---
title: 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'
url: 'https://samisdat.in/books/religion-and-the-rise-of-capitalism-1922/read'
markdown: 'https://samisdat.in/books/religion-and-the-rise-of-capitalism-1922/read.md'
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date: '1922-05-15'
description: 'RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM A HISTORICAL STUDY (HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922) BY R. H. TAWNEY PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH A PREPATORY NOTE BY DR. CHARLES GORE LONDON JOHN MURRAY, A…'
---

## RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

# RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

# A HISTORICAL STUDY

(HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922)

## BY R. H. TAWNEY

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

WITH A PREPATORY NOTE

BY DR. CHARLES GORE

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

| FIRST EL | ITION |  | • |  | March | 1926 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reprinted |  |  | • |  | June | 1926 |
| Reprinted | • | • | • | • | January | 1927 |
| CHEAPER | Editio | N. | • |  | June | 1929 |
| Reprinted | • |  |  |  | January | 1933 |
| Reprinted | (with a | New | Prefac | e) | October | 1936 |
| Reprinted | • |  | • |  | March | 1943 |
| Reprinted | • |  | • | 1 | November | 1944 |
| Reprinted |  |  |  |  | February | 1948 |

#### TO

## DR. CHARLES GORE

WITH

AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE

"Whatever the world thinks; he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman."

BISHOP BERKELEY, Siris, 350.

In the previous editions of this book, pages 1, 2, 63, 64, 133, 134, 195, 196, 275, 276, 289 and 290 were used as half-titles. In view of the economy necessary at present in the use of paper, these pages do not appear in the present printing.

# PREFACE TO 1936

References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the notes at the end of this volume. 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, 1941 (Eng. trans. by Olive Wyon of his Die Sociallehren der

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 a serious journal, to deprecate in all gravity the employment of the term "Capitalism" in an historical

work, as a political catch-word, betraying a sinister intention on the part of the misguided author. An innocent solecism of the kind would not, it is probable, occur so readily to-day. Obviously, the word "Capitalism," like "Feudalism" and "Mercantilism," is open to misuse. Obviously, the time has now come when it is more important to determine the different species of Capitalism, and the successive phases of its growth, than to continue to labour the existence of the genus. But, after more than half a century of work on the subject by scholars of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists; or to suggest that, if it does exist, it is unique among human institutions, in having, like Melchisedek, existed from eternity; or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers. Verbal controversies are profitless; if an author discovers a more suitable term, by all means let him use it. He is unlikely, however, to make much of the history of Europe during the last three centuries, if, in addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.

The more general realization of the rôle of Capitalism in history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. "Trade is one thing, religion is another": once advanced as an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form two separate and co-ordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which its earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an idea than to understand its development. The effects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, need not here be discussed. Whatever its

merits, its victory, it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury, land-grabbing, and extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institution of property, the transactions of the market-place, the whole fabric of society and the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All insist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the appetitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the acquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep its hands off business encountered, when first formulated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, that it effected the transition from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned truth.

The tendency of that transition is no longer in dispute. Its causation and stages remain the subject of debate. The critical period, especially in England, was the two centuries following the Reformation. It is natural, therefore, that most recent work on the subject of this book should have turned its high lights on that distracted age. The most striking attempt to formulate a theory of the movement of religious thought on social issues which then took place was made at the beginning of the present century by a German scholar, Max Weber, in two articles published in 1904 and 1905. Hence it is

<sup>1 For Weber's life and personality, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber, ein Lebensbild, Tübingen, 1926, and Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Deutsches Wesenim politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren, Oldenburg, 1932.

not less natural that much of that work should, consciously or unconsciously, have had Weber as its starting-point.

What exactly was the subject with which he was concerned? That question is obviously the first which should be asked, though not all his critics ask it. He was preparing to undertake the comparative study of the social outlook and influence of different religions, the incomplete results of which appeared in three volumes in 1920, under the name of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssociologie. The articles, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, were a first step towards that larger work, and subsequently, corrected and amplified, formed part of its first volume. Weber thought that Western Christianity as a whole, and in particular certain varieties of it, which acquired an independent life as a result of the Reformation, had been more favourable to the progress of Capitalism than some other great creeds. His articles were an attempt to test that generalization.

Their scope is explained in an introduction written later to the Religionssociologie. His object was to examine—the abstractions fall with a mournful thud on English ears—"the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit or the ethos of an economic system." He hoped—O sancta simplicitas!—to avoid misunderstanding by underlining somewhat heavily the limitations of his theme. He formulated no "dogma"; on the contrary, he emphasized that his articles were to be regarded as merely a Vorarbeit, a preparatory essay. He did not seek "a psychological determination of economic events"; on the contrary, he insisted on "the fundamental importance of the economic factor." He did not profess to offer a

<sup>1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Eng. trans., p. 183.

<sup>3 H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism, p. xii.

\* Weber, op. cit., p. 26

complete interpretation even of the religious attitude discussed in his articles; on the contrary, he urged the necessity of investigating how that attitude itself "was in turn influenced in its development and character by the totality of social conditions, especially the economic ones." So far from desiring—to quote his own words—"to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritual interpretation of civilization and history," he expressly repudiated any intention of the kind

In view of these disclaimers, it should not be necessary to point out that Weber made no attempt in the articles in question to advance a comprehensive theory of the genesis and growth of Capitalism. That topic had been much discussed in Germany since Marx opened the debate, and the first edition of the most massive of recent books on the subject, Sombart's Der Moderne Kapitalismus, had appeared two years before. The range of Weber's interests, and the sweep of his intellectual vision; were, no doubt, unusually wide; but his earliest work had been done on economic history, and he continued to lecture on that subject till his death in 1920. If he did not in his articles refer to the economic consequences of the discovery of America, or of the great depreciation, or of the rise to financial pre-eminence of the Catholic city of Antwerp, it was not that these bashful events had at last hit on an historian whose notice they could elude. Obviously, they were epoch-making; obviously, they had a profound effect, not only on economic organization, but on economic thought. Weber's immediate problem, however, was a different one. Montesquieu remarked,

<sup>1 Weber, op. cit., p. 183.

<sup>2 Ibid., p. 183, and note 118 on chap. v: "it would have been easy to proceed... to a regular construction which logically deduced everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant rationalism. 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."

with perhaps excessive optimism, that the English "had progressed furthest of all peoples in three important things, piety, commerce and freedom." The debt of the third of these admirable attributes to the first had often been emphasized. Was it possible, Weber asked, that the second might also owe something to it? He answered that question in the affirmative. The connecting link was to be found, he thought, in the influence of the religious movement whose greatest figure had been Calvin.

Since Weber's articles are now available in English, it is needless to recapitulate the steps in his argument. My own views upon it, if I may refer to them without undue egotism, were summarized in a note—too lengthy to be read—to the first edition of the present work, and were later restated more fully in the introduction to the English translation of the articles which appeared in 1930.¹ Weber's generalizations had been widely discussed by continental scholars for more than twenty years before this book appeared. The criticisms contained in it, therefore, had no claim to originality—unless, indeed, to be less anxious to refute an author than to understand him is in itself to be original.

The first of them—that "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 "—has since been developed at some length by Mr. Robertson; but it was not, perhaps, quite just. Weber would have replied, no doubt, that such a remark, however true, was, as far as his articles were concerned, an ignoratio elenchi. To meet him fairly he would have said, one should meet him on his own ground, which at the moment was that, not of general economic history, but of religious thought on social issues. My second

See below, note 32 on chap. iv, pp. 319-21, and Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 3-11.

The last point is of some moment. It suggests that the problem discussed by Weber requires to be restated. It is natural, no doubt, that much of the later

<sup>1 Weber, op. cit., pp. 197-8. A chapter expanding the same criticism is contained in H. M. Robertson, Aspects of Economic Individualism, pp. 57-87. The best treatment of the subject is that of Brentano, Die Anfange des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57, and Der Wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1923, pp. 363 sq.

<sup>2 See H. M. Robertson, op. cit., pp. 88-110 and 133-67; and J. Brodrick, 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.

work on the subject should have taken him for its target, and probably inevitable—such is the nature of controversy—that a theory which he advanced as a hypothesis to explain one range of phenomena, and one alone, should have been clothed for the purpose of criticism with the uncompromising finality of a remorseless dogma. His mine has paid handsome dividends; but, whatever its attractions, that vein, it may be suggested, is now worked out. The important question, after all, is not what Weber wrote about the facts, still less what the epigoni who take in his washing have suggested that he wrote, but what the facts were. It is an illusion to suppose that he stands alone in pointing to a connection between the religious movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth ceaturies and the outburst of economic energy which was remaking society in the Netherlands and England. Other students have reached, independently of him, that not recondite conclusion. How much truth does it contain?

To attempt a reply to that question would expand a preface into a book. The materials for answering it are, however, abundant. If contemporary opinion on the point is not easily cited, the difficulty arises, not from lack of evidence to reveal it, but from the embarras de richesse which it offers for quotation. Its tenor is not doubtful. The truth is that the ascription to different confessions of distinctive economic attitudes was not exceptional in the seventeenth century; among writers who handled such topics it was almost common form. It occurs repeatedly in works of religious controversy. It occurs also in books, such as those of Temple, Petty, and Defoe, and numerous pamphlets, by men whose primary

<sup>1 E.g. H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden Nationalökonomischen Ansichten, Leipzig, 1861; F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, London, 1892, Introduction; W. Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, London, 1910 (see below, note 33 on chap. iv). The last work, though published seven years after the appearance of Weber's articles, does not refer to them, nor is its argument similar to theirs.

interest was, not religion, but economic affairs. So far, in fact, from being, as has been suggested with disarming naiveté, the sinister concoction of a dark modern conspiracy, designed to confound Calvinism and Capitalism, godly Geneva and industrious Manchester, in a common ruin, the existence of a connection between economic Radicalism and religious Radicalism was to those who saw both at first-hand something not far from a platitude. Until some reason is produced for rejecting their testimony, it had better be assumed that they knew what they were talking about.

How precisely that connection should be conceived is, of course, a different question. It had, obviously, two sides. Religion influenced, to a degree which to-day is difficult to appreciate, men's outlook on society. Economic and social changes acted powerfully on religion. Weber, as was natural in view of his special interests, emphasized the first point. He did so with a wealth of knowledge and an intellectual force which deserve admiration, and not least the admiration of those who, like myself, have ventured to dissent from some of his conclusions. He touched the second point only enpassant. There is truth in the criticism of Mr. Gordon-Walker that Weber did not inquire how far the Reformation was a response to social needs, or investigate the causes, as well as the consequences, of the religious mentality which he analysed with so much insight.

It is that aspect of the subject which most needs work

<sup>1 E.g. H. M. Robertson, op. ctt., p. xi. "Many writers have taken advantage of an unpopularity of Capitalism in the twentieth century to employ them \[see the theories ascribed to Weber\] 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 (pp. 207-8) actually firing the train appears to be that implacable incendiary, Mr. Aldous Huxley. "Infected," like 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.

to-day. In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical, and economic, through which England passed between the Armada and the Revolution, every ingredient in the caldron worked a subtle change in every other. There was action and reaction. "L'esprit Calviniste," and "l'esprit des hommes nouveaux que la révolution économique du temps introduit dans la vie des affaires," if in theory distinct, were in practice intertwined. Puritanism helped to mould the social order, but it was also itself increasingly moulded by it. Of the influence of the economic expansion of the age on English religious thought something is said in the following pages. I hope that their inadequacies may prompt some more competent writer to deal with that subject as its importance deserves.

R. H. TAWNEY.

1 H. Pirenne, Les Périodes de l'Histoire Sociale du Capitalisme, 1914.

## PREFATORY NOTE

cause so fully and heartily as in that of re-awakening the conscience of Englishmen to the social meaning of the religion of the Incarnation, and who felt as much as anyone the need of accurate research into the causes which have so disastrously obscured it.

CHARLES GORE.

October 1925.

## INTRODUCTION

This book is based on a series of lectures on Religious Thought on Social Questions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which were delivered at King's College, London, for the Holland Foundation in March and April 1922. It does not carry the subject beyond the latter part of the seventeenth century, and it makes no pretence of dealing with the history either of economic theory or of economic organization, except in so far as changes in theory and organization are related to changes in religious opinion. Having been prevented by circumstances from publishing the lectures immediately, I have taken advantage of the delay to re-write part of them, with the addition of some matter which could not easily be included in them in their original form. I must thank my fellow-trustees for their indulgence in allowing me to postpone publication.

The development of religious opinion on questions of social ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay on The Canonist Doctrine first interested me in the subject, by Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O'Brien. But it is no reflection on their work to say that the most important contributions of recent years have come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy, and above all, Max Weber, whose celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus¹ 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

I The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (G. Allen & Unwin).

have not always been able to accept their conclusions, I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret that Mr. Coulton's The Mediaeval Village appeared too late for me to make use of its abundant stores of learning and insight.

It only remains for me to thank the friends whose assistance has enabled me to make this book somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr. J. L. Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have been kind enough to read, and to improve, the manuscript. Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading the proofs, has helped me most generously throughout with advice and criticism. I am deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the proofs and making an index, and to the London School of Economics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for enabling me to make use of her services. My obligation to the help given by my wife is beyond acknowledgment.

R. H. TAWNEY.

## CONTENTS

| Pref | ACE TO | 1936 |  | • | • | • | • | • | Page 1X |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pref | ATORY | Note |  | • | • | • | • |  | xxi |
| Intro | od **uct** i | ON | • | • | • |  | • | • | xxiii |
| chapter I. | THE M | Mediæv | al\] | Заско | ROUN | ъ. | • |  | 3 |
|  | " La r un riche | niséricorde "—Anato | e de I | ieu est i RANCE, *I* | infinie : .e Puits | elle sa de Sair | uvera n ite Cl **air** | nême ø. |  |
|  | **(** i) | The So | cial | Organi | sm | • | • |  | 14 |
|  | (ii) | The Si | n of | Avarie | e. |  | • |  | 36 |
|  | (iii) | The Id | eal a | nd the | Reali | ty. | • | • | 55 |
| II. | THE ( | Contine | NTA | l Ref | ORME | RS. | • |  | 65 |
|  | " Neit wealth, ( public w | her the Cl ought to to eal, or see | urch olerat k it te | of Christ e such as o the hur | t, nor a s prefer rt of the Bucer, | Christiz private eir neig De Reg | en Come gain to hbours.' no Chris | non- the |  |
|  | (i) | The Ec | onon | nic Res | volutio | on. |  |  | 66 |
|  | (ii) | Luther |  |  | • |  | - : |  | 79 |
|  | (iii) | Calvin | • | • | • | • | ٠ | • | 102 |
| III. | THE ( | Church | OF | Engl | AND | , | • | • | 135 |
|  | "If at the com wisheth whoever wealth a | ny man be mon, state peace an he be, he nd in the l Laun, Seri | so ade , he d hap must body mon b | dicted to is void opiness in the in of the Chapter History | his print of the to him the bourch." Majes | vate, the sense of self in dy of the ty, June | at he ne f piety, vain. ne Comm | glect and For, non- |  |
|  | **(i)** | The La | nd ( | Juestio | n. | • | • | • | 137 |
| \_ | (ií) | Religio | us I | heory | and S | Social | Policy | ν. | 150 |
| - | (iii) | The Gr | owth | of Inc | lividu | alism |  |  | 175 |

| ITENTS |
|---|
| į |

|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | PAGE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| THE ! | Puritan | Mo | VEMEN: | r | • |  | • | 197 |
| " And felowe." | the Lorde | was ooxix. | with Jose 2 (Tynda | ph, a le's tr | nd he v anslatio | vas a lu 2). | ıckie |  |
| (i) | Puritar | ism | and So | ciety | • | • |  | 198 |
| **(** ii) | A Godl | y Di: ade | scipline | vers | us the | Relig | gion | 211 |
| (iii) | The Tr | iumį | h of th | e Ec | onom | c Vir | tues | 228 |
| (iv) | The Ne | w M | edicine | for . | Poveri | *y* . | • | 253 |
| Conc | LUSION |  | • |  |  |  |  | 277 |
| " The mon, be answere Mary, s fellow." | er is a certa eynge asked ed, yea. I sayed he, ev '—LATIMER | ine m l if he praye ven as l, Seven | an that s had bend you, said I lyked l n Sermon | hortly at the he, he sym al | after ne serme ow lyke wayes- e King | ny fyrst on that d you h —a sedie Edward | day, ym? cious | • |
| s . | . • | • | • | • | • | • |  | 291 |
| х . |  | • | • |  |  |  |  | 330 |
|  | THE I "And felowe." (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) CONC "The mon, be answere Mary, s fellow." | THE PURITAN "And the Lorde felowe."—Genesis : (i) Puritan (ii) A Godl of Tr. (iii) The Tr (iv) The Ne CONCLUSION "Ther is a certa mon, beynge asked answered, yea. I Mary, sayed he, ex fellow."—LATIMEN | THE PURITAN MO "And the Lorde was felowe."—Genesis xxxix. (i) Puritanism (ii) A Godly Disof Trade (iii) The Triumf (iv) The New M CONCLUSION "Ther is a certaine m mon, beynge asked if he answered, yea. I praye Mary, sayed he, even as fellow."—LATIMER, Sevents | THE PURITAN MOVEMENT "And the Lorde was with Jose felowe."—Genesis XXXIX. 2 (Tynda (i) Puritanism and So (ii) A Godly Discipline of Trade (iii) The Triumph of the (iv) The New Medicine CONCLUSION "Ther is a certaine man that is mon, beynge asked if he had bene answered, yea. I praye you, said Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked it fellow."—Latimer, Seven Sermons. | THE PURITAN MOVEMENT. "And the Lorde was with Joseph, a felowe."—Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale's trace) (i) Puritanism and Society (ii) A Godly Discipline vers of Trade (iii) The Triumph of the Ecc (iv) The New Medicine for a CONCLUSION "Ther is a certaine man that shortly mon, beynge asked if he had bene at the answered, yea. I praye you, said he, he many, sayed he, even as I lyked hym at fellow."—LATIMER, Seven Sermons befores | THE PURITAN MOVEMENT. "And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he violated the Lorde was with Joseph, and he violated the Lorde was with Joseph, and he violated to the Lorde (i) Puritanism and Society (ii) A Godly Discipline versus the of Trade (iii) The Triumph of the Economy (iv) The New Medicine for Poverto Conclusion "Ther is a certaine man that shortly after mon, beynge asked if he had bene at the serme answered, yea. I praye you, said he, how lyke Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked hym alwayesfellow."—Latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before King and the latimer, Seven Sermons before Ki | THE PURITAN MOVEMENT. "And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a highlowe."—Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale's translation). (i) Puritanism and Society (ii) A Godly Discipline versus the Relig of Trade (iii) The Triumph of the Economic Vir. (iv) The New Medicine for Poverty CONCLUSION "Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst mon, beynge asked if he had bene at the sermon that answered, yea. I praye you, said he, how lyked you h Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked hym alwayes—a sedic fellow."—Latimer, Seven Sermons before King Edward. | THE PURITAN MOVEMENT. "And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe."—Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale's translation). (i) Puritanism and Society (ii) A Godly Discipline versus the Religion of Trade (iii) The Triumph of the Economic Virtues (iv) The New Medicine for Poverty 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 I

#### THE MEDIÆVAL BACKGROUND

I must begin these lectures with an apology. Their subject is historical. It is the attitude of religious thought in England towards social organization and economic issues in the period immediately preceding the Reformation and in the two centuries which follow it. Canon Scott Holland was at once a prophet and a theologian. The most suitable beginning for a foundation established to commemorate him would have been either an examination of the spiritual problems concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society, or a philosophical discussion of the contribution which religion can make to their solution. Discretion compels one who is competent neither to inspire to action nor to expound a system, to refrain from meddling with these high matters. I have therefore chosen the humbler task of trying to give an account of the history of opinion during one critical period. But I do so with the consciousness that the choice is due, less to any special appropriateness on the part of the subject, than to the inability of the lecturer to attempt any other.

I would not, however, excuse the selection merely by my own incapacity to do justice to a topic of more immediate moment. Thanks largely to Canon Scott Holland, and to those who worked with him, the conception of the scope and content of Christian ethics which was generally, though not universally, accepted in the nineteenth century, is undergoing a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the experience of mankind, which is history, has played some part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose conception of the relations of Church and State appears to have been modelled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with the protest, "Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life"; and a more recent occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular capital of public affairs."

Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident to-day that the line of division between the spheres of religion and secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity, that the spokesmen of religion "leave the present world to the men of business and the devil," shows some signs of drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent and in America, not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of international politics and of social organization. It is being made to-day. It has been made in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at some point pushed

farther into the tough world of practical affairs men will say,

Here nature first begins Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire As from her outmost works, a broken foe,

will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between Church and State, issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which they have assumed and the phases through which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by widening the experience brought to their consideration.

In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis's has described the secularization of political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.

While the political significance of this development has often been described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less attention. These were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The emergence of an objective and passionless economic science took place more slowly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the State, because the issues were less absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the selfcontained department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world of business relations and, even in the England of the early seventeenth century, to discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism.

Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is between those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a supernatural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern political theory, developed only when society was given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation, and the rise of both was largely due to a changed conception of the nature and functions of a Church. The crucial period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most important arena (apart from Holland) is England, because it is in England, with its new geographical position as the entrepôt between Europe and America, its achievement of internal economic unity two centuries before France and two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the structure

of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its essence is the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is resolved into its elements—politics, business, and spiritual exercises; each assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own being. The social functions matured within the Church, and long identified with it, are transferred to the State, which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel compartments, between which a due balance should be maintained, but which have no vital connection with each other.

The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its general character. It is easy to detect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth century can anticipate the monetary theory associated with the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Laurentius de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance bills, and St. Antonino describe the significance of capital; while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in the style of a mediæval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Badman, who ground the poor with high prices and usury, in the manner of a mediæval friar. But the distance traversed in the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the typical economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the typical popular teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the

Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the destruction of Laud's experiment in a confessional State, and with the failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly. After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct

was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration economists, that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years is not with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circumstances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, before the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester.

Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be refuted by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A mediæval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury

remarked that "he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse." Mr. Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which has as its subject social thought, not the history of business organization, it is not necessary to elaborate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds romantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the merits of different theories of social organization must be left to those who feel confident that they possess an adequate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages is to endeavour to understand a few among them.

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men should have thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as they did, and not least significant when thought and practice are at variance. It may be true that "theory is a criticism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criticism of a bad one." But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself significant, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they were asked. It would be paradoxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age, merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated economic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century merely because, behind canon law and summæ and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind

statutes and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the economic man.

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focussed on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is to-day what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeathes it to its successors.

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of econo-

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 endeavoured not only to christianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal morality and the practices which are permissible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and, if so, ought a Church to endeavour to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are a few of the questions which men are asking to-day, and on which a more competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and wavering light.

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# The Social Organism

We are asking these questions to-day. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradition, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doctrines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation developed, different Churches produced characteristic differences of social opinion.

But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new economic world was not accepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness that changes in doctrine and church government involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily, the historical background.

That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic conditions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded.

The mediæval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging

to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: "Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree."

Each of these attitudes meets us to-day. Each meets us in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper predominates. The author of the Elucidarium, 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 repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif's teaching, that the "just man is already

the devil," but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation of 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 "mediæval thought," is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern Christianity has its roots in mediæval religion. There is a mediæval Puritanism and rationalism as well as a mediæval 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 Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of mediæval parents. Like the Church to-day 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 ot social construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged from it endeavoured, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all alike, in one form or another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic. The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the Summa of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, mediæval 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 allembracing, there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe. "The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the vision of the divine essence."

Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is

to be realized; in its narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at variance with theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is "the sphere of religion," and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant.

There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of mediæval 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." These activities, which form his life according to the law of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.

The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull 1 "The way of religion is to lead the things which

are lower to the things which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to the law of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher." Thus social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, society is an organism of different grades, and human activities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards:

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia, Per ch' una fansi nostre voglie stesse

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of to-day. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the conviction of mediæval thinkers that life has a divine purpose coloured the interpretation of common affairs, as it was coloured by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from

not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true

function was "to defend God's law by power of the world." Craftsmen—the burden of endless sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? "The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every other." "

If the mediæval moralist was often too naïve in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. "The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and . . . labourers. . . . As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained

it... Kindly man's hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body ... and thus should it be in parts of the Church... As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the Church.... Surely the Church shall never be whole before proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and \[by\] medicine of men." 12

who, in the fourteenth century, again and again rose in revolt, the mediæval artisan, especially in backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary organizations, or "parliaments," of wage-earners, which goes on in London even before the end of the thirteenth century," and the growth of journeymen's associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters."

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for each man to know his neighbour, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the most characteristic of mediæval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything like a majority of mediæval workers were ever members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than ninetenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a equestion whether there was not a considerable population of casual workers—consider only the number of unskilled workers that must have been required as labourers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes—who were rarely organized in permanent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested

interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society over-riding particular interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time to time more than a little justification for his complaint, that "all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse \[against false conspiratours\]," 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 century 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 mediæval gild was that, if it sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. "Tout ce petit monde antique," writes the historian of French gilds, "était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd'hui, des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une règle puissante s'imposait à tous et d'une manière générale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par l'Evangile." 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 neighbour in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve

professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury of all—whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate and direct, and there was little room for organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic expediency.

Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not unfavourable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tremendous claim to mediate between even the humblest activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, "avarice." At Rome, everything is for sale. What is followed 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 panperi, soli favet danti.

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re, Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare; Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare, 'Payes, payes,' dit le mot, si vis impetrare."

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific contributions of

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions,

The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labour—the common lot of mankind—is necessary and honour-

able; trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed in mediæval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the Philosopher himself praised avitapresia? But it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in mediæval social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of mediæval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader's status, but payment for labour, skill and risk."

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most mediæval thinkers, they are. Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptionis negotiatio." The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary economic organization. The economy of the mediæval borough—consider only its treatment of food supplies and prices—was one in which consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown,

for whom he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as monasteries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which mediæval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.

he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God's temple." By very definition a man who "buys in order that he may sell dearer," the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, "is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain." "

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 demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labour in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.

# (i

# The Sin of Avarice

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. Their practical expression was the body of economic casuistry, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines sprang as much from the popular consciousness of the plain facts of the economic situation, as from the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fables of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks) "about the year 1240," on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than the refinements of lawyers."

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

the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business—its individual practice was, of course, another matter—because both were formed by the same environment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social expediency.

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 mediæval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that "Juetta \[who\] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation," and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus," should be regarded as figures at once too scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbours and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and enforced, in the last resource, through the courts.

The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. "Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law." The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the long-run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not been yet 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 mediæval and modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any particular action, policy, or system of organization, the former starts from the position that there is a moral authority to which considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated. The practical application of this conception is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the for-

tuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigour, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have been poor yesterday and rich to-day.

discretus, and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitution, and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within which prices might move without involving sin.53

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-

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 insur-

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, except when they could do nought else, and so there would be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger: for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments." The man who used these arguments was not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in *Realpolitik*, and one of the ablest statesmen of his day.

True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The distinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honourable, was as familiar in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no reasonable judgment of the mediæval denunciation of usury is possible, unless it is remembered that whole ranges of financial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international banking-houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommunication.

As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the international money-market escaped from the ban on usury; in the fourteenth century Italy was full of banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in every commercial centre from Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts.41

It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypocrisy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce nor government could be carried on without credit. It was that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based, had reference to a quite different order of economic activities from that represented by loans from great banking-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its object was simple and direct—to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small men that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable. It was for them that the Church's scheme of economic ethics had been worked out, and with reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.

It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesiastical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often analysed 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

term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the sellers run into sin, unless there is a probability that the wares will have changed in value by the time that payment is made; "and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making contracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God." 47

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards' complaint that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation, by taking as his illustration the books which had been written on the text, "Lend, hoping for nothing again," and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little enough "to answer... all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men's

bargains and chafferings together." A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old rigour. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants, and in general—a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment—" all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent," and all "who may keep their neighbour 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 convenient to be victimized by anyone 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 ground that they involved læsio fidei, and with usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon," had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was

For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it is evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by the secular authorities. A statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before) the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living. The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated when the question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an antiquated piece of common

form, even into the age of lusty capitalism under Elizabeth and James I."

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.45 Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the ground that they

It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an attempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the exactions of the money-lender. From a very early date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be "coloured," direct prohibition was almost necessarily impotent, and which favoured the policy of providing facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be obtained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious

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 neighbourly or unneighbourly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich,

# (iii)

# The Ideal and the Reality

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made the age a watershed in economic development. It is evident that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely conserva-

tive. There was no question of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church, to which independence of thought among the lower orders was but little less abhorrent when it related to their temporal well-being than when it was concerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to the most formidable of insurrections.

Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view, which regarded the social order as a thing unalterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labour, the hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore, they denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of mediæval Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in civilization. They referred to questions of economic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct formed an important part.

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners to-day, can lead a crusade against royalties. The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in

defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St. Francis' rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church.

lived under it had no illusions as to its harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money took was to buy himself out of the obligation to work on the lord's demesne. The Peasants' Revolt in England, the *Jacquerie* in France, and the repeated risings of the German peasantry, reveal a state of social exasperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent movements.

It is natural to ask (though some writers on mediæval economics refrain from asking), what the attitude of religious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be treated with humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not "living tools," but men; in the eyes of God all men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus is before Dives. True, villeinage was a legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth century there were serfs who were rich men. But to release the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever "mad priests" might say and do, the official Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circumspection.

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom. Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pronouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the result of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on economic grounds. Almost all mediæval writers appear to assume it or excuse it. Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens, was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared.

to the children of light concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of St. Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and England, who appealed to the fact that "Christ has made all men free"; 100 and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom—and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nineteenth—was part of a general economic movement, with which the Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of the French Revolution.

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was a compromise—a compromise of which the critic can say, "How much that was intolerable was softened!" How much that was intolerable was softened!"

Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opinion acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the mediæval Church almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of the mediæval land system was precisely that which

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the mediæval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.

The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in mediæval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of its contribution does not consist in its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and borrower to extortion. It is to be found in the insistence of mediæval thinkers that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites,

so prone to self-aggrandisement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear to-day as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the mediæval theorist meant by "natural law."

When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination, and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be contested.

## CHAPTER II

#### THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, has said that "after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change." His reference was to the new world revealed by learning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought.

The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the effect of the Reformation to say

that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from which new streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency. The sixteenth century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth—because it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an older social order. The practical implications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced.

# (i)

# The Economic Revolution

The religious revolution of the age came upon a world heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labours quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.

For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favoured spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. The general who marshalled the host and launched the attack was economic power.

Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with the climax of the great Discoveries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the conventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic significance. It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labour of Italian cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors.

The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a single economic system, has no space left for fresh expansion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemorial pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits

imposed on its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.

As was the general scheme, so were the details. Inelastic in its external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal, relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the foreign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an economic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony with its depôt, the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried on under capitulations.

This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted, wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion. Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst. It was not the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled at commons and under-

The result was not the less sensational, because it had been long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter.

Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the

main characteristics, which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery, could already, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun.

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.

Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarnation in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a pattern scrawled to amuse

the childish malice of princes. Of that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the international idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe, Antwerp, "a home common to all nations," was the most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a centre of learning by Plantin's press, the metropolis of painting in a country where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Dürer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found a spiritual home, where the energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of happiness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at Antwerp.

The economic pre-eminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the munitions of the Black Country round Liège, poured in an unceasing stream on to its quays. But Antwerp was a European, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competitor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth century she had crushed her rival. The Hanse League maintained a depôt at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increasing numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepôt through which English cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap the

wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged pre-eminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads which ran east and west met and ended in its harbours. The Portuguese Government made it in 1503 the depôt of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite of protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought finance in its train. The commercial companies and banking houses of south Germany turned from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for financial operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.'

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 mediæval middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the sixteenth century, with its international ramifications, its independence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindication of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own career. "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 liberal bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all precedents, a policy of practical individualism, which would have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian monarchy, which were fought by their more conservative neigh-

bours, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, welcoming the technical improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum cuiusque gentis ac linguae.

where bills could be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nationality changed hands.10

Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labours, 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 spectres of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they re-established them by political art.

The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war. "Of all birds," wrote the sharpest pen of the age, "the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it." The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare's tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Government,

after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including Lyons, the financial capital of southern Europe, 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.

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 successors.

These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money-market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the financier was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, financing impartially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli's Prince. Compared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.

The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German banking houses were involved to astonishing. The Welsers had invested in the Point guese voyage of 1505 to the East Indies, financed the expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezahe in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between Lisbon

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#### Luiher

Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercantilist thinkers resharpened an old

economic weapon for the armoury of princes. Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign exchanges.

The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an instrument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own conception of man's spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had stretched old formulæ to cover the new forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic treatment of economic questions was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology.

Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that questions of economic conduct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to consult the theologians of the University as to the compatibility of speculative exchange business with the canon law." When Eck, later famous as the champion

who crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the University of Bologna authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.

company of the Fuggers." Zwingli and Oecolampadius 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 Luther into his outburst:
"Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle or stab, secretly
or publicly . . . such wonderful times are these that
a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than
another with prayer"; it also helped to stamp
on Lutheranism an almost servile reliance on the
secular authorities. In England there was less violence,
but hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writing
and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon,
Sandys and Jewel—to mention but the best-known
names—all contributed to the debate." Whatever
the social practice of the sixteenth century may have
been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the
part of men of religion. If the world could be saved
by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a
Paradise.

That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in England, is its conservatism. Where questions of social morality were involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to mediæval authorities, and reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.

A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found acceptance in certain quarters has represented the Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something like it is of respectable an-

These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the grand religious struggles of the age have their significance. But the *obiter dicta* of an acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants than on the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to partisans. If capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary gain, and the social relations which establish themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariate whom they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in mediæval Italy and in mediæval Flanders. If by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predominantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic bankers who were its leading financiers.

Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and economic issues, it did so without design, and against the intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensational the innovations in economic practice which accompanied the expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the development of doctrine on the subject of economic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To think of the abdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to

The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression in the writings of the German reformers. Like the return to nature in the eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society disillusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The prosperity of Augsburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central

position, which they were to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepôt between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the Near East. But the expansion of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of an acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Germany from a highway into a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise to a position of overwhelming pre-eminence 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 labour of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements.

Under the impact of these new forces, while the institutions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and operation were transformed. In the larger cities the gild organization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the capitalist, became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate his power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariate, dependent for their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding morass of hopeless pauperism. The peasantry suffered equally from the spread of a commercial civilization into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian servitudes. As

in England, the nouveaux riches of the towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and fines by their competition. But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, was less fortunate. He found corvées redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest exactions.

On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to economic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized themselves into companies, which handled at Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their own resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar movement took place on the narrower stage of European commerce in the generation before the Reformation. Its centre was Germany, and it was defended and attacked by arguments almost identical with those which are familiar to-day. 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 unscramble eggs had already been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do not seem to have been more effective than modern legislation on the same subject.

The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such conditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth century, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.11 In the age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants' companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed merchants with knights, lawyers, and the clergy as public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.11

Luther's utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness.

It was partly that they were pièces de circonstance, thrown off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity. But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a conception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial or mischievous.

"Gold," wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, "constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Paradise." It was this doctrine that all things have their price—future salvation as much as present felicity—which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in common with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolutionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking business

of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and become a congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of Adam.

The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of society more mediæval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commercial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular protests against a commercial civilization which were everywhere in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed and

reproduced with astonishing naïveté, even while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.

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.

In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional doctrines. "A man should not say, 'I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,' but 'I will sell my wares as is right and proper.' For thy selling

should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbour, it should be restrained within such law and conscience that thou mayest practise it without harm or injury 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 labour and his risk, and must settle it accordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments.

On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the canonists. "The greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in interest.... The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world." Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compensation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian burial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the characteristic developments of his generation—the luxury trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking beyond measure. "Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels and spices . . . and drain the land and people of their money, should not be permitted. . . . Of combinations I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong. . . . Who is so stupid as not

to see that combinations are mere outright monopolics, 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?"

The grace that is freely bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the primeval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of contributing to sanctification. "It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty. . . . One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ."

antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man's actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.

The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the content of mediæval social teaching, while rejecting its sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of salvation, as vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is combined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of mediæval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders,

LUTHER 9

festivals and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit could be acquired by the operation of some special machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to them. "There can be no better instructions in . . . all transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbour present to himself these commandments: 'What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,' and 'Love thy neighbour 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 substitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to solve the problem which social duties present to the individual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it necessarily follow that the external order is simply irrelevant to it? To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien to that of the spirit—is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for which mediæval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy of values related to a common end, had attempted, however inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist had answered by anticipation

Luther's contemptuous dismissal of law and learning, when he urged that it was useless for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was prepared to undertake the intellectual labour 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 covetousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on the specific question whether the authorities of Dantzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. "The preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it; he cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the spirit of God urges forward." "

Luther's impotence was not accidental. It sprang directly from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He attacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching with regard to which his criticism was justified were only too numerous. But the remedy for bad law is good law, not lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the application of general principles to particular cases, which is involved in any living system of jurisprudence, whether ecclesiastical or secular. If the principles are not to be applied, on the ground that they are too sublime to be soiled by contact with the gross world of business and politics, what remains of them? Denunciations such as Luther launched against the Fuggers and the peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as he advanced in his tract On Trade and Usury. Pious rhetoric may be edifying, but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul.

"As the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. . . . Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his faith alone more and more." The logic of Luther's religious premises was more potent for posterity than his attachment to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its own inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring. But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dualism which, as its implications were developed, emptied religion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere heights where alone true faith is found, no human institution can avail to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many.

He himself was conscious that he had left the world of secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual restraints. He met the difficulty, partly with an admission that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the majestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, be obeyed; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could find no room in the Church. "Here it will be asked, 'Who then can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For in this fashion no merchandising would remain on earth.'... You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody." "

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. Sceptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.

# (iii) Calvin

The most characteristic and influential form of Protestantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is that which descends, by one path or another, from the teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in different countries, became an international movement, which brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was strewn with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had been socially conservative, deferential to established political authorities, the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism was an active and radical force. It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion.

Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of society, it possessed from the beginning one characteristic which was both novel and important. It assumed an economic organization which was relatively advanced, and expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of mediæval theologians and of Luther. The difference is not merely

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one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on which the discussion is conducted. The background, not only of most mediæval social theory, but also of Luther and his English contemporaries, is the traditional stratification of rural society. It is a natural, rather than a money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of peasants and craftsmen in the small market town, where industry is carried on for the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the production of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole system in motion. When they criticize economic abuses, it is precisely against departures from that natural state of things—against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless competition, which disturb the stability of the existing order with clamorous economic appetites—that their criticism is directed.

