Mediaeval Socialism Part 3

Yet, on the other hand, and by the development of identically the same principles, the individual gains. His tenure of land becomes far less a matter of contract. He himself escapes from his feudal chief, and his inferior tenants slip also from his control. He is no longer one in a pyramid of grouped social organisation, but stands now as an individual answerable only to the head of the State. He has duties still; but no longer a personal relations.h.i.+p to his lord. It is the King and that vague abstraction called the State which now claim him as a subject; and by so doing are obliged to recognise his individual status. This new and startling prominence of the individual disturbed the whole concept of owners.h.i.+p. Originally under the influence of that pure feudalism which nowhere existed in its absolute form, the two great forces in the life of each member of the social group were his own and that of his immediate lord. These fitted together into an almost indissoluble union; and therefore absolute owners.h.i.+p of the soil was theoretically impossible. Now, however, the individual was emanc.i.p.ated from his lord.

He was still, it is true, subject to the King, whose power might be a great deal more oppressive than the barons' had been. But the King was far off, whereas the baron had been near, and nearly always in full evidence. Hence the result was the emphasis of the individual's absolute dominion. Not, indeed, as though it excluded the dominion of the King, but precisely because the royal predominance could only be recognised by the effective shutting out of the interference of the lord. To exclude the "middle-man," the King was driven to recognise the absolute dominion of the individual over his own possessions.

This is brought out in English law by Bracton and his school. Favourers as they were of the royal prerogative, they were driven to take up the paradoxical ground that the King was not the sole owner of property. To defend the King they were obliged to dispossess him. To put his control on its most effective basis, they had no other alternative left them than to admit the fullest rights of the individual against the King. For only if the individual had complete owners.h.i.+p, could there be no interference on the part of the lord; only if the possessions of the tenants were his own, were they prevented from falling under the baronial jurisdiction. Therefore by apparently denying the royal prerogative the civil lawyers were in effect, as they perfectly well recognised, really extending it and enabling it to find its way into cases and courts where it could not else well have entered.

Seemingly, therefore, all idea of socialism or nationalisation of land (at that date the great means of production) was now excluded. The individualistic theory of property had suddenly appeared; and simultaneously the old group forms, which implied collectivism in some shape or other, ceased any longer to be recognised as systems of tenure.

Yet, at the same time, by a paradox as evident as that by which the civilians exalted the royal prerogative apparently at its own expense, or as that by which Wycliff's communism is found to be in reality a justification of the policy of leaving things as they are, while St.

Thomas's theory of property is discovered as far less oppressive and more adaptable to progressive developments of national wealth, it is noticed that, from the point of view of the socialist, monarchical absolutism is the most favourable form of a State's const.i.tution. For wherever a very strictly centralised system of government exists, it is clear that a machinery, which needs little to turn it to the advantage of the absolute rule of a rebellious minority, has been already constructed. In a country where, on the other hand, local government has been enormously encouraged, it is obviously far more difficult for socialism to force an entrance into each little group. There are all sorts of local conditions to be squared, vagaries of law and administration to be reduced to order, connecting bridges to be thrown from one portion of the nation to the next, so as to form of it one single whole. Were the socialists of to-day to seize on the machinery of government in Germany and Russia, they could attain their purposes easily and smoothly, and little difference in const.i.tutional forms would be observed in these countries, for already the theory of State owners.h.i.+p and State interference actually obtains. They would only have to subst.i.tute a _bloc_ for a man. But in France and England, where the centralisation is far less complete, the success of the socialistic party and its achievement of supreme power would mean an almost entire subversal of all established methods of administration, for all the threads would have first to be gathered into a single hand.

Consequently feudalism, which turned the landowners into petty sovereigns and insisted on local courts, &c., though seemingly communistic or socialistic, was really, from its intense local colouring, far less easy of capture by those who favoured State interference. It was individualistic, based on private rights. But the new royal prerogative led the way to the consideration of the evident ease by which, once the machine was possessed, the rest of the system could without difficulty be brought into harmony with the new theories.

To make use of comparison, it was Cardinal Wolsey's a.s.sumption of full legatine power by permission of the Pope which first suggested to Henry VIII that he could dispense with His Holiness altogether. He saw that the Cardinal wielded both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. He coveted his minister's position, and eventually achieved it by ousting both Clement and Wolsey, who had unwittingly shown him in which way more power lay.

