of an English consol is in 1346 (Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 536)

[1]Before this time ambassadors were sent only on occasions of emergency The first instance of a resident ambassador seems to have been in 1455, when Francis Sforza, Duke of Milan, established one at Genos, and towards the close of the century the institution became somewhat common in Italy (Cibrario, Economia Politica, del Medio Evo [Torino, 1842], vol. i. p. 319). It was also about this time that the use of cipher in diplomacy became usual. (Ibid De Plassan, Hist, de la Diplomatie Française, Introd.)

[2]M. Blanqui has collected some extremely remarkable evidence of this (Historie d'Economie Politique, tom. i. pp. 244–270). The Lombards also occasionally manifested extremely enlightened views on these subjects (see Rossi, Economie Politique, tom. i. p. 260), and Milan, perhaps longer than any other great town in Europe, was exempt from the mediæval system of corporations. However, the first Italian writer of considerable merit on Political Economy was probably Serra, who was a Neapolitan, and it was at Naples that the first Professorship of Political Economy in Europe was established in 1754 by the munificence of the Florentine Intieri.

[3]As early as 1282, a magistracy had been constituted at Florence exclusively of merchants and the example was soon followed by Sienna, and in a great measure by Venice and Genoa. (See Blanqui, tom. i. p. 245; Rossi, tom. i. p. 266.)

[1]Many of these views were almost identical with those of Mesmer and his followers. (See Bertrand, Hist, du Magnétisme Animal en France, pp 13–17.)

[2]Sharon Turner's Hist, of England, vol. iv. pp. 39, 40.

[1]See the Olynthiacs

[2]Roscius even wrote a book on this subject, but it has unfortunately not come down to us. He kept a school of declamation, which was attended by the ablest orators of his time. The passion for the theatre is said to have come to Rome from Egypt, and Batyllus, the greatest actor of the Augustan period, was from Alexandria. See on this subject a curious dissertation, ‘De Luxu Romanorum,’ in Grævius, Thesaurus Antiq, Rom., tom. viii.

[1]Murphy's Life of Garrick.

[1]Nero, however, made energetic efforts to relieve the actors from the stigma attached to them (as he did also to alleviate the sufferings of the slaves), and Gibbon has noticed the great honour in which he held the Jewish actor Aliturus, and the repeated and successful efforts of that actor to obtain a relaxation of the persecutions of the Jews. Under Nero, too, lived and died (when only fourteen) a lovely and gifted actress named Eucharis—the first who appeared on the Greek stage, which Nero had instituted—who seems to have won more affection and left a deeper impression than almost any other who died so young. Her charms are recorded in perhaps the most touching of all the epitaphs that have descended to us from antiquity, and her beautiful features formed one of the last ideals of expiring art. (Visconti, Iconographie Ancienne, 287.)

[2]See the evidence of this collected by Sabatier, Hist. de la Législation sur les Femmes Publiques, pp. 45–47; Magnin, Origines du Théâtre, tom. i. pp. 284–287; and Lebrun, Discours sur le Théâtre, pp. 79–82. This last author tries as much as possible to attenuate the facts he admits, in order that the invectives of the Fathers might fall with their full force on the modern theatre. The Floral games were in this respect the worst.

[3]Tertullian, Ad Nationes, lib. i. c. 10.

[1]De Spectaculis, cap. xxiii.

[1]Cod. Theod., lib. xv. tit. 7, 1. 8. If the emancipated actress turned out badly, she was to be dragged back to the stage and kept there till she was ‘a ridiculous old woman’ (ridicula anus).

[2]Neander, Church History, vol. ii. p. 370. An old Council forbade Christian women marrying actors. The actors, however, at a later period claimed one saint as their patron. This was St. Genetus, who was an actor in the reign of Diocletian. According to the legend, he was acting the part of a Christian in a piece which was designed to turn the new religion to ridicule, when, between the acts, he saw a vision, which converted him, and he accordingly proclaimed his allegiance to Christ upon the stage. The emperor and the audience at first loudly applauded, imagining that this was part of the play; but when they discovered the truth, the actor was put to death.