These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of unscrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on the writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example, who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that private property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Councils of Constance and Basel—"assembled, forsooth, at the bidding of the Holy Ghost"—for showing indulgence to the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God." Of the attempts made at Zürich and Geneva to repress extortion something is said below. But these full-blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation by which interest was permitted, and already, when they were uttered.

they had ceased to represent the conclusion of the left wing of the Reformed Churches.

In doing so they naturally started from a frank recognition of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of business life. They thus broke with the tradition which, regarding a preoccupation with economic interests "beyond what is necessary for subsistence" as reprehensible, had stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to the mediæval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty escaped censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of respectability as the earnings of the labourer and the

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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 merchants' 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 Government to undertake the development of the woollen industry on mercantilist lines."

It is in the light of that change of social perspective that the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is to be interpreted. Its significance consisted, not in the phase which it marked in the technique of

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 labour." There have been ages in which such doctrines would have been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather than as a defence of it. Nor were Calvin's specific contributions to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence and from the idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably regarded by himself merely as one additional

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step in the long series of developments through which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on the subject had already gone. In emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from the necessities of the poor and the interest which a prosperous merchant could earn with borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the organizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a legend. Like the author of another revolution in economic theory, he might have turned on his popularizers with the protest: "I am not a Calvinist."

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 offshoots took their stand on the side of the activities which were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring concentration on the task of using for the glory of God the opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could and must be lived.

It was on this practical basis of urban industry and commercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic from the theological premises. "God not only foresaw," Calvin wrote, "the fall of the first man, . . . but also arranged all by the determination of his own will." Certain individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from eternity by "his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit"; the remainder have been consigned to eternal damnation, "by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment." Deliverance, in short, is the work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing to it, but of an objective Power. Human effort, social institutions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the true aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon broken reeds.

That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the sanctification of the world by strife and labour. For Calvinism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained. The central paradox of religious ethics—that only those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they are the humble instruments—finds in it a special exemplification. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live for that end. His task is at once to discipline his individual life, and to create a sanctified society. The Church, the State, the community in which he lives, must not merely be a means of personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs. It must be a "Kingdom of Christ," in which individual duties are performed by men conscious that they are "ever in their great Taskmaster's eye," and the whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing discipline.

The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age from the realization of the contrast between the external order of society and the moral standards recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely felt. The men who made the Reformation had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which, amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures of Nürnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Aeneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Dürer. And already a new dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was splendid, but it had been

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 laboured to create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs, stamped on them a new sanctification, and used them as the warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation: the members of the Reformed Church must be economical and

modest. It had sanctioned the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the savourless formality of individual good works reduced to a commercial system, as though man could keep a profit and loss account with his Creator: the true Christian must organize his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion, even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion.

Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie, conscious of the contrast between its own standards and those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard-bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate an open road for its own way of life by the use of every weapon, including political revolution and war, because the issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or self-interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new ideal of social conduct. Its practical message, it might perhaps be said, was la carrière ouverte—not aux talents, but au caractère.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of order. While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisis of the sixteenth century what Marx did for

the proletariate of the nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of historical materialism. He set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the established order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a chosen people, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; it not merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Compared with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bankrupt monarchies, the middle classes, in whom Calvinism took root most deeply, were a race of iron. It was not surprising that they made several revolutions, and imprinted their conceptions of political and social expediency on the public life of half a dozen different States in the Old World and in the New.

The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the call to fashion for the Christian character an objective embodiment in social institutions. Though logically connected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one of them said, the Scripture was "really and materially to be fulfilled." Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin's doctrine. Which of them

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predominated depended on differences of political environment and of social class. It depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile Government.

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 labourer is most like to God." •1

Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of religion, and the common observation that he assigned to it the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed primarily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censorship of morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from the canon law of the Church

"Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life"—the words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers, and their projects of social reconstruction are a commentary on the sense in which "holiness of life" was understood. It was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in forming at Zürich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of the clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian morals;

a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years." Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

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played the part of Old Testament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the fleshpots of Egypt.

Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for the same reasons which made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars of religion, the city was a financial

Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as larrons, brigands, loups et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to death. "The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but what they are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of God.... One has cried in the market-place, 'a curse on those who bring us dearth.'... The Lord has heard that cry... and yet we are asking the

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The Venerable Company advanced their programme, 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 honourable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices." Their apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question the right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and platform in one; ministers had the public

behind them, and, conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel submission by threatening to resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yielding down of official procrastination, and its first reply was normally qu'on y pense un peu. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he accused members of the Council of having intelligence with speculators who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were reproaching the Council with laxity in administration, and they finally denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social reform.

The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to exhorting the public to attend sermons and to send their children to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers concerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do creditors, they would make no concession to the complaint that debtors were subjected to a "double usury," since they were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. They informed the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding up supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons

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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 10 per cent. interest. Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The Council and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of the local hospital. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were interfering with the magistrate's duties, and implied politely that they would be well advised to mind their own business.

So monstrous a suggestion—as though there were any human activity which was not the business of the Church !—evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, "Cursed is he who keeps his corn in time of scarcity"? To the charge of intemperate language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than follow the example set by Hosea. "If we should be silent," said Beza, "what would the people say? That they are dumb dogs. . . . As to the question of causing scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been punished. . . . It is notorious everywhere that the

city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is 10 per cent. or more." 14

The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed by ten years' imprisonment in chains." But at the godly proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva "most men are debtors." If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed the ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied in the language of Nathan, we are not informed.

Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the collectivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the omnicompetent Church." The religious community formed a closely organized society, which, while using the secular authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting down offences against public order and public morals, providing for the education of youth and for the relief of the poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which for a short time made the system possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a minority in a national State organized on principles quite different from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion, tivil war, or the abandonment of the pretension to

control society, was the inevitable consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, whatever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations to a lapse into immorality.

Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord's Supper? May the brethren trade with such

Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the views of the reformers as to economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the Church before the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline denounced covetousness with the same vehemence as did the "accursed Popery" which it

had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches are required to make provision for the poor. "Oppression of the poor by exactions," it is declared, "\[and\] deceiving of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure... do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God's word commandeth." The interpretation given to these offences is shown by the punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St. Andrews. The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven years after it had in England been finally transferred to the State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox.

Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of New England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of Calvin's Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden, where men desired only to worship God "according to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of God's word," not only were "tobacco and immodest fashions and costly apparel," and "that vain custom of drinking one to another," forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers adopted towards that "notorious evil . . . whereby most men walked in all their commerce—to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can," an attitude which possibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business-like descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachusetts a minister had called attention to the recrudescence

of the old Adam—" profit being the chief aim and not the propagation of religion"—and Governor Bradford, observing uneasily how men grew "in their outward estates," remarked that the increase in material prosperity "will be the ruin of New England, at least of the Churches of God there." "Sometimes Providence smote the exploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American Trust—he owned the only milch cow on board and sold the milk at 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 incorrigible idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to apply the same wholesome discipline to the clusive 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. 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 which he took "in some . . . above 6d. in the shilling profit; in some above 8d.; and in some small things above two for one"; and this, though he

was "an ancient professor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having come over for conscience' sake and for the advancement of the gospel." The scandal was terrible. Profiteers were unpopular—"the cry of the country was great against oppression"—and the grave elders reflected that a reputation for greed would injure the infant community, lying as it did "under the curious observation of all Churches and civil States in the world." In spite of all, the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine what profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law of God required no more than double restitution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him only £200.

Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all "did with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart," and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took occasion in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error of such false principles, and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were these:—

"1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.

"2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest.

"3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc.

"4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another's ignorance or necessity.

"5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take

like recompence of one as of another."

# The rules for trading were not less explicit:-

"I. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e. such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which every man will take, etc.

"2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross,

and therefore must not lay it upon another.

"3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person.

"4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the

land is worth thus much.'

It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not remembered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appropriate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.

The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had

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recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The question was only whether he had erred through ignorance or carelessness, 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 between them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin's system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the mediæval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts.

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist, as the Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariate to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where Calvin's discipline was accepted without Calvin's culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even

the savage superstition of New England, that result was only to be expected.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibres of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron."

## CHAPTER III

#### THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.

Mediæval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centres of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in earnest

revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.

It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbulent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once content to win a position of dignity and power in fraternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to solitary pre-eminence, 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, proletariate, detached from their narrow niche in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control.

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# The Land Question

The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the material on which agitation fed had been accumulating for three generations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the currency, there was not one—neither enclosures and pasture farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, nor the extortions of the engrosser—which had not

evoked popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced legislation and administrative action, long before the Reformation Parliament met. The floods were already running high, when the religious revolution swelled them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the social situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovernment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing, on questions not only of religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head, in a sweeping indictment of the new economic forces, and an eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social obligations. The centre of both was the land question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground of social agitation.

The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460. 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 confiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell

is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last days of monasticism through rose-coloured spectacles. The monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents whom they often employed to manage their property naturally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more frequent or more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical landowners. In England a glance at the proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copyholders into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted arable land to pasture.

the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen—cloth-workers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversion of arable to pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay.

It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine. The touching words in which the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet.

Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of religion. In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encouragement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the

vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.

The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. "These endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day." "King Edward VI's Grammar Schools" are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.

The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual—side by side with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the House of Commons, and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with favourable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence

for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nouveaux riches." 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.

The Commonwealth called Latimer was unrepentant. Combining gifts of humour and invective which are not very common among bishops, his fury at oppres-

sion did not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next. So he was delighted when he provoked one of his audience into the exclamation, "Mary, a seditious fellow!" used the episode as comic relief in his next sermon, and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his denunciations of steplords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself?

You thoughte that I woulde not require The bloode of all suche at your hande, But be you sure, eternall fyre Is redy for each 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 reorganization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher

authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.

innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more business-like and impersonal forms of land-ownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d'être is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labour on the land, or labour in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependants, 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 repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbours 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 neighbours and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties

of his charge to the greed for personal gain. "We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings . . . but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places." Thus, while the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553.

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# Religious Theory and Social Policy

If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized appeal to traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, mediæval social theory, to which the most representative minds of the English Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit,

money-lending and prices. The centre of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries described by the word usury.

"Treasure doth then advance greatness," wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, "when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few." In spite of the growing concentration of property, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phrase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman or a small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosperity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the "housed beggars" of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-à-vis their employers.

The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which evoked programmes of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning proletariate by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials

on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to "give day." Almost everyone, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the moneylender. And the lender is often a monopolist—"a money master," a maltster or corn monger, "a rich priest," who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master."

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 mediæval Popes and interpreted by mediæval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence of the mediæval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most conspicuous species, of extortion.

In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixceenth century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries to-day. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that

It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the centre. 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 mediæval 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.

received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made large profits by church ales, and occasionally engaged in trade." Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political, and economic aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel through which official information was conveyed to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with the parson.

Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the religious thought of the age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization. Both in their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the particular social obligations which religion involved, the most representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social order were to be sought, not in practical expediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guardian and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after the Restoration.

The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. The exactions of middlemen—" merchants

shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende the cause unto God. . . . Last of all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche men, that they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches." 23

traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson's words represented the starting point from which the discussions of social questions still commonly set out.

of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church as to social ethics is as binding on men's consciences after the Reformation as it had been before it.

As Maitland has pointed out," there was a moment towards the middle of the century when the civil law was pressing the canon law hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising career, since it was practised 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 claborate treatise on the subject 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 authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull . . . yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case the Canons are to be preferred. . . . By the laws no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their souls."

It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a pamphleteer, "by the laws of the Church of England . . . usury is simply and generally prohibited." 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 jurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offences with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived from

objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth." Archbishop Grindal's injunctions to the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which the transaction may be concealed." Bishops' articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers." The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline."

The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing the man who refused to "pay to the poor men's box," or who was "detected for being an uncharitable person and for not giving to the poor and impotent," they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanours as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be brought befor the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was

There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the

laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government.

The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armour of theologians

# made A little glooming light, most like a shade.

In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.

As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same

jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation's fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a property-less proletariate, and "the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful hearts."

Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme "usurers and extortioners." The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favourite 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 naturally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic develop-

ment, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of "good order" in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.

to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. "We mean by the Commonwealth," wrote Hooker, "that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides." "

ments which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them.

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows I...
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,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
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.

elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern analogy, "controls." Wages, the movement of labour, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business, rates of interest—all are controlled, partly by Statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to hinder him from asserting his rights at common law, will intervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound "rather to consider what is agreeable... to the use of this State and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular

before the Council. A creditor who has been similarly "hard and unconscionable" is committed to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken "very unjust and immoderate advantage by way of usury." The bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show "a more Christian and charitable consideration of these his neighbours." A nobleman has released two offenders imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province of York for having "taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of the realm," and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual depression, the Council's intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like an informal moratorium."

The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the first two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its ostensible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional interests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental conception, however—the philosophy of the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above immediate exigencies to consider the significance of the system in its totality—had a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class performed its allotted function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. "God and the

Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic, the most reasonable, and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable, and intolerant, yet not without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud's intellectual limitations and practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most powerful forces

To a temper so permeated with the conception that society is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is to maintain their co-operation, 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 riches and advancement. "There is no private end, but in something or other

it will be led to run cross the public: and, if gain come in, though it be by 'making shrines for Diana,' it is no matter with them though Ephesus be in an uproar for it." For Laud, the political virtues, by which he understands subordination, obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community, are as much part of the Christian's religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of those who sigh for social unity to-day, he is as ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attainment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and to practise injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a member of a society and is dedicated by religion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism.

"If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in the body of the Church." "To one holding such a creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the stability of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud's utterances and activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a strong bias in favour of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal government. It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of protecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active in harrying the depopulating landlord. The Council gave sympathetic consideration to petitions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630

The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Government, unhampered by what Laud had called "that noise" of parliamentary debate, was to endeavour by even-handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an unconscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against exploitation at the hands

of merchants by Professor Unwin." In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Elizabethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see that markets were served and prices controlled, appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the North, Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested interests were threatened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavoured to insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating the woollen industry."

Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious interest of the Government, which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud's indifference to the opinion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud's belief in the divine mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people "to lay down the private for the public sake." It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark that the defendant has been "guilty of a most foule offence, which the Prophet hath \[called\] in a very energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore," and that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by "cruell men";" or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Relief of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631."

"A bishop." observed Laud, in answer to the attack of

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# The Growth of Individualism

Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by one school of churchmen

hands of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government's own financial necessities, of a money-market with an almost modern technique—speculation, futures, and arbitrage transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the century, and whose religious and political aspirations were, two generations later, to overthrow the monarchy.

An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of opportunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among neighbours, which regarded keen bargaining as "sharp practice." In the half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international market, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more readily than most economic questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation It was in the long debate provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges that the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered out.

"We see," wrote Malynes, "how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that followeth him." The spirit

of modern business could hardly be more aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that "the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God." To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbour, 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 neighbours who formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England.

It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw their weight against the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and "good conscience" to the impersonal mechanism of large-scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic practice. The obstruction to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest." From

at any rate the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the Government was regarded with scepticism by the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since it weakened the farmer's incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise opposite of those intended. As markets widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal proceedings. Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson's Dialogue: What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he can? " With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract.

Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which interferes with property and business destroys its own title to exist. "All free subjects," declared a Committee of the House of Commons in 1604, "are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few." The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in

the rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by mediæval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken place. "Nature" had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.

forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation. Since Calvin's indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice.

Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the divines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century, though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with qualifications. The *Decades* of Bullinger, of which three English translations were made in the ten years following his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a via media. As uncompromising as any mediæval writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the old fervour 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 horrower and lender.

The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conservative divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 1571 declaring that "all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of God is synne and detestable," to argue that the Statute had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of practical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obedience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure, until he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on capital." But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is "set to hire for a

year or two for four shillings a year," the money being used for their assistance. But the arrangement has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is "very like to have perished through casualty and ill-keeping." Will not the poor be surer of their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to invest money in business in order to provide an income for those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits, what is the particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool crop or to speculate on the exchanges?

To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as "whatever is taken for a loan above the principal." The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption implied in their very disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever con-

cessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social obligations—such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whose conception of a social theory based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While rival authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.

Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over "good conscience" in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality. The problem which it presents in the relations between States is a common-place. But, since its essence is the difficulty of apply-

ing the same moral standard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no difference at all, is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of *Realpolitik*.

With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my neighbour as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbour? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations, by treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had endeavoured 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 proletariate, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnapped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shrivelled mass of desiccated formulæ, it will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England

turned its face from the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It was neglected, because it had become negligible.

century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they released on a writ of *Habeas Corpus* a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.

the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud's régime, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away altogether.

The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of

England as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.

An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great age of English natural science—the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society—drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the political theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfils its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise.

The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material "stock" of society. Those who do not subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry, and freeholders as "the poor"—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, "the

industrious poor," who work for their betters, and "the idle poor," who work for themselves. Hence the unending discussions as to whether "the labouring poor" are to be classed among the "productive" or "unproductive" classes—whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. "It would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money than without poor, ... who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving"; the poor "have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure"; "to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor." "Such sentences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing.

In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position, which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like

Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley's sermon on The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose.

Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man," first published in 1658, and widely read during the following century, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt

to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, "trade is one thing and religion is another," they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. "National commerce, good morals and good government," wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, "are but part of one general scheme, in the designs of Providence."

Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:

> Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bade self-love and social be the same.

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. It was, therefore, in the sphere of providing succour for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in inspiring

the main army, that the social work of the Church was conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eighteenth century were the relief of the poor, the care of the sick, and the establishment of schools. In spite of the genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the poorer classes, which inspired the evangelical revival, it abandoned the fundamental brain-work of criticism and construction to the rationalist and the humanitarian.

## CHAPTER IV

#### THE PURITAN MOVEMENT

By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between religious theory and economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious theory itself, a new system of ideas was being matured, which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to turn on the whole field of social obligations a new and penetrating light. On a world heaving with expanding energies, and on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving, pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and contrition, as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signifies Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to God and haughty to man, the soldier-saints swept over battlefield and scaffold their garments rolled in blood.

In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a considerable advantage, regarded "merely in a commercial view." A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the passion of the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and commonplace cupidities, was one in which, since "Thorough" was no more.

since property was secure, and contracts inviolable, and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of business men were likely to yield a profitable return. So the epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success, mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, but for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint.

(i)

# Puritanism and Society

The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of God and man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three off-shoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped, with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into a State Church, was to produce a credal statement carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the right of every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom of all Churches from the interference of the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperishable legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was Puritanism. Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in those which afterwards separated from it, it determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but political aspirations, business relations, family life and the minutiae of personal behaviour.

The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that

an England which is unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked in men's souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled.

We do it wrong, being so majestical To offer it the show of violence.

In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, "unshaken, unseduced, unterrified," amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths of light and darkness which posterity can observe with reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line cannot plumb.

There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colours are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-place and counting-house and camp, than in the student's chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he remakes, not only his own character

and habits and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order. Conscious that he is but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and damnation. "It made the world seem to me," said a Puritan of his conversion, "as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. . . . It set me upon that method of my studies which since then I have found the benefit of. . . . It caused me first to seek God's Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End." 2

Overwhelmed by a sense of his "Ultimate End," the Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. "The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world." For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed, than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and warning.

Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect; and it was because "much preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion" that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, systematizes his life; "method" was a Puritan catchword a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the Lord's vineyard, in which he is called to labour.