So, similarly, the royal despotism itself, by centralising all power into the hands of a single prince, accustomed men to the idea of the absolute supremacy of national law, drove out of the field every defender of the rights of minorities, and thus paved the way for the subst.i.tution of the people for itself. The French Revolution was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the theories of Louis XIV. It needed only the fire of Rousseau to burn out the advent.i.tious ornamentation which in the shape of that monarch's personal glorification still prevented the naked structure from being seen in all its clearness.

_L'Etat c'est moi_ can be as aptly the watchword of a despotic oligarchy, or a levelling socialism, as of a kingly tyranny, according as it pa.s.ses from the lips of the one to the few or the many. It is true that the last phase was not completed till long after the Middle Ages had closed, but the tendency towards it is evident in the teachings of the civil lawyers.

Thus, for example, State absolutism is visible in the various suggestions made by men like Pierre du Bois and Wycliff (who, in the expression of their thoughts, are both rather lawyers than schoolmen) to dispossess the clergy of their temporalities. The principles urged, for instance, by these two in justification of this spoliation could be applied equally well to the estates of laymen. For the same principles put into the King's hand the undetermined power of doing what was necessary for the well-being of the State. It is true that Pierre du Bois (_De Recuperatione Terre Sancte_, pp. 39-41, 115-8) a.s.serted that the royal authority was limited to deal in this way with Church lands, and could not touch what belonged to others. But this proviso was obviously inserted so arbitrarily that its logical force could not have had any effect. Political necessity alone prevented it from being used against the n.o.bility and gentry.

Ockham, however, the clever Oxford Franciscan, who formed one of the group of pamphleteers that defended Louis of Bavaria against Pope John XXII, quite clearly enlarged the grounds for Church disendowment so as to include the taking over by the State of all individual property. He was a thinker whose theories were strangely compounded of absolutism and democracy. The Emperor was to be supported because his autocracy came from the people. Hence, when Ockham is arguing about ecclesiastical wealth, and the way in which it could be quite fairly confiscated by the Government, he enters into a discussion about the origin of the imperial dignity. This, he declares, was deliberately handed over by the people to the Emperor. To escape making the Pope the original donor of the imperial t.i.tle, Ockham concedes that privilege to the people. It was they, the people, who had handed over to the Caesars of the Holy Roman Empire all their own rights and powers. Hence Louis was a monarch whose absolutism rested on a popular basis. Then he proceeds in his argument to say that the human positive law by which private property was introduced was made by the people themselves, and that the right or power by which this was done was transferred by them to the Emperor along with the imperial dignity.

Louis, therefore, had the same right to undo what they had done, for in him all their powers now resided. This, of course, formed an excellent principle from which to argue to his right to dispossess the Church of its superfluous wealth--indeed of all its wealth. But it could prove equally effectual against the holding by the individual of any property whatever. It made, in effect, private owners.h.i.+p rest on the will of the prince.

Curiously, too, in quite another direction the same form of argument had been already worked out by Nicole Oresme, a famous Bishop of Lisieux, who first translated into French the _Politics_ of Aristotle, and who helped so largely in the reforms of Charles V of France. His great work was in connection with the revision of the coinage, on which he composed a celebrated treatise. He held that the change of the value of money, either by its deliberate depreciation, or by its being brought back to its earlier standard of face value, carried such widespread consequences that the people should most certainly be consulted on it. It was not fair to them to take such a step without their willing co-operation. Yet he admits fully that, though this is the wiser and juster way of acting, there was no absolute need for so doing, since all possession and all property sprang from the King. And this last conclusion was advocated by his rival, Philip de Meziers, whose advice Charles ultimately followed.

Philip taught that the king was sole judge of whatever was for public use.

But there was a further point in the same question which afforded matter for an interesting discussion among the lawyers. Pope Innocent IV, who had first been famous as a canonist, and retained as Pontiff his old love for disputations of this kind, developed a theory of his own on the relation between the right of the individual to possess and the right of the State over that possession. He distinguished carefully between two entirely different concepts, namely, the right and its exercise. The first he admitted to be sacred and inviolable, because it sprang from the very nature of man. It could not be disturbed or in any way molested; the State had therefore no power to interfere with the right.

But he suggested that the exercise of that right, or, to use his actual phrase, the "actions in accord with that right," rested on the basis of civil, positive law, and could therefore be controlled by legal decisions. The right was sacred, its exercise was purely conventional.