[3]Cod. Theod., xvi. 10. 3.

[4]Lebrun, pp. 117, 118; Cod. Theod., xv. 5. 5.

[1]Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the English People. Muratori, Antiq. Ital. Dissert., 29. In Italy the sham fights were carried on on a vast scale and with wooden swords, and were the cause of many deaths. Amusements somewhat similar to those which were once popular in Italy are said to continue in Russia. Storch, Econ. Polit., tom. iii. p. 403.

[2]Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien depuis l'an 1500 jusqu'à l'an 1660, tom. i. pp. 4–6. The author of this remarkable book (who was known professionally under the name of Lelio) was one of the greatest Italian actors of his time. He travelled much from theatre to theatre, and in the different cities he visited ransacked the public libraries for works bearing upon his history. His book was originally written in French, and is dedicated to Queen Caroline of England.

[3]He says distinctly, ‘Officium histrionum, quod ordinatur ad solatium hominibus exhibendum, non est secundum se illicitum.’ It appears certain that when this was written there were no public theatres or dramstic representations, except the religious ones. At the same time, it is impossible to draw a clear line between the public recitation of verses or the exhibitions of mountebanks on the one hand, and the simplest forms of the drama upon the other. Bossuet has cited a passage from St. Thomas's work De Sententiis, in which he speaks of the exhibitions that had ‘formerly taken place in the theatres.’ At all events, the saint was not very favourable to these ‘histriones,’ for he speaks of gains that have been acquired ‘de turpi causâ, sicut de meretricio et histrionatu.’ See on this subject Concina, De Spectaculis, pp. 36–41, Lebrun, Discours sur le Théâtre, pp. 189–194 Bossuet. Réflexions sur la Comédie, §§ 22–25.

[1]‘Joculator.’ Bossuet, however, says that the Acts of St. Paphnutius show that this was simply a perambulant flute-player. After all, Bossuet is obliged to make the following admission: ‘Après avoir purgé la doctrine de Saint Thomas des excès dont on la chargeoit, il faut avouer avec le respect qui est dÛ à un si grand homme, qu'il semble s'être un peu éloigné, je ne dirai pas des sentimens dans le fond, mais plutôt des expressions des anciens Pères sur le sujet des divertissemens.’ (Réflexions sur la Comédie, § 31.)

[2]Mackay's Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, vol. ii. pp. 286–297. Besides the drama, it is probable that the gladiatorial spectacles (which are of Etruscan origin) were originally religious. They seem at first to have been celebrated at the graves, and in honour of the dead.

[1]See Villemain, Moyen Age; Martonne, Piété du Moyen Age; Lercy, Etudes sur les Mystères, p. 41.

[2]Concina, who published his work, De Spectaculis, in 1752, at the request of Benedict XIV., mentions that the custom still continued in soms monasteries; and he devoted a dissertation to proving that monks who laid aside their ecclesiastical dress to personate laymen were guilty of mortal sin.

[3]See the collections of these by Hone, Jubinal, Jacob, &c.; and the works of Leroy, Suard, and Collier upon their history.

[1]On which see Malone, Hist. of the English Stage, pp. 12, 13. Some curious examples of it have been collected by Hone; and also in Strutt's History of the Manners of the People of England, vol. iii. pp. 137–140.

[2]Some striking instances of this indecency, which indeed is sufficiently manifest in most of the mysteries, are given by Jacob in his Introduction to his collection of Farces. Wherever the seventh commandment was to be broken, the actors disappeared behind a curtain which was hung across a part of the stage; and this is the origin of the French proverbial expression about things that are done ‘derrière le rideau.’ More than once the Government suppressed the sacred plays in France on account of their evil effects upon morals. In England matters seem to have been if possible worse; and Warton has shown that on at least one occasion in the fifteenth century, Adam and Eve were brought upon the stage strictly in their state of innocence. In the next scene the fig-leaves were introduced. (Malone's History of the English Stage. pp. 15, 16.)

