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A p a Pi Ma Bagh ih ae Sen he ae hae Hae Me MMe ha S = 4 ‘ F 5 Pena ten Biel em nln Nn Fitna Temi” Beant Diao nice: ain M etme - : : See Naw Fon tee Na Yan Renta Dw ie Dae an i ae ate Pata Raia in pa i a ee an atts nen Lin Mines % Pn Teritom na ei Ea da a8 es Sn Hin Sa Mis See ene ek os aa Fore om Na Raith ae Tinian Nie TaN a nc ante iT tn Tam a 2 Lh ethan net ee ald aK eee Xl Maas oe tm Ea tin MI Ig a Ew as Bh ae Bm Vig a Tali Ha A ie Mina aU rem col Niele aie Patten Stra Sap B Ph RANE. Vn a Fin Peat Pian nt Eatin eal, Foam in Pine thee Man bs ine! 5 a Ram Mn er ate nett ae hme a itn ti in Pins Mm TM Bram, oe i. rt Lirwrhinet cet van Cap themdit a wall anh aD eh Sem iin finn, Bs Peo mein Pn te ’ an ¥inge ne a Pe Rngine “i! a ae . . é. tlhe bee Yow hing. Te Nap ime >. a na i Be ng oe en Pa Pn Bhan Wig Som ie Pet MnP nih at te fan 8 Tom FP Pin in tne eS ae LY i ha Fae? i mel Tae he Py me an Ha Mens Trey Man as Sos tow ten fw a0 Pact Wem Pre Mie "ey ie Fon Ye Hine ae Eine Eo Ene Naw Petre” Nat ao fine Daan hme Pine aE: Paso Thee Bw’ Py gh “FOL ogicat sews Beis ogee oun ome los oa Tawney, R. H. 1880-1962. Religion and the rise of capitalism Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/religionriseofca00tawn_ 2 RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM Ess oe | ry eS j ReRE SD): RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM A HISTORICAL STUDY (HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922) By R. H. TAWNEY READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON} SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved, inciuding the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. [f-5-47] PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO DR. CHARLES GORE WITH AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE “Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.” BrisHop BERKELEY, Siris, 350. aoe ae Riad Sr ri > INTRODUCTION THE object of this book is to trace some strands in the de- velopment of religious thought on social and economic ques- tions in the period which saw the transition from medieval to modern theories of social organization. It does not carry the subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury, and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history either of economic theory or of economic practice, except in so far as theory and practice were related to changes in re- ligious opinion. In reality, however, the connection be- tween them was intimate and vital. The revolutions, at once religious, political and social, which herald the transi- tion from the medieval to the modern world, were hardly less decisive for the economic character of the new civiliza- tion than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious doctrines. The economic categories of modern society have their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions which accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Ref- ormation. The history of religious thought on questions of social ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay on The Canomst Doctrine first interested me in the subject, by Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O’Brien. But it is no reflection on their work to say that the most important contributions of recent years have come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max Weber, whose celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist ix x INTRODUCTION des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No one can work, on however humble a scale, in the same field, without being conscious of the heavy obligation under which these scholars have laid him. While I have not always been able to accept their conclusions, I am glad to have this op- portunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret that Mr. Coulton’s The Medieval Village appeared too late for me to make use of its abundant stores of learning and insight. It only remains for me to thank the friends whose as- sistance has enabled me to make this book somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr. J. L. Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have been kind enough to read, and to improve, the manuscript. Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading the proofs, has helped me most generously throughout with advice and criticism. Iam deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the proofs and making an index, and to the London School of Eco- nomics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for enabling me to make use of her services. My obligation to the help given by my wife is beyond acknowledgment. R. H. TAwney. PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION SINCE the appearance of this book ten years ago, the litera- ture on its subject has considerably increased. The learned work of Troeltsch, the best introduction to the historical study of religious thought on social issues, can now be read in an English translation, as can also the articles of Weber on (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The omission from my book of any reference to post-Reforma- tion Catholic opinion was a serious defect, which subsequent writers have done something to repair. The development of economic thought in mediaeval Italy; the social forces at work in the Germany of Luther, and his attitude to them; the economic doctrines of Calvin; the teaching of the Jesuits on usury and allied topics; English social policy during the Interregnum; the religious and social outlook of the French bourgeoisie of the same period; the attitude of Quakers, Wesleyans, and other bodies of English Nonconformists to the changing economic world which confronted them in the eighteenth century, have all had books devoted to them. In the somewhat lengthy list of articles on these and kindred subjects, those by the late Professor Sée, M. Halbwachs, and Mr. Parsons, and an article by Mr. Gordon Walker which has just appeared in The Economic History Review, specially deserve attention.* It will be seen, therefore, that the problems treated in the following pages, if they continue to perplex, have not ceased to arouse interest. What conclusions, if any, emerge from the discussion? The most significant are truisms. When this book first appeared, it was possible for a friendly reviewer, writing in X1 Xil PREFACE THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND II cont ary progress of mathematics and physics, it han- dles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to dis- tinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, evén though its particular conclusions continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, be- fore the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester. Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be re- futed by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that({the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.) A me- dieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, re- marked that “he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse.” ® Mr. Coulton does well to re- mind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding princi- ples were compatible with very sordid practice. In a dis- cussion which has as its subject social thought, not the his- tory of business organization, it is not necessary to elab- orate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds ro- mantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the merits of different theories of social organization must be left to those who feel confident that they possess an ade- quate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages is to endeavor to understand a few among them. For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt ab- stractions. That men should have thought as they did is ’ , iG 12 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND sometimes as significant as that they should have aged as they did, and not least significant when thought and prac- tice are at variance. It may be true that “theory is a criti- cism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criti- cism of a bad one.” But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself an interpretation, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they were asked. It would be para- doxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age, merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated eco- nomic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the six- teenth century merely because, behind canon law and sum- me and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind statutes and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the economic man. There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of phys- ical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowl- edge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be fol- lowed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conven- tional statement that human nature does not change is plau- sible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 13 man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, be- fore it bequeaths it to its successors. There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, en- vironment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intel- lectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s neces- sity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s provi- dence’; between the attitude which appeals tofa religious standard to repress economic appetites,) and that’ which re- gards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of eco- nomic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to be explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace the change, from a view of economic ac- tivity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of in- dividualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by the Church and of public policy by the State, first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified in the name of economic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it 14 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND had claimed and finally abdicates them—to do this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivu- lets which are now a flood. Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or has it endeavored not only to chris- ianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis be- tween personal morality and the practices which are per- missible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and, if so, ought a Church to endeavor to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on which a more competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and waver- ing light. I, THE SOCIAL ORGANISM We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradi- tion, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doc- trines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doc- trines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 15 developed, different churches produced characteristic dif- ferences of social opinion. But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new economic world was not ac- cepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete uncon- sciousness that innovations in doctrine and church govern- ment involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different schools of religious thought, but between the changed eco- nomic environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily, the historical background. That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic condi- tions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded. The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic % 16 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and eas- ily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic frame- work there was the greatest variety of condition and devel- opment. The contours of economic civilization ran on dif- ferent lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic struc- ture rose were far removed from those of later genera- tions, it flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnat- ing in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Swmme of the Schoolmen, he finds it in THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 17 constant process of development. The economic teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic parts of the sys- tem—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elabo- rated. } | There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in asceticf aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them“5 for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference be- longing to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justi- fication. It may throw itself into an agitation for some par- 3 ticular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaug- urate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross yh world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.” Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us 18 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal tempera- ment evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper redominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.*® It is monasticism, with its repu- diation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to re- store the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of move- ments for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all’ and that “in this world God must serve the devil,’ but an anticipation of the doc- trine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them— the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred. To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net, and to label them “medieval thought,” is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if real- ized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed when it could be suggested that only one- half of modern Christianity has its root in medieval re- ligion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 19 as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in his excellent book," Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines. ‘The social theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Ana- baptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of medieval parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work ' of conversion and of social construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shat- tered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged from it endeavored, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all alike, in one form or another, are represented in the reli- gious thought and practice of the Middle Ages. All are represented in it, but not all are equally repre- sentative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which 1s most characteristic. The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activi- ties is religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the Summe of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination /? 20 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, me- dieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe. “The perfect happiness of man can- not be other than the vision of the divine essence.” ** Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The . | Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its in- terpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at vari- Jin with theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is “the sphere of religion,’ and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant. There is no absolute division, but there is a division of . quality. There are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society— “to know the truth about God and to live in communities.” ** ‘hese activities, which form his life according to the law THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 21 of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis. The contrast between nature and grace, between human . appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy | but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new sig- nificance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or no- torious) Bull: “The way of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to the law ; . of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally rc and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.” ** Thus social insti- tutions assume a character which may almost be called sac- el ramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expres-— sion Of-a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, so- ciety is an Gheasshot different grades, and human activi- ties form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards: Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia, Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse. Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial ac- 22 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND tivity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nine- teenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the six- teenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all € \spects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally rom the working of that idea in the economic environ- ment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the » functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of ~ econgmic ethics. From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII's chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described —an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—is the same.’ Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extor- tion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical in- dividualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare oc- casions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploita- tion, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for_religion is all-compre- hensive. They must be given some ethical meanings must be shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The mean- ing given them is simple. The facts of class status and in- equality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were rational- ized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies ; THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 23 and the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to us—enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more. _As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repres- sive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as rea- son is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is damnable.” *® As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere money-making was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essense of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily inter- preted in terms of social function. Comparatively late in- truders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoni- ously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its over- throw. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the war- 24 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND rior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to empha- size that they had undergone a re-dedication at the hands of religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power be- came office and duty. That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in at- tempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dig- nify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true function was “to defend God’s law by power of the world.” 7 Craftsmen—the burden of end- less sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member ofievery other.” If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 25 more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for hon- esty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expres- sion of economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well- being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. “The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and . . . laborers. . . . As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained it. . . . Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body . . . and thus should it be in parts of the Church. .. . As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left his own proper work, so div- ers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the Church. . . . Surely the Church shall never be whole be- fore proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and [by] medicine of men.” *” Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, how- ever radical it is, the established order. Clearly this pa- triarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval in- dustry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to aban- don nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, can- not admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and re- ligion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less in- 26 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND tractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than it is today. In the great commercial centers there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants.*° But outside them trade, industry, the money market, all that we call the eco- nomic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition. There was very little large-scale organization, With some important exceptions, such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval arti- san, especially in backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on in Lon- don even before the end of the thirteenth century,” and the growth of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced mod- ern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters.” In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their com- parative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such condi- tions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial in- stitutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more THE SOCIAL ORGANISM ae than nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there was nat- urally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a question whether there was not a considerable popu- lation of casual workers—consider only the number of un- skilled workers that must have been required as laborers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes—who were rarely organized in perma- nent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of eco- nomic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society over-riding particular in- terests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against corporations, on the ground that they distracted so- cial unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinis- ter ambitions; but there was probably from time to time more than a little justification for his complaint that “all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse [against false conspirators], because “they conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power.” ** It is significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the cen- tury before the Reformation proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.” There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French gilds, 28 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND “était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises ; mais une régle puissante s’imposait a tous et d’une maniére générale exi- geait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par 1|’Evan- gile.” °° The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to pre- serve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury of all—whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a common en- vironment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate and direct, and there was little room for organi- zation on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic ex- pediency. 3 Such an environment, with its personal economic rela- tions, was a not unfavorable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tre- mendous claim to mediate between even the humblest ac- tivity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Con- temporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of eco- nomic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 29 continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” At Rome, everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the marks of silver.*® Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti, Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti. Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re, Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare; Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare, ‘Payez, payez, dit le mot, si vis impetrare.?7 The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center of the most highly organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and re- ceiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other Governments still included personal services and payments in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of “peculiar sons of the Roman Church.” ** Grosstéte rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London ex- pelled them, but papal protection brought them back.”® Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunica- tion, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the arch- bishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special man- date, it would be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders.” *° The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest | financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as 30 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage in trade and take usury.** Cathedral chapters lend money at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have been refused by churchmen, as hate- ful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging res- titution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the building of Notre-Dame.*? “Thus,” exclaimed St.’ Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bring- eth money. . . . O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beg- garly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.” *° The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence ; and, when the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued, and what standards they erected. The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summe of the Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most sys- tematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the | fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throw- ing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid pre- occupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic ques- tions were eminently practical. The movement which ‘prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 31 reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrel- evant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual move- ment. By lifting the weight of antiquated formule they cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious au- thority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual justification for developments which earlier generations would have condemned. The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a con- siderable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were less significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary ; they have a secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another ; the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,** will consider in found- ing his State the natural resources of the country. But eco- nomic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful ap- petites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to ap- plaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a ~ constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, 32 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary hu- man attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental—sicut quedam adminicula, quibus ad- juvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. “It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our cor- poral life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.’ *° Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches. At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal—if only man’s nature could rise to it—is communism. ‘“‘Communis enim,’ wrote Gra- tian in his decretum, “usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit.” *® At best, indeed, the es- tate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately ac- quired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 33) to share it with those who need, even if they are not in ac- tual destitution. Such were the conditions which com- mended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century Europe.** There have been ages in which they would have been described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to de- fend the property of the peasant and small master is neces- sarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it. ‘The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests _ increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pe- cuniary motives associated with them. Labor—the common BAG aan ie neesa and honorable ; trade is neces- sary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inver- sion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from clas- sical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the Philosopher himself praised avrapxeia ? But it was a con- vention which coincided with a vital element in medieval social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indul- gence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.** The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. 34 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND For why should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptions negotiatio.° The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of con- temporary economic organization. The economy of the medieval borough—consider only its treatment of food sup- plies and prices—was one in which consumption held some- what the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though con- * venient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and pro- vided loans, and to great establishments such as monas-, teries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthless- ness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer. Apart, however, from the color which it took from its environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as distinct from labor, required some special justification. The suspicion of economic mo- tives had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sanctifi- UU] cation. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned all commerce as the sphere of-iniquity, was soft- ened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites ; and THE SOCIAL ORGANISM _ 35 towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The mer- chant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The tra- ditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: “Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.” *° By very defini- tion a man who “buys in order that he may sell dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is justly con- demned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain: *** The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the quali- fication that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehen- sible as turpe lucrum. ‘The condition of the trader’s exon- eration is that “‘he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages of his labor.” ** Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was difficult of application, for evidently it implied the accept- ance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as “an affectation not very common among mer- chants.” But the motives which prompted it were character- istic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase 99 36 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most mer- ciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues. ‘He who has enough to satisfy his wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are in- cited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.” “* Two and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the same.** ‘The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be de- manded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labor in their voca- tion and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches pri- vate gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. ‘The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx. II. THE SIN OF AVARICE If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they re- quired to be translated into terms of the particular transac- tions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. Their practical expression was the body of economic casuis- try, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines sprang as much from the popular conscious- ness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fa- bles of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, THE SIN OF AVARICE 37) or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks), “about the year 1240,” on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illum- inating than the refinements of lawyers.*° On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moral- ists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any un- natural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar sub- jects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and boroughs might forbid their members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a flavor of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of me- dieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business forbidden to Christians.** Cologne was one of the greatest of commercial entrepots; but, when its successful business man came to make his will, he remem- bered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the merchant.*’ The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that 38 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.** It was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was © all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated as a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irre- sistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision be- tween the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business—its individual practice was, of course, another matter—because both were formed by the same en- vironment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social expediency. The economic background of it all was very simple. The medieval consumer—we can sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914— ‘is like a traveller condemned to spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Mo- nopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval in- dustry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of | small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burn- ing question, for, except in the great industrial centers of Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it is today in similar circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption, not for pro- duction. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed- corn, cattle, raw materials, and his distress is the money- lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate pop- ular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the money-lender who takes advan- THE SIN OF AVARICE 39 tage of his neighbor’s necessities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. ‘The usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more than other sin.” *° No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities of commercial immorality.°° Among the peasants and small masters who composed the mass of the population in me- dieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that “Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for ac- commodation,’ and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus,°* should be regarded as figures at once too scan- dalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this pop- ular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystal- lizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and en- forced, in the last resource, through the courts. The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. “Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere per- version of law.” °* The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the long run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not yet been invented, The idea of a law of nature—of natural justice which ought to find expression in positive law, but which is not exhausted in it—supplies an ideal standard by which the equity of particular relations can be measured. The most fundamental difference between medieval and nn 40 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any particular action, policy, or system of organization, the for- mer starts from the position that there is a moral authority to which considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated. The practical application of this conception is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the for- tuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authori- ties, or, failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigor, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing supplies. But they will not vary with individ- _ ual necessity or individual opportunity. The bugbear is the » man who uses, or even creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have been poor yesterday and rich today.” The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through a considerable development. The dominant con- ception of Aquinas—that prices, though they will vary with” the varying conditions of different markets, should corre- spond with the labor and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the communis estimatio, conformity with which was the safeguard against extortion—was qualified by subsequent writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century emphasized the subjective element in the common estimation, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and drew the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be “ reached under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bargain had been struck showed that both parties were satisfied.** Inthe fifteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote with a highly developed commercial civilization beneath his THE SIN OF AVARICE 4I eyes, endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the princi- ple of the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the necessary play should be left to economic motives. After a subtle analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded that the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of “probability and conjecture,” since it would vary with places, periods and persons. His practical contribution was to in- troduce a new elasticity into the whole conception by dis- tinguishing three grades of prices—a gradus pius, discretus, and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitu- tion, and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within which prices might move without involving sin.” This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the in- tense economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evi- dently contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the economic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much more various and much more modern than is sometimes suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was different. It was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard against extortion. ‘To leave the prices of goods at the dis- cretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.” Prices must be such, and no more than such, as will enable each man to “‘have the necessaries of life suitable for his station.” The most desirable course is that they should be fixed by public officials, after making an enquiry into the supplies available and framing an estimate of the requirements of different classes. Failing that, the individual must fix prices for himself, guided by a consideration of “what he 42 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND must charge in order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and labor.” °° If the latter recommendation was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a plati- tude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry out before breakfast. No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man. He may demand compensation—interesse—if he is not repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal, for this is compensation for damages in- curred; or when Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Bur- wode three marks of silver in return for an annual rent of six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when James le Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin, merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for this is a partnership; or when the priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital sum paid down.*’ What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern economic text-books as “pure in- terest’’—interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender. “Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum . . . quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per pactum vel exac- tionem, usura est, quodcunque nomen sibi imponat.” °* The emphasis was on pactum. The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, THE SIN OF AVARICE 43 which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they sare reasonable—for is -not every one in a small way a profit-maker ?—has no mercy for the debenture-holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury. The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth of the habit of investment, of a market for capital, and of new forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange business, theory became steadily more elaborate, and schools more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges produced one controversy, the foreign ex- changes another, the development of Monts de Piété a third. Even before the end of the fourteenth century there had been writers who argued that interest was the remuneration of the services rendered by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they did not draw the modern corol- lary) that present are more valuable than future goods.” But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lend- ing, theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its modern interpreter,°? who sees in its indulgence to interesse the condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in theological circles in any age be- fore that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labor; it is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, for the benefit of the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money is made, , the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and 44 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND why should the creditor demand payment from a man who is merely using what is now his own? The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35—apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the Politics, which some now say was mistranslated also.** But practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit system, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could be said that “he who borrows is always under stress of necessity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, ex- cept when they could do nought else, and so there would be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger; for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments.” °° The man who used these arguments was not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consum- mate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in Real- politik, and one of the ablest statesmen of his day. True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The dis- tinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honorable, was as familiar in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century ; and no rea- sonable judgment of the medieval denunciation of usury is possible, unless it is remembered that whole ranges of finan- cial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal -magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to THE SIN OF AVARICE a8 pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international banking- houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was fre- quently complained, to the morality of their business meth- ods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommu- nication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the interna- tional money-market escaped from it; in the fourteenth cen- tury Italy was full of banking-houses doing foreign ex- change business in every commercial center from Constan- tinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts. It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypoc- risy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither com- merce nor government could be carried on without credit. It was that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based, had reference to a quite different order of economic activities from that represented by loans from great bank- ing-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its object was simple and direct—to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small men that oppression was easiest and its results mast pitiable. It was for them that the Church’s scheme of 46 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND economic ethics had been worked out, and with reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity. It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesias- tical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude to it. Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.°* The Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons in need, take their possessions in pawn, and re- ceive profits beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their office.°* Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to communion or Christian burial; their offerings are not to be accepted ; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.“ The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons (1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re- enacted the measures laid down by the third Lateran Council (1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually made the money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to usurers, but was to expel them (had they been ad- mitted) within three months. They were to be refused con- fession, absolution and Christian burial until they had made restitution, and their wills were to be invalid.** The legis- lation of the Council of Vienne was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned with dismay that there are communities which, contrary to human and divine law, sanction usury and compel debtors to observe usurious con- tracts, it declares that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws are to incur excommunication, and ; THE SIN OF AVARICE 47 requires the legislation in question to be revoked within three months. Since the true nature of usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various specious devices, money- lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities to submit their accounts to examination. Any person obsti- nately declaring that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors are to proceed against him tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de heresi.®® It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the superiority of the moral law to economic expediency, than the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But, for an understanding of the way in which the system was intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps less illuminating than the correspondence between the papal Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on specific cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those who have made money by usury bound to make restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the original offenders. The pious object of ransoming prison- ers is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to be accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, but if he allows for the element of time in a bargain, by asking a higher price when he sells on credit. Even when debtors have sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ec- clesiastical authorities are to compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by the protec- tion given to usurers by the powerful, punishment can be imposed without their evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of common notoriety. An archbishop of Can- terbury is reminded that usury is perilous, not only for the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use ec- clesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the deduction of interest, of property which has been pawned. 48 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND Usurers, says a papal letter to the archbishop of Salerno, ob- ject to restoring gains, or say that they have not the means; he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to those from whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course is possible, they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, non remittitur peccatum, mist restituitur ablatum. At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the sellers run into sin, unless there is a probability that the wares will have changed in value by the time that payment is made; “and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making con- tracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.” ® It is evident from the number of ‘doubtful cases referred to Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury was not easily administered. It is evident, also, that efforts were made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing with hard cases, precedents were in- serted to show how usurers should be handled.*° About the same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the duties of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of ex- tortion, and designed to expose the various illusory con- tracts—fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive deposits against advances—by which the offence was concealed.” Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and THE SIN OF AVARICE 49 covetousness.’’ Barons and knights are to be requested to state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers (ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and craft. Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to theft and detention of the property of others, espe- cially with regard to tithes . . . also as to the removing of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land... . Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of simony . .. an unjust judge... a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a re- mover of landmarks in fields . . . a false merchant, an oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards and others in misery, for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?’ Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large alms, on the principle that “‘contraries are to be cured-with contraries.”” But there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of the priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the poor.” ” The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth 50 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpre- tation, by taking as his illustration the books which had been written on the text, ““Lend, hoping for nothing again,” and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little enough “to answer... all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s bargains and chafferings together.” * A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was still being re- hearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to com- promise with the economic frailties of his fellow-country- men. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants, and in general—a com- prehensive and embarrassing indictment—“all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep their neighbor from poverty and mischance and do it not.” ™ On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice with these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular authorities, to whom the money-lender is too con- venient to be victimized by any one but themselves.” At the end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,“° and seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers. In England commercial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to time for jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of contract in general, on the THE SIN OF AVARICE 51 ground that they involved lesio fidei, and with usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbid- den by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Consti- tutions of Clarendon,** had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down more than once in the course of the next cen- tury. The latter again and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those who dis- regarded the prohibition.’® Both, in spite of repeated pro- tests from the clergy,*° made good their pretension to han- dle usurious contracts in secular courts; but neither suc- ceeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church. The ques- tion at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished —a point as to which there was only one opinion—but who should have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local au- thorities, from the City of London to the humblest ma- norial court, make by-laws against “unlawful chevisance”’ and present offenders against them.** The Commons pray that Lombard brokers may be banished, and that the or- dinances of London concerning them may be made of gen- eral application.“ The justices in eyre hear indictments of usurers,** and the Court of Chancery handles petitions from victims who can get no redress at common law.** And Holy Church, though there seems to be only one example of legis- lation on the subject by an English Church Council,* con- tinues to deal with the usurer after her own manner. For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it 1s evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by the secular authorities. A 52 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before) the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living. The same reservation of ec- clesiastical rights was repeated when the question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an an- tiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty capitalism under Elizabeth and James I.*° That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of enforcing the canon law in connection with money-lending is improbable. It was naturally in the commercial towns that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns did not look with favor on the interference of churchmen in matters of business. In London, collisions between the courts of the Official, the Mayor and the King were fre- quent in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceed- ings before the first, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired, or when their case was of a kind which secular courts were not likely to regard with favor. Thus crafts- men, to give one curious example out of many, were evi- dently using the courts christian as a means of giving ef- fect to trade union regulations, which were more likely to be punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device of imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for breach of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a “confederacy,” supported by an oath, with the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was alleged in court, of preventing any but members of their organization from working at the trade, and sum- moned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts. The spur- riers forbade any one to work between sunset and sunrise, and haled an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the result that “the said Richard, after being three times warned by the Official, had been expelled from the Church and excommunicated, until he would swear to keep the ordinance.” *7 THE SIN OF AVARICE 53 Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused of usury undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.** Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or usury have been begun before “‘spiritual men.” *° The records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though some- times commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury continued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.*°® The dis- reputable family of Marcroft—William the father was a common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pente- cost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day— is punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it de- serves." At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to settle the case out of court.°” The Commissary of London cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurarie pravitatis, on the ground that, having advanced four shillings on the se- curity of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence over and above the principal, and suspends him when he does not appear in court.°* Nor did business of this kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great commercial center like the City of London it was still possible in the reign of James I for the Bishop’s Commissary to be trying tradesmen for “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain.” ** | It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an at- tempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the ex- actions of the money-lender. From a very early date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be “colored,” direct prohibition was almost necessarily im- 54 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND potent, and which favored the policy of providing facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be ob- tained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps monasteries lend corn, cattle and money.’® In England, bishops are organ- izing such loans with papal approval in the middle of the thirteenth century,°® and two centuries later, about 1462, the Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of Monts de Piété, which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and, though never taken up in England—for the Reformation intervened—supplied a topic of frequent comment and eulogy to English writers on economic eth- ics.°’ The canon law on the subject of money-lending un- derwent a steady development, caused by the necessity of adapting it to the increasing complexity of business or- ganization, down at least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with which professional opinion elaborated the code was itself a proof that considerable business— and fees—were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught. The canonists, who had a bad reputa- tion with the laity, were not, to put it mildly, more inno- cent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making busi- ness. The Italians, in particular, as was natural in the financial capital of Europe, made the pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In Eng- land, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, be- cause “they do not fear to make contracts on usury,” °° or, most probably, because English business was a conserva- tive and slow-going affair, the English canonist Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence from an English archbishop of the thirteenth century and to leave it at that.®° THE SIN OF AVARICE 55 But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neigh- borly or unneighborly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hateful to God,*°° it has a traditional prejudice against the arts by which men—or at least laymen—acquire riches, and is apt to lump them together under the ugly name of avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lend- ers who grind the poor, it regards, not as business strate- gists, but as nefande bellue—monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and victualers “who conspire wickedly together that none shall sell better cheap than another,’ and specu- lators “who buy up corn, meat and wine... to amass money at the cost of others,” they are “according to the laws of the Church no better than common criminals.” *” So, when the price of bread rises, or when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit that they are “all poor and caitiffs on account of their own simplicity, and if they would act on his advice they would be rich and powerful,” *° form a combine, to the great loss and hard- ship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not console themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in the approval of all good Christians, they stand the miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the sixth commandment, choosing as his text “the words of the Book of Proverbs, “Give me neither riches nor poverty, but enough for my sustenance.” III. THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which Py 56 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made the age a watershed in economic development. It is evi- dent that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely conservative. There was no question of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church, to which independence of thought among the lower orders was but little less abhorrent when it re- lated to their temporal well-being than when it was con- cerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to the most formi- dable of insurrections. Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view, which regarded the social order as a thing un- alterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labor, the hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, there- fore, they denounced agitations, like the communal move- ment,*°* designed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of medie- val Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent ad- vance in civilization. They referred to questions of eco- nomic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because they were concerned with the main- tenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct formed an important part. Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 57 of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royal- ties. The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St. Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church. The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths of the population consisted of agriculturists, had been serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, con- servative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished age, which “knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father.” *°* Their idealization of the past is as misleading, as an account of the conditions of previous centuries, as it is illuminating as a comment upon those of their own. _In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the bulk of medieval agricuiturists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant prosperity is, except here and there, a ro- mantic myth, at which no one would have been more sur- prised than the peasants themselves. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its fnost naked and shameless form, compulsory labor, additional corvées at the very moments when the peasant’s labor was most ur- gently needed on his own holding, innumerable dues and payments, the obligation to grind at the lord’s mill and bake at the lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s court. The custom of the manor, the scarcity of labor, and, in England, the steadily advancing encroachments of 58 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND the royal courts, blunted the edge of the system, and in fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeomanry was ris- ing on its ruins. But, during the greater part of the Mid- dle Ages, its cumulative weight had been, nevertheless, im- mense, Those who lived under it had no illusions as to its harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money took was to buy himself out of the obliga- tion to work on the lord’s demesne. ‘The Peasants’ Revolt in England, the Jacquerie in France and the repeated ris- ings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social ex- asperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent movements. It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval economics refrain from asking) what the attitude of re- ligious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be treated with humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not “living tools,” but men; in the eyes of God all men are serfs to- gether, conservi, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus is before Dives.°° True, villeinage was a legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth cen- tury there were serfs who were rich men. But to release the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever “mad priests’ might say and do, the official Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circum- spection. The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom.*°° Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pro- nouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the result’ of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on eco- nomic grounds.*°’ Almost all medieval writers appear ta THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 59 assume it or excuse it. Lcclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens, Was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the children of light concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of St. Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and England, who ap- pealed to the fact that “‘Christ has made all men free’’;*°* and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom— and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nine- teenth—was part of a general economic movement, with which the Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less / to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of he French Revolution. The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was a compromise—a compromise of which the critic can say, “How much that was intolerable was accepted!” and the 60 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND eulogist, “How much that was intolerable was softened!” Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opin- ion acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the medieval Church almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land system was precisely that which made it strong, at least in theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the individual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of peaceful labor, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate and the oppressed—for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity against the naked force of violence and oppression. With the growing complexity of economic civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily han- dled by its traditional categories. But, if applied capri- ciously, they were not renounced, and the world of economic morality, which baffles us today, was in its turn converted by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity. What- ever emphasis may be laid—and emphasis can hardly be too strong—upon, the gulf between theory and practice, the qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the endeavor to draw the most common- place of human activities and the least tractable of human appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal sys- tem still glows through it all with a certain tarnished splen- dor. When the distinction between that which is permis- sible in private life and that which is permissible in busi- ness offers so plausible an escape from the judgment pro- nounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted that the law of charity is binding on the second not less than on the first. When the austerity of principles can be evaded by treating them as applicable only to those rela- tions of life in which their application is least exacting, it is something to have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand against commercial unscrupulous- THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 61 ness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate transaction. If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high places, it is not less important to observe that men called these vices by their right names, and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice economy. Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and dis- posed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cyn- ical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the preva- lent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is con- cerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth cen- tury, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the un- charitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand. The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superfi- cial, and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in medieval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of. its contribution consists, not in its particular theories as to prices and in- terest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and _bor- 62 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND rower to extortion, but in its insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that eco- nomic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and re- pressed by reference to the moral ends for which it sup- plies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which con- fines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent ele- ment in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an un- mixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expe- diency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the me- dieval theorist meant. by “natural law.” When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of. moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its prac- tical results. The best proof of the appeal which the at- tempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt among reform- ers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be contested. CHAPTER II THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS “Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.” Bucer, De Regno Christi. iy Ba Ek } - " ee gets ite ash CHAPTER II THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS Lorp Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dis- solution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.” * His ref- erence was to the new world revealed by learning, by sci- ence, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought. The strands in this movement were complex, and the for- mula which associates the Reformation with the rise of eco- nomic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply de- fined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical dis- cipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the 65 66 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS effect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from which new streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organiza- tion until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency{ The sixteenth century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth —because it was an age of social dislocation.4 The retort of conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last great liter- ary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an older social order. The practical 1m- plications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced. I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION The religious revolution of the age came on a world heay- ing with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had ex- perienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curios- ity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the schol- arship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth cir- cle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth la- bors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 67 For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and dis- ciplined ; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. The general who marshaled the host and launched the at- tack was economic power. ' Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with the climax of the great Discov- eries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the con- ventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic significance. It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labor of Italian cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors. The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a single economic system, has no space left for fresh expan- sion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its imme- morial pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the 68 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall. As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic in its external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its in- ternal, relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the for- eign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an economic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony with its depot, the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried on under capit- ulations. This narrow framework had been a home. In the fif- teenth century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding ener- gies pressed against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion. Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst.7 It was not / THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 69 the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been accumulated. It was not great cap- italists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity the basis of a system of pluto- cratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and east to north and west. The records of German and English trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century be- fore the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civiliza- tion,® and for a century after them English economic de- velopment was to be as closely wedded to its continental connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Dis- coveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient economic effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine. The result was not the less sensational because it had been long prepared{_Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid 70 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter. It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sen- sations, which were recorded in the letter-books * of busi- ness men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German cities which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which henceforward must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic im- perialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no longer local but international, and based, not merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors ; a revo- lution in prices which shattered all customary relationships ; the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power ; the triumph of the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church—all were crowded into less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three- quarters of a century the whole framework of European civilization had been transformed. Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Ger- many, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 71 of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could al- ready, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun. The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not dis- cerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an am- bassador of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the water-logged Netherlands.° The justice of the criti- cism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long agony, in which the power- house of European enterprise was to be struck with paraly- sis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political and re- ligious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting strug- gle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her own waste places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years, and which only in the twentieth century was_ a THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS to show signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of mere experiment over, and the new connections firmly established, she appeared to be in sight of an economic stability based on broader foundations than ever before. Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of East and West. But it was not Portugal, with her tiny population, and her empire that was little more than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries an army on the march, and now staggering be- neath the responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the ma- terial harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the political agents of minds more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace. Every period and society has some particular center, or institution, or social class, in which the characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be fixed and embodied. In the Europe of the early Renais- sance the heart of the movement had been Italy. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The institution which best symbolized its eager economic ener- gies was the international money-market and produce-ex- change. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the international financier. Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarna- tion in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 73 pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the international idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe, Antwerp, ‘“‘a home common to all nations,’”’ was the most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a center of learn- ing by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a coun- try where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Durer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a ha- ven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the re- former found a spiritual home, where the energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of hap- piness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at Antwerp. The economic preeminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the muni- tions of the Black Country round Liége, poured in an un- ceasing stream on to its quays.° But Antwerp was a Euro- pean, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competi- tor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth cen- tury she had crushed her rival. The Hanse League main- tained a depot at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increas- ing numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepot through which English cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Ant- 74 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS werp, the first city to tap the wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged preéminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads which ran east and west met and ended in its har- bors. The Portuguese Government made it in 1503 the depét of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Em- pire, and, in spite of protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American silver. Com- merce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought finance in its train. The commercial companies and bank- ing houses of south Germany turned from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for finan- cial operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.’ In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of society, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Professor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook of the medie- val middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the six- teenth century, with its international ramifications, its in- dependence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindi- cation of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own career. “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants at Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the cause of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade there.” ° Swept into wealth on the crest of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the lib- eral bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all prec- edents, a policy of practical individualism, which would have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian mon- archy, which were fought by their more conservative neigh- THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 75 bors, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, wel- coming the technical improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum cuiusque gentis ac linguae. For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in the mere expansion in the scale of commercial en- terprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance the movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the im- pecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the growth of an international banking system mobilized im- mense resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of international cur- rency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They formed together the departments of 70 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS an international clearing-house, where bills could be read- ily discounted, drafts on any important city could be ob- tained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nation- __ality changed hands.*° _ Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Men- aced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought other- wise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be neces- sities imposed by nature, they reéstablished them by politi- cal art. The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it.” ** The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too pro- phetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the six- teenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out be- neath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and pos- ture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most de- THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 77 spairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Nether- lands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, in- cluding the financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared their position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace. It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and can- non. The centralized States which were rising in the age of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial situation. It sprang from the combination of modern administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance.. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of masses of professional infantry and artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspira- tion of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of print- ing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized industry. Government after Government, un- deterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its neigh- bors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which 78 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the tax- payer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property which should have been treated as capital. They parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their suc- cessors. These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money- market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the financier was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, financing im- partially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince. Com- pared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money- power to which political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain. The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German bank- ing houses were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had invested in the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East In- THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 79 dies, financed an expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade be- tween Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Im- hofs were much the same. The Fuggers, thanks to judi- cious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous conces- sions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and commercial ‘businesses in Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Branden- burg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds; pro- vided the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client ; and found the money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per cent. for the preceding sixteen years.” II. LUTHER Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renatis- sance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Ger- many and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of 80 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercan- tilist thinkers resharpened an old economic weapon for the armory of princes, Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign exchanges. The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an in- strument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding ener- gies to its own conception of man’s spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had stretched old formulz to cover the new forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic treatment of economic questions was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology. Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that questions of economic con- duct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious merchants propounded in the confessional. The Span- ish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to consult the theologians of the University as to the LUTHER 81 compatibility of speculative exchange business with the canon law.** When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy, in or- der to seek from the University of Bologna authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.** Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an im- mense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry, and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a scale unknown before, the new economic civilization inevi- tably gave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the friends and the enemies of the Reformation identified it with social change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the protagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social revolution had been fermenting for half a cen- tury, it seemed at last to have come. The rise in prices, an enigma which baffled contemporaries till Bodin published his celebrated tract in 1569,*° produced a storm of indigna- tion against monopolists. Since the rising led by Hans Boheim in 1476, hardly a decade had passed without a peas- ants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and peasant, had become a battle-cry. From city after city mu- nicipal authorities, terrified by popular demands for the re- pression of the extortioner, consulted universities and di- vines as to the legitimacy of interest, and universities and divines gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending and prices.*® Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on the same subject.” Bucer sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a Christian prince.*® Bullinger produced a classical exposition of so- cial ethics in the Decades which he dedicated to Edward VI.** 82 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS Luther preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,”” and said that it was time “‘to put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers.”** Zwingli and Cécolam- padius devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief. Above all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightful catastrophe, not only terrified Lu- ther into his outburst: ‘“Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly . . . such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer’; ** it also helped to stamp on Lu- theranism an almost servile reliance on the secular authori- ties. In England there was less violence, but hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel— to mention but the best-known names—all contributed to the debate.** Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the part of men of religion. If the world could be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise. That the problems of a swiftly changing economic en- vironment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Ger- many and in England, is its conservatism. Where ques- tions of social morality were involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to medieval authori- ties, and reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen. A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found acceptance in certain quarters has repre- LUTHER 83 sented the Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to Oziander protesting against the em- barrassment caused to reformers in England by the indul- gence to moral laxity, in the matter alike of economic transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given by reform- ers in Germany.’ By the seventeenth century the hints had become a theory and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the first theologians to defend extor- tion,”® and it only remained for a pamphleteer to adapt they indictment to popular consumption, by writing bluntly that ‘it grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of heresy.” *? That the revolt from Rome synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a period of acute social distress is un- deniable, nor is any long argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it had its seamy side. What is some- times suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of religious and economic movements, but a logical connection between changes in economic organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad social prac- tice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly teach a congcienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of their teaching. In the eight- eenth century, which had as little love for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as for their political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our own day, the wheel seems almost to have come full circle. What was then a matter for congratulation is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by whom the Ref- ormation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of unscrupu- lous commercialism, which had previously been held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the Church. », These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the ie 84 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS grand religious struggles of the age have their significance. But the obiter dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants than on the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too com- plex to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to partisans. (If capitalism means the di-. rection of industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which establish themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If. by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is pre- pared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predomi- nantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic bankers who were its leading finan- ciers, Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and economic issues, it did so without design, and against the intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensa- tional the innovations in economic practice which accom- panied the expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the development of doctrine on the subject of eco- nomic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is ex- amined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To think of the abdication of LUTHER 85 religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to antedate a movement which was not finally accomplished for another century and a half, and which owed as much to changes in economic and political organi- zation, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all shades of opinion still searched the Bible, the Fathers and the Corpus Juris Canonict for light on practical questions of social morality, and, as far as the first generation of re- formers was concerned, there was no intention, among either Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good conscience, which were supposed to control eco- nomic transactions and social relations. If anything, in- deed, their tendency was to interpret them with a more rig- orous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, in particular, against the avarice which was thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the pas- sion for regeneration and purification, which was one ele- ment in the Reformation, was directed against the corrup- tions of society as well as of the Church. Princes and nobles and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and fished eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and eccle- siastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive Christianity. The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression in the writings of the Ger- man reformers, Like the return to nature in the eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society dis- illusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The prosperity of Augsburg, Nurnberg, Reg- ensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like 86 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central posi- tion, which they were to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepot between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the near East. But the expan- sion of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of an acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Ger- many from a highway into a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise to a position of overwhelming preeminence of the new interests based on the control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally of the personal labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predom- inant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements. Under the impact of these new forces, while the institu- tions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and oper- ation were transformed. In the larger cities the gild or- ganization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the cap- italist, became one of the instruments which he used to con- solidate his power. The rules of fraternities masked a divi- sion of the brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, shel- tered behind barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their mas- ters, and alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever- expanding morass of hopeless pauperism.** The peasantry LUTHER 87 suffered equally from the spread of a commercial civiliza- tion into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches of the towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and fines by their competition. But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not with- out success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found corvées redou- bled, money-payments increased, and common rights cur- tailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanc- tion to its harshest exactions.” On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to eco- nomic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized themselves into companies, which handled at Lis- bon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their own resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar move- ment took place on the narrower stage of European com- merce in the generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany, and it was defended and attacked by argu- ments almost identical with those which are familiar today. 88 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in bulk, drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great pike swallows up a lot of little fishes,’ and plundered the consumer, were the commonplaces of the social reformer.” The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger of interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by the companies. The problem was on several occasions brought before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who observed that it is not possible to unscrambie eggs had already been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do not seem to have been more effective than modern legis- lation on the same subject. The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such con- ditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth cen- tury, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.°* In the age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all mer- chants’ companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstet- ters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed merchants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.*? Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Com- pared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naiveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous em- barrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social LUTHER 89 ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness. It was partly that they were piéces de circonstance, thrown off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely en- rage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity. But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a conception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial or mischievous. “Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Para- dise.” ** It was this doctrine that all things have their price —future salvation as much as present felicity—which scan- dalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to est Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in com- mon with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolu- tionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic in- dividualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude | - towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at 90 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and be- come a congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of Adam. The children of the mind are like the children of the body. Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if their parents could foresee their future development, it would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would have been horrified, could he have anticipated the emoter deductions to be derived from his argument. amba said that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all, and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded by Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed would have more affinity with the thought of Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his teach- ing a plea for treating questions of economic conduct and social organization as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s re- volt against authority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on its laxity and its corruption. His individualism was not the reed of the plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness f public authority an opportunity for personal gain. It as the ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hun- gers for a society in which order and fraternity will reign without “the tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law LUTHER QI and statute,” because they well up in all their native purity? from the heart. Professor Troeltsch has sainted out that Protestants, not less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church- civilization, in which all departments of life, the State and} society, education and science, law, commerce and indus-} try, were to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.** That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on social issues. So far from accepting the view which was afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves for that plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those directed against Rome. The text of his ad- --monitions is always, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a for- mal, legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not need to be organized by law, because it is the spontaneous expression of a habit of love. To restore is to destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder of revolution. It was the declaration of the peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised Mes- siah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées, and enclosures.*° | The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of society more medieval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commer- cial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into J e paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular pro- ee, 92 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS tests against a commercial civilization which were every- where in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naivete, even while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reac- tion of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and cap- italism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for the anxious provision which accumulates for the future, Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk. Chris- tians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow, take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther thought that the most admirable life was that of the peasant, for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commer- cial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.** The labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the com- munity in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined to the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands no more than will compensate him for his labor and risk. The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are mem- bers. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome. For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders, mischievous alike in their practice and by their ex- ample, cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrim- ages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished LUTHER 93 or compelled to labor, and each town must organize charity for the support of the honest poor.** =» Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and subordination, thetigh he knocked away the , ecclesiastical rungs in the-ladder.¢ The combination of re- ligious radicalism and economic conservatism is not un- common, and in the traditional conception of society, as an organism of unequal classes with different rights and func- tions, the father of all later revolutions found an arsenal of arguments against change, which he launched with almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping mo- nopolists.7 His vindication of the spiritual freedom of com- mon men, and his outspoken abuse of the German princes, had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs groan- ing under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another age, was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and his own. As fully convinced as any medieval writer that serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by a political) theory which exalted the ahsolutism of secular authorities, ne: and a religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis be- _¢g®* tween the external order and the life of the spirit. The de-\ ct mand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His pre- cious blood,” ** horrified him, partly as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be confused with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation move- ment, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gos- pel by turning a spiritual message into a program of a cial reconstruction. “This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an ex- ternal worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom can- v| 94 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS not exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’ ” *° After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated. A society may perish by corruption as well as by vio- lence. Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined; and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could be more striking than that between his social theory and the outlook of Calvin. (Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main institutions of a commercial civilization, and sup- plied a creed to the classes which were to dominate the fu- ture. The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw no room in a Christian society for those middle classes whom an English statesman once described as the natural repre- sentatives of the human race. International trade, banking and credit, capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic forces, which, next to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest solvent of the medieval world, seem to him to belong in their very essence to the kingdom of darkness which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law, only to reaffirm more dogmatically the de- tailed rules which it had been used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions at length, as in his Long Ser- mon on Usury in 1520, or his tract On Trade and Usury in 1524, his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpre- tation of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists themselves had at- tempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical life. In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional LUTHER - 95 doctrines. “A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But be- cause thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and con- science that thou mayest practice it without harm or in- jury to him.” *° If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it. If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation. If he has to determine it himself, he must consider the income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his labor, and his risk, and must settle it ac- cordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments. On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the canonists. “The greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in in- terest... . The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.” * Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compen- sation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian bur- ial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the characteristic developments of his generation—the luxury trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking beyond ~ measure. ‘Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels and spices . . . and drain the land and people of their money, should not be permitted. . . . Of combina- 96 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS tions I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong. . . . Who is so stupid as not to see that combinations are mere out- right monopolies, which even heathen civil laws—I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law—condemn as a plainly harmful thing in all the world?’ * So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed that Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, would have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesias- tical jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite. It was one, not merely of indifference, but of repugnance. The prophet who scourged with whips the cupidity of the in- dividual chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned a shattering dialectic on the corporate organi- zation of the Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of human hopes are human institutions, there have been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost everything that men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived at a time when the contrast between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been intoler- able, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless char- ity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to give it a concrete ex- pression. He reiterates the content of medieval economic teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers of the later Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received a positive, if sadly imperfect, expres- sion, he has little but abhorrence. God speaks to the soul, not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social in- stitutions built up by man, but solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and in the heart alone. Thus the bridges be- LUTHER 97 tween the worlds of spirit and of sense are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men, that it may enter into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely . bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourish- ment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the pri- meval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilder- ness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of contributing to sanctification. “It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty. . . . One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.” * The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical re- sult, the argument made, not only good works, but sacra- ments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is be- stowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker—di- -vinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions—drops away, as the blasphemous triv- ialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articu-. lated organism of members contributing in their different 98 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now - set in irreconcilable antagonism to each-other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the exten- sion of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the re- ligious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secu- larized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction be- came more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The divi- sion between them was absolute ; no human effort could span the chasm. The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of salvation as vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is combined with a repudiation of its visible and institu- tional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good LUTHER 99 conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation off medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit could be acquired by the operation of some special } machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordi- nary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mech- anism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to them, “There can be no better instructions in . all transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments: ‘What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for every one's heart and conscience would guide him.” * “Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate sub- stitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to solve the problem which social duties present to the individ- ual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it ‘necessarily follow that the external order is simply irrelevant to it?. To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien to that of the spirit—is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for which medieval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy 100 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS of values related to a common end, had attempted, however inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist had answered by anticipation Luther’s contemptuous dis- missal of law and learning, when he urged that it was use- less for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was pre- pared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the transactions to which the prohibition applied.** It was a pity that Pecock’s douche of common sense was not of a kind which could be appreciated by Luther. He denounced cov- etousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on the specific question whether the authorities of Dantzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. “The preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it; he cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the rahe of God urges forward.” * Luther’s impotence was not accidental. It sprang di- rectly from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He at- tacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in theit teaching with regard to which his criticism was justified were only too numerous. But the remedy for bad law is good law, not lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the ap- plication of general principles to particular cases, which is involved in any living system of jurisprudence, whether ec- clesiastical or secular. If the principles are not to be ap- plied, on ‘the ground that they are too sublime to be soiled by contact with the gross world of business and politics, what remains of them? Denunciations such as Luther launched against the Fuggers and the peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as he advanced in his tract On Trade and Usury. Pious rhetoric LUTHER IOI may be edifying, but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul. ‘As the soul needs the word alone for life and justifica- tion, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. . . . Lherefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his faith alone more and more.” ** The logic of Luther’s re- ligious premises was more potent for posterity than his at- tachment to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its own inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring. But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dual- ism which, as its implications were developed, emptied re- ligion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere heights where alone true faith is found, no human institu- tion can avail to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many. He himself was conscious that he had left the world of secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual re- straints. He met the difficulty, partly with an admission that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the ma- jestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, be obeyed; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could find no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked, ‘Who then can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For in this fashion no merchandising would remain on. earth.’ ... You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and | 102 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.” * Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince. TIT. CALVIN The most characteristic and influential form of Protes- tantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is that which descends, by one path or another, from the teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in differ- ent countries, became an international movement, which | brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was strewn with revolutions. .Where Lutheranism had been so- cially conservative, deferential to established political au- thorities, the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism was an active and radical force. It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but penetrating every department of life, public as well as pri- vate, with the influence of religion. Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of society, it possessed from the beginning one characteris- tic which was both novel and important. It assumed an economic organization which was relatively advanced, and expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this re- _ #o reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by j CALVIN 103 spect the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of medieval theologians and of Luther. The difference is not merely one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on which the discussion is conducted. The background, not only of most medieval social theory, but also of Luther and his English contemporaries, is the traditional stratification of rural society. It is a natural, rather than a money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of peas- ants and craftsmen in the small market town, where indus- try is carried on for the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the produc- tion of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole sys- tem in motion. When they criticize economic abuses, it is precisely against departures from that natural state of things —against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless com- petition, which disturb the stability of the existing order with clamorous economic appetites—that their criticism is directed. These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of unscrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on the writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example, who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between Lu-. ther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that pri- vate property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can} hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Coun- cils of Constance and Basel—“‘assembled, forsooth, at the bidding of the Holy Ghost’”—for showing indulgence to the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanc- tions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God.*® Of the attempts made at Zurich and Geneva to re- press extortion something is said below. But these full- blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by 104 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation by which interest was permitted, and already, when they were uttered, they had ceased to represent the conclusion of the left wing of the Reformed Churches. For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began their voyage lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who saw economic life with the eyes of a peasant and a mystic, oO \ they approached it as men of affairs, disposed neither to idealize the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist en- terprise in commerce and finance. Like early Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban movement ; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from country to country partly by emigrant traders and work- men; and its stronghold was precisely in those social groups to which the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its treatment of economic interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As was to be expected in the exponents of a faith which had its headquarters at Geneva, and later its most influential ad- herents in great business centers, like Antwerp with its in- dustrial hinterland, London, and Amsterdam, its leaders ad- dressed their teaching, not of course exclusively, but none the less primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and in- dustry, who formed the most modern and progressive ele- ments in the life of the age. In doing so they naturally started from a frank recogni- tion of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large- scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of business life. They thus broke with the tradition which, regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond what is necessary for subsistence’ as reprehensible, had stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to CALVIN 105 the medieval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty es- caped censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of re- spectability as the earnings of the laborer and the rents of the landlord. ‘‘What reason is there,’ wrote Calvin to a correspondent, “why the income from business should not be larger than that from land-owning? Whence do the merchant’s profits come, except from his own diligence and industry?’ °° It was quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of merchants, should urge the English Govern- ment to undertake the development of the woollen indus- try on mercantilist lines.”* Since it is the environment of the industrial and com- mercial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and his followers, they have to make terms with its prac- tical necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are concerned to moralize is one in which the main features of a commercial civilization are taken for granted, and that it is for application to such conditions that their teaching is designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has its own rule, and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of eco- nomic affairs. But it no longer suspects the whole world of | economic motives as alien to the life of the spirit, or dis- trusts the capitalist as one who has necessarily grown rich on the misfortunes of his neighbor, or regards poverty as in itself meritorious, and it is perhaps the first systematic body of religious teaching which can be said to recognize and applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy is not the ac- cumulation of riches, but their misuse for purposes of self- indulgence or ostentation. Its ideal is a society which seeks wealth with the-sober gravity of men who are conscious at once of disciplining their own characters by patient labor, and of devoting themselves to a service acceptable to God. It is in the light of that change of social perspective that pda 106 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is to be interpreted. Its significance consisted, not in the phase which it marked in the technique of economic analysis, but in its admission to a new position of respectability of a powerful and growing body of social interests, which, how- ever irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by religious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor _ than by its indulgence. ‘Calvin,’ wrote an English divine a generation after his death, ‘deals with usurie as the apoth- ecarie doth with poyson.’” *? The apologetic was just, for neither his letter to Gécolampadius, nor his sermon on the same subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of the financier. That interest is lawful, provided that it does not exceed an official maximum, that, even when a maximum is fixed, loans must be made gratis to the poor, that the borrower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that excessive security must not be exacted, that what is venial as an occasional expedient is reprehensible when carried on. as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic gain for himself to the injury of his neighbor—a condona- tion of usury protected by such embarrassing entanglements can have offered but tepid consolation to the devout money- lender. Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor might properly be asked to concede some small part of his profits to the creditor with whose capital they had been earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his la- bor.” There have been ages in which such doctrines would have been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather than as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin’s specific contri- butions to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a CALVIN 107 hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence and from the idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably regarded by himself merely as one additional step in the long series of developments through which ecclesi- astical jurisprudence on the subject had already gone. In emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from the necessities of the poor and the interest which a prosper- ous merchant could earn with borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the organizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a legend. Like the author of another revolution in economic theory, he might have turned on his popularizers with the protest: “I am not a Calvinist.” Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its de- fenders were correct in regarding Calvin’s treatment of capital as a watershed. What he did was to change the plane on which the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal to a special body of doctrine on the subject of usury, but as a particular case of the general problem of the social relations of a Christian community, which must be solved in the light of existing circumstances. The significant feature in his discussion of the sub- ject is that he assumes credit to_b l_ and in- wiBIC nGUERE TITHE Wile of society. He therefore dis- misses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testament and the Fathers as irrelevant, because designed for conditions which no longer exist, argues that the payment of interes for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent for land, and throws on the conscience of the individual the Sbligationt of seeing that it does not exceed the amount dictated by 108 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the rule “non fanerabis,” but “léquité et la droiture,’ and appeals from Christian tradition to commercial common sense, which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian. On such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians. But capital and credit are indispensable; the financier is not a pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at interest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans are made freely to the poor, is not per se more extortionate than any other of the economic transactions without which human affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its off-shoots took their stand on the side of the activities which were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring con- centration on the task of using for the glory of God the opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could and must be lived. It was on this practical basis of urban industry and com- mercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic from the theological premises. ‘God not only foresaw,” Calvin wrote, “the fall of the first man, . .. but also ar- ranged all by the determination of his own will.” ** Certain individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit” ; the remainder have been consigned to eter- nal damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, but incom- prehensible, judgment.” ** Deliverance, in short, is the work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing to it, CALVIN | 109 but of an objective Power. Human effort, social institu- tions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salva- tion, and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the true aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon broken reeds. That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the sanctification of the world by strife and labor. For Calvin- ism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but they are indispensable as a proof. that salvation has been attained. The central paradox of religious ethics—that only those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they are the humble instruments—finds in it a special exempli- fication. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live for that end. His task is at once to discipline his individual life, and to create a sanctified society. The Church, the State, the community in which he lives, must not merely be a means of personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs, It must be a “Kingdom of Christ,” in which individual duties are performed by men conscious that they are “ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye,” and the whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing discipline. re F The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age from the realization of the contrast between the ex- ternal order of society and the moral standards recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely felt. The men who made the Reformation had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which, 110 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures of Nurnberg and Frankfurt drawn by _ AEneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Durer. And already a new dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its prom- ise was splendid, but it had been accompanied by a cynical materialism which seemed a denial of all that had been meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more ‘ horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian Church that it reached its height. Shocked by the gulf between theory and practice, men turned this way and that to find some solution of the tension which racked them. The German reformers followed one road and preached a return to primitive simplicity. But who could obliterate the achievements of two centuries, or blot out the new worlds which science had revealed? The Humanists took another, which should lead to the gradual regeneration of mankind by the victory of reason over superstition and bru- tality and avarice. But who could wait for so distant a consummation? Might there not be a third? Was it not possible that, purified and disciplined, the very qualities which economic success demanded—thrift, diligence, so- briety, frugality—were themselves, after all, the foundation, at least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not conceivable that the gulf which yawned between a luxurious world and the life of the spirit could be bridged, not by eschewing material interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by dedi- cating them to the service of God? It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical values which the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was that new type of Christian character that they labored to create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs, stamped on them a new sanctification, and used them as the warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline CALVIN III should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that — fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation; the members of the Reformed Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the vir- tues of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the savorless formality of individual good works reduced to a commercial system, as though man could keep a profit and loss account with his Creator: the true Christian must or- ganize his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion, even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion. Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie, conscious of the contrast between its own standards and _ those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard- bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate an open road for its own way of life by the use of every weapon, including political revolution and war, because the issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or self-interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new ideal of social conduct. Its practical message, it might per- haps be said, was la carriére ouverte—not aux talents, but au caracteére. ) Once the world had been settled to their liking, the mid- dle classes persuaded themselves that they were the con- vinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle 112 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS of order. While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied jthe same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of historical materialism. He set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the established order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a chosen people, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; it not merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Com- pared with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bank- rupt monarchies, the middle classes, in whom Calvinism took root most deeply, were a race of iron. It was not surpris- ing that they made several revolutions, and imprinted their onceptions of political and social expediency on the public ife of half a dozen different States in the Old World and in the New. The two main elements in this teaching were the insist- ence on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the call to fashion for the Christian character an objective embodiment in social institutions. Though logically con- nected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist \ discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from CALVIN 113 the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially f to be fulfilled.” °’ Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on differ- ences of political environment and of social class. It de- pended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile Government. In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the English upper classes in the seventeenth century, individua!- ism in social affairs was, on the whole, the prevalent phi- Tosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who drew inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending on England’s green and pleasant land, and the troopers of Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the theology of Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception of society, diluted by the practical necessities of a commercial age, and softened to suit the conventions of a territorial aristocracy, was poles apart from that of the master who founded a discipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud him- self dryly observed,°® was a thing of shreds and patches. As both the teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice of some Calvinist communities, suggest, the social ethics of the heroic age of Calvinism savored more of a collectivist dic- tatorship than of individualism. The expression of a revolt against the medieval ecclesiastical system, it stood itself, where circumstances favored it, for a discipline far more stringent and comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. If, as some historians have argued, the philosophy o laissez faire emerged as a result of the spread of Calvinism\ © among the middle classes, it did so, like tolerance, by a route which was indirect. It was accepted, less because it was 114 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS esteemed for its own sake, than as a compromise forced Ligon Calvinism at a comparatively late stage in its history, as a result of its modification by the pressure of commercial interests, or of a balance of power between conflicting au- thorities. ’ The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the burning question of Pauperism. The reform of tradi- tional methods of poor relief was in the air—Vives had written his celebrated book in 1526 °’—and, prompted both py Humanists and by men of religion, the secular authori- ties all over Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to cope with what was, at best, a menace to social order, and, at worst, a moral scandal. The question was naturally one which appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reforma- tion. The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like the statesman, as a problem of police, nor, like the more intelligent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, but as a question of character. Calvin quoted with approval the words of St. Paul, “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat,’ condemned indiscriminate alms-giving as vehe- mently as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise un- desirable.°* C&colampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of the poor.*® Bullinger lamented the army of beggars pro- duced by monastic charity, and secured part of the emolu- ments of a dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school and the assistance of the destitute.°° In the plan for the re- organization of poor relief at Zurich, which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to be relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to be made for the sick and aged in special institutions ; no inhabitant was to be entitled to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who CALVIN ; 115 failed to attend church, or who played cards or was other- wise disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive to work. “With labor,’ he wrote, “will no man now sup- port himself. . . . And yet labor is a thing so good and godlike . . . that makes the body hale and strong and cures the sicknesses produced by idleness. ... In the things of this life, the laborer is most like to God.” * In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives were not distinguished. ‘The idleness of the mendicant was both a sin against God and a social evil; the enterprise of the thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and a benefit to the community. The same combination of re- ligious zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks on gambling, swearing, excess in apparel and self-indul- gence in eating and drinking. The essence of the system was not preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible society, which should be at once a Church and a State. Having overthrown monasticism, its aim was to turn the secular world into a giganti¢ monastery, and at Geneva, for a short time, it almost succeeded. “In other places,’ wrote Knox of that devoted city, “I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sin- cerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.” ° Manners and morals were regulated, because it is through the minutie of conduct that the enemy of mankind finds his way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be re- vealed by pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793 those guilty of another kind of incivisme were betrayed by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant legislation, and, still more, administration. The word in which both were sum- marized was Discipline. Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves cf re- ligion,** and the common observation that he assigned to it. 116 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed pri- marily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censor- ship of morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from the canon law of the Church of Rome, as the rules of a pri- vate society may differ from the code of a State. Its es- tablishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the last half of the sixteenth century, was the result of nearly twenty years of struggle between the Council of the city and the Consistory, composed of ministers and laymen. It was only in 1555 that the latter finally vindicated its right to excommunicate, and only in the edition of the Institutes which appeared in 1559 that a scheme of church organiza- Lied and discipline was set out. But, while the answer to the question of the constitution of the authority by whom dis- cipline was to be exercised depended on political conditions, and thus differed in different places and periods, the neces- sity of enforcing a rule of life, which was the practical as- pect of discipline, was from the start of the very essence of Calvinism, Its importance was the theme of a characteristic letter addressed by Calvin to Somerset in October 1548, the moment of social convulsion for which Bucer wrote his book, De Regno Christi. The Protector is reminded that it is not from lack of preaching, but from failure to enforce compliance with it, that the troubles of England have sprung. Though crimes of violence are punished, the licentious are spared, and the licentious have no part in the Kingdom of God. He is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et honneste discipline,” and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de l’Evangile s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.” ** “Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life’’—the words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers, and their projects of social reconstruction are a commen- tary on the sense in which “holiness of life’ was understood. CALVIN 117 It was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in form- ing at Zurich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of the clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian morals ; and drew up a list of sins to be punished by excom- munication, which included, in addition to murder and theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it dis- covers itself in usury and fraud.” © It was in that spirit that Calvin composed in the Institutes a Protestant Summa and manual of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule. It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a compre- hensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whois range of civic administration, from the regulations to be made for markets, crafts, buildings and fairs to the control of prices, interest and rents.°° It was in that spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a generation Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death. “Having considered,” ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576, which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, “that it is a thing worthy of commendation above all others, that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly maintained by good government and policy, and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully in-. structed, and the Hospital well ordered for the support of the poor: Which things can only be if there be established a certain rule and order of living, by which each man may be able to understand the duties of his position. . . .” °" The object of it all was so simple. ‘Each man to under- stand the duties of his position’ —what could be more de- \ 118 THE: CONTINENTAL REFORMERS sirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? It is sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its par- ents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years.°° Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Gov- ernments which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness. The characteristic which was distinctive of Geneva—‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles” **—was not its merciless intol- erance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was possible. It was the attempt to make the law of God prevail even in ee matters of pecuniary gain and loss which mankind, to judge by its history, is disposed to regard more seriously than wounds and deaths. “No member [of the Christian body], wrote Calvin in his Institutes, “holds his gifts to himself, or for his private use, but shares them among his fellow members, nor does he derive benefit save from those things which proceed from the common profit of the body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his brethren all that it is in his power to give.” *° It was natural that so remorseless an attempt to claim the totality of human in- terests for religion should not hesitate to engage even the economic appetites, before which the Churches of a later generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism wel- comed the world of business to its fold with an eagerness unknown before, it did so in the spirit of a conqueror < Jprsanizing a new province, not of a suppliant arranging a compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testa- ment. Samuel and Agag, King of the Amalekites, Jonah and Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of Baal, Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of the Lord, and Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, worked on the tense imagination of the Calvinist as CALVIN 119 did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793. The first half-century of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a pro- longed effort to organize an economic order worthy of the Kingdom of Christ, in which the ministers played the part of Old Testament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the fleshpots of Egypt. Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism made few innovations in the details of social policy, and the contents of the program were thoroughly medieval. The novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into its application. The organ of administration before which offenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed body of laymen and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, punishes usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands or fines the merchant who defrauds his clients, the cloth- maker whose stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who provides short measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat above the rates fixed by authority, the tailor who charges strangers excessive prices, the surgeon who demands an excessive fee for an operation.” In the Consistory the min- isters appear to have carried all before them, and they are constantly pressing for greater stringency. rom the elec- tion of Beza in place of Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes without a new demand for legislation from the clergy, a new censure on economic unrighteous- ness, a new protest against one form or another of the ancient sin of avarice. At one moment, it is excessive in- dulgence to debtors which rouses their indignation; at an- other, the advance of prices and rents caused by the influx of distressed brethren from the persecutions in France; at a third, the multiplication of taverns and the excessive charges demanded by the sellers of wine. Throughout there is a prolonged warfare against the twin evils of extortionate in- terest and extortionate prices. Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely 120 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS for the same reasons which made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars of religion, the city was a financial center of some 1m- portance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In order to secure command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the capital to do exchange business and make ad- vances, the rate of interest being fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To the establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been consulted, agreed ; against the profitable busi- ness of advancing money at high rates of interest to private persons they protested, especially when the loans were made to spendthrifts who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in 1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some company promoters of establishing a second bank in the city, the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the danger of covetousness as revealed by the moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however, the commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist who borrowed in order to invest and make a profit could take care of himself, and the ministers explained that they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur argent aux marchands pour emploier en marchandise.” The crucial issue was that of the money-lender who makes advances “‘simplement a un qui aura besoin,’ and who thereby exploits the necessities of his poorer neighbors.” Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as larrons, brigands, loups et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains: but what they are heaping up for themselves is the CALVIN I2I wrath of God. . . . One has cried in the market-place, ‘a curse on those who bring us dearth.’ . . . The Lord has heard that cry ... and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence! . . . A cut-purse shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet Amos... ‘Famine is come upon my people of Israel, O ye who devour the poor.’ The threats there uttered have been executed against his peo- ple.” “* They demand that for his second offense the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that, if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least be required to testify his repentance publicly in church, before being admitted to the sacrament. They remind their fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momentarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly, they propose to de- prive him of his victims by removing the causes which cre- ate them. Pour tarir les ruisseaux il faut escouper la source. Men borrow because of “idleness, foolish extrava- gance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be estab- lished at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among rich as well as among poor, how each household earns its livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litiga- tion, and to “‘bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the necessities of their poor neighbors.” ™* The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and they concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers the pious hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of your hon- orable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not ven 122 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS ture to question the right of the clergy to be heard on mat- ters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and platform in one; ministers had the public behind them, and, conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel submission by threatening to resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yield- ing down of official procrastination, and its first reply was normally gu’on y pense un peu. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he accused members of the Council of having intelligence with speculators who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the minis- ters were reproaching the Council with laxity in administra- tion, and they finally denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social reform. The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to ex- horting the public to attend sermons and to send their chil- dren to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covet- ousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers con- cerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do cred- itors, they would make no concession to the complaint that debtors were subjected to a ‘“‘double usury,” since they were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. CALVIN 123 They informed the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding up supplies.of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons against avarice, with appropriate topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich,” The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza’s remarks as a personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty, condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty crowns which he had lent at Io per cent. interest. Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The Council and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of the local hospi- tal. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied politely that they would be well advised to mind their own business. So monstrous a suggestion—as though there were any human activity which was not the business of the Church !— evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps his corn in time of scarcity’? To the charge of intemperate language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should be silent,’ said Beza, “what would the people say? That they are dumb dogs. . . . As to the question of causing 124 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been punished. ... It is notorious every- where that the city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is IO per cent. or more.” ‘© The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had mercifully com- muted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.” But at the godly proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, ‘most men are debtors.” If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed the ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the min- isters replied in the language of Nathan, we are not in- formed. , Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the col- lectivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the x omnicompetent Church.’* The religious community formed a closely organized society, which, while using the secular authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting down offences against public order and public morals, pro- viding for the education of youth and for the relief of the poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which for a short time made the system possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a mi- qe CALVIN 125 nority in a national State organized on principles quite dif- ferent from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion, civil war or the abandonment of the pretension | to control society was the inevitable consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, what- ever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations to a lapse into immorality. The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Re- formed Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in 1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted, certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were dis- cussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to lax the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the time.” *° Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves compliance with a standard of economic morality which the Church must enforce, the problems of interpre- tation which arise are innumerable, and the religious com- munity finds itself committed to developing something like a system of case law, by the application of its general prin- ciples to a succession of varying situations. The elaboration of such a system was undertaken; but it was limited in the sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the economic structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva, being concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on which specific guidance was demanded by the Churches. Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards fe -~ 126 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord’s Supper? May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows moderate interest : what is to be the attitude of the Church? What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are lotteries per- missible? Is it legitimate to invest at interest monies be- queathed for the benefit of the poor? The answers which the French Synods made to such questions show the per- sistence of the idea that the transactions of business are the province of the Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an impracticable rigor. All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others must make restitution before they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and tradesmen are to seek only “indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the same division of opinion is visible in the French Reformed Church as existed at the same time in England and Hol- land, and Calvin’s advice on the subject was requested. The stricter school would not hear of confining the prohibition of usury to “excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of raising money for the poor by interest on capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these heroic rigors had passed, and the common-sense view prevailed. The brethren were required to demand no more than the law allowed and than was consistent with charity. Within these limits interest was not to be condemned.*° Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the-views of the reformers as to economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the Church before CALVIN 127 the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline de- nounced covetousness with the same- vehemence as did the “accursed Popery’” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches are required to make provision for the poor. ‘Oppression of the poor by exactions,” it is declared, “[and] deceiving of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure . . . do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God’s word commandeth.” ** The interpreta- tion given to these offences is shown by the punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St. Andrews.* The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scot- land, seven years after it had in England been finally trans- ferred to the State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox. Of English-speaking communities, that in which the so- cial discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of ~ England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rul of Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies ~ of contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bish- ~ opless Eden, where men desired only to worship God “ac- cording to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of God’s word,” * not only were “tobacco and immod- est fashions and costly apparel,” and “that vain custom of drinking one to another,’ forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers adopted towards that “notorious evil... whereby most men walked in all their commerce—to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can,” ** an attitude which pos- sibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business- like descendants. At an early date in the history of Mas- 128 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS sachusetts a minister had called attention to the recru- descence of the old Adam—“profit being the chief aim and not the propagation of religion’”—and Governor Bradford, observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward es- tates,” remarked that the increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New England, at least of the Churches of God there.’ ** Sometimes Providence smote the ex- ploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American Trust—he owned the only milch cow on board and sold the milk at 2d. a quart—“being after at a sermon wherein oppression was complained of . . . fell distracted.” °° Those who escaped the judgment of Heaven had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which, in the infancy of the colony, were the same thing. Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate of interest, fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incor- rigible idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to apply the same wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business profits. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return to the seller.*7 Against those who charged more, their wrath was that of Moses descending to find the chosen people worshipping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to spare from their rage against religious freedom, they turned against economic license. Roger Williams touched a real affinity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he argued that, though extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of which should be left to the discretion of the civil authorities.** Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in CALVIN 129 which he took “in some .... above 6d. in the shilling profit; in some above &d.; and in some small things above two for one”; and this, though he was “an ancient pro- fessor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having come over for conscience’ sake and for the advancement of the gospel.”’ The scandal was terrible. Profiteers were unpopular—‘‘the cry of the coun- try was great against oppression’—and the grave elders re- flected that a reputation for greed would injure the infant community, lying as it did “under the curious observation of all Churches and civil States in the world.” In spite of all, the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine what profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law of God required no more than double res- titution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him only £200. Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all “did with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error af such false principles, and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were these :— 130 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS “1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can. “2, If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest. “2, That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc. “4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or neces- sity. ‘“‘s. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompence of one as of another.” The rules for trading were not less explicit :-— “1, A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which every man will take, etc. “2, When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another. “3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another ; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person. “4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is worth thus much.” It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not re- membered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appro- priate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, -however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent. The sermon was followed by an animated debate within CALVIN 131 the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetous- ness. The question was only whether he had erred through ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his conscience or the very light of nature’—whether, in short, his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with his fine and admonition.” If the only Christian documents which survived were the New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection be- tween them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin’s sys- tem was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts. The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by its champions as a compli- ment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Cal- vinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with en- thusiasm, For the Calvinist Church was an army march- ing back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry ap- peared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the 132 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was ac- cepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endi- cott shocked at last even the savage superstition of New Eng- land, that result was only to be expected. The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyran- nies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable Wee the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron.”° | CHAR EE RSI THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND “Tf any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the eyucch,: Laup, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621. eae .f & ire a i CHAPTER Tit THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doc- trines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their grad- ual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out. Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Dis- coveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of cu- riosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in earnest. 135 136 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life was in process of swift transformation. For- eign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went the growth of the financial organization on which commerce depends, and English capital poured into the growing London money-market, which had previously been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, oppor- tunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent on se- curing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate dis- cipline, their organized torpor restricting individual enter- prise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within which alone the pressure of economic con- formity could be made effective, or he accepted the gild or- ganization, captured its government, and by means of it developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was in effect the servant of an em- ployer. In agriculture, the customary organization of the village was being sapped from below and battered down from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had com- muted the labor services that were still the rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farm- ers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal restric- tions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, indus- try and agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 137 for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships. It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambi- tions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbu- lent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once content to win a position of dignity and power in fra- ternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to solitary preeminence, unaided by the artificial protection of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine, their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added the haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small, proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control. I. THE LAND QUESTION The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the material on which agitation fed had been accumulating for three gen- erations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the currency, there was not one—neither enclosures and pasture farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, nor the extortions of the engrosser—which had not evoked popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced 138 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND legislation and administrative action, long before the Ref- ormation Parliament met. The floods were already run- ning high, when the religious revolution swelled them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the so- cial situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovern- ment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing on questions not only of religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head in a sweeping indictment of the new economic forces and an eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social ob- ligations. The center of both was the land question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupid- ity of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground of social agitation. The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.7 Then had come the legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal Commission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.’ Throughout, a steady stream of criticism had flowed from men of the Renaissance, like More, Starkey and a host of less well-known writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince who would take counsel of philosophers. If, however, the problem was acute long before the con- fiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last THE LAND QUESTION 139 days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents whom they often employed to manage their property nat- urally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more fre- quent o- more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical land-owners.* In England a glance at the proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copy-holders into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted arable land to pasture.* In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to ex- plain the part which the rapid transference of great masses of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Es- tates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed hands.® To the abbey lands which came into the market after 1536 were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial necessities of the Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in its own possession and drawing the rents ; nor, in any case, would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a Government which required a party to carry through a revolution. What it did, therefore, was to alienate most of the land almost immediately, and to spend the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of land speculation. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers, at a ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business men, who brought to bear on its management the methods learned in the financial school of the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gres- Wemeey 140 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ham. Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scat- tered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen—cloth-workers, leather-sellers, mer- chant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversions of arable to pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transac- tion would not pay.° Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? “Do ye not know,” said the grantee of one of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their com- mons, “that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.” * Such arguments, if inconsequent, were too convenient not to be common. The protests of con- temporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and some of the new landlords—the Herberts, who enclosed a whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which, ac- cording to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his Ar- cadia, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Ab- bey, whose tenants found their rents raised from £29 to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging the Gov- ernment with petitions for redress.* The legend, still re- peated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations, though un- veracious, is not surprising. The wish was father to the thought. It was an age in which the popular hatred of the en- closer and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sen- THE LAND QUESTION 141 timent, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social con- servatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and license which had degraded the purity of re- ligion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine. The touching words ® in which the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social ef- fects of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet. Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of dis- appointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of re- ligion.*® In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encour- agement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, 142 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ? was the vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist. It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social pro- gram of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Chris- tian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its de- tails elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plow. It is to take a high line with the commer- cial classes. For, though trade in itself is honorable, most traders are rogues—indeed “next to the sham priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth” ; their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Gov- ernments to overlook both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices—‘‘a very necessary but an easy matter.”’ Only “pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth more than to their own interests,’ are to be allowed to engage in trade at all. In every village and town a school is to be established under a master eminent for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all things strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God. . . . Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbors.” The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social THE LAND QUESTION 143 disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by asermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more schools in pro- portion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day.” * “King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools” are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy. The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privi- leges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual—side by side with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much edu- cation, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the House of Commons, ** and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with favorable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Ref- ormation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nou- 144 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND veaux riches.** ‘The men whose religion was not money said what they thought of the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable congregations spluttering with fury. Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sym- pathy with the peasants who rose under Ket. * Becon told the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only difference between them and the monks was that they were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing the last penny from the tenants, more selfish in spending the whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.*® “In suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges and chantries,”’ preached Lever in St. Paul’s, “the intent of the King’s Maj- esty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other won- drous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods as was superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to bear his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth, or partly unto other men’s hands, for the better re- lief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and the setting forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers have so used this matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the common wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous am- bition. . . . You which have gotten these goods into your own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other goods more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the poor, and brought a common wealth into a common misery.” *7 This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies THE LAND QUESTION 145 as the “Commonwealth men” from their advocacy of social reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge of stirring up class-hatred, which is normally brought against all who call attention to its causes. The result of their activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the conversion of arable to pasture, the introduction of legis- lation requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The gentry were furious. Paget, the secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror, pro- vided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German Peasants’ War was to be reénacted in England; the Council, most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the personification of the predatory property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely for carrying out, as chairman of the Midland committee of the Depopulation Commission, the duties laid upon him by the Government. “Sir,” wrote a plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, “be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretense of simplicity and poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Common Wealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they are in such doubt, that almost they dare touch none of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they are afraid of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.’”’ *® The “Common Wealth called Latimer’? was unrepentant. Combining gifts of humor and invective which are not very common among bishops, his fury at oppression did 146 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next. So he was delighted when he pro- voked one of his audience into the exclamation, “Mary, a seditious fellow!” used the episode as comic relief in his next sermon,”® and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his denunciations of step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself? You thoughte that I woulde not requyre The bloode of all suche at your hande, But be you sure, eternall fyre Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande. Both for the housynge and the lande That you have taken from the pore Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.?° On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the authors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and, thanks to Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, modern research has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the re- organization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give THE LAND QUESTION 147 account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities. The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the expansion of the woollen industry and the devalua- tion of money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced la- . bor, if it had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of landowning had been revolutionized, and for two genera- tions the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to fine or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turn- ing copyholds into leases. The official opposition to de- population, which had begun in 1489 and was to last al- most till 1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interfer- ence with the rights of property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation, and in their fierce resist- ance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eight- eenth century to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties save that of sub- mission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a 148 THE CHURCH Of ENGLAND flattering, but innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the ob- ligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues un- challenged and indefeasible. A religious theory. of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the un- fettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imper- fect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for “the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”’ Toa temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian régime, with its sacrifice of the village—a fellow- ship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, “a little commonwealth’—to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. It was the work of ‘men that live as thoughe there were no God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied.” 7* Its essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repu- diating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Ref- ormation called down fire from heaven. Their doctrine was derived from the conception of prop- erty, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was lim- THE LAND QUESTION 149 ited at cvery turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more business-like and impersonal forms of land-ownership, and which, once an engine of ex- ploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d’étre is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labor on the land, or labor in government, which are in- volved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has “every man’s living and does no man’s duty.” ” The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he re- pudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the vil- lage needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though dif- ferent, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to re: 150 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND buke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain. “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings . . . but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.” * Thus, while the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their liking, did a pious monarch con- sider their eternal welfare in the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553. II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insur- gent economic interests with a generalized appeal to tra- ditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social theory, to which the most representative minds of the Eng- lish Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commer- cial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 151 center of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries de- scribed by the word usury. “Treasure doth then advance greatness,’ wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age,” when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few.” ** In spite of the growing concentration of prop- erty, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosper- ity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed beggars” of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-d-vis their employers. The special eco- nomic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its spe- cial qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile in- dustry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which evoked programs of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning prole- tariat by its employers, but from the relation of the pro- ducer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The crafts- man must buy raw materials on credit and get advances 152 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to “give day.’’ Almost every one, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the money- lender. And the lender is often a monopolist—‘‘a money master,” a malster or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and arti- sans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.” In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the mor- alist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most con- spicuous species, of extortion. In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 153 any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the excessive profits of a middleman—all these had been denounced as usury in the very practical thirteenth- century manual of St. Raymond; ’*° all these were among the “unlawful chaffer,” the ‘“‘sublety and sleight,’ which was what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to ser- mons in parish churches meant by usury three centuries later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he would probably have answered with a quotation from Scrip- ture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the bill introduced in 1571: “It standeth doubtful what usury is; we have no true definition of it.” *’ The truth is, indeed, that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more advantage than the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded as usurious. The description which best sums up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is con- tained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his pa- rishiohers to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling—the cry of all poor men since the world began— Dr. Bennet “is a great taker of advantages.” ”* It was the fact that the theory of usury which the di- vines of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave 154 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the cen- ter. The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned by the conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme of medieval thought, which had attempted to treat economic affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all interests and activities, of which the apex was religion. If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiasti- cal organization and the traditional scheme of social thought. The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse, morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from 1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession of changes in the appearance of the building and the form of the services. But there was little to make him conscious of any alteration in the social system of which the church was the center, or in the duties which that system imposed upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish continued to be a community in which religious and social! obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority, that he bore his share of public burdens and performed such public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he saw most in the routine of his daily life were the church- wardens. The place where most public business was trans- acted, and where news of the doings of the great world came to him, was the parish church. The contributions levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such education as was available for his children was often given by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training in cooperation with his fellows as he received sprang from common undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made large profits by church ales, and oc- casionally engaged in trade.*® Membership of the Church RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 155 and of the State being co-extensive and equally compul- sory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political and economic aspects of life were dis- entangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel through which official information was conveyed to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 col- lectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with the parson. Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the re- ligious thought of the age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization. Both in their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the par- ticular social obligations which religion involved, the most representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social order were to be sought, not in practical ex- pediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guar- dian and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after the Restoration. The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. The exactions of middlemen—‘“merchants of mischief . . . [who] do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet wonderful vile and of small price to many that must needs vi 156 - “CHE CHURCH OF ENGLAND set or sell that which is their own honestly come by’— were pilloried by Lever.*° Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on The Lawful Use of Riches became something like a standard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price, and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded freedom of contract as an excuse for covetousness: “Cloake the same by what title you liste, your synne is excedyng greate. . . . He which hurteth but one man is in a damn- able case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest whole householdes to their graves, or at the leaste art a meanes of their extreame miserie? ‘Thou maiest finde shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte not escape the judgemente of God.” ** Men eminent among Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salisbury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp Arratgn- ment to be dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bish- ops and ten doctors of divinity—not to mention numberless humbler clergy—who had written in the course of the last hundred years on different aspects of the sin of extortion in all its manifold varieties.°* The subject was still a fa- vorite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher was untrammeled by the convention which in a more fastidious age was to preclude as an impropriety the discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market- place. “As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote Heming, “so it is the parte of the preachers to reprove usurie. . . . First, they should earnestly inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked contractes. ... Let them... amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline . . . Then, if they cannot reforme all abuses which they shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende . RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 157 the cause unto God ..-. Last of all, let them with dili- gence admonishe the ritche men, that-they suffer not them- selves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches.’’ *° “This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ecclesiastical condemnation of usury, “hath been the gen- erall judgment of the Church for above this fifteene hun- dred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church of Christ, that could never finde a lawfull usurie before this golden age wherein we live.” ** The first fact which strikes the modern student of this body of teaching is its continuity with the past. In its insistence that buying and selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled by a moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did not differ from religious opinion before it. The reformers themselves were conscious, neither of the emancipation from the economic follies of the age of medieval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth century, nor of the repudiation of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The relation in which they conceived them- selves to stand to the social theory of the medieval Church is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed. ‘“There- fore I would not,” wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and for a short time Secretary of State, “have men altogether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to con- dempne every thinge there written, because the Popes were aucthours of them, as though no good lawe coulde bee made by them. ... Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are some suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, saye others what they list.” °° From the lips of a Tudor official, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain pi- quancy. But, in their appeal to the traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson’s words represented the starting point 158 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND from which the discussions of social questions still com- monly set out. The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, church councils, and commentators on the canon law—all these, and not only the first, continued to be quoted as de- cisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the theology and government of the medieval Church were an abomination. What use Wilson made of them, a glance at his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reforma- tion authorities running into several pages.*° The author of a practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with regard to money-lending—a memorandum which ap- pears to have had some effect upon policy—thought it neces- sary to drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of financiers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and Hostiensis.°7 Even a moralist who denied all virtue what- ever to “the decrees of the Pope’ did so only the more strongly to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable deal- ing contained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.” ** Ob- jective economic science was developing in the hands of the experts who wrote on agriculture, trade, and, above all, on currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intru- sion of Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intel- lectual nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric as the voice of a musty superstition. For one who exam- ined present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The as- sumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 159 as to social ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after the Reformation as it had been before it. Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which no one commits or with sins that every one commits, and the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not however, stand alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Ref- ormation in the political and social position of the Church it is not necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy three-quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous trans- ference of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward pre- sented by lay patrons, were not likely to display any ex- cessive independence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished; the assumption of most churchmen through- out the sixteenth century was that it was to be administered ; and the canon law included the whole body of legislation as to equity in contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages. True, it was administered no longer by the clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under the authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibi- tion of the study of canon law—after the estimable Dr. Lay- ton had “set Dunce in Bocardo” at Oxford—it languished at the universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 to 1552, and again, and on this occasion for good, after 1571, parliamentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided that it did not exceed a statutory maxi- mum. But the convulsion which changed the source of canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope. Its validity was not the less: because it was now enforced in the name, not of the Pope, but of the King. As Maitland has pointed out,*® there was a moment to- wards the middle of the century when the civil law was pressing the common law hard. The civil law, as Sir 160 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical courts.*° Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate treatise on the sub- ject was compiled.** By an argument made familiar by a modern controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not only of the State, but of the Church. “The permission of the Prince,” it was urged, “is no absolution from the author- ity of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull.. . yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case the Canons are to be preferred. . . . By the laws no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their SOULS: (asc It was this theory which was held by almost all the ec- clesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a | pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of England... usury is simply and generally prohibited.” ** When the lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of their privileges, they urged, among other matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon lawes as in tymes past has been used.” ** In the abortive scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdic- tion drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, ex- plaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived from objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth.*® Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 161 the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly empha- sized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which the transaction may be concealed.*® Bishops’ articles of visitation down to the Civil War re- quired the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.*’ The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impeni- tent promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.** The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly un- popular, part in the machinery of local government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for being an un- charitable person and for not giving to the poor and im- potent,” *° they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was ex- pressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanors as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of oppo- sition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. “Thomas Wilkoxe,’”’ complained his 162 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and disquieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed by his own father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy Commun- ion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in the year.’ °° Whether the archdeacon cor- rected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical dis- cipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.** Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some York- shire parishes.*” Even in 1619 two instances occur in which money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commis- sary of the Bishop of London, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of.” One is excommunicated and afterwards ab- solved; both are admonished to amend their ways.” There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occa- sional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ec- clesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government. RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 163 The opinion of the practical man on questions of eco- nomic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A century be- fore, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two gen- erations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armor of theologians made A little glooming light, most like a shade. In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which pre- ceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitu- dinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the con- fusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England. As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bour- geoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the de- fence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was 164 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his vic- tims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a property-less proletariat, and “the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful heartsa Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resent- ment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners.”’ The commonest charity of the age, which was the establish- ment of a fund to make advances without interest to trades- men, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to en- able the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” without which he could not set up in business.*° The issues which confronted the Government were nat- urally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambigu- ous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 165 to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines.. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehen- sion of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy. In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which en- forced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church be- came the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the concep- tion of a single society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the _ King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiasti- cal authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Eccle- siastics, in their turn, were public officers—under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace—and re- lied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious con- formity, but Christian morality, because both were elements 166 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,’ wrote Hooker, “that so- ciety with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.” °° In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes weil, continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturb- ance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial organization. Except when they were di- verted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic de- velopment, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for rea- sons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relation- ships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them. RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 167 Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! ... Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong (Between whose endless jar justice resides) Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then every thing includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, And, last, eat up himself. In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for long to express the official attitude. The practical application of such conceptions was an elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern analogy, “‘controls.”’ Wages, the movement of labor, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business, rates of interest—all are controlled, partly by Statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncer- tainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to hin- der him from asserting his rights at common law, will in- tervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and in- timidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound “rather to consider what is agreeable . . . to the use of this State and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit maie take amonge his tenaunts.” °’ Have prices been raised by a bad harvest? The Council will issue a solemn denun- 168 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ciation of the covetousness of speculators, “in conditions more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural men,” ”® who take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessi- ties; will instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and will order justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus stocks at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental mar- ket threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council will put pressure on clothiers to find work for the opera- tives, “this being the rule by which the wool-grower, the clothier and merchant must Le governed, that whosoever had a part of the gaine in profitable times . . . must now, in the decay of trade ... beare a part of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of the publicke and the maintenance of the generall trade.” °’ Has the value of sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business by prohibiting pri- vate transactions altogether.®® Are local authorities negli- gent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists on regular reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the impotent, and the steps taken to provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied, inun- dates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difficulties? The Council, which keeps sufficiently in touch with business conditions to know when the difficul- ties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a moderating influence by making an example of persons guilty of flagrant extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a compromise. A mortgagee accused of “hard and unchristianly dealing’ is ordered to restore the land which he has seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has been similarly “hard and unconscionable” is com- mitted to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 169 to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken “very un- just and immoderate advantage by way of usury.’ The bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show “a more Christian and charitable consideration of these his neighbors.”’ A nobleman has released two offend- ers imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province of York for having “taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual de- pression, the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like an informal morato- rium.°** The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the first two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising com- monplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glitter- ing facade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public wel- fare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its osten- sible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional inter- ests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental conception, however—the philosophy of the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above im- mediate exigencies to consider the significance of the sys- tem in its totality—had a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class per- formed its allotted function, and was secured such a liveli- hood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was propor- tioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,’’ wrote one who had labored much, amid grave personal dangers, for the 170 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND welfare of his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge we have, but to doe services therfore amonge our neigh- bours abroade.”’ * The divines who fulminated against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middleman, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw in the measures by which the Government endeavored to suppress the greed of individuals or the collision of classes: a much needed cement of social solidarity, and appealed to Cesar to redouble his penalties upon an economic license which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threat- ened to destroy it, and reenforced the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would not have been out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the cor- porate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the State is something more than an institution created by ma- terial necessities or political convenience. It is the tem- poral expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link be- tween the individual soul and that supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God. Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic, the most reasonable and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet not without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own ease, 1s revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a kind to commend him to those of its successor, and history RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 171 has been hardly more merciful to him than were his political opponents. But an intense conviction. of the fundamental solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great community, a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities and sectional interests—these qualities are not among the weaknesses against which the human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its guard, and these qualities Laud possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess. His wor- ship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a superstition. Church and State are one Jerusalem: “Both Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies, made up of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Common- wealth; nay, so near, that the same men, which in a tem- poral respect make the Commonwealth, do in a spiritual make the Church.” °° Private and public interests are in- extricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The foundation of unity is justice: “God will not bless the State, if kings and magistrates do not execute judg- ment, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out against the ‘thrones of justice.’ ” To a temper so permeated with the conception that so- ciety is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is to maintain their cooperation, every social movement or personal motive which sets group against group, or individual against individual, appears, not the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The first demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments must “entertain no private business,” and “parties are ever private ends.” *° The second is the self-interest which leads the individual to struggle for siches and advancement. “There is no private end, but in something or other it will be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come in, though it be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’ it is no matter with them 172 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.” °° For Laud, the political virtues, by which he understands subordination, obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community, are as much part of the Chris- tian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of those who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attain- ment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and to practice injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a member of a society and is dedicated by re- ligion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the obli- gation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism. “If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For who- ever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in the body of the Church.” ®* To one holding such a creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the sta- bility of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud’s utterances and activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a strong bias in favor of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal government. It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of pro- tecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active in harrying the depopulating land- lord. The Council gave sympathetic consideration to peti- tions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the ground that they resulted in depopulation and were RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 173 particularly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were- appointed and special instructions against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In parts of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid down to grass was plowed up in obedience to the Government’s orders. In the four years from 1635 to 1638 a list of some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about £50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.°* With this policy Laud was whole-heartedly in sym- pathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in which he expresses his detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon’s gentle complaint that the arch- bishop meade himself unpopular by his inclination “‘a little too much to countenance the Commission for Depopula- tion.” *° Laud was himself an active member of the Com- mission, and dismissed with impatient contempt the squire- archy’s appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin he was reminded by his enemies of the needlessly sharp censures with which he barbed the fine imposed upon an en- closing landlord.” The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Gov- -ernment, unhampered by what Laud had called “that noise” of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor by even-handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an un- conscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Un- win.” In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Eliza- bethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see that markets were served and prices controlled, ap- 174 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND pointed a special committee of the Privy Council as Com- missioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the North, Wentworth pro- tected the commoners whose vested interests were threat- ened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavored to insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating the woollen industry.” Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious in- terest of the Government, which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference to the opin- ion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the. divine mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people “‘to lay down the private for the public sake.” It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark that the defendant has been “guilty of a most foule offence, which the Prophet hath [called] in a very energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore,”’ and that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by “cruell men’’;“* or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Re- lief of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631." “A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of Lord Saye and Sele, “may preach the Gospel more publicly and to far greater edification in a court of judicature, or at a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw RELIGION AND SOCIAL POLICY 175 things to an issue, than many preachers in their several charges can.” * The Church, which had abandoned the pre- tension itself to control society, found some compensation in the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without influence in impressing the principles which were applied by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty —to use a question-begging phrase—in economic affairs follows somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it. The conception of religion as a thing private and individual does not emerge until after a century in which religious freedom normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to worship God as he pleases. The assertion of economic lib- erty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a religious interpretation of social institutions was often sin- cerely held, the supernatural sanction had been increasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and public ex- pediency. “Jerusalem ... stands not for the City and the State only ... nor for the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both.” ** In identifying the mainte- nance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an incompetent Government, the Church had built its house upon the sand. It did not require prophetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be followed by the destruction of the Temple. 