Thus every man has a right to property; he can never by any possible means divest himself of it, for it is rooted in the depths of his being, and supported by his human nature. But this right appears especially to be something internal, intrinsic. For him to exercise it--that is to say, to hold this land or that, or indeed any land at all--the State's intervention must be secured. At least the State can control his action in buying, selling, or otherwise obtaining it. His right cannot be denied, but for reasons of social importance its exercise well may be.

Nor did this then appear as a merely unmeaning distinction; he would not admit that a right which could not be exercised was hardly worth consideration. And, in point of fact, the Pope's private theory found very many supporters.

There were others, however, who judged it altogether too fantastical.

The most interesting of his opponents was a certain Antonio Roselli, a very judiciously-minded civil lawyer, who goes very thoroughly into the point at issue. He gives Innocent's views, and quotes what authority he can find for them in the Digest and Decretals. But for himself he would prefer to admit that the right to private property is not at all sacred or natural in the sense of being inviolable. He willingly concedes to the State the right to judge all claims of possession. This is the more startling since ordinarily his views are extremely moderate, and throughout the controversy between Pope and Emperor he succeeded in steering a very careful, delicate course. To him, however, all rights to property were purely civil and arguable only on principles of positive law. There was no need, therefore, to discriminate between the right and its exercise, for both equally could be controlled by the State. There are evidences to show that he admitted the right of each man to the support of his own life, and, therefore, to private property in the form of actual food, &c., necessary for the immediate moment; but he distinctly a.s.serts as his own personal idea that "the prince could take away my right to a thing, and any exercise of that right," adding only that for this there must be some cause. The prince cannot arbitrarily confiscate property; he must have some reasonable motive of sufficient gravity to outweigh the social inconveniences which confiscation would necessarily produce. Not every cause is a sufficient one, but those only which concern "public liberty or utility." Hence he decides that the Pope cannot alienate Church lands without some justifying reason, nor hand them over to the prince unless there happens to be an urgent need, springing from national circ.u.mstances. It does not follow, however, that he wishes to make over to the State absolute right to individual property under normal conditions. The individual has the sole dominion over his own possessions; that dominion reverts to the State only in some extreme instance. His treatise, therefore (Goldast, _De Monarchia_, 1611-1614, Hanover, p. 462, &c.), may be looked upon as summing up the controversy as it then stood. The legal distinction suggested by Innocent IV had been given up by the lawyers as insufficient. The theories of Du Bois, Wycliff, Ockham, and the others had ceased to have much significance, because they gave the royal power far too absolute a jurisdiction over the possessions of its subjects. The feudal contractual system, which these suggested reforms had intended to drive out, had failed for entirely different reasons, and could evidently be brought back only at the price of a complete and probably unsuccessful disturbance of the social and economic organisation. The centralisation which had risen on the ruins of the older local sovereignties and immunities, had brought with it an emphasised recognition of the public rights and duties of all subjects, and had at the same time confirmed the individual in the owners.h.i.+p of his little property, and given him at the last not a conditional, but an absolute possession. To safeguard this, and to prevent it from becoming a block in public life, a factor of discontent, the lawyers were engaged in framing an additional clause which should give to the State an ultimate jurisdiction, and would enable it to overrule any objections on the part of the individual to a national policy or law. The suggested distinction that the word "right"

should be emptied of its deeper meaning, by refusing it the further significance of "exercise," was too subtle and too legal to obtain much public support. So that the lawyers were driven to admit that for a just cause the very right itself could be set aside, and every private possession (when public utility and liberty demanded it) confiscated or transferred to another.

Even the right to compensation for such confiscation was with equal cleverness explained away. For it was held that, when an individual had lost his property through State action, and without his having done anything to deserve it as a punishment, compensation could be claimed.

But whenever a whole people or nation was dispossessed by the State, there was no such right at all to any indemnity.

Thus was the wholesale adoption of land-nationalism to be justified.

Thus could the State capture all private possessions without any fear of being guilty of robbery. It was considered that it was only the oppression of the individual and cla.s.s spoliation which really contravened the moral law.

The legal theories, therefore, which supplanted the old feudal concepts were based on the extension of royal authority, and the establishment of public rights. Individualistic possession was emphasised; yet the simultaneous setting up of the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth century really made their ultimate capture by the Socialist party more possible.

CHAPTER VI

THE SOCIAL REFORMERS

It may seem strange to cla.s.s social reforms under the wider heading of Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely, that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be spoken of as socialistic.

Of course there have been reformers in every age who came to bring to society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning.

The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on natural science. For them a university was a place where each student learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois.