[1]The Feast of Fools and the Feast of Asses are said to have originated (though probably under other names) in the Greek Church about 990. (Malone's Hist. of English, Stage, p. 9.) La Mère Sotte, in France, originated, or at least became popular, during the quarrel between the King of France and the Pope, at the beginning of the tenth century. (Monteil, Hist. des Français des Diverses Etats, tom. iii. p. 342, ed. 1853.)

[2]Bibliografia delle Antiche Rappresentazioni Italiane Sacre e Profanestampate nei Secoli XV. e XVI., dal Colomb de Batines (Firenze, 1852). One of these mysteries, the S. Giovanni e Paolo, was writen by Lorenzo de’ Medici himself (Roscoe, Lorenzo de’ Medici, ch. v.).

[1]Riccoboni, tom. i. p. 89. One of the most famous of the early harlequins was Cecchino, who is also celebrated for having published at Venice, in 1621, perhaps the first defence of the theatre. He was ennobled by the Emperor of Germany.

[2]These farces, in the earliest and simplest forms, were called ‘contrasti’ in Italian, or ‘débats’ in French. De Batines has made a list of several which were translated from Italian into French; e. g. the discussions between wine and water, between life and death, between man and woman, &c. Italian actors sometimes migrated to France, and in 1577 we find a regular Italian company, called I Gelosi, there.

[3]As a comic opera, and also, I believe, as a play. The popularity of the farce of Patelin produced Le Nouveau Patelin and Le Testament de Patelin, both of which have been reprinted by Jacob. Hallam says (Hist. of Lit, vol. i. p. 216) that the farce of Patelin was first printed in 1490. There is extreme uncertainty resting upon the early chronology of the drama; scarcely any two authorities agree upon the subject.

[4]The term ‘morality,’ however, was very loosely used. Jacob has reprinted an old play, called La Moralité de l'Aveugle et du Boiteux, which is nothing more than a farce. From the religious plays the personifications passed to the ballets, in which they still sometimes appear. An old French poem describes in rapturous terms the performance of a certain Madame de Brancas, in the character of Geometry, in a ballet on the seven liberal arts, danced before Louis XIV. in 1663.

[1]Farces appear also to have been the chief form of dramatic literature in Spain in the fifteenth century. See Bouterwek's Hist. of Spanish Literature. They were followed by eclogues.

[2]Some remains, however, of the mysteries continue to the present day, aspecially in the villages of the Tyrol. There is still, too, a great ‘passion play,’ is it is termed, celebrated every tenth year at the little village of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, near the frontiers of the Tyrol, which, though it is not more than 300 years old, and though it is almost entirely devoid of grotesque scenes, may be on the whole looked upon as a representative of the mediæval plays. It consists of scenes from the Passion (beginning at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and ending with the appearance to the Magdalene after the Resurrection), between which pictures from the Old Testament (partly wax-work and partly tableaux vivants), typical of the Passion, are displayed. A chorus, like those of the Greek plays, sings hymns concerning the connection between the type and the antitype. When I saw it in 1860, the play lasted for 7 1/4 hours, and commanded the attention of an immense audience to the close.

[1]Riccoboni, tom. i. pp. 32, 33. The Calandra is now nearly forgotten, but its author will always be remembered as the subject of two of the noblest of the portraits of Raphael,—one at Florence, and the other at Madrid.

[2]Compare Riccoboni, tom. ii. pp. 9, 10; and Sismondi, Hist. de la Littérature du Midi, tom. ii. pp. 188–199. The two pieces seem to have been acted nearly at the same time; but the Sophonisba was not printed for some years afterwards. Ruccellai also wrote a play called Orestes, which, however, was not brought at this time on the stage.

[3]Roscoe's Lorenzo de’ Medici, ch. v.; Hogarth's Memoirs of the Opera, pp. 6–8. Of course, as Hallam has observed, recitative not being yet invented, the music was confined to choruses and songs scattered throughout the piece.

[4]Riccoboni, tom. i. p. 183.

[1]See Charles, La Comédie en France au Seizième Siècle (1862). Riccoboni, however, asserts that Molière took the character, and even some of the incidents and speeches, of his Tartuffe from an old Italian play called Doctor Bachetone (tom. i. p. 137).

[2]Among the Arcadians, for example, music was compulsory, and the one district in which this custom fell into desuetude was said to have sunk far below the surrounding civilisation. There is a singularly curious chapter on the effects ascribed to music among the Greeks, in Burney's History of Music, vol. i. pp. 173–194. The legends of Orpheus charming hell, Arion appeasing the waves, and Amphion moving the stones by music, as well as ‘the music of the spheres’ of Pythagoras, will occur to every one.

[3]Called originally ‘discantus.’ The exact date of its invention is a matter of great controversy. It is said to have been suggested by the varied tones of the organ.

[1]See Burney's Hist. of Muisic; Castil-Blaze, Chapelle Musique des Rois de France, Hogarth's Hist. of the Opera, Monteil, Hist des Français (XVII Siècle); the notice of Palestrina in Hallam's Hist. of Literature; and the Essays on Musical Notation, by Vitct and Coussemaker.

[1]The stage of Orange, which is probably the most perfect Roman theatre in existence, is 66 yards broad and 12 deep. (See Vitet's Essay on the Antiquities of Orange, in his Etudes sur l'Histoire d'Art.) The length of the stage of Herculaneum is greater than that of San Carle at Naples, but its depth is only a few feet.

[1]The Spanish theatre very early rose to perfection, and, after 1600, Spanish tragi-comedies soon became dominant, even in Italy. (See Riccoboni's history of the movement; and Bouterwek's Hist. of Spanish Literature.) In this review I have not entered into an examination of the English theatre, for two reasons: first, because its growth was almost entirely isolated, while the dramatic literatures of Italy, Spain, and France were closely connected; and, secondly, because my present object is to trace the relations of Catholicism and the drama.

[2]The following was the decision of the doctors of the Sorbonne in 1694: ‘Les comédiens, par leur profession comme elle s'exercise, sont en état de péché mortel.’—Dict. des Cas de Conscience, de Lamet et Fromageau, tom. i. p. 803.

[3]See an immense mass of evidence of this collected in Desprez de Boissy, Lettres sur les Spectacles (1780); Lebrun, Discours sur la Comédie Concina, De Spectaculis.

[1]‘Arcendi [a sacra communione] sunt publice indigni, quales sunt excommunicati, interdicti, manifeste infames ut meretrices, concubinarii, comœdi.’ (Quoted by Concina, De Spectaculis, p. 42. See also Lebrun, Discours, p. 34.) Some theologians, in order to reconcile their sentiments with the passage from St. Thomas that I have quoted, said that it was actors of immoral pieces that were excommunicated, but they added that the condition of the theatre was such that all actors fell under the censure. Molière was regarded as peculiarly and preëminently bad. Racine was far from innocuous; and Bossuet distinctly maintained that any piece was immoral which contained a representation of love, however legitimate its character. (See his Réflexions sur la Comédie.)

[2]‘l'Église condamne les comédiens, et croit par-là défendre assez la comédie: la décision en est précise dans les Rituels (Rit. de Paris, pp. 108–114), la pratique en est constante. On prive des sacremens et à la vie et à la mort ceux qui jouent la comédie s'ils ne renoncent à leur art; on les passe à la sainte table comme des pécheurs publics; on les exclut des ordres sacrés comme des personnes infâmes; par une suite infaillible, la sépulture ecclésiastique leur est déniée.’—Bossuet, Réflexions sur la Comédie, § xi.

[1]Lebrun relates this with much exultation. Speaking of Molière he says: ‘Ce qui est constant, c'est que sa mort est une morale terrible pour tous ses confrères, et pour tous ceux qui ne cherchent qu'à rire—un peu de terre obtenu par prière, c'est tout ce qu'il a de l'Église, et encore fallut-il bien protester qu'il avoit donné des marques de repentir. Rosimond étant mort subitement en 1691, fut enterré sans clergé sans lumière, et sans aucune prière, dans un endroit du cimetière de St. Sulpice où l'on met les enfans morts sans baptême.’ (Discours sur la Comédie, ed. 1731, p. 259.)