The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every

"The King's cause and party," wrote one who described the situation in Bristol in 1645, "were favoured by two extremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by the middle rank, the true and best citizens." That it was everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism, is suggested by Professor Usher's statistical estimate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the

first decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the country. The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of profounder spiritual import than sociological generalization. Most of the tenants of these gentlemen, wrote Baxter, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the King. On the Parliament's side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and counties which depend on cloathing and such manufactures. He explained the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with the greater centres of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was "the merchants and middle sort of men that were Protestants." 11

The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence "the rebellious city," returning four Dissenters to the Royalist Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to accompany Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was "by meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its universall trade throughout the kingdome

with its commodities conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties." In Lancashire, the clothing towns—"the Genevas of Lancashire"—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile industry, were all centres of Puritanism.

The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon commented bitterly on the "factious humour 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 showing them any favour, on the ground that "trading combinations" were "so many nests of faction and sedition," and that "our late miserable distractions" were "chiefly hatched in the shops of tradesmen." Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they returned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a providential instrument for crippling the centre of disaffection."

When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fashion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of Holland—the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to inquire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations between economic progress and other aspects of the national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle irony, the

diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced from it different conclusions. The question which gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual significance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puritan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most prominent victims, were also those who led commercial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple. A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business community could escape constant friction and obstruction, only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in that age the same thing—to practise its own religion.

Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented nothing, and English economic organization had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accommodating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of trades more important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury, and the problem recurred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. "The gaols were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced from their houses, and thousands of workmen and women, whom they employed, set to starving." The Whig indictment of the disastrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by French

intendants of the widespread distress which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.14

When the collision between economic interests and the policy of compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not surprising that the economists of the age should have enunciated the healing principle, that persecution was incompatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic progress that persecution principally fell. "Every law of this nature," wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject, is not only "expressly against the very principles and rules of the Gospel of Christ," but is also "destructive to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing and driving away the most industrious working hands, and depopulating, and thereby impoverishes our country, which is capable of employing ten times the number of people we now have." 19

Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, found one reason of their success in the fact that, Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise what religion he pleased." De la Court, whose striking book passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same." Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving towns were those where there was most nonconformity, cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is compatible with any religion, the class which is its vehicle will always consist of the heterodox minority, who "profess opinions different from what are publicly established." "There is a kind of natural unaptness," wrote a pamphleteer in 1671, "in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the contrary among the Reformed the greater their zeal, the greater their inclination trade and industry, as holding industries unlaws. The domestic interest of England lieth in the add-note ment of trade by removing all obstructions both in city and country, and providing such laws as more

help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving liberty of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and denying it to Papists."

If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good for trade, the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was aggravated by the fact that it was they who were most vocal in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of the same odious creed, the maxim that "religion ought to make no distinction between Protestants" and the policy "of preferring, on all occasions, the monied interests before the landed." "Even later in the eighteenth century, the stale gibe of the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other corporations." still figured in the pamphlets of the statesman whom Lord Morley describes as the prince of political charlatans. Bolingbroke."

"The middle ranks," "the middle class of men," "the middle sort"—such social strata included, of course, the widest variety of economic interest and personal position. But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil War, two causes prevented the phrase from being merely the vapid substitute for thought which it is to-day. In the first place, outside certain exceptional industries and districts, there was little large-scale production and no massed proletariate of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typical workman was still normally a small master, who continued himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and whose position was that described in Baxter's Kidderminster, where "there were none of the tradesmen very rich . . . the magistrates of the town were few of them worth £40 per annum, and most not half so much; three or four of the richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to £600 in twenty years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by an ill debtor." Differing in wealth from the prosperous merchant or clothier, such men resembled them in economic and social habits, and the distinction between

them was one of degree, not of kind. In the world of industry vertical divisions between district and district still cut deeper than horizontal fissures between class and class. The number of those who could reasonably be described as independent, since they owned their own tools and controlled their own businesses, formed a far larger proportion of the population than is the case in capitalist societies.

That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great divide of the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer glories of the Revolution. In the germinating period of Puritanism, the commercial classes, though

widely affect . . . they feather and enlarge their own nests, the corporations."

There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would be. The feudal noblesse

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# A Godly Discipline versus the Religion of Trade

Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle classes. It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without eradicating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpugnable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence, without whose fore-knowledge not a hammer could beat upon the forge, not a figure could be added to the ledger. But it is a strange school which does not teach more than one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism, trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summarized in the simple formula that it fostered individualism. Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism, in its English version, was the parent of capitalism, and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have lent to the same interpretation the weight of their considerable authority." But the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility together. When the shrivelled tissues lie in our hand, the spiritual bond still eludes us.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action. There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savourless mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine recklessness which would make all things new. For long nourished together, their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil War they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Independent, aristocrat and Leveller, politician and merchant and utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange monsters with whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendours and illusions vanished; the force of common things prevailed; the metal cooled in the mould; and the Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendours and its illusions, settled finally into its decent bed of equable respectability. But each element in its social

philosophy had once been as vital as the other, and the battle was fought, not between a Puritanism solid for one view and a State committed to another, but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself. The problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the reasons which caused this to wax and that to wane.

"The triumph of Puritanism," it has been said, "swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money." That it swept away the restrictions imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither ecclesiastical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber, could function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of the Church of Laud and the State of Strafford, it did so but as a step towards erecting a more rigorous discipline of its own. It would have been scandalized by economic individualism, as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad outlines of its scheme of organization favoured unrestricted liberty in matters of business as little as in the things of the spirit. To the Puritan of any period in the century between the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion that he was the friend of economic or social license would have seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have appeared to most of his critics, who taunted him, except in the single matter of usury, with an intolerable meticulousness.

A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan covenant. Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its vital necessity had been the theme of the Joshuas of Scotland, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established ecclesiastical order. The word "discipline" implied essentially "a directory of Church government," established in order that "the wicked may be corrected with ecclesiastical censures, according to the quality of the fault"; "

and the proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth century show that the conception of a rule of life, to be enforced by the pressure of the common conscience, and in the last resort by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of their system. When, at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, the sectaries in London described their objects as not merely the "free and pure" preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of the sacraments, but "to have, not the fylthye cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus Chryste," "the antithesis suggests that something more than verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that it was the practice, when a sin was committed by one of the faithful, for the elders to apply first admonishment and then excommunication. The minute-book of one of the few classes whose records survive confirms his statement."

All this early movement had almost flickered out before the end of the sixteenth century. But the conception lay at the very root of Presbyterianism, and it re-emerged in the system of church government which the supercilious Scotch Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to inconclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all persons in Holy Orders, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a vacuum. "Mr. Henderson," wrote the insufferable Baillie, "has ready now a short treatise, much called for, of our church discipline." In June 1646 an unenthusiastic Parliament accepted the ordinance which, after a three years' debate of intolerable tedium, emerged from the Assembly's Committee on the Discipline and Government of the Church, and which provided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of scandalous offences. Detested by the Independents, and cold-shouldered by Parliament.

which had no intention of admitting the divine right of presbyteries, the system never took deep root, and in London, at least, there appears to be no evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or classes. In parts of Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems to have been actively at work, down, at any rate, to 1649. The change in the political situation, in particular the triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from functioning longer.19

needier sort." Cartwright, the most famous leader of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as "a hainous offence against God and his Church," and laid down that the offender should be excluded from the sacraments until he satisfied the congregation of his penitence." The ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be content with a modest competence and to shun the allurements of riches. "Every Christian man is bound in conscience before God," wrote Stubbes, "to provide for his household and family, but yet so as his immoderate care surpasse not the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes. . . . So farre from covetousnes and from immoderate care would the Lord have us, that we ought not this day to care for to-morrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day is the travail of the same."

The most influential work on social ethics written in the first half of the seventeenth century from the Puritan standpoint was Ames' De Conscientia, a manual of Christian conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with the practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a standard authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writers. Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent more than twenty years in Holland, where he held a chair of theology at the University of Franeker, and his experience of social life in the country which was then the business capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigour of his social doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was inevitable, the impossibility of distinguishing between interest on capital invested in business, and interest on capital invested in land, since men put money indifferently into both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin, he surrounds his indulgence with qualifications; he requires that no interest shall be charged on loans to the needy, and describes

as the ideal investment for Christians one in which the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands only "a fair share of the profits, according to the degree in which God has blessed him by whom the money is used." His teaching with regard to prices is not less conservative. "To wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as Augustine observes), but it is a common vice." Men must not sell above the maximum fixed by public authority, though they may sell below it, since it is fixed to protect the buyer; when there is no legal maximum, they must follow the market price and "the judgment of prudent and good men." They must not take advantage of the necessities of individual buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not sell them dearer merely because they have cost them much to get." Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing were equally trenchant."

Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the pulpit. It found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some imprint on the conduct of congregations. If D'Ewes was the unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive conscience, he was also a man of the world who played a not inconspicuous part in public affairs; and D'Ewes not only ascribed the fire which destroyed his father's house to the judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly prescribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the accursed thing, provision should be made for his daughters, not by investing his capital at a fixed—and therefore usurious—rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or of annuities." The classis which met at Dedham in the eighties of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with questions of ceremony, of church government, of the right use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys of sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what marks one might detect a witch. But it discussed also what provision could be made to check vagrancy; advised

the brethren to confine their dealings to "the godliest of that trade" (of cloth making); recommended the establishment in the township of a scheme of universal education, that of children of parents too poor to meet the cost being defrayed from collections made in church; and urged that each well-to-do householder should provide in his home for two (or, if less able, one) of his impoverished neighbours who "walke christianly and honestlie in their callinges." In the ever-lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins to be punished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elaborated by the Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not only for drunkards; swearers and blasphemers, worshippers and makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges, persons dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord's day, or resorting to witches, wizards and fortune-tellers, but for the more vulgar vices of those who fell into extortion, barratry and bribery." The classis of Bury in Lancashire (quantum mutatus!) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided in 1647, after considerable debate, that "usury is a scandalous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy."

It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the money-changers from the temple and to make straight the way of the Lord. "God hath honnored you in callinge you to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you should bee faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the grave every day; you dwell uppon the borders of eternity; your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge. . . . How dreadfull will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate! What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence of the Lord?" Such, in that singular age, was the language in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices of Wiltshire to close four public-houses. Apparently they closed them.

The change was momentous. If the English Social Democratic movement has any single source, that source is to be found in the New Model Army. But the conception implied in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic ethics—the theory that every department of life falls beneath the same all-encompassing arch of religion—was too deeply rooted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even by the more corroding march of economic development. Expelled from the world of fact, where it had always been a stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world

of ideas, and its champions in the last half of the century laboured it the more, precisely because they knew that it must be conveyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.

put to its author by members of his congregation. Its aim is not to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal to the enlightened common sense of the Christian reader. It does not overlook, therefore, the practical facts of a world in which commerce is carried on by the East India Company in distant markets, trade is universally conducted on credit, the iron manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding abundant supplies of capital and offering a profitable opening to the judicious investor, and the relations of landlords and tenants have been thrown into confusion by the fire of London. Nor does it ignore the moral qualities for the cultivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial environment of the Restoration, and its teaching is designed for "Rome or London, not Fools' Paradise."

Baxter's acceptance of the realities of his age makes the content of his teaching the more impressive. The attempt to formulate a casuistry of economic conduct obviously implies that economic relations are to be regarded merely as one department of human behaviour, for which each man is morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mechanism, to which ethical judgments are irrelevant. Baxter declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism, which exonerates the individual by representing his actions as the outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists, is committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain ethical standards, and these standards are as obligatory in the sphere of economic transactions as in any other province of human activity. To the conventional objection that religion has nothing to do with business—that "every man will get as much as he can have and that caveat emptor is the only security"—he answers bluntly that this way of dealing does not hold among Christians. Whatever the laxity of the law, the Christian is bound to consider first the golden rule and

the public good. Naturally, therefore, he is debarred from making money at the expense of other persons, and certain profitable avenues of commerce are closed to him at the outset. "It is not lawful to take up or keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many."

or persuade some one else to do so. In no case may a man doctor his wares in order to get for them a higher price than they are really worth, and in no case may he conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to have bought an inferior article, he "may not repair \[his\] loss by doing as \[he\] was done by, . . . no more than \[he\] may cut another's purse because \[his\] was cut." Rivalry in trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian must not snatch a good bargain "out of greedy covetousness, nor to the injury of the poor . . . nor . . . so as to disturb that due and civil order which should be among moderate men in trading." On the contrary, if "a covetous oppressor "offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, "it may be a duty to offer the poor man the worth of his commodity and save him from the oppressor."

The principles which should determine the contract between buyer and seller are applied equally to all other economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes so, when the lender does not allow the borrower "such a proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth require, but . . . will live at ease upon his labours"; or when, in spite of the borrower's misfortune, he rigorously exacts his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for a loan which charity would require to be free. Masters must discipline their servants for their good; but it is "an odious oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deserveth." As the descendant of a family of yeomen, "free," as he says, "from the temptations of poverty and riches," Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under the general rubric of "Cases of oppression, especially of tenants," oppression being defined as the "injuring of inferiors who are unable to resist or to right themselves." "It is too common a

The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the

racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of the idea that "business is business," and that the world of commercial transactions is a closed compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed, did not win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested. Puritan as well as Catholic accepted without demur the view which set all human interests and activities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as Catholics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian casuistry of economic conduct

"The capitalist spirit" is as old as history, and was not, as has sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism. But it found in certain aspects of later

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# The Triumph of the Economic Virtues

To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal themselves in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns brightly on the hearth; but through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues

towards the grave—a wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he must take his way, alone. No aid can avail him: no preacher, for only the elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of God; no Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates belong; no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to increase the glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourishment to man; hardly God himself, for Christ died for the elect, and it may well be that the majesty of the Creator is revealed by the eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the created.\*\*

His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suffers in spirit the perils which the first settlers in America endured in body, the sea behind, the untamed desert in front, a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand. Where Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering like a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society as a mystical body, compact of members varying in order and degree, but dignified by participation in the common life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the spirit which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or hostile world. Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby past was knit to present, and man to man, and man to God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast, in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with horror from the filthy rags of human righteousness. Where they, in short, had found comfort in a sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his soul.

We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual,

he made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own. The moral self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual's destiny hangs on a private transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is left for human intervention? A servant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved less by compassion for his erring brethren, than by impatient indignation at the blindness of vessels of wrath who "sinned their mercies." A spiritual aristocrat, who sacrificed fraternity to liberty, he drew from his idealization of personal responsibility a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and generalized, was to be among the most potent explosives that the world has known. He drew from it also a scale of ethical values, in which the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed, and which, since he was above all things practical, he carried as a dynamic into the routine of business and political life.

For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to attain the free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift has been accorded, what is rejected as a means is resumed as a consequence, and the Puritan flings himself into practical activities with the dæmonic energy of one who, all doubts allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen vessel. Once engaged in affairs, he brings to them both the qualities and limitations of his creed, in all their remorseless logic. Called by God to labour in his vineyard, he has within himself a principle at once of energy and of order, which makes him irresistible both in war and in the struggles of commerce. Convinced that character is all and circum-

stances nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion—though like other gifts they may be abused—but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will. Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic, whose victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the counting-house, and in the market.

This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality and emphasis, found its social organ in those middle and commercial classes who were the citadel of the Puritan spirit, and whom, "ennobled by their own industry and virtue," Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress and enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think of England as par excellence the pioneer of economic progress, that we are apt to forget how recently that rôle has been assumed. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in the sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the Spanish Empire, in the seventeenth to the United Provinces, and, above all, to the Dutch.

The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely mediæval in its economic organization and social outlook, more interested in maintaining customary standards of consumption than in accumulating capital for future production, with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic virtues, a peasantry farming for subsistence amid the organized confusion of the open-field village, and a small, if growing, body of jealously conservative craftsmen. In such a society Puritanism worked like the yeast which sets the whole mass fermenting. It went through its slack and loosely knit texture like a troop of Cromwell's Ironsides through the disorderly cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in Ireland, the elements were so alien that assimilation was out of the question, the result was a wound that festered

for three centuries. In England the effect was that at once of an irritant and of a tonic. Puritanism had its own standards of social conduct, derived partly from the obvious interests of the commercial classes, partly from its conception of the nature of God and the destiny of man. These standards were in sharp antithesis, both to the considerable surviving elements of feudalism in English society, and to the policy of the authoritarian State, with its ideal of an ordered and graded society, whose different members were to be maintained in their traditional status by the pressure and protection of a paternal monarchy. Sapping the former by its influence, and overthrowing the latter by direct attack, Puritanism became a potent force in preparing the way for the commercial civilization which finally triumphed at the Revolution.

The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at upsetting the government of the Church, went hand in hand with an economic radicalism, which resented the restraints on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion or of social policy, was being made by the stricter school of religious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth." Seventeenth-century writers repeated the charge that the Puritan conscience cost its delicacy where matters of business were concerned, and some of them were sufficiently struck by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explanation of it. The example on which they usually seized—the symbol of a supposed general disposition to laxity—was the indulgence shown by Puritan divines in the particular matter of moderate interest. It was the effect, so the picturesque story ran, of the Marian persecution. The refugees who fled to the Continent could not start business in a foreign country. If, driven by necessity, they invested their capital and lived on the proceeds, who could quarrel with so venial a lapse in so good a cause? Subsequent writers

Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pamphleteer. The real story was less dramatic, but more significant. From the very beginning, Calvinism had comprised two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which contained the seeds of future discord.

It had at once given a whole-hearted imprimatur to the life of business enterprise, which most earlier moralists had regarded with suspicion, and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an inquisitorial discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was the creed of a small and homogeneous city, the second aspect had predominated; in the many-sided life of England, where there were numerous conflicting interests to balance it, and where it was long politically weak, the first. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had come the wave of commercial and financial expansion—companies, colonies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining, capitalism in finance—on the crest of which the English commercial classes, in Calvin's day still held in leading-strings by conservative statesmen, had climbed to a position of dignity and affluence.

Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, these two elements flew apart. The collectivist, half-communistic aspect, which had never been acclimatized in England, quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more, and for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant and landowner, in the popular agitation under the Commonwealth. The individualism congenial to the world of business became the distinctive characteristic of a Puritanism which had arrived, and which, in becoming a political force, was at once secularized and committed to a career of compromise. Its note was not the attempt to establish on earth a "Kingdom of Christ," but an ideal of personal character and conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and private duties. Its theory had been discipline; its practical result was liberty.

Given the social and political conditions of England, the transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of Presbyterianism with the stratified arrangement of English society had been remarked by Hooker.11 If the City Fathers of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the seventeenth century the religious

For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as to theology and church government, but as the champion of interests and opinions embracing every side of the life of society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ideologies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were not disentangled; they presented themselves, both to supporters and opponents, as different facets of a single scheme. "All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything good—all these were Puritans." The clash was not one of theories—a systematic and theoretical individualism did not develop till after the Restoration—but of contradictory economic interests and incompatible conceptions of social expediency.

