Towards the Great Peace | Page 3

one of the great glories of the Christian religion that it
gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give freedom to
the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire, and with the
infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery gradually disappeared,

and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real liberty existed as the
product of Christianity and under its protection. Society was
hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the guildsman, the
burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so to the Emperor,
there was a regular succession of graduations, but the lines of
demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the Church,
the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son of a
peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war and
the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble
beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind,
and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were
recognized, accepted and enforced.
This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its
long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to
1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather
than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile class, now reduced
to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a degree
of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized status, the
like of which had never been seen before. It was not a bourgeoisie, for
it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan, craft, art, mechanic;
a great free society, the proudest product of Christian civilization.
With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to
overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The
Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build
up their own expressive form of society, and when this process had
been completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in
the quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the rest
of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased in
proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one the
bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either on
trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto
little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch,
the small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different
sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle
of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically
disappeared.

What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of
western Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and
the monks had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into
bourgeois traders, managers and financeers, but the great majority had
been crushed down and down in the mass of submerged proletariat,
losing liberty, degenerating in character, becoming more and more
servile in status and wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate,
dully ebullient mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life
itself.
I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and its
present catastrophe: the great, predominant, central body of free men
during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie,
and the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat.
They are factors of great significance and potential force.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial
revolution began. Within the space of an hundred years came all the
revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and electricity,
and the invention of the machines that have changed the world. During
the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and economic systems,
so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny, had been
destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had wrecked
the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the guiding
and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear for a new
dispensation.
What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their
derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.
To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be
available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that
unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should
be discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously
greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that
directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.
The conditions of the time made all these possible. The