[2]This marvellous production is given in full by Desprez de Boissy, tom. pp. 510–512. Its author was named Tronchon.

[3]Ibid. p. 124.

[4]The Archbishop of Paris. This refusal was of course comprised in the general rule, that actors as excommunicated persons should be excluded from the sacraments (Desprez de Boissy, tom. i. p. 447). And yet these priests had the audacity to reproach actors with their immorality! The Council of Illiberis, one of the oldest on record, prohibited any Christian woman from marrying an actor. (Lebrun, Discours, p. 157.)

[1]See the curious Arrêt du Parlement, in Desprez de Boissy, tom. i. pp. 473–481.

[2]Hogarth, Memoirs of the Opera, p. 28.

[3]Philip II., however, and Philip IV. banished all actors from Spain (Boissy, Lettres sur les Spectacles, tom. i. pp. 483, 484); and the venerable and miracle-working Father Posadas, at a later period, caused the destruction of the theatre of Cordova (Concina, De Spect. p. 178). On the extent to which actors laboured to win the favour of the Church by religious plays and by singing at the Church festivals, see the indignant remarks of Marians, De Rege, pp. 406–419.

[1]Buckle, Hist., vol. i. p. 347, note. In the same way, Lebrun ascribes the earthquakes that desolated ancient Antioch to the passion of the inhabitants for the theatre (Discours, pp 132, 133) The English bishops, in 1563, attributed the plague to the theatres (Froude's Hist., vol. vii. p. 519).

[2]See an energetic extract which Concina has prefixed to his book. Some of the cardinals, however, were less severe, and in the first half of the seventeenth century the musical parties of the Cardinal Barberini were very famous. It was probably there, and certainly at Rome, that Milton met Leonors Baroni, who was one of the first of the long line of great Italian opera singers, and to whom he, with a very unpuritanical gallantry, addressed three Latin poems (Hogarth, Memoirs of the Opera, pp. 17, 18). These carnival dramas excited the great indignation of the Calvinist Dallæus (Concins, pp 302, 303). The Italians do not seem to have been so violent against the theatre as the French priests, though De Boissy has collected a rather long ist of condemnations.

[3]Desprez de Boissy, tom. ii. pp. 234–236.

[1]On the decrees of the French Protestants against the theatre, see Lebrun, p. 255. Calvin at Geneva was equally severe, and his policy long after found an enthusiastic defender in Rousseau. In England, one of the most atrocious acts of tyranny of which Charles I. was guilty, was elicited by a book called the Histriomastix, of Prynne, and one of the first effects of the triumph of the Puritans was the suppression of the theatre.

[2]I have mentioned the way in which Moliére, Lulli, and Le Couvreur were treated in France. As a single illustration of the different spirits of Catholicism and Anglicanism, I may mention the fate of their English paralels—Shakespeare, Lawes, and Mrs. Oldfield. No murmur of controversy ever disturbed the grave of Shakespeare, and the great poet of Puritanism sang his requiem. Lawes and Mrs. Oldfield both rest in Westminster Abbey, to which the latter was borne with almost regal pomp.

[1]Those who directly or indirectly depend upon fixed incomes.

[1]According to Chevallier (whose book on this subject has been translated and endorsed by Mr. Cobden), the adoption of a gold standard by France is the principal.

[2]The famous sermon of Bishop Latimer, describing the revolution of prices in England, was preached as early as 1548, only twenty-seven years after the conquest of Mexico, and at a time when the great mines of Porosi (which were only discovered in 1545) could scarcely have had any effect upon Europe. The most striking evidence of the perturbation of prices in England in the sixteenth century is given in ‘A Compendious or Briefe Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints of divers of our Countrymen, by W. S.’ [probably William Stafford], 1581. The greater part of this curious pamphlet has been reprinted in the fifth volume of the Pamphleteer (1815).