Puritan member of Parliament had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas as to commercial policy which were not those of the Government. Confident in their own energy and acumen, proud of their success, and regarding with profound distrust the interference both of Church and of State with matters of business and property rights, the commercial classes, in spite of their attachment to a militant mercantilism in matters of trade, were, even before the Civil War, more than half converted to the administrative nihilism which was to be the rule of social policy in the century following it. Their demand was the one which is usual in such circumstances. It was that business affairs should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality or by misconceived arguments of public policy.\*

The separation of economic from ethical interests, which was the note of all this movement, was in sharp opposition to religious tradition, and it did not establish itself without a struggle. Even in the very capital of European commerce and finance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer degrees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamphleteering, in which the theological faculty of the University of Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity, that the States of Holland and West Friesland closed the agitation by declaring that the Church had no concern with questions of banking. In the French Calvinist Churches, the decline of discipline had caused lamentations a generation earlier. In America, the theocracy of Massachusetts, merciless alike to religious liberty and to economic license, was about to be undermined by the rise of new States like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and utilitarian temper was destined to find its greatest representative in the golden common sense of Benjamin Franklin. The sin of our too great fondness for trade, to the

neglecting of our more valuable interests," wrote a Scottish divine in 1709, when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant outburst of commercial enterprise, "I humbly think will be written upon our judgment.... I am sure the Lord is remarkably frowning upon our trade... since it was put in the room of religion.""

In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan writers and divines vigorous protests against usurious interest, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by works, but by faith. Usury, "in time of Popery an odious thing," had become a scandal. Professors, by their covetousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to blaspheme. The exactions of the forestaller and regrater were never so monstrous or so immune from interference. The hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities of the poor so neglected. "The poor able to work are suffered to beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently provided for, but almost starved with the allowance of 3d. and 4d. a piece a week. . . . These are the last times indeed. Men generally are all for themselves. And some would set up such, having a form of religion, without the power of it.""

These utterances came, however, from that part of the Puritan mind which looked backward. That which looked forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, and went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to practical exigencies, appeared in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as

of mediæval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen pointed out, it is true, the peril to the soul involved in a single-minded concentration on economic interests. The enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits sometimes associated with them, and its warnings against an excessive preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more and more the air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching the main tendency and emphasis of which were little affected by these incidental qualifications. It insisted, in short, that morely-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God.

The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf sprang from the very heart of Puritan theology. It was that expressed in the characteristic and oftused phrase, "a Calling." The rational order of the universe is the work of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labour for God's glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a temporal calling. It is the first duty of the Christian to know and believe in God; it is by faith that he will be saved. But faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of Prating Row, whose "religion is to make a noise." The only genuine faith is the faith which produces works. "At the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you doers, or talkers only "?" The second duty of the Christian is to labour in the affairs of practical life, and this second duty is subordinate only to the first. "God," wrote a Puritan divine, "doth call every man and woman . . . to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good. . . . The

Great Governour of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province, and let him be never so active out of his sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own business."

His conception of that life was expressed in the words, "Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful callings, when you are not exercised in the more immediate service of God." In order to deepen his spiritual life, the Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He "is blind in no man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires. . . . He sees the falseness of it \[the world\] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment." There must be no idle leisure; "those that are prodigal of their time despise their own souls." Religion must be active, not merely con-

Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, however, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman ought not to corner the market, or "accumulate two or three callings merely to increase his riches," or oppress the poor; nor should he seek more than "a reasonable proportion of gain," or "lie on the catch to make \[his\] markets of others' straits." But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various objective standards of a reasonable profit—cost of production, standard of life, customary prices—which had been suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual must judge for

himself. "Here, as in many other cases, an upright conscience must be the clerk of the market."

and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman from "frequent and needless frequenting of taverns," and pin him to his shop, "where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God."

When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be a duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county of Coveting in the north." The inference was illogical, but how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon against usury, on the text, "The Pharisees who were covetous heard all these things and they derided

247

Christ," his career in London was brought to an abrupt conclusion."

In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade, by N. B., M.D. Notable for its enlightened discussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it is a good specimen of an indifferent genus. But its authorship was more significant than its argument. For N. B. was Dr. Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks, was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan

rigour to Restoration license is the most familiar of platitudes. The reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more general, and ultimately of greater significance. The profligacy of the courtier had its decorous counterpart in the economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Votaries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more profitable divinity, they celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging with redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing money.

the good and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, "What shall it profit a man?" carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.

The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and the main aim of public policy had been the stability of traditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the identification of labour and enterprise with the service of God. The magnificent energy which changed in a century the face of material civilization was to draw nourishment from that temper. The worship of production and ever greater production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his unhappy servants—was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same compelling creed.

Social development moves with a logic whose inferences are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications had not yet dawned. The version of Christian ethics expounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a flowing tide. It had an unconscious ally in the pre-occupation with

economic interests which found expression in the enthusiasm of business politicians for a commercial Machtpolitik. The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland "for the fairest mistress in the world—trade," was not two years old when it made its own essay in economic imperialism. "A bare-faced war" for commerce, got up by the Royal African Company, was Clarendon's verdict on the Dutch war of 1665-7. Five years later, Shaftesbury hounded the City against Holland with the cry of Delenda est Carthago. The war finance of the Protectorate had made it necessary for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native, capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Restoration was in the hands of those syndicates of goldsmiths, whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the age before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart plutocracy, found not a little disgusting."

The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified no less the mood which glorified the economic virtues. Economic science developed in England, not, as in Germany, as the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in France, through the speculations of philosophers and men of letters, but as the interpreter of the practical interests of the City. With the exception of Petty and Locke, its most eminent practitioners were business men, and the questions which excited them were those, neither of production nor of social organization, but of commerce and finance—the balance of trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The rise of Political Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly influenced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by the progress of natural science, stamped their spontaneous and doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical orthodoxy. "Knowledge," wrote the author of the preface to a work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new science, in great measure is become mechanical." The exact

analysis of natural conditions, the calculations of forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the operation of simple, constant, and measurable forces, was the natural bias of an age interested primarily in mathematics and physics. Its object was "to express itself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites and passions of particular men to the consideration of others.""

the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and had been a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey. Paterson, who supplied the idea of a joint-stock banking corporation, which Michael Godfrey popularized in the City and Montagu piloted through Parliament, was, like the magnificent Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had haunted the Hague in the days when it was the home of disconsolate Whigs. Yarranton, most ingenious of projectors, had been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and his book was a long sermon on the virtues of the Dutch. Defoe, who wrote the idyll of the bourgeoisie in his Complete English Tradesman, was born of nonconformist parents, and was intended for the ministry, before, having failed in trade, he took up politics and literature. In his admirable study of the iron industry, Mr. Ashton has shown that the most eminent iron-masters of the eighteenth century belonged as a rule to the Puritan connection. They had their prototype in the seventeenth century in Baxter's friend, Thomas Foley, "who from almost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum or more by iron works."

To such a generation, a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of economic enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some resemblance to those associated later with the name of Smiles. The good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic man.

# (iv)

# The New Medicine for Poverty

To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer than they are to-day, gave a timely stimulus to economic efficiency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modified the traditional attitude towards social obligations. For the spontaneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the rule of English public life a century before the philosophy of it was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was responsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious movements in the world of affairs—the discrediting of the ideal of a paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of central control over local administration, the dislocation caused by the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the shifting of industry from its accustomed seats—it is perhaps not fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force contributing to the change in social policy which is noticeable after the middle of the century.

The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow. To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous discharge of private duties—how necessary! Yet how readily perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social obligations beyond and above them! To insist that the individual is responsible, that no man can save his brother, that the essence of religion is the contact of the soul with its Maker, how true and indispensable! But how easy to slip from that truth into the suggestion that society is without responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the social order and its consequences are not even the scaffolding by which men may climb to greater heights, but something external, alien and irrelevant—something, at best, indifferent to the life of the spirit, and, at worst, the sphere of the letter which killeth and of the reliance on works which ensnares the soul into the slumber of death! In emphasizing that God's Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of God's

Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false antithesis between the social mechanism and the life of the
spirit, which was to tyrannize over English religious
thought for the next two centuries, it enthroned religion\\nin the privacy of the individual soul, not without some
sighs of sober satisfaction at its abdication from society.
Professor Dicey has commented on the manner in
which "the appeal of the Evangelicals to personal
religion corresponds with the appeal of Benthamite
Liberals to individual energy." 100 The same affinity
between religious and social interests found an even
clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the
seventeenth century. Individualism in religion led\\ninsensibly, if not quite logically, to an individualist
morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric as compared with personal character.

A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of enclosing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time to time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of that period, from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of religious teachers had been one of condemnation. Sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet—not to mention Statutes and Royal Commissions—had been launched against depopulation. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy, but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their different degrees, are members of one Christian commonwealth, within which the law of charity must bridle the corroding appetite for economic gain. In such a mystical corporation, knit together by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage to the full, for no man may seek to live outside "the body of the Church."

Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country

Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering of traditional authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull oppression, started to life, and in several Midland counties the presents rose to pull

down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in 1649 there were rumours of a popular movement to throw down the enclosures of the neighbouring forest, the City Council took the matter up. A petition was drafted, setting out the economic and social evils attending enclosure, and proposing the establishment of machinery to check it, consisting of a committee without whose assent enclosing was not to be permitted. A local minister was instructed to submit the petition to Parliament, "which hath still a watchful eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of the nation." The agent selected to present the city's case was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamphleteer, who for several years attacked the depopulating landlord with all the fervour of Latimer, though with even less than Latimer's success.

Half a century before, such commotions would have been followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of public policy towards the movement had begun to change. Confiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on a smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reformation. As land changed hands, customary relations were shaken and new interests were created. Enclosure, as Moore complained, was being pushed forward by means of law suits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that City merchants and members of the Committee for Compounding, some of whom had found land speculation a profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State interference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than a century.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers should have found the open ear of Parliament impenetrably closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the political and economic environment which had changed. The revolution in thought was equally profound. The theoretical basis of the policy of protecting the peasant by preventing enclosure had been a conception of landownership which vegarded its rights and its duties as inextricably intervoven. 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 tenutes, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an excise, the financial burden previously

The theory which took its place, and which was to become in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that expressed by Locke, when he described property as a right anterior to the existence of the State, and argued that "the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent." But Locke merely poured into a philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered out in the stress of political struggles, and which were already the commonplace of landowner and merchant. The view of society held by that part of the Puritan movement which was socially and politically influential had been expressed by Iretan and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in the army. It was that only the fresholders 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 emails at will, with no fixed interest or abare in the land of the kingdom ut.

Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on agrarian policy. Farmerly a course commending itself to all public-spirited persons the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the programme of a sect of religious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656 introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons, framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities of Leicester, there was an instant outcry from members that it would "destroy property," and the bill was refused a second reading." After the Restoration the tide began to run more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had already become the hobby of the country gentleman. Experts advocated it on economic grounds, and legislation to facilitate it was introduced into Parliament. Though its technique still remained to be elaborated, the attitude which was to be decisive in the eighteenth century had already been crystallized.

The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, of the administrative interference with the rights of property which had infuriated them in the Government of Charles I. It was that opinion as to social policy nad changed, and changed not least among men of religion themselves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the law of nature, is already coming to be identified by the pious with the operation of the providential plan, which is the law of God. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him free to produce it. "It is an undeniable maxime that everyone by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage. . . . The advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public."

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

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon

Everis nights and alls,
Sit thee down and put them on,

And Christs receive thy sauls.

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 Christs 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. 116

The social character of wealth, which had been the essence of the mediæval 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." "Nor had that sovereign indifference to the rigours of the economic calculus disappeared, when, under the influence partly of humanitarian representatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the threads of social administration into their own hands, the statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the momentous admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the

whip had no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve. The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory poor-rate and requiring the ablebodied man to be set on work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the system was administered with fair regularity. But the Elizabethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with disastrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last link in a chain of measures—the prevention of evictions, the control of food supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—intended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the seventeenth century were prolific in the private charity which founded alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of reverence.

It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.118

"What, speak you of such things?" said Nicholas Ferrar on his death-bed to one who commended his charities; "it would have been but a suitable return for me to have given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms here and there." "

It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, both private charity and public relief should fall on evil days. In London, charitable endowments seem to have suffered from more than ordinary malversation, and there were complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the Hospitals was seriously reduced.120 In the country, the records of Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in which the machinery of present-

ment by constables to justices has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves are multiplied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander to and fro at their will.11 The administrative collapse of the Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that the sections in it relating to the provision of employment were a dead letter.11 Always unpopular with the local authorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pressure by the Central Government, they should, except here and there, have been neglected. What is more significant, however, than the practical deficiencies in the administration of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion, which regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory of which both private charity and public relief had been the expression.

"The generall rule of all England," wrote a pamphleteer in 1646, "is to whip and punish the wandring beggars... and so many justices execute one branch of that good Statute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of charitie, they leave \[it\] undone, which is to provide houses and convenient places to set the poore to work." The House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the county justices should be required to see that stocks of material were provided as the law required, and the question of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in distress should be found employment was on several occasions referred to committees of the House. Nothing seems, however, to have come of these proposals, nor was the Elizabethan policy of "setting the poor on work" that which was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the admission that distress was the result, not of personal deficiencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that its victims had a legal

right to be maintained by society, the growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid scepticism, as was later directed against the Speenhamland policy by the reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penalties on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed against improvidence and idleness. The characteristic sentiment was that of Milton's friend, Hartlib: "The law of God saith, he that will not work, let him not eat." This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if . . . none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for it." 1216

The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of public activity provoked by the growth of pauperism between 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound business principles, by means of a corporation which would combine profit with philanthropy, was being sedulously preached by a small group of reformers. Parliament took it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the relief and employment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under which a company was to be established with power to apprehend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and whipping, and to set to compulsory labour all other poor persons, including children without means of maintenance. Eight years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an Act of such extreme severity, as almost to recall the suggestion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who failed to satisfy the justices that he had a good reason for being on the roads should be arrested and

punished as a sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.110

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 assurance that, if indulged, it would perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay.

Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of ethical superiority. "No question," argued a Puritan pamphleteer, "but it \[riches\] should be the portion rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for them; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the life to come." The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy-going indulgence undermined character, the theme of the

economist was that it was economically disastrous and financially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, "men and women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for maintenance." It discourages thrift; "if shame or fear of punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old age his recess from labour or care." It keeps up wages, since "it encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to impose what wages they please upon their labours; and herein they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation that, when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work for less wages than when they were dear." To the landowner who cursed the poorrates, and the clothier who grumbled at the high cost of labour, one school of religious thought now brought the comforting assurance that morality itself would be favoured 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 worshipped property as the foundation of the social order, the mere labourer seemed something less than a full citizen. It was partly the result of the greatly increased influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless materialism, determined at all costs to conquer world-markets from France and Holland, and prepared to sacrifice every other consideration to their economic ambitions. It was partly that, in spite of a century

of large-scale production in textiles, the problems of capitalist industry and of a propertyless proletariate were still too novel for their essential features to be appreciated. Even those writers, like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wickedness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest, rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject of wages. Their social theory had been designed for an age of petty agriculture and industry, in which personal relations had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in economic status from the half-dozen journeymen or labourers whom he employed. In a world increasingly dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mineowners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to economic realities, as leads the twentieth century to talk of employers and employed, long after the individual employer has been converted into an impersonal corporation.

In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx observes that "the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment." "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 proletariate noticeably harsher than that general in the first half of the seventeenth century, and which has no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less reputable of white colonists towards coloured labour. 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 to-day. It is complained that, compared with the Dutch, they are self-indulgent and idle; that they want no more than a bare subsistence, and will cease work the moment they obtain it; that, the higher their wages, the more—"so licentious are they "ne—they spend upon drink; that high prices, therefore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the wage-earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not a blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely conduce to "weekly debauches."

When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not be desirable to re-establish slavery, it was

The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philosophers. But the theory that distress was due not to economic circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 called "individual improvidence and vice," was firmly established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been formulated. The essence of that system was admirably expressed a century later by a Scottish divine, as "the principle

that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right on other men or on society for existence." The 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, the 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.

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 honourable maintenance of the brother in distress a common charge.112

## CHAPTER V

#### CONCLUSION

Societies, like individuals, have their moral crises and their spiritual revolutions. The student can observe the results which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the fire which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit. The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its magnificent promise of fruitful action and of intellectual light; the abdication of the Christian Churches from departments of economic conduct and social theory long claimed as their province; the general acceptance by thinkers of a scale of ethical values, which turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a perilous, if natural, frailty into the idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society—such movements are written large over the history of the tempestuous age which lies between the Reformation and the full light of the eighteenth century. Their consequences have been worked into the very tissue of modern civilization. Posterity still stands too near their source to discern the ocean into which these streams will flow.

In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is the tritest of commonplaces. But social psychology continues too often to be discussed in serene indifference to the categories of time and place, and economic interests are still popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though inherited dispositions may be constant from generation to generation, the system of valuations, preferences, and ideals—the social environment within which individual character functions—is in process of continuous change, and it is in the conception

of the place to be assigned to economic interests in the life of society that change has in recent centuries been most comprehensive in its scope, and most sensational in its consequences. The isolation of economic aims as a specialized object of concentrated and systematic effort, the erection of economic criteria into an independent and authoritative standard of social expediency, are phenomena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity, appear, at least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively recent date in the history of later civilizations. The conflict between the economic outlook of East and West, which impresses the traveller to-day, finds a parallel in the contrast between mediæval and modern economic ideas, which strikes the historian.

The secularization of political thought, which was to be the work of the next two centuries, had profound reactions on social speculation, and by the Restoration the whole perspective, at least in England, has been revolutionized. Religion has been converted from the keystone which holds together the social edifice into one department within it, and the idea of a rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of policy and the criterion of conduct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to survive, must devote a reasonable attention to economic interests, man seems sometimes to have become an economic animal, who will be prudent, nevertheless, if he takes due precautions to assure his spiritual well-being.

truism which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to question, since it is in the heart of the individual that religion has its throne, and to externalize it in rules and institutions is to tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal. Naturally, therefore, they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property. Thus the conflict between religion and those natural economic ambitions, which the thought of an earlier age had regarded with suspicion, is suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind between them. The former takes as its province the individual soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his fellows in the activities of business and the affairs of society. Provided that each keeps to its own territory, peace is assured. They cannot collide, for they can never meet.

History is a stage where forces which are within human control contend and co-operate with forces which are not. The change of opinion described in these pages drew nourishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan revolution had been followed by a dazzling outburst of economic enterprise, and the transformation of the material environment prepared an atmosphere, in which a judicious moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom and the sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion as well as the outer. The march of external progress woke sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to applicate triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute tension between the claims of religion and the glittering allurements of a commercial civilization, such as had tormented the age of the Reformation.

It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, diffidence of men who were conscious that traditional doctrines of social ethics, with their impracticable distrust of economic motives, belonged to the conditions

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next. Few will refuse their admiration to the magnificent conception of a community penetrated from apex to foundation by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great reformers, not less than of the better

minds of the Middle Ages. But, in order to subdue the tough world of material interests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy with its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them. The Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing and a fair trial, and those who will not give him his due are wont to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables by taking his due and something over. Common sense and a respect for realities are not less graces of the spirit than moral zeal. The paroxysms of virtuous fury, with which the children of light denounced each new victory of economic enterprise as yet another stratagem of Mammon, disabled them for the staff-work of their campaign, which needs a cool head as well as a stout heart. Their obstinate refusal to revise old formulæ in the light of new facts exposed them helpless to a counter-attack, in which the whole fabric of their philosophy, truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed together. They despised knowledge, and knowledge destroyed them.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters. Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end the wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the naïve and uncritical worship of economic power, which is the mood of unreason too often engendered in those whom that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no light. Its result is not seldom a world in which men command a mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an organization which has every perfection except that of motion.

Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein, Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu zein.

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard of values, by which the position to be assigned to different objects may be determined. In a world of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic possibilities. But it cannot itself be merely economic, since the comparative importance of economic and of other interests—the sacrifice, for example, of material goods worth incurring in order to extend leisure, or develop

education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature as a whole, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension of their relative significance. "Whatever the world thinks," wrote Bishop Berkeley, "he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman." The philosopher of to-day, who bids us base our hopes of progress on knowledge inspired by love, does not differ from the Bishop so much, perhaps, as he would wish.