This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England (_De Recuperatione Sancte Terre_), has several most interesting and refres.h.i.+ng chapters on the education of women. His bias is always against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward in his scheme of education. He insists on having only lay-mistresses, and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry, and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation.

Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such a fas.h.i.+on as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The spirit of freedom which is felt working through all his papers makes him the apostle of what would now be called the "new woman."

After him, there comes a lull in reforming ideas. But half a century later occurs a very curious and sudden outburst of rebellion all over Europe. From about the middle of the fourteenth century to the early fifteenth there seemed to be an epidemic of severe social unrest. There were at Paris, which has always been the nursery of revolutions, four separate risings. Etienne Marcel, who, however, was rather a tribune of the people than a revolutionary leader, came into prominence in 1355; he was followed by the Jacquerie in 1358, by the Maillotins in 1382, and the Cabochiens in 1411. In Rome we know of Rienzi in 1347, who eventually became hardly more than a popular demagogue; in Florence there was the outbreak of Ciompi in 1378; in Bohemia the excesses of Taborites in 1409; in England the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

It is perfectly obvious that a series of social disturbances of this nature could not leave the economic literature of the succeeding period quite as placid as it had found it. We notice now that, putting away questions of mere academic character, the thinkers and writers concern themselves with the actual state of the people. Parliament has its answer to the problem in a long list of statutes intended to muzzle the turbulent and restless revolutionaries. But this could not satisfy men who set their thought to study the lives and circ.u.mstances of their fellow-citizens. Consequently, as a result, we can notice the rise of a school of writers who interest themselves above all things in the economic conditions of labour. Of this school the easiest exponent to describe is Antonino of Florence, Archbishop and canonised saint. His four great volumes on the exposition of the moral law are fascinating as much for the quotations of other moralists which they contain, as for the actual theories of the saint himself. For the Archbishop cites on almost every page contemporary after contemporary who had had his say on the same problems. He openly a.s.serts that he has read widely, taken notes of all his reading, has deliberately formed his opinions on the judgments, reasoned or merely expressed, of his authors. To read his books, then, is to realise that Antonino is summing up the whole experience of his generation. Indeed he was particularly well placed for one who wished for information. Florence, then at the height of its renown under the brilliant despotism of Cosimo dei Medici, was the scene where the great events of the life of Antonino took place. There he had seen within the city walls, three Popes, a Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperors of East and West, and the most eminent men of both civilisations. He had taken part in a General Council of the Church, and knew thinkers as widely divergent as Giovanni Dominici and aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was, therefore, more likely than most to have heard whatever theories were proposed by the various great political statesmen of Europe, whether they were churchmen or lawyers. Consequently, his schemes, as we might well expect, are startlingly advanced.

He begins by attacking the growing spirit of usury, and the resulting idleness. Men were finding out that under the new conditions which governed the money market it was possible to make a fortune without having done a day's work. The sons of the aristocracy of Florence, which was built up of merchant princes, and which had ama.s.sed its own fortunes in honest trading, had been tempted by the bankers to put their wealth out to interest, and to live on the surplus profit. The ease and security with which this could be done made it a popular investment, especially among the young men of fas.h.i.+on who came in, simply by inheritance, for large sums of money. As a consequence Florence found itself, for the first time in its history, beginning to possess a wealthy cla.s.s of men who had never themselves engaged in any profession.

The old reverence, therefore, which had always existed in the city for the man who laboured in his art or guild, began to slacken. No longer was there the same eagerness noticeable which used to boast openly that its rewards consisted in the consciousness of work well done. Instead, idleness became the badge of gentility, and trade a slur upon a man's reputation. No city can long survive so listless and languid an ideal.

The Archbishop, therefore, denounced this new method of usurious traffic, and hinted further that to it was due the fierce rebellion which had for a while plunged Florence into the horrors of the Jacquerie. Wealth, he taught, should not of itself breed wealth, but only through the toil of honest labour, and that labour should be the labour of oneself, not of another.