[1]Aggravated to a certain extent by the dishonest tampering with the coinage, in which Charles V., like most of the sovereigns of the time, indulged. The chief results of this are, first, that the good coins are driven out of circulation, as men naturally prefer giving the smallest value possible for what they purchase; secondly, nominal prices are raised as the intrinsic value of coins is depreciated; thirdly, all the evils of uncertainty, panic, and suffering inflicted upon creditors and persons with fixed incomes are produced.

[1]See Blanqui, Hist. d'Economie Politique, tom. i. pp. 271–284, where the whole subject of the political economy of Charles V. is admirably treated.

[2]The beginning of the trade dates from 1440, in which year some Portu guese merchants, having kidnapped some Moors on the coast of Africa, only consented to ransom them on receiving negroes in exchange. (M'Pherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 661.)

[1]The first writer who undertook the defence of Las Casas was Grégoire, Bishop of Blois, in a paper read before the French Institute in 1804, and the subject was afterwards treated, though in a rather different point of view, in a letter by a Mexican priest named Don Gregorio Funes, and in an essay by Llorente. They are reprinted, together with translations of all the relevant passages from Herrera (the original authority on the subject), in Llorente's edition of the works of Las Casas (1822). The first of these writers attempted to impugn the authority of Herrera, but for this there seems no sufficient reason; nor does it appear that Herrera, or indeed any one else at the time, considered the conduct of Las Casas wrong. The monks of St. Jerome are much more responsible for the introduction or negroes than Las Casas. It is impossible to read the evidence Llorente has collected without feeling that, as a general rule (with a few striking exceptions), the Spanish clergy laboured earnestly to alleviate the condition of the captive Indians, that this was one of their chief reasons in advocating the import of negroes, and that they never contemplated the horrors that soon grew out of the trade. It should be added that the Spanish Dominican Soto was perhaps the first man who unequivocally condemned that trade.

[2]M'Pherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 638. At a much later period, in 1689, the English made a convention with Snain to supply the West Indies with slaves from Jamaíca.

[1]This was noticed by Bodin in his time. See La République, p. 47

[1]Blanqui, Hist. de l'Econ. Pol., tom. i. p. 277.

[1]The fullest history of hot drinks I have met with is in a curious and learned book, D'Aussy, Hist. de la Vie Privée des Français (Paris, 1815), tom. iii. pp. 116–129, which I have followed closely. See, too, Pierre La-croix, Histoire des Anciennes Corporations, p. 76; Pelletier, Le Thé et le Café; Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, 8me Mémoire; and, for the English part of the history, M'Pherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. pp. 447–489.

[1]I do not include among these causes the diminution of Church holidays, for although in some few countries they may have degenerated into an abuse, the number that are compulsory has been grossly exaggerated; and moreover, their good effects in procuring some additional recreation for the working classes appear to me to have much more than counterbalanced any slight mjury they may have done to labour. There is some correspondence between Dr. Doyle and Lord Cloncurry on this subject, which is well worthy of attention, in Fitzpatrick's Life of Doyle.

[1]The difference between town and country in this respect has been fully noticed by Mr. Buckle (Hist. of Civ., vol. i. pp. 344–347), who ascribes it chiefly to the fact that agriculturists are dependent for their success upon atmospheric changes, which man can neither predict nor control.

[1]See M'Culloch's Political Economy, and his Introduction to the Wealth of Nations.

[1]See Blanqui. In England the mercantile system began under the influence of the East India Company, which, in 1600, obtained permission to export the precious metals to the amount of £30,000 per annum, on the condition that within six months of every expedition (except the first) the Company should import an equal sum. Under Henry VIII., and more than once at an earlier period, all exportation of the precious metals had been forbidden. The restrictive laws on this subject were repealed in 1663 (M'Culloch's Introd. Discourse). The two most eminent English defenders of the mercantile system—Thomas Mun, whose Treasure by Foreign Trade was published in 1664, and Sir Josiah Child, whose New Discourse of Trade was published in 1668—both wrote in the interests of the East India Company.