7 Ill, THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The ex- pression of a theory of society which had made religion 176 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was be- coming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent practice, and what still purported to be the teaching of the Church, is almost the commonest theme of the economic literature of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, indeed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say, men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But then, except in the great commercial centers and in the high finance of the Papacy and of secular Govern- ments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an oppor- tunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth cen- tury was that devices that had formerly been occasional were now woven into the very texture of the industrial and commercial civilization which was developing in the later years of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expan- sion was to give English society its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty years later, Harrington, in a famous pas- sage, described how the ruin of the feudal nobility by the Tudors, by democratizing the ownership of land, had pre- pared the way for the bourgeois republic.” His hint of the economic changes which preceded the Civil War might be given a wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of capitalism in textiles and mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock en- terprise in connection with it, the beginnings of something like deposit banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s own financial necessities, of a money-market with an al- most modern technique—speculation, futures and arbitrage THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 177 transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the century, and whose re- ligious and political aspirations were, two generations later, to overthrow the monarchy. An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of oppor- tunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among neighbors, which regarded keen bargaining as “sharp prac- tice.” In the half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international mar- ket, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians. Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more read- ily than most economic questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long debate provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges, that the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered out. “We see,’ wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or en- forceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that followeth him.” 7° The spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly de- scribed. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denun- ciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be 178 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that “the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.’ To a great clothier, or to a capital- ist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who man- aged the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbor, but as a profitable investment on the part of not too scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and expected others to do the same, they had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England. It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation of any theory of economic indi- vidualism, they should throw their weight against the tra- ditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and “good conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large- scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic practice. The opposi- tion to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, ex- pressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the pur- pose of giving it a rest.” From at any rate the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the Government was regarded with skepticism by the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since it THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 179 weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise opposite of those intended.*° As markets widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistak- able signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that finan- ciers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal proceedings.** Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: ‘What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne pos- session for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he can?’ * With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract. Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the political theory which, when finally sys- tematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which in- terferes with property and business destroys its own title to exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House of Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few.” *° The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the rejec- tion by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon eco- nomic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a signifi- 180 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND cant revolution had taken place. “Nature” had come to: connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play. The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was seen in.a reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all interest as “‘a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.** The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, pro- vided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent., though it still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the de- grees have been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament.. Objective economic science was beginning its disillusioning career, in the form of discussions on the rise in prices, the mechanism-of the money-market, and the balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to analyze forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation. Since Calvin’s indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice. Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 181 the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the di- vines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century, though they did not dream of abandoning the denuncia- tion of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which three English translations were made in the ten years fol- lowing his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, in- dicated a via media. As uncompromising as any medieval writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the old fervor oppressive contracts which grind the poor. But he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of his predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, before interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to consider both the terms of the loan and the position of bor- rower and lender. The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conserva- tive divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 1571 declaring that “all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of God is synne and detestable,” to argue that the Statute had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of prac- tical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obe- dience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure until he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on capital.** But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is “set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year,” the money being used for their assistance. But the arrange- ment has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is ‘‘very like to have perished through cas- ualty and ill-keeping.’’ ** Will not the poor be surer of 182 ‘ THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? Sa it is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to in- vest money in business in order to provide an income for those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits, what is the particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool crop or to speculate on the ex- changes? To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their op- ponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the prin- cipal.” The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assump- tion implied in their very disagreement had been that eco- nomic relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic trans- actions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever concessions the State might see fit to make to hu- man frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 183 be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social obligations—such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on re- ligion which was being discredited. While rival authori- ties were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another. Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over “good con- science” in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the can- onists, were written to answer them. Many of them are ~ learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environ- ment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century. The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between pub- lic and private morality. The problem which it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral stand- ard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as 184 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for busi- ness and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. ‘To argue that there is no difference at all is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable appli- cation, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of Realpolitik. With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my neighbor as my- self, the questions which, under modern conditions of large- scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions the con- ventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations by treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsi- bility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage- earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it te THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 185 point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at star- vation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console it- self for the practical difficulty of applying its moral prin- ciples by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be in- creasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines ad- vanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared ay way for their theoretical abandonment. | They were abandoned because, on the whole, they de- served to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shriveled mass of desiccated formule, it will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelli- gence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their orig- inal authors been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally 186 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND it was shouldered aside. It was neglected because it had become negligible. The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in coun- tries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan move- ment, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were all three, and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic mat- ters. It was not merely that there was the familiar ob- jection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of business—that “‘it is not in simple divines to show what con- tract is lawful and what is not.” *’ More important, there was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were endeavoring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.*° “As things are,’ wrote two years later the author of a trea- tise on the civil and ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two king- domes.” *° The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commis- sion suffered in the same way. In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharg- ing offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 187 released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.°° Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The ac- quiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result that, with the disparage- ment of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which such discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House of Com- mons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abol- ished, and that “they should be no more remembered than they are followed.” ** Feeling against the system rose stead- ily during the next two generations; excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disre- garded; ** and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud’s régime, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation 188 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away altogether. “Not many good days,’ wrote Penn, “since ministers meddled so much in laymen’s business.” °* That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cava- lier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of religion which regarded it as involving the control of eco- nomic self-interest by what Laud had called “the body of the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Tay- lor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works of mercy to his neighbors.** But the conception that the Church possessed, of its own au- thority, an independent standard of social values, which it could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the eco- nomic world, grew steadily weaker. The result, neither im- mediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and paralyz- ing of theories. It may be called Indifferentism. The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost super- fluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 189 may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned. An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth cen- tury was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great age of English natural sci- ence—the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal So- ciety—drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the po- litical theory associated with the name of Locke, but popu- larized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their re- lation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of na- ture. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernat- ural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise. The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tan- gible, material ‘“stock’’ of society. Those who do not sub- scribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders as “‘the poor’—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,’ who work for themselves. Hence the unending 190 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND discussions as to whether “the laboring poor’ are to be classed among the “productive” or “unproductive” classes —whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. “It would be easier, where prop- erty was well secured, to live without money than without poor, . . . who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving’’; the poor “have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure’; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.” ** Such sentences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing. In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position, which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 19] The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prev- alent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a tather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regu- lating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of eco- nomic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose. Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic har- mony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early com- mercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial 1m- morality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not over-sensi- tive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and — theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spec- tacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,°* first pub- lished in 1658, and widely read during the following cen- tury, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth- 192 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND century writer in the words, “trade is one thing and re- ligion is another,” they imply a not very different conclu- sion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions be- tween them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. “National commerce, good morals and good government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warbur- ton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, “ are but part of one general scheme, in the designs of Providence.” . Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound mor- ality coincided with commercial wisdom. ‘The existing or- der, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Gov- ernments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope: Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bade self-love and social be the same. Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical exam- ination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. It was, therefore, in the sphere of providing suc- cor for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in inspiring the main army, that the social work of the Church THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 193 was conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eighteenth century were the relief of the poor, the care of the sick, and the establishment of schools. In spite of the genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual weliare of the poorer classes, which inspired the Evangelical revival, religion abandoned the fundamental brain-work of criticism and construction to the rationalist and the hu- manitarian. Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church should not have been more effective in giving inspiration and guidance during the immense economic reorganization to which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name of the “Industrial Revolution.” It did not give it, because it did not possess it. There were, no doubt, special condi- tions to account for its silence—mere ignorance and ineffi- ciency, the supposed teachings of political economy, and, after 1790, the terror of all humanitarian movements in- spired by France. But the explanation of its attitude is to be sought, less in the peculiar circumstances of the moment, than in the prevalence of a temper which accepted the es- tablished order of class relations as needing no vindication before any higher tribunal, and which made religion, not its critic or its accuser, but its anodyne, its apologist, and its drudge. It was not that there was any relapse into ab- normal inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an independent standard of values, to which social institutions were amenable, had been aban- doned. The surrender had been made long before the bat- tle began. The spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors of the early factory sys- tem was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century. CHAPTER IV ‘THE PURITAN MOVEMENT Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.” Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale’s translation). CHAPTER IV THE PURITAN MOVEME})1 By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between re- “ ligious theory and economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious theory - itself, a new system of ideas was being matured, which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to turn on the whole field of social obligations a new and penetrat- ing light. Ona world heaving with expanding energies, and on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving, pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and contrition, as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signifies Blackness ; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to God and haughty to man, the soldier-saints swept over bat- tlefield and scaffold their garments rolled in blood. Inthe great silence which fell when the Titans had turned to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a con- siderable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial view.” * A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the pas- sion of the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and com- monplace cupidities, was one in which, since ‘“Thorough” 107 198 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT was no more, since property was secure, and contracts in- violable, and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of business men were likely to yield a profitable return. So the epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success, mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, _ but for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint. I. PURITANISM AND SOCIETY The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Con- gregationalism, and a doctrine \of the nature of God and man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three off-shoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped, with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into a State Church, was to produce a credal statement carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the right of every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom of all Churches from the interference of the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperish- able legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was Puritanism, Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in those which afterwards separated from it, it determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but political aspirations, business relations, family life and the minutie of personal behavior. The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan » spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seven- — teenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 199 unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but |C the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only be- cause sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled. We do it wrong, being so majestical To offer it the show of violence. In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding mel- ancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,”’ amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths of light and darkness which posterity can observe with rev- erence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line can- not plumb. There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spir- itual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-place and counting-house and camp than in the stu- dent’s chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sac- ramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacra- ment. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to ex-: orcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above}C or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expand- 200 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT ing spirit, he remakes, not only his own character and hab- its and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order. Conscious that he 1s but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and damnation. ‘‘It made the world seem to me,” said a Puri- tan of his conversion, “as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. . . . It set me upon that method of my studies which since then I have found the benefit of. . . . It caused me first to seek God’s Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End.” ? Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puri- tan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The con- templation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen de- scribed as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. ‘The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.”*® For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and ‘Whe e, PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 201 warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intel- lect ; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion’ * that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, ~ systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He Yo -makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor. Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing God than all the world,” ® he is a natural re- “ publican, for there is none on earth that he can own as mas- ter. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and death—may be too little for the salvation of a single soul. ‘Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction” “—those dreadful words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they nerve his will. For it is will—will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and or- ganization of will every instrument in that tremendous ar- senal of religious fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters | every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shat- ters itself. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every so- ay, » 202 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT cial grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie one another.”* But, if religious zeal and moral enthu- siasm are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux. ‘To contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit seemed to be those classes in society which combined eco- nomic independence, education and a certain decent pride in “their status, revealed at once in a determination to live their » ‘own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through weakness of character or through economic helplessness, were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such, where the feudal spirit had been weakened by con- tact with town life and new intellectual currents, were some of the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, “mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,” * espe- cially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such, above all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those rural districts which had been partially industrialized by the de- centralization of the textile and iron industries. “The King’s cause and party,’ wrote one who described the situation in Bristol in 1645, “were favored by two ex- tremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by the middle rank, the true and best citizens.” ® That it was everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher’s statistical es- timate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 203 ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the country.*° The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of pro- founder spiritual import than sociological generalization. “Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,’ wrote Baxter, “and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and counties which depend on cloathing and such manufactures.’ He explained the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was ‘‘the merchants and middle sort of men that were Protestants.” ** The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence “‘the rebellious city,’ returning four Dissenters to the Royalist Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to ac- company Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nurs- ing the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and shel- tering the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its uni- versall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities 204 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT and corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties.” ** In Lancashire, the clothing towns—‘the Genevas of Lan- cashire’’—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea Of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham.and Leicester ; in the west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile industry, were all centers of Puritanism, The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon com- mented bitterly on the “factious humor which possessed most corporations, and the pride of their wealth’; ** and, after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop of Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against show- ing them any favor, on the ground that “trading combina- tions’ were “so many nests of faction and sedition,’ and that “‘our late miserable distractions’ were ‘“‘chiefly hatched in the shops of tradesmen.” ** Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they re- turned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a provi- dential instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.” When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fash- ion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of Holland—the eco- nomic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to in- quire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the re- lations between economic progress and other aspects of the national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced from it different conclusions. The question which wn ~ PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 205 gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual sig- nificance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puri- tan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most prominent victims, were also those who led commer- cial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple. esis between the social mechanism and the life of the spirit, which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for © the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy of the individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satis- ~ faction at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has commented on the manner in which “‘the appeal of the Evan- gelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal of Benthamite Liberals to individual energy.” *°* The same — affinity between religious and social interests found an even | clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the seven- teenth century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an in- dividualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric as compared with personal character. > mee THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 255 A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of en- closing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time to time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of that period, from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of re- ligious teachers had been one of condemnation. Sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet—not to mention Statutes and Royal Commissions—had been launched against depopulation. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy, but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their different degrees, are members of one Christian common- wealth, within which the law of charity must bridle the cor- roding appetite for economic gain. In such a mystical cor- poration, knit together by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage to the full, for no man may seek to live “outside the body of the Church.” Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentlemen, who had been the obstructive agents of local administration, the practical application of such doctrines had always been intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament struck the weapon of administrative law from the hands of the Crown, it had ceased altogether. But the politics of Westminster were not those of village and borough. The events which seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to close the revolu- tion seemed to the left wing of the victorious army only to begin it. In that earliest and most turbulent of English democracies, where buff-coat taught scripture politics to his general, the talk was not merely of political, but of social, re- construction. The program of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand, not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the 256 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT veto of the House of Lords, but also that “you would have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.” *° Theoretical communism, repudiated by the leading Level- lers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, on whose behalf Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common people of England, by joynt consent of person and purse, have caste out Charles, our Norman oppressour . . . the land now is to returne into the joynt hands of those who have conquered, that is the commonours,” and that the vic- tory over the King was incomplete, as long as “wee... remayne slaves still to the kingly power in the hands of lords of manors.” *°° Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering of traditional authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull oppression, started to life, and in several Midland coun- ties the peasants rose to pull down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in 1649 there were rumors of a popular movement to throw down the enclosures of the neighboring forest, the City Council took the matter up. A petition was drafted, setting out the economic and social evils attending enclosure, and proposing the establishment of machinery to check it, consisting of a committee without whose assent en- closing was not to be permitted. A local minister was in- structed to submit the petition to Parliament, “which hath still a watchful eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of the nation.’”’*°” The agent selected to present the city’s case was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamph- leteer, who for several years attacked the depopulating land- lord with all the fervor of Latimer, though with even less than Latimer’s success. Half a century before, such commotions would have been followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 257 of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of pub- lic policy towards the movement had begun to change. Con- fiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on a smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reforma- tion. As land changed hands, customary relations were shaken and new interests were created. Enclostire, as Moore complained,*® was being pushed forward by means of law suits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that City merchants and members of the Committee for Compounding, some of whom had found land speculation a profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State in- terference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than a century. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reform- ers should have found the open ear of Parliament impene- trably closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the political and economic environment which had changed. The revolution in thought was equally profound. The the- oretical basis of the policy of protecting the peasant by pre- venting enclosure had been a conception of landownership which regarded its rights and its duties as inextricably inter- woven. Property was not merely a source of income, but a public function, and its use was limited by social obligations and necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes who had taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy could make no truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared when the Restoration Parliament swept away military ten- ures, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an excise, the financial burden previously borne by themselves. The theory which took its place, and which was to be- come in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that 258 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT expressed by Locke, when he described property as a right anterior to the existence of the State, and argued that “the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent.” But Locke merely poured into a philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered out in the stress of political struggles, and which were already the commonplace of landowner and merchant. The view of society held by that part of the Puritan move- ment which was socially and politically influential had been expressed by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in the army. It was that only the freeholders really constituted the body politic, and that they could use their property as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to any superior, or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere tenants at will, with no fixed interest or share in the land of the kingdom.** Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on agrarian policy. For- merly a course commending itself to all public-spirited per- sons, the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the program of a sect of religious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656 introduced a meas- ure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons, framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities of Leicester, there was an instant outcry from members that it would “destroy property,” and the bill was refused a sec- ond reading.** After the Restoration the tide began to run more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had already become the hobby of the country gentleman. Experts advo- cated it on economic grounds, and legislation to facilitate it was introduced into Parliament. Though its technique still remained to be elaborated, the attitude which was to be de- cisive in the eighteenth century had already been crystal- lized. The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 259 omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, of the administrative interference with the rights of prop- erty which had infuriated them in the Government of Charles I. It was that opinion as to social policy had changed, and changed not least among men of religion them- selves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the law of nature, is already coming to be identified by the pious with the operation of the providential plan, which is the law of God. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is suited to pro- duce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him free to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim that every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage. . . . The advance- ment of private persons will be the advantage of the pub- Liisa It is significant that such considerations were adduced, not by an economist, but by a minister. For the argument was ethical as well as economic, and, when Moore appealed to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary in- terests, he provoked the retort that a judicious attention to pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is— to use the favorite catchword of the age—“regulation,” and regulation is possible only if they work under the eye of an employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Res- toration, the first, and most neglected, virtue of the poor is industry. Common rights encourage idleness by offering a precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought to be at work for a master. It is not surprising, therefore, that the admonitions of religious teachers against the wick- edness of joining house to house and field to field should almost entirely cease. Long the typical example of unchar- 260 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT itable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not merely economically expedient, but morally beneficial. Baxter, with all his scrupulousness—partly, perhaps, because of his scru- pulousness—differs from most earlier divines in giving a qualified approval to enclosure “done in moderation by a pious man,” for the characteristic reason that a master can establish a moral discipline among his employees, which they would miss if they worked for themselves. What matters, in short, is not their circumstances, but their character. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians. Oppor- tunities for spiritual edification are more important than the mere material environment. If only the material environ- ment were not itself among the forces determining men’s capacity to be edified! The temper which deplored that the open-field village was not a school of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and poor relief an even more shattering criticism. There is no province of social life in which the fashioning of a new scale of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly revealed, In the little communities of peasants and crafts- men which composed medieval England, all, when Heaven sent a bad harvest, had starved together, and the misery of the sick, the orphan and the aged had appeared as a per- sonal calamity, not as a social problem. Apart from a few precocious theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal and secular system of provision for distress, the teaching most characteristic of medieval writers had been that the re- lief of the needy was a primary obligation on those who had means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is typical, quotes with approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those who cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that property is stewardship, and concludes—a conclusion not al- ways drawn from that well-worn phrase—that to withhold alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is mortal sin.** Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical glamour THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 261 both to poverty and to the compassion by which poverty was relieved, for poor men were God’s friends. At best, the poor were thought to represent our Lord in a peculiarly in- timate way—“‘in that sect,” as Langland said, “our Saviour saved all mankind’”—and it was necessary for the author of a religious manual to explain that the rich, as such, were not necessarily hateful to God.** At worst, men reflected that the prayers of the poor availed much, and that the sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf of bread to a beggar, even though a curse went with it. The alms be- stowed today would be repaid a thousandfold, when the soul took its dreadful journey amid rending briars and scorch- ing flames. If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon, Everie nighte and alle, Sit thee down and put them on, And Christe receive thy saule. If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane, Everie nighte and alle, The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane, And Christe receive thy saule. If ever thou gavest meate or drinke, Everie nighte and alle, The fire shall never make thee shrinke, And Christe receive thy saule. If meate or drinke thou gavest nane, Everie nighte and alle, The fire will burne thee to the bare bane, And Christe receive thy saule. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, Everie nighte and alle, Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte, And Christe receive thy saule.1*® 262 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT The social character of wealth, which had been the essence of the medieval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in the sixteenth century with redoubled emphasis, precisely because the growing individualism of the age menaced the traditional conception. ‘The poor man,” preached Latimer, “hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and | to comfort him withal.”*7 Nor had that sovereign indif- ference to the rigors of the economic calculus disappeared, when, under the influence partly of humanitarian represen- tatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the threads of social administration into their own hands, the statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organ- ize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the mo- mentous admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the whip had no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve. The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the sys-__ tem was administered with fair regularity. But the Eliza- | bethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with dis- | astrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic — distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last link in _ a chain of measures—the prevention of evictions, the control of food supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employ- ment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—in- tended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 263 seventeenth century were prolific in the private charity which founded alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of reverence. ‘Tt was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.118 “What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar on his death-bed to one who commended his charities. “It would have been but a suitable return for me to have given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms heresand there **° It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, . both private charity and public relief should fall on evil days. In London, charitable endowments seem to have suffered from more than ordinary malversation, and there were com- plaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the Hospi- tals was seriously reduced.*”° In the country, the records of Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in which the machinery of presentment by constables to justices has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves are multi- plied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander to and fro at their will.*** The administrative collapse of the Eliza- bethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that the sections in it relating to the provision of employment were a dead letter.*°? Always unpopular with the local au- thorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pres- sure by the Central Government, they should, except here and there, have been neglected. What is more significant, however, than the practical deficiencies in the administra- tion of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion, which 264 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory of which both private charity and public relief had been the expression, “The generall rule of all England,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1646, “is to whip and punish the wandring beggars .. . and so many justices execute one branch of that good Stat- ute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of charitie, they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses and convenient places to set the poore to work.” *’* The House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the county justices should be required to see that stocks of ma- terial were provided as the law required,*** and the question of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in dis- tress should be found employment was on several occasions referred to committees of the House.””° Nothing seems, however, to have come of these proposals, nor was the Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on work’ that which was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the ad- mission that distress was the result, not of personal defi- ciencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that its victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid scepticism as was later directed against the Speenhamland policy by the reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penal- ties on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed against improvidence and idleness, The characteristic senti- ment was that of Milton’s friend, Hartlib: “The law of God saith, ‘he that will not work, let him not eat.’ This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if .. . THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 265 none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for ater 126 The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of public activity provoked by the growth of pauperism be- tween 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound business principles. by means of a corporation which would combine profit w:th philanthropy, was being sedulously preached by a small group of reformers.*?’ Parliament took it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the relief and em- ployment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under which a company was to be established with power to appre- hend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other poor persons, including children without means of maintenance.*** Right years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an Act of such extreme severity as almost to recall the sugges- tion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who failed to satisfy the justices that he had a good reason for being on the roads should be arrested and punished as a sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.’ The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the parade of a spurious religion, which sacrificed character to a formal piety, was older than the Reformation, but it had been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic charity, as a bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness and demoralization. “I conclude that all the large givings of the papists,’ preached an English divine in the reign of Elizabeth, “of which at this day many make so great brags, because they be not done in a reverent regard of the commandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being touched with the calamities of the needy, but for to be well 266 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be prayed for after they are dead . . . are indeed no alms, but pharisaical trumpets.” **° The rise of a commercial civi- lization, the reaction against the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism among the middle classes, all combined in the next half-century to sharpen the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which made the discipline of character by industry and self- denial the center of its ethical scheme, the Puritan moralist was undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even the seed of the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to beg its bread, and met the taunt that the repudiation of good works was the cloak for a conscienceless egoism with the retort that the easy-going open-handedness of the senti-— mentalist was not less selfish in its motives and was more corrupting to its objects. “As for idle beggars,’ wrote Steele, “happy for them if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies, and if more shewed some wise compassion upon their souls.’’*** That the greatest of evils is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circum- stances, but of their own “idle, irregular and wicked courses,’ that the truest charity is not to enervate them by relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be unnecessary—such doctrines turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze the impulse of natural pity with the as- surance that, if indulged, it would perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay. Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose con- tinuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the ai THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 267° reward of ethical superiority. “No question,’ argued a Puritan pamphleteer, “but it [riches] should be the portion rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for them; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the life to come.” *? The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restora- tion, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause. A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy- going indulgence undermined character, the theme of the economist was that it was economically disastrous and finan- cially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, “men and women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for maintenance.” It discourages thrift; “if shame or fear of punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old age his recess from labour or care.” It keeps up wages, since “it encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to im- pose what wages they please upon their labours; and herein they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation that, when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work for less wages than when they were dear.” *** To the landowner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier who grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of religious A. 268 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT thought now brought the comforting assurance that moral- ity itself would be favored by a reduction of both. ~ As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century was to prove, there is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way. Such utterances on the subject of poverty were merely one example of a general attitude, which appeared at times to consign to collective perdition almost the whole of the wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age which worshiped property as the foundation of the social order, the mere laborer seemed something less than a full citizen. It was partly the result of the greatly increased influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless materialism, determined at all costs to conquer world-markets from France and Holland, and prepared to sacrifice every other consideration to their economic ambi- tions. It was partly that, in spite of a century of large- scale production in textiles, the problems of capitalist in- dustry and of a propertyless proletariat were still too novel for their essential features to be appreciated. Even those writers, like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wickedness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest, rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject of wages. Their social theory had been designed for an age of petty agriculture and industry, in which per- sonal relations had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in economic status from the half-dozen journey- men or laborers whom he employed. In a world increas- ingly dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mine- owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 269 economic realities as leads the twentieth century to talk of employers and employed, long after the individual employer has been converted into an impersonal corporation. In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx observes that “the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment.’ *** An interesting illustration of his thesis might be found in the discussions of the economics of employment by English writers of the period between 1660 and 1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in the first half of the seventeenth cen- tury, and which has no modern parallel except in the be- havior of the less reputable of white colonists towards colored labor. The denunciations of the “luxury, pride and sloth” **° of the English wage-earners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, indeed, almost exactly identical with those directed against African natives today. It is complained that, compared with the Dutch, they are self- indulgent and idle; that they want no more than a bare sub- sistence, and will cease work the moment they obtain it; that, the higher their wages, the more—“so licentious are they” **°—they spend upon drink; that high prices, there- fore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the wage-earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not a blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely conduce to ‘weekly debauches.” When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the rigors of economic exploitation should be preached as a public duty, and, with a few exceptions, the writers of the period differed only as to the methods by which severity could most advantageously be organized. Pollexfen and minnie h 270 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by reducing the number of days kept as holidays. Bishop Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes, suggested that “sturdy beggars should . . . be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years.” Thomas Alcock, who was shocked at the workman’s taste for snuff, tea and ribbons, proposed the revival of sump- tuary legislation.**’ The writers who advanced schemes for reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of punishment and of training, were innumerable. All were agreed that, on moral no less than on economic grounds, it was vital that wages should be reduced. The doctrine after- wards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote, “every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious,” *** was the trit- est commonplace of Restoration economists. It was not argued; it was accepted as self-evident. When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not be desirable to reéstablish slavery, it was not to be ex- pected that the sufferings of the destitute would wring their hearts with social compunction. The most curious feature in the whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in contrast with the long debate on pauperism carried on in the sixteenth century, was the resolute refusal to admit that society had any responsibility for the causes of distress. Tudor divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle rogues. But the former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded pauperism primarily as a social phenomenon pro- duced by economic dislocation, and the embarrassing ques- tion put by the genial Harrison—‘“at whose handes shall the bloude of these men be required?” **°—was never far from the minds even of the most cynical. Their successors after the Restoration were apparently quite unconscious that it was even conceivable that there might be any other cause of poverty than the moral failings of the poor. The prac- THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 271 tical conclusion to be drawn from so comfortable a creed was at once extremely simple and extremely agreeable. It was not to find employment under the Act of 1601, for to do that was only “to render the poor more bold.” It was to surround the right to relief with obstacles such as those contained in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not be avoided, in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest, to increase the demand for labor by reducing wages. The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philoso- phers. But the theory that distress was due, not to economic circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 called “individual improvidence and vice,” was firmly established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been formulated. The essence of that system was admirably expressed a century later by a Scottish divine as “the prin- ciple that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right on other men or on society for existence.” **° Dr. Chalmers’ attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puritan moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed themselves on Nassau Senior,*** before he set his hand to that brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report, which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the north of England, was to be one of the pillars of the social policy of the nineteenth century. | It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of Puritan ethics without emphasizing the enormous contribu- tion of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress. The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual in- dependence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence 272 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT of the lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement. The virtues of enter- prise, diligence and thrift are the indispensable foundation of any complex and vigorous civilization. It was Puritan- ism which, by investing them with a supernatural sanction, turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion. Nor would it be difficult to find notable repre- sentatives of the Puritan spirit in whom the personal aus- terity, which was the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was combined with a profound consciousness of social solidarity, which was the noblest aspect of that which it displaced. Firmin the philanthropist, and Bellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a century later hailed as the father of his doctrines, were pioneers of Poor Law reform. The Society of Friends, in an age when the divorce between religion and social ethics was almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine, that it was permissible to take such gain as the market offered, by insisting on the obligation of good conscience and forbearance in economic transactions, and on the duty to make the honorable maintenance of the brother in distress a common charge.**” The general climate and character of a country are not altered, however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks which rise into an ampler air. The distinctive note of Puri- tan teaching was different. It was individual responsibility, not social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery of others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown of glory the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary contest with a hostile world, and dismissed concern with the social order as the prop of weaklings and the Capua of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects of that attitude were momentous for the future. It is sometimes suggested that the astonishing outburst of industrial activ- 5 THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 273 ity which took place after 1760 created a new type of economic character, as well as a new system of economic organization. In reality, the ideal which was later to carry all before it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and captain of industry, was well established among Englishmen before the end of the seventeenth century. Among the numerous forces which had gone to form it, some not in- considerable part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis on the life of business enterprise as the appropriate field for Christian endeavor, and on the qualities needed for success in it, which was characteristic of Puritanism, These quali- ties, and the admiration of them, remained, when the re- ligious reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weakened or disappeared. 3 ty She ars xe 2 CHAP EER eV CONCLUSION “Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sermon, beynge asked if he had bene at the sermon that day, answered, yea. I praye you, said he, how lyked you hym? Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked hym alwayes—a sedicious fellow.” LATIMER, Seven Sermons before King Edward VI. CHAPTER V CONCLUSION SociETIEs, like individuals, have their moral crises and their spiritual revolutions. The student can observe the results which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the fire which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit. The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its magnificent promise of fruitful action and of intellectual light; the abdication of the Christian Churches from de- partments of economic conduct and social theory long claimed as their province; the general acceptance by thinkers of a scale of ethical values, which turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a perilous, if natural, frailty into the idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society—such movements are written large over the history of the tem- pestuous age which lies between the Reformation and the full light of the eighteenth century. Their consequences have been worked into the very tissue of modern civiliza- tion. Posterity still stands too near their source to discern / the ocean into which these streams will flow. In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is the tritest of commonplaces. But social psychology con- tinues too often to be discussed in serene indifference to the categories of time and place, and economic interests are still popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though inherited dispositions may be constant from generation to generation, the system of valuations, preferences and ideals -—~the social environment within which individual character 277 278 CONCLUSION functions—is in process of continuous change, and it is in the conception of the place to be assigned to economic in- terests in the life of society that change has in recent cen- turies been most comprehensive in its scope, and most sen- sational in its consequences. he isolation of economic aims as a specialized object of concentrated and systematic effort, the erection of economic criteria into an independent and authoritative standard of social expediency, are phe- nomena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity, appear, at least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively « |recent date in the history of later civilizations. The con- flict between the economic outlook of East and West, which impresses the traveller today, finds a parallel in the con- trast between medieval and modern economic ideas, which strikes the historian. The elements which combined to produce that revolution are too numerous to be summarized in any neat formula. But, side by side with the expansion of trade and the rise | of new classes to political power, there was a further cause, which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least funda- mental. It was the contraction of the territory within which the spirit of religion was conceived to run. The criticism which dismisses the concern of Churches with economic relations and social organization as a modern innovation finds little support in past history. What requires explana- tion is not the view that these matters are part of the province of religion, but the view that they are not. (When | the age of the Reformation begins, economics is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activi- ties are treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral stand- ards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian CONCLUSION 279 Church; the Church itself is regarded as a society wielding | i> theoretical, and sometimes practical, authority in social af- fairs. The secularization of political thought, which was to be the work of the next two centuries, had profound re- actions on social speculation, and by the Restoration the whole perspective, at least in England, has been revolution ized.}/ Religion has been converted from the keystone which holds together the social edifice into one department within] (' it, and the idea of a rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of policy and the criterion of con- duct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to survive, must devote a reasonable attention to economic interest, man seems sometimes to have become an economic animal, who will be prudent, nevertheless, if he takes due precau- tions to assure his spiritual well-being? The result is an attitude which forms so fundamental a part of modern political thought, that both its precarious philosophical basis, and the contrast which it offers with the conceptions of earlier generations, are commonly forgotten. Its essence is a dualism which regards the secular and the religious aspects of life, not as successive stages within a larger unity, but as parallel and independent provinces, gov- erned by different laws, judged by different standards, and amenable to different authorities. To the most representa- tive minds of the Reformation, as of the Middle Ages, a philosophy which treated the transactions of commerce and the institutions of society as indifferent to religion would have appeared, not merely morally reprehensible, but intel- lectually absurd. Holding as their first assumption that the ultimate social authority is the will of God, and that tem-( poral interests are a transitory episode in the life of spirits which are eternal, they state the rules to which the social conduct of the Christian must conform, and, when circum- stances allow, organize the discipline by which those rules may be enforced. By their successors in the eighteenth cen- a 280 CONCLUSION tury the philosophy of Indifferentism, though rarely formu- lated as a matter of theory, is held in practice as a truism which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to question, since it is in the heart of the individual that religion has its throne, and to externalize it in rules and institutions is to tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal. Naturally, therefore, they formulate the ethical principles of Christian- ity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property. Thus the conflict between religion and those natural economic ambitions which the thought of an earlier age had regarded with suspicion is suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind between them. The former takes as its province the in- dividual soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his fellows in the activities of business and the affairs of society. Provided that each keeps to its own territory, peace is _-assured. They cannot collide, for they can never meet. “ae History is a stage where forces which are within human / ) control contend and cooperate with forces which are not. The change of opinion described in these pages drew nour- ishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan revolution had been followed by a dazzling outburst of economic enterprise, and the transformation of the material environment prepared an atmosphere in which a judicious moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom _and the sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion ' as well as the outer. The march of external progress woke sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to applaud its triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute tension between the claims of religion and the glittering allurements of a commercial civilization, such as had tormented the age of the Reformation. | It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, diffidence of men who were conscious that traditional doctrines of CONCLUSION 281 social ethics, with their impracticable distrust of economic motives, belonged to the conditions of a vanished age, but who lacked the creative energy to state them anew, in a form applicable to the needs of a more complex and mobile social order. It was partly that political changes had gone far to identify the Church of England with the ruling aristocracy, so that, while in France, when the crash came, many of the lower clergy threw in their lot with the tiers état, in England it was rarely that the officers of the Church did not echo the views of society which commended them- selves to the rulers of the State. It was partly that, to one important body of opinion, the very heart of religion was a spirit which made indifference to the gross world of external circumstances appear, not a defect, but an ornament of the soul. Untrammelled by the silken chains which bound tlie Establishment, and with a great tradition of discipline be- hind them, the Nonconformist Churches might seem to have possessed opportunities of reasserting the social obliga- tions of religion with a vigor denied to the Church of Eng- land. What impeded their utterance was less a weakness than the most essential and distinctive of their virtues. Founded on the repudiation of the idea that human effort could avail to win salvation, or human aid to assist the pil- grim in his lonely quest, they saw the world of business and society as a battlefield, across which character could march triumphant to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the architect’s hand to set them in their place as the founda- tions of the Kingdom of Heaven. It did not occur to them that character is social, and society, since it is the expression of character, spiritual, Thus the eye is some- times blinded by light itself. | The certainties of one age are the problems of the next. Few will refuse their admiration to the magnificent con- ception of a community penetrated from apex to foundation by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great 282 CONCLUSION reformers, not less than of the better minds of the Middle Ages. But, in order to subdue the tough world of material interests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy with its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them. The Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing and a fair trial, and those who will not give him his due are wont to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables by taking his due and something over. Common sense and a respect for realities are not less graces of the spirit than moral zeal. The paroxysms of virtuous fury, with which the children of light denounced each new victory of eco- nomic enterprise as yet another stratagem of Mammon, disabled them for the staff-work of their campaign, which needs a cool head as well as a stout heart. Their obstinate refusal to revise old formulz in the light of new facts ex- posed them helpless to a counter-attack, in which the whole fabric of their philosophy, truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed together. They despised knowledge, and knowledge destroyed them. Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which Iengland was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters. Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end the wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the naive and uncritical worship of economic power, which is the mood of unreason too often engendered in those whom that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no light. Its result is not seldom a world in which men com- mands a mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an organization which has every perfection except that of motion. CONCLUSION 283 Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein, Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein. The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from the armor of Reason, pierces the lazy caricature which masquerades beneath that sacred name, to flatter its fol- lowers with the smiling illusion of progress won from the mastery of the material environment by a race too selfish and superficial to determine the purpose to which its triumphs shall be applied. Mankind may wring her secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy them- selves; they may command the Ariels of heat and motion, and bind their wings in helpless frustration, while they wrangle over the question of the master whom the im- prisoned genii shall serve. Whether the chemist shall pro- vide them with the means of life or with tri-nitro-toluol and poison gas, whether industry shall straighten the bent back or crush it beneath heavier burdens, depends on an act of choice between incompatible ideals, for which no increase in the apparatus of civilization at man’s disposal is in itself a substitute. Economic efficiency is a necessary element in the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incor- rigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object is to destroy efficiency itself. For the condition of effective action in a complex civilization is codperation. And the condition of cooperation is agreement, both as to the ends to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to be judged. Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a stand- ard of values, by which the position to be assigned to dif- ferent objects may be determined. In a world of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic possibilities. But it cannot itself be Se 284 CONCLUSION merely economic, since the comparative importance of eco- nomic and of other interests—the sacrifice, for example, of | material goods worth incurring in order to extend leisure, © or develop education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature as a whole, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evi- dently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension_ of their relative significance. “Whatever the world thinks,” ,wrote Bishop Berkeley, “he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind and the summum bonum may ‘es possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most in- dubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.” The philosopher of today, who bids us base our hopes of progress on knowledge inspired by love, does not differ from the Bishop so much, perhaps, as he would wish. The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects ad- vanced for reconstructing it, break down through their 4 neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of out- raged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. A reasonable view of its possible modi- fications must recognize that natural appetites may be puri- fied or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupations, the medieval insistence that riches exist CONCLUSION 285 for man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there is no wealth but life,” the argument of the Socialist who urges that production should be organized for service, not for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man. Of that nature and its possibilities the Christian Church was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed in these pages, to hold by definition a conception distinc- tively its own. It was therefore committed to the formula- tion of a social theory, not as a philanthropic gloss upon the main body of its teaching, but as a vital element in a creed concerned with the destiny of men whose character is formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or starved, by the commerce of the market-place and the in- stitutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period and place, its philosophy had as its center a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appe- tites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted texture of individual character and social conduct. That practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which should need no emphasis. But in a world where principles and conduct are unequally mated, men are to be judged by their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends at which they aim as well as by the success with which they attain them. The prudent critic will try himself by his achievement rather than by his ideals, and his neighbors, 286 CONCLUSION living and dead alike, by their ideals not less than by their achievement. Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social his- tory will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against which criticism is most commonly directed. It con- sists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naiveté than by the defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not in- disposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecu- tion, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Com- promise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire. ‘Modern capitalism,’ writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of pos- sessors and pursuers.’ It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the CONCLUSION 287 ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the con- quest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and in- sinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was un- known even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. i he language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the con- tracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agree- able failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Pos- terity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and op- pression as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley—who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III. Be eae: ia we ? 1 obese sak euortilot rae, 4 ee ESE aaa Chan es i ratty alti Mae ras Sette ae ott Wiebe Ps A , ; en nied ge hay st Ae a Pag ae 3: 7 Bet = f.4 aa weer ve inh if Pare ts Levers ieee Bees ‘ge ee 1: ees lee ~ x Ka i abe t ihe: ed Tees of i bes # meee ior, oR: Sys aay be a he NOTES PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION 1 References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the notes on subsequent chapters. The following list of recent books and articles is not exhaustive, but it may be of some use to those interested in the subject. E, Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., London, 1931 (Eng. trans. by Olive Wyon of his Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London, 1930 (Eng. trans. by Talcott Parsons of Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus in “Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,” vols. xx (1904) and xxi (1905); later reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsarze zur Religions- soziologie, 3 vols., Tubingen, 1921); H. Hauser, Les débuts du Capi- talisme, Paris, 1927, chap. ii (“Les Idées économiques de Calvin”); B. Groethuysen, Origines de Vlesprit bourgeois en France, Paris, 1927; Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revo- lution, 1640-1660, London, 1930; Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800, London, 1930; W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, London, 1930; R. Pascal, The Social Basis of the German Reformation, London, 1933; H. M. Robertson, The Rise of Economic Individualism, Cambridge, 1933; A. Fanfani, Le Origini dello Spirito Capitalistico in Italia, Milan, 1933, and Cattolicismo e Protes- tantesimo nella Formazione Storica del Capitalismo, Milan, 1934 (Eng. trans. Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, London, 1935); J. Brodrick, S. J.. The Economic Morals of the Jesuits, London, 10934; E, D. Bebb, Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660-1800, London, 1935. The articles include the following: M. Halbwachs, “Les Origines Puritaines due Capitalisme Moderne” (Revue d'histoire et de Philosophie réligieuses, March-April, 1925) and “Economistes et His- toriens, Max Weber, une vie, un cuvre”’ (Annales d’Histoire Econo- mique et Sociale, No. 1, 1929); H. Sée, “Dans quelle mesure Puritains et Juifs ont-ils contribué au Progrés due Capitalisme Moderne?” (Revue Historique, t. CLV, 1927); Kemper Fullerton, “Calvinism and Capital- ism” (Harvard Theological Review, July 1928) ; F. H. Knight, “Histori- cal and Theoretical Issues in the Problem of Modern Capitalism” (Jour- nal of Economic and Business History, November 1928); Talcott Par- sons, “Capitalism in Recent German Literature” (Journal of Political Economy, December 1928 and February 1929); P. C. Gordon Walker, “Capitalism and the Reformation” (Economic History Review, No- vember 1937). 2For Weber’s life and personality, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber, ein Lebensbild, Tubingen, 1926, and Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Deutsches 289 290 NOTES Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren, Olden- burg, 1932. ; ' 3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Eng. trans. prelose 4H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism, p. Xi. 5 Weber, op. cit., p. 26. 6 Weber, op. cit., p. 183. 7 [bid., p. 183, and note 118 on chap. v: “it would have been easy to proceed ... to a regular construction which logically deduced every- thing characteristic of modern culture from Protestant nationalism, But that sort of thing may be left to the type of dilettante who believes in the unity of the group mind and its reducibility to a single formula.” “Spiritual” is my rendering of the almost untranslatable “spiritualistische kausale.” 8 See below, note 32 on chap. iv, pp. 247-8, and Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 3-II. 9 Weber, op. cit., 197-8. A chapter expanding the same criticism is contained in H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Indi- vidualism, pp. 57-87. The best treatment of the subject is that of Bren- tano, Die Anfange des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57, and Der Wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1923, pp. 363 sq. 10 See H. M. Robertson, of. cit., pp. 88-110 and 133-67; and J. Brod- rick, S. J., The Economic Morals of the Jesuits, which, in addition to correcting Robertson’s errors, contains the best account of the economic teaching of the Jesuits available in English. 11 B.g., H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden Nationalokonomischen Ansichten, Leipzig, 1861; F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, London, 1892, Intro- duction; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1808, chap. III; W. Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, London, 1910 (see below, note 33 on chap. iv). The last work, though published seven yzars after the appearance of Weber’s articles, does not refer to them, nor is its argument similar to theirs. 2 g., H. M. Robertson, op. cit., p. xi. “Many writers have taken advantage of an unpopularity of Capitalism in the twentieth century to employ them [sc. the theories ascribed to Weber] in attacks on Calvinism, or on other branches of religion.” The only Guy Fawkes of the gang— apart, of course, from myself—detected by Mr. Robertson actually firing the train appears to be that implacable incendiary, Mr. Aldous Huxley. “Infected,” liké~the arch-conspirator, Weber, “with a deep hatred of Capitalism,” we stand with him condemned of “a general tendency to undermine the basis of Capitalist society’ (ibid., pp. 207-8). The guilty secret is out at last. 13 Hl, Pirenne, Les Périodes de l’Histoire Sociale due Capitalisme, 1914. CHAPTER I — 1J. B. Say, Cours complet d’Economie politique pratique, vol. vi, 18209, PP. 351-2. 2R. Torrens, An Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, Preface, p. Xiil. 8 ae George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921). 4J. A. Froude, Revival of Romanism, in Short Studies on Great S ub- jects, ara ser., 1877, p. 108. 5J. N. Wiio: From Gerson to Grotius, 1916, pp. 21 seqq. 6 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. ii, chap. ix, § 124. 7 Nicholas Oresme, c.1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377. His Tractatus de origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum was probably written about 1360. The Latin and French texts have been edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and extracts are translated by A. E. Monroe, Early Economic Thought, 1924, pp. 81-102. Its significance is discussed shortly by Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Com- merce, Early and Middle Ages (4th ed., 1905, pp. 354-9), and by Wolowski in his introduction. The date of the De Usuris of. Laurentius de Rodolfis was 1403; a short account of his theories as to the exchanges will be found in E. Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, 1913, pp. 211-17. The most important works of St. Antonino (1389-1459, Archbishop of Florence, 1446) are the Summa Theologica, Summa Confessionalis, and De Usuris. Some account of his teaching is given by Carl Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaft- lichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz, 1904; Schreiber, op. citt., pp. 217-23; and Bede Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medieval Economics, 1914. The full title of Baxter’s work is A Christian Directory: a Summ .of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience, 8 See Chap. IV, p. 206. 9 Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Comediam (ed. Laca- ita), vol. i, p. 579: “Qui facit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui non facit vadit ad inopiam” (quoted by G. G. Coulton, Social Life Es Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 342). 10 Lanfranc, Elucidarium, lib. ii, p. 18 (in Opera, ed. J. A. Giles). See also Vita Sancti Guidonis (Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. iv, p. 43): “Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine crimine exerceri potuit.” 11B. L. Manning, The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 19109, p. 186. 12 Aquinas, Summa gnc 2a 2%, div. 1, Q. iii, art. viii. 18 Tbid., 14 2%, div. i, Q. xciv, art. il. _ 291 s 292 NOTES 14 The Bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII. 15 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus (ed. C. C. I. Webb), lib. v, cap. ii (“Est autem res publica, sicut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam quod di- vini muneris beneficio animatur”), and lib. vi, cap. x, where the analogy is worked out in detail. For Henry VIII’s chaplain see Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (Early English Text Society, Extra Ser., no. xxxii, 1878). 16 Chaucer, The Persone’s Tale, § 66. 17 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xix (Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, 1871, p. 145). 18 John of Salisbury, op. cit., lib. vi, cap. x: “Tunc autem totius rei publicee salus incolumis preclaraque erit, si superiora membra se im- pendant inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respondeant, ut singula sint quasi aliorum ad invicem membra.” 19 Wyclif, op. cit., chaps. ix, x, xi, xvii, passim (Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 130, 131, 132, 134, 143). 20 See, e.g., A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschafts- geschichte, 1901, vol. i, chaps. v, vii. His final verdict (p. 458) is: ‘Man kann es getrost aussprechen: es gibt wohl keine Periode in der © Weltgeschichte, in der die nattirliche Ueberrnacht des Kapitals tiber die besitz- und kapitallose Handarbeit rticksichtsloser, freier von sittlichen und rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer selbstverstandlichen Konse- quenz gewaltet hatte, und bis in die entferntesten Folgen zur Geltung gebracht worden ware, als in der Bliitezeit der Florentiner Tuchindustrie.”’ The picture drawn by Pirenne of the textile industry in Flanders (Bel- gian Democracy: Its Early History, trans. by J. V. Saunders, 1915, pp. 128-34) is somewhat similar. 21TIn Jan. 1298/9 there was held a “parliament of carpenters at Mile- hende, where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to observe a certain ordinance or provision made by the Mayor and Aldermen touch- ing their craft,’ and in the following March a “parliament of smiths” was formed, with a common chest (Calendar of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, 1298-1307, ed. A. H. Thomas, 1924, pp. 25, 33-4). 22 The figures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Léon (His- toire des Corporations de Métiers, 3rd ed., 1922, pp. 219-20, 224, 226) ; those for Frankfurt are given by Bticher (Die Bevélkerung von Frank- furt am Main im XIV und XV Jahrhundert, 1886, pp. 103, 146, 605). They do not include apprentices, and must not be pressed too far. The conclusion of Martin Saint-Léon is: “Il est certain qu’au moyen age (abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n’existait pas encore un prolétariat, le nombre des ouvriers ne dépassant guére ou n’atteignant méme pas celui des maitres” (op. cit., p. 227n.). The towns of Italy should be added, as an exception, to those of Flanders, and in any case the statement is not generally true of the later Middle Ages, when there was certainly a wage-earning proletariat in Germany also (see Lam- precht, Zum Verstandnis der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14. sum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. i, 1893, pp. 191-263), and even, though on a smaller scale, in England. NOTES ON CHAPTER I 293 23 The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned, chap. xxviii (Select Eng- lish Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, p. 333). The passage con- tains comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in particu- lar, gilds, “men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere,” and “marchaun- tis, groceris, and vitileris” who “conspiren wickidly togidre that noon of hem schal bie over a certeyn pris, though the thing that thei bien be moche more worthi” (ibid., pp. 333, 334). Wyclif’s argument is of great interest and importance. It is (1), that such associations for mutual aid are unnecessary. No special in- stitutions are needed to promote fraternity, since, quite apart from them, all members of the community are bound to help each other: “Alle the goodnes that is in thes gildes eche man owith for to do bi comyn fraternyte of Cristendom, by Goddis comaundement.” (2) That combinations are a conspiracy against the public. Both doctrines were points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitary State, and both were to play a large part in subsequent history. They were used by the absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century as an argument for State control over industry, in place of the obstructive torpor of gilds and bor- oughs, and by the individualists of the eighteenth century as an argu- ment for free competition. The line of thought as to the relation of minor associations to the State runs from Wyclif to Turgot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the Act of the Legislative Assembly in 1792 forbidding trade unions (“Les citoyens de méme état ou profession, les ouvriers et compagnons d’un art quelconque ne pourront ... former des réglements sur leurs prétendus intéréts communs”), and the English Combination Acts. 24 Kayser Sigmunds Reformation aller Standen des Heiligen R6- mischen Reichs, printed by Goldast, Collectio Constitutionum Imperial- ium, 1713, vol. iv, pp. 170-200. Its probable date appears to be about 1437. It is discussed shortly by J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 93-9. 25 Martin Saint-Léon, op. cit., p. 187. The author’s remark is made a propos of a ruling of 1270, fixing minimum rates for textile workers in Paris. It appears, however, to be unduly optimistic. The fact that minimum rates were fixed for textile workers must not be taken as evidence that that policy was common, for in England, and probably in France, the textile trades received special treatment, and minimum rates were fixed for them, while maximum rates were fixed for other, and much more numerous, bodies of workers. What is true is that the medieval assumption with regard to wages, as with regard to the much more important question of prices, was that it was possible to bring them into an agreement with an objective standard of equity, which did not reflect the mere play of economic forces. 26 “The Cardinals’ Gospel,” translated from the Carmina Burana by G. G. Coulton, in A Medieval Garner, 1910, p. 347. 27 Printed from the Carmina Burana by S. Gaselee, An Anthology of Medieval Latin, 1925, pp. 58-9. 28 Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of “Romanz ecclesiz filii speciales” (Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 1896, vol. ii, p. 66). 29 For Grosstéte see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. v, pp 294 NOTES 404-5 (where he is reported as denouncing the Cahorsines, “whom in our time the holy fathers and teachers ... had driven out of France, but who have been encouraged and protected by the Pope in England, which did not formerly suffer from this pestilence’), and F. S. Stevenson, Rob- ert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1899, pp. 101-4. For the bishop of London and the Cahorsines see Matthew Paris, Chron. May,, vol. iii, pp. 331-2. A useful collection of references on the whole subject is given by Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 64-8. 30 Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham, vol. i, p. 18, July 1279 (trans- lated by Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Ref- ormation, p. 345). 81 For cases of clerical usury see Selden Society, vol. v, 1891, Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of the Marquis of Lothian, 1905, p. 26; and Th. Bonnin, Regestrum Visitationum Odonis Rigaldi, 1852, p. 35. See also note 88 (below). 82 The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at in- terest to the citizens of Paris (A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augustus, translated by E. B. Krehbiel, 1912, p. 130). For the bishop’s advice to the usurer see ibid., p. 166. 83 From a letter of St. Bernard, c.1125, printed by Coulton, A Me- dieval Garner, pp. 68-73. 84 Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, lib. ii, cap. i-vii, where the eco- nomic foundations of a State are discussed. 85 Aquinas, Swuma Theol., 24 2%, Q. Ixxxiii, art. vi. For St. An- tonino’s remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medieval Economics, p. 59. 36 Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa xii, Q. i, c. ii, § 1. 37 A good account of St. Antonino’s theory of property is given by Ilgner, Die Volkswirthschafilichen Anschauungen Antonins von Flor- eng, chap. x. 88 “Sed si esset bonus legislator in patria indigente, deberet locare pro pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores ...et non tantum eis et familiz sustentationem necessariam invenire, sed etiam industriam, peritiam, et pericula omnia locare; ergo etiam hoc possunt ipsi in vendendo” (quoted Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen PAD ela tas der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, p. 154). 89 Henry of Ghent, Aurea Quodlibeta, p. yah (quoted Schreiber, op. tt. D. 135). 40 Gratian, Decretum, pt. 1, dist. lxxxvili, cap. xi. 41 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 24 2®, Q. Ixxvii, art. iv. 42 Ibid. Trade is unobjectionable, “cum aliquis negotiationi intendit propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessarie ad vitam patric desint, et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium laboris.” 43 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emp- tionis et venditionis, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, of. cit., p. 197). 44 See Chap. II, § ii. 45 Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, A Medieval Garner, 1910, pp. 212-15, 208, and Social Life in England from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1910, p. 346. NOTES ON CHAPTER I 295 46 The facts are given by Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i, p. 223. For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in ae see Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. Pp. 173-200. 47 Bruno Kuske, Quellen zur Geschichte des Kélner Handels und Ver- kehrs im Mittelalter, vol. iii, 1923, pp. 197-8. 48 Karly English Text Society, The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. Harris, 1907-13, p. 544. 49 Wyclif, On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 154-5). The word rendered “loan” is “leeve” [ ? leene] in the text. 50 For examples of such cases see Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. Ixiv, nos, 291 and 1089; Bdle. xxxvii, no. 38; Bdle. xlvi, no. 307. They are discussed in some detail in my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Dis- course upon Usury, 1925, pp. 28-9. 51 Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, p. 27; Selden Soc., Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p. 35. 52 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 14 28, Q. xcv, art. ii. 53 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wvyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iti, p. 153): “Bot men of lawe and marchauntis and chap- men and vitelers synnen more in avarice then done pore laboreres. And this token hereof; for now ben thei pore, and now ben thei ful riche, for wronges that thei done.” 54 F.g., Afgidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. i: “Tantum res es- timatur juste, quantum ad utilitatem possidentis refertur, et tantum juste valet, quantum sine fraude vendi potest. ... Omnis translatio facta libera voluntate dominorum juste fit;” Johannes Buridanus, Ques- tiones super decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis, v, 23: “Si igitur rem suam sic alienat, ipse secundum suam estimationem non damnificatur, sed lucratur; igitur non injustum patitur.’ Both writers are discussed by Schreiber (op. cit., pp. 161-71 and.177-91). The theory of Buridanus appears extraordinarily modern; but he is careful to emphasize that prices should be fixed “secundum utilitatem et necessitatem totius com- munitatis,” not “penes necessitatem ementis vel vendentis.” 55 St. Antonino, Summa Theologica, pars ii, tit. i, cap. viii, § I, and cap. xvi, § iii. a account of St. Antonino’s theory of prices is given by Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Flor- enz, chap. iv; Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medieval Economics; and Schreiber, of. cit., pp. 217-23. Its interest consists in the attempts to maintain the principle of the just price, while making allowance for practical necessities. 56 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emp- tionis et venditionis, i, 11, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 198-200). 57 For these examples see Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 259-60; Records of the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, vol. i, 1906, p. 227; Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls, p. 132; J. M. Wilson, The Worcester Liber Albus, 1920, pp. 199-200, 212-13. The question of the legitimacy of rent- charges and of the profits of partnership has been fully discussed by Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland (1865), and by 296 NOTES Ashley, Economic History. See also G. O’Brien, An Essay on Medieval Economic Teaching (1920), and G. G. Coulton, An Episode in Canon Law (in History, July 1921), where the difficult question raised by the Decretal Naviganti is discussed. 58 Bernardi Papiensis Summa Decretalium (ed. E. A. D. Laspeyres, 1860) ; lib. v, tit. xv. 59 F.g., ALgidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. ii: “Etiam res future per tempora non sunt tante estimationis, sicut eaedem collecte in in- stanti, nec tantam utilitatem inferunt possidentibus, propter quod oportet, quod sint minoris estimationis secundum justitiam.” 60 O’Brien (op. cit.) appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take this view. 61 Politics, I, iii, ad. fin. 1258. See Who said “Barren Metal’? by E. Cannan, W. D. Ross, etc., in Economica, June 1922, pp. 105-7. 62 Innocent IV, Apparatus, lib. v, De Usurts. 63 For Italy, see Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i, pp. 179- gl, and for France, P. Boissonade, Le Travail dans Europe chrétienne au Moyen Age, 1921, pp. 206-9, 212-13. Both emphasize the financial relations of the Papacy, 64 F.g., Council of. Arles, 314; Nicza, 325; Laodicea, 372; and many others. 65 Corpus Juris Canonici, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. 1. 66 Tbid., cap. ili. 67 Tbid., Sexti Decretal, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i, il. 68 Jbid,, Clementinarum, lib. v, tit. v, cap. 1. 89 The passages referred to in this paragraph are as follows: Corp. Jur.~Can., Dectetal., Greg. [X, lib. v, “tits xix,/ cap) Ax; av, syakitipeeore Lave AVis 70 A Formulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, ed. H. C. Lea, 1892, Nos. xcii, clxxviii (2), clxxix. 71 Raimundi de Penna-forti Summa Pastoralis (Ravaisson, Catalogue Général des MSS. des Bibliothéques publiques des Departements, 1849, vol. i, pp. 592 seqq.). The archdeacon is to inquire: “Whether [the priest] feeds his flock, assisting those who are in need and above all those who are sick. Works of mercy also are to be suggested by the archdeacon, to be done by him for their assistance. If he cannot fully accomplish them out of his own resources, he ought, according to his power, to use his personal influence to get from others the means of carrying them out.... Inquiries concerning the parishioners are to be made, both from the priest and from others among them worthy of credence, who, if necessary, are to be summoned for the purpose to the presence of the archdeacon, as well as from the neighbours, with regard to matters which appear to need correction. First, inquiry is to be made whether there are notorious usurers, or persons reputed to be usurers, and what sort of usury they practise, whether any one, that is to say, lends money or anything else . . . on condition that he receive anything above the principal, or holds any pledge and takes profits from it in excess of the principal, or receives pledges and uses them in the mean- time for his own gain; ... whether he holds horses in pledge and reckons in the cost of their fodder more than they can eat... or NO DES ON CHAPTER I 297 whether he buys anything at a much lower. price than it is worth, on condition that the seller can take it back at a fixed term on paying the price, though the buyer knows that he (the seller) will not be able to do so; or whether he buys anything for a less price than it is worth, because he pays before receiving the article, for example, standing corn; or whether any one, as a matter of custom and without express contract, is wont to take payment above the principal, as the Cahorsines do... . Further, it is to be inquired whether he practises usury cloaked under the guise of a partnership (nomine socictatis palliatam), as when a man lends money to a merchant, on condition that he be a partner in the gains, but not in the losses... . Further, whether he practises usury cloaked under the guise of a penalty, that is to say, when his intention in imposing a penalty [for non-payment at a given date] is not that he may be paid more quickly, but that he may be paid more. Further, whether he practises usury in kind, as when a rich man, who has lent money, will not receive from a poor man any money above the principal, but agrees that he shall work two days in his vineyard, or something of the kind. Further, whether he practises usury cloaked by reference to a third party, as when a man will not lend himself, but has a friend whom he induces to lend. When it has been ascertained how many persons in that parish are notorious for usury of this kind, their names are to be reduced to writing, and the archdeacon is to proceed against them in virtue of his office, causing them to be cited to his court on a day fixed, either before himself or his responsible official, even if there is no ac- cuser, on the ground that they are accused by common report. If they are convicted, either because their offence is evident, or by their own confession, or by witnesses, he is to punish them as he thinks best... . If they cannot be directly convicted, by reason of their manifold shifts and stratagems, nevertheless their ill fame as usurers can easily be es- tablished. ... If the archdeacon proceed with caution and diligence against their wicked doings, they will hardly be able to hold their own or to escape—if, that is . .. he vex them with trouble and expense, and humiliate them, by frequently serving citations on them and assigning several different days for their trial, so that by trouble, expense, loss of time, and all manner of confusion they may be induced to repent and submit themselves to the discipline of the Church.” 