The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. A reasonable view of its possible modifications must recognize that natural appetites may be purified or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupations the mediæval insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches, Ruskin's famous outburst, "there is no wealth but life," the argument of the Socialist who

urges that production should be organized for service, not for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities, by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.

"Modern capitalism," writes Mr. Keynes, "is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers." It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its

material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley—who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.

TINIS

## NOTES

## CHAPTER I

- Lloyd George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921).
- 2 J. A. Froude, Revival of Romanism, in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 3rd ser., 1877, p. 108. 
    - 3 J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grolius, 1916, pp. 21 seqq.
    - Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. ii. chap. ix, § 124
- \*Nicholas Oresme, c.1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377. His Tractatus de origine, natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum was probably written about 1360. The Latin and French texts have been edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and extracts are translated by A. E. Monroe, Early Economic Thought, 1924, pp. 81-102. Its significance is discussed shortly by Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages (4th ed., 1905, pp. 354-9), and by Wolowski in his introduction. The date of the De Usuris of Laurentius de Rudolfis was 1403; a short account of his theories as to the exchanges will be found in E. Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, 1913, pp. 211-17. The most important works of St. Antonino (1389-1459, Archbishop of Florence, 1446) are the Summa Theologica, Summa Confessionalis, and De Usuris. Some account of his teaching is given by Carl Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz, 1904; Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 217-23; and Bede Jarrett, St. Antonino and Mediæval Economics, 1914. The full title of Baxter's work is A Christian Directory: a Summ of Practical Theologic and Cases of Conscience. 
    - See Chap. IV, p. 206.
- 7 Benvenuto da Imola. Comentum super Dantis Comædiam (ed. Lacaita), vol. i, p. 579: "Qui facit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui non facit vadit ad inopiam" (quoted by G. G. Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 342).
- \* Elucidarium, lib. ii, p. 18 (in Lanfranci Opera, ed. J. A. Giles). For the reasons for holding that Honorius of Augsburg, and not Lanfranc, as stated in my earlier editions, was the author of the Elucidarium, see J. A. Endres, Honorius Augustodunensis. Beitrag zur Geschichte des geistiger Lebens in 12: Jahrhundert, 1906, pp. 22-26. I am indebted to Professor F. M. Powicke for the correction. See also Vita Sancti Guidonis (Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. iv, p. 43): "Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo din sine crimine exerceri potuit."
- B. L. Manning, The People's Faith in the time of Wyclif, 1919 p. 186. 
    - 10 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2ª 2®, div. i, Q. iii, art. viii.

292 NOTES

- 11 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1º 2º, div. i, Q. xciv, art. if
- 12 The Bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII.
- 13 John of Salisbury, *Polycraticus* (ed. C. C. I. Webb), lib. v, cap. ii ("Est autem res publica, sicut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam quod divini muneris beneficio animatur"), and lib. vi, cap. π, where the analogy is worked out in detail. For Henry VIII's chaplain see Starkey, *A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset* (E.E.T.S., Extra Ser., no. xxxii, 1878). 
    - 14 Chaucer, The Persone's Tale, § 66.
- 18 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xix (Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, 1871, p. 145).
- John of Salisbury, op. cit., lib. vi, cap. x: "Tunc autem totius rei publicæ salus incolumis præclaraque erit, si superiora membra se impendant inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respondeant, ut singula sint quasi aliorum ad invicem membra."
- 17 Wyelif, op. cit., chaps. ix, x, xi, xvii, passim (Works of Wyelif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 130, 131, 134, 143, 132).
- 18 See, e.g., A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsgeschichte, 1901, vol. i, chaps. v, vii. His final verdict (p. 458) is: "Man kann es getrost aussprechen: es gibt wohl keine Periode in der Weltgeschichte, in der die natürliche Uebermacht des Kapitals über die besitz- und kapitallose Handarbeit rücksichtsloser, freier von sittlichen und rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer selbstverständlichen Konsequenz gewaltet hätte, und bis in die entferntesten Folgen zur Geltung gebracht worden wäre, als in der Blütezeit der Florentiner Tuchindustrie." The picture drawn by Pirenne of the textile industry in Flanders (Belgian Democracy, its early History, trans. by J. V. Saunders, 1915, pp. 128-34) is somewhat similar.
- 18 In Jan. 1298/9 there was held a "parliament of carpenters at Milehende, where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to observe a certain ordinance or provision made by the Mayor and Aldermen touching their craft," and in the following March a "parliament of smiths" was formed, with a common chest (Calendar of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, 1298-1307, ed. A. H. Thomas, 1924, pp. 25, 33-4).
- The figures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Léon (Histoire des Corporations de Métiers, 3rd ed., 1922, pp. 219-20, 224, 226); those for Frankfurt are given by Bücher (Die Bevölkerung von Frankfurt am Main im XIV und XV Jahrhundert, 1886, pp. 103, 146, 605). They do not include apprentices, and must not be pressed too far. The conclusion of Martin Saint-Léon is: "Il est certain qu'au moyen âge (abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n'existait pas encore un prolétariat, le nombre des ouvriers ne dépassant guère ou n'atteignant même pas celui des maîtres" (op. cii., p. 227 n.). The towns of Italy should be added, as an exception, to those of

Flanders, and in any case the statement is not generally true of the later Middle Ages, when there was certainly a wage-earning prole-tariate in Germany also (see Lamprecht, Zum Verständniss der wirth-schaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. i, 1893, pp. 191-263), and even, though on a smaller scale, in England.

21 The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned, chap. xxviii (Select English Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, p. 333). The passage contains comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in particular, gilds, "men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere," and "marchauntis, groceris, and vitileris" who "conspiren wickidly togidre that noon of hem schal bie over a certeyn pris, though the thing that thei bien be moche more worthi" (libid., pp. 333, 334).

Wyclif's argument is of great interest and importance. It is (1), that such associations for mutual aid are unnecessary. No special institutions are needed to promote fraternity, since, quite apart from them, all members of the community are bound to help each other: "Alle the goodnes that is in thes gildes eche man owith for to do bi comyn fraternyte of Cristendom, by Goddis comaundement." (2) That combinations are a conspiracy against the public. Both statements were points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitary State, and both were to play a large part in subsequent history. They were used by the absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century as an argument for State control over industry, in place of the obstructive torpor of gilds and boroughs, and by the individualists of the eighteenth century as an argument for free competition. The line of thought as to the relation of minor associations to the State runs from Wyclif to Turgot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the Act of the Legislative Assembly in 1792 forbidding trade unions ("Les citoyens de même état ou profession, les ouvriers et compagnons d'un art quelconque ne pourront . . . former des règlements sur leurs prétendus intérêts communs"), and the English Combination Acts.

\*\* Kayser Sigmunds Reformation aller Ständen des Heiligen Römischen Reichs, printed by Goldast, Collectio Constitutionum Imperialium, 1713, vol. iv, pp. 170-200. Its probable date appears to be about 1437. It is discussed shortly by J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 93-9.

28 Martin Saint-Léon, op. cit., p. 187. The author's remark is made d 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

294 NOTES

fixed for other, and much more numerous, bodies of workers. What is true is that the mediæval 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.

24 "The Cardinals' Gospel," translated from the Carmina Burana by G. G. Coulton, in A Mediaval Garner, 1910, p. 347.

25 Printed from the Carmina Burana by S. Gaselee, An Anthology of Medieval Latin, 1925, pp. 58-0.

26 Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of "Romanæ ecclesiæ filii speciales" (Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 1896, vol. ii, p. 66).

For Grosstète see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. v, pp. 404-5 (where he is reported as denouncing the Cahorsines, "whom in our time the holy fathers and teachers . . . had driven out of France, but who have been encouraged and protected by the Pope in England, which did not formerly suffer from this pestilence"), and F. S. Stevenson, Robert Grosseleste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1899, pp. 101-4. For the bishop of London and the Cahorsines see Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. iii, pp. 331-2. A useful collection of references on the whole subject is given by Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 64-8.

18 Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham, vol. i, p. 18, July 1279 (translated by Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the

Reformation, p. 345).

- Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of the Marquis of Lothian, 1905, p. 26; and Th. Bonnin, Regestrum Visitationum Odonis Rigaldi, 1852, p. 35. See also note 86 below.
- The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at interest to the citizens of Paris (A. Lucheire, 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.
- 21 From a letter of St. Bernard, 6.1125, printed by Coulton, A Mediaval Garner, pp. 68-73.
- Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, lib. ii, cap. i-vii, where the economic foundations of a State are discussed.
- 38 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 2° 2", Q. laxxiii, art. vi. For St. Antonino's remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, St. Antonino and Mediaval Economics, p. 59.

    - Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa xii, Q. i, c. ii, § 1
- 35 A good account of St. Antonino's theory of property is given by Ilgner, Die Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz, chap. x.
- 36 "Sed si esset bonus legislator in patria indigente, deberet locare pro pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores . . . et non tantum eis et familiæ sustentationem necessariam invenire, sed etiam industriam, peritiam, et pericula omnia locare; ergo etiam hoc possunt ipsi in vendendo" (quoted Schreiber, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, p. 154).
- Thenry of Ghent, Aurea Quodlibeta, p. 42h (quoted Schreiber ob. cit., p. 135).

    - Se Gratian, Decretum, pt. I, dist. lxxxviii, cap. xi.
    - 38 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 28 28, Q. bxxvii, art. iv
- 40 Ibid. Trade is unobjectionable, "cum aliquis negotiationi intendit propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessariæ ad vitam patriæ desint, et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium laboris."
- 41 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emptionis et venditionis, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., p. 197).

    - 42 See Chap. II, § ü.
- 43 Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, A Mediaval Garner, 1910, pp. 212-15, 298, and Social Life in England from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 346.
- 44 The facts are given by Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i, p. 223. For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in Florence, see Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirthschaftsgeschichte, vol. i, pp. 173-209.
- 45 Bruno Kuske, Quellen zur Geschichte des Kölner Handels und Verkehrs im Mittelalter, vol. iii, 1923, pp. 197-8.
- 46 E.E.T.S., The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. Harris, 1907-13,
- 47 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.
- \*\* For examples of such cases see Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. lxiv, nos. 291 and 1089; Bdle. xxxvii, no. 38; Bdle. xlvi, no. 307. They are discussed in some detail in my introduction to Thomas Wilson's Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 28-9.
- 49 Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, p. 27; Selden Soc., Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p. 35.

    - Aquinas, Summa Theol., 1° 2°, Q. xcv, art. ii.
- 51 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, p. 153): "Bot men of lawe and marchauntis and chapmen and vitelers synnen more in avarice then done pore laboreres. And this token hereof; for now ben thei pore, and now ben thei ful riche, for wronges that thei done."

    - \* E.g., Ægidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. i: "Tantum

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res estinatur 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, Questiones 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. cii., pp. 161-71 and 177-91). The theory of Buridanus appears extraordinarily modern; but he is careful to emphasize that prices should be fixed "secundum utilitatem et necessitatem totius communitatis," not "penes necessitatem ementis vel vendentis."

- 53 St. Antonino, Sunma Theologica, pars ii, tit. i, cap. viii, § 1, and cap. xvi, § iii. An account of St. Antonino's theory of prices is given by Ilgner, Die volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen Antonins von Florenz, chap. iv; Jarrett, St. Antonino and Mediæval Economics; and Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 217-23. Its interest consists in the attempts to maintain the principle of the just price, while making allowance for practical necessities.
- 51 Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractibus emptionis et venditionis, i, 11, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 198-200).
- For these examples see Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 259-60; Records of the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, vol. i, 1906, p. 227; Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls, p. 132; J. M. Wilson. The Worcester Liber Albus, 1920, pp. 199-200, 212-13. The question of the legitimacy of rent-charges and of the profits of partnership has been fully discussed by Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland (1865), and by Ashley, Economic History. See also G. O'Brien, An Essay on Mediaval Economic Teaching (1920), and G. G. Coulton, An Episcde in Canon Law (in History, July 1921), where the difficult question raised by the Decretal Naviganti is discussed.
- be Bernardi Papiensis Summa Decretalium (ed. E. A. D. Laspeyres, 1860), lib. v, tit. xv.
- bi E.g., Ægidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. ii: "Etiam res futuræ per tempora non sunt tantæ estimationis, sicut eædem collectæ in instanti, ncc tantam utilitatem inferunt possidentibus, propter quod oportet, quod sint minoris estimationis secundum justitiam."
- 58 O'Brien (op. cit.) appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take this view.
- by E. Cannan, W. D. Ross, etc., in Economica, June 1922, pp. 105-7 
    - 81 For Italy, see Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i,

pp. 179-91, and for France, P. Boissonade, Le Travail dans l'Europe chrétienne au Moyen Age, 1921, pp. 206-9, 212-13. Both emphasize the financial relations of the Papacy.

- 42 E.g., Council of Arles, 314; Nicæa, 325; Laodicea, 372; and many others.
- 63 Corpus Juris Canonici, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. i. 
    - 64 Ibid., cap. iii.
    - 15 Ibid., Sexti Decretal, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i, ii.
    - 66 Ibid., Clementinarum, lib. v. tit. v. cap. i.
- 67 The passages referred to in this paragraph are as follows: Corp. Jur. Can., Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. ix, iv, x, xiii. xv. ii. v. vi.
- 63 A Formulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, ed. H. C. Lea, 1892, Nos. xcii, clxxviii (2), clxxix.

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70 E. Martène and U. Durand, Thesaurus novus Anecdolorum, 1717, vol. iv, pp. 696 seqq.

71 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 prele thee . . . seie to me where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hundrid parti of the teching upon matrimonie which y teche in a book mad upon Matrimonie, and in the firste partie of Cristen religioun. . . Seie to me also where in Holi Scripture is yoven the hundrid part of the teching which is yoven upon usure in the thridde parti of the book yclepid The filling of the iiij tables; and yit al thilk hool teching yoven upon usure in the now named book is litil ynough or ouer litle for to leerne, knowe and have sufficiently into mannis behove and into Goddis trewe service and lawe keving what is to be leerned and kunnen aboute

usure, as to reeders and studiers ther yn it muste needis be open. Is ther eny more writen of usure in al the Newe Testament save this, Luke vi, 'Geve ye loone, hoping no thing ther of,' and al that is of usure writen in the Oold Testament favourith rather usure than it reproveth. How evere, therfore, schulde eny man seie that the sufficient leernyng and kunnyng of usure or of the vertu contrarie to usure is groundid in Holi Scripture? Howe evere schal thilk litil now rehercid clausul, Luke vi, be sufficient for to answere and assoile alle the harde scrupulose doutis and questiouns which al dai han neede to be assoiled in mennis bargenyngis and cheffaringis togidere? Ech man having to do with suche questiouns mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth litil or noon light therto at al. Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he forbedith usure, and therfore al that mai be take therbi is this, that usure is unleeful; but though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful, how schal y wite herbi what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it, and whanne in a bargeyn is usure, though to summen seemeth noon, and how in a bargeyn is noon usure though to summen ther semeth to be?"

Pecock's defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching of Scripture was the real answer to the statement afterwards made by Luther that the text, "Love-thy neighbour as thyself," was an all-sufficient guide to action (see Chap. II, p. 99). Examples of teaching as to usury contained in books such as Pecock had in mind will be found in Myrc's Instructions for Parish Priests (E.E.T.S., ed. E. Peacock and F. J. Furnivall, 1902), the Pupilla Oculi, and Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwyl (E.E.T.S., ed. R. Morris, 1866).

The Catechism of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, 1552, ed. T. G. Law, 1884, pp. 97-9. Under the seventh commandment are denounced: "Fyftlie, al thay that defraudis or spoulyeis the common geir, aganis the common weill for lufe of their awin pryvate and singulare weill. Saxtlie, all usuraris and ockiraris synnis aganis this command, that wil nocht len thair geir frelie, bot makis conditione of ockir, aganis the command of Christe. Sevintlie, all thay quhilk hais servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair fee or waige, accordyng to conditioun and thair deservyng, quilk syn, as sanct James sayis, cryis vengeance before God. Auchtlie, all that that strykis cowyne of unlauchful metall, quhair through the common weil is hurt and skaithit. The nynte, all Merchandis that sellis corruppit and evyll stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony uther in bying or sellyng use desait, falsate, parjurie, wrang mettis or weychtis, to the skaith of thair nychtbour, thay committ gret syn agane this command. Nother can we clenge fra breakyng of this command all kyndis of craftis men quhilk usis nocht thair awin craft leillalie and trewlie as thai suld do.

Al wrechis that wyl be ground ryche incontynent, quhay be fraud.

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falset, and gyle twynnis men and thair geir, quhay may keip thair nychbour fra povertie and myschance and dois it nocht. Quhay takis ouer sair mail, ouer mekle ferme or ony blake maillis fra thair tennands, or puttis thair cottaris to ouir sair labouris, quhair throw the tenentis and cottaris is put to herschip Quha invies his nychbouris gud fortune, ouir byis him or takis his geir out of his handis with fair hechtis, or prevenis him, or begyles him at his marchandis hand." The detail in which different forms of commercial sharp practice are denounced is noticeable.

73 See e.g. Matt. Paris, Chron. Maj., vol. iii, pp. 191-2, for the case of a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excommunicate usurer, is seized by order of the Count of Brittany and buried alive, bound to the dead man. See also Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. v, p 38.

74 Harduin, Acta Conciliorum, vol. vii, pp. 1017-20: "Anno prædicto \[1485\], diebus Mercurii et Jovis prædictis, scilicet ante Ramos Palmarum, ibidem apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesiæ de Vicano; coram domino archiepiscopo, et mandato suo, personæ infrascriptæ, parochiani de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria pravitate erant quam plurimum diffamati; coram domino propter hoc vocati abjuraverunt: et per mandatum domini summas infrascriptas, quas se confessi fuerunt habuisse per usurariam pravitatem, per juramentum suum restituere promiserunt, et stare juri super his coram eo. Bertrandus de Faveriis abjuratus usuras, ut præmittitur, promisit restituere centum solidos monetæ antiquæ: quos, proui ipse confessus est, habuerat per usurariam pravitatem. . . ."
Thirty-six more cases were treated in this way.

Villani, Cronica, book xii, chap. lviii (ed. 1823, vol. vi, p. 142): Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor: "Ma per attignere danari, d'ogni piccola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per iniquità contra 1ddio, o dicesse che usura non fosse peccato mortale, o simili parole, condannava in grossa somma di danari, secondo che l'uomo era ricco."

76 Constitutions of Clarendon, cap. 15: "Placita de debitis, quæ fide interposita debentur, vel absque interpositione fidel, sint in justitia regis." On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 2nd ed., 1898, vol. ii, pp. 197-202, and F. Makower, Constitutional History of the Church of England, 1895, § 60.

77 Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 44, 88, 156, 235; Selden Soc., Borough Customs, ed. M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1906, pp. 161 (London) and 209-10 (Dublin); Records of Leicester, ed. M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1901, p. 49. For similar prohibitions by manorial courts, see Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, p. 28, and G. P. Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, 1852, p. 238.

Annales de Burton, p. 256; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. il, p 115; Rol. Parl., vol. ii, p. 129b.

78 Cal. of Letter Books of the City of London, ed. R. R. Sharpe, vol. H, pp. 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200, 206-7, 261-2, 365; Liber Albus, bk. iii, pt. ii, pp. 77, 315, 394-401, 683; Selden Soc., Lett Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lothian, pp. 26, 27.