[1]The earliest writer who very clearly expounded the true nature of money was probably Bishop Berkeley, whose Querist, considering that it was written in 1735, is one of the most remarkable instances of political sagacity of the age; far superior in this respect, I think, to the economical writings of Locke. Berkeley very nearly broke loose from the system of ‘the balance of commerce.’ The following queries are a curious example of the struggles of an acute reason against this universal error:—

‘Whether that trade should not be accounted most pernicious, wherein the balance is most against us? and whether this be not the trade of France?’ ‘Whether the annual trade between Italy and Lyons be not about four millions in favour of the former, and yet whether Lyons be not a gainer by this trade?’ ‘Whether the general rule of determining the profit of a commerce by its balance doth not, like other rules, admit of exceptions?’ ‘Whether it would not be a monstrous folly to import nothing but gold and silver, supposing we might do it, from every foreign part to which we trade?’ ‘Whether he must not be a wrong-headed patriot or politician whose ultinate view was drawing money into a country and keeping it there?’ (Querist, 61, 555, 556, 557, 559.)

Berkeley is an example of, perhaps, the rarest form of genius—that which is equally adapted for political speculation, and for the most subtle and super sensuous regions of metaphysics.

[1]Say, Traité d’ Economie Politique, liv. i. ch. 2

[1]Wealth of Nations, book ii. ch. 5.

[1]As long as the good land to be cultivated is practically unlimited relatively to the population, no rent is paid. When, however, the best land no longer sufficiently supplies the wants of an increased population, it will still continue to be cultivated; but it will be necessary also to cultivate land of an inferior quality. The cost of the production of a given quantity of the best corn will necessarily be greater when derived from the latter than when derived from the former; but when brought to the market, all corn of the same quality will bear the same price, and that price will be regulated by the eost of production which is greatest (for no one would cultivate the bad land if the sale of its produce did not compensate for his outlay), so that in the sale of corn of the same quality at the same price, the profits of the posses sors of the good, will be greater than the profits of the possessors of the bad land. This difference is the origin of rent, which is, therefore, not a primal element of agriculture, and which has not, as Adam Smith supposed, and influence on price.

[1]The earliest European notice of windmills is, I believe, to be found in a charter of William, Count of Mortain (grandson of William the Conqueror), dated 1105, which has been published by Mabillon. They are supposed to have been brought from Asia Minor. (D'Aussy, La Vice Privée des Francais, tom, i. pp. 62, 63.)

[1]Amongst others, Colbert.

[1]There are some striking, though now rather ancient, statistics on this point in Babbage On Machines, ch. i. In 1830, the non-cultivators were in Italy as 31 to 100; in France, as 50 to 100; in England, as 200 to 100 During the first thirty years of the century, the population of England in creased about fifty-one per cent.; that of the great towns, 123 per cent.

[1]Even Voltaire said, ‘Telle est la condition humaine, que souhaiter la grandeur de son pays c'est souhaiter du mal a ses voisins…. II est clair qu'un pays ne peut gagner sans qu'un autre perd.’ (Dict. Phil., art Patrie.)

[1]Written in 1863.

[1]There is a full description of these in Chevallier's Lettres sur l'Organisation du Travail—a very able, and, considering that it was written in 1848, a very courageous book.

[2]The main interest of the poor is that as large a proportion as possible of the national wealth should be converted into capital, or, in other words, diverted from unproductive to productive channels. Wealth in the form of diamonds or gold ornaments, retained only for ostentation, has no effect upon wages. Wealth expended in feasts or pageants does undoubtedly directly benefit those who furnish them, but is of no ultimate good to the community, because the purchased article perishes uuproductively by the use. Were the sums expended in these ways devoted to productive sources, they would, after each such employment, be reproduced, and become again available for the purposes of society; and those who now gain their living in supplying what is useless to mankind would betake themselves to the enlarged field of productive enterprise. But this train of reasoning should be corrected by the following considerations: 1st. Wealth is a mean, and not an end, its end being happiness; and therefore mere accumulation, with no further object, is plainly irrational. Some modes of expenditure (such as public amusements), which rank very low indeed when judged by one test, rank very high when judged by the other. The intensity, and the wide diffusion of enjoyment they produce, compensate for their transience. 2d. There is such a thing as immaterial production. Expenditure in the domain of art or science, which adds nothing to the material wealth of the community, may not only produce enjoyment, but may become the source of enjoyment and improvement for all future time. 3d. The great incentive to production is the desire to rise to the higher ranks, and the great attraction of those ranks to the majority of men is the ostentation that accompanies them; so that that expenditure which directly is unproductive may indirectly be highly productive. Besides this, we should consider the effects of sudden outbursts of luxury at different periods of history and its different influences upon morals. So stated, the question of the most advantageous expenditure is extremely complicated, and varies much with different circumstances. As a general rule, however, political economy tends to repress the luxury of ostentation.