72. Marténe and U. Durand, Thesaurus novus Anecdotorum, 1717, vol. iv, pp. 696 seqq. 73 Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, ed. C. Babington, 1860, pt. i, chap. iii, pp. 15-16. His words show both the difficulties which confronted ecclesiastical teaching and the attempts to overcome them. “I preie thee ... seie to me where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hundrid parti of the teching upon matrimonie which y teche in a book mad upon Matrimonie, and in the firste partie of Cristen religioun ... Seie to me also where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hun- drid part of the teching which is yoven upon usure in the thridde parti of the book yclepid The filling of the wij tables; and yit al thilk hool teching yoven upon usure in the now named book is litil ynough or ouer litle for to leerne, knowe and have sufficientli into mannis behove and into Goddis trewe service and lawe keping what is to be leerned and 298 NOTES kunnen aboute usure, as to reeders and studiers ther yn it muste needis be open. Is ther eny more writen of usure in al the Newe Testament save this, Luke vi, ‘Geve ye loone, hoping no thing ther of,’ and al that is of usure writen in the Oold Testament favourith rather’ usure than it reproveth. How evere, therfore, schulde eny man seie that the sufficient leernyng and kunnyng of usure or of the vertu contrarie to usure is groundid in Holi Scripture? Howe evere schal thilk litil now rehercid clausul, Luke vi, be sufficient for to answere and assoile alle the harde scrupulose doutis and questiouns which al dai han neede to be assoiled in mennis bargenyngis and cheffaringis togidere? Ech man having to do with suche questiouns mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth litil or noon light thereto at al. Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he forbedith usure, and therfore al that mai be take therbi is this, that usure is unleeful; but though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful, how schal y wite herbi what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it, and whanne in a bargeyn is usure, though to summen seemeth noon, and how in a bargeyn is noon usure though to summen ther semeth to be ?” Pecock’s defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching of Scripture was the real answer to the statement afterwards made by Luther that the text, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ was an all-suffi- cient guide to action (see Chap. II, p. 99). Examples of teaching as to usury contained in books such as Pecock had in mind will be found in Myrc’s Instructions for Parish Priests (Early English Text Society, ed. E. Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, 1902), the Pupilla Oculi, and Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt (Early English Text Society, ed. R. Morris, 1866). 74 The Catechism of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, 1552, ed. T. G. Law, 1884, pp. 97-9. Under the seventh commandment are denounced: “Fyitlie, al thay that defraudis or spoulyeis the com- mon geir, aganis the common weill for lufe of their awin pryvate and singulare weill. Saxtlie, all usuraris and ockiraris synnis aganis this command, that wil nocht len thair geir frelie, bot makis conditione of ockir, aganis the command of Christe. Sevintlie, all thay quhilk hais servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair fee or waige, accordyng to conditioun and thair deservyng, quilk syn, as sanct James sayis, cryis vengeance before God. Auchtlie, all thai that strykis cowyne of unlauchful metall, quhair throuch the common weil is hurt and skaithit. The nynte, all Merchandis that sellis corruppit and evyll stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony uther in bying or sellyng use desait, falsate, parjurie, wrang mettis or weychtis, to the skaith of thair nycht- bour, thay committ gret syn agane this command. Nother can we clenge fra breakyng of this command all kyndis of craftis men quhilk usis nocht thair awin craft leillalie and trewlie as thai suld do. . . . All wrechis that wyl be ground ryche incontynent, quhay be fraud, falset, and gyle twynnis men and thair geir, quhay may keip thair nychbour fra povertie and myschance and dois it nocht. Quhay takis ouer sair mail, ouer mekle ferme or ony blake maillis fra thair tennands, or puttis thair cottaris to ouir sair labouris, quhair throw the tenentis and cottaris is put to herschip. Quha invies his nychbouris gud fortune, ouir byis him or takis his geir out of his handis with fair hechtis, or prevenis him, NOTES ON CHAPTER I 299 or begyles him at his marchandis hand.” The detail in which different forms of commercial sharp practice are denounced is noticeable. 75 See e.g. Matt. Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. ili, pp. 191-2, for the case of a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excommunicate usurer, is seized by order of the Count of Brittany and buried alive, bound to the dead man. See also Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. v, p. 38. 76 Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. vii, pp. 1017-20; “Anno predicto [1485], diebus Mercurii et Jovis predictis, scilicet ante Ramos Pal- marum, ibidem apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesie de Vicano; coram domino archiepiscopo, et mandato suo, persone infrascripte, parochiani de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria pravitate erant quam plurimum dif- famati; coram domino propter hoc vocati abjuraverunt: et per mandatum domini summas infrascriptas, quas se confessi fuerunt habuisse per usurariam pravitatem, per juramentum suum restituere promiserunt, et stare juri super his coram eo. Bertrandus de Faveriis abjuratus usuras, ut premittitur, promisit restituere centum solidos monete antique: quos, prout ipse confessus est, habuerat per usurariam pravitatem. ...” Thir- ty-six more cases were treated in this way. 77 Villani, Cronica, book xii, chap. lviii (ed. 1823, vol. vi, p. 142): Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor: “Ma per attignere danari, d’ogni piccola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per iniquita contra Iddio, o dicesse che usura non fosse peccato mortale, o simili parole, condannava in grossa somma di danari, secondo che l’uomo era ricco.” 78 Constitutions of Clarendon, cap. 15: “Placita de debitis, que fide in- terposita debentur, vel absque interpositione fidei, sint in justitia regis.” On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, and ed., 1808, vol. ii, pp. 197-202, and F. Makower, Constitutional His- tory of the Church of England, 1895, § 60. 79 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 44, 88, 156, 235; Selden Soc., Borough Customs, ed. M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1906, pp. 161 (London) and 209-10 (Dublin) ; Records of Leicester, ed. M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1901, p. 49. For similar prohibi- tions by manorial courts, see Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, p. 28, and G. P. Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, 1852, p. 238. 80 Annales de Burton, p. 256; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. ii, p. 115; Rot. Parl., vol. ii, p. 129b. 81 Cal, of Letter Books of the City of London, ed. R. R. Sharpe, vol. H, pp. 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200, 206-7, 261-2, 365; Liber Albus, bk. iti, pt. 1i, PP. 77, 315, 394-401, 683; Selden Soc., Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Com, MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, pp. 26, 27. 82 Rot. Parl., vol. ii, pp. 332a, 350b. 88 R, H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns, 1894 (?), p. 190. 84 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xi, no. 307; Bdle. xxix, nos. 193-5; Bdle. xxxi, nos. 96-100, 527; Bdle. Ix, no. 20; Bdle. Ixiv, no. 1089. See also Year Books and Plea Rolls as Sources of Historical In- 300 NOTES formation, by H. G. Richardson, in Trans. Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. v, 1922, pp. 47-8. 85 Ed. Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, 2nd ed., 1761, p. 1026. 86.10 Ed: [lL st. 1, c.5 7 3-HemaVUl,'c. 5; 11 Hens VIljc. 85 137i Caio Peo. VAC Leena 78 87 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. I, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, 156, 226, 235, 251. The cases of the smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In the fifteenth century a gild still occasionally tried to enforce its rules by proceedings in an ecclesiastical court (see Wm. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 1847, nos. xxxvi and Ixviii, where per- sons breaking gild rules are cited before the Commissary’s court). 88 Canterbury and York Soc., Registrum Thome Spofford, ed. A. T. Bannister, I919, p. 52 (1424); and Surtees Society, vol. cxxxviii, The Register of Thomas of Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York, ed. Wm. Brown, 1925, vol. i, pp. 187-8: “6 kal. Maii, 1303. Wilton.’ Littera testimonialis super purgacione domini Johannis de Multhorp, vicarii ecclesie de Garton’, de usura sibi imposita. Universis Christi fidelibus, ad quos presentes littere pervenerint, patéat per easdem quod, cum dominus Johannes de Multhorp’, vicarius ecclesie de Garton’, nostre diocesis, coram nobis Thoma, Dei gracia, etc., in visitacione nostra super usura fuisset notatus, videlicet, quod mutuavit cuidam Jollano de Briddale, ut dicebatur, xxxiij s. iiij d., eo pacto quod idem vicarius ab eo reciperet per x annos annis singulis x s. pro eisdem, de quibus eciam dictum fuit quod prefatus Jollanus dicto vicario pro,octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et solvit predicto; eundem vicarium super hoc vocari fecimus coram nobis et ei objecimus supradicta, que ipse inficians constancius atque negans se optulit in forma juris super hiis legitime purgaturum. Nos autem eidem vicario purgacionem suam cum sua sexta manu vicariorum et aliorum presbiterorum sui ordinis indiximus faciendam, quam die Veneris proxima ante festum apostolorum Philippi et Jacobi (April 26), anno gracie m°ccc® tercio, ad hoc sibi prefixo, in manerio nostro de Wilton’ super articulo recipimus supradicto, idemque vicarius unacum dominis Johanne, rectore ecclesie B.M. juxta portam castri de Eboraco, Johanne et Jo- hanne, de Wharrum et de Wyverthorp’ ecclesiarum vicariis ac Roberto, Johanne, Alano, Stepheno et Willelmo, de Nafferton’, Driffeld’, Wete- wang’, Foston’ et Wintringham ecclesiarum presbiteris parochialibus fidedignis, de memorato articulo legitime se purgavit; propter quod ipsum vicarium sic purgatum pronunciamus et inmunem sentencialiter declara- mus, restituentes eundem ad suam pristinam bonam famam. In cujus rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est appensum.” 89 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xviii, no. 137; Bdle. xix, no. 21585; Bdle. xxiv, no. 255; Bdle. xxxi, no. 348. See also A. Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century, 1900, pp. 215-17. In view of these examples, it seems probable that a more thorough examination of the Early Chancery Proceedings would show that, even in the fifteenth century, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in matters of contract and usury was of greater practical importance than has sometimes been supposed. NOTES ON CHAPTER I 301 90 Surtees Soc., vol. Ixiv, 1875 (Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Ripon) contains more than 100 cases in which the court deals with questions of contract, debt, etc. The case which is dismissed “propter civilitatem caus” occurs in 1532 (Surtees Soc., vol. xxi, 1845, Ecclesi- astical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, p. 49). ®1 Chetham Soc., vol. xliv, 1901, Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court of Whalley, pp. 15-16. 92 Surtees Soc., vol. Ixiv, 1875, Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Ripon, p. 20. 93 Hale, op. cit. (note 87 above), no. ccxxxviii. ee-ee, Chap: lil; p.16r: ®5 For parishes, see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv, where numerous examples are given. For a gild which appears to have acted as a bank, see Hist. MSS. Com., 11th Report, 1887, Appx., pt. iii, p. 228 (MSS. of the Borough of King’s Lynn), and for other examples of loans, H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Medieval England, 1910, pp. 61-3, Records of the City of Oxford, ed. Wm. H. Turner, 1880, p. 8, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. C. Wordsworth, pt. ii, 1897, pp. 616- 17, and G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908, p. 121. For a hospital, see Hist. MSS. Com., 14th Report, Appx., pt. viii, 1895, p. 129 (MSS. of the Corporation of Bury St. Edmunds), where 20d. is lent (or given) to a poor man to buy seed for his land. A statement (made half a century after the Dissolution) as to loans by monasteries is quoted by F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, 7th ed., 1920, p. 463; specific examples are not known to me. 96 W. H. Bliss, Cal. of Papal Letters, vol. i, pp. 267-8. ®7 For the early history of the Monts de Piété see Holzapfel, Die An- finge der Montes Pietatis (1903), and for their development in the Low Countries, A. Henne, Histoire du Régne de Charles-quint en Belgique, 1859, vol. v, pp. 220-3. For proposals to establish them in England see S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cx, no. 57 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Eco- nomic Documents, vol. iii, sect. ili, no. 6), and my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 125-7. 98 Camden Soc., A Relation of the Island of England about the Year 1500 (translated from the Italian), 1847, p. 23. 99 Lyndwood, Provinciale, sub. tit. Usura, and Gibson, Codex Jur. Eccl, Angi., vol. ii, p. 1026. 106 Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, pt. iti, chap. iv, pp. 296-7: “Also Crist seide here in this present proces, that ‘at God’ it is possible a riche man to entre into the kingdom of heuen; that is to seie, with grace which God profrith and geueth ... though he abide stille riche, and though withoute such grace it is ouer hard to him being riche to entre. Wherfore folewith herof openli, that it is not forbodun of God eny man to be riche; for thanne noon such man schulde euere entre heuen. ... And if it be not forbode eny man to be riche, certis thanne it is leeful ynough ech man to be riche; in lasse than he vowe the contrarie or that he knowith bi assay and experience him silf so miche indisposid anentis richessis, that he schal not mowe rewle him silf aright anentis tho richessis: for in thilk caas he is bonde to holde him silf in poverte.’ The embarrassing qualification at the end—which 302 NOTES suggests the question, who then dare be rich?—is the more striking because of the common-sense rationalism of the rest of the passage. 101 Trithemius, quoted by J. Janssen, History of the German People at the close of the Middle Ages, vol. ii, 1896, p. 102. 102 Cal. of Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 157-8. 103 See A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augustus (translated by E. B. Krehbiel), pp. 391-2, where an eloquent denuncia- tion by Jacques de Vitry is quoted. 104 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is a surveyor, one Humberstone. ) 105 See e.g. Chaucer, The Persone’s Tale, §§ 64-6. The parson ex- presses the orthodox view that “the condicioun of thraldom and the firste cause of thraldom is for sinne.” But he insists that serfs and lords are spiritually equal: “Thilke that thou clepest thy thralles been goddes peple; for humble folk been Cristes freendes.” 106 Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa x, Q. ii, c. ili, and causa xii, Q. Ce ea ho 107 Summa Theol., 12 22°, Q. xciv, art. v, § 3. 108 An article of the German Peasants’ program in 1525 declared: “For men to hold us as their own property ... is pitiable enough, con- sidering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free.” (The program is printed in J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 137-42.) The rebels under Ket prayed ‘“‘that all bondmen may be made free, for God freed them all with His precious blood-shedding” (printed in Bland, Brown, and Tawney, English Eco- nomic History, Select Documents, pt. ii, sect. i, no. 8). / CHAPTER II 1A Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge, June 11, 1895, by Lord Acton, p. 9. 2\W. Sombart (Der moderne Kapitalismus, 1916, vol. i, pp. 524-6) gives facts and figures. See also J. Strieder, Studien zur Geschichte kapitalistischer Organisationsformen, 1914, kap. i, ii. 3F, R. Daenell, Die Bliitezeit der Deutschen Hanse, 1905; Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik gegen die Ende des Mittelalters, vol. i; N. S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System, 1918, pp. 452-514, 4F.g., The Fugger News-Letters, 1568-1605, ed. V. von Klarwill, trans. P. de Chary, 1924. 5 E. Albéri, Le Relasione degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, serie I, vol. iii, 1853, p. 357 (Relazione di Filippo II Re di Spagna da Michele Soriano nel 1559) : “Questi sono li tesori del re di Spagna, queste le min- iere, queste l’Indie che hanno sostentato l’imprese dell’ Imperatore tanti anni.” 6 The best contemporary picture of the trade of Antwerp is that of L. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tuttt 1 Paesit Bassi (1567), of which part is reprinted in a French translation in Tawney and Power, Tudor Eco- nomic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 149-173. The best modern accounts of Antwerp are given by Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vol. ii, pp. 399-403, and yol. iii, pp. 259-72; Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, vol. ii, pp. 3-68; and J. A. Goris, Etude sur les Colonies Marchandes Méridionales a Anvers de 1488 a 1567 (1925). 7The Meutings had opened a branch in Antwerp in 1479, the Hoch- stetters in 1486, the Fuggers in 1508, the Welsers in 1509 (Pirenne, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 261). 8 Pirenne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 273-6. ® Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 7-8. 10 A short account of international financial relations in the sixteenth century will be found in my introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 60-86. 11 Erasmus, Adagia; see also The Complaint of Peace. 12 For the Fuggers, see Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 85-186, and fot the other German firms mentioned, ibid,., pp. 187-260. 13 See Goris, op. cit., pp. 510-45, where the reply of the Paris theo- logians is printed in full; and Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 18, 21. For Bellarmin, see Goris, op. cit., pp. 551-2. A curious illustration of the manner in which it was still thought necessary in the later sixteenth century, and in Protestant England, to reconcile economic policy with canonist doctrine, will be found in S.P.D. Eliz., vol. Ixxv, no. 54 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 359-70). The writer, who is urging the repeal of the Act of 1552 303 304. NOTES forbidding all interest whatever, cites Aquinas and Hostiensis to prove that “trewe and unfayned interest” is not to be condemned as usury. 14 Ashley, Economic History, 1893, vol. 1, pt. ii, pp. 442-3. 15 Bodin, La Response de Jean Bodin aux Paradoxes de Malestroit touchant Venchérissement de toutes choses et le moyen d’y remédier. 16 See Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, 1865, pp. 487 seqq. 17 Calvin’s views will be found in his Epistole et Responsa, 1575, pp. 355-7, and in Sermon xxviii in the Opera. 18 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 19 Third Decade, 1st and 2nd Sermons, in The Decades of Henry Bull- inger (Parker Society), vol. iii, 1850. 20 Luther, Kleiner Sermon vom Wucher (1519) in Werke (Weimar ed.), vol. vi, pp. 1-8; Grosser Sermon vom Wucher (1520), in tbid., pp. 33-60; Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher (1524), in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 279-322; An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen, V ermahnung (1540), in ibid., vol. li, pp. 325-424. 21 “Hie miisste man wahrlich auch den Fuckern und der geistlichen Gesellschaft einen Zaum ins Maul legen” (quoted by Ehrenberg, of. cit., VOLS) pr dI7m) 3 22 See pp. 114-15. 23ZLuther, Wider die riduberischen und morderischen Rotten der Bauern (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, pp. 357-61. 24 Latimer, Sermons; Ponet, An Exhortation, or rather a Warning, to the Lords and Commons; Crowley, The Way to Wealth, and Epigrams (in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S., 1872) ; Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 1895); Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 1553; Sandys, 2nd, roth, t1th, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 1841); Jewel, Works, pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker So- ciety, 1850). Citations from less well-known writers and preachers will be found in J. O. W. Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, 1844. 25 Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. xvi, no. 357. 26 Bossuet, Traité de l’Usure. For an account of his views, see Favre, Le prét a intérét dans lancienne France. 27 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England with the Mis- chiefs attending it, 1673, 28 For an account of these changes see K. Lamprecht, Zum Verstand- niss der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14. sum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirth- schaftsgeschichte, Bd. i, 1893, pp. I9I seqq. 29 Lamprecht, of. cit., and J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Ref- ormation, 1909, pp. 40-73. 80 Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 20-39, and Steitden op. cit, (see note 2), pp. 156-212. 81 For the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund see Chap. I, note 24, and for the Peasants’ Articles, ibid., note 108. 82 For Geiler von Kaiserberg and Hipler see Schapiro, of. cit., pp. 30, 126-31. For Hutten see H. Wiskemann, Dartstellung der in Deutsch- land zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden Nationaldkonomischen Ansichten, 1861, pp. 13-24. NOTES-ON CHAPTER II 305 33 Quoted W. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century, 1910, p. 28. 84 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 1912, pp.. 44-52. 35 Schapiro, op. cit., p. 137. 86 See citations in Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 47-8, and, for a discussion of Luther’s social theory, Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, 1912, pp. 549-93. 87 Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (1520), in Werke, vol. vi, pp. 381 seqq. 88 Schapiro, op. cit., p. 139. 89 Luther, Ermahnung sum Frieden auf die swilf Artikel der Bauer- schaft in Schwaben (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, p. 327. 40 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, p. 205. 41 An den christlichen Adel, in ibid., vol. vi, p. 466 (quoted by R. H. Murray, Erasmus and Luther, 1920, p. 239). 42 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 293-4, 312. 43 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, Luther’s Primary Works, 1896, pp. 256-7. 44 Grosser Sermon vom Wucher, in Werke, vol. vi, p. 49. 45 See note 73 on Chapter I. 46 Printed in Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Beilage F, pp. 618-109. 47 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, op. cit., pp. 258-9. 48 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in Werke, vol. xv, p. 302. 49 Zwingli, Von der gottlichen und menschlichen Gerechtigkeit, oder von dem gottlichen Gesetze und den biirgerlichen Gesetzen, printed in R. Christoffel, H. Zwingli, Leben und ausgewahlte Schriften, 1857, pt. ii, pp. 313 seqg. See also Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 71-4. 50“Quid si igitur ex negociatione plus lucri percipi possit quam ex fundi cuiusvis proventu? Unde vero mercatoris lucrum? Ex ipsius inquies, diligentia et industria” (quoted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirche, p. 707). 51 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 52 Roger. Fenton, 4 Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 61. 53 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by J. Allen, 1838, WOlsii pr tA7e bk. 111, ch. xxili, par..7). 54 [bid., vol. ii, pp. 128-9 (bk. ili, ch. xxi, par. 7). 55 Gerrard Winstanley, 4 New-Yeer’s Gift for the Parliament and Armie, 1650 (Thomason Tracts, Brit. Mus., E. 587 [6], p. 42). 56 The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, pt. i, TORT De 213: 57 De Subventione Pauperum. 58 “Quod ad maiores natu spectat, a nobis quotannis repetitur inspectio cuiusque familie. Distribuimus inter nos urbis regiones, ut ordine singulas decurias executere liceat. Adest ministro comes unus ex senioribus. Illic novi incole examinantur. Qui semel recepti sunt, omittuntur; nisi quod requiritur sitne domus pacata et recte composita, num lites cum vicinis, num qua ebrietas, num pigri sint et ignari ad conciones frequentendas” (quoted by Wiskemann, of. cit., p. 80n.). For his condemnation of indiscriminate alms-giving, see zbid., p. 79 n. 306 NOTES 59 De non habendo Pauperum Delectu (1523), and De Erogatione Eleemosynarum (1524). See K. R. Hagenbach, Johann Oekolampad und Oswald Myconius, die Reformatoren Basels, 1859, p. 46. 60 Carl Pestallozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, Leben wnd ausgewahlie Schriften, 1858, pp. 50-1, 122-5, 340-2. 61 Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 70-4. 62 Quoted by Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, 1921, p. 174. 63 Calvin, Inst., bk. iv, ch. xii, par. 1. 64 Printed in Paul Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins, vol. ii, 1838, Appx., pp. 26-41. 65 R. Christoffel, Zwingli, or the Rise of the Reformation in Switzer- land, trans. by John Cochran, 1858, pp. 159-60. 66 Printed in Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, Appx., pp. 23-5. 67 E, Choisy, L’Etat Chrétien Calviniste & Genéve au temps de Théo- dore de Béze, 1902, p. 145. I should like to make acknowledgments to this excellent book for most of the matter contained in the following paragraphs. 68 Paul Henry, op. cit., pp. 70-5. Other examples are given by Pre- served Smith, op. cit., pp. 170-4, and by F. W. Kampschulte, Johann Calvin, seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf, 1869. Statistical esti- mates of the bloodthirstiness of Calvin’s régime vary; Smith (p. 171) states that in Geneva, a town of 16,000 inhabitants, 58 persons were executed and 76 banished in the years 1542-6. 69 Knox, quoted by Preserved Smith, op. cit., p. 174. 70 Calvin, Jnst., bk. iii, ch. vii, par. 5. 71 Choisy, op. cit., pp. 442-3. 72 Ibid., pp. 35-37. 73 Tbid., pp. 189, 117-19. 74 Ibid., pp. 35, 165-7. 75 [bid., pp. 119-21. 76 Ibid., pp. 189-94. 17 Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 70n. 78 See the description ae the Giech given in Calvin, Inst., bk. iv, ch. i, par. 4: “Quia nunc de ecclesia visibili disserere propositum est, discamus vel matris elogio, quam utilis sit nobis eius cognitio, immo necessaria, quando non alius est in vitam ingressus nisi nos ipsa concipiat in utero, nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique sub custodia et guber- -natione sua nos tueatur, donec excuti carne mortali, similes erimus angelis. Neque enim patitur nostra infirmitas a schola nos dimitti, donec toto vite cursu discipuli fuerimus. Adde quod extra eius gremium nulla est speranda peccatorum remissio nec ulla salus.” 79 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata: Or the Acts, Decisions, Decrees and Canons of those famous National Councils of the Reformed Churches in France, 1692, vol. i, p. 99. 80 [bid., vol. i, p. 9 (pirates and ny Bocce tradesmen), pp. 25, 34, 38, 79, 140, 149 (interest and usury), p. 70 (false merchandize and selling of stretched cloth), p. 99 (reasonable profits), pp. 162, 204 (investment of money for the benefit of the poor), pp. 194, 213 (lotteries). NOTES ON CHAPTER II 307 81 The Buke of Discipline, in Works of John Knox, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 1848, p. 227. 82 Scottish History Soc., St. Andrews Kirk Session Register, ed. D. H. Fleming, 1889-90, vol. i, p. 309; vol. ii, p. 822. 83 W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1890, vol. i, p. 11. The words are Governor Bradford’s. 84 Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,’ 1630-49, ed. J. K. Hosmer, 1908, vol. i, pp. 134, 325; vol. ii, p. 20. ; 85 Weeden, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 125, 58. 86 Winthrop, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 20. 87 J. A. Doyle, The English in America, vol. ii, 1887, p. 57; the price of cattle “must not be judged by urgent necessity, but by reasonable profit.” 88 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644, chap. lv. 89 Winthrop, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 315-18. A similar set of rules as to the conduct of the Christian in trade are given by Bunyan in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1905 ed., pp. 118-22. 90 T owe this phrase to the excellent book of J. T. Adams, The Found- ang of New England. CHAPTER III 1J. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglie (ed. T. Hearne). 2.4 Hen; VI, c:-10;°6 Hens VEIL cise 7 Hens V IN crs 25 eee VIII, c. 13. For the Commission of 1517 see Leadam, The Domesday of Enclosures. 3 For examples see J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reforma- tion, pp. 60-1, 65, 67, 70-1. 4More, Utopia, p. 32 (Pitt Press ed., 1879): “Noblemen and gentle- men, yea and certeyne abbottes, holy men no doubt . . . leave no grounde for tillage, thei enclose al into pastures.” For a case of claiming a bondman see Selden Society, vol. xvi, 1903, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, pp. cxxiii-cxxix, 118-29 (Carter uv, the Abbott of Malmesbury) ; for conversion of copyholds to tenancies at will, Selden Society, vol. xii, 1898, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. lix-Ixv, 64-101 (Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot’s Ripton v. St. John; the change was alleged to have been made in 1471). 5A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradoff, vol. i, 1909, p. 100), estimates the net temporal income of English monasteries in 1535 at £109,736, and the net income from all sources at £136,361. These figures require to be multiplied by at least 12 to convert them into terms of modern money. An estimate of the capital value which they represent can only be a guess, but it can hardly have been less (in terms of modern money) than £20,000,000. ; 6 For the status and payments of grantees, see the figures of Savine, printed in H. A. L. Fisher, The Political History of England, 1485-1547, Appx. ii: the low price paid by peers is particularly striking. The best study is that of S. B. Liljegren, The Fall of the Monasteries and the Social Changes in England leading up to the Great Revolution (1924), which shows in detail (pp. 118-25) the activities of speculators. 7 Star Chamber Proc., Hen. VIII, vol. vi, no. 181, printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, pp. 19-29. 8 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. lviii-lxix, 198-200. ® Quoted by F. A. Gasquet, Henry the Eighth and the English Monas- teries, 1920, pp. 227-8. 10 See, e.g., The Obedience of a Christian Man (in Tyndale’s Doc- trinal Treatises, Parker Society, 1848), p. 231, where the treatment of the poor by the early Church is cited as an example; and Policies to reduce this Realme of Englande unto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate, 1549 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. ili, pp. 311-45): “Like as we suffered our selfes to be ignorant of the trewe worshipping of God, even so God kepte from us the right knowl- edge how to reforme those inconveniences which we did see before our eyes to tende unto the utter Desolation of the Realme. But now the 308 NOTES ON CHAPTER III 309 the trew worshepping of Gode is . . . so purely and sincerely sett forthe, it is likewise to be trusted that God... will use the kinges maiestie and your grace to be also his ministres in plucking up by the roots all the cawses and occasions of this foresaid Decaye and Desolation.” 11 Bucer, De Regno Christi. 12 A, F, Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, 1915, p. 331. He goes on: “The contrasts between one grammar school to every 5,625 people, and that presented by the Schools Inquiry Report in 1864 of one to every 23,750 people .. . is not to the disadvantage of our pre-Refor- mation ancestors.” For details of the Edwardian spoliation, see the same author’s English Schools at the Reformation, 1546-8 (1806). 13 See Acts of the Privy Council, vol. ii, pp. 193-5 (1548) ; in response to protests from the members for Lynn and Coventry, the gild lands of those cities are regranted to them. 14 Crowley, The Way to Wealth, in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper (Early English Text Society, 1872, pp. 129-150). 15 Crowley, op. cit., and Epigrams (in ibid., pp. 1-51). 16 Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 1553: “They abhore the names of Monkes, Friers, Chanons, Nonnes, etc., but their goodes they gredely gripe. And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a reson- able price, norished scholes, brought up youth in good letters, they do none of all these thynges.” 17'Thomas Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 1895), p. 32. The same charge is repeated in subsequent sermons. 18, W. Russell, Keti’s Rebellion in Norfolk, 1859, p. 202. For Somerset’s policy and the revolt of the gentry against it, see Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Stxteenth Century, pp. 365-70. 19 Latimer, Seven Sermons before Edward VI (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 1895), pp. 84-6. 20 Pleasure and Pain, in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper, p. 116. 21 The Way to Wealth, in tbid., p. 132. 22 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. 23 4 Prayer for Landlords, from A Book of Private Prayer set forth by Order of King Edward VI, 24 Bacon, Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain. 25 For a discussion of the problem of credit as it affected the peasant and small master, see my introduction to Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 1925, PP. 17-30. 26 See note 71 on Chapter I. 27 D’Ewes, Journals, 1682, p. 173. 28 Calendar S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi, nos. I9, 20. 29 For examples see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv. The best account of parish business and organization is given by S. L. Ware, The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects, 1908. 80 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. See also Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. xviii. 81,4 Godlie Treatise concerning the Lawful Use of Riches, a trans- lation by Thos. Rogers from the Latin of Nicholas Heming, 1578, p. 8 310 NOTES 82 Sandys, 2nd, 1oth, 11th, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 1841) ; Jewel, Works, pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850); Thos. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, 1572; Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie, 1595; John Blaxton, The English Usurer, or Usury Condemned by the Most Learned and Famous Divines of the Church of England, 1634. 33 Heming, op. cit., pp. 16-17. 84 Roger Fenton, 4 Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 59. 85 Wilson, op. cit., 1925 ed., p. 281. 36 Miles Mosse, op, cit. 87S. P.D, Eliz., vol. Ixxv, no. 54. (Printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iti, pp. 359-70). 38 Heming, op. cit., p. II. 39 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 1901. 40 Quoted by Maitland, op. cit., pp. 49-50. 41 Wilson, op. cit. 42 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 1660, bk. iii, ch. iii, par. 30. 43 Mosse, op. cit., Dedication, p. 6. 44. Cardwell, Synodalia, 1842, p. 436. 45 Cardwell, The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws, 1850, pp. 206, 323. 46 The Remains of Archbishop Grindal, ed. Wm. Nicholson (Parker Soc., 1843), p. 143. 47 See, e.g., W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 1924, vol. iii, p. 180 (Archdeacon Mullins’ Articles for the Archdeaconry of London (1585): “Item, whether you do know that within your parish there is (or are) any person or persons notoriously known or suspected by probable tokens or common fame to be an usurer; or doth offend by any colour or means directly or indirectly in the same”), and pp. 184, 233; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv, pp. 319, 337, 416. 48 Cardwell, Synodalia, vol. i, pp. 144, 308; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv, p. 500. 49 Ware, op. cit. (see note 29 above), quotes several examples. See also Arche@ologia Cantiana, vol. xxv, 1902, pp. 27, 48 (Visitations of the Archdeacon of Canterbury). 50 Hist. MSS. Com., 13th Report, 1892, Appx., pt. iv, pp. 333-4 (MSS. of the Borough of Hereford). 51 W. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 1847, p. 166. 52 Yorkshire Arch. Journal, vol. xviii, 1895, p. 331. 53 Commissary of London Correction Books, 1618-1625 (H. 184, pp. 164, 192). I am indebted to Mr. Fincham of Somerset House (where the books are kept) for kindly calling my attention to these cases. The shorter of them (p. 192) runs as follows: Ranceneeentoni Detected for an usurer that taketh above the rate of x/i in the 100! and above the rate of 2s. extra Aldersgate : ’ Thomas Witham in the pound for money by him lent for a yeare, or more than after that rate for a lesse tyme ex fama prout in rotula. Quo die comparuit, etc. at the signe of the Unicorne NOTES ON CHAPTER III 311 gmo Maii 1620 coram domino officiali principali etc. et in eius camera etc. comparuit dictus Witham et ei objecto ut supra allegavit that he is seldom at home himselfe but leaves his man to deale in the business of his shop, and yf any fault be committed he saith the fault is in his man and not in himselfe, and he sayeth he will give charge and take care that no oppression shall be made nor offence committed this way hereafter, humbly praying the judge for favour to be dismissed, unde dominus monuit eum that thereafter neither by himselfe nor his servant he offende in the lyke nor suffer any such oppression to be committed, et cum hac monitione eum dimisit. 54.9 PD. Eliz., vol. ixxv, no. 54. 55 For an account of these expedients see my introduction to Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 123-8. 56 Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy, bk. viii, chap. i, par: 5. 57 Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xxvii, 1597, p. 129. 58 The Stiffkey Papers (ed. H. W. Saunders, Royal Historical Society, Camden Third Series, vol. xxvi, 1915), p. 140. 59 Quoted by E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, 1900, p. 148. 60 For an account of the treatment of exchange business under Eliza- beth, see Wilson, of. cit., Introduction, pp. 146-54. 81 For references see ibid., pp. 164-5; and Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593-1609, ed. W. P. Baildon, 1804, pp. 235-7. The latter book contains several instances of intervention by the Star Cham- ber in cases of engrossing of corn (pp. 71, 76-7, 78-9, 91) and of en- closure and depopulation (pp. 49-52, 164-5, 192-3, 247, 346-7). 82 4 Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed. E. Lamond, 1893, p. 14. 63 The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. i, 1847, p. 6. 64 Thid., p. 64. 85 Tbid., pp. 80, 138. 66 Tbid., p. 167. 87 [bid., pp. 28-0. 68 Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 166-7. For the activity of the Government from 1629 to 1640, see Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 391, and E. M. Leonard, The Inclosure of Common Fields in the Seventeenth Century, in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., N.S., vol. xix, pp. I01 seqq. 69 Letter to Dr. Gilbert Sheldon, Warden of All Souls (in Laud’s Works, vol. vi, pt. ii, p. 520): “One thing more I must tell you, that, though I did you this favour, to make stay of the hearing till your return, yet for the business itself, I can show you none; partly because I am a great hater of depopulations in any kind, as being one of the greatest mischiefs in this kingdom, and of very ill example from a college, or college tenant”; Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. i, par. 204. 70 $.P.D. Chas. I, vol. ceccexcix, no. 10 (printed in Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 420-1); and Lords’ Journals, vol. vi, p. 468b (March 13, 1643-4), Articles against Laud: “Then Mr. Talbot upon oath deposed how the Archbishop did oppose 302 NOTES the law in the business of inclosures and depopulations; how, when the law was desired to be pleaded for the right of land, he bid them ‘Go plead law in inferior Courts, they should not plead it before him’; and that the Archbishop did fine him for that business two hundred pounds for using the property of his freehold, and would not suffer the law to be pleaded.” 71 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 150-64; Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen- turies, 1904, pp. 142-7. 72 R, R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North, 1921, pp. 412, 413 n. 73 Camden Soc., N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, p. 46. For another case of engrossing of corn, see ibid., pp. 82-9. 74 Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace, in Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 551-4; Leonard, op. cit., p. 157. 7 The Works of William Laud, ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, 1857, pt. i, p. 191. (Answer to Lord Save and Sele’s speech upon the Bill about Bishops’ Powers in Civil Affairs and Courts of Judicature.) 76 Ibid., vol. i, pp. 5-6. 77 Harrington, Works, 1700 ed., pp. 69 (Oceana) and 388-9 (The Art of Law-giving). 78 G. Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 1622. The same simile had been used much earlier in A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed. E. Lamond, p. 98. 79 D’Ewes, Journals, p. 674; and 39 Eliz., c. 2. 80 For criticisms of price control see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 339-41, and vol. ii, p. 188, and Stiffkey Papers (see note 58 above), pp. 130-40. 81H. Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. ii, 1827, letter clxxxii, and J. W. Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 1839, VOI; si, Dp. 343. 82 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 249. 83 Commons’ Journals, May 21, 1604, vol. i, p. 218. 8413 Eliz. c. 8, repealing 5 and 6 Ed. VI, c. 20; D’Ewes, Journals, pp. I7I-4. 85 Qwen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 1825, vol. ii, pp. 304n., 412. 86 Hist. MSS. Com., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 1901, p. 46 (MSS. of Corporation of Burford). 87 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 233. 88 Coke, Institutes, pt. ii, 1797, pp. 601 seqqg. (Certain articles of abuses which are desired to be reformed in granting of prohibitions, exhibited by Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury.) 89 Thomas Ridley, A View of the Civile and Ecclesiastical Law, and wherein the Practice of them is streitened and may be relieved within this Land, 1607, Dedication, p. 3. 80 W. Huntley, A Breviate of the Prelates’ intolerable Usurpation, 1637, pp. 183-4. The case referred to is that of Hinde, alleged to have been heard Mich, 18 and 19 Eliz. For the controversy over prohibitions, see NOTES ON CHAPTER III 313 R. G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the.High Commission, 1913, pp. 180 seqq. 91 D’Ewes, Journals, pp. 171, 173. 92 See, e.g., Surtees Society, vol. xxxiv, 1858, The Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham, Preface, which shows that between 1626 and 1639 cases of contempt of the ordinary ecclesiasti- cal jurisdiction ran into hundreds. 93 Penn, No Cross, No Crown, pt. i, ch. xii, par. 8. 94 Sanderson, De Obligatione Conscientie, 1666; Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, 1650, chap. iii, sect. iii (Of Negotiation or Civil Contracts, Rules and Measures of Justice in Bargaining). 95 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 1924, pp. 193, 194. Similar sentiments with regard to the necessity of poverty were expressed later by the Rev. J. Townsend, in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1785), and by Patrick Colquhoun in his Treatise on the Wealth and Resources of the British Empire (1814). Like Mandeville, both these writers argue that poverty is essential to the prosperity, and, indeed, to the very existence, of civilization. For a full collection of citations to the same effect from eighteenth-century writers, see E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. iv-vi. 96 The Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar Way for the Use of All, 1658. CHAPTER IV 1 Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to Trade, 1750, p. 33. The best account of Tucker, most of whose works are scarce, is given by W. E. Clark, Josiah Tucker, Economist (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University, vol. xix, 1903-5). 2 Reliquie Baxteriane: or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the most memorable Passages of his Life and Times, 1696, p. 5. 3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 4The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of New~ castle (Everyman ed., 1915, p. 153). 5 Baxter, op. cit., p. 31. 6 Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress. 7 Baxter, op. cit., p. 80. 8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, 1884 ed., p. 122. 9 Quoted S. Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii, 1823, p. 314. 10R, G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, vol. i, 1910, pp. 249-50. 11 Baxter, op. cit., p. 30. 12 An orderly and plaine Narration of the Beginnings and Causes of this Warre, 1644, p. 4 (Brit. Mus., Thomason Tracts, E. 54 [3]). I owe this reference to the kindness of Father Paschal Larkin. 13 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. vi, par. 271. 14 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1670, Preface, p. xxxix. 15 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, 1827 ed., vol. iii, p. IOI. 16D, C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, 1886, vol. i, pp. 20-1. In 1640 the Root and Branch Petition included, among the evils due to the Bishops, “the discouragement and destruction of all good subjects, of whom are multitudes, both clothiers, merchants and others, who, being deprived of their ministers, and overburthened with these pressures, have departed the kingdom to Holland and other parts, and have drawn with them a great manufacture of cloth and trading out of the land into other places where they reside, whereby wool, the great staple of the kingdom, is become of small value, and vends not, trading is decayed, many poor people want work, seamen lose employment, and the whole land is much impoverished” (S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 [1889], p. 73). For in- stances of the comparatively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under Elizabeth, see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, section vi, nos. 3, 4, II (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt. i, pp. 79-84. 17 Toryism and Trade can never agree, 1713, p. 12. The tract is 314 NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 315 wrongly ascribed to Davenant by’ H. Levy, Economic Liberalism, 1913, p. 12. 18 See, e¢.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le régne de Louis XIV, 1899, chap. xvii, where the reports of several intendants are quoted; and Levasseur, Histoire du commerce de la France, 1911, vol. i, p. 421. 19.4 Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the Country about the Odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 20. 20 Sir Wm. Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, chap. v, vi. 21 The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland, i702, pt. i, chap. xiv. 22 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp. 25-6. 23 The Present Interest of England stated, by a Lover of his King and Country, 1671. I am indebted to Mr. A. P. Wadsworth for calling my attention to the passage quoted in the text. The same point is put more specifically by Lawrence Braddon: “The superstition of their re- ligion obligeth France to keep (at least) fifty Holy days more than we are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work is done is one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the deluded people” (Abstract of the Draft of a Bill for relieving, reforming and employing the Poor, 1717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry into Occasional Con- formity, 1702, pp. 18-19: “We wonder, gentlemen, you will accept our money on your deficient funds, our stocks to help carry on your wars, our loans and credits to your victualling office and navy office. If you would go on to distinguish us, get a law made we shall buy no lands, that we may not be freeholders; and see if you could find money to buy us out. Transplant us into towns and bodies, and let us trade by our selves; let us card, spin, knit, weave and work with and for one another, and see how you'll maintain your own poor without us. Let us fraight our ships apart, keep our money out of your Bank, accept none of our bills, and separate your selves as absolutely from us in civil matters, as we do from you in religious, and see how you can go on without us.” 24 Swift, Examiner. 25 Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, 1753, p. 21. 26 Reliquie Baxteriane (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: “The gen- erality of the Master Workmen [i.e., employers] lived but a little better than their journeymen (from pond to mouth) but only that they laboured not altogether so hard.” 27 Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, no. x, and Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, xix, 27, and xx, 22. See also the remarks to the same effect in D’Argenson, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France, 1765. 28 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673. 29 Marston, Eastward Ho!, act I, sc. i. 30 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. 1, par. 163. 31 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23 82 Max- Weber, Die protestantische Bihik und der Geist dest Kapi- talismus, first published in the Archiv fiir Sosialz vissenschaft und Sozial- politik Statistik, vols. xx, xxi, and since reprinted in vol. i of his 316 NOTES Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Religionssoziologie, 1920; Troeltsch, Die Soztallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress, 1912; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Fret- handel, 1906; Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 1914, chap. v. Weber’s essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany. Its main thesis—that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of pre- ponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favor- able to the growth of capitalist enterprise—appears to be accepted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, pp. 704 seqq. It is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfdnge des mo- dernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57), who dissents from many of Weber’s conclusions. Weber’s essay is certainly one of the most fruit- ful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it, in particular with reference to its discussion of the economic applica- tion given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by the word “calling.” At the same time, there are several points on which Weber’s arguments appear to me to be one-sided and overstrained, and on which Brentano’s criticisms of it seem to me to be sound. Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable in an essay dealing with economic and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and social organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to moral and intellectual influences developments which have their principal expiana- tion in another region altogether. There was plenty of the “capitalist spirit” in fifteenth-century Venice and Florence, or in south Germany and Flanders, for the simple reason that these areas were the greatest commercial and financial centers of the age, though all were, at least nominally, Catholic. The development of capitalism in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the results which flowed from them. Of course material and psychological changes went together, and of course the second reacted on the first. But it seems a little artificial to talk as though capitalist enterprise could not appear till religious changes had produced a capitalist spirit. It would be equally true, and equally one-sided, to say that the religious changes were purely the result of economic movements. (ii) Weber ignores, or at least touches too lightly on, intellectual movements, which were favorable to the growth of business enterprise and to an individualist attitude towards economic relations, but which had little to do with religion. The political thought of the Renaissance was one; as Brentano points out, Machiavelli was at least as powerful a solvent of traditional ethical restraints as Calvin. The speculations of business men and economists on money, prices and the foreign ex- changes were a second. Both contributed to the temper of single- minded concentration on pecuniary gain, which Weber understands by the capitalist spirit. (111) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself. In the NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 317 first place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the seven- teenth century the conception of social ethics held by Calvin and his immediate followers. In the second place, he speaks as though all English Puritans in the seventeenth century held much the same view of social duties and expediency. Both suggestions are misleading. On the one hand, the Calvinists of the sixteenth century (including English Puritans) were believers in a rigorous discipline, and the individualism ascribed not unjustly to the Puritan movement in its later phases would have horrified them. The really significant question is that of the causes of the change from the one standpoint to the other, a question which Weber appears to ignore. On the other hand, there were within seven- teenth-century Puritanism a variety of elements, which held widely dif- ferent views as to social policy. As Cromwell discovered, there was no formula which would gather Puritan aristocrats and Levellers, land- owners and Diggers, merchants and artisans, buff-coat and his general, into the fold of a single social theory. The issue between divergent doctrines was fought out within the Puritan movement itself. Some won; others lost. Both “the capitalist spirit” and “Protestant ethics,” therefore, were a good deal more complex than Weber seems to imply. What is true and valuable in his essay is his insistence that the commercial classes in seventeenth-century England were the standard-bearers of a par- ticular conception of social expediency, which was markedly different from that of the more conservative elements in society—the peasants, the craftsmen, and many landed gentry—and that that conception found expression in religion, in politics, and, not least, in social and economic conduct and policy. 83 Cunningham, The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money and the Use of Wealth, 1900, p. 25. 34 Knox, The Buke of Discipline, in Works, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 1848, pp. 183 seqg.; Thos. Cartwright, A Directory of Church Govern- ment (printed in D. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1822, vol. v, Appx. iv); W. Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Dis- cipline, 1574; J. Udall, A Demonstration of the Trueth of that Discipline which Christe hath prescribed in his Worde for the Government of his Church, 1589; Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings published and practised within this Iland of Brytaine under Pretence of Reforma- tion and for the Presbyteriall Discipline, 1593 (part reprinted in R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, as illustrated by the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1905). 35 Cartwright, op. cit. 36 Usher, op. cit., p. I. 87 Ibid., pp. 14-15, for Bancroft’s account of the procedure. 88 Quoted from Baillie’s Letters by W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 1900, vol. i, p. 128. ; 89 Shaw, op. cit., vol. ii, chap. iii (The Presbyterian System, 1646-60). For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline, see Chetham So- ciety, vols. xx, xxii, xxiv, Minutes of the Manchester Classis, and vols. xxxvi, xli, Minutes of the Bury Classis. 318 NOTES 40 See Chap. III, p. 142. 41 Pyritan Manifestoes, p. 120, quoted by H. G. Wood, The Influence of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property, in Prop- erty, its Rights and Duties, 1913, p. 142. Mr. Wood’s essay contains an excellent discussion of the whole subject, and I should like here to acknowledge my obligations to it. For the views of Knewstub, Smith, and Baro, see the quotations from them printed by Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, 1844, pp. 237-40, 243-6. It should be noted that Baro, while condemning those who, “sitting idle at home, make merchandise only of their money, by giving it out in this sort to needy persons... without having any regard of his commodity to whome they give it, but only of their own gain,” nevertheless admitted that interest was not always to be condemned. See also Thos. Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge, ed. M. Prickett and T. Wright, 1840, pp. 275-6, 288-9, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Com- merce, Modern Times, 1921 ed., pt. i, pp. 157-8. 42 New Shakespeare Society, Series vi, no. 6, 1877-9, Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed. F. J. Furnivall, pp. 115-16. 43 W. Ames, De Conscientia et eius iure vel casibus libri quinque, bk. v, chaps. xliii, xliv. Ames (1576-1633) was educated at Christ’s Col- lege, Cambridge, tried to settle at Colchester, but was forbidden to preach by the Bishop of London, went to Leyden about 1610, was appointed to the theological chair at Franeker in 1622, where he re- mained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam. 44 F.g., Stubbes, op. cit.; Richard Capel, Temptations, their Nature, Danger, Cure, 1633; John Moore, The Crying Sin of England of not caring for the Poor; wherein Inclosure, vig. such as doth unpeople Townes, and uncorn Fields, is arraigned, convicted and condemned, 1653. 45J. O. Halliwell, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1845, vol. i, pp. 206-10, 322, 354; vol. ii, pp. 96, 153-4. 46 Usher, op. cit. (see note 34 above), pp. 32, 53, 70, 99-100. 47 Sept. 26, 1645, it is resolved “that it shall be in the power of the eldership to suspend from the sacrament of the Lord’s supper any person that shall be legally attainted of Barratry, Forgery, Extortion, Perjury, or Bribery” (Commons’ Journals, vol. iv, p. 290). 48 Chetham Society, Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, 1647-57, pt. i, pp. 32-3. The Cambridge classis (ibid., pt. ii, pp. 196-7) decided in 1657 that the ordinance of Parliament of August 29, 1648 should be taken as the rule of the classis in the matter of scandal. The various scandals mentioned in the ordinance included extortion, and the classis decided that “no person lawfully convict of any of the fore- said scandalls bee admitted to the Lord’s supper without signification of sincere repentance,” but it appears (p. 198) to have been mainly inter- ested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers. 49 Hist. MSS. Comm., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, IQOI, p. 132. 50 Quoted by F. J. Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baster,. 1924, p. 92. 51 Selections from those parts of The Christian Directory which bear on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawney, Chapters from Richard a ee, i NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 31gs Baxter's Christian Directory, 1925, in which most of the passages quoted in the text will be found. 52 Reliquie Baxteriane (see note 2), p. I. 53 Jife and Death of Mr. Badman (Cambridge English Classics, 1905), pp. 116-25, where Bunyan discusses at length the ethics of prices. 54 Carlyle, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Letter ii. 55 See on these points Weber, op. cit. (note 32 above), p. 94, whose main conclusions I paraphrase. 56 Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1692 ed.), p. xvii. 57 See, e.g., Thos. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, Preface, 1925 ed., p. 178: “There bee two sortes of men that are alwayes to bee looked upon very narrowly, the one is the dissemblinge gospeller, and the other is the wilfull and indurate papiste. The first under colour of religion overthroweth all religion, and bearing good men in hande that he loveth playnesse, useth covertelie all deceypte that maye bee, and for pryvate gayne undoeth the common welfare of man. And touching thys sinne of usurie, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these counterfeite professours of thys pure religion.” 58 Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, pp. 60-1. 59 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673. 60S. Richardson, The Cause of the Poor Pleaded, 1653, Thomason Tracts, E. 703 (9), p. 14. For other references, see note 72 below. For extortionate prices, see Thomason Tracts, E. 399 (6), The Worth of a Penny, or a Caution to keep Money, 1647. I am indebted for this and subsequent references to the Thomason Tracts to Miss P. James. 61 Hooker, Preface to The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman ed., 1907, vol. i, p. 128. 62 Wilson, op. cit., p. 250. 63 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his Widow Lucy, Everyman ed., 1908, pp. 64-5. 64 See the references given in note 66. 65 The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Despatches, by William Knowler, D.D., 1739, vol. ii, p. 138. 66 No attempt has been made in the text to do more than refer to the points on which the economic interests and outlook of the commercial and propertied classes brought them into collision with the monarchy, and only the most obvious sources of information are mentioned here. For patents and monopolies, including the hated soap monopoly, see G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908, chap. xvii, and W. Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly, 1906, chap. xi, and passim. For the control of exchange business, Cambium Regis, or the Office of his Majesties Exchange Royall, declaring and justifying hs Majesties Right and the Convenience thereof, 1628, and Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, 1819, vol. iv, pp. 201-10. For the punishment of specu- lation by the Star Chamber, and for projects of public granaries, Camden Society, N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, pp. 43 seqq., 82 seqq., and N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 1915, pp. 246-50. For the control of the textile industry and the reaction against it, H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 320 NOTES 1920, chaps. iv, vii; Kate E. Barford, The West of England Cloth In- dustry: A seventeenth-century Experiment in State Control, in the Wilt- shire Archeological and Natural History Magazine, Dec., 1924, pp. 531- 42; R. R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North, 1921, pt. iv, chap. ii; Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 263-8. For the interven- tion of the Privy Council to raise the wages of textile workers and to protect craftsmen, Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace, in the Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirth- schaftsgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 307-37, 533-64; Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 160-3; Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 268-9; and Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904, pp. 142-7. For the Depopu- lation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 301. For the squeezing of money from the East India Company and the infringement of its Charter, Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the XV IIth Century, 1923, pp. 60-73. For the colonial interests of Puritan members, A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, 1914, and C. E. Wade, John Pym, IQI2, 67 RF, Laspeyres, Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederlander und ihrer Litteratur sur Zeit der Republik, 1863, pp. 256-70. An idea of the points at issue can be gathered from the ex- haustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasius, De Modo Usurarum, 1639. 68 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, vol. i, p. 99. 69 I‘or the change of sentiment in America, see Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writ- ings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence of Capi- talism, 1915, pp. 116-21. 70 Rev. Robert Woodrow (quoted by Sombart, op. cit., p. 149). 71 John Cooke, Unum Necessarium or the Poore Man’s Case (1648), which contains a plea for the regulation of prices and the establishment of Monts de Piété. 72 For the scandal caused to the Protestant religion by its alleged condonation of covetousness, see T. Watson, 4 Plea for Alms, 1658 (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), pp. 21, 33-4: “The Church of Rome layes upon us this aspersion that we are against good workes ... I am sorry that any who go for honest men should be brought into the indightment ; I mean that any professors should be impeached as guilty of this sinne of covetousnesse and unmercifulnesse ... I tell you these devout misers are the reproach of Christianity ...I may say of penurious votaries, they have the wings of profession by which they. seem to fly to heaven, but the feet of beasts, walking on the earth and even licking the dust... Oh, take heed, that, seeing your religion will not destroy your covetous- nesse, at last your covetousnesse does not destroy your religion.” See also Sir Balthazar Gerbier, A New Year’s Result in favour of the Poore, 1651 (Thomason Tracts, E. 651 [14]), p. 4: “If the Papists did rely as much on faith as the reformed professors of the Gospel (according to our English tenets) doe, or that the reformed professors did so much practice charity as the Papists doe?” 73S. Richardson, op. cit. (see note 60 above), pp. 7-8, 10. NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 321 74 The first person to emphasize the way in which the idea of a “calling” was used as an argument for the economic virtues was Weber (see note 32 above), to whose conclusions I am largely indebted for the following paragraphs. 7 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 76 Richard Steele, The Tradesman’s Calling, being a Discourse con- cerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in general, 1684, pp. I, 4. 7 Ibid., pp. 21-2. 78 Ibid., p. 35. 79 Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed., vol. i, p. 336b. 80 Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit., p. 96n.). 81 Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p. 168n.). 82 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, p. IIIa. 83 Steele, op. cit., p. 20. 84 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 378b, 108); vol. iv, p. 253a. 85 Navigation Spiritualized: or a New Compass for Seamen, consisting of xxxu Points: Pleasant Observations of ~ Profitable Applications and Serious Reflections. All concluded with so many spiritual poems. Whereunto is now added, i. A sober conversation of the sin of drunkenness. ii. The Harlot’s face in the scripture-glass, etc. Being an essay towards their much desired Reformation from the hor- rible and detestable sins of Drunkenness, Swearing, Uncleanness, Forget- fulness of Mercies, Violation of Promises, and Atheistical Contempt of Death. 1682. The author of this cheerful work was a Devonshire minister, John Flavell, who also wrote Husbandry Spiritualized, or the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things, 1669. In him, as in Steele, the Chadband touch is unmistakable. The Religious Weaver, apparently by one Fawcett, I have not been able to trace. 86 Steele, op. cit. (see note 76 above). 87 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 88 David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth’s, 1602. 89 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 1690, ed. by Professor John H. Hollander (4A Reprint of Economic Tracts, Series ii, no. 1). 90 The words of a member of the Long Parliament, quoted by C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell, 1902, p. 313. 1 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1827 ed., vol. ii, p. 235: “The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this argu- ment [ie., the advantages of war], and shortly after to discourse ‘of the infinite benefit that would accrue from a barefaced war against the Dutch, how easily they might be subdued and the trade carried by the English.’” According to Clarendon, who despised the merchants and 322 NOTES hated the whole business, it was almost a classical example of a com- mercial war, carefully stage-managed in all its details, from the director- ship which the Royal African Company gave to the Duke of York down to the inevitable “incident” with which hostilities began. 92 [bid., vol. ili, pp. 7-9. 93 Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, 1691, Preface. 94 Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface. 95 Chamberlayne, Anglie Notitia (quoted P. E. Dove, Account of Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p. 82n.). 96 Roger North, The Lives of the Norths (1826 ed.), vol. iii, p. 103; T. Watson, A Plea for Alms (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), p. 33; Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 2nd part, 1682, p. 9, where Sir Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor 1679-80, and Member of Parliament for the City 1679-81 and again from 1689, appears as “extorting Ishban.” He was a scrivener who had made his money by usury. 97 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love, and John Jones. 98 Charles King (The British Merchant, 1721, vol. i, p. 181) gives the following persons as signatories of an analysis of the trade between England and France in 1674: Patience Ward, Thomas Papillon, James Houblon, William Bellamy, Michael Godfrey, George Toriano, John Houblon, John Houghe, John Mervin, Peter Paravicine, John Dubois, Benj. Godfrey, Edm. Harrison, Benj. Delaune. The number of foreign names is remarkable. °9 For Dutch capital in London, see Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Report, 1881, p. 134 (proceedings of the Committee on the decay of trade, 1669) ; with regard to investment of foreign capital in England, it was stated that “Alderman Bucknell had above £100,000 in his hands, Mr. Meynell above £30,000, Mr. Vandeput at one time £60,000, Mr. Dericost always near £200,000 of Dutch money, lent to merchants at 7, 6, and 5 per cent.” 100 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 289-93, and vol. iii, pp. 4-7; and John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street, 1925. 101S, Bannister, William Paterson, the Merchant-Statesman, and Founder of the Bank of England: His Life and Trials, 1858. 102 A. Yarranton, England’s Improvement, 1677. 103 The Complete English Tradesman (1726) belongs to the same genus as the book of Steele (see above, pp. 244-6), but it has reduced Christianity to even more innocuous proportions: see Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing). 104T, S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, 1924, pp. 211-26. Mr. A. P. Wadsworth has shown that the leading Lancashire clothiers were often Nonconformists (History of the Rochdale Woollen Trade, in Trans, Rochdale Lit. and Sci. Soc., vol. xv, 1925). 105 Quoted F. J. Powicke, Life of Baxter, 1924, p. 158. 106 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 1905, pp. 400-1. 107 The Humble Petition of Thousands of well-affected Persons in- habiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets, and Places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Levellers’ Peti- tions, c. 15, 3 Linc.). See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1808. NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 323 108 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, 1891-4, vol. ii, pp. 217-21 (letter from Winstanley to Fairfax and the Council of War, Dec. 8, 1649). . 109 Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603-88, ed. Helen Stocks, 1923, Pp. 370, 414, 428-30. 110 John Moore, op. cit. (see note 44, above), p. 13. See also E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 53-5. 111 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, vol. i, pp. 299 seqq., Ixvii seqq. 112 The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt, 1828, vol. i, pp. 175-6. A letter from Whalley, referring to agitations against enclosure in Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, will be found in Thurloe, State Papers, vol. iv, p. 686. 113 Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p. 9. 114 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 22 2®, Q,. xxxii, art. v. 115 Dives et Pauper, 1493, Prol., chap. vii; cf. Pecock, The Repressor of over-much Blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii, chap. iv, pp. 296-7. For an excellent account of the medieval attitude towards the poor, see B. L. Manning, The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 1919, chap. x. 116 4 [yke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allingham, The Ballad Book, 1907, no. XxXXi. 117 Latimer, The fifth Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer (in Sermons, Everyman /ed., p. 336). Cf.. Tyndale, The Parable of the. Wicked Mammon (in Doctrinal Treatises of William Tyndale, Parker Society, 1848, p. 97): “If thy brother or neighbour therefore need, and thou have to help him, and yet showest not mercy, but withdrawest thy hands from him, then robbest thou him of his own, and art a thief.” 118 Christopher Harvey, The Overseer of the Poor (in G. Gilfillan, The Poetical Works of George Herbert, 1853, pp. 241-3). 119J, E. B. Mayor, Two Lives of N. Ferrar, by his brother John and Dr. Jebb, p. 261 (quoted by B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy, 1905, p. 54). 120 4 True Report of the Great Cost and Charges of the foure Hos- - pitals in the City of London, 1644 (quoted, ibid., p. 66). 121 See, ¢.g., Hist. MSS. Comm., Reports on MSS. in various Collec- tions, vol. i, 1901, pp. 109-24; Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 268-9. 122 Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse touching Provision for the Poor, 1683. 123 Stanley’s Remedy, or the Way how to reform wandering Beggars, Thieves, Highway Robbers and Pick-pockets, 1646 (Thomason Tracts, E. 317°[6]), p. 4. 124 Commons’ Journals, March 19, 1648/9, vol. vi, p. 167. 125 [bid., vol. vi, pp. 201, 374, 416, 481; vol. vii, p. 127. 126 Samuel Hartlib, London’s Charity Inlarged, 1650, p. i. 127 Hartlib, op. cit. 128 Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1911, vol. ii, pp. 104-10. An ordinance creating a corporation had been passed Dec. 17, 1647 (ibid., vol. i, pp. 1042-5). 129 [bid., vol. ii, pp. 1098-0. 324 NOTES 130 Stockwood, at Paul’s Cross, 1578 (quoted by Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, p. 277). 131 Steele, op. cit. (note 76 above), p. 22. 182 R, Younge, The Poores’ Advocate, 1654 (Thomason Tracts, E. 1452 [3]), p. 6. 183 For these and other passages from Restoration economists to the same effect, see a striking article by Dr. T. E. Gregory on The Eco- nomics of Employment in England (1660-1713) in Economica, no. 1, Jan., 1921, pp. 37 seqqg., and E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Labourer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. v, vi. 134 Das Kommunistische Manifest, 1918 ed., pp. 27-8: “Die Bourgeoisie, wo sie zur Herrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patriarchalischen, idyllischen verhaltnisse zerstért. Sie hat die buntscheckigen Feudal- bande, die den Menschen an seinen nattirlichen. Vorgesetzten knupften, unbarmherzig zerrissen, und kein anderes Band zwischen Mensch und Mensch iibrig gelassen, als das nackte Interesse, als die gefiihllose bare Zahlung.” 135 Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, 1704, pp. 25-7. 136 Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 45. 187 Sir Henry Pollexfen, Discourse of Trade, 1697, p. 49; Walter Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland, 1691, pp. 43-4; The Querist, 1737 (in The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., ed. A. C. Fraser, 1871, p. 387); Thomas Alcock, Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, 1752, pp. 45 seqq. (quoted Furniss, op. cit., Porrss): 138 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, 1771, vol. iv, p. 361. 139 Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. x, Of Provision made for the Poor. 140 FH, Hunter, Problems of Poverty: Selections from the... Writ- ings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., 1912, p. 202. 141 For the influence of Chalmers’ idea on Senior, and, through him, on the new Poor Law of 1834, see T. Mackay, History of the English Poor Law, vol. iii, 1899, pp. 32-4. Chalmers held that any Poor Law was in itself objectionable. Senior, who described Chalmers’ evidence before the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland as “the most instructive, perhaps, that ever was given before a Committee of the House of Commons,” appears to have begun by agreeing with him, but later to have adopted the principle of deterrence, backed by the test workhouse, as a second best. The Commissioners of 1832-4 were right in thinking the existing methods of relief administration extremely bad; they were wrong in supposing distress to be due mainly to lax adminis- tration, instead of realizing, as was the fact, that lax administration had arisen as an attempt to meet the increase of distress. Their dis- cussion of the causes of pauperism is, therefore, extremely superficial, — and requires to be supplemented by the evidence contained in the various contemporary reports (such, e.g., as those on the hand-loom binge dealing with the industrial aspects of the problem. 142, W. C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 1910, pp. a NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 325 560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the Quakers in Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing) in The Complete English Trades- man. Mr. Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, p. 219) remarks, “The eighteenth century Friend no less than the medieval Cath- olic held firmly to some doctrine of Just Price,’ and quotes examples from the conduct of Quaker iron-masters. ‘ Ue Nas bes INDEX Abbot’s Ripton, 140, 308 Acton, Lord, 65 Acts of Parliament: EBSatd 111, st.s1, ¢.5' (1341), 52 37 Hen. VIII, c. 9 (1545), 159 Saands 0. Ed. V1, c.20.<(1552), 159, 180 E3tz.,4C..o. (1571), 159, 180, 181, 187 39 Eliz., c. 2 (1597), 178 Aegidius Lessinus, 295, 2 Aeneas Silvius, 110 Agriculture, 136-50, 231. See also “Enclosures, Land, Pasture farm- ing, Peasants Alcock, Thomas, 270 Alien immigrants, 205, 314 Almsgiving, condemnation of, 114, 265, 305; a duty, 260-1 America, silver of, 68, 74, Calvinism in, 127-32, 227, 320 Bee 216-7, 318 Amsterdam, 104 Anglicans. See Clergy and Church of England Annuities, 42, 217 Antwerp, 72, 73-5, 79, 80, 86, 87, BOA, S105; 1278, 303; tall of; 77, 176 Apparel, excess in, 115, 127 Aquinas. See St. Thomas Archdeacons, visitations of, 48, 52, 162, 206-7, 310 Aristotle, 44 Asceticism, 17, 18, 19 Ashton, 1 ..9.,: 252,325 Aske, 141 Augsburg, Pit; 135; 238, 79, 85 Bacon, 148, 151, 185 Baillie, 214 Bancroft, Archbishop, 214 Bank, at Geneva, 120 —of England, 252 Banking, deposit, 176 186, 213, beginnings of, Barbon, Dr. Nicholas, 247 Barebones, Praise- God, 247 Bargaining, equity in, 152, 159, 181, 183, 188, 221-3, 224, 244, 272. See also Prices and Profits Baro, 215, 318 Basle, 120; Council of, 103 Baxter, Richard, 9, I9, 200, 203, 207, 219-24, 226, 242 (quoted), 243 (quoted), 253, 260, 268, 2901 Becon, 82, 141, 744 Beggars. See Almsgiving and Vagrancy Bellarmin, 80, 303 Bellers, 19, 272 Belloc, H., 92 Bennet, Dr., 153 Benvenuto da Imola, quoted, 11 Berkeley, Bishop, 270, 284 Berne, 120 Berthold, Brother, 225 Bézawriomi2ziei22 tease 21s Birmingham, 204 Bishops, articles of visitation of, 161; were normally justices, 165 ; Bill re powers of, 174-5, 312; abolition of, 188, 214. See also Commissary, Court of High Commission and Courts, ecclesi- astical Blaxton, John, cited, 156 Bodin, 81 Boheim, Hans, 81 Bolingbroke, 207 Bologna, University of, 81 Boniface VIII, 19; bull of, 21 Bossuet, 83 Boston, 128-31 Bourges, 50 Braddon, Lawrence, 315 Bradford, 204 —, Governor, 127 (quoted), 128 Brentano, 316 Bristol, 202 Brittany, Count of, 299 Bruges, 73 Bucer, 10, 63, 81, 83, 105, 116, 142, 215 327 328 Bullinger, 19, 81, 114, 181 Bunyan, 9, 19, 199, 225, 208, 307 Burford, 181 Buridanus, Johannes, 295 Bury, 218 Cahorsines, 29, 294, 207 “Calling,” 240-6, 316, 321 ; Calvin, 10, 19, 94, 102-32; teaching of, on usury, 81, 83, 126, 181, 215, 216, 233, 239; letter of, to Somerset, 116; Institutes of, 116, 117; scheme of municipal government drafted by, 117; death of, 119. See also Cal- vinism Calvinism, 102-32, 233-5}; sancti- fication of economic enterprise by, 34, 104-5, 108, 109, 110, III, 116, 233, 239; connection of in- dividualism with, 112-3, 227, 316-7; discipline of, 112, I13, 115-32, 215, 219, 227, 234, 238, 316-7; in France, 125-6; in Scotland, 126-7; development of, in England, 198; in Holland, 211. See also Calvin and Puri- tanism Cambridge, 318 Canon law. See Law, canon Canonists, chicanery and casuistry of, 37, 51, 54, 60, 100. See also Law, canon Canterbury, 205; archbishop of, 47, 156; Canons of, 161 Capitalism, early appearance of, 16, 26, 84, 226; connection of, with Puritanism, 212, 315-8 Carpenters, parliament of, 292 Cartwright, Thomas, 213, 215 Sena ts and capitalism, 84, 21 Cattle, loaning of, 54, 154, 181-2 Cecil, William, 145, 165 Chalmers, Dr., 271, 324 Charles I, social policy of, 169-74, 211, 235-8, 319-20 Charles V, 71, 79 Chaucer, 23 (quoted), 302 Chauvet, 123 Chesterton, G. K., 92 Chevage, 147 Chevisance, 51 Choisy, 306 Church, medieval, pomp and avarice of, 59, 60, 62; attitude INDEX of, to established social order, 56-9; strength and weakness of, — 59-60; ideals of, 60-2 —of England, 135-93; conserva- tism and ineffectiveness of so- cial theory of, 85, 155-7, 184-93, 282; Puritanism represented in, 198 Church of Ireland, 161 | See also Clergy, Councils (Church), Courts (ecclesiasti- cal), Law (canon), Papacy, Reformation, Religion, and under State Churches, Nonconformist, attitude of, to social problems in 18th century, 281. See also Presby- terianism, Puritanism, Tolerance Civil Law. See Law, civil Clarendon Code, 205 —, Constitutions of, 51 —, Earl of, 173, 204, 249, 252, 321 Class hatred, 18, 123, 145 Classes, Puritan, 213, 217, 318 Clayton, Sir Robert, 322 Clergy, taking of usury by, 30, 46, 53, 292-3, 300; subservience of, 159, 281; return of, to City churches, 204; popular sym- pathies of, in France, 281. See also Church of England Cloth industry, 105, 136, 142, 147; capitalism in, 70, 176, 268-9; distress in, 168, 205, 314; wages in, 174, 203, 320; regulation of, 174, 236, 237, 319; Puritanism in centers of, 202, 203, 204, 322; proposed nationalization of, 236. See also Textile workers Coke, 186 Colbert, 77, 236 Cologne, 37. ~ Colonization, 71, 238, 320 Colquhoun, Patrick, 313 Columbus, 67, 69, 89 Combinations, 55, 87-8, 95-6, 203. See also Gilds 317; Commissary, Court of, 53, 162, 300, 310 Commissions, Depopulation, 138, 145, 173, 237, 320 ommons, enclosure of, 140, 167, 174, 256, 259, 260. See alsa Enclosures “Commonwealth men,” 145 INDEX Communal movement, 56 Communism, 32, 256 Companies, iniringement of char- ters of, 237. See also East India Co. and Royal African Co. Confessors, instructions to, 48-9 Congregationalism, 198 Consistory, at Geneva, 116, 117, 119-24 Constance, Council of, 103 Consumption, 34, 231, 248, 251 Copper, 73, 75, 79 Copyholders, 139, 147, 167, 308 Corn, engrossing of, 123, 168, 174, 311. See also Granaries Coulton, G. G., II, 30 Councils, Church, 46-7, 51, 54, 206 Court, De la, 206 Court of Arches, 186 A, Chancery, 51, 53, 295, 300 — Delegates, 186 — High Commission, 162, 186-7, 237, 313; abolition of, 188, 213, 214 — Requests, 139, 308 — Star Chamber, 139, 174, 308, 311, 312, 319; abolition of, 213 Courts, jurisdiction of, with re- gard to usury, 37-9, 50-4, 160-2; ecclesiastical, 50-4, 160-2, 186-8, 213, 214, 300, 301; royal, en- croachments of, on feudal sys- tem, 57-8, 87. See also the several Courts above-mentioned Coventry, 37, 309 Craftsmen, deceits practiced by, 24, 126, 298; relations between mer- chants and, 26, 136, 137, 173-4, 236, 320; labor of, honorable, 92, 240. See also Guilds and W age-earners Cranmer, 83, 160 Cromwell, Oliver, 199, (quoted), 249, 258, 317 Crowley, Robert, 82, 141, 144, 146 (quoted), 148 (quoted) Cunningham, William, (quoted ) Curia, papal, 47-8 Currency, depreciation of, 77, 78, 137, 177 Dantzig, 100 Debtor, defaulting, punishment of, 127 Dedham, classis of, 217-8 219, 227 S125 213 329 Defoe; 205, 252, 315, 324, 325 Depopulation. See Commissions and Enclosures D’Ewes, 217 Dicey, Prof., 254 Diet, Imperial, 88 Diggers, 256, 317 Discipline, versus the Religion of Trade, 211-27. See also Calvin- ism, Presbyterianism, Puritanism PASE Ry SUeSs 67; 60, °73, 80; 57, 135; 31 Dives et Pauper, 9, 216, 261, 323 Downing, Sir George, 252 Duns Scotus, 33 Dutch, virtues of, 211, 252, 269; capital supplied to England by, 249, 252, .322; imitation of methods of, 252. See also Hol- land East Anglia, 174; Puritanism in, 202, 203 — India Co., 320 Eck, 81 Economic science, development of, 7-10, 80, 158, 180, 185, 180, 204, 249-50. See also Economists Economists, 249; attitude of, towards religious tolerance, 10, 204-5, 206-7; attitude of, to- wards poor relief, 267-72, 323-4. See also Economic Science Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 205 Education, diffusion of, 141, 142, 143; parochial, 154. See also Schools Enclosures, 137-50; popular agita- tions against, 137-8, 140, 143-5, 256-7, 323; first account of, 138; steps taken by Government to check, 138, 145, 147, 172-3, 178, 230, 255, 300, 311, 312; attitude of Puritans to, 217, 224, 236, 255-60. See also under Gentry England, comparison of, with the Continent, 8, 16, 54, 70, 135, 231 Engrossers, 36, 38, 40, 55, I19, 122, 123, 164, 168, 174, 191, 236, 239, 244, 311, 312 Erasmus, 72, 76 Erastians, 214 Essex, 162, 203 Evangelicals, 193, 254 Exchanger, Royal, 237 330 Exchanges, foreign, discussions on, 43). 158 117774 310; control) “of, 74; 168, 236, 237, 311, 319; law- fulness of transactions on, 80-I Exchequer, stop of, 224 Exclusion Bill, 203 Excommunication, 29, 45, 46, 47, C2 aLIG tl 2lyy 42 VIO, 1284, nc disregarding of, 159, 187 Exeter, 204; bishop of, 169 Fairs, 45 Fenton, Roger, 305 Ferrar, Nicholas, 263 Feudalism, 22, 57-9, 231; decline of, 57-8, 147, 149, 174. See also Peasants Figgis, Dr., 6 Financiers, medieval attitude to, 23, 33, 104-5; international, rise of, 72, 75-6, 78-9; Catholicism of, 84; attitude of Swiss re- formers to, 104, 108. See also quoted, 106, 157, Usury Firmin, 272 Flanders. See Low Countries Flavell, John, 321 Fletcher of Saltoun, 265 Florence, 16, 37, 50, 292, 295, 316 Foley, Thomas, 253 Fondaco Tedesco, 68 Food-supplies, control of, 173-4, 235, 236, 262., Seé also Corn Fox, 199, 200 Foxe, 160 France, 54, 77, 236, 250, 268, 281, 203, 302, 315; peasantry in, 58, 59, 136, 151; Calvinism in, 125-6, ‘203, 238. See also Lyons and Paris Franciscans, 18, 54; Spiritual, 57 Franeker, University of, 216 Frankfurt, 26, 75, 85, 110 Franklin, Benjamin, 238, 320 Free Cities, 56 Freeholders, 202, 203, 258 Freiburg, 86 Friars, 18 Friends. See Quakers Friesland, West, 238 Froissart, 18 Froude, 5 Fruiterers, of London, 55 Fuggers, the, 79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90, I9I, 303 INDEX Gay, Prof., 146 Geiler von Kaiserberg, 88, 304 Geneva, 103, 104, I13, 115-25, 215; 226, 227, 234, 235, 306 Genoa, 48 Gentry, opposition of, to preven- tion of enclosures, 145, 147, 178, 235, 237; 255-7, 258, 309; atti- tude of, to commercial classes, 207-10 George, Lloyd, quoted, 4, 291 Germany, 54, 68, 77, 250; schemes of social reconstruction in, 27, 88, 302; peasantry in, 58, 50, 81, 82, 86-7, 88, 91, 93, 136, 139, I5I, 302; trade and banking business of, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78-9, 86-8, 89-90, 316; Reformation in, 70, Sr, 82, 83, Qs. -102, IIO, 1413 wage-earning class in, in Middle Ages, 86, 292 Gilds, membership of, 26; policy and ideals of, 26-8; enforcement of rules of, 52, 300; loans by, 54, 301; capture of, by capitalist members, 69, 86, 136; control of, at Antwerp, 75; malpractices of, 137, 203; confiscation of lands of, 139, 309 Glasgow, 238 Gloucester, 204 Godfrey, Michael, 252 Goldsmiths, 249 Granaries, public, 236, 319 Gratian, 32, 35 Gregory VIL 19 Gresham, Sir Richard, 140 —, Sir Thomas, 9, 143, 179 Grindal, Archbishop, 160 Grosstéte, Bishop, 20, 203 178, Hague, The, 252 Hale, Sir Matthew, 263 Hales, John, 145 Halifax, 204 Hamilton, John. See St. Andrews, Archbishop of Hammond, Mr. and Mrs., 18 Hanse League, 68, 73 Harrington, 176 Harris, Walter, 270 Harrison, 270 Hartlib, Samuel, 264 Hatfield Chase, 174 Haugs, the, 79 INDEX Heming, Nicholas, 156, 158 (quoted) Henry of Ghent, quoted, 34 —of Langenstein, quoted, 36, 42 Herberts, the, 140, 146 Hinde, 312 Hipler, 88, 304 Hobbes, 1 Hochstetters, the, 79, 88, 303 Holland, 8; wars and commercial rivalry of England with, 7, 240, 252, 208, 321; religious develop- ments in, IO, 211, 227; economic progress of, 10, 204, 211, 216, 231, 316; controversy in, about usury, 126, 238; middle classes in, 208, 211; emigration of Dis- senters to, 314. See also Dutch and Low Countries Holland, Lord, 237 Hooker, Richard, 166, 170, 234 Hospitals, 144, 263; loans by, 54, 301 Hostiensis, 158, 304 Houblon, James and John, 252 House of Commons, 143, 178, 179, 187, 264 —of Convocation, 160 Huguenots, 252 Humanists, 79, 110, 114, 262 Hungary, 75, 79 Hutten, 88, 304 Imhofs, the, 79 Independents, I12, 212, 214, 252 a Indians, American, 130, 185 Indifferentism, 17, 18, 19, 188, 280 Individualism, rise of, TOt135n ez, 6s, 74, 81, 141, 163, 166, 172, 175-03, 227, 235, 250, 253, 254, 262, 316-7; deduction of, from teaching of reformers, Qo- -4, 90, 112-3, 226-7. See also under Puritanism Industrial Revolution, 18, 193 Innocent IV, 20, 44, 203 Interesse, 42, 43, 95 Interest, rate of, 120, 124, 128, 153, 162, 180, B22" “pure,” 42; true and unfeigned, not usury, 304. See also Interesse and Usury Ireland, 231, 270, 324; Church of, 161 Ireton, 258 Iron industry, 202, 220, 252-3, 325 210, 331 Italy, 9, 54, 72; medieval capital- ism in, 26, 84, 86, 316; wage- earners in, 26, 38, 292; finan- ciers of, 20, 45, 73, 136; canon- ists of, 54; economic position of, 67, 60, 70, 231. See also Flor- ence and Venice Jacquerie, 58 Jewel, Bishop, 82, 156 Jews, 37, 249 John XXII, bull of, 57 John of Salisbury, quoted, 22, 24, 292 ages tous enterprise, outburst of, 17 Jones, Rev. David, 246 Journeymen. See Wage-earners Justices in Eyre, 51 —of Assize, 173 —of the Peace, usurers dealt with by, 164, 168; regulation of markets and of wages by, 173; closing of public-houses by, 218; administration of poor laws by, 236, 263; administration of orders against enclosures by, 173, 255 Keane, Robert, 128-31 Ket, 144, 302 Keynes, J. M., 251, 286 Kidderminster, 207, 220 King’s Lynn, 301, 300 Knewstub, 215, 318 Knox, John, 10, 109, (quoted), 127, 213 TIS.4e8IS Lancashire, Puritanism in, 203, 204, 214, 322. See also Bury Land, 9, 137-50; purchase of, by nouveaux riches, and speculation in, 87, 139-41, 143-4, 176, 208, 207: mortgaging of, 103, 168. See also Enclosures, Landlords, Pasture farming, Property, Rent-charge, Rents Landlords, oppressions of, 50, 140, 155, 164, 167, 172, 223, 236, 238, 298; ecclesiastical, management of) estates ) by, 58-9, 130, 144. See also Peasants and Rents Lanfranc, 18 Langland, 18, 261 Lateran Councils, 46, 54 332 INDEX Latimer, 10, 19, 82, I41, 145, 255, 256, 262, 275, 287 Laud, 10, 19, 113, 133, 170-5, 188, 205, 210, 213, 236, 237, 255, 311 Laurentius de Rudolfis, 9, 291 Law, canon, 9, 165; rules of, as to usury, 10, 36-55, 94, 95; serf- dom recognized by, 58; discredit of, 62, 65, 143, 159, 187; con- tinued appeal to, 81, 85, 152-63, 305-6; compatibility of exchange business ‘with, 80. See also Canonists —, civil, 159-60 —,common, 159, 161, 186 —,natural, 30, -62, 179-80, 1092, 259, 278 Law, John, 253 —, William, 190 Layton, Dr., 159 Leach, A. F., 143 Leadam, 146 Lease-mongers, 144 Lee, Joseph, quoted, 259 Leeds, 204 Leicester, 204, 256, 258 Leonard, Miss, 173 Levellers, 19, 212, 255, 317 Lever, 82, 141, 144, 156 Linen industry, 142 Lisbon, 79, 86, 87 Loans, ’ charitable, 54, 154, 164, 203, 301; public, indemnification of subscribers to, 179. See also Interest and Usury ee 7 (quoted), 179, 189, 250, 25 Lollards, 50 Lombard bankers, 20, 51 London, 26, 51, 52, 55, 140, 263; growth of money-market in, 75, 136, 177; Nonconformity in, 104, 203, 204, 214, 243, 252; fire of, 204, 221; bishop of, 20, 53, 162, 204 Lotteries, 126, 306 Low Countries, -70, 7I, 72-3, 77; 231 ; early capitalism in, 16, 25, 84, 292, 316; wage-earners in, 25-6, 38, 202; Monts de Piété in, 54, 301; religious tolerance in, 206. See also Antwerp and Holland Luchaire, A., 30 Luther, 10, 19, 36, 79-102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 116, 241, 265, 208 Lyndwood, 54 Lyons, 75, 77, 120; Poor Men of, 18; Council of, 46 Machiavelli, 7, 80, 184, 316 Maidstone, 205 Maitland, 159 Major, 107 Malynes, G., 17 Mandeville, 190 athedys 313 Manning, B. L., 19 Marx, Karl, 36, 112, 269 Massachusetts, 127-31, 238 Melanchthon, Sr, 92, 107, 158 Mendicant orders, 92, 240 Mercantilism, 31, 80, 237, 251 Merchant Adventurers, 68, 73 Merchants. See Traders Merchet, 147 Meutings, the, 79, 303 Middle classes, rise of, 8, 86, 87, 04, III, 176, 177, 208, 234, 268, 269 ; Calvinism and Puritanism among, III, 113, 187, 202-I0, 211-2, 231, 266, 317; qualities of, III, 208, 211, 230-1; humbler, at- titude of, to rising commercial- ism, 163-4; economic position of, 207-8, 244, 315 Middlemen. See Traders Mill, James, 243 Milton, 190, 231 Mines, of New World, 68; of Europe, 68, *75,-793 capitalism in working of, 70, 176 Monarchy, paternal, 211, 232, 235, 236-8, 253, 319. See also Charles I and Tudors Monasteries, loans by, 54, 301; re- lief of beggars by, 92, 114, 266; dissolution of, 138-41, 144, 308, 300 Moneylenders. See Interest, Loans (public), Usury Money-market. See Exchanges, Financiers, and under London Monopolies. See Patents Monopolists, denunciations of, 38, 81, 88, 93, 96, 119, 221 Montagu, 253 Montesquieu, 208 Monts de Piété, 43, 54, 301, 320 Moore, John, 257, 259 More, Sir Thomas, 73, 138, 139 Mosse, Miles, 156, 158, 160 (quoted) Muliins, Archdeacon, 310 ‘ es ee INDEX Nationalism, 68, 77 Netherlands. See Low Countries New England, Calvinism in, 127-32, 227, 238 New Model Army, 219 Nicholas III, 29 Nonconformists. See Churches (Nonconformist), Independents, Presbyterianism, Puritanism, Quakers, Tolerance Norfolk, 168, 203 North, Sir Dudley, quoted, 250 Notre-Dame, Cathedral of, 30, 204 Nurnberg, 85, 110 O’Brien, G., 43 (cited) (Ecolampadius, 82, 106, I14 Oresme, Nicholas, 9, 291 Owen, Robert, 272 Oziander, 83 Paget, 145 Paley, 287 Pallavicino, 178 Papacy, avarice and corruption of, 29, 85, 89-90, 92, I10, III; finan- cial relations of, 29, 30, 44, 290-7 Papillon, Thomas, 252 Papists, unaptness of, for business, 206; charity of, 233, 265, 320 Parise) 209675, 7.00,. $20;81325,!5203' bishop of, 30, 294 Parish, loans by, 54, 154, 301; or- ganization of, 154-5, 312 Parker, Bishop, 204 Parliament, Levellers’ for reform of, 255 Parliament, Barebones, 219, 247 —, Long, 175, 187, 237, 255, 257 “Parliaments,” of wage-earners, 26, 202 Partnership, profits of, lawful, 42, 295; fictitious, 48, 297 Pasture farming, 136, 137, 139, 140, Tazo tac? 173, 178 See -also Enclosures Patents, 236, 237, 319 Paterson, William, 253 Pawnshops, public, 164 Peasants, associations among, 27; harshness of lot of, 57-8; re- volts of, 58, 59, 70, 140, 143-5, 256, 302; revolts of, in Ger- many, 58, 59, 81, 82, 88, QI, 93, 139, 145, 302 emancipation of, from etdom, 58, 59, 69, 87, demands 333 130, 147; comparison of, with peasantry of France and Ger- many, 59, 86-7, 136, 151; calling of, praised, 92. See also Jac- querie and Landlords Peckham, Archbishop, 29 Pecock, Bishop, 50, 55, 100, 297-8, 301 Penn, William, 188 Pennsylvania, 238 Pepper, 75 Pepys, 204 Petty, Sir William, 206, 250, 251 (quoted ) Piccarda, 17 Pilgrimage of Grace, 141 Pirenne, Prof., 74, 292 Political Arithmetic, 10, 204, 250. Science Pollexfen, Sir Henry, 269 Ponet, 82, 141 Poor, relief of, 82, 92, 114, I41, 144, 155, I6I, 193, 239; invest- ment of money for benefit of, 126, 182, 306; legislation re re- lief of, 127, 262, 264-6, 271, 323, 324; administration of laws for relief of, 168, 173-4, 236, 263; right of, to relief, 264-5, 271; relief to, to be deterrent, 271, 324; able-bodied, employment of, 168; 202% 264) 265° 271; \ 323-4, See also Almsgiving, Poverty, Vagrancy — Law Commissioners, 271, 324 — Men of Lyons, 18 Portugal, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84 Poverty, attitude of Swiss re- formers to, 105, I14-5, 132; atti- tude to, in eighteenth century, 189-90; attitude of Puritans to, 231, 233, 253-5, 260-73; medieval attitude to, 260-I, 323; attitude of Quakers to, 272; causes of, 262, 264-5, 205-7, 270, 324. See also Poor Predestination, 108, I12 Presbyterianism, 198, 213-5, 217-8, 234, 317, 318. ‘See also Puri- tanism Presbyterians, 203, struggle between and, 112, 212, 214 Prices, rise! inj 00,170}" 754.08, 197; 147, 177, 180: just, doctrine with 185, 189, See also Economic 207, sr2R23 Independents 334 regard to, 17, 36, 4I, 81, 04-5, 153, 156, 216-7, 222, 225, 244, 268, 203, 295, 318, 325; control of, 41, I17, 119, 122, 123, 128-30, 142, 143, 168, 173, 174, 262, 320; opposition to control of, 170, 235; 315. See also Bargaining Privy Council, activities of, 166-9, 173-4, 236-8, 263, 320 | Production, 248, 249, 251 Profits, medieval doctrine as to, 32, 34-6, 42, 104; attempted limi- tation of, in New England, 127- 31. See also Traders Property, theories with regard to, 32, 102, 146-50, 189, 258, 261, 262 Prophesyings, 201 Public-houses, closing of, 218 Puritanism, 195-273; quarrel be- tween monarchy and, 6, 212, 232, 235-8, 318-9; medieval, 18; dis- cipline of, I13, 127-31, 187, 213-0, 234-5, 317; theology of, 113, 227-30; connection of individual- ism with, 113, 127, 2124216))-210, 227, 229-390, 253, 254, 266, 271, 272, 316; divergent elements in, 198, 212-3, 316; sanctification of business life by, 199, 201, 230, 233, 230-54, 272; geographical distribution of, 202-4; connection of, with capitalism, 212, 316-7. See also Calvinism, Middle classes, New England, Poverty, Presbytertanism, Usury Gaees 10,°272.326 Quarter Sessions. See Justices of the Peace Quicksilver, 79 Rabelais, 77 Rationalism, medieval, 18 Reformation, relation of, to changes in social theory, 14-5, 19-20, 65-6, 81, 82-5, 89-03, 141, 154, 155-60 Regensburg, 85, 225 Religion, sphere of, Brainerd 5, 8-10, 14, 18, 19-36, 60-2, 8-5, 90-1, 97-8, 90, 148, Sas, 182-3, 221, 224-6, 278, 270, 281-2, 285 (see ‘also under Traders) ; : economic and social activities excluded from ‘province of, 5, 6-13, 17, 91, 96-101, 175, 177-93, INDEX 221, 226, 238, 254-5, 277, 278-87; wars of, 6-7, 119. See also Asceticism, Calvinism, Indif- ferentism, Presbyterianism, Puri- tanism, Reformation, Tolerance Rent-charge, considered lawful, 42, 43, 95, 182, 216, 217, 295 Rents, control of, at Geneva, 117; raising of, I19, 140, 146, 153; Baxter’s teaching as to, 224 Rhode Island, 238 Riches, medieval attitude to, 32, 34-5, 55, 285, 301-2; attitude of Calvinists and Puritans to, 105, 132, 230, 2390, 267; modern atti- tude to, 282-7. See also Finan- ciers and Traders Ridley, Thomas, quoted, 186 Ripon, 53 Rome, corruption and avarice at, 28-30, 85, 90, 92, II0 Root and Branch Petition, 314 Rotenburg, 86 Rouen, 75 Rousseau, 203 Royal African Co., 249, 322 St. Ambrose, 260 St. Andrews, 127; archbishop of, 50 St. Antonino, 9, 17, 32, 40-I, 88, 225, 291, 204, 205 St. Augustine, 48 St. Bernard, 30 St Erancts,718)«57 St. Johns, the, 140, 308 St. Léon, Martin, 28 (quoted), 292, 203 St. Raymond, 48, 153 St. Thomas, 17, 20 (quoted), 31, 33, 35. (quoted), 36, 39 (quoted), 40, 58, 152, 200, 225, 260, 304 Salerno, archbishop of, 48 Salisbury, bishop of, 156; mayor of, 218 Sanderson, Bishop, 188 Sandwich, 205 Sandys, en, 82, 156 Says Jeeb., Saye and Sele, Lord, 174, 312 Schoolmen, 9, 16, 10, 30-6, 40-1, 80, 82, 148, 152, 155, 158, 183, 225. See also St. Antonino and St. Thomas Schools, confiscation of endow- ments of, 143, 300; establish- INDEX ment of, by Church, 193. See also Education Schulze-Gaevernitz, 212 Scotland, 113, 126-7, 227; Com- missioners from, 214 Scriveners, 176 Self-interest, of individual, har- mony of needs of society with, 13, 24, 179-80, I91, 192, 246, 259-60, 277. See also Individ- ualism Senior, Nassau, 271, 324 Serfdom, 57-9; attitude of Church to, 22, 58-9, 302. See also Peasants Serfs, runaway, 139, 147, 308. See also Peasants Seville, 75, 135 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 249 Shaw, W. A., 215 Sheep-grazing. See Pasture farm- ing Sheldon, Dr. Gilbert, 311 Sidney, Sir Philip, 140 Sigismund, Emperor, Reformation Ofi027>,85, 203 Silver, of America, Go 7am E355 Of Europe, 79 Sion, monastery of, 140 Slave-trade, 185 Smiles, Samuel, 253 Smith, Adam, 35, 192, 253, 293 —, Rev. Henry, 215, 318 —, Sir Thomas, 160 Smiths, of London, 52, 292, 300 Soap, monopoly of, 237, 319 Social Democratic movement, 219 Society, functional theory of, 13, 22-5, 93, 97, 149, 169-70, 171, 172, 189, 191, 254; modern con- ception of, 12-3, 22, 189, 191 Somerset, Duke of, 116, 147, 309 South Sea Bubble, tot Spain, 70, 71, 72, 77, 79, 84; dealers of, on Antwerp Bourse, 80 Speculation. See Engrossers Speenhamland, 264 Spices, trade in, 74, 75, 79, 86 Spinola, 178 Spurriers, of London, 52, 300 Starkey, 22, 138, 202 State, relation between Church and, 6-10, 18-9, 20, 70, OI, I0I-2, 124, 159, 165-6, 170-1, 172, 175, 278-9; Locke’s conception of, 7 (quoted), 170, 189; unitary, sov- 335 ereignty of, 278, 293; Distribu- tive, 92, 151 Steele, Richard, 240, 243 (quoted), 243-5, 251, 266 Step-lords, 146 Stockwood, Rev. J., quoted, 266 Strafford, Earl of, 210, 213, 236 Strassburg, 75 Stubbes, Philip, 216 Summe, 16, 19, 30, 220. Schoolmen Swift, Dean, 207 Switzerland, Reformation in, 102- 25, 141, 205; bourgeoisie in, III, 122, 208 Synods, French, 125-6 See also Taunton, 204 Taylor, Jeremy, 160 (quoted), 188 Temple, Sir William, 206 Tenures, military, abolition of, 257 Textile workers, of Flanders and Ltaly.4- 2662025 O£*' Paris;* 203. For England see under Cloth industry Tobacco, 127 Tolerance, religious, 113, 118, 175, 219; commercially advantageous, 10, 197, 205-7 Tories, distrust of classes by, 207 Torrens, R., 3 Townsend, Rev. J., 313 Trade, flourishing of, under re- ligious tolerance, 10, 197, 205-7; free exercise of, 179; foreign, increase in, 136, 176; balance of, 247, 250 Trade unionism, 26, 203 Traders, medieval attitude to, 17-8, 23, 32, 33-6, 37, 104; relations between craftsmen and, 26, 136, 137, 173)-°230,26320 3, sanctifica= tion of occupation of, 34, 104-5, 108, 100, I10, III, 115, 199, 20f, 230, 234, 239-53, 254, 273; frauds and extortion of, 50, 105, I109, 126, 142, 153, 155-6, 208-9, 307; Luther’s attitude to, 92; growth of power of, 136, 137; purchase of land by, 140, 208; break-down of State control of, 179, 236. See also Bargaining, Prices, Profits Travers, W., 213 Troeltsch, Prof., 91, 212, 316 commercial 336 Tucker; Dean, . 11, 197 (quoted), 314 Tudors, social policy of, 164-70, 235, 202-3, 266, 270 Turgot, 293 Turks, 68, 69 Tyndale, 308, 323 Tyrol, 68, 75, 79 Udall bars Ulm, 85 Unwin, Prof., 173 Usher, R. G., 202 Usury, controversy on, 9, 81, 82, 151-64, 178, 180-3; teaching of medieval Church on, 17, 36-9, 42-55; practicing of, on a large scale, in Middle Ages, 29, 44-5, 176; restitution of profits of, 30, 46, 47, 49; enforcement of prohibition of, 37, 45-53, 100, IIQ, 121, 123, 127, 160-2, 164, 169, 187, 237, 238, 297, 298, 310; prevalence of, 30, I5I-2; popu- lar denunciations of, 30, 81, 138, 144, 152; annuities, compensa- tion for loss, profits of partner- ship and rent-charges not re- garded as, 42, 43, 95, 182, 216-7, 295; ecclesiastical legislation as to, 46, 52, 55; devices for con- cealment #0f,°.47, 140). 53s 207i, secular legislation as to, 52, 153, 159, 180, 187; attitude of re- formers to, in Germany, 81, 83, 04, 95, 100; in Switzerland, 81, 83, 103-4, 105-8, 117, 119-24, 181, 215, 216; in France, 126, 306; meaning of term, 152-3, 160-1, , 183; disappears from episcopal charges, 191; Puritan attitude to, 200, 213, 215-7, 218, 223, 225, 232-3, 230, 246, 252, 269, 318, 319, 320. See also Clergy, In- terest, Loans Utilitarianism, 243, 271 Utrecht, University of, 238 192, Vagrancy, measures for suppres- sion of, 92, 168, 217, 262, 263, 265, 260-70, 271; increase of, 263, 265. See also Almsgiving and Poor Value, theories of, 36, 40 Venezuela, 79 Venice, 68, 70, 73, 75, 87, 120, 316 INDEX Vienne, Council of, 46 Villeinage. See Serfdom Virtues, economic, applauding of, by Calvinists and Puritans, 105, I10, III, 114-5, 227-54, 271-2, 273 Vitry, Jacques de, 302 Vives, 114, 262 Voltaire, 208 Wadsworth, A. P., 322 . Wage-earners, small number of, 26, 38, 137, 151, 207, 268, 292; organizations of, 26; attitude of economists to, 268-70. See aiso Wages Wages, withholding of, 50, 223, 298; regulation of, 128, 173, 174, 235, 236, 293, 320; payment of, in truck, 153, 174, 236; eco- nomists’ views on the subject of, 268-70, 271. See also Wage- earners Wallas, Graham, 12 Wamba, 90 Warburton, 192 Ward, Sir Patience, 252 Warwick, Earl of, 145 Warwickshire, 138, 323 Washerne, 140 Wealth. See Riches Weber, Max, 212, 316-7, 319, 321 Welsers, the, 78-9, 88, 303 Wentworth, 174 Wesley, 190 Westminster Assembly, Production and 10, 214, 218 Whalley, ecclesiastical court of, 53 Whalley, Major-General, 259, 323 Whigs, 203, 252 Whitby, Abbey, 140 Whole Duty of Man, The, 191 Widows and orphans, usury for benefit of, 182, 233 Wilcox, Thomas, 161 Williams, Roger, 128 Wilson, Thomas, 156, 157, 160, 179, 234, 319 Wiltshire, 218, 237 Winstanley, Gerrard, 113 (quoted), 256 Witt, John de, 206 Wolsey, 138, 147 Wood, H. G., 318 INDEX By scstow, Rev. Robert, quoted, 23 Woollen industry. See Cloth in- dustry Worcester, Priory of, 42 Workhouses, 265, 270, 271, 324 Works, good, 98, I09, III, 239, 242, 266, 320 Wyclif, 18, 25 (quoted), 27, 39 (quoted), 40, 293 337 Yarranton, A., 253 Yeomanry, 58, 202 York, Province of, 161, 169 Yorke, Sir John, 140 Yorkshire, 141, 162, 204 Young, Arthur, 270 Younge, R., quoted, 267 ZULICU ATOZ, TAS 117 Zwingli, 82, 103, 114-5, I17 ov ne y ; z ig aw x De r Libra , J j fe yy mn b oF oy vy ’ i lal f ; nie ual Oe ‘i Dh ae ‘a a yt rel her oe i) ak fo Neh ee Pio Waal Pave ts, A } EE fa } (bree i a : ras ag ri ial a oe . , thaw yt tate me ne nt ne Sie gaan pm ct yao eR Meee ee ae Ree Ry eg ET on ee ee tes ere ee ee eens ee Ee ae a =o Fe ep ge nD Re LF ee Se) Be Se ga We eokp bry ans aOe Bre needees ive Fo Pe BONA = La - 7 enw er ea TeCe bs Gog are epee ge Pte en Seine ene ~ amet eae Sanne =, Sy me ee oe are ona se tgs CE Aiea Pr Ma A AE aT waren i i tie onto, hg Son pm ne fone ae GEE He RRS a gee BE PS we a eee Piso eee . iy etm ag rE int cea a SO Ly ee pI OC EU ie eae rae ie ee LF ta aon eS gee eee Bae eee Wa Senne, moe tneerey ee memienire peg lecseacan aie cig aoe Ee POE orien gen tga sions, ste ee me ge ET at im PALA RAMA sata Some ae aes a eet er apy Perr’ S SAI Bp 1d Eon PS nak pr RS een arma aniata~ aang Pid ene yap Piso renin “2 owes ee aoonrorirt Smee re ape FSC mack Speitianael Aint ened (chins 0 pil Hai i SBS Rit Nae ieee wee pon rae Pt sat at ela cd td cd a it ed ko cel a Ee ee 11 pm a Ge amt gemye gat gem ny Me Meat Fs Sy ie swan ieee peare imam rerio ae te ax arora tN sey meetin omelet gee th ga a rm mm eye Qe ei dfce nn eee og = LE ae at tee eae ART fief nap ene EM nO ROT YB Ee Wie ie enema em ger em Em em e norm Ee yr gm iene ep ym nme eH mem ea al oer tet tae oe ee eS Kei ee. om, cre = oo monet, aranarene meres sangeet aoe er. aa ae ree ener eee ee ere e a Pea I A ~ 4 Soragpetgins od Toe De aie glee aay a wy ar ag OS Cee aed dam De tome a ly Te WS oe 2" SLES RESET eS ELMR ES 2Og TS MEE ETT ie eG MERE pd EET react Pe eee greg atete Sm germ iew ake Sastagl ES SSL oy eee ee Sneed SSS" ee RNY mE RTM A Ryn ae geese eg me my ewes)