60 Rot. Parl., vol. ii, pp. 332a, 350b.

81 R. H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns, 1804 (?), p. 190.

68 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xi, no. 307; Bdle. xxix, nos. 193-5; Bdle. xxxi, nos. 96-100, 527; Bdle. lx, no. 20; Bdle. lxiv, no. 1089. See also Year Books and Plea Rolls as Sources of Historical Information, by H. G. Richardson, in Trans. R.H.S., 4th series, vol. v, 1922, pp. 47-8.

83 Ed. Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, 2nd ed.,

84 15 Ed. III, st. 1, c. 5; 3 Hen. VII, c. 5; 11 Hen. VII, c. 8; 13 Eliz. c. 8; 21 Jac. I. c. 17

85 Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 1, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, 156, 226, 235, 251. The cases of the smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In the fifteenth century a gild still occasionally tried to enforce its rules by proceedings in an ecclesiastical court (see Wm. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 1847, nos. xxxvi and lxviii, where persons breaking gild rules are cited before the Commissary's court).

A. T. Bannister, 1919, p. 52 (1424); and Surtees Society, vol. exxxviii, The Register of Thomas of Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York, ed. Wm. Brown, 1925, vol. i, pp. 187-8: "6 kal. Maii, 1303. Wilton.' Littera testimonialis super purgacione domini Johannis de Multhorp, vicarii ecclesie de Garton', de usura sibi imposita. Universis Christi fidelibus, ad quos presentes littere pervenerint, pateat per easdem quod, cum dominus Johannes de Multhorp', vicarius ecclesie de Garton', nostre diocesis, coram nobis Thoma, Dei gracia, etc., in visitacione nostra super usura fuisset notatus, videlicet, quod mutuavit cuidam Jollano de Briddale, ut dicebatur, xxxiij s. iiij d., eo pacto quod idem vicarius ab eo reciperet per x annos annis singulis x s. pro eisdem, de quibus eciam dictum fuit quod prefatus Jollanus dicto vicario pro octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et solvit predicto; eundem vicarium super hoc vocari fecimus coram nobis et ei objecimus supradicta, que ipse inficians constancius atque negans se optulit in forma juris super hiis legitime purgaturum. Nos autem eidem vicario purgacionem suam cum sua sexta manu

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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 Johanne, de Wharrum et de Wyverthorp' ecclesiarum vicariis ac Roberto, Johanne, Alano, Stepheno et Willelmo, de Nafferton', Driffeld', Wetewang', Foston' et Wintringham ecclesiarum presbiteris parochialibus fidedignis, de memorato articulo legitime se purgavit; propter quod ipsum vicarium sic purgatum pronunciamus et inmunem sentencialiter declaramus, restituentes eundem ad suam pristinam bonam famam. In cujus rei testimonium sigillum nostrum presentibus est appensum."

15 Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xviii, no. 137; Bdle. xix, no. 2155; Bdle. xxiv, no. 255; Bdle. xxxi, no. 348. See also A. Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century, 1909, pp. 215-17. In view of these examples, it seems probable that a more thorough examination of the Early Chancery Proceedings would show that, even in the fifteenth century, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in matters of contract and usury was of greater practical importance than has sometimes been supposed.

Surtees Soc., vol. lxlv, 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 cause" occurs in 1532 (Surtees Soc., vol. xxi, 1845, Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, p. 49).

- 80 Chetham Soc., vol. xliv, 1901, Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court of Whalley, pp. 15-16.
- 90 Surtees Soc., vol. lxiv, 1875, Acts of Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Ripon, p. 26. 
    - Hale, op. cit. (note 85 above), no. ccxxxviii.
    - 93 See Chap. III, p. 162
- chap. xv, where numerous examples are given. For a gild which appears to have acted as a bank, see Hist. MSS. Com., 11th Report, 1887, Appx., pt. iii, p. 228 (MSS. of the Borough of King's Lynn), and for other examples of loans, H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediæval England, 1919, pp. 61-3, Records of the City of Oxford, ed. Wm. H. Turner, 1880, p. 8, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. C. Wordsworth, pt. ii, 1897, pp. 616-17, and 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.

W. H. Bliss, Cal. of Papal Letters, vol. i, pp. 267-8.

95 For the early history of the Monts de Piété see Holzapfel, Dis Anfänge der Montes Pietatis (1903), and for their development in the Low Countries, A. Henne, Histoire du Règne de Charlesquint en Belgique, 1859, vol. v, pp. 220-3. For proposals to establish them in England see S.P.D. Eliz., vol. ex, no. 57 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, sect iii, no. 6), and my introduction to Thomas Wilson's Discourse upon Usury, 1925 ed., pp. 125-7.

06 Camden Soc., A Relation of the Island of England about the year 1500 (translated from the Italian), 1847, D. 23.

97 Lyndwood, Provinciale, sub tit. Usura, and Gibson, Codes, Jur. Eccl. Angl., vol. ii, p. 1026.

pt. iii, chap. iv, pp. 296-7: "Also Crist seide here in this present proces, that 'at God' it is possible a riche man to entre into the kingdom of heuen; that is to seie, with grace which God profrith and geueth... though he abide stille riche, and though withoute such; grace it is ouer hard to him being riche to entre. Wherfore folewith herof openli, that it is not forbodun of God eny man to be riche; for thanne noon such man schulde euere entre heuen.... And if it be not forbode eny man to be riche, certis thanne it is leeful ynough ech man to be riche; in lasse than he vowe the contrarie or that he knowith bi assay and experience him silf so miche indisposid anentis richessis, that he schal not mowe rewle him silf aright anentis tho richessis: for in thilk caas he is bonde to holde him silf in poverte." The embarrassing qualification at the end—which suggests the question, who then dare be rich?—is the more striking because of the common-sense rationalism of the rest of the passage.

Trithemius, quoted by J. Janssen, History of the German People at the close of the Middle Ages, vol. ii, 1896, p. 102.

100 Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas, pp. 157-8.

101 See A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augustus (translated by E. B. Krehbiel), pp. 391-2, where an eloquent denunciation by Jacques de Vitry is quoted.

102 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is a surveyor, one Humberstone.)

108 See e.g. Chaucer, The Persono's Tale, §§ 64-6. The parson expresses the orthodox view that "the condicious 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

304 NOTES

thy thralles been goddes peple; for humble folk been Cristes freendes."

104 Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa x, Q. ii, c. iii, and causa xii, Q. ii, c. xxxix.

105 Summa Theol., 1 2 2, Q. xciv, art. v, § 3.

100 An article of the German Peasants' programme in 1525 declared: "For men to hold us as their own property... is pitiable enough, considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free." (The programme is printed in J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 137-42.) The rebels under Ket prayed "that all bondmen may be made free, for God freed them all with His precious blood-shedding" (printed in Bland, Brown, and Tawney, English Economic History, Select Documents, pt. ii, sect. i, no. 8.)

## CHAPTER II

- 1 A 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.
- 2 E. R. Daenell, Die Blütezeit 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-
- 4 E.g., The Fugger News-Letters, 1568-1605, ed. V. von Klarwill, trans. P. de Chary, 1924.
- 5 E. Albèri, Le Relazione degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato, serie 1, 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 miniere, queste l'Indie che hanno sostentato l'imprese dell' Imperatore tanti anni."
- The best contemporary picture of the trade of Antwerp is that of L. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567), of which part is reprinted in a French translation in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic 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 vol. iii, pp. 259-72; Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger, vol. ii, pp. 3-68; and J. A. Goris, Étude sur les Colonies Marchandes Méridionales à Anvers de 1488 à 1567 (1025).
- 7 The Meutings had opened a branch in Antwerp in 1479, the Hochstetters in 1486, the Fuggers in 1508, the Welsers in 1509 (Pirenne, op. ci., vol. iii, p. 261). 
    - 8 Pirenne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 273-6.
    - Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. il, 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 ed., pp. 60-86. 
    - 11 Erasmus, Adagia; see also The Complaint of Peace.
- 18 For the Fuggers, see Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 85-186 and for the other German firms mentioned, ibid., pp. 187-260.
- 13 See Goris, op. cit., pp. 510-45, where the teply of the Paris theologians is printed in full; and Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 18, 21 For Bellarmin, see Goris, op. cit., pp. 551-2. A curious

306 NOTES

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. lxxv, 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 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. i, pt. ii, pp. 442-3
- 16 Bodin, La Response de Jean Bodin aux Paradoxes de Malestroit touchant l'enchérissement 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 Epistolæ 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 Bullinger (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 ibid., pp. 33-60; Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher (1524), in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 279-322; An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen, Vermahnung (1540), in ibid., vol. li, pp. 325-424.
- 21 "Hie müsste man wahrlich auch den Fuckern und der geistlichen Gesellschaft einen Zaum ins Maul legen" (quoted by Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. i, p. 117 n.). 
    - 22 See pp. 114-15.
- 23 Luther, Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, pp. 357-61.
- 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, 10th, 11th, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 1841); Jewel, Works, pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850). Citations from less well-known writers and preachers will be found in J. O. W. Haweis, Shetches 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 prêt a intérêt dans l'ancienne France.
- 27 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England with the Mischiefs attending it, 1673.
- 26 For an account of these changes see K. Lamprecht, Zum Verständniss der wirthschaftlichen und sozialen Wandlungen in

Deutschland vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, Bd. i, 1893, pp. 191 segq.

- 28 Lamprecht, op. cit., and J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 40-73.
- Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 20-39, and Strieder, op. cit. (see note 2), pp. 156-212.
- 31 For the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund see Chap. I, note 22, and for the Peasants' Articles, *ibid.*, note 106.
- 32 For Geiler von Kaiserberg and Hipler see Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 30, 126-31. For Hutten see H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland zur Zeit der Reformation herrschenden National-ökonomischen Ansichten, 1861, pp. 13-24.
- 33 Quoted W. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century, 1910, p. 28.

    - 34 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 1912, pp. 44-52.
    - Schapiro, op. cit., p. 137.
- 36 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.
- 37 Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (1520), in Werke, vol. vi, pp. 381 seqq.

    - 38 Schapiro, op. cit., p. 139.
- 38 Luther, Ermahnung zum Frieden auf die zwölf Artikel der Bauerschaft in Schwaben (1525), in Werke, vol. xviii, p. 327.

    - 40 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, p. 295.
- 41 An den christlichen Adel, in ibid., vol. vi, p. 456 (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.
    - See note 71 on Chapter I.
- \*\* Printed in Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland. Beilage F, pp. 618-19.
- 47 Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, op. cit. pp. 258-9.

    - 40 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucker, in Werke, vol. xv, p 302.
- 48 Zwingli, Von der göttlichen und menschlichen Gerechtigkeit, oder von dem göttlichen Gesetze und den bürgerlichen Gesetzen, printed in R. Christoffel, H. Zwingli, Leben und ausgewählte Schriften, 1857, pt. ii, pp. 313 segg. 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 Saniellahum des Christliches Kirche p. 2022)
- 51 Bucer, De Regno Christi,
- Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 61
- So Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by J. Allen, 1838, vol. ii, p. 147 (bk. iii, ch. xxiii, par. 7).

    - Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 128-9 (bk. iii, ch. xxi, par. 7)
- 55 Gerrard Winstanley, A New-Yeers 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, 1857, p. 213.

    - 57 De Subventione Pauperum.
- inspectio cuiusque familiæ. Distribuimus inter nos urbis regiones, ut ordine singulas decurias executere liceat. Adest ministro comes unus ex senioribus. Illic novi incolæ 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, op. cit., p. 80 n.). For his condemnation of indiscriminate alms-giving, see ibid., p. 79 n.
- 58 De non habendo Pauperum Delectu (1523), and De Erogation Eleemosynarum (1524). See K. R. Hagenbach, Johann Oeholampad und Oswald Myconius, die Reformatoren Basels, 1859, p. 46.
- 66 Carl Pestallozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, Leben und ausgewählte Schriften, 1858, pp. 50-1, 122-5, 340-2.

    - " Wiskemann, op. cu., pp. 70-4.
- 63 Quoted by Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, 1921, p. 174.

    - 63 Calvin, Inst., bk. iv, ch. xii, par. 1.
- 61 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 Switzerland, trans. by John Cochran, 1858, pp. 159-60.

    - 66 Printed in Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, Appx., pp. 23-5
- 47 E. Choisy, L'Etat Chrétien Calviniste à Genève au temps de Théodore de Bèze, 1902, p. 145. I should like to make acknowledgments to this excellent book for most of the matter contained in the following paragraphs.
- 65 Paul Henry, op. cit., pp. 70-5. Other examples are given by Preserved Smith, op. cit., pp. 170-4, and by F. W. Kampschulte, Johann Calvin, seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf, 1869. Statistical estimates 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.

    - 89 Knox, quoted by Preserved Smith, ob. cit., p. 174.
    - 70 Calvin, Inst., bk. fii, ch. vii, par. 5.
- 11 Choisy, op. cit., pp. 442-3.
- Ibid., pp. 35–37.
- 13 *Ibid.*, pp. 189, 117–19
- 74 Ibid., pp. 35, 165-7.
- 75 *Ibid.*, pp. 119-21.
- 76 Ibid., pp. 189-94.
- Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 70 n.
- 16 See the description of the Church 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 gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donec excuti carne mortali, similes erimus angelis. Neque enim patitur nostra infirmitas a schola nos dimitti, donec toto vitæ cursu discipuli fuerimus. Adde quod extra eius gremium nulla est speranda peccatorum remissio nec ulla salus."
- 70 Synodicon in Gallia Reformata: Or the Acts, Decisions, Decrees and Canons of those famous National Councils of the Reformed Churches in France, by John Quick, 1692, vol. i, p. 99.
- 86 Ibid., vol. i, p. 9 (pirates and fraudulent tradesmen), pp. 25, 34, 38, 79, 140, 149 (interest and usury), p. 70 (false merchandise 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).
- 81 The Buke of Discipline, in Works of John Knoz, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 1848, p. 227.
- 62 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.
- 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.
    - Winthrop, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 20
- 67 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. Iv.
- 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 I owe this phrase to the excellent book of J. T. Adams, The Founding of New England.

## CHAPTER III

- 1 I. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglia (ed. T. Hearne).
- 2 4 Hen. VII, c. 19; 6 Hen. VIII. c. 5; 7 Hen. VIII, c. 1; 25 Hen. 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-
- More, Utopia, p. 32 (Pitt Press ed., 1879): "Noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certeyne abottes, 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 v. the Abbot of Malmesbury); for conversion of copyholds to tenancies at will, Selden Society, vol. xii, 1898, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp. lix-lxv, 64-101 (Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot's Ripton v. St. John; the change was alleged to have been made in 1471.)
- 5 A. 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.
- 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.
- 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 Monasteries, 1920, pp. 227-8. 
    - 10 See, e.g., The Obedience of a Christian Man (in Tyndale's

Doctrinal 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. iii, pp. 311-45): "Like as we suffered our selfest to be ignorant of the trewe worshipping of God, even so God kepte from us the right knowledge how to reforme those inconveniences which we did see before our eyes to tende unto the utter Desolation of the Realme. But now that 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 Mediaval England, 1915, p. 331. He goes on: "The contrast 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-Reformation ancestors." For details of the Edwardian spoliation, see the same author's English Schools at the Reformation, 1846-8 (1896).

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 (E.E.T.S., 1872, pp. 129-150).

    - 16 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 resonable price, norished scholes, brought up youth in good letters, they do none of all these thynges."
- Thomas Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber, 1895), p. 32. The same charge is repeated in Subsequent sermons.
- 18 F. W. Russell, Kett'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 Sixteenth 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.

    - n The Way to Wealth, in ibid., p. 132.
    - Lever, op. cit., p. 130.
- \*\* A 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.
- 28 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 69 on Chapter I.
    - 27 D'Ewes, Journals, 1682, p. 173.
    - 28 Calendar S.P D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi, nos. 19, 20.
- 29 For examples see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv. The best account of parish business and organisation is given by S. L. Ware, The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects, 1908.
- 30 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. See also Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., blk, ii, chap. xviii.
- 81 A Godlie Treatise concerning the Lawful Use of Riches, a translation by Thos. Rogers from the Latin of Nicholas Heming, 1578, p. 8.
- 32 Sandys, 2nd, 10th, 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.

    - 38 Heming, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
    - Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 59.
    - Wilson, op. cit., 1925 ed., p. 281.
    - 36 Miles Mosse, op. cit.
- 8 S.P.D. Eliz., vol. lxxv, no. 54. (Printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 359-70).

    - 38 Heming, op. cit., p. 11.
    - 39 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 1901.
    - Ouoted by Maitland, op. cit., pp. 49-50.
    - Wilson, op. cit.
    - 42 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 1660, bk. iii, ch. iii, par. 30.
    - 48 Mosse, op. cit., Dedication, p. 6.
    - 44 E. 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.

- 45 Cardwell, Synodalia, vol. i, pp. 144, 308; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv, p. 509.
- Ware, op. cit. (see note 29 above), quotes several examples. See also Archaeologia 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.
- 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:

Sancti Botolphi extra Aldersgate Thomas Witham at the signe of the Unicome Detected for an usurer that taketh above the rate of x" in the 100" and above the rate of 2s. 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.

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 S.P.D. Eliz., vol. lxxv, no. 54.
- 55 For an account of these expedients see my introduction to Wilson's Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 123-8.
- 58 Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. viii, chap. i, par. 5.

    - 57 Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xxvii, 1597, p. 129.
- 58 The Stiffhey Papers (ed. H. W. Saunders, R.H.S., Camden Third Series, vol. xxvi, 1915), p. 140.
- 55 Quoted by E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, 1900, p 148
- 60 For an account of the treatment of exchange pusiness under Elizabeth, see Wilson, op. cit., Introduction, pp. 146-54.
- 61 For references see *ibid.*, pp. 164-5; and Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593-1609, ed. W. P. Baildon, 1894, pp. 235-7. The latter book contains several instances of intervention by the Star Chamber in cases of engrossing of corn (pp. 71, 76-7, 78-9, 91) and of enclosure and depopulation (pp. 49-52, 164-5, 192-3, 247, 346-7).
- 22 A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed. E. Lamond. 1893, p. 14.
- es The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. i, 1847, p. 6.

    - 64 Ibid., p. 64.
    - 65 *Ibid.*, pp. 89, 138.
    - 66 Ibid., p. 167.
    - 67 Ibid., pp. 28-9.
- 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. 101 seqq.
- 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 S.P.D. Chas. I, vol. cccxcix, 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 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 centuries, 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.
- Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace, in Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 551-4; Leonard, op. cit., p. 157.
- 76 The Works of William Laud, ed. Wm Scott, vol. vi, 1857, pt. i p. 191. (Answer to Lord Saye and Sele's speech upon the Bil about Bishops' Powers in Civil Affairs and Courts of Judicature.)

    - 76 *Ibid.*, vol. i, pp. 5-6.
- Harrington, Works, 1700 ed., pp. 69 (Oceana) and 388-9 (The
- 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.
- 81 H. Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. ii, 1827, letter clxxxii, and J. W. Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 1839, vol. ii, p. 343,

    - 82 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 249.
    - 83 Commons' Journals, May 21, 1604, vol. i, p. 218.
- 84 13 Eliz., c. 8, repealing 5 and 6 Ed. VI, c. 20; D'Ewes, Journals, pp. 171-4.
- 63 Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 1825, vol. ii, pp. 364 n., 412.
- 66 Hist. MSS. Com., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 1901, p. 46 (MSS. of Corporation of Burford).

    - 67 Wilson, op. cii. (see note 55 above), p. 233
- 88 Coke, Institutes, pt. ii, 1797, pp. 601 seqq. (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 R. G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission, 1013, pp. 180 sequ.

    - H D'Ewes, Journals, pp. 171, 173.
- 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 ecclesiastical jurisdiction ran into hundreds.

    - Penn, No Cross, No Crown, pt. i, ch, zii, par. 8.

316 NOTES

- M Sanderson, De Obligatione Conscientia, 1660; 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.)
- 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 in the century 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.
- 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, Economiss (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University, vol. xix, 1903-5).
- Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: 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.
- 4 The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (Everyman ed., 1915, p. 153). 
    - 6 Baxter, op. cit., p. 31.
    - Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress.
    - 7 Baxter, op. cit., p. 89.
    - 8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, 1884 ed., p. 122.
    - Quoted S. Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii, 1823, p. 314
- 10 R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, vol. i, 1910, pp. 249-50. 
    - Baxter, op. cit., p. 30.
- 13 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. 
    - 18 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. vi, par. 271.
- 14 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1670, Preface, p. xxxix.
- 16 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, 1827 ed., vol. iii, p. 101.
- 18 D. 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

318 NOTES

- impoverished" (S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 (1889), p. 73). For instances of the comparatively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under Elizabeth see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i. section vi, nos. 3, 4, 11 (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt. i, pp. 79-84.
- 17 Torism and Trade can never agree, p. 12. The tract is wrongly attributed to Davenant by Levy (Economic Liberalism, p. 12).
- 18 See, e.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le règne 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 A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the Country about the odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 29.
- 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, 1702, pt. i, chap. xiv. 
    - 22 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp. 25-6.
- 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 religion 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 Conformity, 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 free-holders; 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." 
    - Swift. Examiner.
    - 26 Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, 1753, p. 21,
- 16 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: "The generality of the Master Workmen \[i.e. employers\] lived but a little

better than their journeymen (from hand to mouth), but only that they laboured not altogether so hard."

- 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 Hol, act I, sc. i.
    - 30 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. i, par. 163.
    - 31 Petty. Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23.
- Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, first published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Statistik, vols. xx, xxi, and since reprinted in vol. i of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 1920; Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress, 1912; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Freihandel, 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 preponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favourable to the growth of capitalist enterprise—appears to be accepted by Troeltsch, op. cit., pp. 704 seqq. It is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57), who dissents from many of Weber's conclusions. Weber's essay is certainly one of the most fruitful 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 application 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 explanation 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 centres 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

320 NOTES

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 favourable 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 exchanges were a second. Both contributed to the temper of single-minded concentration on pecuniary gain, which Weber understands by the capitalist spirit.
- (iii) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself. In the first place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the seventeenth 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 seventeenth-century Puritanism a variety of elements, which held widely different views as to social policy. As Cromwell discovered, there was no formula which would gather Puritan aristocrats and Levellers, landowners 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 particular 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.

- 25 Cunningham, The Morat Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money and the Use of Weatth, 1909, p. 25.
- 34 Knox, The Buke of Discipline, in Works, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 1848, pp. 183 seqq.; Thos. Cartwright, A Directory of Church Government (printed in D. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1822, vol. v, Appx. iv); W. Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline, 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 Reformation and for the Presbyterial 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. 1
    - 37 Ibid., pp. 14-15, for Bancroft's account of the procedure.
- 28 Quoted from Baillic'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.
- 30 Shaw, op. cit., vol. ii, chap. iii (The Presbyterian System, 1646-60). For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline see Chetham Society, vols. xx, xxii, xxiv, Minutes of the Manchester Ctassis, and vols. xxxvi, xli, Minutes of the Bury Classis. 
    - 40 See Chap. III, p. 142.
- 41 Puritan Manifestoes, p. 120, quoted by H. G. Wood, The Influence of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property in Property, 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 Commerce, Modern Times, 1921 ed., pt. i, pp. 157-8. 
    - 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 College, 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 Francker in 1622, where he remained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam.
- 44 E.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, viz. such as doth unpeople Townes, and uncorn Fields, is arraigned, convicted and condemned, 1653,
- 45 J. 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).
- Ghetham Society, Minutes of the Bury Presbylerian 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 foresaid scandalls bee admitted to the Lord's supper without signification of sincere repentance," but it appears (p. 198) to have been mainly interested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers.
- 49 Hist. MSS. Comm., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 1901, p. 132.
- 50 Quoted by F. J. Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter, 1924, p. 92.
- bi Selections from those parts of *The Christian Directory* which bear on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawney, *Chapters from Richard Baxter's Christian Directory*, 1925, in which most of the passages quoted in the text will be found.

    - 51 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (see note 2), p. I
- Life 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.
- 66 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."

    - Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, pp. 60-1.
    - Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673.
- 60 S. 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.
- el 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 widou Lucy, Everyman ed., 1908, pp. 64-5.

    - 65 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.
- 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 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 his Majesties Right and the Convenience thereof, 1628, and Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, 1819, vol. iv, pp. 201-10. For the punishment of speculation 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, 1015, pp. 246-50. For the courtel of

324 NOTES

the textile industry and the reaction against it, H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 1920, chaps. iv, vii; Kate E. Barford, The West of England Cloth Industry: A seventeenth century Experiment in State Control, in the Wiltshire Archaelogical and Natural History Magazine, Dec., 1924, pp. 531-42; R. R. Reid, The King's Council in the North, 1921, pt. iv, chap. ii; V.C.H., Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 263-8. For the intervention 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 für Sozial- und Wirthschaftgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 307-37, 533-64; Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 160-3; V.C.H., Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 268-9; and Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904, pp. 142-7. For the Depopulation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 391. 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 XVIIth Century, 1923, pp. 69-73. For the colonial interests of Puritan members, A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, 1914, and C. E. Wade, John Pym, 1912.

et E. Laspeyres, Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederländer und ihrer Litteratur zur Zeit der Republik, 1863, pp. 256-70. An idea of the points at issue can be gathered from the exhaustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasius, De Modo

Usurarum, 1639.

18 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, vol. i, p. 99.

69 For the change of sentiment in America see Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, 1915, pp. 116-21.

76 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, A 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 unmerciful nesse... 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 covetousnesse, at last your covetousnesse doth 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?"

- 78 S. Richardson, op. cit. (see note 60 above), pp. 7-8, 10.
- 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. 
    - 75 Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress.
- 76 Richard Steele, The Tradesman's Calling, being a Discourse concerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in general, 1684, pp. 1, 4. 
    - 27 Ibid., pp. 21-2.
    - 78 Ibid., p. 35.
    - 78 Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed., vol. i, p. 336b.
    - 60 Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit., p. 96 n.).
    - 61 Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p. 168 n.).
    - 82 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, p. 111a.
    - 63 Steele, op. cit., p. 20.
    - 84 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 378b, 108b; vol. iv, p. 253a
- no Navigation Spiritualized: or a New Compass for Seamen, consisting of xxxii Points:

of Pleasant Observations
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 horrible and detestable sins of Drunkenness, Swearing, Uncleanness, Forgetfulness of Mercies, Violation of Promises, and Atherstical 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.

326 NOTES

- 66 Steele, op. cit. (see note 76 above).
- Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress.
- 88 David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth's, 1692
- 83 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 1690, ed. by Professor John H. Hollander (A Reprint of Economic Tracts, Series ii, no. 1).
- 90 The words of a member of the Long Parliament, quoted by C. H. Firth, Oliver Gromwell, 1992, p. 313.
- The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1827 ed., vol. ii, p. 235: "The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this argument \[i.e. the advantages of war\], 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 hated the whole business, it was almost a classical example of a commercial war, carefully stagemanaged in all its details, from the directorship which the Royal African Company gave to the Duke of York down to the inevitable "incident" with which hostilities began.

    - **№ 1bid.,** vol. iii, pp. 7–9.
    - 33 Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, 1691, Preface.
    - 24 Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface.
- 25 Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia (quoted P. E. Dove, Account of Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p. 82 n.).
- 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.
- 67 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love, and John Jones.
- 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.
- 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.
- 101 S. Bannister, William Paterson, the Merchant-Statesman, and Founder of the Bank of England: his Life and Trials, 1858.

    - 109 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 avii (Of Honesty in Dealing).
- 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.
    - 108 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 1905, pp. 400-1
- 107 The Humble Petition of thousands of well affected persons inhabiting the city of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets, and places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Levellers' Petitions, c. 15, 3 Linc.). See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898.
- 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).
- 108 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 Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 53-5.

    - 111 Camden Soc., The Clarke Papers, vol. i, pp. 299 seqq., lxvii 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.

    - 112 Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p. 9.
    - 114 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 2" 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 mediæval attitude towards the poor, see B. L. Manning, The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclef, 1919, chap. x.
- no A Lyke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allingham, The Ballad Book, 1907, no. \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
- 117 Latimer, The fifth Sermon on the Lord's Prayer (in Sermons, Everyman ed., p. 336). Cf. Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked

328 NOTES

Mammon (in Doctrinal Treatises of William Tyndals, 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).
- 119 J. 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 A True Report of the Great Cost and Charges of the foure Hospitals in the City of London, 1644 (quoted, ibid., p. 66).
- 121 See, e.g., Hist. MSS. Comm., Reports on MSS. in various collections, 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, 1682.
- 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).

    - Commons' Journals, March 19, 1648/9, vol. vi, p. 167
    - 125 Ibid., 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.
- vol. ii, pp. 104-10. An ordinance creating a corporation had been passed Dec. 17, 1647 (ibid., vol. i, pp. 1042-5).

    - 120 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 1098-9.
- 150 Stockwood, at Paul's Cross, 1578 (quoted by Haweis, Shetches of the Reformation, p. 277).

    - 131 Steele, op. cit. (note 76 above), p. 22.
- 188 R. Younge, The Poores' Advocate, 1654 (Thomason Tracts, E. 1452 (3)), p. 6.
- 188 For these and other passages from Restoration economists to the same effect, see a striking article by Dr. T. E. Gregory on The Economics of Employment in England (1660-1713) in Economica, no. i, Jan. 1921, pp. 37 seqq., and E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Labourer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. v, vi.
- Bourgeoisie, wo sie zur Herrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patriarchalischen, idyllischen Verhältnisse zerstört. Sie hat die buntscheckigen Feudalbande, die den Menschen an seinen natürlichen Vorgesetzten knüpf en, unbarmherzig zerrissen, und kein anderes Baud zwischen Mensch und Mensch übrig gelassen, als das nackte Interesse, als die gefühllose bare Zahlung."
- 185 Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, 1704, pp. 25-7.
- Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 45.
- 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., p. 153).

    - 188 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,
- 149 H. Hunter, Problems of Poverty: Selections from the . . . writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., 1912, p. 202.

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 administration, instead of realising, as was the fact, that lax administration had arisen as an attempt to meet the increase of distress. Their discussion 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 weavers) dealing with the industrial aspects of the problem.

pp. 560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the Quakers in Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing), in The Complete English Tradesman. Mr. Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, p. 219) remarks, "The eighteenth century Friend no less than the mediæval Catholic held firmly to some doctrine of Just Price," and quotes examples from the conduct of Quaker iron-masters.

## INDEX

| Abbot's Ripton Tip ato | Bargaining equity in 152 150 181 |
|---|---|
| Asten Tour Sa | 782 798 007-2 005 044-F 002 |
| Acton, Lord, 65 | Con also Delices and Delices. |
| Acts of Parliament: | See also Prices and Profits |
| 15 Ed. III, st. 1, c. 5 (1341), 51 | Baro, 215, 321 |
| 37 Hen, VIII, c. 9 (1545), 159 | Basel, 120; Council of, 103 |
| 5 and 6 Ed. VI. c. 20 (1552), 150. | Baxter, Richard, 8, 18, 200, 203, |
| T80 | 207 220-6 226 242 (quoted) |
| File - 0 /+ + +90 +91 | ers (quoted) are and and |
| 13 E12, C. a (1571), 159, 160, 161, | 245 (quoteu), 253, 200, 209, 291 |
| 187 | Decon, 62, 141, 144 |
| 39 Eliz., c. 2 (1597), 178 | Beggars. See Almsgiving and |
| Aegidius Lessinus, 295-6, 296 | Vagrancy |
| Aeneas Silvius, 100 | Bellarmin, 80, 305 |
| Agriculture, 136-50, 231. See also | Bellers, 18, 272 |
| Englanues I and Declare forms | Belloc H og |
| Enclosures, Luna, Passare jurin- | Bennet De see |
| ing, reasonis | Denuet, DI., 153 |
| Alcock, Thomas, 270 | Benvenuto da Imola, quoted, 10-11 |
| Alien immigrants, 205, 318 | Berkeley, Bishop, vii, 270, 284 |
| Almsgiving condemnation of, III, | Berne, 120 |
| 114, 266, 308; a duty, 261-2 | Berthold, Brother, 225 |
| America, silver of, 68, 74, 135; | Beza, 119, 121, 122, 123, 215 |
| Calvinism in 127-22 227 228 | Birmingham, 204 |
| \* ****************\*\*\*\***************** | Bishops articles of resitation of |
| 324 | The same and the first and |
| Ames, 210-7, 322 | 101, 191; were normany justices, |
| Amsterdam, 104 | 105; Bill re powers of, 174-5, |
| Anglicans. See Clergy and Church | 315; abolition of, 188, 214. See |
| of England | also Commissary, Court of High |
| Annuities, 42, 217 | Commission and Courts, ecclesias- |
| Antwerp, 72, 73-6, 70, 80, 86, 87, | tical |
| 104 168 178 205 fall of 77. | Blaxton, John, cited, 156 |
| 104, 100, 170, J-J, 100, J-J, 100, J-J, | Bodin &t |
| Amount excess in TVE 705 | Pahaim Hang Ny |
| Apparei, excess in, 115, 127 | Dollar Land |
| Adumas, See St. I nomas | Dolling Droke, 207 |
| Archdeacons, visitations of, 48, 52, | Bologna, University of, 81 |
| 162, 297–8, 312, 313 | Boniface VIII, 18; bull of, 20-1 |
| Aristotle, 43 | Bossuet, 83 |
| Asceticism, 16, 17, 19 | Boston, 128-31 |
| Ashley, Sir William, xi | Bourges, so |
| Ashton T S 252 320 | Braddon Lawrence 218 |
| Asles T.T | Bradford so. |
| ASKC, 141 | Communa Com (control) |
| Augsburg, 79, 85 | -, Governor, 127 (quoted), 128 |
|  | Brentano, x1, 319, 320 |
| Bacon, 148, 151, 185 | Bristol, 202 |
| Baillie, 214 | Brittany, Count of, 300 |
| Bancroft, Archbishop, 186, 213, 214 | Bruges, 73 |
| Bank at Geneva. 20 | Bucer, 18, 62, 81, 82, 105, 116, 142 |
| — of England 252 | OTE |
| Touling denotit had not not vet | Bullinger to Dr. er. ebe |
| Danking, deposit, occumings of, 170 | Duninger, 10, 01, 114, 101 |
| Barbon, Dr. Nicholas, 247 | Бипуан, 8, 18, 199, 225, 269, 309 |
| Rarelyones Praise-God 242 | Burtord 181\_2 |

Fairs, 45
Fenton, Roger, quoted, 106, 157
Ferrar, Nicholas, 263
Feudalism, 22, 56-9, 232; decline of, 57, 147, 149, 174. See also Peasants
Figgis, Dr., 5

Quakers, 18, 272–3, 329 Quarter Sessions. See *Justices of* the Peace Quicksilver, 79

Rabelais, 77 Rationalism, mediæval, 18

124, 159, 165-6, 170-1, 172, 175, 278-9; Locke's conception of, 6, 179, 189; unitary, sovereignty of, 27, 293; Distributive, 92, 151.
Steele, Richard, 240-1, 243 (quoted), 244-6, 251, 266
Step-lords, 146
Stockwood, Rev. J., quoted, 266
Strafford, Earl of, 211, 213, 237
Strassburg, 75
Stubbes, Philip, 216
Summø, 16, 19, 30, 220. See also Schoolmen
Swift, Dean, 207
Switzerland, Reformation in, 102-25, 141, 266; bourgeoisie in, 111, 122, 208
Synods, French, 125-6

Temple, Sir William, 206
Tenures, military, abolition of, 258
Textile workers, of Flanders and
Italy, 25-6, 292; of Paris, 293.
For England see under Cloth\\nindustry
Tobacco, 127
Tolerance, religious, 113, 118, 175,
219; commercially advantageous,
10, 197, 205-7
Tories, distrust of commercial
classes by, 207
Townsend, Rev. J., 316
Trade, flourishing of, under religious
tolerance, 10, 197, 205-7; free\\nexercise of, 179; foreign, increase\\nin, 136, 176; balance of, 247,
250
Trade unionism, 26, 293
Trades, mediæval attitude to, 17,
23, 32, 33-6, 37, 104; relations
between craftsmen and, 25-6, 136,
137, 173-4, 237, 324; sanctification of occupation of, 34, 104-5,
108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 199, 201,
230-1, 234, 239-53, 254, 273;
frauds and extortion of, 50, 105,
119, 125, 126, 142, 153, 155-6,
299-300, 309; Luther's attitude
to, 92; growth of power of,
136, 137; purchase of land by,
140, 208; break-down of State
control of, 179, 237. See also
Bargaining, Prices, Profits
Travers, W., 213
Troeltsch, Prof., xi, 91, 212, 319

Tucker, Dean, 10, 192, 197 (quoted), 317 Tudors, social policy of, 164–70, 235 262–3, 266, 271 Turgot, 293 Turks, 68, 69 Tyndale, 310–1, 327–8 Tyrol, 68, 75, 70

Vagrancy, measures for suppression of, 92, 168, 217, 262, 264, 265-6, 270, 271; increase of, 264, 265. See also Almsgiving and Poor Value, theories of, 36, 40 Venezuela, 78 Venice, 68, 70, 73, 75, 87, 120, 319 Vienne, Council of, 46 Villeinage. See Serfaoms

Virtues, economic, applauding of, by Calvinists and Puritans, 105, 110, 111, 114-5, 228-54, 272, 273 Vitry, Jacques de, 303 Vives, 114, 262 Voltaire, 208

Wadsworth, A. P., 327
Wage-earners, small number of, 26, 38, 137, 151, 207, 269, 292-3; organizations of, 26; attitude of economists to, 268-70. See also Wages
Wages, withholding of, 50, 223, 299; regulation of, 128, 173, 174, 235, 236, 293-4, 324; payment of, in truck, 153, 174, 236, economists 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
Warwick, Earl of, 145
Warwick, Earl of, 145
Warwick, Earl of, 138, 327
Washerne, 140
Wealth. See Production and Riches
Weber, Max, xi, 212, 319-21, 322, 325
Welsers, the, 78-9, 88, 305
Wentworth, 174
Wesley, 191
Westminster Assembly, 9, 214, 218

Whole Duty of Man, The, 191
Whole Duty of Man, The, 191
Widows and orphans, neary for benefit of, 182, 233
Wilcox, Thomas, 162
Williams, Roger, 128
Wilson, Thomas, 156, 157-8, 160, 179, 235, 323
Wiltshire, 218, 237
Winstanley, Gerrard, 112 (quoted), 256
Witt, John de, 206
Wolsey, 138, 147
Wood, H. G., x1, 321
Woodrow, Rev Robert, quoted, 239
Woollen industry. See Cloth industry
Worcester, Priory of, 42
Workhouses, 265, 270, 271, 329
Works, good, 98, 109, 111, 239, 242, 266, 324
Wychf, 17, 24-5 (quoted), 27, 38 (quoted), 40, 293

Yarranton, A., 253 Yeomanry, 57, 202 York, Province of, 161, 16 Yorke, Sir John, 140 Yorkshire, 141, 162, 204 Young, Arthur, 270 Younge, R., quoted, 267

Zūrich, 103, 114, 116 Zwingli, 82, 103, 114–5, 116–7

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