[1]At least til. Say, whose Theorie des Debouches (directed against the notion of a ‘universal glut,’ which was maintained in France by Sismondi and in England by Malthus) may be regarded as the highest demonstration of the truth. The first writer who intimated the identity of the interests of nations engaged in commerce was probably Dudley North, in his famous work on commerce, published in 1691.

[1]The Therapeutes mentioned by Philo (De Vita Contemplatived) were orobably pagans; and, indeed, in Asia and Africa the monastic type has always existed, and has assumed forms very similar to that among Christians. The horrible macerations of the Buddhists rival those of any Christian sect, and the antipathy to the fair sex is nearly as great among the pagan as among the Christian anchorites. Some pagan religionists of Siam made it a rule never to keep hens, because those animals are of the female sex. (Bayle, Nouvelles Lettres, lettre xxi.) Some Christians of Syria, with equal wisdom, resolved never to eat the flesh of any female animal. (Ibid.)

[1]The Carmelites had existed before upon Mount Carmel, and had even traced their origin to the prophet Elijah; but they were transferred to Europe, reorganised, and greatly multiplied in the thirteenth century.

[1]Montalembert, Moines d'Occident, Introd. pp. 199, 200

[1]Among the ancients, the Phœnician colonies, and a few others of lese Importance, were no doubt commercial; but the immense majority were due either to the love of migration natural to a barbarous people, or to an excess of population, or to a desire when vanquished to escape servitude, or to a feat of invasion, or to the spirit of conquest. The substitution of the industrial for the military colonial system is one of the important changes in history and on the whole, perhaps, it cannot be better dated than from the Portuguese colonial empire, which Vasco da Gama founded, and Albuquerque consolidated.

[1]A great political economist, in a work which has now become very rare says, ‘Toute vertu qui n'a pas l'utilité pour objet immédiat me parait futile ridicule, pareille à cette perfection de Talapoin qui consiste à se tenir sur ud seul pied plusieurs années de suite, ou dans quelque autre mortification nuisible à lui-même, inutile aux autres, et que son Dieu même doit regarder en pitié.’ (J. B. Say, Olbie, p. 81.)

[1]Périn, La Richesse dans les Sociétés Chrétiennes.

[2]Mahomet Effendi. See Bayle, Pensées Diverses, § 182.

[1]As Madame de Stael said, ‘La morale fondée sur l'intérêt, si fortement prêchée par les écrivains francais du deirmer siècle, est dans une connexion intime avec la métaphysique qui attribue toutes nos idées à des sensations’ (L'Allemagne). I believe all who are conversant with the history of philosophy will acknowledge this to be profoundly true.

[1]It is indeed true, that a first principle of the Positive school is the assertion that the limit of human faculties is the study of the successions of phenomena, and that we are therefore incapable of ascertaining their causes; and M. Littré, in his preface to the recent edition of Comte's works, has adduced this principle to show that Positivism is unaffected by arguments against materialism. As a matter of fact, however, the leading Positivists have been avowed materialists; the negation of the existence of metaphysics as a science distinct from physiology, which is one of their cardinal doctrines, implies, or all but implies, materialism; and the tendency of their school has, I think, of late years been steadily to substitute direct negations for scepticism. There are some good remarks on this in a very clear and able little book, called La Matérialisme Contemporaine, by Paul Janet, a writer on whom (since Saisset died) the defence of Spiritualism in France seems to have mainly devolved.