Then he proceeded to argue that as upon the husband lies the labour of trade, the greater portion of his day must necessarily be pa.s.sed outside the circle of family life. The breadwinner can attend neither to works of piety nor of charity in the way he should, and, consequently, to his wife it must be left to supply for his defects. She must take his place in the church, and amid the slums of the poor; she must for him and his lift her hands in prayer, and dispense his superfluous wealth in succouring the poverty-stricken. For the Archbishop will have none of the soothing doctrine which the millionaire preaches to the mob. He a.s.serts that poverty is not a good thing; in itself it is an evil, and can be considered to lead only accidentally to any good. When, therefore, it a.s.sumes the form of dest.i.tution, every effort must be made to banish it from the State. For if it were to become at all prevalent in a nation, then would that people be on the pathway to its ruin. The politicians should therefore make it the end of their endeavours--though this, it may be, is an ideal which can never be fully brought to realisation--to leave each man in a state of sufficiency. No one, for whatever reason, should be allowed to become dest.i.tute. Even should it be by his own fault that he were brought low, he must be provided for by the State, which has, however, in these circ.u.mstances, at the same time, the duty of punis.h.i.+ng him.

But he remarks that the cause of poverty is more often the unjust rate of wages. The compet.i.tion even of those days made men beat each other down in clamouring for work to be given them, and afforded to the employers an opportunity of taking workers who willingly accepted an inadequate scale of remuneration. This state of things he considered to be unjustifiable and unjust. No one had any right to make profit out of the wretchedness of the poor. Each human being had the duty of supporting his own life, and this he could not do except by the hiring of his own labour to another. That other, therefore, by the immutable laws of justice, when he used the powers of his fellow-man, was obliged in conscience to see that those powers could be fittingly sustained by the commodity which he exchanged for them. That is, the employer was bound to take note that his employees received such return for their labour as should compensate them for his use of it. The payment promised and given should be, in other words, what we would now speak of as a "living wage." But further, above this mere margin, additional rewards should be added according to the skill of the workman, or the dangerous nature of his employment, or the number of his children. The wages also should be paid promptly, without delay.

But it may sometimes happen that the labour which a man can contribute is not of such a kind as will enable him to receive the fair remuneration that should suffice for his bodily comfort. The saint is thinking of boy-labour, and the case of those too enfeebled by age or illness to work adequately, or perhaps at all. What is to be done for them? Let the State look to it, is his reply. The community must, by the law of its own existence, support all its members, and out of its superfluous wealth must provide for its weaker citizens. Those, therefore, who can labour harder than they need, or who already possess more riches than suffice for them, are obliged by the natural law of charity to give to those less favourably circ.u.mstanced than themselves.

St. Antonino does not, therefore, pretend to advocate any system of rigid equality among men. There is bound to be, in his opinion, variety among them, and from this variety comes indeed the harmony of the universe. For some are born to rule, and others, by the feebleness of their understanding or of their will, are fitted only to obey. The workman and servant must faithfully discharge the duties of their trade or service, be quick to receive a command, and reverent in their obedience. And the masters, in their turn, must be forbearing in their language, generous in their remuneration, and temperate in their commands. It is their business to study the powers of each of those whom they employ, and to measure out the work to each one according to the capacity which is discoverable in him. When a faithful labourer has become ill, the employer must himself tend and care for him, and be in no hurry to send him to a hospital.

About the hospitals themselves he has his own ideas, or at least he has picked out the sanest that he can find in the books and conversation of people whom he has come across. He insists strongly that women should, as matrons and nurses, manage those inst.i.tutions which are solely for the benefit of women; and even in those where men also are received, he can see no incompatibility in their being administered by these same capable directors. He much commends the custom of chemists in Florence on Sundays, feast-days, and holidays of opening their dispensaries in turn. So that even should all the other shops be closed, there would always be one place open where medicines and drugs could be obtained in an emergency.

The education of the citizens, too, is another work which the State must consider. It is not something merely optional which is to be left to the judgment of the parent. The Archbishop holds that its proper organisation is the duty of the prince. Education, in his eyes, means that the children must be taught the knowledge of G.o.d, of letters, and of the arts and crafts they are to pursue in after life.

Again, he has thought out the theory of taxation. He admits its necessity. The State is obliged to perform certain duties for the community. It is obliged, for example, to make its roads fit for travelling, and so render them pa.s.sable for the transfer of merchandise.

It is bound to clear away all brigandage, highway robbery, and the like, for were this not done, no merchant would venture out through that State's territory, and its people would accordingly suffer.

Hence, again, he deduces the need for some sort of army, so that the goods of the citizens may be secured against the invader, for without this security there would be no stimulus to trade. Bridges must be built, and fords kept in repair. Since, therefore, the State is obliged to incur expenses in order to attain these objects, the State has the right, and indeed the duty, to order it so that the community shall pay for the benefits which it is to receive. Hence follows taxation.

But he sees at once that this power of demanding forced contributions from wealthy members of society needs safeguarding against abuse. Thus he is careful to insist that taxation can be valid only when it is levied by public authority, else it becomes sheer brigandage. No less is it to be reprobated when ordered indeed by public authority, but not used for public benefit. Thus, should it happen that a prince or other ruler of a State extorted money from his subjects on pretence of keeping the roads in good order, or similar works for the advantage of the community, and yet neglected to put the contributions of his people to this use, he would be defrauding the public, and guilty of treason against his country. So, too, to lay heavier burdens on his subjects than they could bear, or to graduate the scale in such a fas.h.i.+on as to weigh more heavily on one cla.s.s than another, would be, in the ruler, an aggravated form of theft. Taxation must therefore be decreed by public authority, and be arranged according to some reasonable measure, and rest on the motive of benefiting the social organisation.

The citizens therefore who are elected to settle the incidence of taxation must be careful to take account of the income of each man, and so manage that on no one should the burden be too oppressive. He suggests himself the percentage of one pound per hundred. Nor, again, must there be any deliberate attempt to penalise political opponents, or to make use of taxation in order to avenge cla.s.s-oppression. Were this to be done, the citizens so acting would be bound to make rest.i.tution to the persons whom they had thus injured.

Then St. Antonino takes the case of those who make a false declaration of their income. These, too, he convicts of injustice, and requires of them that they also should make rest.i.tution, but to the State. An exception to this, however, he allows. For if it happens to be the custom for each to make a declaration of income which is obviously below the real amount, then simply because all do it and all are known to do it, there is no obligation for the individual to act differently from his neighbours. It is not injustice, for the law evidently recognises the practice. And were he, on the other hand, to announce his full yearly wage of earnings, he would allow himself to be taxed beyond the proper measure of value. But to refuse to pay, or to elude by some subterfuge the just contribution which a man owes of his wealth to the easing of the public burdens, is in the eyes of the Archbishop a crime against the State. It would be an act of injustice, of theft, all the more heinous in that, as he declares with a flash of the energy of Rousseau, the "common good is something almost divine."

We have dwelt rather at length on the schemes of this one economist, and may seem, therefore, to have overlooked the writings of others equally full of interest. But the reason has been because this Florentine moralist does stand so perfectly for a whole school. He has read omnivorously, and has but selected most of his thoughts. He compares himself, indeed, in one pa.s.sage of these volumes, to the laborious ant, "that tiny insect which wanders here and there, and gathers together what it thinks to be of use to its community." He represents a whole school, and represents it at its best, for there is no extreme dogmatism in him, no arguing from grounds that are purely arbitrary, or from _a priori_ principles. It is his knowledge of the people among whom he had laboured so long which fits him to speak of the real sufferings of the poor. But experience requires for its being effectually put to the best advantage, that it should be wielded by one whose judgment is sober and careful. Now, St. Antonino was known in his own day as Antonino the Counsellor; and his justly-balanced decision, his delicately-poised advice, the straightness of his insight, are noticeable in the masterly way in which he sums up all the best that earlier and contemporary writers had devised in the domain of social economics.

There is, just at the close of the period with which this book deals, a rising school of reformers who can be grouped round More's _Utopia_.

Some foreshadowed him, and others continued his speculations. Men like Harrington in his _Oceana_, and Milton in his _Areopagitica_, really belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the simple justice which St. Antonino and his fellows judged to be sufficient to set things back again as they had been in the Golden Age.

The new writers are rather political than social. For them, as for the Greeks, it is the const.i.tution which must be repaired. Whereas the mediaeval socialists thought, as St. Thomas indeed never wearied of repeating, that unrest and discontent would continue under any form of government whatever. The more each city changed its const.i.tution, the more it remained the same. Florence, whether under a republic or a despotism, was equally happy and equally sad. For it was the spirit of government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers, made the State what it happened to be.

In this the modern sociologist of to-day finds himself more akin with the mediaeval thinkers than with the idealists of the parliamentary era in England, or of the Revolution in France. These fixed their hopes on definite organisations of government, and on the exact balance of executive and legislative powers. But for Scotus, and Wycliff, and St.

Antonino, the cause of the evil is far deeper and more personal. Not in any form of the const.i.tution, nor in any division of ruling authority, nor in its union under a firm despot, nor in the divine right of kings, or n.o.bles, or people, was security to be found, or the well-ordering of the nation. But peace and rest from faction could be achieved with certainty only on the conditions of strict justice between man and man, on the observance of G.o.d's commandments.