[Sidenote: Regulation of monopolies]

Just as in our own memory the trusts have aroused popular hatred and have brought down on their heads many attempts, usually unsuccessful, of governments to deal with them, so at the beginning of the capitalistic era, intense unpopularity was the lot of the new commercial methods and their exponents. Monopolies were fiercely denounced in the contemporary German tracts and every Diet made some effort to deal with them. First of all the merchants had to meet not only the envy and prejudices of the old order, but the positive teachings of the church. The prohibition of usury, and the doctrine that every article had a just or natural price, barred the road of the early entrepreneur. Aquinas believed that no one should be allowed to make more money than he needed and that profits on {530} commerce should be scaled down to such a point that they would give only a reasonable return. This idea was shared by Catholic and Protestant alike in the first years of the Reformation; it can be found in Geiler of Kaiserberg and in Luther. In the Reformer's influential tract, To the German Nobility, [Sidenote: 1520] usury and "Fuggerei" are denounced as the greatest misfortunes of Germany. Ulrich von Hutten said that of the four classes of robbers, free-booting knights, lawyers, priests and merchants, the merchants were the worst.

The imperial Diets reflected popular opinion faithfully enough to try their best to bridle the great companies. The Diet of Treves-Cologne [Sidenote: 1512] asked that monopolies and artificial enhancement of the prices of spice, copper and woolen cloth be prohibited. To effect this acts were passed intended to insure competition. [Sidenote: 1523] This law against monopolies, however, was not vigorously enforced until the Imperial Treasurer cited before his tribunal many merchants of Augsburg accused of violating it. The panic-stricken offenders feverishly hastened to make interest with the princes and city magistrates. But their main support was the emperor, who intervened energetically in their favor. From this time the bankers and great merchants labored hard at each Diet to place the control of monopolies in the hands of the monarch. In return for his constant support he was made a large sharer in the profits of the great houses.

In the struggle with the Diets, at last the capitalists were thoroughly successful. The Imperial Council of Regency passed an epoch-making ordinance, [Sidenote: 1525] kept secret for fear of the people, expressly allowing merchants to sell at the highest prices they could get and recognizing certain monopolies said to be in the national interest as against other countries, and justified for the wages they provided for labor. About this {531} time, for some reason, the agitation gradually died down. It is probable that the religious controversy took the public's mind off economic questions and the Peasant's War, like all unsuccessful but dangerous risings of the poor, was followed by a strong reaction in favor of the conservative rich. Moreover, it is evident that the currents of the time were too strong to be resisted by the feeble methods proposed by the reformers. When we remember that the chief practical measure recommended by Luther was the total prohibition of trading in spices and other foreign wares that took money out of the country, it is easy to see that the regulation of a complex industry was beyond the scope of his ability. And little, if any, enlightenment came from other quarters.

[Sidenote: The Netherlands]

While the towns of southern Germany were becoming the world's banking and industrial centers, the cities of the Netherlands became its chief staple ports. For generations Antwerp had had two fairs a year, but in 1484 it started a perpetual market, open to all merchants, even to foreigners, the whole year round, and in addition to this it increased its fairs to four. Later a new Merchants' Exchange or Bourse was built [Sidenote: 1531] in which almost all the transactions now seen on our stock or produce exchanges took place. There was wild speculation, partly on borrowed money, especially in pepper, the price of which furnished a sort of barometer of bourse feeling. Bets on prices and on events were made, and from this practice various forms of insurance took their rise.

[Sidenote: Antwerp]

The discovery of the new world brought an era of prosperity to Antwerp that doubtless put her at the head of all commercial cities until the Spanish sword cut her down. In 1560 there were commonly 2500 ships anchored in her harbor, as against 500 at Amsterdam, her chief rival and eventual heir. Of these not {532} uncommonly as many as 500 sailed in one day, and, it is said, 12,000 carriages came in daily, 2000 with passengers and 10,000 with wares. Even if these statements are considerable exaggerations, a reliable account of the exports in the single year 1560 shows the real greatness of the town. The total imports in that year amounted to 31,870,000 gulden ($17,848,000), divided as follows: Italian silks, satins and ornaments 6,000,000 gulden; German dimities 1,200,000; German wines 3,000,000; Northern wheat 3,360,000; French wine 2,000,000; French dyes 600,000; French salt 360,000; Spanish wool 1,250,000; Spanish wine 1,600,000; Portuguese spices 2,000,000; English wool 500,000; English cloth 10,000,000. The last named article indicates the decay of Flemish weaving due to English competition. For a time there had been war to the knife with English merchants, following the great commercial treaty popularly called the Malus Intercursus. [Sidenote: 1506] According to the theory then held that one nation's loss was another's gain, [Sidenote: Commercial policy] this treaty was considered a masterpiece of policy in England and the foundation of her commercial greatness. It and its predecessor, the Magnus Intercursus, [Sidenote: 1496] marked the new policy, characteristic of modern times, that made commercial advantages a chief object of diplomacy and of legislation. Protective tariffs were enacted, the export of gold and silver prohibited, and sumptuary laws passed to encourage domestic industries. The policy as to export varied throughout the century and according to the article. The value of ships was highly appreciated. Sir Walter Raleigh opined that command of the sea meant command of the world's riches and ultimately of the world itself. Sir Humphrey Gilbert drew up a report advocating the acquisition of colonies as means of providing markets for home products. So little were the rights of the natives {533} considered that Sir Humphrey stated that the savages would be amply rewarded for all that could be taken from them by the inestimable gift of Christianity.

[Sidenote: Buccaneering]

As little regard was shown for the property of Catholics as for that of heathens. Merry England drew her dividends from slave-trading and from buccaneering as well as from honest exchange of goods. There is something fascinating about the career of a man like Sir John Hawking whose character was as infamous as his daring was serviceable. He early learned that "negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and that they might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea," and so, financed by the British aristocracy and blessed by Protestant patriots, he chartered the Jesus of Luebeck and went burning, stealing and body-snatching in West African villages, crowded his hold full of blacks and sold those of them who survived at $800 a head in the Indies. Quite fittingly he received as a crest "a demi-Moor, proper, in chains." He then went preying on the Spanish galleons, and at one time swindled Philip out of $200,000 by pretending to be a traitor and a renegade; thus he rose from slaver to pirate and from pirate to admiral.

[Sidenote: English commerce]

So pious, patriotic and profitable a business as buccaneering absorbed a greater portion of England's energies than did ordinary maritime commerce. A list of all ships engaged in foreign trade in 1572 shows that they amounted to an aggregate of only 51,000 tons burden, less than that of a single steamer of the largest size today. The largest ship that could reach London was of 240 tons, but some twice as large anchored at other harbors. Throughout the century trade multiplied, that of London, which profited the most, ten-fold. If the customs' dues furnish an accurate barometer for the volume of trade, while London was increasing the other ports were falling behind not only {534} relatively but positively. In the years 1506-9 London yielded to the treasury $60,000 and other ports $75,000; in 1581-2 London paid $175,000 and other ports only $25,000.

As she grew in size and wealth London, like Antwerp, felt the need of permanent fairs. From the continental city Sir Thomas Gresham, the English financial agent in the Netherlands, brought architect and materials [Sidenote: 1568] and erected the Royal Exchange on the north side of Cornhill in London, where the same institution stands today. Built by Gresham at his own expense, it was lined by a hundred small shops rented by him. As the new was rung in, the old passed away. The ancient restrictions on the fluidity of capital were almost broken down [Sidenote: 1542 and 1571] by the end of Elizabeth's reign. The statutes of bankruptcy, giving new and strong securities to creditors, marked the advent to power of the commercial class. Capitalism took form in the chartering of large companies. The first of these, "the mistery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown," [Sidenote: 1553] commonly called the Russia Company, was a joint-stock corporation with 240 members, each with a share valued at $125. It traded principally with Russia, but, before the century was out, was followed by the Levant Company, the East India Company, and others, for the exploitation of other regions.

To northern Spain England sent coarse cloth, cottons, sheepskins, wheat, butter and cheese, and brought back wine, oranges, lemons and timber. To France went wax, tallow, butter, cheese, wheat, rye, "Manchester cloth," beans and biscuit in exchange for pitch, rosin, feathers, prunes and "great ynnions that be xii or xiiii ynches aboute," iron and wine. To the Russian Baltic ports, Riga, Reval and Narva went coarse cloth, "corrupt" (i.e., adulterated) wine, cony-skins, {535} salt and brandy, and from the same came flax, hemp, pitch, tar, tallow, wax and furs. Salmon from Ireland and other fish from Scotland and Denmark were paid for by "corrupt" wines. To the Italian ports of Leghorn, Barcelona, Civita Vecchia and Venice, and to the Balearic Isles went lead, fine cloth, hides, Newfoundland fish and lime, and from them came oil, silk and fine porcelain. To Barbary went fine cloth, ordnance and artillery, armor and timber for oars, though, as a memorandum of 1580 says, "if the Spaniards catch you trading with them, you shall die for it." Probably what they objected to most was the sale of arms to the infidel. From Barbary came sugar, saltpetre, dates, molasses and carpets. Andalusia demanded fine cloth and cambric in return for wines called "seckes," sweet oil, raisins, salt, cochineal, indigo, sumac, silk and soap. Portugal took butter, cheese, fine cloth "light green or sad blue," lead, tin and hides in exchange for salt, oil, soap, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, pepper and all other Indian wares.

While the English drove practically no trade with the East Indies, to the West Indies they sent directly oil, looking-glasses, knives, shears, scissors, linen, and wine which, to be salable, must be "singular good." From thence came gold, pearls "very orient and big withall," sugar and molasses. To Syria went colored cloth of the finest quality, and for it currants and sweet oil were taken. The establishment of an English factor in Turkey [Sidenote: 1582] with the express purpose of furthering trade with that country is an interesting landmark in commercial history.

Even as late as the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, [Sidenote: Gammer Gurton's Needle, c. 1559] the whole household being turned upside down to look for {536} the one lost by Gammer Gurton. These articles, as well as knives, nails, pins, buttons, dolls, tennis-balls, tape, thread, glass, and laces, were imported from the Netherlands and Germany. From the same quarter came "small wares for grocers,"—by which may be meant cabbages, turnips and lettuce,—and also hops, copper and brass ware.

[Sidenote: Manufacture]

Having swept all before it in the domains of banking, mining and trade, capitalism, flushed with victory, sought for new worlds to conquer and found them in manufacture. Here also a great struggle was necessary. Hitherto the opposition to the new companies had been mainly on the part of the consumer; now the hostility of the laborer was aroused. The grapple of the two classes, in which the wage-earner went down, partly before the arquebus of the mercenary, partly under the lash and branding-iron of pitiless laws, will be described in the next section. Here it is not the strife of the classes, but of the two economic systems, that is considered. Capitalism won economically before it imposed its yoke on the vanquished by the harsh means of soldier and police. It won, in the final analysis, not because of the inherent power of concentrated wealth, though it used and abused this recklessly, but because, in the struggle for existence, it proved itself the form of life better fitted to survive in the conditions of modern society. It called forth technical improvements, it stimulated individual effort, it put an immense premium on thrift and investment, it cheapened production by the application of initially expensive but ultimately repaying, apparatus, it effected enormous economies in wholesale production and distribution. Before the new methods of business the old gilds stood as helpless, as unready, as bowmen in the face of cannon.

{537} [Sidenote: Gilds]

Each medieval "craft" or "mistery" [1] was in the hands of a gild, all the members of which were theoretically equal. Each passed through the ranks of apprentice and other lower grades until he normally became a master-workman and as such entitled to a full and equal share in the management. The gild managed its property almost like that of an endowment in the hands of trustees; it supervised the whole life of each member, took care of him when sick, buried him when dead and pensioned his widow. In these respects it was like some mutual benefit societies of our day. Almost inevitably in that age, it was under the protection of a patron saint and discharged various religious duties. It acted as a corporate whole in the government of the city and marched and acted as one on festive occasions.

As typical of the organization of industry at the turning-point may be given the list of gilds at Antwerp drawn up by Albert Duerer: [Sidenote: 1520] There were goldsmiths, painters, stone-cutters, embroiderers, sculptors, joiners, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, cloth-weavers, bakers, cobblers, "and all sorts of artisans and many laborers and merchants of provisions." The list is fully as significant for what it omits as for what it includes. Be it noted that there was no gild of printers, for that art had grown up since the crafts had begun to decline, and, though in some places found as a gild, was usually a combination of a learned profession and a capitalistic venture. Again, in this great banking and trading port, there is no mention of gilds of wholesale merchants (for the "merchants of provisions" were certainly not this) nor of bankers. These were two fully capitalized businesses. Finally, observe that there were many skilled and unskilled laborers {538} not included in a special gild. Here we have the beginning of the proletariat. A century earlier there would have been no special class of laborers, a century later no gilds worth mentioning.

The gilds were handicapped by their own petty regulations. Notwithstanding the fact that their high standards of craftsmanship produced an excellent grade of goods, they were over-regulated and hide-bound, averse to new methods. There was as great a contrast between their meticulous traditions and the freer paths of the new capitalism as there was between scholasticism and science. They could neither raise nor administer the funds needed for foreign commerce and for export industries. Presently new technical methods were adopted by the capitalists, a finer way of smelting ores, and a new way of making brass, invented by Peter von Hoffberg, that saved 50 per cent. of the fuel previously used. In the textile industries came first the spinning-wheel, then the stocking-frame. So in other manufactures, new machinery required novel organization. Significant was the growth of new towns. The old cities were often so gild-ridden that they decayed, while places like Manchester sprang up suddenly at the call of employment. The constant effort of the gild had been to suppress competition and to organize a completely stationary society. In a dynamic world that which refuses to change, perishes. So the gilds, while charging all their woes to the government, really choked themselves to death in their own bands.

[Sidenote: Capitalistic production]

There is perhaps some analogy between the progress of capitalism in the sixteenth century and the process by which the trusts have come to dominate production in our own memory. The larger industries, and especially those connected with export trade, were seized and reorganized first; for a long time, indeed throughout {539} the century, the gilds kept their hold on small, local industries. For a long time both systems went on side by side; the encroachment was steady, but gradual. The exact method of the change was two-fold. In the first place the constitution of the gild became more oligarchical. The older members tended to restrict the administration more and more; they increased the number of apprentices by lengthening the years of apprenticeship and reduced the poorer members to the rank of journeymen who were expected to work, not as before for a limited term of years, but for life, as wage-earners. When the journeymen rebelled, they were put down. The English Clothworkers' Court Book, for example, enacted the rule in 1538 that journeymen who would not work on conditions imposed by the masters should be imprisoned for the first offence and whipped and branded for the second. Nevertheless, to some extent, the master's calling was kept open to the more enterprising and intelligent laborers. It is this opportunity to rise that has always broken up the solidarity of the working class more than anything else.

[Sidenote: Great commercial companies]

But a second transforming influence worked faster from without than did the internal decay of the gild. This was the extension of the commercial system to manufacture. The gilds soon found themselves at the mercy of the great new companies that wanted wares in large quantities for export. Thus the commercial company came either to absorb or to dominate the industries that supplied it. An example of this is supplied by the Paris mercers, who, from being mainly dealers in foreign goods, gradually became employers of the crafts. Similarly the London haberdashers absorbed the crafts of the hatters and cappers. The middle man, who commanded the market, soon found the strategic value of his position for controlling {540} the supply of articles. Commercial capital rapidly became industrial. One by one the great gilds fell under the control of commercial companies. One of the last instances was the formation of the Stationers' Company by which the printers were reduced to the rank of an industry subordinate to that of booksellers.

[Sidenote: Legislation on gilds]

Finally came the legislative attack on the gilds, that broke what little power they had left. There is now a tendency to minimise the result of legislation in this field, but the impression that one gets by perusing the statutes not only of England but of Continental countries is that, while perhaps the governments would not have admitted any hostility to the gilds as such, they were strongly opposed to many features of them, and were determined to change them in accordance with the interests of the now dominant class. The policy of the moneyed men was not to destroy the crafts, but to exploit them; indeed they often found their old franchises extremely useful in arrogating to themselves the powers that had once belonged to the gild as a whole. The town governments were elected by the wealthy burghers; Parliaments soon came to side with them, and the monarch had already been bribed into an ally.

To give specific examples of the new trend is easy. When the great tapestry manufacture of Brussels was reorganized [Sidenote: 1544] on a basis very favorable to the capitalists, the law sanctioning this step spoke contemptuously of the mutual benefit and religious functions of the gild as "petty details." [Sidenote: 1515] Brandenburg now regulated the terms on which entrance to a gild should be allowed instead of leaving the matter as of old to the members themselves. [Sidenote: 1540] The Polish nobility, jealous of the cities' monopoly of trade, demanded the total abolition of the gilds. [Sidenote: 1503 ff.] A series of measures in England weakened the power of the gilds; under Edward VI [Sidenote: 1547] their endowments for religious purposes were {541} attacked, and this hurt them far more than would appear on the surface. The important Act Touching Weavers [Sidenote: 1555] both witnessed the unhappy condition of the misteries and, without seeming to do so, still further put them in the power of their masters. The workmen, it seems, had complained "that the rich and wealthy clothiers oppress them" by building up factories, or workshops in which many looms were installed, instead of keeping to the old commission or sweat-shop system, by which piece work was given out and done by each man at home. The gild-workmen preferred this method, because their great rival was the newly developed proletariat, masses of men who could only be accommodated in large buildings. The act, under the guise of redressing the grievance, in reality confirmed the powers of the capitalists, for, while forbidding the use of factories outside of cities, it allowed them within towns and in the four northern counties, thus fortifying the monopolists in those places where they were strong, and hitting their rivals elsewhere. Further legislation, like the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, [Sidenote: 1563] strengthened the hands of the masters at the expense of the journeymen. Such examples are only typical; similar laws were enacted throughout Europe. By act after act the employers were favored at the expense of the laborers.

[Sidenote: Agriculture]

There remained agriculture, at that time by far the largest and most important of all the means by which man wrings his sustenance from nature. Even now the greater part of the population in most civilized countries—and still more in semi-civilized—is rural, but four hundred years ago the proportion was much larger. England was a predominantly agricultural country until the eighteenth century,—England, the most commercial and industrial of nations! Though {542} the last field to be attacked by capital, agriculture was as thoroughly renovated in the sixteenth century by this irrigating force as the other manners of livelihood had been transformed before it.

Medieval agriculture was carried on by peasants holding small amounts of land which would correspond to the small shops and slender capital of the handicraftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or a manor, was made up of different kinds of land,—arable, commons for pasturing sheep and cattle, forests for gathering firewood and for herding swine and meadows for growing hay. The arable land was divided into three so-called "fields," or sections, each field partitioned into smaller portions called in England "shots," and these in turn were subdivided into acre strips. Each peasant possessed a certain number of these tiny lots, generally about thirty, ten in each field. Normally, one field would be left fallow each year in turn, one field would be sown with winter wheat or rye (the bread crop), and one field with barley for beer and oats for feeding the horses and cattle. Into this system it was impossible to introduce individualism. Each man had to plow and sow when the village decided it should be done. And the commons and woodlands were free for all, with certain regulations.[2]

[Sidenote: Medieval farming methods]

The art of farming was not quite primitive, but it had changed less since the dawn of history than it has changed since 1600. Instead of great steam-plows and all sorts of machinery for harrowing and harvesting, small plows were pulled by oxen, and hoes and rakes were plied by hand. Lime, marl and manure were used for fertilizing, but scantily. The cattle were {543} small and thin, and after a hard winter were sometimes so weak that they had to be dragged out to pasture. Sheep were more profitable, and in the summer season good returns were secured from chickens, geese, swine and bees. Diseases of cattle were rife and deadly. The principles of breeding were hardly understood. Fitzherbert, who wrote on husbandry in the early sixteenth century, along with some sensible advice makes remarks, on the influence of the moon on horse-breeding, worthy of Hesiod. Indeed, the matter was left almost to itself until a statute of Henry VIII provided that no stallions above two years old and under fifteen hands high be allowed to run loose on the commons, and no mares of less than thirteen hands, lest the breed of horses deteriorate. It was to meet the same situation that the habit of castrating horses arose and became common about 1580.

[Sidenote: Capitalistic change]

The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture took two principal forms. In some countries, like Germany, it was the consequence of the change from natural economy to money economy. The new commercial men bought up the estates of the nobles and subjected them to a more intense cultivation, at the same time using all the resources of law and government to make them as lucrative as possible.

[Sidenote: Inclosures]

But in two countries, England and Spain, and to some small extent in others, a profitable opportunity for investment was found in sheep-farming on a large scale. In England this manifested itself in "inclosures," by which was primarily meant the fencing in for private use of the commons, but secondarily came to be applied to the conversion of arable land into pasture[3] and the substitution of large holdings for small. The cause of the movement was the demand for wool in cloth-weaving, largely for export trade.

{544} [Sidenote: Complaint against inclosures]

Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the operations of this economic change. A cry went up that sheep were eating men, that England was being turned into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich, while the land needed for grain was abandoned and tenants forcibly ejected. The outcry became loudest about the years 1516-8, when a commission was appointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It was found that in the past thirty years the amount of land in the eight counties most affected was 22,500 acres. This was not all for grazing; in Yorkshire it was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, in the south for pasture.

The acreage would seem extremely small to account for the complaint it excited. Doubtless it was only the chief and most typical of the hardships caused to a certain class by the introduction of new methods. One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth century, when the vast gain in wealth to the community as a whole, being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at the cost of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always hard on a certain class and the sufferers quite naturally vociferate their woes without regard to the real causes of the change or to the larger interests of society.

Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted throughout the century, in spite of legislative attempts to stop them. Indeed, they could hardly help continuing, when they were so immensely profitable. Land that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for every three pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep multiplied accordingly. The law of 1534 spoke of some men owning as many as 24,000 sheep, and unwittingly gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, {545} namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. The law limited the number of sheep allowed to one man to 2000. The people arose and slaughtered sheep wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the proletariat now and then seeks to destroy the wealth that accentuates their poverty. Then as always, the only causes for unwelcome alterations of their manner of life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of a ring of men, or of the government. The deeper economic forces escaped detection, or at least, attention.

During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 2 3/4 per cent. of the total area of England had been inclosed. The counties most affected were the Midlands, in some of which the amount of land affected was 8 per cent. to 9 per cent. of the total area. But though the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger proportion, in the then thinly settled state of the realm, of the total arable land,—of this it was probably one-fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the improved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was under the plow.

[Sidenote: Spain: the Mesta]

In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for commercial purposes manifested itself in a slightly different form. There, not by the inclosure of commons, but by the establishment of a monopoly by the Castilian "sheep-trust," the Mesta, did a large corporation come to prevail over the scattered and peasant agricultural interests. The Mesta, which existed from 1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its power in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. [Sidenote: 1568] When it took over from the government the appointment of the officer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the Alcalde Entregador, it may be said to have won a decisive victory for capitalism. At that time it owned {546} as many as seven million sheep, and exported wool to the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value of $560,000, per annum.

[Sidenote: Wheat growing]

Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by wool-growing, the capitalists next turned to arable land and by their transformation of it took the last step in the commercializing of life. Even now, in England, land is not regarded as quite the same kind of investment as a factory or railroad; there is still the vestige of a tradition that the tenant has customary privileges against the right of the owner of the land to exploit it for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint ghost of the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the profit of the landlord entirely secondary. The longest step away from the medieval to the modern system was taken in the sixteenth century, and its outward and visible sign was the substitution of the leasehold for the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the nature of a vested right or interest; the former was but a contract for a limited, often for a short, term, at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the rent raised, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine (i.e., fee) exacted for renewal of the lease.

The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part consist of, the acquisition of the land by the new commercial class, resulting in increased productivity. New and better methods of tillage were introduced. The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were consolidated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used as the owner thought best. One year a field would be under a cereal crop; the next year converted into pasture. This improved method, known as "convertible husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser extent on the Continent, was a big step in the direction of scientific agriculture. Regular rotation of crops {547} was hardly a common practice before the eighteenth century, but there was something like it in places where hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals. Capitalists in the Netherlands built dykes, drained marshes and dug expensive canals. Elsewhere also swamps were drained and irrigation begun. But perhaps no single improvement in technique accounted for the greater yield of the land so much as the careful and watchful self-interest of the private owner, as against the previous semi-communistic carelessness. Several popular proverbs then gained currency in the sense that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like that put on by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in Elizabeth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as an acre and a half of common, is borne out by the English statistics of the grain trade. From 1500 to 1534, while the process of inclosure was at its height, the export of corn more than doubled; it then diminished until it almost ceased in 1563, after which it rapidly increased until 1600. During the whole century the population was growing, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500.

[Sidenote: Export of grain after 1559]

It must, however, be admitted that the increase in exports was in part caused by and in part symptomatic of a change in the policy of the government. When commerce became king he looked out for his own interests first, and identified these interests with the dividends of small groups of his chief ministers. Trade was regulated, by tariff and bounty, no longer in the interests of the consumer but in those of the manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nineteenth-century England have their counterpart in the Elizabethan policy of encouraging the export of grain that was needed at home. As soon as the land and the Parliament both fell into the hands of the new {548} capitalistic landlords, they used the one to enhance to profits of the other. Nor was England alone in this. France favored the towns, that is the industrial centers, by forcing the rural population to sell at very low rates, and by encouraging export of grain. Perhaps this same policy was most glaring of all in Sixtine Rome, where the Papal States were taxed, as the provinces of the Empire had been before, to keep bread cheap in the city.



[1] From the Latin ministerium, French metier, not connected with "mystery."

[2] For the substance of this paragraph, as well as for numerous suggestions on the rest of the chapter, I am indebted to Professor N. S. B. Gras, of Minneapolis.

[3] Although some of the inclosed land was tilled; see below.



SECTION 2. THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER

[Sidenote: Money crowned king]

In modern times, Money has been king. Perhaps at a certain period in the ancient world wealth had as much power as it has now, but in the Middle Ages it was not so. Money was then ignored by the tenant or serf who paid his dues in feudal service or in kind; it was despised by the noble as the vulgar possession of Jews or of men without gentle breeding, and it was hated by the church as filthy lucre, the root of all evil and, together with sex, as one of the chief instruments of Satan. The "religious" man would vow poverty as well as celibacy.

But money now became too powerful to be neglected or despised, and too desirable to be hated. In the age of transition the medieval and modern conceptions of riches are found side by side. When Holbein came to London the Hanse merchants there employed him to design a pageant for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. In their hall he painted two allegorical pictures, The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Wealth. The choice of subjects was representative of the time of transition.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

The economic innovation sketched in the last few pages was followed by a social readjustment sufficiently violent and sufficiently rapid to merit the name of revolution. The wave struck different countries at {549} different times, but when it did come in each, it came with a rush, chiefly in the twenties in Germany and Spain, in the thirties and forties in England, a little later, with the civil wars, in France. It submerged all classes but the bourgeoisie; or, rather, it subjugated them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman triumph, the conquering car of Wealth.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie uses monarchy]

The one other power in the state that was visibly aggrandized at the expense of other classes, besides the plutocracy, was that of the prince. This is sometimes spoken of as the result of a new political theory, an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther and Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. But in truth their theories were but an expression of the accomplished, or easily foreseen, fact; and this fact was due in largest measure to the need of the commercial class for stable and for strong government. Riches, which at the dawn of the twentieth century seemed, momentarily, to have assumed a cosmopolitan character, were then bound up closely with the power of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to secure concessions and markets, a mercantile society needed a strong executive, and this they could find only in the person of the prince. Luther says that kings are only God's gaolers and hangmen, high-born and splendid because the meanest of God's servants must be thus accoutred. It would be a little truer to say that they were the gaolers and hangmen hired by the bourgeoisie to over-awe the masses and that their quaint trappings and titles were kept as an ornament to the gay world of snobbery.

[Sidenote: And other agencies]

Together with the monarchy, the new masters of men developed other instruments, parliamentary government in some countries, a bureaucracy in others, and a mercenary army in nearly all. At that time was either invented or much quoted the saying that {550} gold was one of the nerves of war. The expensive firearms that blew up the feudal castle were equally deadly when turned against the rioting peasants.

[Sidenote: To break the nobility]

Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way into the front rank, he was greatly aided by the frantic civil strife that broke out in both the older privileged orders. Never was better use made of the maxim, "divide and conquer," than when the Reformation divided the church, and the civil wars, dynastic in England, feudal in Germany and nominally religious in France, broke the sword of the noble. When the earls and knights had finished cutting each others' throats there were hardly enough of them left to make a strong stand. Occasionally they tried to do so, as in the revolt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls in England, and in the early stages of the rising of the Communeros in Spain. In every case they were defeated, and the work of the sword was completed by the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the blood-soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succumbed to the hired assassins of Catharine, the old nobles were disposed of and the power of their caste was broken. But their places were soon taken by new men. Some bought baronies and titles outright, others ripened more gradually to these honors in the warmth of the royal smile and on the sunny slopes of manors wrested from the monks. But the end finally attained was that the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the rich, the final badge of social deference to success in money-making.

[Sidenote: Plunder the church]

Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years, into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers. In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy representing either landed or commercial wealth.

Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the examples of the Reformers. [Sidenote: 1536] Venice forbade gifts or legacies to church or cloisters. [Sidenote: 1557] France, where confiscation was proposed, [Sidenote: 1516] partially attained the same ends by subjecting the clergy to the power of the crown.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie]

Among the groups into which society naturally falls is that of the intellectual class, the body of professional men, scientists, writers and teachers. [Sidenote: Bribes the intelligentsia] This group, just as it came into a new prominence in the sixteenth century, at the same time became in part an annex and a servant to the money power. The high expense of education as compared with the Middle Ages, the enormous fees then charged for graduating in professional schools, the custom of buying {552} livings in the church and practices in law and medicine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made it nearly impossible for the sons of the poor to enter into the palace of learning. Moreover the patronage of the wealthy, their assertion of a monopoly of good form and social prestige, seduced the professional class that now ate from the merchant's hand, aped his manners, and served his interests. For four hundred years law, divinity, journalism, art, and education, have cut their coats, at least to some extent, in the fashion of the court of wealth.

[Sidenote: And subjugates the proletariat]

Last of all, there remained the only power that proved itself nearly a match for money, that of labor. Far outnumbering the capitalists, in every other way the workers were their inferiors,—in education, in organization, in leadership and in material resources. One thing that made their struggle so hard was that those men of exceptional ability who might have been their leaders almost always made fortunes of their own and then turned their strength against their former comrades. Labor also suffered terribly from quacks and ranters with counsels of folly or of madness.

The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of the characteristics of both medieval and modern times. The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was both communistic and religious; the risings of Communeros and the Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; the several rebellions in England were partly religious. But a new element marked them all, the demand on the part of the workers for better wages and living conditions. The proletariat of town and mining district joined the German peasants in 1524; the revolt was in many respects like a gigantic general strike.

[Sidenote: Emancipation of the serfs]

Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, the emancipation of the serfs cannot be reckoned as {553} an immediate economic gain to them. They were freed not because of the growth of any moral sentiment, much less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but because free labor was found more profitable than unfree. It is notable that serfs were emancipated first in those countries like Scotland where there had been no peasants' revolt; the inference is that they were held in bondage in other countries longer than it was profitable to do so for political reasons. The last serf was reclaimed in Scotland in 1365, but the serfs had not been entirely freed in England even in the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of the serfs themselves. One hundred thousand peasants emigrated from Northern France to Burgundy at that time to exchange their free for a servile state. However, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs in the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, lost their last chains in the sixteenth century, most rapidly between the years 1515 and 1531. In Germany serfdom remained far beyond the end of the sixteenth century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited by the civil war of 1525.

[Sidenote: Regulation of labor]

In place of the old serfdom under one master came a new and detailed regulation of labor by the government. This regulation was entirely from the point of view, and consequently all but entirely in the interests, of the propertied classes. The form was the old form of medieval paternalism, but the spirit was the new spirit of capitalistic gain. The endeavor of the government to be fair to the laborer as well as to the employer is very faint, but it is just perceptible in some laws.

Most of the taxes and burdens of the state were loaded on the backs of the poor. Hours of labor were fixed at from 12 to 15 according to the season. {554} Regulation of wages was not sporadic, but was a regular part of the work of certain magistrates, in England of the justices of the peace. Parliament enforced with incredible severity the duty of the poor and able-bodied man to work. Sturdy idlers were arrested and drafted into the new proletariat needed by capital. When whipping, branding, and short terms of imprisonment, did not suffice to compel men to work, a law was passed to brand able-bodied vagrants on the chest with a "V," [Sidenote: 1547] and to assign them to some honest neighbor "to have and to hold as a slave for the space of two years then next following." The master should "only give him bread and water and small drink and such refuse of meat as he should think meet to cause the said slave to work." If the slave still idled, or if he ran away and was caught again he was to be marked on the face with an "S" and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally refractory he was to be sentenced as a felon. This terrible measure, intended partly to reduce lawless vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers, failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. Its re-enactment was vainly urged by Cecil upon Parliament in 1559. As a substitute for it in this year the law was passed forbidding masters to receive any workman without a testimonial from his last employer; laborers were not allowed to stop work or change employers without good cause, and conversely employers were forbidden to dismiss servants "unduly."

[Sidenote: The proletariat]

In Germany the features of the modern struggle between owners and workers are plainest. In mining, especially, there developed a real proletariat, a class of laborers seeking employment wherever it was best paid and combining and striking for higher wages. To combat them were formed pools of employers to keep down wages and to blacklist agitators. Typical of these was the agreement made by Duke George of {555} Saxony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, [Sidenote: 1520] not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking work, and not to hire any troublesome agitator once dismissed by any operator.

It is extraordinary how rapidly many features of the modern proletariat developed. Take, for example, the housing problem. As this became acute some employers built model tenements for their workers. Others started stores at which they could buy food and clothing, and even paid them in part in goods instead of in money. Labor tended to become fluid, moving from one town to another and from one industry to another according to demand. Such a thing had been not unknown in the previous centuries; it was strongly opposed by law in the sixteenth. The new risks run by workers were brought out when, for the first time in history, a great mining accident took place in 1515, a flood by which eighty-eight miners were drowned. Women began to be employed in factories and were cruelly exploited. Most sickening of all, children were forced, as they still are in some places, to wear out their little lives in grinding toil. The lace-making industry in Belgium, for example, fell entirely into the hands of children. Far from protesting against this outrage, the law actually sanctioned it by the provision that no girl over twelve be allowed to make lace, lest the supply of maidservants be diminished.

[Sidenote: Strikes]

Strikes there were and rebellions of all sorts, every one of them beaten back by the forces of the government and of the capitalists combined. The kings of commerce were then, more than now, a timorous and violent race, for then they were conscious of being usurpers. When they saw a Muenzer or a Kett—the mad Hamlets of the people—mop and mow and stage their deeds before the world, they became frantic with terror and could do nought but take subtle counsel to {556} kill these heirs, or pretenders, to their realms. The great rebellions are all that history now pays much attention to, but in reality the warfare on the poor was ceaseless, a chronic disease of the body politic. Louis XI spared nothing, disfranchisement, expulsion, wholesale execution, to beat down the lean and hungry conspirators against the public order, whose raucous cries of misery he detested. With somewhat gentler, because stronger, hand, his successors followed in his footsteps. But when needed the troops were there to support the rich. The great strike of printers at Lyons is one example of several in France. In the German mines there were occasional strikes, sternly suppressed by the princes acting in agreement.

[Sidenote: Degradation of the poor]

There can be no doubt that the economic developments of the sixteenth century worked tremendous hardship to the poor. It was noted everywhere that whereas wine and meat were common articles in 1500, they had become luxuries by 1600. Some scholars have even argued from this a diminution of the wealth of Europe during the century. This, however, was not the case. The aggregate of capital, if we may judge from many other indications, notably increased throughout the century. But it became more and more concentrated in a few hands.

The chief natural cause of the depression of the working class was the rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by substituting foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products. The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to the peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive terms of service and dues.

Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched, destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there then much pity for the poor. The charity and worship for "apostolic poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness, so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who do not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race—"the ox without horns" they called him—to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved. "Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and "the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the ass will have blows and the people will be ruled by force."

There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble peasant," wrote an obscure German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt, not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their wrongs. The Utopia will always remain one of the world's noblest books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social problem.

[Sidenote: Pauperism]

This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the declasse journeyman of the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of sturdy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was coined in England about 1550 to name the new class. The Book of Vagabonds, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Huetlin of Pfortzheim, describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of their population in vagabondage.

In the face of this appalling situation the medieval method of charity completely broke down. In fact, with its many begging friars, with its injunction of alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to God, and with its respect for voluntary poverty, the church rather aggravated than palliated the evil of mendicancy. The state had to step in to relieve the church.

[Sidenote: State poor-relief, 1506]

This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe edict was issued and repeatedly re-enacted against tramps ordering them to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and to be further punished with stocks. An enterprising group of humanists and lawyers demanded that the government should take over the duty of poor-relief from the church. Accordingly at Lille a "common chest" was started, the first civil charitable bureau in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1512] At Bruges a cloister was secularized and turned into a school for eight hundred poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of charity was started at Antwerp. [Sidenote: 1521]

Under these circumstances the humanist Lewis Vives wrote his famous tract on the relief of the poor, [Sidenote: January, 1526] in the form of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In this well thought out treatise he advocated the law that no one should eat who did not work, and urged that all able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to artisans—a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to {560} draft men into their workshops! Cases of people unable to work should also be taken up, and they should be cared for by application of religious endowments by the government. Vives' claim to recognition lies even more in his spirit than in his definite program. For almost the first time in history he plainly said that poverty was a disgrace as well as a danger to the state and should be, not palliated, but extirpated.

While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city of Ypres [Sidenote: 1525] (tragic name!) had already sought his advice and acted upon it, as well as upon the example of earlier reforms in German cities, in promulgating an ordinance. The city government combined all religious and philanthropic endowments into one fund and appointed a committee to administer it, and to collect further gifts. These citizens were to visit the poor in their dwellings, to apply what relief was necessary, to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures and to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging and idleness. All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.

Though there were sporadic examples of municipal poor-relief in Germany prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his Address to the German Nobility Luther had recommended that each city should take care of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per cent. A severe law against begging was passed. Augsburg and Nuremberg followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote: 1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one joined the procession.

For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development, whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract. Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published A Plea for the Right of the Poor to Beg. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk, Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his Sacred Economy of caring for the Poor, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the direction of charity.

[Sidenote: 1531]

But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but informed by the modern spirit, grew up.

In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere. The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all needs. After municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing need, the first compulsory Poor Rates were laid. Three or four years later came an act for setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These measures failed of the success that met the continental method. Even compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some {562} authorities have asserted that by giving the poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote: 1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of the commercialism that made money but did not make men.



{563}

CHAPTER XII

MAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT

Were we reading the biography of a wayward genius, we should find the significance of the book neither in the account of his quarrels and of his sins nor in the calculation of his financial difficulties and successes, but in the estimate of his contributions to the beauty and wisdom of the world. Something the same is true about the history of a race or of a period; the political and economic events are but the outward framework; the intellectual achievement is both the most attractive and the most repaying object of our study. In this respect the sixteenth century was one of the most brilliant; it produced works of science that outstripped all its predecessors; it poured forth masterpieces of art and literature that are all but matchless.

SECTION 1. BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP

[Sidenote: Position of Bible in 16th century]

It is naturally impossible to give a full account of all the products of sixteenth century genius. In so vast a panorama only the mountain peaks can be pointed out. One of these peaks is assuredly the Bible. Never before nor since has that book been so popular; never has its study absorbed so large a part of the energies of men. It is true that the elucidation of the text was not proportional to the amount of labor spent on it. For the most part it was approached not in a scientific but in a dogmatic spirit. Men did not read it historically and critically but to find their own dogmas in it. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for both the textual and the higher criticism.

{564} [Sidenote: The Greek Text]

The Greek text of the New Testament was first published by Erasmus in March, 1516. Revised, but not always improved, editions were brought out by him in 1519, 1522 and 1527. For the first edition he had before him ten manuscripts, all of them minuscules, the oldest of which, though he believed it might have come from the apostolic age, is assigned by modern criticism to the twelfth century. In the course of printing, some bad errors were introduced, and the last six verses of the Apocalypse, wanting in all the manuscripts, were supplied by an extremely faulty translation from the Latin. The results were such as might have been anticipated. Though the text has been vastly purified by modern critics, the edition of Erasmus was of great service and was thoroughly honest. He noted that the last verses of Mark were doubtful and that the passage on the adulteress (John vii, 53 to viii, 11) was lacking in the best authorities, and he omitted the text on the three heavenly witnesses (I John v, 7) as wanting in all his manuscripts.

For this omission he was violently attacked. To support his position he asked his friend Bombasius to consult the Codex Vaticanus, and dared to assert that were a single manuscript found with the verse in Greek, he would include it in subsequent editions. Though there were at the time no codices with the verse in question—which was a Latin forgery of the fourth century, possibly due to Priscillian—one was promptly manufactured. Though Erasmus suspected the truth, that the verse had been interpolated from the Latin text, he added it in his third edition "that no occasion for calumny be given." This one sample must serve to show how Erasmus's work was received. For every deviation from the Vulgate, whether in the Greek text or in the new Latin translation with which he accompanied it, he was ferociously assailed. His {565} own anecdote of the old priest who, having the misprint "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in his missal, refused to correct the error when it was pointed out, is perfectly typical of the position of his critics. New truth must ever struggle hard against old prejudice.

While Erasmus was working, a much more ambitious scheme for publishing the Scriptures was maturing under the direction of Cardinal Ximenez at Alcala or, as the town was called in Latin, Complutum. The Complutensian Polyglot, as it was thence named, was published in six volumes, four devoted to the Old Testament, one to the New Testament, and one to a Hebrew lexicon and grammar. The New Testament volume has the earliest date, 1514, but was withheld from the public for several years after this. The manuscripts from which the Greek texts were taken are unknown, but they were better than those used by Erasmus. The later editors of the Greek text in the sixteenth century, Robert Estienne (Stephanus) and Theodore Beza, did little to castigate it, although one of the codices used by Beza, and now known by his name, is of great value.

[Sidenote: Hebrew text]

The Hebrew Massoretic text of the Old Testament was printed by Gerson Ben Mosheh at Brescia in 1494, and far more elaborately in the first four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglot. With the Hebrew text the Spanish editors offered the Septuagint Greek, the Syriac, and the Vulgate, the Hebrew, Syriac and Greek having Latin translations. The manuscripts for the Hebrew were procured from Rome. A critical revision was undertaken by Sebastian Muenster and published with a new Latin version at Basle 1534-5. Later recensions do not call for special notice here. An incomplete text of the Syriac New Testament was published at Antwerp in 1569.

[Sidenote: Latin versions]

The numerous new Latin translations made during {566} this period testify to the general discontent with the Vulgate. Not only humanists like Valla, Lefevre and Erasmus, but perfectly orthodox theologians like Pope Nicholas V, Cajetan and Sadoletus, saw that the common version could be much improved. In the new Latin translation by Erasmus many of the errors of the Vulgate were corrected. Thus, in Matthew iii, 2, he offers "resipiscite" or "ad mentem redite" instead of "poenitentiam agite." This, as well as his substitution of "sermo" for "verbum" in John i, 1, was fiercely assailed. Indeed, when it was seen what use was made by the Protestants of the new Greek texts and of the new Latin versions, of which there were many, a strong reaction followed in favor of the traditional text. Even by the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot the Vulgate was regarded with such favor that, being printed between the Hebrew and Greek, it was compared by them to Christ crucified between the two thieves. [Sidenote: 1530] The Sorbonne condemned as "Lutheran" the assertion that the Bible could not be properly understood or expounded without knowledge of the original languages. [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] In the decree of Trent the Vulgate was declared to be the authentic form of the Scriptures. The preface to the English Catholic version printed at Rheims [Sidenote: 1582] defends the thesis, now generally held by Catholics, that the Latin text is superior in accuracy to the Greek, having been corrected by Jerome, preserved by the church and sanctioned by the Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1592] In order to have this text in its utmost purity an official edition was issued.

[Sidenote: Biblical scholarship]

Modern critics, having far surpassed the results achieved by their predecessors, are inclined to underestimate their debts to these pioneers in the field. The manuals, encyclopaedias, commentaries, concordances, special lexicons, all that make an introduction to biblical criticism so easy nowadays, were lacking then, or {567} were supplied only by the labor of a life-time. The professors at Wittenberg, after prolonged inquiry, were unable to find a map of Palestine. The first Hebrew concordance was printed, with many errors, at Venice in 1523; the first Greek concordance not until 1546, at Basle. To find a parallel passage or illustrative material or ancient comment on a given text, the critic then had to search through dusty tomes and manuscripts, instead of finding them accumulated for him in ready reference books. That all this has been done is the work of ten generations of scholars, among whom the pioneers of the Renaissance should not lack their due meed of honor. The early critics were hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical (or didactic).

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

Erasmus, under the tuition of Valla, felt his way to a more fruitful method. It is true that his main object was a moral one, the overthrow of superstition and the establishment of the gentle "philosophy of Christ." He used the allegorical method only, or chiefly, to explain away as fables stories that would seem silly or obscene as history. In the New Testament he sought the man Jesus and not the deified Christ. He preferred the New Testament, with its "simple, plain and gentle truth, without savor of superstition or cruelty" to the Old Testament. He discriminated nicely even among the books of the New Testament, considering the chief ones the gospels, Acts, the Pauline epistles (except Hebrews), I Peter and I John. He hinted that many did not consider the Apocalypse canonical; he found Ephesians Pauline in thought but not in style; he believed Hebrews to have {568} been written by Clement of Rome; and he called James lacking in apostolic dignity.

[Sidenote: Luther]

By far the best biblical criticism of the century was the mature work of Martin Luther. It is a remarkable fact that a man whose doctrine of the binding authority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his disciples permission to interpret the text with the least shade of independence, should himself have shown a freedom in the treatment of the inspired writers unequaled in any Christian for the next three centuries. It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were mere matters of taste; that he took what he liked and rejected what he disliked, and this is true to a certain extent. "What treats well of Christ, that is Scripture, even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he averred, and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against Christ, we must urge Christ against the Bible." His wish to exclude the epistle of James from the canon, on the ground that its doctrine of justification contradicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and excited wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir Thomas More, but also from many Protestants, beginning with Bullinger.

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of the Bible were usually far more than would be implied by a merely dogmatic interest. Together with the best scholarship of the age he had a strong intuitive feeling for style that guided him aright in many cases. In denying the Mosaic authorship of a part of the Pentateuch, in asserting that Job and Jonah were fables, in finding that the books of Kings were more credible than Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes had received their final form from later editors, he but advanced theses now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply {569} confirmed. Some modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry. Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty volumes in deserved neglect.

[Sidenote: German version]

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of the Bible that of Luther stands first in every sense of the word. Long he had meditated on it before his enforced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the leisure to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had much help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg professors, was a life-long labor. Only recently have the minutes of the meetings of these scholars come to light, and they testify to the endless trouble taken by the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. He wrote no dialect, but a common, standard German which he believed to have been introduced by the Saxon chancery. But he also modelled his style not only on the few good German authors then extant, but on the speech of the market-place. From the mouths of the people he took the sweet, common words that he gave back to them again, "so that they may note that we are speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put into the German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, lofty eloquence, poetry.

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the Bible. To make Moses "so German that no one would know that he was a Jew" insured a noble style, but involved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. Thus the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite plainly, and of German May-festivals; and the passover is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there not even {570} an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the translation of Micah iv, 8?—"Und du Thurm Eder, eine Feste der Tochter Zion, es wird deine goldene Rose kommen." Luther declared his intention of "simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the rest of Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of fact the greatest change that he actually made was the introduction of the word "alone" after "faith" in the passage (Romans iii, 28) "A man is justified by faith without works of the law." Luther never used the word "church" (Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it by "congregation" (Gemeinde). Following Erasmus he turned [Greek] metanoieite (Matthew iii, 2, 8) into "bessert euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" ("do penance") as in the older German versions. Also, following the Erasmian text, he omitted the "comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7); this was first insinuated into the German Bible in 1575.

[Sidenote: English Bible]

None of the other vernacular versions, not even the French translation of Lefevre and Olivetan can compare with the German save one, the English. How William Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed the work in 1535, has been told on another page. Many revisions followed: the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops' Bible of 1568. Then came the Catholic, or Douai version of 1582, the only one completely differing from the others, with its foundation on the Vulgate and its numerous barbarisms: "parasceue" for "preparation," "feast of Azymes" for "feast of unleavened bread," "imposing of hands," "what to me and thee, woman" (John ii, 4), "penance," "chalice," "host," "against the spirituals of wickedness in the celestials" (Ephesians vi, 12), "supersubstantial bread" in the Lord's prayer, "he exinanited himself" (Philippians ii, 7).

We are accustomed to speak of the Authorized Version {571} of 1610 as if it were a new product of the literary genius of Shakespeare's age. In fact, it was a mere revision, and a rather light one, of previous work. Its rare perfection of form is due to the labors of many men manipulating and polishing the same material. Like the Homeric poems, like the Greek gospels themselves probably, the greatest English classic is the product of the genius of a race and not of one man.

Even from the very beginning it was such to some extent. Tyndale could hardly have known Wyclif's version, which was never printed and was rare in manuscript, but his use of certain words, such as "mote," "beam," and "strait gate," also found in the earlier version, prove that he was already working in a literary tradition, one generation handing down to another certain Scriptural phrases first heard in the mouths of the Lollards.

Both Tyndale and Coverdale borrowed largely from the German interpreters, as was acknowledged on the title-page and in the prologue to the Bible of 1535. Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the marginal notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, "this is once bone of my bone," "they offered unto field-devils" (Luther, "Felt-teuffem"), "Blessed is the room-maker, Gad" (Luther, "Raum-macher"). The English translators also followed the German in using "elder" frequently for "priest," "congregation" for "church," and "love" for "charity." By counting every instance of this and similar renderings, Sir Thomas More claimed to have found one thousand errors in the New Testament alone.

[Sidenote: Popularity of Bible]

The astounding popularity of the Bible, chiefly but not only in Protestant countries, is witnessed by a myriad voices. Probably in all Christian countries in every age it has been the most read book, but in the sixteenth century it added to an unequaled reputation {572} for infallibility the zest of a new discovery. Edward VI demanding the Bible at his coronation, Elizabeth passionately kissing it at hers, were but types of the time. That joyous princess of the Renaissance, Isabella d'Este, ordered a new translation of the Psalms for her own perusal. Margaret of Navarre, in the Introduction to her frivolous Heptameron, expresses the pious hope that all present have read the Scripture. Hundreds of editions of the German and English translations were called for. The people, wrote an Englishman in 1539, "have now in every church and place, almost every man, the Bible and New Testament in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round . . . and such other whose impure filth and vain fabulosity the light of God hath abolished there utterly." In Protestant lands it became almost a matter of good form to own the Bible, and reading it has been called, not ineptly, "the opus operatum of the Evangelicals." Even the Catholics bore witness to the demand, which they tried to check. While they admonished the laity that it was unnecessary and dangerous to taste of this tree of knowledge, while they even curtailed the reading of the Scripture by the clergy, they were forced to supply vernacular versions of their own.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

Along with unbounded popularity the Bible then enjoyed a much higher reputation for infallibility than it bears today. The one point on which all Protestant churches were agreed was the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. The Word, said Calvin, flowed from the very mouth of God himself; it was the sole foundation of faith and the one fountain of all wisdom. "What Christ says must be true whether I or any other man can understand it," preached Luther. "Scripture is fully to be believed," wrote an English theologian, "as a thing necessary to salvation, though {573} the thing contained in Scripture pertain not merely to the faith, as that Aaron had a beard." The Swiss and the Anabaptists added their voices to this chorus of bibliolatry.

[Sidenote: Abeunt studia in mores]

Since studies pass into character, it is natural to find a marked effect from this turning loose of a new source of spiritual authority. That thousands were made privately better, wiser and happier from the reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that standards of morality were raised and ethical tastes purified thereby, is certain. But the same cause had several effects that were either morally indifferent or positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by contemporaries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, as Luther complained, interpreted the Holy Book according to his own brain and crazy reason. The old saying that the Bible was the book of heretics, came true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that none but the ministers (i.e. themselves) had the right to interpret Scripture. It was in vain for the governments to forbid, as the Scotch statute expressed it, "any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible"; [Sidenote: 1550] discordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig-headed and intolerant.

There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion to the amount of inerrancy attributed to it, became a stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism was regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, as a cause of vehement suspicion of atheism. Some texts buttressed the horrible and cruel superstition of witchcraft. The examples of the wars of Israel and the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to support the duty of intolerance. Social reformers, like {574} Vives, in their struggle to abolish poverty, were confronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal verity, that the poor are always with us. Finally the great moral lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission of polygamy, was supported by biblical texts.

[Sidenote: The classics]

Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the classics. Most of the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most important exception being the Annals of Tacitus, of which the editio princeps was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates of the editiones principes of the other principal Greek writers:

1502: Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus. 1503: Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's Hellenica. 1504: Demosthenes. 1509: Plutarch's Moralia. 1513: Pindar, Plato. 1516: Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pausanias, Strabo. 1517: Plutarch's Lives. 1518: Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays. 1525: Galen, Xenophon's complete works. 1528: Epictetus. 1530: Polybius. 1532: Aristophanes, eleven plays. 1533: Euclid, Ptolemy. 1544: Josephus. 1552: Aeschylus, seven plays. 1558: Marcus Aurelius. 1559: Diodorus. 1565: Bion and Moschus. 1572: Plutarch's complete works.

Naturally the first editions were not usually the best. {575} [Sidenote: Scholarship] The labor of successive generations has made the text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not exclusively, in editing the fathers of the church, was done by Erasmus. But a really new school of historical criticism was created by Joseph Justus Scaliger, [Sidenote: J. J. Scaliger, 1540-1609] the greatest of scholars. His editions of the Latin poets first laid down and applied sound rules of textual emendation, besides elucidating the authors with a wealth of learned comment.

The editing of the texts was but a small portion of the labor that went to the cultivation of the classics. The foundations of our modern lexicons were laid in the great Thesaurus linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in three volumes 1543) and the Thesauris linguae Graecae by Henry Estienne the younger, published in five volumes in 1572. This latter is still used, the best edition being that in nine volumes 1829-63.

So much of ancient learning has become a matter of course to the modern student that he does not always realize the amount of ground covered in the last four centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani: [Sidenote: November 13, 1517] "The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient poets vainly promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that its very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the greatest scholars then was ignorant of a site now visited by every tourist in the Eternal City, how much must there not have been to learn in other respects? Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and successors of Erasmus labored to supply the knowledge then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammars were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epigraphy, on ancient religion, on chronology, on comparative philology, on Roman law, laid deep and strong the foundations of the consummate scholarship of modern times.

{576} [Sidenote: Idolatry of ancients]

The classics were not only studied in the sixteenth century, they were loved, they were even worshipped. "Every elegant study, every science worthy of the attention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there is of polite learning," wrote the French savant Muret, [Sidenote: 1573] "is contained nowhere save in the literature of the Greeks." Joachim du Bellay wrote a cycle of sonnets on the antiquities of Rome, in the spirit:

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

"The Latin allureth me by its gracious dignity," wrote Montaigne, "and the writings of the Greeks not only fill and satisfy me, but transfix me with admiration. . . . What glory can compare with that of Homer?" Machiavelli tells how he dressed each evening in his best attire to be worthy to converse with the spirits of the ancients, and how, while reading them, he forgot all the woes of life and the terror of death. Almost all learned works, and a great many not learned, were written in Latin. For those who could not read the classics for themselves translations were supplied. Perhaps the best of these were the Lives of Famous Men by Plutarch, first rendered into French by Amyot and thence into English by Sir Thomas North.

[Sidenote: Value of classics in 16th century]

Strong, buoyant, self-confident as was the spirit of the age, it bore plainly upon it the impress of its zealous schooling in the lore of the ancients. In supplying the imperious need of cultured men for good literature the Romans and Greeks had, in the year 1500, but few rivals—save in Italy, hardly any. To an age that had much to learn they had much to teach; to men as greedy for the things of the mind as they were for luxury and wealth the classics offered a new world as rich in spoils of wisdom and beauty as were the East Indies and {577} Peru in spices and gold. The supreme value of the Greek and Latin books is that which they have in common with all literature; they furnished, for the mass of reading men, the best and most copious supply of food for the intellectual and spiritual life. "Books," says Erasmus, "are both cheering and wholesome. In prosperity they steady one, in affliction console, do not vary with fortune and follow one through all dangers even to the grave. . . . What wealth or what scepters would I exchange for my tranquil reading?" "From my earliest childhood," Montaigne confides, "poetry has had the power to pierce me through and transport me."

In the best sense of the word, books are popular philosophy. All cannot study the deepest problems of life or of science for themselves, but all can absorb the quintessence of thought in the pleasant and stimulating form in which it is served up in the best literature. Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to cultivate a high and noble inward life. This, their supreme value for the moulding of character, was appreciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink the spirit of the classics," observes Montaigne, "rather than learn their precepts," and again, "the use to which I put my studies is a practical one—the formation of character for the exigencies of life."