Towards the Great Peace | Page 5

jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the
natural and actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly
enough as the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII,
Edward VI and Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full
measure. France suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the
end of the Thirty Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely
disappeared, while the class of "gentlemen" had been almost
exterminated. In France, until the fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany
and Great Britain up to the present moment, the recruiting of the formal
aristocracy has gone on steadily, but on a different basis and from a
different class from anything known before. Demonstrated personal
ability to gain and maintain leadership; distinguished service to the
nation in war or statecraft; courage, honour, fealty--these, in general,
had been the ground for admission to the ranks of the aristocracy. In
general, also, advancement to the ranks of the higher nobility was from
the class of "gentlemen," though the Church, the universities, and
chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages, wide opportunity for personal
merit to achieve the highest honours.
Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that
from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force
in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the
upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil
slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men
(peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes") was
increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy, further
weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell burst to
the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of servility,
no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the
gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an
age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the
instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.
As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman
Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was
during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under
mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the
peasant was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved
definite status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very

thin and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land
tenure, the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood
and monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this,
however; absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the
abolition of the guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the
dominance of the Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the
position he had held under the Roman Empire, and from which
Christianity had lifted him. By 1790 he had been for nearly three
centuries under a progressive oppression that had undone nearly all the
beneficent work of the Middle Ages and made the peasant class
practically outlaw, while breaking down its character, degrading its
morals, increasing its ignorance, and building up a sullen rage and an
invincible hatred of all that stood visible as law and order in the
persons of the ruling class.
Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving
aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons
certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were
imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the
finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce
that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force of
modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold
of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities, and
by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the world.
Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in
government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which
lay the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine,
could give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was
such a thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to
the absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which
was fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the
ally of the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as
the misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a splendid
uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed in