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 HISTOBIC AND ECONOMIC 

 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 Crown 8vo. 
 
 ENGLISH ECONOMIC HISTORY 
 AND THEORY 
 
 Part I.THE MIDDLE AGES. 5s. 
 
 Part II. THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
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 LONDON, NEW TOBK, AND BOMBAY 
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 SURVEYS 
 
 HISTOEIO AND ECONOMIC 
 
 Wf J. ASHLEY, M.A. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 SOMETIME FELLOW OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 89 PATERNOSTER BOW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 
 1900 
 
 A.11 rights reserved
 
 TO 
 
 GUSTAV SCHMOLLEE 
 
 PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 
 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN, 
 
 HISTORIOGRAPHER OF BRANDENBURG 
 
 DEAR PROFESSOR SCHMOLLER, 
 
 To you I wa/nt to give myself the pleasure of dedicating this 
 handful of essays and reviews. I have not always found it 
 possible to agree with your opinions with whose opinions would 
 that be possible ? And in reading some of your recent utterances 
 about English policy in the eighteenth century, and indeed in 
 times nearer our own, I must confess\to a desire to criticise an 
 epithet here and there. Yet I feel that for a dozen years I 
 have received more stimulus and encouragement from your 
 writings than from those of any other; encouragement in the 
 effort, which academic and popular opi/nion renders so difficult, 
 to be an economist without ceasing to be an historian. You have 
 shown me by your example how to carry the historical spirit into 
 the ^uork of the economist, and the economic interest into the work 
 of the historian. 
 
 y The [rivalries of Germany, Great Britain, and the United 
 
 States are likely to be altogether economic in the century which 
 is about to open, and economists are in evident danger of be- 
 coming the mouthpieces of national sentiment. We may be con- 
 O fident, notwithstanding, that scholars who have caught your spirit 
 LO will never altogether lose the scientific temper, and also never 
 Q quite forget that even powerful nationalities are but steps to- 
 ,_. wards something better for humanity in the future. 
 
 rs. 
 
 Believe me sincerely yours, 
 
 W. J. ASHLEY. 
 
 CD 
 
 \P 
 
 CO 
 H 
 
 *
 
 PEE FACE 
 
 THE five and forty essays and reviews which make up 
 this volume fall into a few well-marked groups. Two 
 of the longest are devoted to the economic relations 
 between England and her American colonies during 
 the century from 1660 to 1760 : they aim at removing 
 some misapprehensions which are even more persistent 
 in England than in the United States ; and the second 
 of them explains for the first time, so far as I am 
 aware the true nature of the import trade of 
 America. Their theme associates them with the pre- 
 ceding group of papers on the history of Economic 
 Opinion, and especially with the essay on Tory 
 Free Trade in the age of Sir Dudley North and 
 Bolingbroke which deals with a forgotten chapter in 
 the history of English political parties. The groups 
 labelled ' Mediaeval Agrarian ' and ' Mediaeval Urban ' 
 may seem at first sight of a somewhat specialist and 
 archaeological character. But I am convinced that no 
 satisfactory conception can be attained of the course 
 of social evolution without a more definite answer 
 than historians have hitherto contented themselves 
 with to certain fundamental questions concerning the
 
 viii PKEFACE 
 
 early Middle Ages. This is peculiarly true of land 
 tenure ; and it will be found that even the origins of 
 municipal government cannot be intelligently dealt 
 with without a working hypothesis as to the extent 
 and meaning of serfdom in the open country. A time 
 will come, no doubt, when the theory of the Mark 
 and of the Free Village Community will be looked 
 back upon as a curious aberration in historical scholar- 
 ship, due to the unsuspected influence of contemporary 
 political liberalism. Meantime the group of papers 
 which approach that subject from various sides may 
 still serve the purpose of clearing the ground ; and a 
 comparison of the results, or non-results, of recent 
 investigation in Germany, France, Wales, India, 
 Central Asia, and Japan may help to correct the 
 mischief wrought by ' the comparative method.' At 
 the opposite pole of interest, as it may appear, are the 
 papers on Industrial Organisation in our own time ; 
 I can only hope that they will illustrate the applica- 
 tion of the historical spirit to the burning questions of 
 the day. It should tend towards patience and charity, 
 if not towards ready ' solutions.' 
 
 I have prefixed my lecture of eight years ago on 
 economic history as an academic study, and find little 
 in it that later events make me wish to alter. In 
 a pendant to it, more recently written, I have said 
 something about the dispute, too noisy of late in 
 Germany, about 'the materialistic conception* of 
 history. Towards the end of the volume I have 
 placed a small sheaf of biographical papers which will
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 explain themselves. From what I have said of 
 Toynbee it will be seen that in my judgment the 
 genius of Mrs. Humphry Ward has succeeded better 
 in realising the sort of man he was than some of those 
 who stood nearer to him in his lifetime. I have 
 ventured to add a group of papers on academic life and 
 organisation. The development of American uni- 
 versities has reached a point where German influence 
 is waning and English example will make itself felt 
 either for good or for evil. German universities have 
 shown themselves of late not above learning from 
 America ; and there is possibly something that Harvard 
 can teach Oxford. 
 
 Two of the longer and a few of the shorter papers 
 have not before been printed ; the rest have appeared 
 in different reviews and journals during the last eleven 
 years, and necessarily retain the marks of their diverse 
 origins. An analytical table of contents will facilitate 
 their perusal and indicate their interrelation. 
 
 SMITH'S COVE, DIGBY, NOVA SCOTIA 
 August 1900.
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PBBLIMINAEIES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTORY 1-21 
 
 The new spirit of tolerance among economists .... 1 
 
 Apparent disappointment of the hopes of the historical school 2 
 
 Its real influence, nevertheless 3 
 
 Present direction of the historical movement .... 6 
 
 ' Law ' in the sense of the historical school .... 7 
 
 A truce to controversy ........ 8 
 
 Advice to an imaginary enquirer 9 
 
 Answer to the objections : (1) that theory is needed for the 
 
 interpretation of phenomena 12 
 
 And (2) that the historical record is imperfect ... 14 
 The nature of economic history : its difference from the 
 
 history of civilisation 15 
 
 Its enquiry after the institutional framework of society . . 16 
 
 Why it becomes the work of the economist 17 
 
 Reasons for the study of economic history .... 18 
 
 The craving for a satisfying conception of social evolution . 20 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTORY : AFTER SEVEN YEARS 22-30 
 
 Why economic history necessarily engages attention at 
 
 present 22 
 
 Comparison with ecclesiastical and constitutional history . 23 
 
 Its place among academic disciplines 24 
 
 Economic History and Materialism 25 
 
 The ultimate question, the problem of Determinism . . . 26 
 But this can be postponed, till a prima facie case is made out 
 
 for some particular bit of materialist interpretation . . 27 
 
 The Lamprecht controversy . . . . . . . 28 
 
 Its lesson for the ' pure ' historian and the ' pure ' economist . 29 
 
 ROSCHER'S PROGRAMME OF 1843 31-37
 
 xii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 MEDLEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 PAGK 
 
 THE HISTOBY OP ENGLISH SERFDOM 39-60 
 
 The advent of the ' mark ' theory, and its dominance in Oxford 
 
 about 1880 . . . . . , . . . . 39 
 The attack of Mr. Seebohm and M. Fustel . . . .41 
 
 Anticipated defence by Professor Vinogradoff . . . . 42 
 
 Character of his ' Villainage in England ' .... 43 
 
 The method of ' survival ' 44 
 
 Examples of this method of argument : 1. Bracton and 
 
 ' wainage ' 46 
 
 2. Bracton and free men holding in villeinage . . . . 46 
 
 3. Ancient demesne 47 
 
 4. The Hundredors 50 
 
 Supposed three stages of development : difference, however, 
 
 between legal and economic freedom 53 
 
 Supposed passage from the ' farm-system ' to the ' labour- 
 system : ' but the former rested on the latter . . . . 55 
 The possible implications of free virgates .... 56 
 Bearing of the open-field upon the question . . . . 57 
 Mr. Vinogradoff's tentative arguments sometimes become 
 positive conclusions 59 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON ' TOWNSHIP ' 61-79 
 
 Advent of the term ' township : ' its supposed meaning . . 61 
 
 The three passages in which ' tunscipe ' occurs . . . . 63 
 
 Its real meaning, the villagers 65 
 
 Later history of ' town ' and ' township ' 65 
 
 New England practice and de Tocqueville's example . . 69 
 
 Importance of a correct historical terminology . . . . 70 
 
 The equivalence of ' tun ' and ' villa ' 71 
 
 Prima facie reasons for likening the ' tun ' or ' villa ' to the 
 
 later manor 73 
 
 The alleged ' functions ' of the ' township ' . . .75 
 
 Supposed regular representation of the ' townships ' in the 
 courts of the hundred and county : the reeve and four best 
 
 men 77 
 
 The argument from ' survivals ' 79 
 
 PEOFESSOB ALLEN'S ' MONOGBAPHS AND ESSAYS "... 80-82 
 
 His place in the academic renaissance in America ... 80 
 
 On mediaeval freeholders, court baron, and ' town ' . . . 82
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MB. BOUND'S 'FEUDAL ENGLAND' . . -. . . . 83-86 
 His advance from the chroniclers to the ' records ' . . 83 
 
 His discovery of the distinction between the five-hide-unit 
 
 area, and the six-carucate-unit area . .... 84 
 His theory of the origin of knight's fees . . . . . 85 
 
 PKOFESSOB MAITLAND'S ' DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND ' . 87-91 
 
 His relation to Bishop Stubbs and Mr. Seebohm . . . 87 
 
 His picture of early Britain after the English Conquest : non- 
 manorial, but also non-communal 88 
 
 ' The red thread of the Norman Conquest ; ' and a suggested 
 
 Domesday meaning of ' manerium ' 89 
 
 Implications of his argument concerning the ' hide ' . . 90 
 
 MR. SEEBOHM'S 'TRIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES' .... 92-106 
 
 Eelation of this work to the ' English Village Community ' . 92 
 Mr. Seebohm now turns from the Eoman ' villa ' to ' tribal ' 
 
 practice in his search for manorial origins . . . . 93 
 His permanent contribution is his account of the Welsh 
 
 ' wele ' 94 
 
 Description of the manor of Aberffraw : the ' heredes ' with 
 
 their ' weles,' and the villeins holding in ' trefgevery ' . .97 
 The ' weles ' of the free tenants further described, from the 
 
 Extents 97 
 
 The evidence of the Welsh Codes : their rule as to inheritance 
 
 by the kindred-to-four-degrees made the explanation of the 
 
 'wele' 99 
 
 Argument as to the passage from a patriarchal tribalism to a 
 
 landed aristocracy 101 
 
 The ' taeogs ' or non-Cymry : their position according to the 
 
 Codes ; and the absence of inheritance .... 103 
 The food-rents from free men ; the ' tune ' pound and the 
 
 'villata' 104 
 
 Evidence from the ninth and sixth centuries .... 105 
 
 Reasons for caution . . . 105 
 
 ADDENDUM : the effects of Cunedda's conquest : the post- 
 
 medifflval history of Welsh tenancies 106 
 
 DR. GROSSMANN ON THE PEASANTS OF BRANDENBURG . . . 107-110 
 Manors (' Eittergiiter ') in Brandenburg from the time of the 
 
 colonisation 108 
 
 Evidence from the fifteenth century capable of more than one 
 
 interpretation 109 
 
 The alleged effects of the introduction of Eoman law . .110
 
 xiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PROFESSOR INAMA-STERNEGG'S GERMAN ECONOMIC HISTORY . 111-114 
 Significance of the appearance of such a treatise in 1879 . Ill 
 It illustrates, also, both the advantage and danger of a training 
 
 in economic theory 112 
 
 Its historical assumptions, and the scanty evidence adduced . 113 
 
 PROFESSOR MEITZEN'S ' SETTLEMENT OF THE GERMANS ' . . 115-131 
 
 Professor Meitzen's position among scholars .... 115 
 
 Character of his ' Siedelung und Agrarwesen ' . . . . 116 
 Its theory of a specifically German form of village : the 
 
 German ' Haufendorfer,' on purely German territory, as 
 
 contrasted with Celtic ' Einzelhofe ' to the west, and Slavonic 
 
 ' Runddorf er ' and ' Strassendorf er ' to the east . . .117 
 Importance of the field division into ' furlongs ' : ' Gewann- 
 
 dorfer ' 118 
 
 Account of the origin of the German village .... 118 
 
 Transition from pastoral life to tillage 119 
 
 Settlement of the common freemen in villages, while the 
 
 magnates keep the ' marks ' 120 
 
 Meitzen's peculiar use of the word ' mark ' .... 121 
 His explanation of the ' hundred ' as the grazing area required 
 
 by 120 pastoral families 122 
 
 And his explanation of the ' Hufen ' 124 
 
 Criticism of Meitzen's Central-Asian parallels . . . 125 
 
 His account of the origin of landlordship on Romance soil . 127 
 
 And of its entrance into the purely German territory . . . 129 
 Want of relation between his agrarian-economic material and 
 
 his historical theories 130 
 
 PROFESSOR KNAPP'S LECTURES 132-136 
 
 The work of Professor Knapp and his school . . . . 132 
 Reaction against the hitherto prevailing views of German 
 
 ' origins ' 134 
 
 The main movement of Carolingian times not the disappear- 
 ance of free properties, but the absorption of small lordships 
 
 by larger 135 
 
 Criticism of Meitzen's ' rationalistic ' version of earlier social 
 history 136 
 
 M. FLACH'S 'BEGINNINGS OF ANCIENT FRANCK ' . . . .137-143 
 His polemic against Fustel de Coulanges .... 137 
 
 The Vici ' of Celtic Gaul 138 
 
 The ' Vici ' of Roman Gaul 139 
 
 The ' Vici ' of^Germany 141 
 
 The ' Vici ' of Frankish Gaul . . . . . . .142 
 
 The problem of free v. dependent villages a quantitative one . 142
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MB. JENKS ON THE STATE AND THE CLAN 144-146 
 
 His key to mediaeval history 145 
 
 Vagueness in the conception of ' clan ' 145 
 
 Need for a more precise terminology 146 
 
 MR. BADEN-POWELL'S ' INDIAN VILLAGE COMMUNITY ' . . 147-151 
 
 The Comparative Method : its use and abuse .... 147 
 Its application to the question of the origin of property 
 
 inland 148 
 
 Maine's 'Village Communities : ' its influence and defi- 
 ciencies 149 
 
 The ' Baiyatwari ' village, and the ' Joint or Shared ' village . 150 
 Primitive right to land based on cultivation, subject to a 
 
 certain control by the clan 150 
 
 PROFESSOR WIGMORE ON LAND TENURE IN JAPAN . . . 152-156 
 
 Similarity between mediaeval institutions in Japan and 
 
 Europe . 152 
 
 The ' shoyen/ or manors 153 
 
 A parallel to ' frankpledge ' 154 
 
 Japanese serfdom the result of conquest 155 
 
 The early ' uji ' (' clans ') with their lands and serfs . . 155 
 Customs apparently communal sometimes the result of 
 
 governmental pressure 156 
 
 PROFESSOR HILDEBRAND'S ' LAW AND CUSTOM ' 157-160 
 
 Appropriateness of the book from his father's son . . . 157 
 His complete departure from the current German tradition of 
 
 social origins 159 
 
 Comparison with M. Fustel de Coulanges .... 159 
 
 His view that landlordship and serfdom began with tillage . . 160 
 
 ON AN ALLEGED ENGLISH FASHION : THE WORD ' MARK ' . 161-166 
 
 Professor Maitland's account of ' the true Markgenossen- 
 
 schaft,' following Meitzen ....... 161 
 
 This a departure from the teaching of von Maurer . . . 162 
 
 And of his followers : e.g. Boscher, Brunner, Lamprecht . . 163 
 
 And of Waitz, and Hanssen 165 
 
 The alleged English fashion merely a copy of a German usage . 166 
 [With this group of agrarian papers may be conveniently 
 read the first part of the review of Nitzsch, infra, pp. 242- 
 245, and the last part of the review of Mr. Bound's 
 ' Commune of London,' infra, pp. 236, 237]
 
 xvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 MEDLEVAL UEBAN 
 
 PAQK 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OP TOWN LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES . . 167-212 
 
 The problems of constitution and economic condition 
 
 inseparable 167 
 
 Sketch of earlier theories : Arnold and the Ottonian privileges ; 
 Nitzsch and the ' Ministeriales ; ' von Maurer and the 
 
 ' mark ; ' Wilda and the gild . . . . . . 169 
 
 Gierke's expansion of Wilda's theory 170 
 
 Nitzsch on the North-German towns 171 
 
 French writers : Thierry parallel to Wilda ; and Giry and 
 
 Luchaire to Gierke 172 
 
 The question reopened by von Below . . . . . 173 
 
 He found the origin of the town in the rural commune . . 174 
 But Sohm led the discussion in another direction by ascribing 
 
 the origin of the civic constitution to market privileges . 175 
 Gross and Hegel, however, sharply distinguish between the city 
 
 government and the merchant gild 176 
 
 Four recent surveys of the subject 177 
 
 M . Flach : His division of French towns into old and new . . 178 
 The old towns : the ' cite ' of Eoman descent, with its ' chateau,' 
 
 and the adjacent ' bourg ' 179 
 
 Extreme partition of authority therein 180 
 
 The new towns: growing up around a castle or religious 
 
 house 181 
 
 Importance attached by M. Flach to the ' sauvete' . . . 181 
 Military, ecclesiastical, and commercial elements in town 
 
 growth 183 
 
 Growth of a sense of corporate life within several groups of 
 
 townsmen 184 
 
 All these groups bound together by the sworn ' commune ' . 186 
 
 Merits and defects of M. Flach's treatment of the subject . . 187 
 
 Dr. Varges : his assignment to towns of four characteristics . 188 
 
 The town as a stronghold 189 
 
 The town as enjoying a special peace : new theory as to its 
 
 origin 190 
 
 The town as a place of trade : new view as to ' mercatus' . . 190 
 
 The town as a community of public law .... 191 
 
 Criticism of Dr. Varges's conception of ' Burg ' . . . . 193 
 
 And of his definition of ' mercatus ' 194
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OP CONTENTS xvii 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS or TOWN LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. (cont.) : PAOB 
 
 M. Pirenne : his view of the fortunes of the Roman cities . 195 
 
 The towns of the Middle Ages the creation of the merchants 196 
 
 Their settlements in the ' faubourgs ' ... , . 197 
 
 The merchant gild . . . . ... % . . 198 
 
 The town peace : explained as a permanent ' state of siege ' . 199 
 
 Character of the urban tribunal 200 
 
 Vagueness in M. Pirenne's picture of the merchant body, and 
 
 of its relation to pre-existing institutions .... 201 
 
 Dr. Eeutgen : his view as to the rise of the town community 
 
 from the rural commune 203 
 
 The town courts, 'hundred ' courts 204 
 
 Town law arose from the town peace : new theory as to the 
 
 origin of this peace in the king's peace of a fortress . . 205 
 
 This view of the meaning of ' Burgbann ' a mere conjecture . 206 
 And the ' autonomy ' of the rural commune an unproved 
 
 assumption 206 
 
 Danger in neglecting the inhabitants of the Boman towns . . 208 
 
 And the seigneurial side of the rural commune . . . 208 
 
 Tendency to evacuate ' merchant ' of all economic significance 208 
 Difficulty in understanding the relation of merchants to 
 craftsmen probably due to changes in the economic activity 
 
 of the craftsmen 209 
 
 Necessity of distinguishing between ' town ' as a legal concep- 
 tion and ' town ' as an economic conception . . . . 211 
 And of a greater regard to chronology 211 
 
 ADDENDUM : the Norwich ' cives ' and the Norwich craft gilds . . 212 
 PROFESSOR GROSS'S ' GILD MERCHANT ' 213-218 
 
 An example of scientific internationalism . . . . . 213 
 Substantial character of Professor Gross's achievement : proof 
 
 of a distinct stage in English economic development . . 214 
 
 The relation of the gild merchant to the craft gilds still obscure 215 
 
 Were the craftsmen usually burghers 216 
 
 And able to fulfil other requirements for entering the merchant 
 
 gild? 217 
 
 Continental analogies, if not to be pressed, not to be disregarded 218 
 
 PROFESSOR VON BELOW 's TRACTATES 219-226 
 
 Their place in the discussion of municipal ' origins ' . . 219 
 They trace the origin of the town to the ' Ortsgemeinde, 1 the 
 
 rural commune or township 221 
 
 The place of the lord minimised 222 
 
 a
 
 xviii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PROFESSOR VON BELOW'S TRACTATES (cont.) : PAGE 
 
 Von Below emphasises only the passive elements in the 
 
 development 223 
 
 Dr. Doren's survey of the history of merchant gilds . . . 224 
 Light cast by von Below and by Doren on the collision 
 
 between merchants and craftsmen 225 
 
 MRS. GREEN'S ' TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY ' . 227-230 
 
 The interest and merits of the book 227 
 
 Its defects, an over-emphatic style and a pro-municipal bias 228 
 
 PROFESSOR MAITLAND'S ' TOWNSHIP AND BOROUGH ' . . 231-233 
 
 The ' garrison theory ' 232 
 
 The borough also as a ' tun,' and as the market and ' moot- 
 stow ' of its shire . . 232 
 
 Growth of the community into the corporation . . . 233 
 
 And parallel growth of the idea of property . . . . 233 
 
 MR. BOUND'S ' COMMUNE OF LONDON ' 234-237 
 
 His discovery of the oath to the Commune (A.D. 1191), and of 
 
 the oath of the Twenty-Four (A.D. 1205) 235 
 
 Probability that London obtained a fully developed Commune 
 
 similar to that of Bouen 235 
 
 Mr. Bound on the study of place-names 236 
 
 His criticism of the alleged patronymic implication of the 
 
 suffix -ing 236 
 
 And his argument based on its appearance in the names of 
 
 mere farmsteads .... .... 237 
 
 PROFESSOR PIRENNE ON THE FLEMISH TOWNS . . . 238-241 
 
 Character of his History of Belgium 238 
 
 His account of the textile crafts of the Flemish towns . . 240 
 Their economic position not that of the typical mediaeval 
 
 giflr, but of industries in the ' domestic ' stage . . . 241 
 
 KARL WILHELM NFTZSCH 242-248 
 
 The first historian to make the economic element the dominat- 
 ing one 242 
 
 His employment of the conceptions ' Natural- ' and ' Geld- 
 
 wirthschaft' 243 
 
 On the association of serfdom with a settled agriculture . . 243 
 
 The ' Ministeriales ' and the nascent burgher-body . . 245
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xix 
 
 KABL WILHELM NITZSCH (cont.) : PAGE 
 
 Modern German history, the story of the mutual relations of 
 the ' Junkerthum ' (squirearchy) and ' Biirgerthum ' . . 246 
 
 Origin of the municipal constitution 247 
 
 The share of the craft gilds in municipal government in North 
 Germany and South-Western Germany respectively . . 247 
 
 JOURNEYMEN'S CLUBS . 249-262 
 
 Dr. Schoenlank's book on the Journeymen's Associations of 
 Nuremberg in the sixteenth century 249 
 
 These associations practically identical with the ' Schenken ' . 251 
 
 Failure of the attempt to abolish the ' Schenken ' by imperial 
 legislation 252 
 
 The ' Umbfrag,' or exclusive right of the Journeymen's Asso- 
 ciations to find work for newcomers to the town . . 253 
 
 Comparison between the conditions of the sixteenth century 
 and to-day 253 
 
 The drinking usages of the ' Schenken ' .... 254 
 
 Similarity between the ' trade clubs ' of England in the 
 eighteenth century, with their ' houses of call,' and the 
 contemporary German ' Schenken ' 257 
 
 Probable antiquity of certain trade union usages . . . 259 
 
 Conditions in a skilled trade as late as forty years ago : the 
 hatters' societies 259 
 
 The turn-house (like the German ' Herberge ') ; the drinking 
 usages ; the jurisdiction of the ' battery ' presided over by 
 the ' constable,' and of the ' dozening ' 260 
 
 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 MONTCHRTIEN 263-267 
 
 Exaggerated estimate by some modern economists of the 
 
 historical importance of certain early writers . . . 263 
 Montchretien the first to write a book under the title ' Political 
 
 Economy,' but not a great economist 264 
 
 His indebtedness to Bodin for his ' formula of protectionism ' 264 
 
 And for some other parts of his treatise 265 
 
 And to Laffemas for his proposals as to manufactures . . 266 
 
 Relation of the treatise to Montchretien's business interests . 266 
 
 Value of the book . 267
 
 xx ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAOK 
 
 THE TOBY ORIGIN OF FBEE TBADE POLICY . . 268-803 
 
 Sir Dudley North and Nicholas Barbon alleged free traders in 
 the modern sense, and Sir Josiah Child and Charles 
 Davenant, supposed to be writers of unusually liberal views 268 
 
 But these were all Tories. . 269 
 
 Connection between their views on trade and their political 
 sympathies 270 
 
 The Prohibition of 1678 the starting-point in the history of 
 Whig foreign policy . i 271 
 
 Davenant's account of the origin of the outcry against France 272 
 
 Fortrey's alarmist pamphlet, 1663 ; reprinted 1673 . . 273 
 
 Colbert's Tariff of 1667, and the growing consumption of 
 French goods 273 
 
 The Commission of London Merchants . '. . . . 274 
 
 The Old Scheme, 1674 . . . . * ... 275 
 
 Parliamentary debates, 1675 . . . . i . . 277 
 
 Passage of the Act of Prohibition of 1678 : first period of ex- 
 clusion of French goods, 1678-1685 278 
 
 Eeassuring arguments of ' England's Greatest Happiness ' . 279 
 
 Which follows Mun in appealing to the idea of a general 
 balance, as against that of a particular balance ; and also 
 argues from ' the signs of wealth ' . . . . 279 
 
 The government of James II. substitutes heavy duties for 
 prohibition : political activity of North and Davenant . . 282 
 
 The Revolution government reverts to prohibition : second 
 period of exclusion, 1688-1696 283 
 
 Economic literature of the period : the chief questions at 
 issue 284 
 
 Sir Josiah Child : repeats the teaching of Mun and 'England's 
 Greatest Happiness ' 285 
 
 And discredits the comparison of export and import statistics, 
 even as a test of the general balance . .... 286 
 
 In favour, on the whole, of a policy of commercial freedom ; 
 and yet has not abandoned the principles of restriction . . 287 
 
 A mercantilist : but mercantilism itself was in a sense a fore- 
 runner of the school of natural liberty . . . . . 287 
 
 Nicholas Barbon : makes vague assertions as against the 
 Whigs which contain elements of truth, but he does not 
 advance in argument beyond Child 288 
 
 And has no theoretic answer to the Whig difficulty as to the 
 payment of foreign balances . . , a . . . . 291 
 
 Sir Dudley North : his famous propositions are trite observa- 
 tions, showing no advance beyond Mun 293
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OP CONTENTS xxi 
 
 THE TORT ORIGIN OF FREE TRADE POLICY (cont.) : PAGK 
 
 The main purpose of his tractate to protest against a par- 
 ticular method of reforming the currency . . 294 
 
 And several of his large generalisations are intended to apply 
 to the currency problem . . . . . . . . . 296 
 
 As to trade, he does not advance beyond the rejection of the 
 particular-balance idea 297 
 
 Comparison of the Tory writers with John Locke, who, in 
 policy less liberal, was in theory more clear-sighted . . 298 
 
 Third period of exclusion, 1704-1713 299 
 
 Party struggle over Bolingbroke's proposed commercial treaty 299 
 
 The writings of Charles Davenant, the most considerable of 
 the Tory advocates of ' free trade ' 300 
 
 Like North and Child, he makes sweeping assertions of a 
 very ' enlightened ' character 300 
 
 But the inferences drawn from them do not go further than a 
 rejection of the particular-balance idea in favour of the 
 'universal' . . . .- . . . . . 302 
 
 No Tory writer before Hume saw his way to a theoretic ' refu- 
 tation ' of the doctrine of the Balance of Trade . . . 303 
 
 Political significance of Adam Smith 303 
 
 Continuity of Whig commercial policy, 1678-1786 . . . 303 
 
 OOURNAY . . ... . . . . . . .304-30? 
 
 Gournay apparently a liberal mercantilist .... 304 
 
 Yet M. Schelle, in his recent ' Life,' ascribes to him com- 
 pletely laissez-faire principles with regard to interest . . 305 
 
 And with regard to foreign trade, in order to save his 
 
 economic orthodoxy 306 
 
 The doge ascribed to Turgot is unsatisfactory evidence . . 306 
 
 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA 1660-1760 
 
 THE COMMERCIAL LEGISLATION OF ENGLAND AND THE AMERICAN 
 
 COLONIES, 1660-1760 . ^ . . .... . 309-335 
 
 Adam Smith's condemnation of the commercial policy of 
 England 309 
 
 Supposed injurious effects in America ; by Mr. Lecky made 
 the ultimate cause of the American Revolution . . . 310 
 
 The purpose of the paper to show that, whatever the motives 
 of the legislation, its effects were beneficial to the American 
 colonies . . 311
 
 xxii ANALYTICAL TABLE OP CONTENTS 
 
 THE COMMERCIAL LEGISLATION OF ENGLAND, <fec. (cont.) : PAGE 
 
 1. The Navigation Laws proper 311 
 
 They stimulated the growth of New England shipbuilding . . 313 
 Some general considerations as to the benefit to the American 
 
 Colonies of the naval power of England 314 
 
 2. The Enumeration 315 
 
 In the case of furs and copper this was of no moment what- 
 ever -. 315 
 
 In the case of rice it somewhat interfered with the demand 
 during a part of the period ; but in the last thirty years it 
 affected the situation but slightly, if at all . . . . 316 
 
 The case of tobacco the most important 316 
 
 England the natural entrepdt for the supply of all that area 
 of Europe which admitted American tobacco . . . . 317 
 
 Any possible diminution of the European market more than 
 made up for by a monopoly of the English market . . 318 
 
 The importation into America of European commodities . . 319 
 [See also the following paper] 
 
 3. The restrictions on American manufactures . . . . 320 
 Improbability that woollen manufactures would have been 
 
 established in America had there been no restriction : 
 
 opinions of Franklin and Adam Smith . . . .321 
 Similar improbability as to the manufacture of hats . . . 325 
 Effect of the restriction on the iron manufacture : attempt to 
 
 compensate the colonies by other legislation . . . 326 
 Effect of the English policy to encourage the production of 
 
 naval stores " . 328 
 
 The one great exception : the unenforced Molasses Act . . 329 
 
 Its enforcement would have dislocated American trade . . 330 
 
 Benefit to the colonies from the investment of English capital 332 
 No evidence of general irritation in America with the Acts of 
 
 Trade before 1760 332 
 
 The rise of critical historical scholarship in America . . 334 
 
 AMERICAN SMUGGLING, 1660-1760 336-360 
 
 Hesitation in accepting the preceding argument in the one 
 point of importation from Europe 336 
 
 Argument based on the alleged prevalence of smuggling . . 337 
 
 The evasion of the Molasses Act not pertinent to the present 
 issue 337 
 
 Other forms of ' illicit ' trade which need to be eliminated from 
 the discussion ... 338
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxiii 
 
 AMERICAN SMUGGLING, 1660-1760 (cont.) : PAGE 
 
 Including trade with the King's enemies 339 
 
 The question that of the proportion of illicit to licit trade . 341 
 
 Date of most of the evidence hitherto produced . . . . 341 
 
 The case of Peter Faneuil 342 
 
 The opinion of Joshua Gee 343 
 
 Significance of the fact that American trade with England did 
 
 not diminish after Independence 344 
 
 Disappointment of the French government 345 
 
 Statements of Lord Sheffield as to the nature of the legal and 
 
 illegal trade of America respectively 346 
 
 As to woollens and other manufactures supplied by England . 347 
 
 As to linens and tea, supplied through England . . . 349 
 
 As to wine 351 
 
 Conclusion : the illicit trade with Europe comparatively 
 
 inconsiderable 354 
 
 Causes of this : cheapness of English goods, convenience of 
 
 making up assorted general cargoes in England, and the 
 
 long credits given by English merchants 354 
 
 When were the Acts of Trade first regarded as a grievance ? . 355 
 
 The Otis legend 356 
 
 Minor causes of discontent in the colonies : the lumbermen ; 
 
 the Congregational ministers ; the supporters of the Land 
 
 Bank 358 
 
 The fundamental causes of the Eevolution . 360 
 
 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 THE CANADIAN SUGAR COMBINE 361-377 
 
 The combination of the Wholesale Grocers of Canada for 
 
 regulating the sale of sugar 362 
 
 Causes of the combination : ' cutting prices ' . . . 364 
 
 Objections urged by dissentient wholesalers .... 366 
 
 Grievances of certain retailers 368 
 
 The attitude of the modern economist toward competition . 371 
 
 The attitude of economists of a past generation . . . 373 
 
 Actual results of the ' combine ' so far 374 
 
 AMERICAN TRUSTS 378-393 
 
 The anti-trust movement 379 
 
 Form of organisation of the ' trust ' properly so called . . 380
 
 xxiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 AMERICAN TRUSTS (cont.) : PAGE 
 
 Recent disappearance of the ' trust ' form, but no practical 
 
 change in the real situation 381 
 
 The tendency towards combination not a temporary pheno- 
 menon . 382 
 
 Nor in any way exceptional 382 
 
 Supposed connection of the combinations with defective or 
 excessive governmental action, and especially with pro- 
 tection . 382 
 
 Deeper causes, in the very nature of ' the great industry ' . 384 
 Competition rendered more acute by the increasing use of 
 
 fixed capital 384 
 
 Trusts, the reaction from extreme competition . - k + . . 385 
 
 The effect of the trusts on prices 385 
 
 And on the position of the labourer 386 
 
 Position of the combination in industrial evolution . . . 387 
 
 Inadequacy as a ' remedy ' of the removal of protection . . 388 
 Ultimate duty of the government to control prices : but for this 
 
 it needs an efficient administrative machinery ... . 388 
 Need for more consideration of the problem of non-competitive 
 
 determination of prices -.-.'"*. 389 
 
 And for the investigation of actual conditions. - . . . 390 
 
 APPENDIX : the report of the U.S. Industrial Commission . . 391 
 
 MR. SMITH'S NEW TRADES COMBINATION, IN THK ENGLISH MID- 
 LANDS . . .... . ' . ' " . . 394-398 
 
 The Birmingham Bedstead Alliance 394 
 
 The principle of ' taking out costs ' 395 
 
 The new feature in Mr. Smith's plan of combination : a coali- 
 tion with the workmen's unions to enforce the agreement . 395 
 Likelihood that this attempt to create a vertical organisation 
 
 of the field of industry will be copied elsewhere in England. 397 
 
 The weak point of the scheme : the interest of the consumer . 397 
 
 Some points on which further information is required . . 398 
 
 CO-OPERATIVE PRODUCTION IN ENGLAND .... 399-404 
 Contrast between the position of co-operative production in 
 
 England in 1882 and 1898 399 
 
 The new type of productive society . . . . . 401 
 
 Its dependence on the distributive co-operative market . . 402 
 
 And on capital provided by the distributive stores . . . 403 
 
 Competition between the productive societies .... 403 
 The larger productive societies not in actual working very 
 
 unlike the Wholesale . 404
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxv 
 
 PAGB 
 
 THE ECONOMIC ATMOSPHERE OF AMERICA : ' THE AMERICAN 
 SPIRIT' 405-422 
 
 America the home of ' individualism : ' some comments on the 
 
 term 405 
 
 Historical sources of the spirit . . . . . . . 406 
 
 Effects of modern immigration and of the westward move- 
 ment , V . ' . . 408 
 
 Forces affecting the entrepreneurs : the nature of the market ; 
 
 ' mass production ' ?- . 408 
 
 Their claim for a free hand as a moral right .... 409 
 Competition of the newer parts of the country with the older . 410 
 
 The case of New England 411 
 
 How this is facilitated by modern transportation . . . 412 
 Connection between a ' dynamic ' society and the function of 
 
 the entrepreneur 412 
 
 Effect upon the temper of the employers of the substitution 
 
 of foreign for native labour 413 
 
 Forces affecting the employe's : slow growth of esprit de corps 
 
 and of trade unionism ; recent changes in this matter . . 415 
 American megalomania and its effect in the labour world . 416 
 
 The political environment 417 
 
 Effect of the political system in weakening the sense of re- 
 sponsibility 417 
 
 And in depriving the State of the services of men of the 
 
 highest ability 419 
 
 The bilateral function of the Boss as intermediary between 
 State or municipal governments and business interests . 420 
 
 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 SIR GEORGE NICHOLLS 423-427 
 
 Appropriateness of the new edition of Nicholls's History of the 
 
 Poor Law 423 
 
 Sketch of his life 424 
 
 His work as Poor Law Commissioner 425 
 
 Subsequent departures from the programme of 1834 . . . 426 
 
 ARNOLD TOYNBEE 428-431 
 
 Professor Montague's biography 428 
 
 Toynbee's real place in the history of English thought . . 429 
 Some reminiscences 430 
 
 b
 
 xxvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 EDWABD A. FREEMAN . . 432-439 
 
 The ' Life and Letters ' 432 
 
 Causes which contributed to his early success : his expression 
 
 of the enthusiasm for nationality 434 
 
 And his response to the craving for precedent on the part of 
 
 constitutional reformers 435 
 
 Causes which have contributed to the recent neglect of his 
 
 writings; his limited conception of history and want of 
 
 interest in economic conditions ...... 436 
 
 And his imperfect sense of historical evolution . . . 438 
 The permanent merits of his work . . . . - . . 438 
 
 LOED ACTON . . ..... . , . 440-444 
 
 Lord Acton's family history and career . . - . . . 440 
 His inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at 
 
 Cambridge 442 
 
 His attitude towards Liberty, and towards Morality in 
 
 History 443 
 
 ACADEMIC 
 
 JOWETT AND THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL 445-463 
 
 A time of halt in American university development . . . 445 
 
 Jowett's ' Life ' suggests some consideration of academic ideals 446 
 
 The chronology of Jowett's life 446 
 
 His reputation based mainly on his work as Master of Balliol 446 
 
 His views as to the functions of the university . . . . 447 
 
 The tutorial system : what it is 449 
 
 Its introduction into Oxford 450 
 
 Jowett, in large measure, creator of the present tutorial ideal . 451 
 
 The tutorial theory primarily pastoral . .... 452 
 
 Effects of the system upon the undergraduates . . . 453 
 
 And upon the tutors themselves 454 
 
 The tutorial burden increased by the ' combined lecture ' 
 
 system 455 
 
 The other academic ideal, that of research and learning, 
 
 advocated by Mark Pattison 456 
 
 Merits and defects of the Oxford of to-day .... 457 
 New forces beginning to work the advent of the graduate 
 
 student ... , . 458
 
 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxvii 
 
 JOWETT AND THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL (cOUt.) ' PAGE 
 
 The situation at Harvard; the professorial ideal in the 
 
 teaching body, and the tutorial ideal in the constituency . 458 
 
 Dangers to learning in the tendencies of American life . . 459 
 
 The position of instructors and assistants in Harvard . . 460 
 
 Too much supervision and too many tests ' . 461 
 
 The elective system still on trial 462 
 
 The place of beauty in university life 462 
 
 SCHOLARSHIPS AT OXFOBD AND AT HARVARD .... 464-471 
 
 Position at Oxford of a scholar of his college .... 464 
 
 Contrast with Harvard 465 
 
 Explanation in the restriction of scholarships at Harvard to 
 
 pecuniary need 465 
 
 The opposite system in Oxford 466 
 
 Beneficial results of the Oxford system 467 
 
 It furnishes the schools with higher standards than the 
 
 entrance examinations 468 
 
 ' The ladder from the board school to the university ' . . . 469 
 Impressions as to the present bestowal of pecuniary aid at 
 
 Harvard . . 469 
 
 The recent creation of new precedents 471 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OP FRIBOURG IN SWITZERLAND . . . 472-476 
 
 The creation of the university 472 
 
 Its internal history : its microcosmic interest .... 473 
 The memorial of the resigning German professors and the 
 
 answer of the government 474
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 ON THE 
 STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOKY 1 
 
 THE teacher in England or America who seeks to explain 
 his attitude towards economic science does so at the present 
 time under peculiarly favourable conditions. There reigns 
 just now a spirit of tolerance and mutual charity among 
 political economists such as has not always been found 
 within their circle. It is not that we have returned to the 
 confident dogmatism and unanimity of the last generation 
 of the period which extended from the publication of John 
 Stuart Mill's treatise to the sounding of the first note of 
 revolt in Cliffe Leslie's essays. It is rather that, though 
 there are still marked divergencies, the followers of one 
 method no longer maintain that it is the only method of 
 scientific investigation ; that, on the contrary, the believers 
 in induction now recognise more fully the value of deduc- 
 tion; that the most abstract sometimes refer to facts and 
 the most concrete occasionally make use of abstraction ; 
 and, what is far more important, that they are inclined, 
 whatever their own turn of thought may be, to let others 
 
 1 [An Introductory Lecture delivered before Harvard University, 
 January 4, 1893, on entering upon the Professorship of Economic 
 History. Printed in the Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics, 
 January 1893 ; and translated into German in the Beilage zur Allge- 
 meinen Zeitung (Munich), July 11 and 12, 1894.] 
 
 B
 
 2 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 alone who walk not with them, or even to cheer them on 
 their way in the benevolent hope that they may arrive at 
 something worth the getting. It has now become almost a 
 commonplace even with economists of the older school that 
 students may usefully be led to work in different ways, 
 owing to ' varieties of mind, of temper, of training, and of 
 opportunities.' l In England an association has at last been 
 founded which includes among its members most of those 
 writers and teachers who are seriously interested in econo- 
 mics, and a journal has been established which welcomes 
 contributions from every side with admirable impartiality. 
 In America an association, which has for some years 
 been doing excellent work, but which has hitherto been 
 a little one-sided in its membership, has just widened its 
 borders, and brought in even those against whose teach- 
 ings it was once its business to protest. The controversies 
 which break the monotony of life for our German colleagues 
 have now but attaint echo among English-speaking econo- 
 mists ; the personal antagonisms which separate French 
 schools are altogether absent ; and to most of us the recent 
 exchange of hostilities between two distinguished English 
 economists has seemed almost an anachronism. It is 
 therefore with something of trepidation that I venture upon 
 what may possibly look like a renewal of old controversies. 
 Yet it is encouraging to think that, even if one had some- 
 thing very ' extreme ' to say, one might now count upon 
 being heard with patience and urbanity. 
 
 It would be idle to deny that the hopes which were 
 entertained by the younger men of the ' historical ' or 
 ' inductive ' school in Germany some twenty years ago, and 
 by Cliffe Leslie and more recently by Dr. Ingram among 
 English writers, have not hitherto been realised. They 
 looked for a complete and rapid transformation of economic 
 science ; and it needs only a glance at the most widely 
 used textbooks of to-day to see that no such complete 
 transformation has taken place. Of this disappointment a 
 
 1 Marshall, Principles, p. 92 (2nd ed.).
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 3 
 
 partial explanation may be found in the fact that the 
 historical economists were still so far under the spell of the 
 old discipline as to continue to conceive of economics under 
 the forms made familiar by the manuals. They still had 
 before their eyes the customary rubrics of Production, 
 Distribution, and Exchange ; they still handled the sacred 
 terms Value, Supply, Demand, Capital, Kent, and the rest 
 terms which, to use Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, were 
 just as much in need of depolarisation as the terms of 
 theology ; they still looked forward to framing ' laws ' 
 similar in character, however different in content, to the 
 ' laws ' in possession of the field. Aiming, as they uncon- 
 sciously did, at the construction of a body of general 
 propositions dealing with just the same relations between 
 individuals as the older school had given its attention to, it 
 was natural that they should fall back on the use of that 
 deductive method which is certainly of service for the 
 analysis of modern competitive conditions, although they 
 had begun by unnecessarily rejecting it. And thus the 
 ' methodological ' arguments of the orthodox may seem to 
 have gained an easy victory. 
 
 I shall attempt to show later that this is not an adequate 
 version of the matter ; that during this period the historical 
 movement has been slowly pushing its way towards its own 
 true field of work. Even in its relation to current economic 
 teaching, it has performed a work of vital importance. It 
 has been no mere aberration, passing away and leaving no 
 trace ; nor is it quite a complete account of it to say that it 
 has contributed useful elements which have been incorporated 
 in the body of economic science. It has done more than 
 this : it has changed the whole mental attitude of economists 
 towards their own teaching. The acceptance of the two 
 great principles which are but different forms of the same 
 idea that economic conclusions are relative to given condi- 
 tions, and that they possess only hypothetical validity, is at 
 last a part of the mental habit of economists. The same is 
 true of the conviction that economic considerations are not 
 the only ones of which we must take account in judging of 
 
 B2
 
 4 PKELIMINAKIES 
 
 social phenomena, and that economic forces are not the only 
 forces which move men. It need hardly be said that all this 
 was recognised in word long ago ; but it may be left to the 
 verdict of those who are conversant with the literature of 
 the last generation whether these convictions were really 
 underlying and fruitful parts of daily thought, as they are 
 now tending to be. The remark, indeed, is not out of place 
 in passing, that, although this salutary conversion may be 
 discerned among professional economists, it has hardly taken 
 place so completely as one could wish with the educated 
 public, and that historical zealots may still do good service 
 in insisting on these well-worn platitudes. 
 
 The altered mental attitude of the theoretic economists 
 themselves towards their own doctrine is so much the most 
 important result, from the point of view of current teach- 
 ing, of the historical movement that it dwarfs its other 
 effects in the same direction. But these other effects are 
 well worth looking at ; and they are evident enough, if we 
 turn over the two most important of modern treatises, the 
 ' Principles ' of Professor Marshall and the ' Lehrbuch ' of 
 Professor Wagner. Professor Marshall so clearly realises 
 that the understanding of modern conditions is assisted by a 
 consideration of their genesis that he introduces his work by 
 two chapters on ' The Growth of Free Industry and Enter- 
 prise/ and by another chapter on ' The Growth of Economic 
 Science." So, again, his discussion of Population is preceded 
 by a history of the doctrine, and a history of population 
 itself in England. His treatment of Industrial Organisation 
 consists largely of historical reflections. The theory of 
 Distribution is introduced by a sketch of its history, and the 
 doctrine of Kent is considered in relation to early forms 
 of land tenure. With Professor Wagner the influence of 
 historical thought is even more marked. As every one is 
 aware who has had occasion to consult the recent volumes 
 of his ' Finanzwissenschaft,' his accumulation of historical 
 material has grown so fast that it is threatening to become 
 unwieldy. A more convincing evidence of his familiarity 
 with historical modes of thought is presented in many parts
 
 ON THE STUDY OP ECONOMIC HISTOEY 5 
 
 of his treatment of general theory ; e.g. in his acceptance 
 of the position that ' capital,' as it is now understood, is an 
 ' historical ' and not an eternally necessary ' category.' He 
 even attempts to formulate an historical law a law of the 
 course of economic evolution and that in a matter which 
 touches modern problems very closely ; to wit, his ' law of 
 the increasing extension of public and state activity.' That 
 Wagner should to-day be regarded, and should regard him- 
 self, as a champion of abstraction and deduction as against 
 the ' extreme Historismus ' though just enough in the 
 main has in it something of the irony of circumstances. It 
 reminds one of the observation of John Stuart Mill that the 
 great advantage from the presence of extremists is that 
 any course short of the extreme gains the charm of ' modera- 
 tion.' 
 
 It need hardly be said with regard to the examples just 
 given that, suggestive as such historical reflections and 
 generalisations may be, they are not to be regarded as 
 necessarily either accurate or desirable methods of using 
 historical material. They illustrate, however and that is 
 all I wish to show the influence, to a large extent the 
 unrealised influence, of the Zeitgeist even over writers who 
 wish to carry on the old traditions. 
 
 In the wider issue of the comparative merits of induction 
 and deduction, it may be observed that conservative econo- 
 mists themselves no longer employ the sweeping language 
 in favour of deduction which characterised their predecessors. 
 They have discovered, like M. Jourdain with his prose, that 
 in one very important field, that of Production, they have 
 been inductive all along without knowing it. 1 It is further 
 allowed by recognised authorities that ' within the province 
 of descriptive and classificatory economics there is unlimited 
 scope for valuable economic work.' 2 And accordingly we 
 see a series of useful studies in modern industrial life 
 studies largely historical appearing under the highest 
 
 1 Sidgwick, Principles, Introduction, chap. ii. 1. 
 
 2 Keynes, Scope and Method of Political Economy, p. 166.
 
 6 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 economic patronage. 1 Even the pages of the Harvard 
 ' Quarterly Journal of Economics ' the peculiar home of 
 theory furnish articles on the history of the tariff or of the 
 currency ; though it must be allowed that even the severest 
 theorists have sometimes coquetted with facts when they 
 approached these particular topics. It is true that we are 
 cautioned that ' the knowledge of particular facts, which is 
 thus afforded, does not in itself constitute the end and aim 
 of economic science.' 2 But we will not be distressed by this 
 if only the work of inquiry will go on. It marks the awaken- 
 ing or the re-awakening in American and English eco- 
 nomics of a sacred passion for the observation of real life, 
 of which it has too long been devoid. 
 
 I have, however, already remarked that, while thus 
 affecting the character of the teaching of economic theory, 
 the historical movement has pursued its way, and is now 
 settling down into a channel of its own. This is none other 
 than the actual investigation of economic history itself. This 
 may perhaps be a somewhat surprising remark. It may be 
 asked, ' What, then, have the economists of that school been 
 doing hitherto ? ' It will, however, I think be found that 
 the creators of the school were rather men who had been 
 touched by the historical thought around them, and inspired 
 by its ideas, than original investigators. This was not to 
 their discredit : it was the result of the situation. But to-day 
 the leaders of the school are throwing themselves into 
 detailed research, and are feeling their way towards inde- 
 pendent historical construction. We have only to look at 
 the publications of Professor Schmoller, of Berlin, and of the 
 body of fellow-workers he has gathered around him, or at 
 the large programme of inquiry into agrarian history which 
 Professor Knapp, of Strasburg, and his circle have put before 
 themselves, 3 to discover how strong is the current in this 
 
 1 E.g. Price's Industrial Peace, with preface by Professor Marshall ; 
 and the other publications of the Toynbee Trust. 2 Keynes, p. 167. 
 
 3 The reader who is unacquainted with the really considerable work 
 undertaken by Professor Knapp and his friends will find some account
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 7 
 
 direction. And with this serious engagement in historical 
 inquiry has come a clearer perception of the nature of the 
 generalisations towards which that inquiry must work. It 
 is seen that these will not be mere corrections or amplifica- 
 tions of current economic doctrines : they will rather be con- 
 clusions as to the character and sequence of the stages in 
 economic development. The point of view is here no longer 
 that of a bargain between individuals in given social condi- 
 tions, but of the life and movement of whole industries and 
 classes, of the creation and modification of social mechanism, 
 of the parallel progress and interaction of economic pheno- 
 mena and economic thought. The studies of the school are 
 no longer individualist and psychological, but collectivist and 
 institutional. To help out my meaning by two hackneyed 
 but convenient phrases, the ' laws ' of which they think are 
 ' dynamic ' rather than ' static ; ' and they aim at presenting 
 the ' philosophy ' of economic history. And thus their in- 
 terest in any one period is not that they may directly compare 
 it with the present or any other period, but because every 
 period may furnish them with points from which they may 
 determine the curve of economic evolution. 1 
 
 It has been inevitable that, with such an ideal before 
 him, the leader of this newer historical school, Gustav 
 Schmoller, should sometimes have spoken slightingly of the 
 attempt to continue the old work of deductive argumenta- 
 tion : it was inevitable that the theorists he has in mind 
 should retort with language of equal confidence in the 
 superior merits of their own methods. It is often hard for a 
 man to recognise that he pursues a particular line of thought 
 chiefly because his own mental gifts lie in that direction. 
 It is very natural that he should feel that the task towards 
 which he is himself drawn is the most urgent and beneficent 
 of all tasks. But when Professor Schmoller, instead of being 
 
 of it in a review by Mr. Keasbey and another by the present writer in 
 the Political Science Quarterly for December 1892 [and in the article 
 on the recent writings of Professor Knapp, infra, p. 132]. 
 
 1 [Of. my article on ' Historical School of Economists ' in Palgrave's 
 Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. ii. 189G.]
 
 8 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 submissive to the lessons read to him, remarks that it is 
 useless to expect progress from ' the further distillation of 
 the already-a-hundred-times-distilled abstractions of the old 
 dogmatism,' l and declares very plainly that those who 
 attempt the process lack a wide philosophical training, 2 he 
 uses language which, as Matthew Arnold said on a some- 
 what similar occasion, has certainly ' too much vivacity,' and 
 is sure to create soreness. And when Professor Menger 
 retorts by inventing for the labours of his opponent the 
 pleasing terms ' miniature-painting/ 3 ' micrography,' 4 and 
 ' specialissima about some gilds or other,' 5 he can hardly be 
 acquitted of a certain acerbity. 
 
 It is surely time to cry a truce to controversy. Let it be 
 acknowledged that for a long time to come there are likely 
 to be many honest and hard-working and intelligent men 
 who will be interested in economic theory : let it be ac- 
 knowledged, likewise, that there are likely to be a number 
 small, indeed, in America and England, but still noticeable 
 who also are honest and hard-working and not altogether 
 unintelligent, who will be interested in economic history. 
 Let us try for the next twenty years to leave one another 
 severely alone, and see what will come of it. If we have 
 time, let us read one another's books. Perhaps we shall be 
 converted : perhaps we shall only get a suggestion here and 
 there ; but, if we cannot agree, let us be silent. We shall, 
 at any rate, gain some little additional time for our own 
 inquiries ; and meanwhile the general progress of human 
 thought may quietly bring a solution. And yet I must 
 not be supposed to imply that the controversy of the last 
 few years has been a waste of words. A good deal of 
 fighting was necessary before the right of the historical 
 economist to a fair field was recognised in England and 
 America. I should not be surprised to hear that in Germany 
 some few years ago there was the opposite evil a too 
 
 1 Zur Litteraturgeschichte der Stoats- und Sozialwisscnscliaften, 
 p. 279. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 293. 3 Die Irrthiimer des Historismus, pp. 26, 37. 
 4 Ibid. pp. 27, 37. 5 Ibid. p. 40,
 
 complete exclusion of economic theorists from places of 
 academic influence. But now that an armistice can be 
 signed on honourable terms, it were well to do so. Harvard 
 must receive the credit of having been the first among 
 universities to realise the altered situation. It has been the 
 first to see the wisdom of having both attitudes the 
 theoretical and the historical represented in a great institu- 
 tion of learning. Its action is the more commendable 
 because it has been determined upon at the instigation of 
 teachers already in possession of the territory, whose own 
 intellectual sympathies are chiefly on the side of theory. 
 They have shown a confidence in free inquiry, and an 
 understanding of the true nature of a university, which are 
 still rare. 
 
 But such a truce certainly ought not to prevent any of 
 us from frankly expressing his own private opinions to any 
 student who cares to ask for them. Arid the opportunity to 
 make one's own position plain upon assuming new duties in 
 a new sphere is so rare that it may fairly be brought within 
 the same exception. It must be remembered that I shall be ex- 
 pressing only my own individual judgment ; that I know full 
 well that there are many able men who absolutely differ from 
 me ; that it is probable enough that, having heard what I 
 may have to say, students will straightway go off and work 
 in another direction ; and that they may be happy in doing 
 so. Still, what I should say to an able and properly pre- 
 pared student of mature mind who came to me for suggestions 
 would be somewhat as follows : 
 
 ' You have already, I understand, given some attention 
 to Political Economy. You are acquainted with the main 
 outline of the theory as it is presented, for instance, by John 
 Stuart Mill. You know something of the history of Political 
 Economy from Adam Smith to Mill, and of the general 
 character of the development since Mill's time. If indeed 
 you have not already got this equipment, I would advise 
 you to get it; the study will supply you with points of 
 view which you will afterwards find convenient, and it will
 
 10 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 introduce you to an interesting chapter of modern thought. 
 Moreover, as teaching is now arranged in the great 
 universities, you will have little difficulty in making these 
 preliminary studies. Six months' steady work will probably 
 suffice. I can assume, you tell me, that you already have 
 this knowledge ; you are interested in the economic life of 
 society ; you would like to attempt a little independent work 
 of your own ; and you ask in what direction your efforts are 
 likely to be most fruitful. I cannot say that the outlook in 
 the field of theoretic discussion looks very hopeful. For 
 years there has been a keen controversy going on upon the 
 subject of Distribution ; and economists, even economists of 
 the first rank, seem as far from agreement as ever. Accord- 
 ing to President Walker, Wages are the Eesidual Share 
 which falls to the labourer out of the joint produce of capi- 
 talist, employer, landowner, and labourer, the three other 
 shares being limited. For fifteen years he has maintained 
 this in books of every size : it has been echoed in half the 
 colleges of America and Great Britain ; and yet I doubt 
 whether you could discover another living economist of 
 eminence who agrees with him. Or take Profits. You 
 will find equally competent writers who explain Profits as 
 the Wages of management, as a reward for Eisk, and as a 
 species of gain governed by laws similar to those of Eent. 
 I am aware that several of the younger American econo- 
 mists are accepting wholesale the new Austrian doctrine 
 of "subjective value," and think they find in it the key 
 to every problem. But I notice that, in the judgment of 
 Dr. Bonar who has himself done more than any one else 
 to introduce the Austrian writers to the attention of English- 
 speaking students what they have given us is " rather a 
 definition of value than an explanation of its causes." l 
 Their principles have still to be applied to " the problems 
 of distribution as they meet us in modern countries ; " 2 and 
 it is not clear that in this undertaking their American 
 disciples are being greatly helped by the new phraseology. 
 
 1 Quarterly Journal of Economics, Hi. 26, 2 Ibid. p. 31.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTORY 11 
 
 Moreover, one cannot but observe that the early difficulty 
 is still constantly turning up that economists cannot 
 understand one another. There is a page in one of the 
 back numbers of our own " Quarterly Journal " which 
 makes one pause. It contains two brief letters. In one, 
 distinguished economist A says of a criticism of his views 
 by distinguished economist B, " I abide by my doctrines as 
 expounded by myself, and I do not accept the paraphrase of 
 them given by Mr. B." In the other, well-known writer C 
 remarks of well-known writer D, " I shall have no difficulty 
 in showing that Mr. D, despite his denial, did use the term 
 ' profits ' as I understood it." 1 One takes up by chance 
 another number of the " Quarterly," and one's eye catches 
 " The misunderstanding that is the basis of President Z's 
 chief criticism [of me] is radical and unexpected." 2 I see 
 no reason to suppose,' I should say to my inquiring friend, 
 ' that you are likely to be much more successful in interpret- 
 ing statements of theory than these able persons have been. 
 Of course, if you have reason to believe that you possess a 
 peculiar aptitude for abstract reasoning, and are strongly 
 attracted towards economic theory, you may find a good 
 deal of pleasure in turning your thoughts in that direction. 
 I hardly care to prophesy, with any very strong feeling of 
 certitude, that you will not arrive at valuable results ; 
 though I scarcely think it probable. Farther than that I 
 am not inclined to go. But, if you have no such strong 
 bent, then I would suggest that you should consider the 
 advisability of trying your hand at economic history. Here 
 is an almost untrodden field : here is abundance of material ; 
 and, even if you do not arrive at any very wide -reaching con- 
 clusions, the facts which you may discover will themselves 
 be positive accessions to knowledge. As Lotze says, " To 
 know facts is not everything, but it is a great deal ; and to 
 think lightly of them because one yearns for something 
 further is fitting only to those who do not understand that 
 the half is often better than the whole." ' 
 
 1 Qwrterly Journal of Economics, iii. 109. 2 Ibid. vi. 116.
 
 12 PEELIMINARIES 
 
 Before proceeding now to speak more at length of 
 economic history itself, there are two criticisms which it 
 will be well to clear out of the way. It is urged, in the 
 first place, that 'some familiarity with economic theory is 
 essential to the interpretation of industrial phenomena such 
 as it falls within the province of the historian to give.' l 
 It will be remembered that I have advised the imaginary 
 enthusiast to begin by gaining even a considerable familiarity 
 with economic theory. But I must confess that I have done 
 so chiefly from a sense of justice to the man himself in the 
 present state of opinion. Theoretic political economy is 
 still so strong in the support of most teachers in England 
 and America that it would be hardly fair to set a man 
 against the current especially if his professional prospects 
 as a teacher were at all involved unless he were in a posi- 
 tion to judge for himself. But, so far as the actual utility 
 of economic theory to the historian is concerned, I cannot 
 help feeling that much of the language used is unnecessarily 
 grandiose, especially as applied to those periods which are 
 in most need of investigation. Says the same writer, ' All 
 that is really given us in each case by direct evidence is a 
 highly complex sequence of events, in which the true bonds 
 of causal connection may be disguised in a thousand dif- 
 ferent ways, so that, far from being patent to every observer, 
 they can be detected only by the trained student thoroughly 
 equipped with scientific knowledge." But, when this same 
 writer goes on to illustrate economic theory from history, 
 the sort of illustration he takes is a statement that ' a dry 
 summer ' in the Middle Ages ' caused much wear and tear 
 of implements, and consequently an increased demand and 
 a higher price, so that the bailiffs' accounts frequently 
 mention " the dearness of iron on account of drought." ' 
 ' We could not/ he says, ' have a better illustration of the 
 effect of demand on price.' 2 Surely, the power of tracing 
 so obvious a connection between phenomena demands 
 nothing more than plain common sense : we might even use 
 
 1 Keynes, p. 271. 2 Ibid. p. 28?.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 13 
 
 the amusing phrase of Thorold Eogers, and say that ' so 
 much was known in the days of the Egyptian and Baby- 
 lonian kings.' The author whom I have quoted would seem 
 to have been unwittingly taking for granted that the histori- 
 cal economist is anxious to discuss just such problems as 
 the modern theorist, only in a different environment. Such 
 exaggerated estimates of the value of theory will disappear 
 when the character of the work before the economic historian 
 comes to be better understood. It will be seen to be almost 
 as great a mistake to use such language in relation to the 
 historian of economic conditions as it would be to use it in 
 relation to the historian of constitutional or legal conditions. 
 It is strange that this is not already apparent. No one, for 
 instance, would deny the great value for a true understand- 
 ing of social progress of two recent books touching very 
 different periods, Mr. Seebohm's ' Village Community ' and 
 Mr. Charles Booth's ' Labour and Life of the People.' In 
 neither of these books has economic theory been of any 
 visible service. 
 
 Nevertheless, to provide against the chance that even the 
 simplest causal connections may be overlooked, it will be a 
 wise precaution to advise students to begin by making them- 
 selves familiar with the rudiments of modern Political 
 Economy. Moreover, since modern Political Economy has 
 certainly brought into prominence some of the leading 
 characteristics of the agriculture and industry and trade of 
 to-day, its formulae will give the economic historian con- 
 venient standards of comparison, whereby he may the better 
 perceive what are the distinctive features of past conditions. 
 But more than this economic theory will not, in my opinion, 
 do for any save those states of society to which its ablest 
 vindicator, Bagehot, expressly restricted its applicability 
 those 'states of society in which commerce has largely 
 developed, and where it has taken the form of development, 
 or something near the form, which it has taken in England ' 
 and America during the last hundred years. 1 And even for 
 
 1 Economic S.udies, p. 6 ; cf. pp. 5, 17.
 
 14 PRELIMINAEIES 
 
 this very recent period a good deal of excellent work, of 
 indispensable work, is possible without the use of ' the 
 economic organon ; ' l as is abundantly shown by the 
 writings of Mr. Charles Booth and what may be called his 
 school such investigators as Mr. Schloss, Mr. Llewellyn 
 Smith, and Miss Collet. 
 
 The other stumbling-block to be cleared out of the way 
 is the argument based on the imperfection of the historical 
 record. Mr. Keynes has quoted from Eichard Jones the 
 remark that 'history has suffered to drop from her pages, 
 perhaps has never recorded, much of the information which 
 would now be most precious to us ; ' 2 and, as Jones is 
 one of the Fathers of the historical church, the objection is a 
 depressing one. But, on referring to the passage itself, it 
 will be found that Richard Jones went on to put a more 
 cheering view of the matter in language which, though a 
 little rhetorical, ought always to be quoted after citing the 
 preceding sentence : ' Yet this defect does not always exist 
 when we think it does. The compiler and the student are 
 sometimes more to blame than the original historian. The 
 labours of Niebuhr, Savigny, Heeren, Muller, have proved 
 that there is much knowledge, most important to our 
 subject, in historical records, which has faded from the 
 minds of men, and must be laboriously recovered from the 
 recesses of neglected literature, like lost and sunken riches 
 from the secret depths of the ocean. Our own scholars and 
 antiquaries will not, we may hope, be backward in imitating 
 them ; and the historical documents, both of our own and 
 
 1 This is the happy phrase of Professor Marshall, and the text of 
 his Present Position of Economics (1885). With a very great part of 
 Professor Marshall's argument the present writer would entirely agree ; 
 though he would point out that the ' examination of facts by reason ' 
 (p. 44) and the use of the ' three familiar scientific methods ' (p. 45) do 
 not necessarily involve the use of the ' organon.' He would urge, also, 
 that to say, as Professor Marshall does, that ' facts by themselves are 
 silent ' (p. 41) is to overshoot the mark. The lecture, however, shows 
 the dawn of the sun of conciliation seven years ago rather than the 
 present effulgence of its noontide beams. 
 
 2 Scope and Method, p. 308.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 15 
 
 of foreign countries, 'contain, we may well believe, large and 
 unknown stores of economical instruction many a heap of 
 unsunned treasures to reward their researches.' 1 
 
 We are now in a position to look at the nature of 
 economic history a little more closely. Let us begin by 
 asking wherein it differs from what has hitherto been 
 known as social history, or what the Germans call ' the 
 history of civilisation ' Culturgeschichte. Social history 
 so far, indeed, as it has existed at all has appealed to a 
 multiplicity of interests. It has appealed, e.g., to a psycho- 
 logical interest, curious to study forms of thought remote 
 from our own ; it has appealed still more to what may be 
 called an aesthetic interest, the pleasure we take in mere 
 quaintness or strangeness, like our satisfaction at seeing a 
 mediaeval market-place on the stage. But economic history 
 is throughout dominated by one main interest the economic. 
 It asks what has been the material basis of social existence ; 
 how have the necessaries and conveniences of human life 
 been produced; by what organisation has labour been 
 provided and directed; how have the commodities thus 
 produced been distributed ; what have been the institutions 
 resting on this direction and distribution ; what changes 
 have taken place in the methods of agriculture, of industry, 
 of trade ; can any intelligible development be traced ; and, 
 if so, has it been from worse to better. These, and many 
 like them, are the questions which will be asked by the 
 student of economic history. The marking out of such a 
 field of study is only a fresh example of the division of 
 scientific labour : it is the provisional isolation, for the better 
 investigation of them, of a particular group of facts and 
 forces. And this especial study of what may at first sight 
 seem a sordid side of human affairs is justified by its 
 importance. For ' the two things best worth attending to in 
 history,' as Mr. John Morley has well remarked, 'are the 
 great movements of the economic forces of a society, on the 
 
 1 Literary Remains, p. 570.
 
 16 PEELIMINAKIES 
 
 one hand, and, on the other, the forms of religious opinion 
 and ecclesiastical organisation.' l Much that has been 
 included in social history the student will now relegate to 
 the historian of art, of literature, of technical processes, of 
 superstition, and what not. What remains he will utilise 
 for his special purpose, endeavouring to place in order and 
 coherence what has hitherto been but a heap of disconnected 
 particulars. 
 
 It may, however, be observed in this connection that the 
 economic historian will often think it wise to postpone the 
 consideration of many bits of information may even be 
 tempted to thrust them impatiently on one side which are 
 commonly supposed to be of prime importance for his 
 purpose. This is particularly true of statistics as to prices 
 and wages in the Middle Ages. Partly because Thorold 
 Rogers gave his whole attention to the collection of this sort 
 of material, partly because the economic theorists are pre- 
 occupied by the operations of the market, there has grown 
 up an idea that what the economic historian most craves for 
 is to learn the price of a day's labour or of a day's food in 
 past centuries. Facts of this kind are valuable, but only 
 when we can place them in their proper setting. Our first 
 requirement is to understand, far more precisely than we do 
 at present, what has been the institutional framework of 
 society at the several periods, what has been the constitution 
 of the various social classes, and their relation to one another. 
 This is the explanation of what must have struck every one 
 who has given serious attention to English agrarian history 
 the infinitely greater importance of the first one hundred 
 pages of Mr. Seebohm's work than of all Thorold Eogers's 
 voluminous collections, and that although the former had 
 not in all probability given to the subject one-fourth of the 
 time and labour bestowed by the second. It is because 
 Mr. Seebohm has given us a vivid picture of the daily life of 
 the agricultural population, which has for the first time 
 imparted to Mr. Eogers's facts a true significance. 
 
 1 ' On Popular Culture,' in Miscellanies (ed. 1886), iii. 9.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 17 
 
 'If " economic history," after all, is only a branch of 
 history, why not leave it/ it may be asked, ' to the historian 
 pure and simple ? or, if you are not content to do that, why 
 thrust yourself into the ranks of the economists?' Well, 
 the time may come when those who are interested in 
 economic history will have to turn their backs on the 
 ' economists,' and cry, Ecce convertimur ad gentes ! It may 
 be granted that, as things are now, economic history belongs 
 equally to the departments of history and economics. But 
 this same characteristic of touching two fields which are 
 nevertheless fenced off from one another is equally true of 
 legal history and of ecclesiastical history. There is no reason 
 in the nature of things why the 'pure historian,' as he is 
 called, should not investigate both the history of religion and 
 the history of law. But, as a matter of fact, the work of 
 research in these two fields has usually been carried on by 
 men who began by being theologians and lawyers in the 
 narrow sense. So, similarly, the men who have of late done 
 most to advance the knowledge of economic history are 
 men like Schanz, Ochenkowski, Held, Brentano, Toynbee, 
 Cunningham to mention only those writers who have given 
 special attention to England. All these have been men who 
 have had an ' economic ' training, and have been drawn to 
 the study of the past by their interest in the problems of 
 the present. Professor Menger has indeed complained, in 
 language which leaves nothing to be desired in point of 
 vehemence, that 'the historical school has been from the 
 very first not the result of the profound study of the problems 
 of our own science : it has not arisen, like historical juris- 
 prudence, from the scientific needs of economists dealing 
 seriously with their own questions.' l ' Like foreign conquerors 
 have the historians entered upon the territory of our science, to 
 force upon us their speech and usages, their terminology and 
 methods.' 2 Professor Menger may have had in his mind, 
 while thus writing, circumstances hidden from the world ; 
 but, certainly, his statement is very far from being precise, 
 
 1 IrrthUmer, Vonvort, p. iii. 2 Ibid. p. vi.
 
 18 PEELIMINARIES 
 
 so far as English work is concerned. No one would, I 
 imagine, deny the name of economist to Richard Jones, to 
 Cliffe Leslie, to Thorold Rogers, to Arnold Toynbee. The 
 case of Toynbee is sufficient to illustrate the motives that 
 have been at work. Towards the end of his brief life Toynbee 
 came to give his attention more and more exclusively to the 
 economic history of the last two centuries, precisely because 
 of his inexorable desire to penetrate more deeply into ' the 
 problems of our own science.' 
 
 But to dwell on the somewhat grudging attitude of certain 
 writers would be to partake of their spirit. In my lectures 
 here if I may speak for myself I shall assume such an 
 acquaintance with the main facts of ' pure history ' and also 
 with the main ideas of ' pure economics ' as may fairly be 
 asked of intelligent men. My hearers may be expected, I 
 hope, to know the centuries to which belong the Norman 
 Conquest, the Fall of Constantinople, the Discovery of 
 America, the French Revolution, just as they may be ex- 
 pected to know the general meaning of Division of Labour, 
 and Supply and Demand. It will be cause for rejoicing if 
 the study attracts men from the historical side as well as 
 from the economic. But so long as students present them- 
 selves, and men are stimulated, after a survey of the field, 
 to engage in new investigation, we need not greatly care to 
 what group of studies this particular one is assigned. It 
 is indeed one of the advantages of the elastic system of 
 Harvard teaching that here such perplexities need hardly 
 trouble us. 
 
 And now let us ask ourselves, before we leave the sub- 
 ject, why, after all, we should study economic history. 
 First, then, we study economic history for a reason which 
 some may think the lowest, and others will regard as 
 of the essence of a liberal education : in order to gratify 
 a natural and innocent curiosity. The more we discover 
 that history, as we have hitherto possessed it, has told 
 us scarce anything but the external movements of the sur- 
 face waters of society, the more we shall be drawn to the
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 19 
 
 search for really trustworthy and illuminating knowledge. 
 The mere desire to know will be for many the only motive 
 and the sufficient justification. A distinguished man of 
 letters has indeed said that he ' does not in the least want 
 to know what happened in the past, except as it enables him 
 to see his way more clearly through what is happening 
 to-day.' 1 Auguste Comte carried the principle further, and 
 even proposed to put the continued pursuit of certain studies 
 under the ban as unsocial, when once they had reached a 
 point beyond which, in his judgment, they were incapable 
 of being of service to mankind. It chanced that the very 
 study which Comte would have proscribed, pursued, as it 
 was, in spite of his anathema, from the mere love of truth, 
 has since been fruitful in new and practical applications. 
 And so it may be with economic history. Let us know all 
 we can about it ; and the application may be trusted to take 
 care of itself. Even if the subject had no utility outside its 
 interest for the student himself, it would widen his sym- 
 pathies, enlarge his conceptions of the possible, and save 
 him from the Philistinism of the market-place. 
 
 But with many of us it will properly be an additional 
 motive that economic history is intimately bound up with 
 modern discussions. This is a consequence of that pecu- 
 liarly English and American trait, the love of precedent. 
 To what is called the ' Anglo-Saxon ' mind the fact that 
 such and such conditions existed in the past is itself a 
 strong reason why they should be made to exist in the 
 present. It is very noticeable to any one who has come 
 into contact with popular socialistic or revolutionary move- 
 ments that an alleged historical fact has often more hold 
 upon men's minds than any theoretic argument. Take, for 
 instance, the belief in a primitive communism. Mr. Henry 
 George tells his readers and he has doubtless a certain 
 apparent justification in the writings of some recent 
 authorities that 'the common right to land has every- 
 where been primarily recognised, and private ownership 
 
 ' Mr. John Morley, UA. 
 
 c2
 
 20 PRELIMINAEIES 
 
 has nowhere grown up save as the result of usurpation ; ' 
 and, again, that ' historically, as ethically, private property 
 in land is robbery.' l You have only to attend a single-tax 
 meeting to find that this argument plays a much greater 
 part in the thoughts of Mr. George's disciples than it 
 does even with Mr. George himself. Or, again, notice 
 how prominent in English socialist literature has become 
 the picture of the golden age of the English labourer in the 
 fifteenth century a theory which was first borrowed from 
 Thorold Eogers, and is now regarded almost as an ac- 
 cepted truth. We are even beginning to be told that 
 the eight-hours movement is but the restoration of the 
 labourer's long-lost happiness. We shall not, I trust, turn 
 to history merely in order to find arguments for or against 
 any such movements ; but the circumstance that our study 
 has this curious bearing on modern discussions may fairly 
 endow it with a keener zest. 
 
 And, finally, there may be some who will be drawn to 
 this field of inquiry by a hope akin to that which has been 
 so stimulating in the investigation of physical nature 
 the hope that they may thereby arrive at a more satisfying 
 and intelligible conception of the evolution of human society. 
 Just as in biological and physical science the investigator is 
 buoyed up by the conviction that every isolated fact, could 
 he but learn how, has its own place in a sequence, 
 its own significance and appropriateness, so in the history 
 of man we can never be content until we have found it a 
 connected and consecutive whole, or until we know of a 
 surety that it is but a chaos of meaningless fragments. We 
 cannot cease attempting to use an old phrase in a more 
 modern sense ' to justify the ways of God to man.' How 
 far we still are from any such unifying conception of history 
 I need hardly say, least of all to those who have tried in 
 vain to satisfy their hunger with the husks of ' Sociology.' 
 May it not be that in those constant daily needs which men 
 have ever been compelled to meet on penalty of starvation, 
 
 1 Progress and Poverty, Book VII. chap. iv.
 
 ON THE STUDY OP ECONOMIC HISTOEY 21 
 
 in the never-ceasing labour to produce out of the earth the 
 good things it contains, and in the efforts after a wiser 
 distribution of the product, we may find the thread of 
 continuity, the unifying generalisations, which shall at 
 last make history something more than ' a shallow village 
 tale ' ?
 
 22 PRELIMINAKIES 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY: 
 AFTER SEVEN YEARS 1 
 
 FOE the title assigned to this paper 2 1 disclaim responsibility ; 
 it is the kind invention of the Chairman of the Programme 
 Committee. Perhaps I weakly acquiesced in it in an incon- 
 siderate moment ; but, on turning the matter over, I have 
 felt more and more loth to disparage a subject for which I 
 care so greatly by anything in the nature of a ' plea.' For, 
 indeed, the time has gone by when that was necessary : we 
 who concern ourselves with economic history have with us 
 the current of the world's thought ; and, without any word 
 of argument on its behalf as ' a field of study,' it is sure for 
 a long time to come to engage a larger and larger share of 
 public and academic attention. The grounds of this confi- 
 dence are evident. Consciously or unconsciously, each genera- 
 tion is bound to look with peculiar interest, in its survey of 
 the past, at those aspects or sides of life which for any reason 
 interest it most in the present. This is not only because it 
 expects the study of history to throw light on its own 
 immediate problems, though that is a motive which has 
 greatly influenced it ; it is quite as much because the circum- 
 stances and discussions of its own time have opened its eyes 
 to the existence of a whole realm of phenomena in the past 
 to which it was before blind, and have thus extended the 
 bounds of a rational curiosity. Whether, as a result, it 
 writes its general histories with a preponderating regard for 
 
 1 [A Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical 
 Association, Boston, December 28, 1899.] 
 
 2 A Plea for Economic History.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOKY 23 
 
 certain elements, or singles out those elements and writes 
 special histories of them, is not of any great significance ; it 
 is sure to do one or the other. 
 
 For three centuries men's minds were turned in one par- 
 ticular direction by theological controversies ; and accordingly 
 vast stores of erudition were amassed by professed historians 
 of the Church, from Bellarmin to Mosheim ; huge collections 
 of authorities were printed by the Benedictines and others ; 
 and, what is of more significance, every great scholar, a Grotius 
 or a Casaubon, was inevitably a good deal of an ecclesiastical 
 historian. How foreign to us of to-day such an attitude has 
 become is apparent when we reflect on the prevailing tendency 
 to relegate Church history to theological seminaries, and on 
 the difficulties which most university teachers now encounter 
 when they seek to make a class believe that theological defini- 
 tions have ever seriously affected human action. The era of 
 constitution-making, ushered in by the French Eevolution, 
 gave us our constitutional historians. Without 1830 and 1832, 
 Guizot and Hallam and Macaulay are inexplicable : unless 
 the student of the twenty-first century has in mind the two 
 Napoleons he will find it hard quite to appreciate the point 
 of view of Mommsen's ' Eome ; ' and, if he has forgotten what 
 the English party system was like in the days of Victoria, he 
 will imperfectly understand the Greek history of Mr. Grote. 
 Precisely in the same way, the pressure of modern economic 
 problems is certain to produce, has already begun to produce, 
 a whole literature of economic history. The Socialist critics 
 of existing social conditions were among the first to turn to 
 history for arguments in support of their contentions : more 
 conservative students of social affairs have felt bound to 
 examine their statements of alleged fact ; and what with the 
 labour question and the agricultural question and the tariff 
 question and the money question all in the air, what with 
 the democratisation of politics, and humanitarian ethics, even 
 the general historian has been carried along by the stream. 
 The preface to Green's ' Short History of the English People ' 
 is the profession of faith of the typical historian of our age ; 
 and not among the least significant things about it is its date,
 
 24 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 1874. Much of this new interest in ' the common people ' 
 will doubtless expend itself on external details, of clothing, 
 food, housing, and manners ; but I am sure that all serious 
 students will agree with me in this, that most particulars of 
 this kind are essentially trivial until they are brought into 
 relation to those economic conditions on which reposes the 
 structure of society at any particular epoch. How my ex- 
 pected successor at this desk l would have interpreted the 
 epithet ' social' I will not conjecture. At least three senses 
 may be attached to it : it may mean more or less entertaining 
 gossip about ' habits and customs,' meaningless without an 
 economic or technological commentary; or it may be a 
 synonym for economic history; or it may designate that 
 complete portrayal of the whole evolution of society which 
 shall do justice to each of its elements and aspects, and which 
 we all, I suppose, dream of as an ultimate ideal. Towards 
 social history in this latter sense, it is the task of economic 
 history to furnish, not the only, but, as some of us believe, a 
 very considerable contribution. 
 
 For one with anticipations like these, it would be absurd 
 to worry about the precise place which the study of the eco- 
 nomic side of history may take among academic disciplines, 
 or the precise designation it may bear. To secure the ad- 
 vantages of division of labour there is just as much to be said 
 for the establishment of a separate chair of economic his- 
 tory as for separate chairs of ecclesiastical or constitutional 
 history. If established, it may be attached to an historical 
 department or to an economic department, or to both ; just 
 as a chair of ecclesiastical history may be attached to History 
 or to Theology, or to both ; or a chair of constitutional 
 history to History or to Law, or to both. Or again and 
 this is an arrangement which I should personally prefer 
 and in which there is some practical advantage Economic 
 History may be brought within some larger grouping in- 
 cluding both History and Economics. But this is a matter of 
 polity to be differently treated under different circumstances ; 
 and universities will do well to be guided by some considera- 
 1 Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, with A Pica for Social History.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 25 
 
 tion of the idiosyncrasies of the teachers they already possess. 
 Where a university already possesses an Historian with 
 adequate economic training who is eager to direct his 
 students to the development of the economic organisation 
 of society, or an Economist of sufficiently wide and accurate 
 historical knowledge, who is anxious to show the historical 
 background of the economic problems of the present, I see 
 no reason why Economic History should not be taught in the 
 one case as ' History ' and in the other as ' Economics.' 
 Certainly the plan of a separate chair and separate courses, 
 while it has its advantages, brings with it exactly the same 
 danger as every other partition of the historical field : the 
 danger lest it should lead to an unreal isolation of certain 
 groups of phenomena, and lest teachers and students should 
 forget that the field of history is after all one, and only pro- 
 visionally divisible. In one of the greatest of universities, I 
 have known a question, proposed for an ' Economic History ' 
 paper, objected to on the ground that ' the constitutional 
 and economic effects ' of such and such a measure fell only 
 to the extent of one-half under the heading of the paper ; as 
 if it were not a positive merit in a question that it asked men 
 to look at an event from more than one side. And what is 
 true of ' branches ' of History, is true also of the relations 
 between History and Economics. The important thing is to 
 remember that all our sharp distinctions are for temporary 
 convenience merely ; there are no such sharp distinctions in 
 human life itself. 
 
 In some circles of late years fortunately not yet in 
 America or England it has been thought necessary for 
 economic history to clear itself from the charge of ' material- 
 ism.' Karl Marx, a man of great ability, but neither so learned 
 nor so original as he appeared, was in the habit of using 
 language which implied that the economic situation at any 
 particular time not only conditioned but also created, as a sort 
 of reflection of itself, all the political, intellectual, and even 
 religious phenomena of the period. His disciples have 
 eulogised him as the ' discoverer ' of the ' materialistic con-
 
 26 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 ception of history,' and they have not hesitated to apply it to 
 the most apparently recalcitrant matter. According to the 
 most distinguished of them, even Calvin's doctrine of Elec- 
 tion is but the theological expression of the dependence of 
 success or failure in competitive business on causes outside 
 individual control. More recently a Professor of Political 
 Economy at an Italian university, Signer Loria, has 
 elaborately set forth his conviction also that politics, ethics, 
 and religion are simply the product of the economic environ- 
 ment. Still more lately a German Professor of History, 
 Dr. Karl Lamprecht, has taken occasion, apropos of the 
 publication of his attractively written History of Germany, 
 to justify his ' method ' in language which at any rate pro- 
 duced the same impression. All this has created so much 
 consternation and alarm, that for the last two or three years 
 everybody who has ventured to write about economic 
 history at all has been liable to be called upon to ' stand 
 and deliver ' his opinion, as to the materialistic conception 
 of history, at a moment's notice. 
 
 The sort of line which I have occasionally ventured upon 
 when tackled on the subject and which, I am bound to add, 
 has usually struck my questioners as rather mean-spirited 
 I would make bold to adopt on this present occasion. The 
 question whether a ' materialistic ' conception of history is 
 tenable i.e. the question whether the whole movement of 
 human history in all its phases is due to the pressure of ex- 
 ternal conditions independent of man's volition, save so far 
 as his apparent volition may be itself the result of the milieu 
 is only another form of the eternal problem of the Universe : 
 Necessity or Free Will? I am ready to talk round and 
 about the subject if I am compelled. I would point out that 
 to ' condition ' political or intellectual progress is not the 
 same thing as to ' cause ' it, if for no other reason than this, 
 that more than one set of political institutions, more than one 
 body of religious opinions may be consistent with possible 
 under given external conditions. I would point out, again, 
 that a system of thought, even supposing it created by the 
 external environment, has evidently often developed by its
 
 ON THE STUDY OF ECONOMIC HISTOEY 27 
 
 own internal logic, and grown to something very different 
 from its original form, but equally if not more powerful over 
 men's actions, without any precisely corresponding change 
 in surrounding circumstances. I would point, moreover, 
 to certain crises in the world's history which would seem 
 to have been determined by such old-fashioned causes as 
 patriotism or individual genius. For instance, with the 
 material before us for an opinion, it would be a paradox to 
 describe the resistance of Athens to Persia as due to the 
 economic situation of Attica : it was the Medising states 
 which yielded to the pressure of material interest, not Athens. 
 Or again, when we compare England under the Confessor with 
 the contemporary kingdoms of France and Germany, I see 
 no explanation for the fact that England afterwards gained a 
 relatively strong central government while the other kingdoms 
 lost it a fact of large importance for the subsequent develop- 
 ment of the country, politically, economically, ecclesiastically 
 save in the circumstances that such a ruler as William of 
 Normandy conquered the land, and that he was followed 
 by such men as the second Henry and the first Edward. 
 But while I might put in all these pleas for caution, I shall 
 not think it worth while, in my character as an historian, 
 to come to close quarters with the heart of the question, 
 the problem of Determinism, until and this is the point 
 something like a prima facie case has been made out 
 by the economic necessarians. 1 I have yet to see any 
 considerable part of the history of mankind explained as 
 the exclusive result of material conditions in a way which 
 can satisfy the more immediate and obvious tests of the 
 careful historian. 
 
 Only too frequently I have in my mind a recent be- 
 wildering treatise by an American economist A is explained 
 by B, when to the mere historian, who looks after dates and 
 evidence and knows something of ordinary human nature, it is 
 apparent that A did not exist, that B did not exist, and that 
 
 1 Readers who are not disposed to wait may be provisionally referred 
 to Professor James's essay on ' The Dilemma of Determinism ' in The 
 Will to believe.
 
 28 PKELIMINAEIES 
 
 if A and B had existed, B would not have been adequate to 
 explain A. 1 I might illustrate my attitude by means of an ex- 
 ample from the book of Professor Lamprecht. He asserts that 
 the bureaucracy of the fifteenth century in Germany was the 
 outcome of the new Geldwirthschaft of the time. Before I 
 accept or deny this proposition, I should like to see it proved 
 
 (1) that there was a ' bureaucracy ' in the fifteenth century, 
 
 (2) that there was a Geldwirthschaft ', and, when this 
 preliminary task is completed, (3) that the bureaucracy was 
 actually supported by the Geldwirthschaft, and (4) that in 
 all the other countries that had a bureaucracy there was a 
 Geldwirthschaft, and in every country where there was a 
 Geldwirthschaft there was a bureaucracy. When all this 
 is shown, it will be quite time enough to speculate whether 
 the instance confirms a materialistic view of history or not. 
 
 I do not like, however, to mention Professor Lamprecht 
 without some brief reference to the controversy which has 
 raged around his book. I should hope it is possible to 
 dwell upon it for a moment without imitating the scurrility 
 which has made us blush, as we turned over the pages of 
 pamphlet and journal, for the academic profession to which we 
 belong. My own impression is that Dr. Lamprecht is right 
 in the main in attempting what he has aimed at ; that the 
 economic side of history has been vastly more important 
 than most historians have borne in mind, whatever they may 
 have incidentally allowed ; that throughout it has conditioned 
 the political development ; that again and again the eco- 
 nomic moment, as the Germans say, has been the most im- 
 portant in the movement of a nation's career ; that all this 
 wants to be put, and steadily kept, in the forefront of our 
 general histories ; that the writer who does this deserves well 
 of his time ; and that some exaggeration is pardonable in an 
 early attempt. 2 But I think that some of his incautious 
 
 1 Cf. my review of Professor Patten's Development of English 
 Thought in the Economic Journal, September 1899. 
 
 2 But Professor Lamprecht's is by no means the first attempt. The 
 work of Nitzsch has been strangely forgotten in this connection. See 
 infra, p. 242.
 
 ON THE STUDY OP ECONOMIC HISTORY 29 
 
 philosophisings have claimed far more for economic forces 
 than can be maintained at the present stage of inquiry, or 
 than is at all necessary for his purpose ; and that this has 
 unduly prejudiced his cause. To me, also, Dr. Lamprecht 
 seems to operate with far too few economic conceptions : or 
 rather that the one economic formula, the contrast between 
 Natural- and Geld-wirthschaft, with which he would un- 
 lock every historical mystery, is scarcely adequate for the 
 purpose. Instead of objecting to him for being so much of an 
 economist, I could wish he had been somewhat more of one. 
 And after all, the strongest argument in favour of a particular 
 ' conception ' of history or a particular ' method ' is work 
 which will stand the test of the ordinary criteria of scholar- 
 ship ; and though much of the criticism Dr. Lamprecht has 
 received has been petty and carping, it is only too apparent 
 that a good deal of his later writing has been simply ill- 
 informed and over-hasty. But I do not regard the cause of 
 economic history as bound up either with the assertion 
 of a materialistic philosophy, or with the claims of Dr. 
 Lamprecht's admirers. 1 
 
 The episode has one lesson for the ' pure ' historian. It 
 emphasises the duty of generalisation as the complement to 
 the duty of research. Detailed research is very necessary : 
 it is, indeed, indispensable for the historian who cares for 
 the economic side of life ; for the truth is, that of the greater 
 
 1 Perhaps I may be allowed to refer also to my review of Dr. 
 Lamprecht's first three volumes, in the Political Science Quarterly, 
 December 1894, written three or four years before the outbreak of the 
 controversy which has since been raging in Germany. The reader who 
 wishes to look into the ' literature ' of the discussion, may be referred 
 among others to the following writings, after Professor Lamprecht's 
 Deutsche Geschichte, Band v., which occasioned the discussion ; Lenz in 
 Historische Zeitschrift, Ixxvii. 385 seq. ; von Below in the same Zeitschrift, 
 Ixxxi. 193 seq. ; Bachfahl in Preussische Jahrbilclier, Ixxxiii. 48 seq., 
 and Ixxxiv. 542 seq. ; and the same writer in Jahrbttcher filr National- 
 Gkonomie, Ixviii. 659 seq.; Barth on ' Die sogenannte materialistische 
 Geschichtsphilosophie ' in the same Jahrbilcher, Ixvi. 1 seq. ; and Pro- 
 fessor Lamprecht's Zwei Streitschriften (1897) and Die histvrisclie 
 Methode des Herrn von Below (1899).
 
 30 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 part of our field we still know next to nothing, and yet 
 there is superabundant material if we could but get at it. 
 And useful research work is a good deal easier than the 
 formation of sound general conclusions. Accordingly, duty 
 and indolence and scientific caution often combine to keep 
 the professional historian within a somewhat narrow range 
 of interests. But the general cultivated public cares very 
 little for exactitude of detail : it wants to know how 
 individuals and episodes are related to some large whole, 
 and what the significance of it all has been. If scholars 
 competently trained will not try to satisfy this natural and 
 laudable desire, incompetent writers will. The historian 
 and the economist for they are equally to blame may 
 expel nature with the fork of the Seminary or the Deductive 
 Method ; but Nemesis stands very near the shoulder of 
 ' Pure Economics ' or ' Pure History ' and in America it 
 usually calls itself ' Sociology.' 
 
 One final observation and I have done. I spoke, at the 
 outset, of the diverse motives with which men turned to the 
 investigation of economic history. Let me add it ought to 
 be, but it is not, superfluous that what happened a week or 
 so ago falls within the scope of history just as much as what 
 happened in remote centuries, though it is sometimes not so 
 easy to find out ; that, for instance, I am as much interested, 
 as an economic historian, in the recent combination of firms 
 engaged in the calico-printing trade of Lancashire and 
 Scotland, or of those occupied in the manufacture of carpets 
 in New England, as in the Decree of the German Diet in 
 1512 concerning Monopolies ; and that to me the chief 
 interest of economic as of all other history lies in the 
 reflection that it is not yet ended.
 
 31 
 
 KOSCHEE'S PKOGEAMME OF 1843 ' 
 
 THE late Professor Wilhelm Eoscher must, beyond question, 
 be regarded as the founder of the historical school of econo- 
 mists, so far as that part can be assigned to any one writer. 
 It was the ' Preface ' to his ' Grundriss zu Vorlesungen iiber 
 die Staatswirthschaft, nach geschichtlicher Methode ' (' Out- 
 line of Lectures on Political Economy, following the 
 Historical Method') which sounded the first clear note of 
 the new movement in academic circles, and inspired its 
 further progress. It is, therefore, justly described by sub- 
 sequent writers as a sort of manifesto as a programme not 
 only for Eoscher's own scientific activity, but also for the 
 future work of the historical school. 
 
 A brief abstract of these significant pages has been given 
 by Professor Cohn in the first volume of his ' Grundlegung,' 
 and by Dr. Ingram in his ' History.' But these omit some 
 points essential to a complete estimate of Eoscher's position. 
 The ' Grundriss ' itself has never been reprinted. It is diffi- 
 cult to obtain ; and it is very evident that not a few of those 
 who have written about Eoscher's place in the history of 
 economics both among sympathisers and non-sympathisers 
 have failed to give adequate attention to Eoscher's own 
 words. It may be worth while, accordingly, to print a trans- 
 lation of the ' Preface ' as a document, and in the interests of 
 historical accuracy, now that attention is naturally being 
 turned anew to Eoscher's achievements. 
 
 The ' Grundriss ' is an octavo of 150 pages, published by 
 the Dieterich house at Gottingen. It includes an 'Intro- 
 
 1 [Quarterly Journal of Economics, October 1894.]
 
 32 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 duction ' of less than five pages, and four books, entitled 
 ' General Part ' (including Production, Distribution, and 
 Consumption of Goods, and occupying twenty-two pages) ; 
 ' National Economy,' VolJcswirthschaft (including a treat- 
 ment, primarily historical and descriptive, of Agriculture, 
 Industry, Trade, Population, and Poor Law, and occupy- 
 ing seventy-four pages ) ; ' State-household,' Staatshaushalt 
 (chiefly given up to Taxation and Public Finance, and 
 taking forty-three pages) ; and a ' Bibliography,' or Literar- 
 geschichte, of seven pages. Even these bare facts of arrange- 
 ment are not without their significance. The work is made 
 up of brief paragraphs, much as in Eoscher's later treatises, 
 but more compressed, omitting verbs, and often merely 
 indicating the subjects discussed. It is preceded by the cele- 
 brated 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The following little work is simply intended for the purposes 
 of the author's lectures. The more the subject-matter of political 
 science daily increases in bulk, the less possible it becomes to work 
 through it at all satisfactorily in the course of, at most, a hundred 
 hours. And yet, as North-Western Germany is almost entirely 
 wanting in opportunities for an administrative career, it would 
 hardly be expedient to deal with political economy and financial 
 science, or even economic policy (WirthschaftspoUzet), in separate 
 courses. And so for the author to put into print the outlines 
 which he has hitherto dictated, together with a list of books for 
 beginners, and thereby to gain twelve or fifteen hours to expand 
 his lectures in, seems to him a quite sufficient advantage of itself. 
 But he does not hi the least intend by this to make it unnecessary 
 for his hearers to take notes. He knows from his own experience 
 how greatly the practice of writing the substance of a lecture 
 conduces to attention during the hour, and regularity in attendance 
 upon the course. 
 
 Should any one acquainted with the science happen to take up this 
 little book, he will not fail to notice that underlying the whole there 
 is a peculiar and carefully followed method ; to wit, the historical. 
 It is clear, of course, that any judgment upon it must be deferred 
 until in larger works I have clad in flesh and blood what is here a 
 mere skeleton. The historical method exhibits itself, not only in 
 the external form of a chronological arrangement of the material,
 
 ROSCHER'S PROGRAMME OF 1843 33 
 
 wherever that is possible, but most of all in the following funda- 
 mental ideas : 
 
 1. The question how the wealth of a nation is best furthered, we, 
 like others, regard as a main question ; but it constitutes by no means 
 our essential purpose. Political economy (die Staatswirthschaft) is 
 not only a chrematistic, an art the art of becoming rich, it is also 
 a political science, whose business it is to pass judgment on and 
 rule over men. Our aim is the representation (Darstellung) of 
 what nations have thought, willed, and discovered in the economic 
 field, what they have striven after and attained, why they have 
 striven after and why they have attained it. Such a presenta- 
 tion is only possible in closest alliance with the other sciences of 
 national life, and especially the history of law, the history of polity, 
 and the history of civilisation. 
 
 2. The nation is not merely the mass of individuals now living. 
 He, therefore, who seeks to investigate the national economy, finds 
 it impossible to satisfy himself with the observation of merely con- 
 temporary conditions. Accordingly, the study of earlier stages of 
 civilisation which, in any case, is the best teacher for all the ruder 
 peoples of to-day appears to us of almost equal importance, even 
 though it is not possible in lecturing to give the same amount of 
 time to it. 
 
 3. The difficulty of picking out the essential and normal (das 
 Oesetzmassige) from the great mass of phenomena makes it obliga- 
 tory upon us to compare with one another, from the economic point 
 of view, all nations of which we can learn anything. Indeed, the 
 nations of the modern world are so entwined with one another that 
 no fundamental treatment of one is possible without a treatment of 
 all. And the ancient peoples, whose career is already ended, are 
 peculiarly instructive, in that their whole development lies com- 
 pleted before us. So that where in the modern economy a tendency 
 can be shown similar to the old, the parallel furnishes us with a 
 priceless clue to the estimate to be formed of it. 
 
 4. The historical method will not be quick either to praise or 
 blame any economic institution absolutely ; as, indeed, it is certain 
 that there have been few institutions that have been wholesome or 
 harmful for all peoples and all stages of civilisation. The leading- 
 strings of the child, the crutch of the aged, would be unbearable by 
 the grown man. On the contrary, it is a principal task of science 
 to show how and why from reason has gradually arisen folly, from 
 a benefaction a curse. No doubt the man of genius, although his 
 study of the matter in hand may have been but slight, will easily 
 
 D
 
 34 PKELIMINARIES 
 
 distinguish the essentials, which are the main things in practice 
 and readily separate the effete from the living. But what teacher 
 can plan his lectures for none but men of genius ? As a rule, he 
 alone can rightly judge when, how, and why, e.g., land taxes, feudal 
 dues, gild privileges, the monopoly of trading companies, must be 
 abolished, who has completely understood why at one time they 
 had to be introduced. Yet it is not to be supposed that this teaching 
 will make practice easier, like a pons asinorum. Indeed, it will 
 add to its difficulties, since it will call attention to the thousand 
 and one considerations which have to be taken into account at every 
 step of the legislator or administrator. 
 
 It will be seen that this method aims at much the same result 
 for political economy as the method of Savigny and Eichhorn has 
 attained in jurisprudence. It is remote (liegtferri) from the school 
 of Eicardo, although in itself it by no means opposes it, and thank- 
 fully seeks to make use of its results. For that very reason it is 
 nearer to the methods of Malthus and Kau. And, far as I am from 
 holding that it is the only way to truth, or even the very shortest, 
 I am equally far from doubting that it leads through districts of 
 peculiar beauty and fruitfulness, and that, once properly cultivated, 
 it will never be quite abandoned. To history, historical economics 
 can, and ought to, render somewhat the same service as histology 
 and organic chemistry render to-day to natural history. 
 
 That I have throughout inserted in the outline a treatment 
 of economic policy and of measures for promoting prosperity 
 (die Wirthschafts- oder WoMfahrtspolizei)' will not surprise any 
 one after 3 and 4. The other main division of administra- 
 tive science (Polizeiwissenschaft) namely, legal administration 
 (Bechtspolize'i) I am accustomed to discuss in my lectures on 
 Politics (im, politischen Vorlesungeri), where general administrative 
 institutions and principles find a suitable place. It may be rather 
 more surprising that I should have placed the literature of political 
 economy at the end of the whole rather than after the Introduction, 
 as is the custom. But I know from experience that, when one 
 follows the latter plan, it is either impossible, or possible only with 
 an infinite expenditure of tune, to turn the list of names into a 
 succession of lifelike and well-grouped characterisations. But at 
 the end, when the hearers already know something of the science, 
 each book can be described in few words, and therewith may be 
 combined a wholesome repetition of the most difficult and con- 
 troverted subjects. 
 
 GOTTINOEN : Easter 1843.
 
 EOSCHEE'S PEOGEAMME OF 1843 35 
 
 The statement of Eoscher's position here given needs, 
 however, to be supplemented by the first part of the 
 ' Grundriss ' itself, the 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 1. METHOD OF THE POLITICAL SCIENCES IN GENERAL 
 
 1. Distinction between the Historical and the Philosophical 
 Methods. The philosopher seeks after a system of concepts or 
 judgments as abstract as possible i.e. divested as much as possible 
 of the contingencies of space and tune ; the historian, a delineation 
 of human developments and relations, as closely as possible copied 
 from real life. The former has explained a fact when he has 
 defined it, and no concept appears in his definition which has not 
 been already examined hi the earlier portions of his system : the 
 latter [has explained a fact] when he has pictured the men by 
 whom and for whom it came to be. 
 
 2. Subjective Character of the Philosophical Ideals of the 
 State. The commonest form under which the philosophical 
 doctrine of the state appears is that of the ideal state. Divers 
 expressions for it. Great differences both hi fundamental ideas and 
 hi results. Yet almost all ideals, abstract as they may appear at 
 first glance, are only somewhat unproved copies of the conditions 
 which actually surround the author, or which the party of the 
 author seeks to introduce. The same thing with the laws of 
 nature and aesthetics. The only exceptions are the eclectics, and 
 those philosophers of originality who avoid all detail. Proof of the 
 proposition from the leading theorists of modern times : MachiaveUi, 
 the reformers, the Jesuits, the absolutists of the seventeenth 
 century, Locke, Montesquieu, the revolutionaries, the reactionaries, 
 the constitutionalists. The case the same even with Plato. Ex- 
 planation of this law : the influence of great theorists usually rests 
 upon their giving scientific expression to the dun feelings and 
 unexplained wishes of their contemporaries, and furnishing them 
 with scientific justification. But the real needs of a people must 
 always, in the long run, be actually satisfied. It is only when, by 
 the passage of generations, a people has gradually become some- 
 thing different that the individuals, who also have now changed, 
 really come to need changed institutions. Such crises, when they 
 are passed through in a legal manner, are called reforms ; when 
 with violence, revolutions. And thus when two philosophers work 
 up into systems the differing political creeds of two parties, they do 
 
 Dl
 
 36 PEELIMINAEIES 
 
 not, regarded historically, contradict one another. Each may be 
 justified for his own people and his own time. 
 
 3. Historical Method. Examination of the political impulse 
 among men, which can only be investigated by means of a com- 
 parison of all known peoples. What is uniform in the development 
 of the different peoples put in the form of a law of development. 
 Work of the historian and of the student of natural history similar. 
 This historical method has, in any case, if it does not altogether 
 go astray, objective truth. It is most instructive for the men of 
 affairs, less indeed through immediate precept than by the forma- 
 tion of general political sense. Its highest aim is to hand on to 
 posterity in scientific shape the political results to which humanity 
 has attained. 
 
 Section 2 is given up to definitions, which need not be 
 cited here. 
 
 3. POSITION OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE CIRCLE OF THE 
 POLITICAL SCIENCES 
 
 Political Economy (Staatswirthschaft) is the doctrine (Lehre) 
 of the laws of development of the national economy (VolJcswirth- 
 schaft). 
 
 1. Relation to the Gamer al Sciences. Short literary history 
 of the Cameral Sciences. The Cameral Sciences, or Private 
 Economics (Privatokonomilc), divided into Agriculture, Technology, 
 Commercial Education, Forestry, and Architecture. Then- object 
 is to represent the present position and the most advantageous 
 methods of the various branches of industry. Therefore, necessary 
 auxiliaries to Political Economy. But, while the Cameralist has 
 to do with things themselves, things interest the economist only so 
 far as they affect human, and especially political, relations. 
 
 2. Relation to tJie Other Political Sciences. Politics is the 
 doctrine of the laws of development of the state as a whole. 
 Political Economy an especially important part thereof, and there- 
 fore one worked out with especial detail. International Law has 
 the same relation to Politics : it is the more complete presentation 
 of the foreign relations of the state. Important subdivisions of 
 these branches : Financial Science and Diplomacy. Under 
 Administration (Polizei] we understand the action of the state 
 designed for the direct maintenance of external order. So 
 Administration forms one side of what is peculiarly called Politics 
 (as legal administration), just as it does of Political Economy
 
 KOSCHEK'S PEOGEAMME OF 1843 37 
 
 (commercial policy, policy as to transportation, &c.) and of Inter- 
 national Law (foreign relations). While the sciences just named 
 discover the laws of development of the state from the study of all 
 periods and peoples, Statistics is a representation of existing states 
 under the guidance of these laws. General Staatsrecht, Positive 
 Staatsrecht. 
 
 3. Value of Political Economy. Indispensability of Political 
 Economy to any well-founded opinions upon the state, especially 
 in our times. Warning, on the other hand, against one-sided over- 
 valuation of material interests. The political and the economic 
 side of the science to be equally emphasised. 
 
 4. SURVEY OF THE FOLLOWING COURSE OF INSTRUCTION 
 
 Comparison of the ' General Part ' with Mathematics, though 
 it rests simply on psychological experiences. How far, then, it is 
 appropriate to express politico-economic relations in algebraic 
 formulae. Explanation of the terms National Economy, VolJcswirth- 
 schaftslehre, Finance. Whether we can omit Economic Policy and 
 Financial Science from Political Economy. Eecommendation and 
 characterisation of the systems of Ad. Smith, J. B. Say, Kicardo, 
 and Eau, and Patriotische Phantasieen of J. Moser, which are to 
 be used side by side with the lectures.
 
 39 
 
 MEDIAEVAL AGBABIAN 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH SERFDOM 1 
 
 THE history of dogma possesses a peculiarly fascinating 
 interest : it abounds in illustrations of what we may call 
 collective mental processes. And this interest is not confined 
 to the dogmas of theology ; it is provoked by dogmas of 
 every kind by the dogmas of history itself. Such a dogma, 
 for instance, is what is known as the mark theory. 2 This 
 is the theory that English social history began with the 
 occupation of the country by groups of ^ p p Anf ^ PT lti ^fifimfir 1 ; 
 that these settled down in free village communities, with 
 common ownership of the area they cultivated ; or, if, as 
 oSewiOUgntTonr forefathers had already arrived at the 
 idea of private property in the arable fields, that primitive 
 communism survived in their common ownership of the 
 pasture and adjacent waste ; and that the lord of the manor 
 was a comparatively late comer, who contrived in divers 
 Ways todepjress the, villagers to the condition of serfdom. 
 All this happened, it was supposed/m the period between 
 the conquest of England by the English and the conquest 
 
 1 [Economic Review, April 1893 ; apropos of Villainage in England, 
 by Paul Vinogradoff, Professor in the University of Moscow. 1892.] 
 
 * [As to the use of tha term nunrh tor the ptfloga community, which 
 has lately been spoken of as an English misunderstanding, see 
 infra, p. 161.]
 
 40 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 by the Normans, and by the latter conquest the process was 
 consummated. 
 
 The appearance of this doctrine in Oxford was, I should 
 imagine, roughly coeval with the establishment of the 
 separate Honour School of Modern History in 1872. Up to 
 that time, so far as English history was studied at all, the 
 usual textbook was Hallam ; and Hallam does not seem to 
 have even suspected the existence of any such institution as 
 the free village community. He laid down, without any 
 misgivings, that in the Anglo-Saxon period ' there were two 
 denominations of persons above the class of servitude, 
 Thanes and Ceorls, the owners and the cultivators of land.' 1 
 A ceorl might occasionally have land ' of his own ; ' 2 and he 
 explained, in a later note, that it was a mistake to speak of 
 the ceorl as ' legally in servitude.' 3 But, nevertheless, he 
 believed that he ' was not generally an independent free- 
 holder,' 4 and that the ceorls as a class were ' obliged to 
 reside on the lands which they cultivated.' 5 But all these 
 ideas vanished soon after 1872. In 1871 had appeared Sir 
 Henry Maine's ' Village Communities in East and West,' in 
 which the mark was treated as being, so far as Germany 
 was concerned, absolutely demonstrated by the researches 
 of Georg von Maurer ; so that all that was left was to apply 
 his conclusions to England, and illustrate them from the re- 
 cords of other nations, notably of India. Then, in 1873, 
 appeared the first volume of Dr. Stubbs's ' Constitutional 
 History,' which transferred to England, cautiously and 
 with reserves, yet unhesitatingly in the main, the doctrines 
 of the whole Teutonist school of constitutional historians, 
 represented by Waitz doctrines of which Maurer's mark 
 theory was a consistent part. The new Honour School 
 called for a new body of tutors : these tutors were just then 
 emerging from pupilage ; and the mark theory became in an 
 amazingly brief period the accepted tutorial doctrine. It 
 appealed to many of the strongest feelings of academic man. 
 It was new, and therefore enlightened : on the other hand, 
 
 1 Middle Ages (ed. 1878), ii. 275. 2 Ibid. p. 276. 
 
 8 Ibid. p. 370. 4 Ibid. p. 366. 5 Ibid. p. 370.
 
 ENGLISH SEEFDOM 41 
 
 the example of Dr. Stubbs showed that it was compatible 
 with great learning and unimpeachable Conservatism. 
 Moreover it was admirably adapted to the exigencies of the 
 modern tutorial method, which tempts the teacher to put 
 his instruction into the form of neat tips, and leaves 
 him scant time or inclination to revise his system. 1 Thus 
 it was that the mark theory arose almost at once to the 
 majestic height of unquestionable truth, in a way which 
 Oxford men of an earlier date can hardly realise. When, 
 some time about 1880, Mr. Denman Boss came to Oxford, 
 and ventured to express his doubts as to Maurer's use of 
 his authorities, we Oxford undergraduates, who never by 
 any chance had looked at any one of the original authorities 
 except fragments of Caesar and Tacitus regarded him as 
 an amiable maniac ; and, in the columns of the ' Saturday 
 Beview,' he was promptly butchered to make an Oxford 
 holiday. 
 
 But these halcyon days were not destined to last. In 
 1883 came forth Mr. Seebohm's^ English Village Commu- 
 nity.' This presented the subjecT in such an entirely new 
 light that the first feeling was one of blank bewilderment. 
 It was true, Mr. Seebohm told us, that early English society 
 was organised in groups so closely bound together that they 
 may properly be spoken of as ' village communities ; ' but 
 these communities, he went on toTETgue, were ' communities 
 in serfdom under a manorial lordship," 2 and this would 
 seem to have been their character from the very beginning 
 of English history. Such a proposition called for the recon- 
 sideration of the whole of the accepted doctrine of early 
 constitutional development ; and this was too much to ex- 
 pect from mortal men. Accordingly, what Oxford criticism 
 
 1 [If there seems some acerbity in this language, the writer can only 
 plead that he was himself a ' coach ' in Oxford between 1881 and 1885 
 and a college tutor between 1885 and 1888, and is conscious that the 
 environment had this effect on him. That the tutorial system has 
 many and great merits will be found expressly recognised in the papers 
 on academic life which conclude this volume.] 
 
 * Preface, p. ix.
 
 42 MEDIEVAL AGEABIAN 
 
 first saw in Mr. Seebohm's book was the weakness of the 
 chain of argument by which he sought to connect the 
 manorial system with the Eoman ; and there was a marked 
 disposition to push his book on one side as undeserving 
 serious attention. But ' Peace ! peace ! ' was cried in vain. It 
 was the peculiar ill-luck of the tutorial teaching to be 
 wounded in the house of its friends. Mr. Seebohm, himself, 
 before he set out upon his mad course, had been an honoured 
 name in Oxford : his ' Oxford Reformers ' had for some years 
 been one of the chief sources of ' ideas ' on sixteenth-century 
 history. And now another venerated name joined the 
 enemy. The ' Cite 1 Antique ' of M. Fustel de Coulanges had, 
 not long before, been the most 'paying' of all 'paying' 
 books for scholarship examinations and for ' Greats.' It had 
 become almost a classic ; and, to judge from his long silence, 
 M. Fustel de Coulanges would seem to have already joined 
 the other writers of classics. But he had not : he had only 
 been quietly studying mediaeval history ; and now, in 1885, 
 he gave to the world a volume of ' Eecherches,' in which he 
 also maintained that the primitive free-mark community 
 was a figment of the Teutonic brain. It was, indeed, only 
 the German evidence which he examined ; but, as the argu- 
 ment for its existence in England had always rested on the 
 supposition that in Germany it was beyond question, this 
 was very serious. To make matters worse, it began to be 
 noticed that Professor Maitland, who, with a happy freedom 
 from the tutorial system, was reconstructing legal history 
 far away in the recesses of Cambridge, actually spoke of 
 Mr. Seebohm with a certain respect. Finally, in 1888, 
 Professor Earle reminded us in his ' Land Charters ' of a 
 fact we had almost forgotten, viz. that of direct evidence for 
 the mark there was not a particle to be found in Anglo-Saxon 
 documents whatever there might be of indirect. 
 
 At this moment of gloom, hope sprang up in the hearts 
 of the beleaguered garrison of the mark citadel. Far away 
 in the remote East was seen the shining helmet of an ap- 
 proaching deliverer. Professor Vinogradoff, of the Univer- 
 sity of Moscow, had been studying early English agrarian
 
 ENGLISH SEEFDOM 43 
 
 conditions : in his visits to England he had won the hearts 
 of all the scholars he had come across : and now it was 
 spread about that a book of his, for the time locked up in 
 Eussian, but shortly to issue forth in English from the 
 Clarendon Press, was to smite the infidel hip and thigh. 
 There was a hush of expectation as the champion drew near. 
 Venturesome persons, who dared meanwhile to 'commit 
 themselves,' as it was called, 'to Mr. Seebohm's theory/ 
 were rapped sharply on the knuckles. It was made a duty 
 to wait for the Eussian scholar's pronouncement. 
 
 At last this came in 1892, and Professor Vinogradoff' s 
 ' Villainage in England ' saw the light. Yet, now that the 
 first glow of excitement is over, and the book has become a 
 part of our ordinary studies, one cannot help seeing that the 
 hopes with which it was awaited were altogether dispropor- 
 tionate and this from no lack of learning in the author. 
 It is the common feeling, I think, of all who have seriously 
 examined the problem that, after all, Mr. Vinogradoff s book 
 leaves the question very much where it was before. It is 
 a learned book ; it is an interesting book ; it is a suggestive 
 book : but it is not a decisive book. 
 
 Professor Vinogradoff has devoted ten years or more to 
 the study of all the printed materials bearing on English 
 rural conditions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 
 and of great masses of unprinted material; and to this 
 power of application he joins a rapidity of perception which 
 approaches genius. He has arrived at a knowledge of legal 
 opinion and procedure in those centuries which would be 
 more than worshipful in an Englishman, and is nothing less 
 than terrifying in a foreigner. Could he have been borrowed 
 from a later age and transferred from the professor's desk at 
 Moscow, in the nineteenth century, to the English judicial 
 bench in the thirteenth, his colleagues would never have 
 discovered that he had not always been one of themselves ; 
 except possibly in 1279, when he would have felt it necessary 
 to dissent from the unanimous judgment of eight of his 
 brethren, with the Chief Justice at their head. 1 No wonder 
 1 Villainage in England, p. 119.
 
 44 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 that modern English lawyers are carried off their feet by 
 admiration. But it does not follow that because a scholar 
 can unravel the inconsistencies of legal opinion in a given 
 century, he is to be followed in his explanation of the way 
 those inconsistencies had come about ; and Mr. Vinogradoff s 
 book illustrates throughout the difference between legal 
 analysis and historical construction. 
 
 It consists of two essays, of which the first, on 'The 
 Peasantry of the Feudal Age,' is in the main a discussion, 
 based on legal evidence, of the personal status of the villeins ; 
 the second, on ' The Manor and the Village Community,' is 
 . a discussion of the system of joint agriculture revealed by 
 manorial documents. Each of these contains an abundance 
 of information on thirteenth and fourteenth century condi- 
 tions ; much light is cast on the position of the villein class, 
 and the circumstances of their life ; and the work will long 
 continue to be one which the economic historian will have to 
 consult when he deals with that period. But Professor 
 Vinogradoffs interest is not in the facts of the period for 
 their own sake, but for the help they furnish in the study of 
 social origins. All his material with occasional parentheses 
 is therefore arranged in such a way as to present a case. 
 This case in the first essay is, as he puts it in one place, that 
 .'.freedom' was 'an important constitutive element in the 
 historical process leading to feudalism.' l But this is a pro- 
 position which, in one sense, no one would care to deny. 
 Every one, I should think, would recognise, on general 
 historical grounds, which I need not enter upon here, that 
 it is very improbable that the villein population of the 
 thirteenth century were descended entirely either from 
 slaves or from persons who had always been in subjection 
 to a lord. Mr^Seebohm holds that the organisation of the 
 Eoman villa had great influence on the development of the 
 English manor ; but both Mr. Seebohm and M. Fustel de 
 Coulanges have laid great stress on the degradation of free 
 tenants into dependent coloni as an ' important constitutive 
 
 1 P. 208.
 
 ENGLISH SEEFDOM 45 
 
 element ' in the formation of the villa system. 1 Then, after 
 the English had conquered Britain, and, as Mr. Seebohm 
 supposes, taken control of the villa-groups which they found, 
 the same writer points out how independent freemen would 
 be drawn into the servile circle, and the 'community in 
 serfdom on a lord's estate recruited from above and below.' 2 
 The question is not whether freedom was an important 
 element ; but Jww important it was, and when and how it 
 entered into the historical process : and these are questions 
 for Professor Vinogradoff s answer to which we must wait 
 for a further volume. But even in his argument as he has 
 so far presented it, there is much that is very open to 
 criticism. His method may be characterised by the one 
 word which he is so fond of employing ; it is the method of 
 survival. 3 He first expounds the strict mediaeval theory of 
 villein status ; then he finds local exceptions, divergencies 
 of opinion, occasional dicta, &c., which seem incompatible 
 with the strict theory, and appear to indicate a greater 
 freedom than the strict theory allows ; and these are set 
 down as survivals of an earlier condition. Now, it cannot 
 be denied that there are parts of his argument which carry 
 conviction with them ; nor can it be asserted that Mr. Vino- 
 gradoff is blind to the possibility of another explanation of 
 his facts than survival : but it is fitting to remark that Mr. 
 Vinogradoff s preoccupation with his one idea leads him to 
 look at possibilities a little too readily from one point of 
 view. His method is identical at bottom with the method 
 of Mr. Seebohm the method of proceeding ' from the known 
 to the unknown ; ' and he has himself called our attention 
 to its obvious dangers. 4 But, while Mr. Seebohm sees sur- 
 vivals in the great broad facts of mediaeval life, Mr. Vino- 
 gradoff s alleged survivals are found among the smaller and 
 
 1 Seebohm, pp. 266 seq., 302 seq. ; Fustel de Coulanges on Le Colonat 
 Romain in Recherches ; cf. Pelham, The Imperial Domains and tJie 
 Colonate, pp. 12, 13. 
 
 2 Pp. 405, 406 ; cf. Fustel de Coulanges' Origin of Property in 
 Land, Engl. trans., Introduction by the present writer, p. xxxix. 
 
 3 Villainage, p. 134 ; cf. pp. 75, 192 et passim. 4 P. 38.
 
 46 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 more exceptional facts ; and perhaps for that very reason 
 they demand more careful scrutiny. 
 
 Let us take an example. Bracton says in one place that 
 the villein has an action against his lord if the lord should 
 take away the villein's wainage, i.e. plough and plough-team. 
 This remark, Professor Vinogradoff notes, ' is quite out of 
 keeping with the doctrine that the villein had no property to 
 vindicate against his lord ; ... it is not supported by legal 
 practice in the thirteenth century, and it is omitted by Bracton ' 
 when he touches upon the subject later. 1 Hence, our author 
 tells us, ' it cannot be explained otherwise than as a survival 
 of a time when some part of the peasantry was possessed of 
 civil rights and of the power to vindicate them.' But why 
 are we shut up to this explanation ? Professor Vinogradoff 
 tells us repeatedly that ' the (law) courts ' of this period 
 'proclaimed their leaning "in favour of liberty" quite 
 openly ; ' 2 and he implies that it would be quite justifiable 
 to regard this partiality of the law as being in some cases ' a 
 consequence of enlightened and humanitarian views making 
 towards the liberation of the servile class.' 3 Why should we 
 not regard the remark of Bracton as itself an instance of this 
 humanitarian tendency ? It is difficult to see why the one 
 explanation is not as likely as the other, unless we start with 
 an assumption. 
 
 Take another instance. There was a celebrated case of 
 Montacute v. Bestenore, which was decided in 1220 ; and, 
 resting upon the decision, Bracton laid down that if a free 
 man held in villeinage by villein services he could not be 
 ejected by the lord, provided he was performing the services 
 due from the holding. Bracton appeals also to a decision 
 granting an assize of mort d' ancestor to a free man holding in 
 villeinage. What is Mr. Vinogradoff' s comment ? It is that 
 this view ' places villeinage substantially on the same footing 
 as freehold,' 4 and that ' these instances go clean against the 
 usually accepted doctrine that holding in villeinage is the 
 same as holding at the will of the lord.' 5 But does this 
 
 1 Pp. 74, 75. 2 P. 84. P. 86. 
 
 P. 80. 5 P. 81.
 
 ENGLISH SEEFDOM 47 
 
 follow ? When the lawyers laid down the doctrine that 
 holding in villeinage was the same as holding at the will of 
 the lord, did not they have in their mind the normal case 
 where the holding in villeinage was by a villein ? And is it 
 not more than possible that, in the two cases relied on by 
 Bracton, the new doctrine was due to the introduction of a 
 new element, viz. the holding by a free man ? It is true that 
 according to current theory the phrase ' in villeinage ' implied 
 a holding at will ; but is it not likely that this consideration 
 was outweighed in Bracton's mind by the fact that the 
 tenant was a free man with whom an implied contract was 
 possible ? That seems to me quite as likely a supposition as 
 that we have here a ' remnant ' of forgotten rights. It must, 
 indeed, be mentioned that Mr. Vinogradoff supports his 
 contention by citing one case where it was held that a villein 
 had a right, which the courts would protect, to retain his land 
 in spite of his lord, on performing ' predictas consuetudines.' 
 Before basing much upon this case one would like to know 
 what 'predict consuetudines ' were : they may have included 
 more or less arbitrary claims at the will of the lord. But 
 supposing that they were fixed, and that the decision really 
 gave the villein security of tenure, then it must be noticed 
 that 'the decision is quite isolated, and goes against the 
 rules of procedure.' If it is not a mere ' mistake,' as even 
 Professor Vinogradoff seems inclined to regard it, it may 
 with some probability be attributed to those ' humanitarian ' 
 views to which we have already referred. In any case it 
 loses very much of its force as a proof of survival when it is 
 dissociated from those cases concerning free men with which 
 in principle it has clearly nothing to do. 
 
 There is a long chapter on ' Ancient Demesne,' with much 
 that is interesting, and not a little also that the non-legal 
 reader finds it hard to follow. A large number of the villeins 
 on the ancient demesne of the Crown were certainly, in the 
 language of the time, ' privileged ; ' i.e. they ' enjoyed a 
 certainty of condition protected by law,' ' and defendable 
 in the courts of the manors of which they held. The 
 
 1 P. 89.
 
 48 MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 circumstance seems to prove that this particular class of 
 villeins on these particular manors had for some time been 
 in a position in important respects different from that of most 
 villeins elsewhere. But it does not prove more. And when 
 Professor Vinogradoff pronounces that the ancient demesne 
 tenure is ' a remnant of the [general] condition of things 
 before the Conquest/ and that ' the effect of conquest was 
 to narrow to a particular class a protection originally con- 
 ferred broadly,' l he is following the high d priori road. 
 That this is the correct explanation is precisely what has to 
 be proved. Mr. Vinogradoffs countryman, Mr. Kovalevsky, 
 who shares the predisposition to see the free community 
 everywhere, has nevertheless suggested that the law of 
 ancient demesne was imported from Normandy. This sug- 
 gestion may be inacceptable on other grounds ; but the 
 only grounds for rejecting it stated by Mr. Vinogradoff are 
 these : 
 
 Whatever the position of the villeins was in the Duchy. 
 
 influence in England made for subjection because it was Hie 
 influence of conquest. It must be remembered that, in a sense, 
 the feudal law of England was the hardest of all in Western 
 Europe, and this on account of the invasion. 2 
 
 Surely the first sentence here quoted is pure a priori 
 reasoning. The Norman influence of which Mr. Kovalevsky 
 was thinking was the influence of the king ; and what 
 reason is there for thinking that the influence of the Norman 
 king tended towards the subjection of the villeins'? Mr. 
 Vinogradoff himself in another connection recognises the 
 possibility that it was quite otherwise. 3 And the second 
 sentence, in the natural sense of the words, seems to be nihil 
 ad rem. The ' feudal law of England ' i.e. the law about 
 wardship and marriage and relief, &c. was the hardest of 
 all in Western Europe, because the king's hand was heavy 
 
 1 Pp. 123, 124. 2 P. 124, n. 4. 
 
 * First half of p. 135, and second half of p. 179. For some general 
 considerations of importance, see Freeman's Norman Conquest, v. 384,
 
 ENGLISH SEKFDOM 49 
 
 on his barons, not because of his relation to the working 
 population. 1 
 
 There is one minor part of Mr. Vinogradoff s argument as 
 to ancient demesne where I should like to make a sugges- 
 tion. There was a 'peculiar procedure provided for the 
 privileged villeins, whereby they could secure the revision by 
 the courts of common law of the action of the manorial 
 courts in cases concerning their tenements.' 2 This, we are 
 told, ' shows conclusively ' that the advantage enjoyed by 
 such villeins ' was only an instance and a variation of the 
 general law of the land, maintaining actionable rights of 
 free persons." The ' substance ' of these rights is, in short, 
 a survival from Saxon tunes. 3 But is there not another 
 explanation possible ? The key to mediaeval villeinage, as 
 Mr. Vinogradoff points out again and again, was ' territorial 
 lordship.' 4 Hence an ordinary lord's villein could not be 
 allowed to appeal to the king's court, because by so doing he 
 would lead to an infringement upon his lord's territorial 
 power. But this result would not seem to arise if the 
 villein were a villein on one of the king's manors. To appeal 
 from the manorial court to the courts of the king's justices 
 would only be appealing from a lower to a higher court of 
 the same lord, and would not appear to detract from his 
 authority. We modern constitutionalists can, of course, dis- 
 tinguish clearly enough between the king's authority as 
 landlord and his authority as national sovereign ; but it may 
 be doubted whether the distinction was so clear at the time 
 when the common law courts were just coming into 
 existence. And since this suggestion occurred to me, I have 
 noticed that Mr. Vinogradoff hints at the same tiling : 
 
 1 Several other explanations are possible, and one well worth 
 considering is that the favoured tenants on demesne were descended 
 from coloni on imperial estates (cf. Fustel do Coulanges, L' Alien, 
 pp. 55, 71 ; and on the retention of their identity by imperial estates 
 into mediaeval times, Pelham, pp. 6, 7). Mr. Kovalevsky's suggestion is 
 cited to show (1) that the facts do not suggest the same inference even to 
 a scholar predisposed to accept it, and (2) that Mr. Vinogradoff 's reason- 
 ing is unconsciously a priori. 
 
 2 Pp. 99, 100. * Pp. 123, 124. * Pp. 57, 58. 
 
 E
 
 50 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 The curse of villeinage was that manorial courts were inde- 
 pendent of superior organisation as far as the lower tenants were 
 concerned. But courts in royal manors were the king's courts 
 after all, and as such they could hardly be severed from the higher 
 tribunals held in the king's name. 1 
 
 Considerations of this kind might naturally lead to a con- 
 nection between them as soon as the curia regis began to ex- 
 tend its action over the kingdom ; and, if so, what becomes 
 of the ' survival ' argument ? 
 
 In the latter part of the first essay Mr. Vinogradoff 
 labours to prove that there was a considerable class of ' free 
 peasantry ' in the thirteenth century. He recognises most 
 distinctly that in a very large number of cases the appearance 
 of ' free tenure ' was simply the result of a commutation of 
 labour services for money payments. 2 But he argues that 
 many cases are instances of survival. 
 
 They may have come from an old stock of people whose 
 immemorial custom has been to pay rent in money or hi kind, and 
 who have always remained more or less free from base labour. 3 
 
 I have italicised some words in this sentence to show that, 
 even if we could prove the existence of this class of depen- 
 dent cultivators, subject to superiors but free from some 
 of the more degrading incidents of ordinary villein life, we 
 should still be far away from independent self-governing 
 members of free village communities. But let us examine 
 in detail some part of the argument. Take the case of the 
 hundredors.* We frequently come across manorial tenants 
 in the thirteenth century who are termed hundredors because 
 they are bound to appear in the hundred court. They are 
 clearly members of the villein body ; on the other hand, 
 
 their tenure by the ' sergeanty ' of attending hundreds and shires 
 ranks again and again with freehold. Does it not seem at first 
 sight that the case of the hundredors (i.e. their being regarded as 
 free tenants) is simply a case of exemption (i.e. from labour, in 
 return for their undertaking the duty of attendance), and exactly 
 
 1 P. 125. 2 Pp. 178 seq., 310. 
 
 3 P. 188. 4 Pp. 188 seq.
 
 ENGLISH SEBFDOM 51 
 
 on a parallel with the commutation of servile obligations for 
 money ? ' 
 
 It certainly does. Why, then, does Mr. Vinogradoff reject 
 this view ? For three reasons chiefly, so far as I can make out. 
 First, we find the requirement in some cases that the priest 
 should go with the other four or five representatives. This 
 ' presence of the priest warns us that we have to reckon . . . 
 with a survival, with an element of tradition and not of 
 mere innovation.' 2 It is not easy to see why. There is no 
 evidence, as far as I know, of the presence of the priest in 
 the courts before the so-called ' Laws of Henry I.; ' and even 
 they imply that the proper thing was for the lord or his 
 steward to be present, and that the reeve, priest, and four 
 best men were only called upon to attend if the lord 
 or steward were obliged to be absent. 3 After two minor 
 arguments, based upon Britton and the Assize of Clarendon, 
 which limitations of space compel me to pass over, and upon 
 which Mr. Vinogradoff himself lays no great stress, he 
 returns again to the ' Laws of Henry I.' He points out 
 that the interchanging representation of the mil in the 
 hundred by the lord or steward, and by the six men, 
 illustrates the fact that it was the territorial unity that was 
 represented, and not classes. But then ' the question arises 
 naturally, where is one to look for the small freeholders in 
 the enactment ? However much we may restrict their 
 probable number, their existence cannot be simply denied or 
 disregarded.' And hence they must have been ' included 
 in the population of the township ' represented by the six 
 hundredors. 4 But, again, why cannot we suppose that the 
 number of freeholders, other than lords of land, was at that 
 time too small to be taken into account '? Mr. Vinogradoff 
 is of course very well aware that it is a capital point in Mr. 
 Seebohm's theory that the fact that Domesday does not 
 mention free tenants in the greater part of England proves 
 that there were none at that time. But he has a view of 
 
 1 P. 191. " P. 192. 
 
 * ' Si uterque necessario desit.' 4 P. 193. 
 
 2
 
 52 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 his own about Domesday which he is to give us by-and- 
 by ; and for the present he rules the Survey out of the 
 discussion. Yet, if we take a manor for which we have 
 later evidence at different periods, we find that as we go 
 back the number of freeholders diminishes. Thus there 
 were in the manor of Beauchamp, belonging to the chapter 
 of St. Paul's, thirty-four freeholders in 1222 ; forty-one 
 years before, in 1181, there were only eighteen. Is it not 
 altogether likely that the further back we could go, the fewer 
 free tenants we should find? That the freeholders were 
 ' specially privileged villeins,' and, as a class, of feudal and 
 post-Conquest origin, was maintained on grounds like these 
 long before Mr. Seebohm by an independent scholar 
 Professor Allen, of the University of Wisconsin in spite of 
 his own strong leaning towards the free -community view. 1 
 In the present state of our knowledge, then, the smaller free- 
 holders circ. 1100 may be ' disregarded ' with some show of 
 reason. For his final argument, Mr. Vinogradoff makes use 
 of the next clause in the ' Leges Henrici : ' 
 
 In the great hundred for the view of frankpledge ... all men 
 are to appear who are ' free and worthy of their were and their 
 wite ; this . . . includes distinctly the great bulk of the villein 
 population as personally free. 2 
 
 Now, if our author had quoted ' Leg. Hen. I.' c. 8, 1 
 ' conveniant . . . quicumque liberi' he might possibly 
 have made out something in behalf of his contention, 
 though, on the face of it, it seems rather to tell against him. 
 But the phrase about ' were and wite ' comes from 2, which 
 says nothing about attendance. ' Quisquis werse vel witee vel 
 jure liberi dignus curat aestimari ' is, from the twelfth year of 
 his age, to be ' in hundredo et decima vel plegio liberali.' He 
 is to be ' in a hundred ' whatever that may mean for 
 police purposes, not to attend a hundred ; unless it is held 
 also that he is to attend it from the age of twelve, and also 
 to ' attend ' a frankpledge ! It must be allowed, I think, 
 
 1 See his paper on. ' The Origin of the Freeholders ' (1877), reprinted 
 in Essays and Monographs (Boston, 1890); [and the review infra, p. 82]. 
 
 2 Pp. 193, 194.
 
 ENGLISH SERFDOM 53 
 
 that however impressive Mr. VinogradofF s reasoning may be, 
 it is not strengthened by these particular arguments. 
 
 In the concluding chapter of the first essay Professor 
 Vinogradoff arrives at a further and more wide-reaching 
 contention than that with which he has, as a rule, previously 
 contented himself. It is that the analysis of legal theory 
 shows three stages of development. 
 
 The three tests of freedom applied by our documents are connected 
 with each other by the very terms in which they are stated, and at 
 the same time they present three consecutive stages of development. 
 The notion of serfdom was originally confined to forms of personal 
 subjection and to the possession of land under the bane of personal 
 subjection : in this sense servitude is a narrow term, and the con- 
 dition noted by it exceptional. In its second meaning it connects 
 itself with rural labour, and spreads over the whole class of 
 peasants engaged in it. In its last and broadest sense it 
 includes all the people and all the land not protected by the Common 
 Law. 1 
 
 Hence the villeins as a class are to be regarded as ' customary 
 freeholders who have lost legal protection.' 2 
 
 The reader must not fail to observe that the evidence 
 here adduced is not evidence as to a change in physical con- 
 ditions, but evidence concerning a supposed widening range of 
 legal definition. But this throws no light on the genesis of 
 the economic situation now in question. It might be supposed 
 to do so, by those unfamiliar with the technical meaning of 
 1 freeholders ; ' though Mr. Vinogradoff does his best to warn 
 them by inserting the adjective ' customary.' Our author 
 does not mean that these supposed ' freeholders ' were 
 independent owners, like the American farmers of to-day. 
 He would allow that they were members of the groups 
 known after the Conquest as manors ; that they were 
 dependent upon lords, and bound to render to them most 
 burdensome services labour two or three days a week all the 
 year round, and almost all their time at busy seasons. That 
 these agricultural dependents should in A.D. 1000 have been 
 technically free men, and in A.D. 1200 technically not free, 
 
 1 P, 217, * P. 220.
 
 54 MEDIAEVAL AGEAKIAN 
 
 although a notable difference, need not have been, from 
 the economic point of view, a matter of great moment. 
 They would not have been able, at the later date, to ap- 
 peal to the national courts to maintain their rights ; but 
 this temporary loss of civil rights might very well have 
 been concurrent with an improvement in economic con- 
 dition. 1 Moreover, we are not yet in a position to say to 
 what extent a technical freedom of the tenants and a theoretic 
 ability to appeal to the national courts if it existed would 
 actually have protected them. Mr. Vinogradoff himself gives 
 several examples of the inability even of persons possessing 
 rights recognised at common law to enforce them against 
 their lords, and this at a time when the central government 
 was incomparably stronger than before the Conquest, and 
 when it made itself felt through the itinerant justices in every 
 corner of the kingdom. We may fairly conjecture that in 
 earlier centuries when the very existence of royal courts 
 practically accessible to the masses of the people may 
 well be doubted the nominal possession of rights would 
 have been far less beneficial. This is indeed an instance 
 of both the strength and the weakness of the purely legal 
 method. The question at issue is primarily an economic 
 one, the origin of the dependent agrarian group ; and Mr. 
 Vinogradoff' s contention, even if he had proved it, does not 
 touch this problem. If he went no further than he goes in 
 this first essay, he would go no whit beyond Palgrave and 
 Hallam, both of whom laid stress on the freedom of the 
 ceorls, but also both believed that they occupied substantially 
 the same economic position as the later villeins. Mr. 
 Seebohm, wishing to emphasise the economic dependence of 
 the cultivators of the soil, naturally used the terms ' serfs ' 
 and ' servile ' in the loose modern sense of persons in a posi- 
 tion intermediate between what we commonly understand by 
 freedom and what we commonly understand by slavery. Mr. 
 Vinogradoff has seized upon the term, and now seems to think 
 that if he can prove the legal freedom of the villagers, he has 
 cut away Mr. Seebohm's foundation. But Mr. Seebohm had 
 1 Of. pp. 180, 181,
 
 ENGLISH SEKFDOM 55 
 
 already anticipated him, though not perhaps in language 
 of technical accuracy. 
 
 In one sense, both in England and Germany the holders of the 
 yard-lands and ' huben,' though serfs, were free. As regards their 
 lords, they were serfs. As regards the slaves, they were free. 
 
 And he makes up for the want of legal phraseology by adding 
 a parallel which even technically is very close to the alleged 
 position of the ceoii : ' In this respect,' he says, ' they re- 
 sembled very closely the Koman coloni on a private villa.' l 
 To say this over again at greater length hardly advances the 
 solution of the problem. 
 
 The second essay collects a wide array of facts touching 
 the agricultural side of manorial life in the thirteenth century, 
 and it will be an indispensable storehouse for the student of 
 the period. But the main outlines of the agrarian system 
 had already been laid down ; and Professor Vinogradoff in- 
 troduces no considerable change. Evidence is accumulated 
 for what is beyond question ; where it is really most needed 
 to support the author's suggestions as to the antecedents 
 of the manor it is often inadequate. We may begin by 
 referring to a contention to which Professor Vinogradoff 
 clearly attaches great importance. It is that the 'labour- 
 system ' upon the manors was preceded by what he calls the 
 ' farm-system ' (from a use of the term firma which we need 
 not pause to explain), i.e. a system of food-rents. 2 There are 
 several cases recorded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
 where each of the manors belonging to some great lord was 
 expected to render to him food of various kinds sufficient to 
 maintain his household for a certain period. Now, in no 
 case, so far as I can see, are we told that tenants were 
 individually bound to render such quantities of food as would 
 make up the total, and that they had no other dues either of 
 labour or of any other kind to render. But this is clearly 
 what Mr. Vinogradoff supposes ; and he assumes without 
 evidence that the labour- services of individual tenants are 
 
 1 English Village Community, p. 407. 2 Pp. 301 seq.
 
 56 MEDIEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 a later substitute for this more primitive system. Then, 
 having assumed this transition, he proceeds to contrast the 
 one stage with the other. But it remains to be proved (1) that 
 the food-rent system was of the kind he supposes, and (2) 
 that it was replaced by the labour-system. As to (1), we 
 find that in the only case where we have detailed information, 
 that of the estates of St. Paul, the food -rent was the result of 
 an arrangement with the canon who ' farmed ' each manor ; 
 and that it was paid out of the total gains in money or in 
 kind, as they were obtained by means of the various dues 
 required from the tenants, and chiefly, of course, by the week- 
 work. The food-rents in the St. Paul's case were simply 
 the form taken in a ' natural economy ' by the results of 
 the labour-system itself. Certainly the week-works were 
 demanded on those manors as elsewhere. Why should we 
 not suppose that that was the case in the other instances ? 
 Moreover (2), what replaced the food-rent system was, so far 
 as our evidence goes, not the labour-rents which had long 
 existed but the payment of a sum of money by the bailiff 
 or other manager of the demesne in lieu of food. Surely 
 Professor Vinogradoff is confusing two things the individual 
 duties of each tenant, and the form in which the proceeds of 
 manorial farming were forwarded to the lord. 
 
 There is the same lack of proof in an argument as to 
 freehold virgates. Many of these, he allows, are evidently 
 the result of commutation. But others ' seem to be ancient 
 and primitive.' l The traits which mark them are ' share- 
 holding ' i.e. that they are virgates in the open fields with 
 appurtenant pasture, and light rents. ' In regard to duties, 
 they are practically outside the community.' 2 These data 
 are open to a good deal of criticism ; but suppose we grant 
 them, what then? Then they 'imply manorial relations 
 superimposed on a village community.' 3 But where is the 
 sequiturl A body of twenty persons is found, of whom 
 nineteen hold shares in the village lands with labour dues ; 
 the twentieth holds a share, but is free from the labour dues : 
 therefore, it is argued, manorial relations have been super- 
 1 P. 345. P. 347. 3 Cf. p. 349 with p. 353.
 
 ENGLISH SEKFDOM 57 
 
 imposed on the wlwle body of twenty. Is it not equally easy 
 to suppose that groups, which we may for brevity call 
 manorial groups, having somehow or other already grown 
 up, certain new comers had been admitted to a share in the 
 lands without being subjected to the burdens of those they 
 joined ? We can imagine this to have taken place if Saxon 
 warriors settled down side by side with bodies of provincial 
 serfs on Eoman villas ; and, with still greater likelihood, if 
 Danish warriors settled down by the side of dependent Saxon 
 villages already constituted. This would seem to explain 
 the striking fact that freemen and socmen are recorded in 
 Domesday only in the districts affected by Danish occupa- 
 tion. At any rate, it is as likely a supposition as that of a free 
 community falling into subjection but leaving a few sur- 
 vivors to tell the tale. And each is no more than a supposi- 
 tion until positive proof can be adduced. 
 
 We have looked now, I think, at most of the important 
 new contentions raised by Mr. Vinogradoff. But there are 
 two other points which I may notice in passing. Mr. 
 Vinogradoff rightly lays stress on the strong communal tie 
 binding together the manorial group. I have already, in 
 another place, recognised that the origin of this communal 
 bond is still an unsolved problem ; and that this is the weak 
 point in the theories of Fustel de Coulanges. 1 Perhaps we 
 shall find its origin in tribal conditions preceding the 
 manorial period. But Professor Vinogradoff presses this 
 point a little too far. He notices that ' the manorial bailiff 
 was matched by the communal reeve.' 2 But it is exceedingly 
 improbable that the doubling of officers described by Fleta 
 was general or ancient. 3 And a careful recent investigator 
 of the Saxon evidence has come to the conclusion that ' in 
 Saxon times . . . the duties performed by each of the later 
 officers were undertaken by the one functionary, the gerefa, 
 
 1 Introduction to Origin of Property, p. xlii. 2 P. 356. 
 
 * This suggestion by the present writer, in his Econ. Hist. I. i. 12, 
 has been abundantly confirmed by the publication of the anonymous 
 Husbandry, by Miss Lamond. See hereon, Eng. Hist. Rev. vii. 151.
 
 58 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 who was appointed by the lord.' l Then, again, Mr. 
 Vinogradoff argues that the open-field system, with its 
 appurtenances, points to earlier 'practices of division of 
 allotment,' 2 and he implies that this presupposes a primitive 
 communism. Curiously enough, however, the custom of 
 periodical division of lands in Eussia, which writers have 
 long been accustomed to regard in a similar way, has of late 
 been declared by one of the strongest supporters of the free- 
 village theory, Mr. Kovalevsky, to be of recent origin, and 
 due chiefly to Peter the Great's imposition of a capitation 
 tax. 3 I do not suggest that this proves the English usages 
 to be due to some other force than the will of self-governing 
 groups ; but it suggests that we ought to hesitate before we 
 pronounce every feature in the manorial life which at first 
 sight strikes us as non-individualistic to be archaic and 
 communistic. And as to the open-field cultivation itself with 
 its intermixed strips, Mr. Vinogradoff ' o'erleaps himself and 
 falls on the other ' side when he insists that 
 
 it is in full work in countries where the manor has not been esta- 
 blished, and in times when it has not as yet been formed : we may 
 take India or tribal Italy, for instance 
 
 and that therefore the system ' is not a manorial arrangement, 
 though it may be adapted to the manor.' 4 This, he thinks, 
 tells against the manorial theory : ' all these features point 
 to one source the village community.' But we have no 
 historical knowledge of any village community without a more 
 or less manorial organisation ; and Mr. Vinogradoff himself 
 says that the open field is found in tribal societies. We may, 
 therefore, with equal justice say that the open field ' is not a 
 village arrangement though it may be adapted to the village.' 
 Mr. Seebohm has expressly argued that the open field was a 
 feature in the tribal agriculture of the Welsh and the Irish ; 
 that in Britain it was probably pre-Eoman, ' so that what 
 
 1 Andrews, The Old English Manor, p. 135. [Cf. infra, p. 153.] 
 P. 403. 
 
 3 Kovalevsky's Modern Customs and Ancient Laws oj Russia, 
 pp. 93-97, * P. 400.
 
 ENGLISH SEEFDOM 59 
 
 the Eomans added to transform it into the manorial three- 
 field system ' was chiefly ' the three-course rotation of crops.' l 
 But we need not accept this particular explanation. We 
 may suppose that the English themselves, when in a tribal 
 stage, were acquainted with open-field agriculture. The 
 vital point to observe is that certain ' communal ' features of 
 the later manor may just as well be ascribed to a tribal 
 condition as to a free-village condition. The difficulty is to 
 find room, between the tribal period and the manorial period, 
 for a supposed free-village period for which, even Professor 
 Vinogradoff would grant, no distinct positive evidence has 
 come down to us. The mark hypothesis has, in short, 
 served its purpose as a nucleus round which to accumulate 
 facts ; and it is now rather a hindrance than a help. It will 
 be wise in future to drop it out of our minds as far as pos- 
 sible, and to concentrate our attention, first, on the analysis 
 of tribal organisation, as we find it still existing in various 
 parts of the world ; and secondly, on the examination of that 
 other great force which was at work in the formation of 
 modern society, viz. Eoman influence. 
 
 To judge from internal indications, Professor Vinogradoff 
 set out upon his English researches a convinced ' markman.' 
 Mr. Seebohm's book has made him hesitate a little ; and his 
 intention in writing the treatise before us was to hold the 
 balance evenly as between the various ' elements ' in the 
 problem, the seigneurial and the communal, the servile and 
 the free, and to present materials towards a final judgment. 
 But the ' old Adam ' frequently peeps out. What he presents 
 tentatively in argument, he is apt to state positively in his 
 summing up at the end of each chapter. Let me give an 
 example. ' The manorial ceremony of surrender and admit- 
 tance may,' he suggests, ' have gone back to a practice which 
 was nothing to do with the lord's ownership,' 2 and he com- 
 pares it with the practice described in the Salic law, where a 
 middleman receives a rod from the outgoing owner and 
 
 1 English Village Community, p. 411 ; cf. pp. 117 seq., 266 seq. 
 8 P. 372,
 
 60 MEDIAEVAL AGRAKIAN 
 
 gives it to the incoming, as a symbol of the transference of 
 the property. This is a suggestion which deserves thinking 
 over. But in his summary, Mr. Vinogradoff leaps all the 
 way from supposition to proof, and lays down that the English 
 conveyancing formalities actually ' go back to very early com- 
 munal practice.' * And the same unconscious prepossession 
 sometimes leads him to state conclusions, needing to be 
 carefully limited, in language which carries a much wider 
 implication. For instance, he comments on the constitution 
 of the manorial court at Stoneleigh on the facts that ' the 
 right and duty ' of the socmen ' to give judgment ' is emphati- 
 cally stated, and that the acquiescence of the court is 
 required for the admission of a new tenant. 2 Let us 
 remember, however, that all these socmen were distinctly 
 understood to be tenants of the lord of the manor ; that they 
 paid him an annual rent of one penny for each virgate, and 
 took part in the harvest work upon his demesne ; and that 
 they paid heriots, and fines upon admission, and also fines 
 upon the marriage of their daughters. I cannot discover 
 how large the demesne was, but it was probably at least a 
 third of the total area. When we remember all this, does 
 it not seem an exaggeration to say that ' the Stoneleigh 
 Kegister shows a closely and powerfully organised community, 
 of which the lord is merely the president ' ? Mr. Vinogradoff is 
 probably thinking only of the court itself ; but his language 
 will give an impression to many readers that is hardly borne 
 out by the facts. 3 
 
 I have perhaps said too much by way of criticism ; yet it 
 need hardly be remarked that criticism is perfectly com- 
 patible with admiration and gratitude. It is only when 
 undue expectations are put on one side that we are able to 
 see the book as what it is a most valuable contribution to 
 our knowledge of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
 
 1 P. 396. 2 P. 382. 
 
 3 It may be added, as not unworthy of consideration, that (1) the 
 Stoneleigh Register dates only from 1392, and (2) that Domesday enters 
 most of the tenants as villeins and only a few as socmen. The appear- 
 ance three hundred years later of a greater number of socmen is most 
 easily explained by commutation.
 
 61 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 1 
 
 IN recent historical writing dealing with Anglo-Saxon con- 
 ditions, a great place has been occupied by the ' township.' 
 The example was set sixty years ago by Palgrave ; 2 but it 
 does not seem to have been generally followed 3 until in 1874 
 Dr. Stubbs gave the word a prominent place in his ' Constitu- 
 tional History.' With Dr. Stubbs the ' township ' was ' the 
 unit of the constitutional machinery or local administra- 
 tion ; ' 4 and since then most writers on constitutional and 
 legal history have followed in the same direction. The most 
 detailed description of the township was given by Mr. 
 Green, 9 who pictured for us its ' entrenchments,' ' the homes 
 within its bounds,' and 'the dwellers in' it. Professor 
 Cunningham has spoken of ' the lands they [sc. the English 
 
 1 [Quarterly Journal of Economics, April 1894.] 
 
 2 ' Anglo-Saxon state composed of townships.' English Common- 
 wealth, i. 65, marginal abstract. 
 
 3 ' Township ' plays no part in the theories of Lappenberg, 
 Kemble, Hallam (Supplementary Notes, 1848), and Freeman (Norman 
 Conquest, 1867), and is barely mentioned by Pearson (History of 
 England, 1867). The only writer, so far as I know, who attached much 
 weight to Palgrave's phrases before 1874 was Sir Edward Creasy. ' We 
 may safely follow him,' wrote Creasy in 1853, ' in taking the Anglo- 
 Saxon townships as the integral molecules out of which the Anglo- 
 Saxon State was formed ' (Rise and Progress of English Constitution 
 (ed. 1886), p. 45). 
 
 4 Constitutional History, i. 88 ( 39). 
 
 5 Making of England, pp. 180-194.
 
 62 MEDIAEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 invaders] had conquered ' being ' apportioned among the 
 warriors in townships." l Mr. Do well has given the word the 
 sanction of the historian of taxation. 2 And, finally, Sir 
 Frederick Pollock, after pointing out how unauthorised is the 
 use of 'mark,' has observed that ' our proper English word 
 [for ' the English village community '], and the only one for 
 which there is ancient authority, is " township," afterwards 
 latinised as " vill." ' 3 From England the use of the term 
 has passed to the United States ; and it has been popularised 
 especially by that group among the younger historians who 
 have received their training at the Johns Hopkins University. 
 Thus Professor Howard, in his learned and useful work on the 
 ' Local Institutional History of the United States,' 4 begins 
 by stating as an accepted fact that ' in the early records of 
 English history the tunscipe, or township, appears as the 
 lowest form of self-government and the primary division of 
 the state.' 
 
 The language commonly used in this connection need 
 not, perhaps, necessarily be understood as meaning that the 
 phenomenon which the writers have in mind was actually 
 known to the Saxons themselves as a ' township ' (tunscipe}. 
 It may be said that ' township ' is merely a modern name 
 which it is convenient to apply to it. Yet, certainly, that 
 language usually suggests that it was under that name that 
 the Saxons knew it ; and that was evidently the belief of 
 Dr. Stubbs, when he spoke of King Alfred as having ' no 
 difficulty in recognising in the vicus of Bede the tunscipe of 
 his own land.' 5 
 
 It is therefore of some interest, at least for historical 
 terminology and possibly for other and more important 
 reasons to point out that there is no good foundation in 
 Anglo-Saxon sources for such a use of the term ; that 
 tunscipe in the few places where it does appear does not 
 mean an area of land, an extent of territory, or even the 
 material houses and crofts of a village ; that it is probably 
 
 1 English Industry, i. 60. * History of Taxation, i. 5. 
 
 8 Oxford Lectures, p. 124. 4 i. 18. 
 
 5 Constitutional History, i. 45 ( 22).
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON TOWNSHIP 63 
 
 nothing more than a loose general term for ' the villagers." 
 Some feeling that this is the case has probably occurred to 
 many who have looked into the matter, but I do not know 
 that it has ever been pointed out in print. 
 
 Only three passages in Anglo-Saxon literature have as 
 yet been found in which the word tunscipe appears the 
 Saxon translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, v. 10, 
 the Laws of Edgar, iv. 8, and the Saxon Chronicle, s. a. 1137. 
 Of these the first is by far the most important, since it 
 is supposed to establish the equivalence of tunscipe, and 
 vicus. 
 
 In his account of the murder of certain English mission- 
 aries among the Old Saxons i.e. the Saxons of the Con- 
 tinent Bede had paused to remark that ' the Old Saxons 
 have not a king, but a great number of satraps set over 
 their nation.' He then tells of the murder ; and Dr. Stubbs 
 thus comments upon the sequel : ' In connection with the 
 same story the venerable historian describes one of these 
 satraps as acting with summary jurisdiction on the in- 
 habitants of a vicus which was under the mediate govern- 
 ment of a villicus. King Alfred, when he translated Bede, 
 had no difficulty in recognising in the satrap the ealdorman, 
 in the villicus the tungerefa, in the vicus the tunscipe of his 
 own land." 
 
 Before looking more closely at the passage, two remarks 
 are in place. The first is of trifling consequence. It is that 
 the only scholarly editor ' this old version of Bede has yet 
 found is of opinion that its language is so evidently Anglian 
 that it cannot possibly be attributed to Alfred, and assigns 
 the earliest manuscript of it to the latter half of the tenth 
 century. 
 
 The other consideration is more vital. In no other 
 passage of this old English version is there any possibility 
 of asserting that vicus is translated tunscipe. Vicus and 
 villa are everywhere else, at any rate, represented by tun. 
 
 1 Dr. Miller, in Introduction to the Old English Version of Bede's 
 Ecclesiastical History. Early English Text Society, 1890.
 
 64 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 The following is, I believe, a pretty complete list of the 
 passages in Bede where vicus and villa appear : 
 
 iii. 16, viculis = tunas. 
 
 iii. 17, villa regia =cynelecan tune. 
 
 iii. 17, villis regis = cyninges tune. 
 
 iii. 17, vicus = tun. 
 
 iii. 17, vicuna =tun. 
 
 iii. 21, vico regis = tune cyninges. 
 
 iii. 22, villa regia = cynelecan tuune. 
 
 iii. 22, vico regio = cynelican tune. 
 
 v. 4, villa comitis = gesithes tun. 
 
 v. 12, villulae = tunes. 
 
 And now, on looking at v. 10, it will be seen that there 
 also the anonymous translator puts tun for vicus. Bede tells 
 us that, when the satrapa (ealdorman) of the Old Saxons 
 heard of the murder, he was wroth, and 'mittens occidit 
 vicanos illos omnes, vicumque incendio consumpsit,' which 
 the translator renders 'heht thone tunscipe ealne ofslean, 
 and thone tun forbernan.' Thus tunscipe here is not a 
 place, or an area, or a district, but a group of persons the 
 vicani, the villagers, the people of the village. 
 
 Before turning to the passage from Edgar's laws, let us 
 look at the Chronicle, where again the meaning is un- 
 mistakable. Speaking of the misdeeds of the barons in the 
 reign of Stephen, the chronicler says : ' They laid " gilds " on 
 the towns (tunes), and called it " tenserie ; " and, when the 
 miserable men had no more to give, then plundered they 
 and burned all the towns ; and well mightest thou fare a 
 whole day's journey nor ever shouldst thou find a man 
 settled in a town [in tune sittende], nor land tilled. ... If 
 two or three men came riding to a town [an tun], all the 
 tunscipe fled before them, and weened that they were 
 robbers.' 1 Here, again, the tunscipe are the people of the tun. 
 
 The law of Edgar (iv. 8) ordains that, ' if a man, being 
 out on any journey, unintentionally make a bargain without 
 having declared it when he rode out,' he shall ' declare it 
 when he comes home ; ' ' and, if it be live stock, let him, with 
 
 1 Earle, Ttvo of the Saxon Chronicles parallel, p. 262.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 65 
 
 witness of his township [mid his tunscipes gewitnysse], bring 
 it to the common pasture.' l Now, it may, of course, be 
 maintained that this implies the formal action of the officials 
 of a district organised for administrative purposes. But it 
 is surely much more likely to have the more commonplace 
 meaning that the man who unexpectedly brings a strange 
 beast into the village, which he says he has bought, is not 
 to hurry it off to the pastures without telling any one about 
 it, but is to publish his story abroad, and put the beast on 
 the pasture under the eyes and with the knowledge of the 
 other inhabitants of the milage. For let us look at the 
 context. The previous clause says ' he who rides in quest 
 of any cattle [i.e. to buy], let him declare (beforehand) to his 
 neighbours about what he rides.' And in this clause itself 
 the law goes on to order that, if the bringer of the strange 
 cattle do not call in the ' witness ' within five days, ' the 
 town's men ' are to declare it to the ' ealdor ' of the hun- 
 dred ; ' and let them be exempt from " wite," both themselves 
 and their herdsmen, and let him forfeit the cattle who 
 brought it thither, because he would not declare it to his 
 neighbours [his neah-geburum]' 2 And, when we add to the 
 argument from the context, that fairly deducible from the 
 proved meaning of the word in the two other places, it is 
 difficult to see how there can any longer be much doubt. 
 Schmid, with only this passage before him, had apparently 
 no hesitation in defining tunscipe as 'die Bewohnerschaft 
 eines tun.' 3 The formation of the word may be roughly 
 paralleled with that of geferscipe, a body of companions 
 on a journey, or gebeorscipe (= beer-ship), a drinking 
 party (convivium), in the story of Csedmon. 4 
 
 The later history of the word ' township ' would probably 
 
 1 Thorpe's translation in Ancient Laws and Institutes (fol. ed.), 116. 
 
 * It may be noticed that this law of Edgar seems to assume that 
 every tun is subordinate in some sort of way to a landrica ; for it 
 orders that half the forfeited cattle are to go to the landrica, half to the 
 hundred. * Gesetze der Angelsachsen, Glossar, s.v. 
 
 4 Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, iv. 24. 
 
 P
 
 66 MEDIAEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 repay investigation. It is certainly not a common word 
 in literature until comparatively recent times ; and, where it 
 does appear, its old meaning seems often to cling to it. At 
 least, such a meaning is just as fairly assignable to it as the 
 more formal and institutional one. This is the case in the 
 one passage in which it occurs in Shakspere : l 
 
 Suffolk .... What's here ? [Beads] ' Against the Duke of 
 Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Melford.' How now, sir 
 knave ? 
 
 Second Petitioner. Alas, sir, I am but a poor petitioner of our 
 whole township. 8 
 
 So also with the certificate of the sale of church plate (1547) 
 in the parish of Beccles. ' Beccles . . . sold anno primo 
 Edward sexti Regis, etc., by the townshype and Churche- 
 wardens so much plate as amounteth to the sum of xi I.' 3 
 
 Yet as early as 1414 the word had begun to be used for 
 a certain local area. 4 In a petition of that year the first 
 English petition on the Rolls of Parliament we find 'the 
 manor and township of Chestreton.' 5 And in the sixteenth 
 century the word was quite commonly used by the translators 
 of the statutes as the equivalent for ' ville.' 
 
 Nevertheless, there is a good deal to make one believe 
 
 1 Second Part of King Henry VI. Act I. Scene 3. 
 
 2 Here Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon looking at the passage, we 
 may suppose, without constitutional prepossessions defines ' Township : 
 The body of the inhabitants of a town.' 
 
 s East Anglian, May 1885, quoted by W. F. Allen, Monographs and 
 Essays, p. 269. 
 
 4 It is very probable it was used a good deal earlier. Tunscipemot 
 occurs in certain charters of Bichard I. and John ; but, as Professor 
 Maitland observes (Law Quarterly Review, ix. 226), its occurrence here 
 'in close connection with the "hustings" and the " portmanemot " 
 suggests that it was chiefly within the cities and boroughs that a town- 
 ship-moot was to be found.' It is significant that in Stratmann's 
 Dictionary of the Old English Language (3rd ed. 1878), ' compiled from 
 writings of the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries,' 
 though there are some fifteen references for tun in various senses, there 
 is but one for tunscipe ; and that is the passage in the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle already discussed. 
 
 5 Rot. Parl. iv. 57. I owe this reference to Mr. Oliphant's New 
 English. Mr. Oliphant speaks of ' township ' as a ' new word.'
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 67 
 
 that town continued to be the common popular term for what 
 we may describe in general language as a rural centre of 
 population even into the eighteenth century. Chaucer's 
 model priest from the country was 'a poure persone of a 
 toun.' l The Enclosure Act of 1488-89 speaks of the ' pulling - 
 down of townes,' and of 'townes' where 'two hundred 
 persons were occupied, and now be there occupied ii or iii 
 herdemen.' 2 The sixteenth -century translation of the Ordi- 
 nance of Labourers of 1349, as well as that of the Statute 
 of Labourers of 1360-61, uses toun for villa and ville. 3 Lever, 
 preaching in 1550, describes how, before the Reformation, 
 1 there were in some townes 6, some 8, and some 12 kyne, 
 given unto a slock for the relief of the poor.' 4 In a Certifi- 
 cate of Church Goods in Suffolk, in the Customary of 
 Tettenhall Regis (1604), and in Colonel Hutchinson's 
 Memoirs, ' town ' is used for ' manor ; ' 5 while the same 
 Certificates of church goods of 1547 give abundant ex- 
 amples of its use for ' parish.' 6 Coke translates Littleton's 
 statement, ' chescun burgh est un ville, mes nemy e converso ' 
 1 every borough is a town, but not e converso ' ; and goes on 
 to comment : ' It cannot be a town in law unless it hath, or 
 in times past hath had, a church and celebration of divine 
 service, sacraments and burials. . . . There be in England 
 and Wales eight thousand eight hundred and three towns 
 or thereabouts.' 7 The Act of 13 & 14 Charles II. c. 6, 
 groups together ' parish, town, village, or hamlet ; ' 8 and 
 Mr. Toulmin Smith gives long extracts from the records of 
 the parish of Ardley in Hertford for the period of 1707-1831, 
 
 1 Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 1. 480. He had a ' wide parish,' and 
 his brother was a ' plowman.' 
 
 2 4 Hen. VII. c. 19 ; Statutes of the Realm, ii. 542. 
 8 Statutes of the Realm, i. 307, 367. 
 
 4 Lever's Sermon before the King, Arber's reprint, p. 82. 
 
 4 Quoted in Allen's Monographs, pp. 273, 275. 
 
 8 Ibid. pp. 268, 269. For other examples of the equivalence of town 
 and parish, circa A.D. 1600, see Professor Channing's convincing essay 
 on Town and County Government in tJie English Colonies (1884), 
 pp. 9-11. ' Co. Lit. [115 bj, sect. 171. 
 
 8 Cited by Toulmin Smith, The Parish, 2nd ed. p. 108. 
 
 F'2
 
 68 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 found in a volume marked ' The Towne Book.' l The word 
 is used for village throughout Ellwood's Autobiography, 
 published in 1714. 2 Even to-day there are parts of England 
 where ' town ' (in Yorkshire pronounced toon) is still the 
 rustic term for village. 3 
 
 That in particular cases ' town ' (villa), ' manor/ and 
 ' parish ' often did not coincide is very apparent. There were 
 many instances of parishes including more than one town ; 
 but the above instances make it clear that in common usage, 
 over a large part of the country, the three terms were 
 equivalents. Thus Coke declares, ' By the name of a town, 
 villa, a manor may pass,' and, in another place, ' If a matter 
 be alleged in parochid, it shall be intended in law that it 
 containeth no more towns than one, unless the party doth 
 shew the contrary.' 4 
 
 It may be added that the far more general use of the 
 word town than of township in early New England is most 
 naturally explained by supposing that it was the word 
 ordinarily employed in England at the time of the migration 
 at any rate, in East Anglia. And it is worth while to recall 
 the common use of town for the village on a landlord's 
 estate in Ireland, 5 and its appearance in the same sense in 
 Southern Scotland. 6 
 
 1 The Parish, 2nd ed. p. 525. 2 See, e.g., pp. 1, 36 (ed. Crump, 1900). 
 
 3 See the Provincial Dictionaries of Halliwell and Wright, and, 
 better still, Morris's Yorkshire Folk Talk and Baker's Northamptonshire 
 Glossary, 
 
 4 Co. Lit. [5 a], sect. 1 ; [125 b], sect. 193. For this latter reference 
 I am indebted to the courtesy of Sir Frederick Pollock. 
 
 s A good instance is given in Miss Edgeworth's Absentee, where also 
 the circumstance that the authoress thinks it necessary to add an ex- 
 planation shows that she supposed the word would be strange to her 
 polite readers: 'He arrived at a village, or as it was called a town, 
 which bore the name of Colambre. . . . Lord Colambre . . . asked him 
 to whom the town belonged, and who were the proprietors of the 
 neighbouring estates. " The town belongs to an absentee lord one 
 Lord Clonbrony " ' (chap. ix.). 
 
 6 E.g. the ' auld town ' of St. Eonan's (St. Ronan's Well, chap. ii.). 
 See also the examples in Jamieson's Dictionary of Scottish Language, 
 especially of ' towngate ' for village street in the South.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 69 
 
 If, then, it was town that the country folk themselves were 
 wont to speak of, it is a little difficult to understand how 
 township has obtained its literary prominence. It is probably 
 the result, in the main, of the employment of town, from a 
 period at least as early as the sixteenth century, 1 for an urban 
 centre as an equivalent, in short, for urbs. This itself, of 
 course, is not an ultimate fact, and needs explanation. But 
 it is easy to see that, when this other use became common 
 in cities and boroughs, writers who addressed themselves to 
 an urban public would feel the need of a word not liable to 
 misunderstanding, and would tend to adopt township. The 
 country folk themselves would not feel the ambiguity, and 
 would continue to speak of their towns. It may not be far- 
 fetched to suggest that there is a further and even more 
 literary explanation of the prominence given to the word 
 township by recent writers. The late Professor Allen, of the 
 University of Wisconsin, has commented 2 on the curious 
 fact that, although ' at present the word " township " is not 
 in use in New England, except occasionally . . . and never 
 as a body politic, 3 it is the word, fastened upon by De Tocque- 
 ville, that is regularly used by foreign writers to describe 
 the New England town system.' De Tocqueville was doubt- 
 less unconsciously influenced by the contemporary English 
 literary use of township ; but it does seem very probable 
 that his employment of the word gave it a dignity, a 
 sort of politico-philosophical propriety, in the eyes of his 
 contemporaries which it had never enjoyed before, and 
 
 1 It is commonly so, for instance, in Shakspere. 
 
 2 Monographs, p. 269. 
 
 * It is now currently said that ' township ' is only accurately used 
 for the area or stretch of land, and that ' town ' is the only proper term 
 for the body as a juristic person, or as a political or administrative 
 organism. How far this agrees with seventeenth-century usage I am 
 unable to say. Freeman's Town Officer (for Massachusetts), which 
 passed through several editions at the end of the eighteenth and 
 beginning of the nineteenth century, seems to use ' town ' alone, and 
 speaks not only of ' the power and duty of towns,' but of ' inhabitants of 
 a town.'
 
 70 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 which not a little influenced even the most scholarly 
 historians. 1 
 
 To return to Anglo-Saxon times. It might very naturally 
 be said that the effect of the foregoing argument is no more 
 than to replace ' township ' by ' town/ and that such a change 
 is immaterial that it is a difference between tweedledum 
 and tweedledee. I cannot help thinking, however, that the 
 adoption of a more correct terminology will be of scientific 
 advantage ; and for this reason. So long as we speak of 
 the Anglo-Saxon ' township,' we can hardly help attaching 
 to the word some of its modern associations. We are apt 
 to think of it as an area inhabited by freemen who are accus- 
 tomed to manage some of the administrative business of 
 their district by means of a local assembly and local 
 officials. We start, that is, with a sort of unconscious 
 presumption that the ' township ' was what we call ' free.' 2 
 Townships under a lord we speak of as ' dependent town- 
 ships ; ' and we can hardly help thinking of them as ex- 
 ceptional or as later than the free ones. Now, it is this 
 question as to the position of the body of the population in 
 the earliest Anglo-Saxon times that is just now at issue ; and 
 no student would say that at present the question is settled. 
 And, while that is so, it is surely better to use a terminology 
 which is as far as possible from suggesting an answer which 
 we are not yet in a position to prove to say simply that we 
 know of the existence among the Saxons of villae and vici 
 and tuns, and there for the present leave the matter. 3 
 
 1 La Democratic en Amtrique, chap. v. Mr. Bryce (American 
 Commonwealth, chap, xlviii.) returns to the more accurate term ' town.' 
 He gives a quotation from Jefferson, ' Those wards called townships in 
 New England,' which may help to explain whence De Tocqueville got 
 the word. 
 
 * Cf. Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 89. 
 
 * It is not, however, unfair to add that the use of tun itself may be 
 adduced as strengthening somewhat the argument for supposing that 
 the later ' towns ' grew up around seigneurial or dominical households. 
 Town is still used in Scotland for a single farmstead. In Devonshire 
 and some other parts of England it is used for the court or farm yard. 
 In Ireland tun denotes ' the manured grass-plot, enclosed within a low
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 71 
 
 So far we have been dealing with a narrowly limited 
 matter the use of the word ' township ' and engaged in the 
 interpretation of certain definite citations ; and this was the 
 only object of this paper. But it can do no great harm to 
 tack on to this some speculations as to the history of the 
 ' tun ' itself, if it is distinctly stated that they are but tenta- 
 tive speculations, thrown out by way of experiment. 
 
 From the earliest time for which we have any informa- 
 tion there were villae and tuns scattered over England. 
 The appearance of the two terms is practically contempora- 
 neous. Tun occurs first, in an authentic document, in a 
 charter of A.D. 674, where Wulfhere of Mercia sells to a 
 relative ' aliquam partem agri in hereditatem perpetuam, id 
 est v. manentes, ubi ruricoli nominantur Dilingtun, cum 
 campis et silvis et omnibus utensilibus rebus ad isto agro perti- 
 nente ; ' l while villa confronts us again and again in Bede's 
 ' Historia Ecclesiastical Now, Bedewas born A.D. 672, and 
 ceased writing his Ecclesiastical History, which he had 
 probably begun some years before, in 731. The ' king's tun,' 
 the ' earl's tun,' and ' a man's tun ' do indeed occur in 
 the laws of Ethelbert of Kent, 2 assignable to circa A.D. 600. 
 It must, however, be remembered that the editors of the 
 Anglo-Saxon laws are agreed that ' it would be unreasonable 
 to suppose that these laws have descended to us in their 
 primitive state,' 3 though they probably contain the substance 
 green bank or raised dyke, which surrounds the farmhouse.' This is 
 in perfect harmony with the accepted derivation of the word, which 
 interprets it as an ' enclosure,' and connects it with the German Zaun, a 
 hedge. But there seems no reason for supposing that whole villages 
 were enclosed either the whole land of the village (as Nasse understands 
 Kemble to mean ; though this, as he justly says, is inconsistent with the 
 later history of enclosures) or merely the group of village homesteads (as 
 Nasse conjectures, Agricultural Community, p. 15). If so, the application 
 of the term to a village must be a secondary use, and may very well have 
 come to it from the fact (if true) that it grew up around the tun of a lord. 
 Town, in brief, suggests the same sort of prima facie argument as villa. 
 1 Earle's Land Charters, p. 5. 2 5, 13, 17. 
 
 8 Thorpe's Ancient Laws, Preface, p. iv. Of. Schmid, Gesetze, Ein- 
 leitung, xxx : ' Es ist schwer zu glauben dass derselbe uns die Sprache 
 ^Ethelbirhts treu wiedergegeben habe.'
 
 72 MEDIEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 of some of Ethelbert's enactments; so that it would be 
 unsafe to cite them for our purpose. 
 
 It can hardly be disputed, also, that the words were 
 equivalents, though we have no examples of translation before 
 the tenth century. 1 We should hesitate, however, before 
 speaking either of tun being ' latinised ' as villa or villa 
 being ' anglicised ' as tun. To say that tun was latinised 
 ' afterwards 'as villa is to suggest that the English institution 
 was really known only as tun, and that scholars consciously 
 sought for a designation in a dead language, and chose 
 villa perhaps unwisely. It would be truer, probably, to 
 say that people who used English commonly called the 
 thing tun, and people who used Latin called it villa. 2 To 
 determine what proportion of the inhabitants spoke of it 
 under one name and what under the other, we should have 
 to answer the question, still hotly disputed, as to whether 
 the Provincials survived under new masters. It must be 
 allowed that villa does not survive in place-names to any- 
 thing like the same extent as tun or ham in England, or villa 
 itself in France. Such a phrase as ' ubi ruricoli nominantur 
 Dilingto.' in the charter of A.D. 674, or 'invico regio qui dicitur 
 Bendlaes/i<xm/ 3 is good evidence that then and there a name 
 of English origin was used. Yet in his Lives of the Abbots 
 of Wearmouth Bede tells us of ' terra viginti familiarum 
 
 1 Besides the Old English Version of Bede, see the charter of 
 A.D. 940, granting land at ' Oswalding villam, 1 with its contemporary 
 endorsement, ' Oswalding tun,' in Kemble, Codex Diplomatictis, ccclxxxv., 
 and Earle, p. 175. Cf. the charter of 780, C.D. cxl., where of four 
 villulae the names of two end in tun. 
 
 2 We commonly think of these latter as only a few clergy. There is, 
 however, a passage in Bede which would seem to imply that Latin was 
 known to some extent by a good number of people. 'Haec [insula] 
 in praesenti . . . quinque gentium linguis unam . . . summae veritatis 
 . . . scientiam scrutatur et confitetur, Anglorum videlicet, Brittonum, 
 Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum, quae [sc. Latinorum lingua ? ] 
 meditatione scripturarum ceteris omnibus est facta communis ' (lib. i. 
 cap. 1). 
 
 * Bede's Historic/, Ecclesiastica, iii. 22.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 73 
 
 in loco qui, incolarum lingua, Ad Villam Sambuce vocatur.' l 
 And Professor Earle has shown some reason for believing 
 that villa has survived to a larger extent than we had 
 imagined, and that ' it is obscurely embedded in some of our 
 place-names.' 2 
 
 But what were these villae and tuns? It is very 
 possible that some, both of the villae and of the tuns, were 
 still simply ' country-houses ' with enclosed farmsteads, but 
 without any group of residents around them except the hand- 
 ful of persons who formed the family and household of the 
 owner. It is quite conceivable that in some cases they were 
 groups of free proprietors living together in villages. But it 
 is far more probable that in most, if not all, cases they were 
 private estates, having upon them villages of dependants 
 of various degrees, from slaves up to free tenants. If we 
 assume, as Gibbon did, 3 that the English conquerors would 
 find it ' their interest to preserve the peasants as well as the 
 cattle of the unresisting country,' no difficulty will remain : 
 we shall conclude that the estates known as villae of the 
 Eoman time survived with much of their old organisation 
 and population, to become the nuclei round which would 
 grow up the later manors. And we can draw this con- 
 clusion without necessarily imagining that every English 
 warrior who did not become the lord of a villa became a serf. 
 It is very possible that there was a considerable number of 
 free English proprietors at first, who were gradually drawn 
 into the vortex of manorial formation around the villa nuclei. 
 But, if Gibbon's assumption seems too hazardous, there are 
 other and independent reasons for the same view as to the 
 Anglo-Saxon villa or tun. In the first place there can be little 
 doubt that, at the time when Bede wrote, villa elsewhere in 
 Western Europe commonly denoted an estate with dependants 
 
 1 Vita Abbatum Wiremuthensium, in Complete Works of Bede, ed. 
 Giles (1843), iv. 386. 
 
 2 ' The Villa and the Manor,' in the Economic Journal, ii. 744. 
 
 3 Decline and Fall, chap, xxxviii.
 
 74 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 upon it. 1 The burden of proof is upon those who would as- 
 sert that Bede used it in any other sense. In the second place, 
 the earliest charters of land use as the units of measurement 
 cassati, manentes, and tributarii, either actually transferring 
 so many cassati &c., or the land of so many cassati.* Now, 
 these were quite common terms on the Continent for prsedial 
 serfs and their holdings ; 3 and it would be very odd if the 
 terms had been used here without similar classes having 
 existed. 4 Moreover, some of the earliest grants of such 
 more or less servile holdings describe them as being ' in 
 [more rarely ' ubi '] the place called (such and such a) tun 5 
 or ham,' 6 and go on to speak of the appurtenant enjoyment 
 of fields, pastures, meadows, &c. That is, they imply that 
 the tun or ham was some sort of larger unit, made up of a 
 number of such servile holdings with their appurtenances, 
 much in the same way as the later manor was made up of 
 plough-lands or yard-lands. And, in the third place, it is a 
 curious circumstance that, whenever Bede speaks of a village 
 (vicus, in the old English version tun) such as, if we had 
 no farther information, we might suppose to be a village of 
 free proprietors he either adds some such word as regis or 
 regius, or speaks of it later as villa ; and in the same way 
 
 1 As far as I can make out, this does not seem to be denied even by 
 M. Flach, who, in his Origines de VAncienne France (1893), has taken 
 up the cudgels against M. Fustel de Coulanges, and has tried to make 
 out that the Frankish villae were in some cases independent villages. 
 
 2 Cassati and manentes occur on every page of Earle's Land 
 Charters. For tributarii see charters of A.D. 693, C.D. xxxvi., A.D. 725, 
 C.D. M., and A.D. 780, C.D. cxl. 
 
 3 On tributarii see Waitz's Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, ii. 223, 
 224. 
 
 4 It is true that these terms do not appear outside the land charters ; 
 but then our evidence is very scanty. The forms of the charters may 
 have been awkwardly copied from Italian precedents. Still, the condi- 
 tions cannot have been altogether dissimilar, or it would hardly have 
 been possible to estimate the size of an estate by the number of such 
 tenures. Cf. HaUam's Middle Ages (ed. 1870), ii. 366. 
 
 5 E.g. charters of 674 (Earle, p. 4) and 714 (C.D. xlvii.). 
 8 E.g. charters of 692 and 704, C.D. xxxv., lii.
 
 THE ANGLCT-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 75 
 
 that, when villa alone is used, it is either qualified by comitis 
 or regis, or is the subject of a grant. 1 
 
 The earlier tun or ham or villa was thus, in all proba- 
 bility, usually an estate containing upon it a group of 
 dependants living together in what we may call a village. 
 And the view of social evolution to which such a conclusion 
 brings us is that ' the village community ' of later times, so 
 far as it existed, was in large measure the result of the 
 common bond or tie to the proprietor, the lord, or seigneur. 2 
 The sense of community of interests, the habit of joint 
 action created by seigneurial or, to use Professor Earle's 
 term, dominical pressure, would survive, and even for a time 
 grow stronger as the grasp of the lord was loosened. And 
 so out of the dependent group would slowly grow the ' town ' 
 and 'township' the latter term originally applying in a 
 general way to the 'villagers ' or ' townsmen,' then coming to be 
 associated with the idea of corporate unity, like villata, and 
 then naturally being extended to the area cultivated by the 
 villagers. Out of it would arise much of the 'parish' 
 machinery of later times ; and, in places favoured by circum- 
 stances, municipal self-government would also find there its 
 beginning. 
 
 But we must not antedate the various stages in this 
 process. When we come to look up the authorities that are 
 given for the ' functions ' of the Anglo-Saxon ' township,' it 
 is startling to find how they slip from between our fingers. 
 No scholar is now inclined to build much upon the single 
 appearance of mearc-mot in a document professing to be of 
 A.D. 971, and regarded by Kemble himself as of doubtful 
 authenticity. 3 But it is hardly realised that with the disap- 
 
 1 See the list given above. The only exception is the vicus among 
 the Old Saxons ; about which we are only told that it had a villicus who 
 was, in some unexplained way, subordinate to a satrapa. 
 
 2 The co-operation rendered necessary by the open-field system of 
 husbandry had certainly much also to do with it ; but that opens 
 another field of inquiry, which we cannot enter here. 
 
 3 C.D. D Ixviii. See also Earle's Land Charters, xlv., and Pollock's 
 Oxford Lectures.
 
 76 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 pearance of mearc-mot disappears all the Saxon evidence for 
 a township assembly of any sort. Important administrative 
 functions have been assigned to the Anglo-Saxon township : 
 ' it carried into effect the requisitions of the higher courts 
 in the way of taxes and other exactions, the pursuit of 
 criminals, and the search for stolen goods ; ' l and four 
 passages are cited from the laws. One only of these is early. 
 It is a clause of the Laws of Hlothere and Eadric. 2 This 
 happens to be one of the most obscure, and probably corrupt, 
 passages in the Saxon laws a passage which Schmid gives 
 up the attempt to translate ; and all that can be made out of 
 it is that, if some one is accused of stealing a man, he is to swear 
 to his innocence with the help of certain compurgators, 
 ' each in the tun to which he belongs.' Possibly the cere- 
 mony took place before the altar of the village church a most 
 natural thing to do, and implying very little function on the 
 part of the townsfolk except that of ' occasional crowd.' The 
 next passage is that ordinance of Edgar's already discussed, 
 which requires the witness of the neighbours, when cattle 
 have been acquired. The third is another clause of the same 
 set of laws : 3 ' I will that townsmen (tunes-men) and their 
 herdsmen have the same enquiry concerning my live cattle 
 and that of my thegns as they have concerning their own. 
 But if my reeve, or any other man, more or less powerful, 
 shun this, and command things unseemly, either to towns- 
 men or their herdsmen, let the Danes choose, according to 
 their laws, what punishment they will adopt respecting 
 him.' 4 This is certainly far from lucid. And the fourth 
 passage comes from the Laws of Ethelred, 5 assignable to so 
 late a date as A.D. 997. This simply says that ' he who robs 
 a man in broad daylight, and he [i.e. the robbed] declare 
 it in three tuns, shall not be entitled to any frith/ (i.e. 
 apparently, the robbed person can take summary vengeance, 
 or get it taken, on the criminal,) if the prosecutor first makes 
 the business known in three neighbouring villages. In all these 
 
 1 Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 97. 2 Sect. 5. 3 iv. 13. 
 
 4 Thorpe's translation, Ancient Laws, 117. 5 iii. 15.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 77 
 
 laws there is scarcely any trace of formal administrative or 
 police action on the part of the tun or its supposed officers. 
 What most nearly approaches to it is the clause in Edgar's 
 Ordinance of the Hundred, in the second half of the tenth 
 century, requiring the assistance of the ' tithing men ' in the 
 pursuit and punishment of thieves. 1 But the relation of the 
 ' tithing ' to the ' town ' is a tangled mystery, upon which it 
 were rash to enter here. It is with the ' town ' and ' town- 
 ship ' that we are now dealing ; and one is very much 
 inclined to agree in the sweeping statement that the Anglo- 
 Saxon township (or tun) ' had not a single constitutional 
 function of any kind, sort, or description.' 2 
 
 One supposed function and that, if real, an important 
 one still, however, remains to be considered. The town- 
 ship, it is said, ' arranged the representation of its interests 
 in the courts of the hundred and the shire, where the gerefa 
 and four best men appeared for the township.' 3 And, again, 
 ' in the free townships the reeve and the four best men were 
 the legal representatives of the community in the court of 
 the hundred and the shire.' 4 The one authority cited is ' the 
 
 1 Edgar, i. 2. 
 
 2 North American Review, July 1874 (vol. cxix. p. 239). 
 
 3 Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 97. 
 
 4 Ibid. i. 102. Such a statement lends itself very easily to political 
 philosophising. Thus Mr. Gardiner, speaking of ' the institutions of the 
 [English] settlers ' in Britain, compares them with those of the Roman 
 Empire thus : ' The organisation of which he [every freeman] formed 
 part did not, as in the empire, reach from the state to the individual, 
 but from the individual to the state. Every township . . . made its 
 appearance every month in the hundred mote to decide quarrels and 
 witness contracts ' (Gardiner and Mullinger, Introduction to the Study 
 of English History, p. 18). So, also, Mr. Fiske contrasts the ' Roman Idea 
 and English Idea,' or Non-representation and Representation, thus : 
 ' In the [Anglo-Saxon] county meeting we may observe a singular 
 feature, something never seen before in the world, something destined to 
 work out vaster political results than Caesar ever dreamt of. This 
 county meeting is not a primary assembly : all the freemen from all the 
 townships cannot leave their homes and their daily business to attend 
 it. Nor is it merely an assembly of notables, attended by the most 
 important men of the neighbourhood. It is a representative assembly,
 
 78 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 laws of Henry I.' Now, these ' laws ' are an unauthorised 
 compilation, assigned by Dr. Liebermann to the period 
 between 1108 and 1118. It is possible nay, probable 
 that ' they contain very many vestiges of ancient English 
 jurisprudence.' But it would be eminently unsafe to select 
 any clause as containing such a ' vestige,' unless the archaic 
 nature of the ordinance were clearly proved by other evi- 
 dence. And, after all, what precisely do these laws say ? l 
 In the paragraph dealing with the county courts it de- 
 clares : 
 
 7. Si quis baronurn regis vel aliorum comitatui secundum 
 legem interfuerit, totam terram, quam illic in dominio suo habet, 
 adquietare poterit. Eodem modo est si dapifer ejus legitime fuerit. 
 Si uterque necessario desit, prepositus et sacerdos et quatuor de 
 melioribus villae adsint pro omnibus qui nominatim non erunt ad 
 placitum submoniti. 
 
 8. Item in hundredo decrevimus observandum de locis et 
 vicibus et judicum observantiis, de causis singulorum justis examina- 
 tionibus audiendis, de domini et dapiferi VEL sacerdotis et 
 praepositi et meliorum hominum presentia. 
 
 Is it necessary to point out that what this anonymous 
 writer of the beginning of the twelfth century says is that 
 the priest and reeve and the rest are to attend only if the 
 lord or his steward is obliged to be absent, and that he 
 assumes that there is a lord as the normal condition of 
 things ? 2 
 
 attended by select men from each township. We may see in it the germ 
 of the British parliament and of the American congress, as indeed of all 
 modern legislative bodies ' (The Beginnings of New England, p. 28). 
 
 1 Leges Henrici Primi, vii. 7, 8 ; Schmid's Gesetze, p. 440. 
 
 2 Mr. Bigelow (History of Procedure in England, p. 134) argues as 
 follows : ' The statement that the reeve, priest, and four men represented 
 the lower classes ' (which is hardly the exact case), 'when the baron 
 and his steward were necessarily detained, probably does not mean that 
 the attendance of such representative persons was dependent upon the 
 absence of the baron and steward, but that, if the latter were excusably 
 absent, then the lower classes, such as were represented by the 
 baron and his steward, when present, were to be represented by 
 the delegates attending with the parish priest. And, if this be true, it 
 follows that this delegation (being regularly present) properly and always 
 represented others than those represented by the barons.' I must
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON 'TOWNSHIP' 79 
 
 The only reason that remains for attributing to the 
 Anglo-Saxon ' township ' i.e. town certain functions of 
 the kind we have been looking for is the argument from 
 supposed ' survivals.' 1 The courts of the manors, and the 
 parish meetings of a later date, had certain features, which, 
 if we start with an unconscious presupposition as to the 
 original constitution of Anglo-Saxon society, may easily 
 strike us as ' archaic,' as ' vestiges ' and ' survivals.' But 
 this is one of the most dangerous of arguments. Every one 
 of those customs and features may just as well in default 
 of evidence to the contrary be regarded as the outcome 
 of an evolution away from the original condition. What is 
 vitally necessary and alone sufficient is early evidence as to 
 the early condition itself. 
 
 confess that this seems a mere juggle with words, occasioned by the 
 assumption that this ' regular presence ' of the ' delegation ' is beyond 
 question, forgetting that these particular passages are our only evidence. 
 The utmost that can be said is that here we may see the very beginnings 
 of the idea of representation. But it should not be forgotten that the 
 same compilation says of the county courts, 'Intersint episcopi . . . 
 praepositi, barones, vavassores, tungrevii et caeteri terrarum domini ' 
 (vii. 2) ; and ' Eegis judices sunt barones comitatus, qui liberas in eis 
 terras habent . . . Villani vero vel cotseti . . . non sunt inter legum 
 judices numerandi ' (xxix. 1). 
 
 1 I have since observed that Dr. Stubbs makes somewhat the same 
 concession in regard to representation in the county court (Constitu- 
 tional History, i. 128). This point, he says, 'left questionable in the 
 laws, is proved by the later practice ; ' and he refers to the county 
 courts of Henry III. But it is difficult to see how the practice of 1231 
 can prove anything as to 1066, unless we suppose social and political 
 conditions to have remained unchanged. But this was far from being 
 the case. In a footnote Dr. Stubbs asks us to compare certain four 
 passages from Domesday. Three of these have no suggestion of 
 representation. The only one that has is the case of Archenfield (i. 179), 
 where ' si vicecomes evocat eos ad sciremot, meliores ex eis, vi aut vii, 
 vadunt cum eo.' But Archenfield (later known as Irchenfield) was not 
 a manor in the sense in which the word was used in England proper. 
 It was a considerable tract on the Welsh border, containing several 
 villages, where the king had ' c homines . . . qui habent LXXHI. car' cum 
 suis hominibus.' That six or seven of these vassals (homines) should 
 attend the shiremoot indicates little as to the practice in the cases of 
 manors of the English type. Cf. Camden's Britannia (ed. Gibson), 
 i. 491.
 
 80 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 WHEN the history of the university renaissance in America 
 during the last quarter of a century comes to be written, the 
 name of Professor Allen, of the University of Wisconsin, 
 will find in it an honourable place. To that elevation of the 
 character of academic instruction and academic study which 
 has at last created true universities where before were but 
 finishing schools and professional seminaries, William Francis 
 Allen contributed in no small measure. He did not, perhaps, 
 greatly worry himself or others about ' methods ; ' he did 
 not try to turn the average American graduate into a poor 
 copy of the German privat-docent ; nor did he yield to the 
 temptation to invite the general public to look at what he 
 was doing. He recognised the limitations of his material, 
 and set himself quietly to do the best he could under the 
 conditions. He was indeed somewhat too unobtrusive : one 
 of our modern young specialists would doubtless have per- 
 suaded the governing body to allow him to exchange the 
 chair of classics for that of history in something less than 
 eighteen years. What, nevertheless, Professor Allen did at 
 the University of Wisconsin was to substitute the intelligent 
 study of historical questions and the scholarly use of 
 historical material for the schoolboy recital of textbook 
 lessons ; and what he more perhaps than any one else 
 
 1 [Monographs and Essays, by William Francis Allen. Memorial 
 Volume (Boston, 1890). Eeviewed in the Political Science Quarterly, 
 December 1892.]
 
 ALLEN OF WISCONSIN 81 
 
 did for historical study generally in America was to de- 
 provincialise it and bring it into touch with the best modern 
 thought of Europe. This he did by the long series of 
 reviews he contributed to the New York ' Nation.' Certainly 
 no English journal has made so sustained an effort as this 
 American publication to keep its readers abreast of the best 
 historical work of Germany and France ; and the ' Nation ' 
 was in this connection but another name for Professor 
 Allen. Professor Allen left behind no literary monument at 
 all worthy of his great powers. The explanation is to be 
 found, not so much in his arduous university duties, as the 
 writer of the introductory memoir suggests, as in his never- 
 ceasing activity as a reviewer a reviewer not only of impor- 
 tant treatises, but of innumerable school handbooks ; not 
 only of works in a particular field, but in many and widely 
 different subjects. The very excellence of these ephemeral 
 criticisms is their condemnation. No man has sufficient 
 mental energy to carry on honest and thoughtful labour of 
 this kind side by side with sustained original investigation. 
 Without further particulars of Mr. Allen's life, we cannot 
 venture to criticise such an employment of his knowledge 
 and ability ; but whatever the explanation may have been, it 
 was a great pity. 
 
 There was, however, one subject to which Mr. Allen turned 
 again and again during the last fifteen or sixteen years of 
 his life, and in which he displayed a vigour and independence 
 in the use of the scanty materials at his disposal which 
 seemed to promise a considerable achievement, and did 
 indeed produce new and valuable conclusions. This was 
 the subject of early English land tenure; and it is the 
 papers on this subject collected in the Memorial Volume 
 lately issued which give it its scientific interest. The 
 Wisconsin Academy is doubtless doing good service to its 
 state ; but until the communication of the results of his- 
 torical research is better organised than at present, papers 
 published in its ' Transactions ' are practically non-existent for 
 the great majority of scholars. Their union and publication 
 in an accessible form is therefore very welcome; and the 
 
 Q
 
 82 MEDIAEVAL AGEABIAN 
 
 book is one which ought to find its way to all who are really 
 interested in the subject. 
 
 A number of papers scattered over a period of sixteen 
 years, towards the end of which so epoch-making a work 
 as that of Mr. Seebohm appeared, is sure to contain 
 much that recent research has antiquated or disproved. 
 For instance, the explanation in one place of a virgate 
 (following, no doubt, a chance remark of Thorold Eogers) 
 as eight acres, and the use of the term ' farm ' in many 
 places obviously in its modern sense, show that, like every 
 one else, Professor Allen did not fully grasp the open-field 
 system until Mr. Seebohm explained it to us. But there is 
 not a page which is not still worth reading ; and on some 
 important parts of the general question, Professor Allen 
 anticipated his European fellow-workers in laying down 
 propositions that are now coming to be generally accepted. 
 Thus as long ago as 1873 he argued that the tenants in 
 socage and the freeholders of the thirteenth century were 
 simply ' specially privileged villani ' that they were a class 
 that had grown up since Domesday, and not simply, as Arch- 
 deacon Hale and others used to think, omitted in Domesday. 
 Then again, in 1877, Professor Allen anticipated one of the 
 most recent conclusions of Professor Maitland and the new 
 school of English legal historians, in urging that the court 
 baron bore the marks of a feudal court and not of a pre- 
 historic popular assembly. 
 
 But Professor Allen's contributions to agrarian history 
 have a significance beyond that of the particular conclusions at 
 which he arrived. He was among the earliest of those 
 who are now turning to the details of early social organisation, 
 not in the spirit of the antiquary, but in the spirit to use an 
 objectionable but sometimes useful word of the sociologist. 
 And he was absolutely the first among American scholars to 
 realise that even in America there has been no breach of con- 
 tinuity ; that the New England ' town ' was but the English 
 ' town ' of the seventeenth century, planted amid new con- 
 ditions ; and that neither it nor its offspring can be fully 
 understood until we penetrate the mystery of the origin of 
 mediaeval serfdom.
 
 83 
 
 ME. BOUND'S 'FEUDAL ENGLAND' 1 
 
 THIS book in part reprinted from the ' English Historical 
 Eeview,' but in the main new is one of the most important 
 contributions to the knowledge of mediaeval English condi- 
 tions that have appeared of late years. For a decade or 
 more after the appearance of Professor (now Bishop) Stubbs's 
 first volume of ' Constitutional History,' the movement of 
 thought in that field took the direction chiefly of the appro- 
 priation and popularisation of his conclusions : but during 
 the last ten years or so there has been a fresh impulse 
 towards further investigation ; and this further investigation 
 has had the result, partly of securing greater precision, 
 partly of undermining some not unimportant positions even 
 of the great Bishop himself. In this work four scholars 
 have preeminently distinguished themselves, and stand head 
 and shoulders above all others Mr. Seebohm, Professor 
 Vinogradoff, Professor Maitland, and Mr. Bound. 
 
 Mr. Eound remarks, in more than one place, that while 
 the task of the last generation of scholars was to interpret 
 the 'chroniclers,' the task of the present is to supplement 
 and correct that evidence by recourse to the ' records ; ' and 
 the remark is just. Not that the ' records ' were never con- 
 sulted before : it was Palgrave who did most to make them 
 accessible ; and even Freeman made occasional use of 
 the Domesday Book. But what is new is the effort, not to 
 pick out mere illustrations or proofs for opinions otherwise 
 
 1 [Feudal England : Historical Studies of tlie Eleventh and Twelfth 
 Centuries, by J. H. Eound (1895). Reviewed in the New York Nation, 
 April 23, 1896.] 
 
 o2
 
 84 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 formed, but to master the records as wholes, to determine 
 their exact relations inter se, to analyse their contents, and 
 to let the facts themselves spontaneously fall into significant 
 order. And this result is what, in the volume before us, 
 Mr. Eound has gone far towards bringing about with the 
 record of the great survey of William the Conqueror and the 
 documents that cluster around it. 
 
 Setting out from the ' Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigien- 
 sis,' and comparing it on the one side with the ' Inquisitio 
 Eliensis ' and on the other with the Domesday Book itself, 
 Mr. Eound first reaches the important discovery that among 
 the ' socmen ' there were two kinds of tenure, ' thegnland ' 
 and ' sokeland,' distinguished by important differences. He 
 then produces some new and quite conclusive evidence in 
 support of Mr. Seebohm's contentions that the caruca of 
 ' Domesday ' always meant a plough team of eight oxen, that 
 the hide contained four virgates, and that each virgate con- 
 tained thirty acres though he guards himself by inserting 
 geld before each of the terms hide, virgate, and acre. His 
 conclusions, that is to say, are limited to the assessment of 
 land for the purpose of taxation, and the relation of this 
 assessment to agricultural management is left undetermined. 
 Next comes the most exciting discovery of all, viz. that in 
 the ' hidated ' portions of England the ' hidation ' was evi- 
 dently arranged in multiples of a five-hide unit. In a large 
 number of cases the 'Hundred' itself was reckoned at a 
 hundred hides a fact that clearly has a direct bearing on 
 the origin of that territorial division. Nor is this all ; there 
 is much to make it seem probable that ' it was the Hundred 
 itself which was assessed for geld, and which was held 
 responsible for its payment.' Moreover, it is clear that ' the 
 part which is played in the hidated district of England by 
 the five-hide unit is played in the Danish districts by a unit 
 of six carucates.' In the Danish districts there were pro- 
 bably some other peculiarities ; chief of them a small 
 ' Hundred,' usually composed of 12 carucates, and forming 
 a subdivision of the Wapentake. But the broad distinction 
 between the five-hide-unit area and the six-carucate-unit
 
 'FEUDAL ENGLAND' 85 
 
 area is beyond doubt, and indeed lies on the surface of the 
 evidence, when once it has been pointed out ; and it will 
 have to be taken into account by all future writers. 
 
 The other main theme of the book is the origin of 
 knight's fees. Here Mr. Bound's view is not quite so novel ; 
 for he has already presented it in the pages of the English 
 Historical Review.' Taking for his point of departure the 
 returns made to the Exchequer in 1166, to which hitherto 
 but scant attention has been paid, Mr. Bound argues con- 
 vincingly that the view generally accepted, on Dr. Stubbs's 
 authority, is altogether mistaken ; that instead of the 
 Norman Conquest making no change save in the direction 
 of greater definiteness in the obligations resting on the land- 
 holders, and these obligations continuing to be determined 
 by the hidage or value of the holding, the tenants-in-chief 
 received their fiefs from the Conqueror to hold of the Crown 
 by a definite quota, fixed more or less arbitrarily, of military 
 service. Strictly speaking, this is but 'a theory,' for no 
 contemporary account of an enfeoffment on such terms has 
 hitherto been found : but Mr. Bound's argument backward 
 from the known to the unknown makes it difficult to escape 
 some such conclusion. 
 
 To these remarkable papers on Domesday and knight- 
 service, Mr. Bound adds a number of articles of less moment, 
 though those on ' The Alleged Debate on Danegeld in 1163,' 
 and 'The Oxford Debate on Foreign Service in 1197,' are 
 not to be overlooked in any consideration of the constitu- 
 tional position of the Church. He adds, also, and here we 
 cannot but think him not altogether well advised, a selection 
 from his ' Quarterly ' and other papers on Mr. Freeman's 
 account of the battle of Hastings. The quantity of argu- 
 mentative writing around this subject has been so great, 
 Mr. Bound and Mr. Archer are both such good medievalists 
 and such ardent pleaders, the question as to the ' palisade ' has 
 been so confused by the introduction of the side issue of the 
 ' shield-wall,' that a reviewer will hesitate long before he 
 commits himself to a positive conclusion. After all, there 
 are many other points wherein Mr. Freeman's incomplete
 
 86 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 information and over-hasty judgment can be shown with far 
 less question. Moreover, the current of historical thought 
 is rapidly turning away from the sort of anticipatory demo- 
 cratic enthusiasm which coloured all Freeman's judgment 
 of past institutions. Very soon Freeman's work will come 
 to be estimated aright, both in its strength and its weakness ; 
 and meanwhile we grudge time and energy spent on the 
 'palisade,' which Mr. Bound, we feel sure, could turn to 
 better account. 
 
 It is curious to contrast Mr. Bound's outspoken and not 
 over-sympathetic criticism of Freeman with his carefully 
 reverential attitude towards Dr. Stubbs. Doubtless Freeman 
 was less adequately equipped for writing the history of the 
 eleventh and twelfth centuries ; doubtless his more positive 
 temperament led him to more definite statements, while his 
 friend avoided committing himself ; but we cannot help ask- 
 ing ourselves what Mr. Bound would have said if Dr. Stubbs 
 had been, let us say, a German scholar, and not an English 
 Conservative. For, in spite of Freeman's extravagances and 
 Dr. Stubbs's moderation, the underlying conceptions of both 
 were substantially the same just as the Badical theory and 
 the Whig theory of government are at bottom identical. 
 Both, like Waitz, their German exemplar, seem to have 
 carried back to the past the ideas of equality and self-govern- 
 ment which have characterised our own age. The destruc- 
 tive process which Mr. Bound has set going will not, it may 
 be anticipated, stop with Mr. Freeman. 
 
 The time has certainly come for constitutional history to 
 be written by Conservatives. And yet the presence in this 
 admirable volume of certain pages which would have been 
 rather more in place in the Quarterly Beview, suggests the 
 reflection that if Liberal spectacles are not altogether satisfac- 
 tory for looking at the past, Conservative spectacles are not 
 to be altogether trusted for a complete view of the present.
 
 87 
 
 PEOFESSOE MAITLAND'S 'DOMESDAY 
 BOOK AND BEYOND' 1 
 
 IT is not often that a reviewer can safely use the term 
 ' epoch-making ' ; but to Professor Maitland's book it may 
 be applied with confidence, and in its true sense. When 
 the future historian of historiography comes to write his 
 chapter on the study of the social and political origins of the 
 English people, he will probably point to the earlier sections 
 of Bishop Stubbs's ' Constitutional History ' as summing up 
 in compact and cautious form the conclusions of one whole 
 great school of industrious and enthusiastic scholars. He 
 will then point to Mr. Seebohm's ' English Village Com- 
 munity,' and to various English statements of the views of 
 M. Fustel de Coulanges, as somewhat unexpectedly reopen- 
 ing the discussion by calling in question what had come to 
 be regarded as settled fundamentals. Over the literature of 
 the next few years, including though it did at least one 
 loudly trumpeted work, he will pass rapidly, and he will 
 find the next distinct stage in the course of investigation in 
 the present work of Professor Maitland. For, like all the 
 books which really mark an epoch in the progress of science, 
 this of Mr. Maitland is no mere defence of a threatened 
 position. It advances to a new position, which, if closer to 
 the older one than to its critics, is yet other than the older 
 
 1 [Domesday Book and Beyond : Three Essays in tlie Early History 
 of England, by Frederic William Maitland, LL.D., Downing Professor of 
 the Laws of England in the University of Cambridge. (1897.) Beviewed 
 in the Nation, September 16, 1897.]
 
 88 MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 one. We would not, perhaps, apply to historiography what 
 some writers are fond of saying of philosophy. We would 
 not speak, for example, of Professor Maitland as taking up 
 into his doctrine what may be regarded as the valuable 
 elements in the doctrine of Mr. Seebohm. The antithesis 
 between the views of the one and the other is as sharp as 
 can well be : there is, indeed, one respect in which the 
 antithesis is even sharper than it was between Mr. Seebohm 
 and Bishop Stubbs. But, without speculating on what 
 might have been, it is clear that Mr. Maitland's book, as we 
 have it and at the time we have it, is very much the result of 
 the antagonistic movement of thought called forth by ' The 
 English Village Community,' and also that it recognises and 
 deals with elements in the problem, such as the yard-land, to 
 which Mr. Seebohm was the first effectively to call our atten- 
 tion. 
 
 In form Professor Maitland's book is a model of the 
 tentative. It is made up of three ' Essays : ' one on 
 ' Domesday Book ; ' one on ' England before the Conquest,' 
 devoted mainly to the Anglo-Saxon land-books ; and one to 
 the ' Hide.' In each of these he takes a very wide com- 
 pass ; he approaches the matter at issue at a dozen points ; 
 he exhausts the phraseology of conjecture, of dubiety, of 
 suggestion, of caution ; and ever and anon there are purple 
 patches of self-depreciation. Nevertheless, certain suffi- 
 ciently positive conclusions gradually emerge which are 
 capable of brief statement. 
 
 Mr. Maitland, then, thinks of what afterwards became 
 England as in the main settled by English freemen cultivat- 
 ing their land with the aid perhaps of a slave or so apiece, 
 but unaffected to any noteworthy extent by any previous 
 agricultural system. So far he agrees with the Germanists- 
 To each such adult freeman, head of a family, he assigns in 
 the beginning, as his normal holding, a long hundred (120) 
 of the local ' acres ' which is his interpretation of the hide. 
 But now, unlike all those, from Sir Henry Maine and Bishop 
 Stubbs downward, who have been affected by ' the mark 
 theory,' he altogether refuses to make this freeman's holding
 
 DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND 89 
 
 subject to any sort of communal ownership. There were, 
 indeed, from the first, apparently over a large part of the 
 country, groups of more or less contiguous residences which 
 grew later into mediaeval villages as we know them. The 
 holdings were, moreover, composed of intermingled acre- 
 strips ; but they were bound to one another only by the 
 customary rotation of crop and fallow which ' must have 
 appeared less as the outcome of human ordinance than as 
 an unalterable arrangement established by the nature of 
 things ; ' * and private ownership was as complete as the 
 strong sense of the family tie would allow it to be. There was 
 no village ' moot ' worthy of the name : the manorial court 
 was the result of later ' feudalising ' tendencies : and much of 
 the ' communalism ' of subsequent centuries was apparently 
 the consequence of 'seignorial pressure.' The growth of 
 seignorial authority and of ' the manorial system ' Mr. Mait- 
 land explains as the slow result of many causes the transfer 
 to private lords of royal rights, the ' commendation ' of the 
 weak to the strong, the encroachments of magnates, lay 
 and ecclesiastical. Above all, the pressure of Danegeld was 
 ' fully capable of transmuting a whole nation." 2 It is Mr. 
 Maitland's most novel and, so far as we can see at present, 
 his most valuable contention that manerium in Domesday 
 is a technical term, meaning nothing more or less than ' a 
 house against which geld is charged,' and responsible for 
 the geld which lies on any land that is in any way subject 
 to the power of its holder. 3 Agrarian history, instead of 
 being characterised by the permanence of relations, as Mr. 
 Seebohm, in agreement with the spirit of modern evolu- 
 tionary thought, would have us believe, 'becomes more 
 catastrophic as we trace it backwards.' 4 Of these cata- 
 strophes the Norman Conquest was one of the greatest. The 
 formation of what we may by anticipation call ' manors ' 
 had gone a very long way before that event ; but much still 
 remained to be done before the external symmetry of the 
 
 1 P. 347. 2 P. 8. 
 
 8 Pp. 120, 121. [But see the recent criticism by Mr. J. H. Bound in 
 the English Historical Review for April 1900.] 4 P. 365.
 
 90 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 thirteenth century was realised ; and of this the greater part 
 was accomplished by the Norman Conquest and the violence 
 that accompanied it. ' We cannot treat either the legal or 
 the economic history of our peasantry as a continuous 
 whole ; it is divided into two parts by the red thread of the 
 Norman Conquest.' l 
 
 In this attempted reconstruction of early English social 
 history, there is much that seems to promise solidity. The 
 proposed explanation of the original meaning of ' manor ' 
 deserves serious attention. That, however, does not neces- 
 sarily carry with it any very far-reaching conclusions. Very 
 different in that respect is Mr. Maitland's argument concern- 
 ing the hide. If there was from the first only one kind 
 of hide: if that hide consisted of as much as 120 acres 
 of arable land with the appurtenant pasture ; if that was the 
 ordinary holding of the great majority of the individual 
 heads of cultivating families then it does seem difficult 
 to find any considerable space for provincial villae with 
 their coloni and servi. The proof that is offered us is cumula- 
 tive, and needs minute examination in detail. How much of 
 it Mr. Maitland could surrender and yet produce conviction 
 remains to be seen. But certainly much of it is open to 
 grave doubt. For instance, it is requiring us to attribute 
 extraordinary stupidity to those who drew up the early land 
 charters, to ask us to believe that the technical language of 
 Eoman law for the conveyance of ownership was employed 
 for a mere conveyance of a ' superiority.' 
 
 Mr. Maitland regards himself as but opening the way to 
 further investigation ; and that investigation has a sufficiently 
 hard task before it. There is one consideration to which we 
 would invite attention. If the yardland arose simply from 
 the fissure of the hide, it is surely surprising that the process 
 of disintegration should so very generally have gone just to 
 the point of producing the yardland, and no further. Much 
 of the effectiveness of Mr. Seebohm's argument was due to 
 the impression of uniformity it produced. Mr. Maitland 
 
 1 P. 60.
 
 DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND 91 
 
 has sought with skill and success to weaken the impression ; 
 he delights in revealing heterogeneity and irregularity. 
 Nevertheless, if we are not very much mistaken, over the 
 larger part of England and over wide districts of Germany 
 the thirty-acre yard , or hufe, was so far more common than 
 any other for the plenus villanus, the Voll-spanner, as to be 
 deemed normal. There may be reasons, in the productivity 
 of the soil or in the spread of fashion, for this result, but it 
 is not what we should have expected on Mr. Maitland's 
 hypothesis. 
 
 But ' Domesday Book and Beyond ' is not to be lightly 
 disposed of. Students will have to work over it for several 
 years to come ; and though it is in great measure caviare to 
 the general, there is perhaps no work in which profound 
 learning is so gracefully and amusingly handled.
 
 92 MEDIAEVAL AGKARIAN 
 
 ME. SEEBOHM'S 
 'TKIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES' 1 
 
 THAT the appearance in 1883 of Mr. Frederic Seebohm's 
 ' English Village Community ' opened a new period in the 
 study of mediaeval social and economic history, no longer 
 needs saying. That book did two things : it gave us a 
 knowledge, such as we had not possessed before, of the 
 daily life of the mass of the English people ; and it created 
 a presumption that the explanation then currently accepted 
 of the genesis of those conditions was altogether inadequate. 
 But it has to be confessed that it did not quite succeed in 
 making clear to its readers the directions in which its author 
 himself looked for a solution of the problem. It was 
 understood that Mr. Seebohm abandoned the theory which 
 traced back the manor to a free village community ; it was 
 frequently supposed that he substituted a purely ' Eoman ' 
 origin. 2 This impression was a natural result of the 
 emphasis Mr. Seebohm laid, and very properly laid, on the 
 late-Eoman villa and on its resemblance to the mediaeval 
 manor : it was confirmed by the natural association in 
 many minds of Mr. Seebohm's name with that of M. Fustel 
 de Coulanges. But a more careful reading will show that 
 Mr. Seebohm was even then not disposed to find in the 
 
 1 [Political Science Quarterly, June 1896 ; apropos of The Tribal 
 System in Wales, being part of an Inquiry into the Structure and 
 Methods of Tribal Society, by Frederic Seebohm, LL.D. (1895.)] 
 
 2 See, for instance, Vinogradoff's Villainage in England, p. 33 ; 
 Digby's History of the Law of Real Property, Preface to fourth edition.
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 93 
 
 Eoman villa the last word in the discussion. He will be 
 found arguing that ' the tribal system ' of early Germany 
 itself showed a tendency towards a manorial organisation. 1 
 The later ' manor ' may thus, as he frequently remarks, 2 
 have had ' a complex origin ' in German tribal conditions 
 on the one side, as well as in Eoman methods of estate 
 management on the other. So far, however, as the argu- 
 ment in the ' English Village Community ' goes, the ' tribal ' 
 element is looked for mainly in the German migration : and, 
 as a result of his examination of early Celtic evidence, Mr. 
 Seebohm goes so far as to say that ' the pre-Eoman tribal 
 system in Britain was evidently not the parent ' of the later 
 manor. 3 
 
 Subsequent reflection has only strengthened Mr. Seebohm 
 in his conviction that, by the side of Eoman institutions, we 
 have to make room, not indeed for a village communalism, 
 the stage of the discussion is past in which that could any 
 longer be thought possible but for the tribal system as 
 an almost universal factor in the formation of mediaeval 
 institutions. 4 His investigations for some time past have 
 been devoted to the problem of the constitution of tribal 
 society; and the results of these investigations, so far as 
 they have gone at present, are now before us in ' The Tribal 
 System in Wales.' That Mr. Seebohm should begin with 
 Wales is hardly perhaps what we should have anticipated, 
 considering the conclusions of the earlier volume. The 
 existence of a mass of ' remarkably full and detailed Welsh 
 documentary evidence ' would hardly have furnished a 
 sufficient motive, did not Mr. Seebohm now believe, whatever 
 he may have thought twelve years ago, that ' a substantial 
 knowledge of the facts of one tribal system,' even though it 
 
 1 English Village Community, p. 345. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. xiv, 346, 414, and ' compound product,' p. 422. 
 
 1 Ibid. p. 252 ; cf . p. 345, ' The Welsh system was not directly ap- 
 proaching the manorial arrangement, except perhaps on the mensal land 
 of the chiefs,' and side analysis. Nevertheless, even in this book, the 
 Romans are spoken of in another place as ' strengthening the manorial 
 element on British estates ' (p. 411). 
 
 4 Tlie Tribal System in Wales, Preface, p. viii.
 
 94 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 be a Celtic one, will serve as ' a key with which to unlock 
 the riddles of others.' l He does not here express the 
 further opinion, which we have some reason to believe he 
 has come more distinctly to entertain, that the evidence now 
 warrants our tracing the social evolution which culminated 
 in the manor, behind even the Eoman occupation, back into 
 the purely Celtic period. 
 
 It must be said at the outset that ' The Tribal System in 
 Wales,' while not so startling and far-reaching in the scope 
 of its argument as ' The English Village Community ' and 
 that was impossible from the nature of the case is a book 
 which distinctly furthers the discussion, and makes at 
 least one contribution to it of fundamental importance. As 
 compared with the treatment of Celtic material by previous 
 writers, like Sullivan, Maine, and Skene, there is an evident 
 gain in concreteness and consistency a gain due, as it 
 would seem, to the ' economic ' interest which compels the 
 investigator to picture to himself the realities behind 
 nomenclature. And the one permanent contribution is the 
 account of the Welsh wele. The earlier book of Mr. 
 Seebohm and the later have thus rendered like services to 
 historical science : whether or no it has helped us with the 
 'origins,' each has made a great positive addition to our 
 working knowledge of conditions well within the docu- 
 mentary period. Before 1883 nobody really knew, in any 
 living sense, what the virgate was ; now it has become a 
 commonplace starting-point of discussion. And so the Welsh 
 wele was all the time in the Welsh printed material ; it was 
 even in the Welsh chapter of the earlier book : but it had 
 not obtained for itself a prominent and secure place in our 
 thoughts until it was put in the forefront of the argument in 
 ' The Tribal System in Wales.' 
 
 Accordingly it must not be thought any detraction from 
 the merits of the book to say that the whole argument of 
 Mr. Seebohm calls for thoroughgoing criticism, and demands 
 more documentary support, if it is to be accepted, than
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 95 
 
 Mr. Seebohm has so far furnished. Mr. Seebohm himself 
 does not claim finality ; he ' prints this part of the essay 
 separately ' with the express object of securing a considera- 
 tion of the Welsh evidence ' on its own merits ; ' and I am 
 confident he will himself prefer that the piety of disciples 
 take for the present a controversial form. Therefore, in the 
 present article there will be given first a synopsis of the 
 argument of each chapter, slightly rearranged occasionally, 
 and then such critical observations as it may seem to call 
 for. These latter will be hardly intelligible without the 
 book, and may be skipped by the general reader. 
 
 Chapter I. sets forth ' the land system in Anglesey as 
 described in the Extents' of 1294, 1339, 1351, and 1352, 
 soon after the conquest of North Wales (1282), and when, 
 as we find from these same documents, the pre-conquest 
 conditions, so far as the mass of the people was concerned, 
 were practically unchanged. Anglesey was then and is still, 
 it must be remembered, a district, for Wales, ' exceptionally 
 agricultural.' There were in that island four ' manors/ in 
 the language of the Extents ; and one of these is examined 
 in detail. The ' manor ' of Aberffraw, which had been the 
 seat of the princes of North Wales, consisted of two portions, 
 a larger and a smaller, separated by a mile or so of ecclesi- 
 astical territory. The larger portion was made up, in the 
 first place, of what the later Extents call the ' demesne,' 
 including five carucates of (arable) land, three mills, two 
 meadows, and the fishery ; and the demesne itself consisted of 
 1. a Maerdref (' the prince's home farm . . . cultivated by 
 villani of Aberffraw ') occupying four carucates, 2. Trefcastell 
 (' the farm homestead of the Maerdref ') with one carucate 
 attached to it, and, 3. Garthey (some fourteen little gardens 
 of cottiers). In the same larger portion were also the 
 holdings of the ' free tenants,' who appear as four sets of 
 heredes, each set called a wele (literally ' a bed '). The 
 smaller portion of the manor, on the contrary, was exclu- 
 sively occupied by 'villeins,' arranged in three groups or 
 ' hamlets.' All the villeins were subject to money rents, 
 to heavy payments in kind, and to the performance of a
 
 96 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 large number of day-works ; while but little was due from 
 the free tenants except money rents. Moreover, the tenure 
 of the villeins, both on the Maerdref and on the outlying 
 hamlets, was ' of the nature of trefgevery,' i.e. it involved 
 some sort of group responsibility for dues. The use of this 
 term serves to identify their position with that of a prince's 
 aillts (to be spoken of later) as described in the Welsh 
 Codes ; though in the case of the aillts the feature of their 
 position on which most stress is laid is the ' regulation ' by 
 which equal division of the land was brought about within 
 the group, with no recognition of individual claims to 
 inheritance. Outside the manor proper there were, in the 
 surrounding territorial division called a cantref, a number of 
 villae, occupied some by free tenants and some by villani 
 and some by both, paying rents in money and in kind to 
 the prince. But of these we are told little, and our attention 
 is concentrated on the manor itself. 
 
 The point most obscure in this account is the nature of 
 the Maerdref and the relation to it of the ' villeins of Aber- 
 ffraw.' Was it like the ' demesne ' of an English manor? That 
 is what is suggested by 'the prince's home farm,' L and similar 
 phrases. Or was it like the mllenagium of an English 
 manor, and was there no separate ' demesne ' in the narrower 
 sense ? This is what is implied by the argument that ' the 
 land of the Maerdref was of the nature of regulated' or 
 servile land. 2 May it not have included something like 
 a manorial demesne and something like manorial land- 
 in-villenage ? The latter, because we are told, in the records, 
 of ' tenements ' from which were due considerable payments 
 in kind ; the former, because these tenants were also liable 
 to some 900 ' day-works,' which must have been on land 
 other than their tenements. A somewhat similar but less 
 serious difficulty is presented by the position of the villeins 
 of the smaller portion of the ' manor : ' there also it would 
 seem that there must have been some distinction between 
 the tenements and the land on which the day-works were 
 
 1 The Tribal System in Wales, p. 15. 2 P. 18.
 
 97 
 
 to be expended. These are, indeed, questions as to which 
 Mr. Seebohm may reply that his readers, with the evidence 
 set before them in the Appendix, may as fittingly hazard a 
 conjecture as himself ; and they are mentioned only to show 
 that it is hardly so easy to picture the Aberffraw of the 
 thirteenth century as Mr. Seebohm's pages might suggest. 1 
 As to the free tenants, it should be noticed that at 
 Aberffraw they seem to have all been attached to the service 
 of the prince's household ; and it is only by anticipating 
 the argument of later chapters, and not from any clear 
 indication in the evidence presented in this, that they can 
 be called 'successors of the Welsh free tribesmen/ 2 and 
 their money payments a commutation for ' the old food -rents 
 of the free tenants.' 3 
 
 -fit the second chapter, the most important in the book, 
 Mr. Seebohm turns to the free tenants, and seeks to make 
 their position clear by the aid of an Extent of the Castle 
 and Honour of Denbigh of the year 1335. From this Extent 
 iU ; 'fa evident that the land of that district was then held 
 in lecta or weles, terms designating both the holders and 
 the holdings. That these weles were groups of kindred, 
 descended from an ancestor whose name the wele bore, is 
 clear from- the lists of persons there given with the prefix ap 
 to their names, from the use of progenies as an equivalent 
 for wele, and from the frequent description of the tenants as 
 coheredes et participes, or coheredes et parcenarii. The 
 geographical areas called mllatae were occupied by these 
 weles in such a way that sometimes a villata was divided 
 among several weles, sometimes a wele had shares of more 
 
 1 There are, however, a number of smaller points in the exposition 
 more open to criticism. Such is the account of the relation of the 
 ' manor ' to the cantref and its subdivisions the'cymwds. On p. 1 there 
 is a manor ' in each cantref,' while on p. 4 there is one hi each of two 
 cymwds ; cf . the vagueness ' cantref or cymwd ' of pp. 26, 90, 136, 
 149. We may question the appropriateness of the use of the term 
 'Norman' for English officials of 1294 and half a century later (pp. 3, 
 5, 8, 51, 125, 135, 235, 237 et al.) 
 
 2 P. 13. 3 P. 9. 
 
 H
 
 98 MEDIEVAL AGRAEIAN 
 
 than one villata, and sometimes a wele occupied the whole 
 of a villata or even more. From each villata 20s., the ' tune 
 pound,' were due to the lord ; and the obligation was divided 
 among the weles in proportion to their share of the villata. 
 The wele itself was composed of four degrees of kindred ; 
 and the holdings if not of the weles, as Mr. Seebohm 
 thinks, at any rate of the primary fractions of them, which 
 had been allotted to each son of the original ancestor 
 and which were known as gavells l remained undivided ; 
 although individual rights of user were carefully denned. 
 The physical features of the Denbigh district favoured a 
 pastoral life and put difficulties in the way of an extension 
 of tillage, being in these respects more characteristic of Wales 
 as a whole than were those of Anglesey. This fact, when 
 combined with what we have learned of the wele, suggests 
 that the free population was composed of 
 
 communities of graziers of cattle, with rights of grazing ... in 
 different parts of the district ; each 'community, with, it may be, its 
 score or two of kinsmen, forming a complex unit, one in its rela- 
 tions to the other kindreds, but nevertheless with intricate internal 
 hereditary and family divisions and rights. 
 
 There is evidence for weks, presumably of the same character, 
 in other parts of North Wales and also in South Wales. 
 
 All this is admirably set forth ; and that some such 
 kindred-holding was then general among fully free Welsh- 
 men can no longer be doubted. Mr. Seebohm, indeed, 
 gives the impression that such methods were characteristic 
 only of the fully free, unconsciously perhaps anticipating a 
 subsequent argument. For priodarii, as the tenants are 
 sometimes called in the Extent, does not, as Mr. Seebohm 
 himself points out later, necessarily mean 'free tribesmen,' 
 though to them it was most commonly applied ; 2 and in 
 1335 there seem to have been as many weles ' in tenura 
 nativorum ' as ' in tenura liberorum.' 3 
 
 1 P. 35. 
 
 2 P. 31 ; but cf. pp. 122, 123 ; and Appendix, p. 93, where care is 
 taken to add 'liberi ' to ' priodarii.' 
 
 8 See, e.g., Appendix, p. 72.
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 99 
 
 In the third chapter Mr. Seebohm begins to utilise 
 the less trustworthy material presented by the Welsh Codes 
 and Triads. He makes no attempt to determine their dates 
 and varying values, but points out fairly enough that ' if the 
 Codes contain a body of customary law, which in natural 
 course would produce the condition of things described by 
 the Surveys ' already looked at, ' their authenticity will be 
 substantially confirmed.' 'If,' also, 'the legal traditions of 
 more doubtful date and origin/ the Triads, ' supply reasons, 
 in tribal sentiment or in more or less archaic details of 
 custom, for the legal rules of the Codes, they themselves 
 become evidence which cannot be wholly ignored.' He then 
 seeks to show that there existed in ancient Wales a sharp 
 ' distinction between tribesmen and non-tribesmen, primarily 
 one of blood,' and therefore wellnigh insuperable ; and that 
 this was the real significance of the later anglicised and 
 manorialised classification of ' free ' and ' bond,' Uberi and 
 mllani or nativi. The tie of kindred among the tribesmen 
 was exceedingly strong ; and Mr. Seebohm traces several 
 circles of kin-association. First of all, there was ' the 
 kindred to the ninth degree of descent,' with its chief and its 
 other officers. A sentence, not free from obscurity, in one 
 of the Codes lends some colour to the assertion that this 
 chief of kin was afterwards replaced by a ' lord ; ' and we 
 may go on to suppose that the practice described elsewhere 
 in the Codes, according to which a son at the age of fourteen 
 was brought to a lord to become his man and receive from 
 him support, had taken the place of an earlier usage in which 
 the young tribesman became dependent on the chief of kin 
 a chain of argument, however, whose links are hardly strong 
 enough to carry much weight. The Triads, it is next 
 pointed out, speak of the cyvarwys, or rights acquired by 
 every native Cymro on attaining the age of fourteen, as ' five 
 free erws (acres), co-tillage of the waste, and hunting ; ' and 
 it is remarked that such statements ' do not seem, on the 
 whole, inconsistent with the facts just learned from the 
 Codes.' Indeed, Mr. Seebohm seems to regard the acqui- 
 sition of cyvarwys as identical with the grant of maintenance 
 
 n2
 
 100 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 by the lord (or chief of kin) 1 a bold surmise, for at first 
 sight the two things seem to have nothing in common but 
 the age of the recipient, and, indeed, to belong to different 
 environments, the one to a growing chivalry, the other to 
 pastoral life. 
 
 The Codes not only reveal the larger kindred group, 
 composed of relatives to the ninth degree of descent: 
 according to Mr. Seebohm they present rules as to inheri- 
 tance of land which serve to explain the lesser kindred to 
 four degrees already disclosed to us in the weles of the 
 Extents. It is laid down in the Venedotian Code of North 
 Wales that brothers are to share land ; that when all the 
 brothers are dead, their children, being cousins, are, if they 
 please, again to share equally; and again their children, 
 being second cousins : and the same rule occurs in different 
 terms in the Dimetian Code of South Wales. The final 
 division and settlement of claims could not take place till all 
 the grandsons had died ; and therefore, until then, the 
 original holding of the ancestor would ' remain the external 
 unit.' 2 Hence the constitution of the wele, 
 
 This is a thrilling piece of construction ; but there are a 
 good many perplexities attached to it. In the first place, it 
 is not clear that the distinction of the Codes between those 
 of Cymric blood (' innate ' Cymry) and those of alien blood 
 is made more intelligible by being described as one between 
 ' tribesmen and non-tribesmen.' Was there only one ' tribe ' 
 among the Cymry ? Then, again, though we may readily 
 believe that the later distinction between liberi and nativi 
 went back to a distinction between Cymry and non-Cymry, 
 it might be well to strengthen this contention by the 
 citation of unmistakable evidence, considering that Mr. 
 Skene, with the same material before him, had no hesitation 
 in regarding the aillts of the Codes (who confessedly answer, 
 in part, to the later villani) as ' native members of the tribe.' 3 
 
 The conclusion based on the rules of the Codes as to re- 
 uH.1 ino'il DOUiBoJ ieu[ Joj;1 oi'i n'Jiv/ Jmijs.'f-.nopfn .ylorlv/ 
 
 i <li ;p; gg . 1 !_ yg f . 
 
 nadriijm? Celtic Scotland, iii. 200, 205.
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 101 
 
 partition of land-rights from generation to generation, until 
 second cousins get their turn, is not greatly strengthened by 
 the citation l from the Denbigh Extent to the effect that 
 inheritance was allowed no further than the fourth degree ; 
 for this Denbigh record does not hint at renewed partitions, 
 and deals only with the case of succession to a man who 
 has no nearer kin than a nephew or cousin. 2 The latter 
 part of the chapter is rendered uselessly bewildering, I 
 cannot help thinking, by the introduction of a fresh gradation 
 of kinship groups to the fourth and ninth degrees (not to 
 mention another to seven degrees) for the payment of 
 saraad and galanas 3 (like the Teutonic wer gelds). As Mr. 
 Seebohm points out later, 4 these are not coincident with the 
 lesser and greater kindreds before considered, inasmuch as 
 they are based, not like the latter on agnatic, but on cognatic 
 relationship. 5 
 
 The further we go, the more conjectural the argument 
 becomes. Chapter IV. deals with the relationship of the 
 kindred groups to the occupation of land. Little is 
 said, however, of the greater group, and our author confines 
 his attention almost entirely to the lesser group-to-four- 
 degrees, identified by him with the wele. His conclusion is 
 that the head of such a kinship was the ' landed person,' the 
 uchelwr or breyr (translated commonly ' noble ') of the 
 
 1 The Tribal System in Wales, pp. 45, 73. 
 
 2 On p. 45 Mr. Seebohm gives three brief paragraphs in English as a 
 ' passage from the Extent,' referring in a footnote to Appendix B. i. 
 This is probably a misprint, for there is no Appendix B. i. In B. h. 
 (Appendix, p. 96), however, there is an extract from an Extent, of which 
 the paragraphs on p. 45 are possibly meant as an abstract in English. 
 But besides slight inaccuracies as to the amounts of the reliefs, the 
 English makes the note refer to the sons and relatives of ' a free 
 priodaur,' while the Latin says nothing of 'free,' and does say 'si quis 
 eorum eeu quorumcumque aliorum Nativorum.' The English also 
 omits to translate the phrases 'sifilium non habuit, tune frater ejus aut 
 nepos aut consanguineus qui ejus Jieres propinquior fueriU 
 
 * P -* 6 4 P. 101. 
 
 8 Professor Maitland has some excellent observations on the urgent 
 necessity of clearing up this matter of the historic relation of agnation 
 to cognation, in the Economic Journal, v. 592.
 
 102 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 Codes ; that ' in him were vested the rights of the wele ; ' 
 that he represented it towards the outside world ; and that 
 the other members of the wele were not regarded as joint 
 tenants, but, on the contrary, had nothing but rights of main- 
 tenance. It must be confessed that this is a dangerously expe- 
 ditious way of getting a landed aristocracy out of a patriarchal 
 regime. That there is no direct evidence for it, Mr. Seebohm 
 would doubtless allow. And there are at least three objec- 
 tions to it. The Extents do not indicate that there was 
 usually some one distinct head to the wele, after the death of 
 the ancestor from whom it was named : Mr. Seebohm him- 
 self speaks of the sons and grandsons succeeding in the 
 proprietorship of occupation rights. Nor is there any indi- 
 cation that these Denbigh weles had grown or were growing 
 into territorial lordships. And lastly, the lord or chief of 
 kindred who is referred to ! as providing maintenance for the 
 young tribesman is, according to the argument of the previous 
 chapter, not the head of the kindred-to-four-degrees (which does 
 not clearly appear in the Codes as an organised group), but the 
 head of the kindred-to-nine-degrees. Perhaps Mr. Seebohm 
 thinks that, on ' the passage from nomad life to settled 
 occupation,' 2 the responsibility passed over from the head of 
 the larger to the (supposed) head of the smaller group. If so, 
 this is a position that needs to be stated and argued. 
 
 Assuming, however, this relation of the ordinary tribes- 
 man to the head of the smaller kindred as proved, Mr. 
 Seebohm sets about explaining the long list of chattels which 
 is given in one of the Codes in a connection which implies 
 that they were private property. The ordinary tribesman is 
 to be looked upon, he maintains, as 
 
 a little dairy farmer with separate homestead, chiefly engaged in 
 making butter and cheese ; but with a car and yoke of oxen for 
 carrying and ploughing, with corn crops growing on his five free 
 erws, as well as corn in the bin. And thus his maintenance was 
 not provided by his sharing in a common meal, or receiving 
 doles in money or in kind from the common purse or produce of 
 
 1 P. 92. 2 P. 87.
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 103 
 
 the kindred, but the result of his own labour and use of the cattle 
 and cyvarwys which was received as his tribesman's right on his 
 coming of age. 1 
 
 This, however probable it may seem, stands or falls with 
 the construction on which it is based. 
 
 So much then for the ' free tribesmen,' for whom, as no 
 such words as ' tribe ' or ' tribesmen ' seem to appear in the 
 Codes, it would probably be better to substitute some such 
 term as ' the free Cymry.' In Chapter V. we turn to the non- 
 Cymry, the ' strangers in blood,' and their position according 
 to the Codes. As a rule, says Mr. Seebohm, they appear, 
 whether described as taeogs, aillts, or alltuds, as 'located 
 either on the maerdref of a prince or in separate taeog-trefs,' 
 apart from the free Cymry an account with which the 
 situation at Aberffraw at the time of the English conquest 
 is delightfully consistent. Now ' the peculiar feature of the 
 taeog-tref as described in the Codes was the entire absence 
 of any rights of inheritance, all the taeogs sharing equally in 
 the land ; ' 2 and, as we have seen, the use of tir cyfrif to 
 denote such a tenure connects these passages of the Codes 
 with the Anglesey trefgevery, involving joint responsibility. 
 Mr. Seebohm regards this peculiar kind of tenure as ' the 
 natural result of carrying out the tribal principle that there 
 was no true kinship and inheritance among strangers in 
 blood,' i.e. non-Cymry ; and so he arrives at a clear-cut 
 distinction, henceforth regarded by him as fundamental, 
 between tir cyfrif, the ' register ' land of aliens on the one 
 side, and tir gwelyawc, the land held in wele tenure by Cymry 
 on the other. But though 'regulated' taeog-trefs were the 
 rule for non-Cymry, Mr. Seebohm allows that strangers ' in 
 better circumstances ' were permitted to settle on the waste 
 of a chieftain or uchelwr, and so in course of time to create 
 non-Cymric weles, bound to the soil but also irremovable 
 after the fourth generation. This enables him to explain the 
 weles of nativi in the Denbigh Extent ; but at the same time 
 it comes very near surrendering his theory that the Cymry 
 
 1 P. 99. 2 P. 117.
 
 104 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 obstinately refused to recognise anything like kinship on the 
 part of aliens. Nor can it be said that it is an altogether 
 satisfactory explanation of the origin of the intermingled 
 free and villein weles of Denbigh. Unfortunately the ex- 
 tracts from the Denbigh Extent printed in the Appendix 
 appear to omit some of the passages concerning the ' native ' 
 or villein weles. But even from those here given it is clear 
 that the weles ' of natives ' sometimes paid tune ', l and yet 
 tune was a commutation of the gwestva, or payment in kind 
 to the prince, which was peculiarly characteristic, so Mr. 
 Seebohm declares in the next chapter, of the ' free tribesman.' 2 
 Chapter VI. deals with chieftainship. The designations 
 used for the Welsh princelings suggest, argues Mr. Seebohm, 
 that their authority was in most cases based on ideas of kin- 
 ship not a very conclusive argument. The scanty evidence 
 as to the conquest of 'the western part of North Wales from 
 the Gaels by the Cyinry under ' Cunedda and his sons,' and 
 of the western part of South Wales by his descendant 
 Maelgyn, in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively, is next 
 interpreted as showing that ' tribal chieftainship ' itself was 
 ' that of a family ' a sort of princely wele.* The evidence 
 is not convincing ; and it is strange that Mr. Seebohm does 
 not lay more stress on that conquest itself, as furnishing a 
 likely explanation of the existence, especially in those parts 
 of North Wales, of a subject non-Cymric population. 4 More 
 satisfactory is the account, following the Codes, of the 
 chieftain's food-rents from free tribesmen, commuted later 
 for money, as well as the explanation, suggested by a com- 
 parison of the Codes with the Extents, of the later mllata, as 
 ' the geographical unit from which the tune pound was due.' 
 The more burdensome food-dues paid by non-Cymry are also 
 set forth, but not in so clear a light. 
 
 This is the end of the main argument. Hitherto we 
 i OKJ.IJ iua iroa oili oi unijrod ,?,aJauj onnr/0-non 
 
 ' hl >E.g. Appendix, p. 77. According to the quotation from the 
 Venedotian Code, on p. 15, it was usually the duty of ' the men of the 
 maertrev ' to 'pay the tune of their land.' . 
 
 2 P. 154 ; and see the index, s.v. gwestva. 
 
 3 Pp. 143, 144-1 .'I J 4 But see Addendum, infra, p. 106.
 
 THE TEIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES 105 
 
 have dealt with no material of assured antiquity earlier than 
 the thirteenth century, though the Codes appear to present 
 many ' archaic ' features. In Chapter VII. Mr. Seebohm 
 seeks to show the probability that the picture he has drawn 
 is true for a much earlier period. The Book of Chad, 
 belonging originally to Llandaff, contains in a handwriting 
 of the ninth century a number of .records of donations of land 
 to the church ; and two of these transfer a tref, with a census 
 resembling very closely in character the winter and summer 
 payments from taeog-trefs set forth in the Codes. Growing 
 still bolder in his flight, Mr. Seebohm finally rests upon 
 some entries in a twelfth-century Life of St. Cadoc, which 
 go back in substance, he believes, to the end of the sixth 
 century 1 They do not claim to be contemporary records ; 
 but his conclusion (from an elaborate argument as to the 
 recurrence of the same names as in Gildas, and as to their 
 similarity to seventh-century continental documents) is that 
 they may be relied on for a substantially true statement of 
 what actually took place. Now these mention the grant of 
 ' cibaria per tres nodes,' resembling the gwestva from free 
 tribesmen, and also the payment from villae granted to the 
 church of pensiones resembling in character the taeog food- 
 rents. The implication is that where the food-rents existed, 
 the rest of the system, of which in the time of the Codes they 
 formed part, existed also. 
 
 Looking back now over the course of Mr. Seebohm's ex- 
 positiop, the reader may perhaps agree with the estimate with 
 which this article began, viz. that in forcing upon our atten- 
 tion the Welsh wele of the thirteenth century consists the 
 chief value of his treatise. The theory which he puts forward 
 of the' origin of the wele needs further support : his views as 
 to the relation of the wele to ' tribal ' organisation, and as to 
 the creation of the social classes of later centuries, cannot be 
 regarded as much more than brilliant hypotheses. It is 
 necessary, even if ungracious, to say this, because in the 
 present chaos of ideas as to social origins, there is some 
 danger lest what may be called ' tribalism ' may seize the 
 command, vice the mark theory retired, before it has proved
 
 106 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 its authority. But as yet we hardly know what we mean 
 when we speak of a ' tribe.' Mr. Seebohm rather assumes 
 the notion than explains it. 
 
 Nevertheless we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Seebohm 
 for the determination with which he has compelled what 
 before was a bewildering jungle of Celtic nomenclature to 
 yield up to us some sort of intelligible shape. We have now 
 something to discuss that we can at least try to make a men- 
 tal picture of : and that is a great gain. But Mr. Seebohm's 
 work has a way of growing upon one on repeated reading ; 
 and it is not unlikely that further consideration may reveal 
 a cogency in his argument not now as apparent as one would 
 like. If so, my excuse must be that ' The Tribal System in 
 Wales ' is not an easy book to read. 
 
 [ADDENDUM. Much new information will be found in The Welsh People, 
 by John Bhys, M.A., Principal of Jesus College, and David Brynmor- 
 Jones, M.P. (1900). This contains a valuable chapter on the history of 
 land tenure, of which ' the greater part ' was written by Mr. Seebohm, as 
 a portion of the Report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales 
 (1896). It gives a lucid summary of its author's conclusions ; with this 
 addition, that the permanent distinction between free and unfree is now 
 definitely traced back to the conquest by Cunedda (The Welsh People, 
 p. 396 ; cf. the preceding criticism, supra, p. 104). I must confess, 
 however, that I am left with a growing inability to picture to myself 
 the formation of ' weles,' as we find them in the thirteenth century, 
 from the operation through centuries of the rule of inheritance as 
 explained by Mr. Seebohm. I cannot help thinking that the ' weles ' 
 suggest a certain stereotyping of the divisions of land at an early date. 
 What will be altogether new to his readers, and is most suggestive, is 
 the account which follows of the survival of the mediaeval free holdings, 
 except so far as they have been disposed of voluntarily, and the con- 
 version of the servile tenures into the present year-to-year tenancies, 
 after an intermediate period of long leases. Mr. Seebohm's comparison 
 between the results of historical evolution in Wales, England, and Ireland 
 is deserving of careful attention.]
 
 107 
 
 DB. GBOSSMANN ON THE PEASANTS OF 
 BKANDENBUBG ' 
 
 ' THE history of the emancipation of the peasants is the 
 history of the social question of the eighteenth century ' in 
 Europe ; and since Professor Knapp of Strasburg, with this 
 appeal to the attention of economic students, issued his sub- 
 stantial treatise on ' The Emancipation of the Peasants, and 
 the Origin of the Agricultural Labourers in the Older Portions 
 of Prussia ' (1887), a considerable literature has begun to grow 
 up on the subject. The greater part of this literature, how- 
 ever, does but concern itself with the details in particular 
 districts of the emancipating movement whereof Knapp has 
 sketched the outlines. In the main results of Knapp's inves- 
 tigation, which is primarily devoted to the century and a 
 half between 1706 and 1857, there seems to be a general and 
 just acquiescence. Dr. Grossmann's essay does not attempt 
 to call these in question ; it is distinguished from most of 
 the works which Knapp's book has called forth in that it is 
 devoted to the earlier history of peasant conditions to the 
 more minute examination of that prior development to which 
 Knapp, from the very nature of his task, could allot only 
 a few introductory pages. 2 Such an attempt was certainly 
 needed ; for, although it is possible to describe the conditions 
 
 1 \Ueber die guisherrlich-bauerlichen Rechtsverha'ltnisse in der 
 Mark Brandenburg vom 16 bis 18 Jahrhundert, by Dr. Fr. Grossmann, 
 in Schmoller's Forscnungen. (1890.) Eeviewed in the Political Science 
 Quarterly, December 1892.] 
 
 2 [But now see infra, p. 132.]
 
 108 MEDIEVAL AGKAEIAN 
 
 of 1700, and then the subsequent changes, without raising the 
 question as to how those conditions came into existence, it is 
 obvious that for a wider view of the whole history of the 
 peasant class an answer to that question is essential. Are 
 we to regard the emancipation as the last stage in an upward 
 movement, on the whole continuous within historical times, 
 or are we to regard it as the restoration of an independence 
 and freedom which had passed away during the Middle Ages ? 
 The answer to this question Knapp had taken in substance 
 from an article of the jurist Korn which appeared in 1873. 
 Korn's view may be described as an application to the pe- 
 culiar conditions of Brandenburg conquered and colonised 
 by the Germans in comparatively late centuries of the theory 
 of the originally free peasant, the Altfrei, which a school of 
 German scholars has made the corner-stone of constitutional 
 and economic history. According to this view ' peasants ' and 
 ' knights ' were originally in Brandenburg nothing more than 
 ' neighbours.' Knapp so far departed from this position as to 
 concede that in most cases the colonisation was brought 
 about by ' knights ' or nobles, who received grants of land 
 from the prince and brought in German settlers to cultivate 
 it. But he maintained that these nobles were not Gutsherren, 
 but only Grundherren, a distinction difficult to put into 
 English. It may perhaps be expressed by saying that the 
 country was not divided into estates (such as would be called 
 in England ' manors ') whereof part was cultivated by the 
 lord and part by more or less servile tenants; but into 
 districts in each of which almost the whole area was occupied 
 by free peasants in a very loose and slight subordination to 
 a superior. The creation of Bitterguter, or manors, was 
 brought about by the degradation of these peasants, a pro- 
 cess which was still going on in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries, and reached its furthest point after the Thirty 
 Years' War. 
 
 All this historical construction Dr. Grossmann now calls 
 in question. He maintains that the Mittergut system was 
 established during and with the colonisation itself ; and ho 
 adduces weighty arguments in support of this contention.
 
 THE PEASANTS OF BBANDENBUBG 109 
 
 The most striking, perhaps, is that in an agreement between 
 the prince and his barons in 1283 at a time when the 
 colonisation was but recently completed the peasants are 
 spoken of as subditi vasalli, and the vasalhis, or noble, is 
 described as the dominus bonorum. How vital this correction 
 is, and what a new colour it gives to all the subsequent history, 
 the author himself hardly realises. For instance, he so far 
 accepts Knapp's version of events as to concede that there 
 was a distinct depression of the peasants from the second 
 half of the fifteenth century onward. Whether this is shown 
 by the ' Gesindezwangdienst ' is not clear without further ex- 
 planation than is here given; Dr. Grossmann, writing for 
 German specialists, omits much that the English reader has 
 to guess. But certainly the legislation on the subject would 
 seem to be not altogether unlike the English statutes of the 
 period dealing with agricultural labour statutes which wit- 
 ness to increasing independence on the part of the peasant 
 class. All the other alleged proofs are clearly inadequate. 
 The demand of the knights in 1484, that no one should re- 
 ceive the peasants of another, may never have been necessary 
 before because they had never run away. The punishment 
 of a peasant who wrongfully sued his lord in the prince's 
 court may be, similarly, not a new restriction, but a check 
 upon a new attempt to secure greater independence. It is 
 true that the lord was given the right on certain conditions 
 to buy out a tenant ; and this permission was often abused. 
 But Dr. Grossmann points out that the lords had enjoyed this 
 right long before the fifteenth century. 
 
 AB a matter of fact, the number of peasant holdings re- 
 mained unchanged down to at least 1527 ; and the favour- 
 able conditions of 'peasant life as compared with surrounding 
 countries caused a considerable migration into the Mark. 
 Facts which, when we begin with a roseate view of the 
 peasants' original condition, point to a tightening of the lord's 
 hold upon them, may very fairly, when we recognise that the 
 manorial system was of long standing, be regarded as indi- 
 cating that his authority was already decaying. 
 
 Dr. Grossmann more than makes up, however, for his
 
 110 MEDIAEVAL AGBAEIAN 
 
 over-ready acceptance of customary views on this point, by his 
 criticism of another very generally accepted position, viz. that 
 the introduction of Boman law at this period was detrimental 
 to peasant rights. He shows that if any danger did arise 
 from the Boman law in Brandenburg, it was only from the 
 tendency of the lawyers who were influenced by it to generalise 
 too freely. He points out that the great jurists of the sixteenth 
 and the early part of the following century expressly recog- 
 nised the proprietary rights of the tenants ; as, for instance, 
 in the dictum of Scheplitz in 1634 : Dominium horum prae- 
 diorum est penes rusticos, et nobiles habent tantum domi- 
 nium percipiendi ; and that, so far as the supreme tribunal of 
 the Mark was concerned, the action of the judiciary tended 
 to put obstacles in the way of the removal of the peasants 
 from their holdings. 
 
 The author gives a careful account of the various classes 
 as they were to be found in the seventeenth century an 
 account in which we can discern many curiously minute re- 
 semblances to the varieties of copyhold tenure in England ; 
 and he endeavours to show that the Lassiten, who make 
 their first appearance about the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century, were the descendants of peasants settled on lands 
 left vacant during the Thirty Years' War. All this is very 
 well worth reading, even by students of economic history out- 
 side of Germany, and it displays much acuteness and original 
 research. But it is to the earlier portion of the book that I 
 have thought it well to draw especial attention as of more 
 far-reaching importance. It is interesting to observe that 
 German scholars are now beginning to limit the range of the 
 ' original freeman,' who once so completely monopolised the 
 historical field. Even when they leave him his freedom, 
 they are inclined to deprive him of the greater part of that 
 social independence which freedom was once thought to 
 imply.
 
 Ill 
 
 PEOFESSOE INAMA-STEENEGG'S 
 GEEMAN ECONOMIC HISTOEY ' 
 
 IT is possible that some future historian of thought may 
 assign to Dr. Inama-Sternegg's 'Deutsche Wirtschaftsge- 
 schichte ' (appearing with its first volume in 1879, and now 
 with its second) a position in the nineteenth century some- 
 thing like that of Montchre'tien's 'Trait6 de rEconomie 
 Politique' in the seventeenth. The two books, widely as 
 they differ in most other respects, have this in common : their 
 titles alone, whatever may be the value of their contents, are 
 important landmarks in science. They both indicate that the 
 time had come for marking off a particular field of inquiry 
 from the larger area in which it had before been included, 
 and both set the example of staking out the lot. Dr. Inama- 
 Sternegg's book, wherein almost for the first time economic 
 history has made its appearance as an independent study, 
 is but a later stage in that process of specialisation which 
 earlier led to the rise of political economy. 
 
 It is interesting to watch a new study, a' fresh academic 
 discipline, coming into existence. It probably touches two 
 or three already established studies ; and its first cultivators 
 are commonly men who are already engaged in teaching one 
 of these established studies, and who seem to themselves to 
 be doing nothing but extending the area properly belonging 
 to their own subject. And thus men meet together in a 
 common interest who set out from very different starting- 
 points, and realise with difficulty their new brotherhood. 
 
 1 [Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, by Karl Theodor von Inama- 
 Sternegg. Zweiter Band : 10. bis 12. Jahrhundert. (1891.) Beviewed in 
 the Political Science Quarterly, December 1893.]
 
 112 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 This is what is clearly taking place as to economic 
 history. It is drawing students almost equally from the 
 fields of ' pure economics ' and ' pure history.' We are yet 
 in the midst of the process, and it would be unwise to pre- 
 dict the precise result : at present the old ' historical ' or 
 ' economic ' training, as the case may be, is still pretty easily 
 discernible in each individual investigator ; but there are 
 signs already of an identity of point of view, a community 
 of purpose, which may in no long time do much to obliterate 
 the marks of origin. To Dr. Inama-Sternegg not even Pro- 
 fessor Monger would deny the name of economist. Among 
 the most useful parts of his latest volume are those in which 
 he shows how, during the period of which he is treating, 
 phenomena gradually emerge corresponding to the modern 
 economic categories of rent and profit, capitalist and 
 entrepreneur. And indeed, his use of such criteria is so 
 apposite and illuminating as to confirm us in the belief that 
 for the future economic historian a preliminary study of 
 economic theory will always be of utility. It does at any 
 rate provide a standard by the use of which, if only by con- 
 trast, the essential characteristics of a period may be realised 
 the more vividly. 
 
 Yet such a training has its dangers, and Dr. Inama- 
 Sternegg has not, perhaps, wholly escaped them. Is it 
 unfair to attribute to the deductive bent which the study of 
 economic theory is apt to produce a certain fondness for what 
 is, apparently, purely a priori reasoning ? I say ' apparently ; ' 
 for as he has abstained of set purpose (p. x) from referring 
 to modern writers, it may be that in every point of his argu- 
 ment the author supposes himself to be resting on the solid 
 ground of ascertained fact. A reviewer who is but imperfectly 
 acquainted with the German literature of the subject can only 
 state an impression : certainly it does sometimes look as if 
 our author filled in the gaps in his construction by deductions 
 from current theories which are still far from complete proof. 
 This impression is confirmed by not a few of his quotations 
 from original authorities. He has not cared, he tells us, 
 to ' heap up citations,' but rather to produce ' characteristic
 
 THE WOBK OF INAMA-STERNEGG 113 
 
 passages word for word, and so to give us directly the con- 
 temporary expression of the facts.' But one cannot help 
 seeing, when we come to look at some of them closely, that 
 though they may mean what Dr. Inama-Sternegg quotes 
 them as meaning, they may often mean something different, 1 
 It is in his treatment of the agrarian organisation that 
 his prepossessions are most evident. For the constitutional 
 aspects of his subject he depends, he tells us, on Waitz; 
 hardly realising that every theory of primitive or mediasval 
 political constitutions already implies some sort of theory of 
 social conditions. Accordingly he assumes throughout ' the 
 old social organisation of the Germans, which rested upon 
 the association of free men, with equal rights and equal 
 social and economic value.' 2 Doubtless there was a time, in 
 the nomadic or tribal stage, when ' the common freemen ' 
 were the most important part of the population. But Dr. 
 Inama-Sternegg brings this condition of things well within 
 historic times, and adopts without hesitation that particular 
 view of it hallowed by the term Markgenossenschaft. 3 No 
 doubt when he began to write, about 1878, the mark theory 
 was still in absolute possession of historical circles ; and it 
 is still vigorously defended. But its acceptance by our 
 author has certainly rendered it harder for him to give a con- 
 sistent impression of agrarian progress ; at the very time 
 when, as he points out again and again, the characteristic 
 phenomenon was an elevation of the position of the serfs, 4 he 
 is still concerned to show the absorption of the ' common 
 freeman ' 5 and the seizure of the Allmend. 6 How strong 
 such prepossessions are, may be shown by the fact that he 
 confirms his statement as to the clearing of the new eastern 
 provinces largely by ' simple freemen,' 7 by citing the grant in 
 1002 of an ' estate (pracdium) with the wood adjoining 100 
 
 1 Thus p. 62, nn. 1 and 2, and p. 85, n. 1, have little apparent 
 connection with the text. 
 
 * Or ' weight.' His words are : ' der Genossenschoft gleichberech- 
 tigter und gesellschaftlich wie wirthschaftlich gleichwertiger freier 
 Manner.' See p. 85. * E.g. p. 222. 
 
 * E.g. p. 199. 5 E.g. p. 88. 'E.g. p. 207. 
 7 ' Die Rodung des kleinen freien Mannes ' (p. 7). 
 
 I'Hfc )<
 
 114 MEDIAEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 mansi ' to a miles ; and the further fact that he cites an ex- 
 change by a nobilis miles of an estate (praedium) in 
 Bavaria with two serf families on it for one in Carinthia with 
 eight serf families, as an example of the voluntary migration 
 of a simple freeman. 1 
 
 Now that we have fallen into a mood of adverse criticism, 
 let us have done with the ungracious task as speedily as 
 possible. The book is somewhat disconnected ; topics are 
 dealt with at disproportionate length ; and there is often an 
 undue air of certitude. Would that we already knew for 
 certain anything like as much as our author seems to suppose ! 
 But all these defects cannot prevent our recognising the 
 work as one of signal importance. It is the first attempt to 
 subject all sides of the economic activity of Germany to 
 scholarly investigation, and to show their inter-relation. In 
 this respect as taking possession of and defining a territory 
 to be subsequently worked over with more minute and pierc- 
 ing inquiry he may be compared with his English con- 
 temporary, Dr. Cunningham. But, to change the metaphor 
 slightly, if Dr. Cunningham, taking all English history for 
 his province, has been more extensive in his methods, Dr. 
 Inama-Sternegg, taking only the Middle Ages, has been more 
 intensive ; and on several corners of his smaller field he has 
 done a good deal of the steady plough-drudgery of original 
 investigation. 
 
 To the student of English economic history, the work 
 will, probably for many years, be an indispensable com- 
 panion. It will preserve him from the fault which has 
 detracted from much of the historical writing of the last fifty 
 years the provincialism which, knowing little of the inner 
 life of other countries and dazzled by the brightness of 
 Parliament, imagines an English development altogether 
 different in kind, as well as in degree and period, from that 
 to be seen elsewhere. It is time that the 'comparative 
 method ' should begin to be put to its true use. 2 
 
 1 Pp. 7, 8 and n. 2. 
 
 3 [A notice by the present writer of the first part of the third volume 
 (1899) of this work will be found in the Economic Journal for 
 Sept. 1899.]
 
 115 
 
 ONCE more we have a book such as those of the brave days 
 of old, lordly in bulk, magistral in contents ; none of the 
 booklets of this effeminate age, but three ponderous volumes 
 and, for additional ballast, a whole atlas of maps ; no mere 
 Beitrage or Studien, zur this or that, but a masterful grasp, a 
 confident handling, of the whole of a vast province of the 
 world's history. 
 
 Since the death of Georg Hanssen, Professor Meitzen 
 has been the acknowledged chief of agrarian historians and 
 agrarian economists in Germany, and, indeed, in Europe. 
 Serving as he did for many years as a commissioner to carry 
 out partitions of land between peasants and landlords, he 
 was able to form an intimate acquaintance with the minutiae 
 of rural life : intrusted by the government with the task of 
 drawing up a description of the agricultural condition of 
 Prussia, he has enjoyed unusual official facilities in the col- 
 lection of information. For more than a quarter of century 
 he has been travelling to and fro over Germany, gathering 
 village maps and field plans ; he has formed a score of pupils 
 who have contributed to his store ; and now the result, or, 
 rather, one half of the result, is before us. A subsequent 
 series of volumes is to give us ' the German colonisation of the 
 
 1 {Political Science Quarterly, March 1898 ; apropos of Wanderungen, 
 Anbau und Agrarrccht der Volker Europas nordlich der Alpen, by 
 August Meitzen; erste Abtheilung, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der 
 Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, Homer, Finnen und 
 Slaven. (1895.)] 
 
 IS
 
 116 MEDIEVAL AGEAKIAN 
 
 East/ as well as 'the system of large farming, and the 
 progress and outlook of modern agriculture' north of the 
 Alps. In these three he confines himself to the original 
 settlement, and to the agricultural organisation before it was 
 broken in upon by comparatively recent forces. 
 
 That the book provides a vast amount of information 
 need not be said. Had Professor Meitzen given us nothing 
 but the village maps, he would have done us a great service ; 
 and their value will be increasingly recognised, even if the 
 text to which they are attached should come to be disregarded. 
 He has thrown out at least one large idea the idea that 
 differences in village formation go along with racial differ- 
 ences which is sure to play a great part in subsequent 
 discussions. 1 Yet, somehow, one experiences a certain 
 sense of disappointment as one makes one's way into the 
 book. Professor Meitzen undertakes the most urgent of all 
 historical tasks : he undertakes to set forth the origin and 
 growth of the economic system of the Middle Ages of 
 what for brevity we may call ' feudalism ' and 'serfdom.' 
 We see the structure rise beneath his hands, ye^ we 
 cannot help thinking it looks somewhat unsubstantial. 
 There may be solid foundations beneath, there may be steel 
 girders supporting the flying arches ; but the ordinary spec- 
 tator cannot discern them. In ' Siedelung und Agrarwesen ' 
 we are given conclusions rather than argument : references 
 are rare, and sometimes altogether absent at critical points. 
 It would be pleasant to take it all on trust, were this not 
 dangerous. Perhaps the reviewer's best course will be first 
 to explain Dr. Meitzen's general plan, and then to select the 
 central portion of his undertaking and set forth just what it 
 is that we are there told. )TO j 8 
 
 Professor Meitzen begins by defining the area of ' national 2 
 
 1 The idea has already been utilised by Professor Maitland, in whose 
 Domesday Book and Beyond it appears in the contrast drawn between 
 nucleated milages and the land of -hamlets and scattered steads. 
 Compare Maitland's maps, p. 16, with those of Meitzen, Anlagem, 1, 2. 
 
 2 No English equivalent can give an adequate impression of the 
 flavour of Volksthum, volJcsthiiinlich, Volksland, &c.
 
 THE GERMAN SETTLEMENT 117 
 
 German settlement ' the untouched home of the German 
 people (Volksland), bearing the exclusive character of a 
 definite nationality (Volksthum), and never subjected to 
 foreign influence. 1 This he finds in the area bordered on 
 the west by the Weser and the highlands which extend La 
 a south-westerly direction to the junction between the Main 
 and the Ehine ; on the south (roughly) by the Main and the 
 Thuringian forest ; on the east by a line drawn between 
 Leipzig and Kiel ; and including on the north all the 
 Scandinavian countries except Finland. This area, according 
 to Professor Meitzen, is also distinguished from the lands on 
 either side of it by the characteristic grouping of its rural 
 habitations. In this Volksland they are grouped in large 
 villages, with houses placed together in a compact group, 
 but on no definite plan. Dorf, indeed, originally meant Hauf, 
 a heap ; and these purely German^ villages may, therefore, 
 properly be termed Haufenddrfer* Immediately to the west 
 of them the peasants do not really live in villages at all ; such 
 groups of houses as look like villages are not ancient settle- 
 ments of actual cultivators of the soil. They live, on the 
 contrary, in isolated farmsteads, Einzelhofe, each with his own 
 square or round fields surrounding it. To the east of the 
 unspoilt Germans, on the other hand, there are again villages ; 
 but they are marked off from the truly German ones by 
 their more formal shape their houses are symmetrically 
 arranged, either round a circular enclosure or on the two 
 sides of a short street. These are christened Bunddorfer 
 and Strassendorfer. It is assumed, as the obvious conclusion 
 to be drawn from geographical and historical facts, that the 
 Einzelhofe are to be regarded as characteristically Celtic, 
 the Rund- and Strassendorfer as characteristically Slavonic. 3 
 Having thus marked out the boundaries of the three 
 great territories to be investigated, Professor Meitzen gives, 
 
 1 1?88. I, 47. 
 
 * The possibility that such differences may be due to situation 
 and soil and not to race is hardly referred to. But the remark 
 (III, xxii) about the Alpine Einzelhofe is probably capable of a wider 
 application.
 
 118 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 of course, the first place to the Volksland, and proceeds to 
 describe its other 'national peculiarities.' They are what 
 Mr. Seebohm and other writers have already made us 
 familiar with in England the intermixed strips, the com- 
 pulsory rotation of crop and fallow (Flurzwang), the normal 
 holding (Hufe) and the like. What is fresh in Meitzen's 
 account is the stress he lays upon the division of the arable 
 fields into Gewanne (furlongs or shots). This he explains as 
 due to a desire to give each shareholder a piece of every sort 
 of land ; l and he regards it as so peculiarly characteristic of 
 the villages of the Volksland that he drops the term Haufen- 
 dorfer, and substitutes for it Gewanndorfer. 2 In the Ueber- 
 sichtskarte, prefixed to the atlas volume, the volksmassige 
 Getvanndorfer der Germanen occupy the centre of interest. 
 But it can hardly be said that the propriety of the term has 
 been altogether made apparent, for it seems that Eussian 
 village fields are also divided into furlongs. 3 
 
 How, then, have these typical German Gewanndorfer 
 arisen ? Professor Meitzen gives us the answer, with hardly 
 a tremor of hesitation, in a section occupying no more than 
 thirty pages. 4 That this is all the space he devotes to it, out 
 of some nineteen hundred pages, shows how sure he is of 
 his ground. If once he is granted this for his foundation, 
 it will be absurd to hesitate about anything else : here are to 
 be found all the fundamental data on which he subsequently 
 builds. This will be my excuse for dwelling at an otherwise 
 disproportionate length on one little section, leaving the 
 Swabians and the Franks, not to mention the Celts, the 
 Eomans, and the Slavs, to wait upon their unalloyed-German 
 betters. To avoid misrepresentation, I shall largely quote 
 Professor Meitzen's own words. 
 
 The Germans of the time of Tacitus, Professor Meitzen sets 
 out by telling us, were definitely settled on the soil. But this 
 had come to be the case only at a comparatively recent period. 
 
 1 I, 170. 2 I, 122. 
 
 3 H, 221, and Fig. 86 ; cf. II, 182, and III, Anlage 97. 
 
 4 I, 131-161.
 
 THE GEEMAN SETTLEMENT 119 
 
 In Caesar's time they still pursued ' a pastoral life without 
 permanent tillage : ' his description is altogether irreconcil- 
 able with anything like the later village. But the population 
 was already as large as the country could bear with the 
 methods then employed for obtaining food. Moreover, we 
 must not think of the land as unpossessed, or of agricultural 
 settlements as taking place in out-of-the-way wildernesses. 
 All the land that could be made use of was already employed 
 by the tribesmen, 1 and, in this sense, taken possession of. 
 
 No other conclusion is possible than that in the creation of fixed 
 settlements we are to discern a crisis in the national life of the 
 Germanic people a crisis which was inevitable in its origin, and 
 therefore made relatively rapid progress in the short space of a 
 century. 
 
 The nature of this ' crisis ' is illustrated by the example of 
 the nomad of central Asia at the present day, who turns to 
 agriculture only when he can no longer maintain himself as 
 a shepherd. Such resort to tillage on the part of the poorer 
 tribesman might, however, easily prove prejudicial to the 
 interests of the wealthy herd-owners, who would find their 
 pasturage encroached on and their herdsmen leaving them. 
 Accordingly, the magistratus acprincipes,a,s Caesar calls them, 
 would do what they could to limit in space and time these 
 agricultural experiments. But they were not long able to 
 keep the mass of the people content with an arrangement so 
 unsatisfactory; and a permanent settlement had to be 
 allowed. 
 
 We cannot but conclude that the pasturage must early have 
 appeared insufficient, and have needed to be supplemented by tillage, 
 and that, in spite of all the disinclination for the heavy work of the 
 plough on which Caesar and Tacitus lay stress, the mass of the poorer 
 freemen must have been ready to carry on this tillage in such a way 
 as to suit the wealthier men (who dominated them by means of their 
 possession of the herds, on which all were still dependent), until a 
 
 Stammesgenossen. Dr. Meitzen does not anywhere, so far as I 
 know, define Stamm. In I, 138, Gau is used as an equivalent or 
 alternative.
 
 MEDIAEVAL AGKAEIAN 
 
 time came when they [the mass of the poorer freemen] realised that 
 such a sporadic agriculture involved heavy labour on their part, 
 without giving them the advantages which a fixed settlement would 
 bring, in the way of personal independence and regular returns. 
 We may well believe that 'their betters' [die VorneJimen] en- 
 deavoured to persuade them, both on public and private occasions, 
 by all the considerations adduced by Caesar, 1 not to give up the 
 accustomed mode of life. In all the considerations there men- 
 tioned, there is, indeed, no word of the main motive influencing the 
 prmcipes the danger to their pastoral wealth and to their whole 
 position in life : over that they were silent, though it must have 
 been notorious. But this seems to show that Caesar's account is 
 correctly taken from the public speeches of wealthy Germans. 2 
 
 mi c. i J- L j. t J.-L. 11 3 i- n 
 
 The final adjustment ' in the small democratic German 
 tribal states ' took place in ' the sovereign popular assemblies ' 
 described by Tacitus. As the will of the majority of men 
 under arms must finally have its own way, 
 
 the principes had at last to cease their opposition, and to bend all 
 their energies to guide the revolution and to make it as subservient 
 as possible to their wishes. Under the circumstances, these wishes 
 of theirs centred in this : that the pasturages for their herds should 
 be as little as possible encroached upon that, in other words, a 
 method of settlement should be carried out which should satisfy the 
 main body of the common freemen upon a relatively small area of 
 land, and leave sufficiently large stretches of land open, to be used, 
 as before, for the raising of cattle. We cannot fail to recognise that 
 the method of settlement displayed to us in the villages [on the one 
 side] and the marks [on the other] satisfied the claims of both par- 
 ties in the easiest possible way. The majority of the heads of 
 families wished to settle down ; and were assigned, group by group, 
 the localities in the tribal territory (Stammgebiet) which were most 
 fertile and had already been sporadically tilled. These allotments 
 were so large that each group received as much land as seemed 
 
 sufficient for the competent subsistence of its families, and not too 
 
 . . __ 
 
 1 Ejus rti multas afferunt causas . '"! f . "" 
 
 2 Prom which it will be seen that these Germans were already 
 pretty self-conscious in their proceedings, and not unacquainted with the 
 modern arts of politics. But there is more to come in the way of 
 conscious planning.
 
 121 
 
 much for the labour power of the several peasant families. The 
 remaining land was retained by those who did not settle down to 
 agriculture, to the exclusion in whole or in part of those who did so 
 settle. We have already, in substance, the distinction between 
 villages and marks. 1 
 
 A more distinct impression of these processes of settle- 
 ment may be obtained, Professor Meitzen goes on to argue, 
 from what we find in the ' hundreds.' That the division into 
 hundreds of the people and the land was an early German 
 institution cannot be doubted, nor that it had somehow to 
 do with ' 120 freemen capable of bearing arms roughly the 
 
 1 Particular attention must be paid to Dr. Meitzen's use of this word 
 mark. As will have been gathered from the above, he uses it, not as a 
 synonym for a village or for village lands, but in contrast to them. In 
 certain parts of Germany, notably around Hanover and Bremen, there 
 are stretches of woodland controlled by corporations known as MarJc- 
 genossenschaften, which are composed of persons, not living together on 
 the land itself, but settled here and there, usually in neighbouring but 
 sometimes in quite distant places. As a rule, their rights in the mark 
 are bound up with their arable holdings. They hold an assembly (to 
 determine upon common action in the use of the woodland) known 
 as a Markerding or Markgericht, but more commonly Holtding, presided 
 over by an Obermarker or Holzgraf. There seems to be scarcely any 
 documentary evidence concerning these marks earlier than the sixteenth 
 century ; and the only conclusion to be derived from their boundaries is 
 that they are not identical with those of the Gauen (I, 129 ; III, 77-80). 
 Professor Meitzen believes, however, and speaks throughout as if there 
 could hardly be any doubt, that these marks are ' remains of the old 
 national land,' and the rights to them ' a survival from the national 
 right of every member of the nation to make use of the pasture for his 
 herd,' &c. He chooses also to employ the term mark exclusively in this 
 ' stricter and more proper ' sense. This usage will not, perhaps, 
 altogether conduce to mutual understanding; but the word is in- 
 telligible enough in this sense when explained ; and there can be no 
 objection to it it we distinguish what is still unproven theory from 
 the known facts of the case. Yet that it involves certain difficulties 
 even for Professor Meitzen may be illustrated from I, 573, where he 
 almost complains of the Rhenish documents because ' die begrciflichen 
 Auffassutigen von Almcndc und Mark' do not show themselves ' mit 
 Idnreicliender Scharfe ' that is, the documents do not harmonise with 
 his ' Begri/e. J [On the modern use of the term mark, see infra, p. 161.]
 
 122 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 same thing as 120 fathers of (families.' Unfortunately, there 
 are certain historical difficulties about the hundreds of what 
 is now Germany ; and to determine their original extent as 
 geographical areas, we must have recourse to the ' Her ads or 
 Harden of Schleswig, Jutland and the Danish Isles.' ' The 
 Harden have been the foundation of the judicial and 
 administrative system from time immemorial [von jeher], 
 as the Danish laws of the thirteenth century show.' Now 
 the average size of the Danish Herad turns out to be 5'3 
 square miles, confuting the opinion of some that the hundred 
 was the territory of 120 villages, and leaving open to us only 
 the other opinion that it was the territory of 120 families. 
 But for what purpose can the people have been divided into 
 groups of 120 families ? Not for war for reasons we must 
 pass over. The reason for this particular number and for 
 the size of its territory is best sought for in an economic 
 motive, and it is to be found in the conditions of pastoral life. 
 One hundred and twenty pastoral families, consisting on an 
 average of eight members each, would need for their support 
 an amount of stock which (reducing horses, goats, sheep, and 
 swine to the common denominator, cows) may be reckoned 
 at thirty-six hundred cows. Thirty-six hundred cows would 
 need sixteen million kilograms of hay. To produce this 
 quantity of hay, a territory would be required to roam over 
 of about three square miles. Comparing this with the figure 
 5*3 previously obtained from Denmark, and 2'48, which is 
 the average extent of the Swedish Herad in cultivable land, 
 we arrive at the probable conclusion that about a hundred 
 and twenty families are to be regarded as ' the convenient 
 and customary number to carry on the necessary common 
 operations of a pastoral life.' The hundred was originally 
 the band of herdsmen, 1 and the term was naturally trans- 
 ferred to the territory over which its flocks and herds 
 wandered. 
 
 Turn now to Germany proper. Ceasar tells us that the 
 Suevi numbered 200,000 men capable of bearing arms. This 
 
 1 Die Hundertschaft der alte Hirtenhauf.
 
 THE GEEMAN SETTLEMENT 123 
 
 means about 125,000 families, 1 that is, 1,000 hundreds. By 
 a striking coincidence, we find that the territory occupied at 
 that time by the Suevi would actually allow each hundred on 
 the average 2'4 square miles. This was still just enough ; 
 but it was a tight fit, even under pastoral conditions. 
 
 A doubling of the population, such as might come about in forty 
 years of peace, could not be supported without a resort to tillage. 
 Thus, then, we get to the appearance of villages, and the distinction 
 between them and the marks, through the natural development of 
 the original pastoral conditions. The custom of living in camp- 
 companies [Lagergenossenschaften] of about one hundred and 
 twenty families was for the time quite satisfactory. But when the 
 numbers grew, and adjoining districts were taken up by other 
 companies, there was nothing left for the mass of the people but to 
 turn to tillage and settled life, distasteful as these were to them. 
 Yet in the territory already occupied there remained for a long time 
 a surplus of land not required for agriculture, which was open as 
 before to the rich herd-proprietors to continue their pasturing 
 thereon. 
 
 In order that ' the settlers ' should be free from trouble 
 from the ' numerous herds of the pastoral-economies ' 
 continuing outside, a certain definite area had to be marked 
 out for them. This was the Dorfmark, the Gemarkung, the 
 Flur ; while outside lay the proper or common mark, the old 
 Volksland. 2 
 
 Some of the Dorfmark, it is true, remained uncultivated ; this 
 was, however, no longer a portion of the common mark, but the 
 exclusive property in common of the settlers in the village. It is 
 best designated Almende, to distinguish it from the tilled land 
 actually divided up, on the one hand, and from the Marks proper 
 on the other. 
 
 1 Beckoning half the population masculine, half of these children, 
 and one-fifth of the rest aged, 200,000 adult men means a popula- 
 tion of 1,000,000. Beckoning the household at eight persons, the 
 number of families comes out at 125,000. 
 
 2 This, it will be observed, is a different use of the word from thai in 
 the opening sections. It is akin to the meaning that until recently was 
 attributed to the English folcland.
 
 124 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 It was equally necessary that the enjoyment of the 
 marks should be free from dispute, and therefore defined. 
 
 At first, considerable detachments of the tribe (Stamm), especially 
 the richer and more important members of it, will have continued 
 to wander in the old fashion up and down the wide pasture grounds 
 still left to them. But, as, sooner or later, all settled down, 
 
 something had to be determined about the land still outside 
 the cultivated areas. This must have been the work of ' the 
 sovereign power, the tribal assembly.' We must think of 
 this power as ' authorising the settlements ; ' and we cannot 
 suppose the process was carried out ' without many proposals, 
 contests, deliberations, agreements, and contracts.' The final 
 
 outcome must have been the result of ' contractual and 
 
 > 
 legislative arrangements. 
 
 Assuming the amount of knowledge and organising ability 
 implied in the foregoing, we have no difficulty in explaining 
 the Hufen. These were the equal shares given, immediately 
 after the land had been taken up, to the several heads of 
 families, themselves equal. ' We have also to suppose that 
 there were a certain number of rich men, who provided others 
 with cattle and implements, and set them, whether free or 
 slaves, to work in the Flur.' It would be a natural corollary 
 from the Hufen plan to give such men two or more shares of 
 land, in proportion to the labour-force contributed, without 
 regard to the status of the labourers, considering that they 
 would have to bear in like proportion the public burdens 
 which were assessed on the Hufen. And finally we have 
 (for various reasons) to think of these village settlements as 
 settlements of kindred (Familien- oder Sippenansiedelungeri). 
 Within the kindred there must have been other inequalities, 
 due to the privileges of the head of kin and the shifting 
 claims of inheritance. 
 
 Here, then, drawn in strong and clear lines, is the 
 constitution of the earliest settled agricultural society in 
 Germany, as set forth by Professor Meitzen. The above 
 statement of his conclusions contains also all the arguments 
 with which he supports them; and it will be sufficient of
 
 125 
 
 itself to suggest grave scruples in the way of their acceptance. 
 Without, however, raising any of the more fundamental 
 questions which the problem involves, let us follow Professor 
 Meitzen's own train of thought and call attention to one or 
 two of the difficulties that occur. 
 
 Professor Meitzen refers to the phenomena of nomad life 
 in the present day in central Asia as explaining the forces at 
 work in the German transition to agriculture. A convenient 
 collection of citations from von Middendorf and other recent 
 travellers will be found in Professor Hildebrand's ' Eecht und 
 Sitte ' 1 (1896) a book, be it said in passing, which contains 
 a singularly fresh and independent treatment of the anthro- 
 pological evidence and of its bearing on the problem of Ger- 
 manic origins. 2 But when one comes to look into the actual 
 course of affairs among the pastoral peoples of central Asia, one 
 finds that it differs in every single respect from that imagined 
 among the Germans, except in the one circumstance that want 
 of food leads in some way or other to a resort to agriculture. 
 Among the Kirghises and similar peoples, (1) it is occa- 
 sional individuals, or families here and there, who, falling 
 into poverty from the loss of their herds through pestilence or 
 other causes, (2) are obliged to consent to receive plough-oxen, 
 seed, &c., from the hands of their wealthy neighbours, and 
 stay behind (or return from time to time) to cultivate patches 
 of land, (3) falling thereby into a certain dependence 3 upon 
 the owner of the stock, to whom they pay a fixed proportion 
 of the annual crop, retaining for themselves hardly more than 
 enough to live upon. This is, however, altogether different 
 from the settlement (with the consent and after the delibera- 
 tion of a sovereign legislature) of whole village groups, 
 
 1 See p. 47. 2 [Hereon see infra, p. 157.] 
 
 * It is true, as has been said, that ' dependent ' and ' independent ' 
 ate ' inexact and ambiguous.' But it may well be that the situation is 
 incapable of exact and unambiguous statement in modern English. 
 Thus, in the present case, one observer distinguishes only between 
 ' Ics tnaitres du bttoAl et Ics laboureurs,' while another does not hesitate 
 to speak of ' Sklavcn.' We may be pretty sure, however, that either 
 ' labourer ' or ' slave ' would give a mistaken impression. Dependent ' 
 would seem a more entirely non-committal word.
 
 126 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 consisting of men who, though poorer than others of the 
 tribe, are yet, for the most part, able to set up their little 
 establishments independently of those who do not choose 
 just yet to settle down. Notice, also, that while the 
 Kirghises are able to go on in the way described for an 
 indefinite time the great majority of the tribe, including 
 certainly the wealthy owners of large flocks, showing no 
 disposition to abandon their pastoral life Dr. Meitzen 
 imagines all the Germans to have been led, ' sooner or later,' 
 by the pressure of population on the means of subsistence, 
 to settle down to agriculture, apparently in the same sort of 
 villages as were established by the ' poorer freemen ' who 
 first set the example. 
 
 There is another criticism to offer. Dr. Meitzen's German 
 population is made up of ' the rich ' (die Vornehmen) and 
 ' the poorer freemen ' the latter being, however, economically 
 independent. One would hardly guess from his account 
 that there existed any other class. 1 But, if we are to get any 
 suggestions at all from central Asia, it is surely worth while 
 remembering that Tacitus describes a class of persons among 
 the Germans whom he calls servi, but goes on to compare to 
 the Koman coloni not, he tells us, attached to their lord's 
 household, but each having his own homestead and paying 
 dues in kind/ The resemblance between these Tacitean 
 servi and the Kirghis tillers of the soil would seem too 
 obvious to be passed over in silence. 2 
 
 Let us now pass to the second period in the great 
 historical process, the period of transition from the villages 
 and marks thus described to the landlordship (die Grundherr- 
 lichkeit) of later times. The matter, so far as 'the old, 
 
 ' The case is imagined of ' Vornehmen,' who ' Freie oder Knechte 
 zur Arbeit in der Flur stellenS But this is clearly regarded as 
 exceptional. 
 
 2 When we compare 'frumenti modum . . . dominus injungit ut 
 cokmo,' with v. Middendorf's ' Anteilswirthschaft ist im Lande 
 durchgdngig im Gebraztch, so dass der Arbeiter einen bestimmten 
 Anteil an der Ernie bezieht, im Uebrigen aber nicht eigentlich hdriger 
 Knecht ist,' anthropology begins to seem of some use.
 
 THE GEEMAN SETTLEMENT 127 
 
 never-Eomanised national lands ' * are concerned, is disposed 
 of with the same astonishing brevity. A section of some 
 twenty-eight pages 2 all that is assigned to it is occupied 
 with the same large assertions and general considerations as 
 make up the thirty already looked at. But, as it is entitled 
 ' the entrance ' of landlordship, and is preceded by a section 
 entitled 'the origin of landlordship on Eomance soil/ we 
 must look first at the latter. 
 
 Leaping over the territory between the Weser and the 
 Lower Ehine, occupied since a very early period by Celtic 
 Einzelhofe, we find, according to Dr. Meitzen, villages of the 
 German type scattered all over the Celto-Eoman territory over- 
 run by the German arms in southern Germany, on the 
 middle Ehine, and in a great part of northern France and of 
 England. 3 These represent settlements of the national sort 
 (volksmassigen Dorfergriindungen), wherein the majority of 
 the free tribesmen (diefreien Stammesgenosseri) were able to 
 satisfy the economic impulse which had driven them forward. 
 But by their side were to be found, from the first, something 
 very different, to wit, estates belonging to landlords and 
 cultivated by various classes of dependents ; and in some 
 districts, such as northern Gaul, these estates from the 
 beginning greatly preponderated over the free villages. Here 
 the Germans entered as ' a ruling, land-possessing, military 
 aristocracy,' receiving, as the reward of conquest or from the 
 subsequent favour of the kings, what had previously been the 
 property of the Eoman state or of the provincial magnates. 
 Professor Meitzen goes over the familiar ground of the 
 development of the benefice and the feud. Into this we need 
 not follow him : as to the upper stages of the feudal structure 
 there is comparatively little uncertainty. It is with the lower 
 stages that we are now concerned ; and, as to these, we 
 gather from Professor Meitzen (1) that such estates were 
 already in large part cultivated by coloni, who were left 
 undisturbed ; (2) that where coloni were not already to be 
 
 1 The phrase of the first volume ' Volksland' is replaced in the 
 second by ' Volkslande ' and ' Volkslander.' 2 II, 294-322. 
 
 8 This conclusion is depicted on Anlage 66 a.
 
 128 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 found, or not in sufficient numbers, the new owners would 
 be anxious to bring on to their lands ' free or unfree folk 
 who should take holdings in return for services, money 
 payments or rents in kind ' (from what classes we may 
 suppose them drawn we are not told) ; (3) that such newly 
 planted colonies ' might, indeed, conform in external appear- 
 ance to the national popular (volJcsthumlich) village arrange- 
 ment, e.g., in the partition into Hufen, but would really 
 be fundamentally different from them.' In such plantations 
 there could be no claim to equal treatment in the allotment 
 of land; accordingly, there would be no reason for the 
 Gewanne ; indeed, each peasant's land could be given him 
 in a few biggish blocks, of oblong or round shape. We are 
 also shown, following Brunner, the various ways in which 
 the seigneurial jurisdiction can be supposed to have grown up. 
 But, meanwhile, there also existed, as already observed, 
 in other parts of the conquered provinces ' the possessions of 
 the great body of the common German freemen,' 1 which at 
 first and during the early centuries cannot, says Professor 
 Meitzen, have been appreciably affected by the contemporary 
 landlord estates. In the long run, however, even the old 
 original free settlements fell in large measure under the 
 power of lords. As to the how and the why Professor 
 Meitzen has little to tell us. Indeed, he seems to pass over 
 the problem very lightly, and is inclined to forget the sharp 
 distinctions which he drew at the outset. So far as we can 
 disentangle his meaning, it is that the fall of the common 
 freeman was due to royal grants of jurisdiction and military 
 command from above, and to commendation and surrenders 
 of various kinds on the part of the peasants from below. 
 But there is absolutely not a single reference given in the few 
 pages devoted to the subject. Professor Meitzen evidently 
 regards himself as building on the sure foundation of German 
 historical science. The familiar explanation, inadequate 
 
 1 ' Der Besitz der angesiedelten gem&infreicn deutschen Volksmassc,' 
 II, 280. Cf. the observation as to ' die aWierkommliche Volksgemeinde,' 
 II, 275.
 
 THE GEEMAN SETTLEMENT 129 
 
 before, does not sound any the more adequate as he 
 states it. 
 
 Pass now from these Eomance lands to the untouched- 
 German soil, and we shall find that, in Professor Meitzen's 
 view, the same process was repeated there, with apparently 
 these two differences : first, that it took place some centuries 
 later (not beginning in the Saxon land till the campaign of 
 Charles the Great in A.D. 782) ; and, secondly, that the form of 
 landlordism that now entered into competition with the alien 
 Volksthum was the Frankish seigneury, the hybrid growth 
 (die neue Mischform) from the diverse forces at work in the 
 earlier period on Eomance soil. From the forest lands (the 
 marks), taken more or less into the possession of the con- 
 queror, lordships were carved, and the like was done with 
 confiscated lands. For these estates their new owners would 
 seek to get tenants ; as before, we are not told where they 
 were to come from. Even with those freemen who remained 
 undisturbed in their holdings, the situation must have been 
 fundamentally changed by a concurrence of forces : from 
 below, by the need of commendation or surrender to a lord 
 to secure protection or relief from public burdens, by the 
 introduction of the Eoman theory of property, and by sur- 
 render to the church ; from above, by grants of a jurisdiction 
 which ultimately turned itself into landlordship. As before, 
 all this is apparently offered to us as the unquestioned result 
 of historical inquiry. If it is in any way rendered a more 
 sufficient explanation of subsequent facts by the mass of 
 modern agrarian data accumulated by Professor Meitzen, 
 the fact is not apparent in these sections ; and, to judge 
 from the careful table of contents, there is no other appro- 
 priate place for it. 
 
 It may be observed, however, that Professor Meitzen 
 departs occasionally from his own position that ' the condi- 
 tion of public law must be supposed in all essentials the 
 same at the time of the Frankish invasion as at the time of 
 Tacitus ' that is, as described by him. Thus, apropos of 
 Nithard's division of the Saxon people into edhilingi, frilingi, 
 and lazzi, he remarks that 'in these lazzi we are to see 
 
 K
 
 130 MEDIAEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 conquered folk who had been allowed to remain in their old 
 possessions, paying dues, and with a diminished freedom.' l 
 In his account of Tacitean times, as we have seen, no such 
 class is contemplated. Later he speaks of the surrender by 
 individuals of separate Hufen to magnates, ' shaking both 
 the popular common and the free lassitic peasant commu- 
 nities in their communal independence.' 2 And we are told 
 of ' crown lands ' and of ' estates (Outer) of the nobles,' such 
 as we should hardly expect in a Volksland so volksthiimlich, 
 as we have had it described to us. 
 
 As the present writer has worked his way through the 
 two or three sections selected for special examination, he 
 must confess that his disappointment has deepened. What 
 Professor Meitzen has done has been to show the possibility 
 of new and interesting means of approach to the solution of 
 a great problem, the genesis of mediaeval serfdom. 3 That 
 means of approach is the study of agricultural practice and 
 rural conditions as they are to be found to-day, and in 
 epochs for which we have abundant evidence. And he 
 has contributed towards the data of this study a great 
 mass of material. Yet it cannot but prove a hindrance 
 to the proper use of his work, and it will probably delay 
 not a few in their unbiased approach to the field, that he 
 has at the same time spoken in the tone of one who can 
 already determine the fundamental questions involved. The 
 main lines of his theory, so far as central Europe is con- 
 cerned, are after all nothing but those already laid down by 
 the school of German constitutional and legal historians 
 which reached its highest points in Waitz and Brunner. 
 With his agrarian-economic material it has the loosest 
 possible connection. And as the general conclusions of the 
 German medievalists are hardly any longer (outside 
 Germany) received with the same confidence as of yore, as 
 the beautiful picture of the German freeman is now begin - 
 
 1 I, 297. 
 
 - I, 304. The German sentence really cannot be translated. 
 
 3 In the modern literary sense of the term.
 
 THE GEEMAN SETTLEMENT 131 
 
 ning somewhat to fade, we shall perhaps best show our 
 gratitude to Professor Meitzen by assiduously combining 
 and recombining the definite facts he lavishes upon us, while 
 carefully putting on one side, for the time, the broad 
 generalisations by which they are accompanied. 1 
 
 1 [An imposing part of Professor Meitzen's structure, which has not 
 been mentioned in the above article his distinction between the Celtic 
 and German type of dwelling has recently been subjected to a 
 destructive criticism by M. Jacques Flach in L'Origine historiyue de 
 ^habitation et des lieux habiMs en France (1899). For Professor 
 Knapp's judgment upon the book, see infra, p. 135.] 
 
 K2
 
 132 MEDIAEVAL AGEAKIAN 
 
 PEOFESSOB KNAPP'S LECTURES i 
 
 UNTIL within the last few years, agrarian history in Germany, 
 when seriously dealt with at all, had been almost exclusively 
 handled by constitutional or legal historians : outside Ger- 
 many, of course, the subject received scarcely any atten- 
 tion. What these historians made of it, and especially their 
 construction of the whole development from the time of 
 the Volkerwanderung down to the twelfth century, is well 
 enough known. It serves as the basis, it provides the 
 underlying assumptions, for the text-books of early constitu- 
 tional history still current in Germany and England. The 
 more elaborate and artistic form given to the specifically 
 agrarian part of it by von Maurer the doctrine of the 
 Markgenossenschaft, of the ' village community ' which 
 sank into the manor has, it is true, been pretty generally 
 surrendered of late by English writers ; but in Germany it 
 held its ground until very recently ; and in both countries 
 the more general assumptions, which find perhaps their 
 most classic expression in the work of Waitz, have continued 
 to be almost universally accepted as too obvious for discus- 
 sion. In this teaching there was much to excite criticism ; 
 to the present writer, at any rate, it seems very evident that, 
 in its main features, it was but a carrying back into the past 
 of certain ideals of the first half of the nineteenth century. 
 
 1 [Grundherrschaft und Bittergut. Vortrage, mit biographischen 
 Beilagen, von Georg Friedrich Knapp. (1897.) Reviewed in the Economic 
 Journal, June 1899.]
 
 PEOFESSOE KNAPP'S LECTUEES 133 
 
 We can hardly fail to observe that for much of it there was 
 very little direct evidence ; the references which crowded the 
 footnotes were commonly to scraps of documents which 
 might be, indeed, fitted into the general scheme, but by no 
 means compelled such an interpretation. This characteristic 
 may fairly be traced to the purely legal training of the 
 scholars in question : they were satisfied if they could put 
 together a logically consistent series of formulae ; they felt 
 no craving to visualise, to make a mental picture of, the 
 social institutions they described. 
 
 For a more realistic and concrete treatment of agrarian 
 history, Germany had to wait until the economists should 
 take it in hand. They began to be drawn to it some twenty 
 years ago, not merely by their ' historical ' leanings, but by 
 the political necessities of the hour. ' Industrial ' difficulties 
 are not the only ' social questions ' in Germany, though 
 foreigners sometimes speak as if they were : the lot of the 
 agricultural labourer presents an equally pressing problem, 
 in some respects a graver one ; for if the socialist propaganda 
 should ever carry away the rural population, as it has the 
 industrial, the government would have to yield to social 
 democracy. Accordingly it became the business of German 
 economists to ascertain how the rural proletariate had 
 arisen, and to see whether the causes which had created it 
 were capable of modification or removal. 
 
 Conspicuous among these investigations was early to be 
 seen the treatise of Professor Knapp of Strassburg on the 
 ' Emancipation of the Peasants in Prussia ; ' and to Professor 
 Knapp must be ascribed the still greater achievement of 
 producing from his seminary a whole school of agrarian 
 historians, who during the last twenty years have taken one 
 after another of the provinces of Germany until there is now 
 hardly a district which has escaped their scrutiny. All this 
 work, be it observed, had an immediately practical purpose ; 
 it dealt mainly with very recent history indeed ; it was 
 usually content to begin in the eighteenth century ; and the 
 preliminary half-dozen pages were commonly based upon 
 the generally accepted authorities. Within its range it was
 
 134 MEDIEVAL AGKARIAN 
 
 exceedingly valuable : one might stake the case for ' the 
 historical method ' as a source of practical guidance to 
 the statesman upon the lucid survey of the position of 
 the agricultural labouring class in the several parts of the 
 country which formed Professor Knapp's address to the 
 Verein fur Sozialpolitik in 1893, and fitly opens the 
 present volume. Would that there existed anything equally 
 good for England ! But German thoroughness could not 
 stop at immediate practical needs ; Professor Knapp and his 
 school were bound to reopen for themselves the question of 
 ' origins ; ' and the interesting thing about this volume is 
 that it shows an inclination to throw all the older doctrines 
 overboard. For years M. Fustel de Coulanges seemed to 
 have written in vain, so far as German scholars were con- 
 cerned ; now the independent movement, as it would appear, 
 of German investigation is beginning to lead it to conclusions 
 identical with his on the negative side, even though it hardly 
 sees its way as yet to any very positive construction. 
 
 The new departure will be found in an address in this 
 volume, summing up with approval the arguments of 
 Wittich in his ' Grundherrschaft in Nordwestdeutschland ' 
 (1896), as well as in a review of Meitzen's ' Siedelung und 
 Agrarwesen.' Wittich and Knapp decisively reject the 
 notion, quite inconsistent with Tacitus, that the primitive 
 Germans were free self-governing peasants, tilling their own 
 soil. To them it seems more likely that ' the Germans of 
 Tacitus were small landlords, a kind of social aristocracy, 
 who met together in court and assembly, but never put their 
 hand to the servile plough. They had dependents settled on 
 their land (angesiedelte Knechte) ; and these were peasants 
 who had to provide from the soil their lords' food. Land- 
 lordship, far from being a gradual evolution in historical 
 times, was the oldest of known institutions ; and it was out 
 of it that later institutions arose.' For the Carolingian 
 period, they are equally unable to accept the common view 
 that serfdom grew out of the voluntary submission of the 
 weaker freemen to the greater, to escape the burdens of 
 military service, though there were doubtless many such
 
 PEOFESSOE KNAPP'S LECTUEES 135 
 
 cases. 'But this was not the general process in Lower 
 Saxony, because the dependent peasant was already the 
 rule. When peasant holdings are given to a monastery, the 
 donor is not the cultivating peasant, but his small landlord, 
 who gives the land and the peasant on it. What happened 
 in the Carolingian time was not the birth of landlordship, 
 but a new allotment of the permanently dependent (horig) 
 peasants, leading to the formation of a relatively small 
 number of great lordships instead of a large number of little 
 ones.' The further sketch of the subsequent progress of 
 ' villication ' must be regretfully passed over. 
 
 The second article is even more outspoken. Professor 
 Meitzen is a very solid representative of a class for which 
 we can find no English parallel that of professional agrarian 
 experts, produced alike by the agricultural colleges and by 
 the administrative labours of German officials in the regula- 
 tion of peasant holdings : men learned in soils and manures, 
 and at the same time thoroughly familiar with the details 
 of local tenure, and with all the curiosities of peasant 
 usage. The late George Hanssen was a man of essentially 
 the same type practical, and, within the range of his 
 interests, a true historical scholar furnishing indeed a 
 wealth of material to younger men with wider interests ; 
 but yet capable of writing a long dissertation upon the 
 origin of the three-field system with hardly a reference to 
 the status of the people who worked it. As Professor Knapp 
 remarks in a sympathetic character sketch of his old master, 
 to be found in this collection, ' Hanssen sprang from a period 
 in which there were as yet no social politics in Germany.' 
 
 Professor Meitzen's strength, in like manner, lies in his 
 knowledge of existing conditions. In his recent enormous 
 work, he has poured forth a flood of information, and 
 he has been the first of German scholars to follow Mr. 
 Seebohm's example and utilise modern field maps. But he 
 is not content merely to set forth the life of the modern 
 German Junker, Bauer, and Landarbeiter, or even of their 
 mediaeval predecessors ; he must have his version of the 
 beginnings ; and here, with all his apparent originality of
 
 136 MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 argument, he is but repeating what he had learnt from 
 Waitz and Sohm and the rest. His reputation is so great 
 that it required some little courage for Professor Knapp to 
 urge, however politely, that his whole doctrine of origins is 
 mere hypothesis, and that another explanation might suit the 
 facts equally well. But this is what he does here. The 
 notion of Meitzen and others that the laying out of Gewanne 
 and Hufen (furlongs and virgates) was intended to produce 
 equality of holdings among free peasants, he properly 
 declares far too ' rationalistic ' for such times. He calls in 
 question the supposed freedom and equality of the peasants ; 
 at any rate, as he shows, it is not a necessary presupposition 
 of the open-field system. And the notion that the village 
 with open fields is something specifically German while the 
 isolated homestead is specifically Celtic is, he points out, 
 much less obviously probable than that each corresponds to 
 the geographical conditions under which it was the most 
 advantageous method of settlement. 
 
 As I hinted above, Professor Knapp and his school are 
 still in the stage of criticism. But we may assuredly expect 
 that they will go on to more positive work upon the earlier 
 centuries. They are at any rate free from any inclination 
 towards ' Romanist ' exaggeration ; they are not likely to 
 see the Roman villa in Germany unless they are compelled 
 to ! Only a few years ago English writers who ventured to 
 cast doubt on the ' free Teuton ' view of things were ' anti- 
 Teutonic iconoclasts ' even in England : with Professor 
 Hildebrand l and Professor Knapp to keep us company, we 
 may now feel tolerably comfortable. 
 
 [See infra, p. 157.]
 
 137 
 
 M. FLACH'S 'BEGINNINGS OF ANCIENT 
 FKANCE ' l 
 
 THE second volume of M. Flach's ' Origines de 1'Ancienne 
 France,' valuable as it is for the whole life of the Middle 
 Ages, calls for attention in this place, where historical in- 
 vestigations are viewed mainly in their relations to the 
 larger features of social evolution, chiefly on account of the 
 early chapters, which may not improperly be described as 
 one long polemic against the late M. Fustel de Coulanges. 
 To M. Flach's treatment of other themes, such as the rise 
 of the mediaeval town, I hope to return on some other 
 occasion. 2 
 
 M. Fustel's view is stated by M. Flach 3 with sufficient 
 accuracy as follows : 
 
 The organisation of the country districts of Gaul, before and 
 after the Germanic invasions, was based entirely on the Roman 
 organisation. The Eomans either did not know, or were but 
 slightly acquainted with, the village ; they knew only the villa, the 
 large farmstead with its dependencies, the centre of a considerable 
 estate. The villa system introduced by them into Gaul there 
 developed and prospered. The Barbarians found it there, and 
 adopted it so completely that all the rural population, with but 
 few exceptions, was [soon] to be found distributed among these 
 villas. 
 
 1 \Les Origines de VAncienne France : X e et XI e Siecles. II. Les 
 Origines Communales. La Feodalit& et la Chcvaleric. By Jacques 
 Flach. (1893.) Reviewed in the Political Science Quarterly, September 
 1895.] 2 [See infra, pp. 177 et seq.] * P. 28.
 
 138 MEDIAEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 This, as we have just said, is a fair enough statement of 
 M. Fustel's theory : though it should be carefully borne in 
 mind that that great scholar took frequent occasion to make 
 it clear that all that he was arguing for was the predominance 
 of the villa system, and not its complete occupation of the 
 field ; 1 and also that by ' village ' he meant not simply a 
 cluster of houses, but something like the ' village ' of modern 
 France ' a group of some fifty or a hundred families not 
 only free but proprietors of the soil.' 2 And upon such a 
 theory M. Flach does well to concentrate his attention ; for 
 if accepted it would have the profoundest influence upon 
 our conception of the subsequent social and economic history 
 of France and, indeed, of western Europe. M. Flach's 
 utterances have been received with a chorus of welcome by 
 those to whom M. Fustel's opinions, or his methods of 
 expressing them, were distasteful. And yet in my judg- 
 ment M. Flach's book leaves the subject very much where 
 it was before. That this is so will appear from a review of 
 his argument. 
 
 1. As to Celtic Gaul. 3 Caesar tells us there were very 
 many vici. True. But, as M. Flach goes on to say, it is 
 extremely probable from other reports of Caesar that ' the 
 population of these villages was composed of the clients and 
 tenants of the chiefs, knights, and druids.' The full force of 
 such an admission can only be grasped if we keep well in 
 mind the significant words : ' Plebs paene servorum habetur 
 loco.' 4 And to any one who has a keen sense of social 
 evolution, the problem frames itself in some such question as 
 this : What would be likely to be the effect of Roman rule 
 when it came upon dependent groups such as M. Flach indi- 
 cates ? This is a question he makes no attempt to answer. 
 Instead of doing so, he goes on to remark that according to 
 Caesar there were aedificia, and they were scattered over the 
 country. M. Fustel had argued 5 that the meaning of 
 aedificia might be explained by the practice of Varro and 
 
 1 L' 'Alien, pp. 35 (top), 37 (top). 2 Ibid. p. 38. 
 
 3 P. 31. ' De Bello Oallico, VI, 13. 
 
 5 Origin of Property in Land, p. 146.
 
 'BEGINNINGS OF ANCIENT FRANCE' 139 
 
 Columella, who used the word to denote the farm buildings 
 in the midst of a villa estate. M. Flach, on the other hand, 
 declares that ' la plupart semblent de petites f ermes ^parses 
 dans la campagne, habitation du paysan avec granges, 
 e" curies ou ^tables.' For all proof he refers to a number of 
 passages of Caesar which speak of the difficulty of getting 
 fodder when aedificia are scattered, or the like, and which 
 give absolutely no indication of the social position of the 
 persons to whom the aedificia belonged. And by thrusting 
 in that little word 'paysan,' which inevitably brings to mind 
 the modern French peasant, he imports into Caesar just what 
 he seeks to prove from him. If it must be confessed that 
 M. Fustel, on his side, leans too heavily upon the authority 
 of Varro, it must be pointed out that M. Flach's imagination 
 is singularly limited by modern associations when it begins 
 to play round ' rara et disjecta aedificia.' And then he throws 
 evidence to the wind, and goes on : ' Leur reunion ' which 
 Caesar has never hinted ' forme le village disse'mine', dont 
 le type se retrouve de nos jours en Bretagne et en Suisse.' 
 
 Perhaps ! But between ' our day ' and that of Caesar are 
 eighteen centuries, in which a good deal could happen. 
 
 2. In any case, the relative numbers of the dependent 
 groups whose existence M. Flach allows, and of the inde- 
 pendent groups in which, without clear evidence, he also 
 believes, we can only judge from what Caesar tells us of 
 social conditions generally ; and we have already seen what 
 that is. M. Flach, however, goes on with happy serenity to 
 the Roman period : ' Apres la conqu^te romaine, les villages ' 
 (which ? dependent or independent ? that makes all the 
 difference) ' disparurent-ils ? Loin de la. Leur existence 
 nous est atteste'e par les inscriptions et les itine'raires.' l 
 
 As far as the several parts of his argument can be disen- 
 tangled it seems to be composed of the following propositions : 
 
 (a) That the inscriptions and laws make frequent 
 mention of vici? This is, of course, allowed by M. Fustel ; 
 but it is pointed out by him that the term vicus, designating 
 
 1 P. 32. 2 Pp. 32, 33.
 
 140 MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN 
 
 the lowest administrative unit, was applied to a street or 
 to a quarter of a town, as well as to a rural group. 1 
 
 (b) That rural vici were inhabited by various classes ; by 
 most of the middle class known as possessores, by townsfolk 
 who had become coloni to escape taxation, by tenant farmers, 
 by tenant slaves. 2 As to the last three classes, M. Fustel 
 has whole sections on each, as constituents of the villa 
 organisation ; 3 where he undoubtedly differed from M. Flach 
 was in supposing that each vicus thus inhabited was really 
 the property of some one person or family or of two or three 
 separate owners. As to the possessores, M. Fustel grants 
 that there must have been some villages in which these pre- 
 ponderated, to account for the powers of joint action and 
 self-government which some vici evidently enjoyed. 4 It is 
 fair to argue, as M. Flach does elsewhere, 5 that he makes too 
 sharp a distinction between ' villages d'hommes libres ' and 
 ' agglomerations de serfs.' But, after all, it is a quantitative 
 question. M. Flach thinks it ' invraisemblable ' that most of 
 the possessores lived in the towns ; Professor Marquardt 
 believes that ' grossentheils ' they did, and ' left on their 
 property only coloni, slaves, and freedmen.' 
 
 Moreover, M. Flach himself declares that 'the rapid 
 growth of the Gallic towns under Eoman rule drew thither 
 the aristocracy of the country, and henceforth they only 
 visited from time to time their aedificia now transformed into 
 villae, or their villae newly created." 6 These are the estates 
 on which M. Fustel fixes his perhaps too exclusive atten- 
 tion. In what proportion to these did the free or composite 
 villages stand ? M. Flach seems to assume that the latter 
 preponderated. For an unpartisan opinion we cannot do 
 better than turn to Professor Mommsen : 
 
 Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of 
 the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, 
 
 1 L' Alien, p. 38. Of. Marquardt, ROmische Staatsverwaltung, p. 8, 
 and see also ibid. p. 9, n. 4, for the difficulties due to the circumstance 
 that many of the inscriptions seem to refer to town vici. 
 
 2 Pp. 34-37. 3 L' Allen, pp. 50-79. 4 Ibid. p. 40. 
 5 P. 49. 8 P. 34.
 
 'BEGINNINGS OF ANCIENT FKANCE' 141 
 
 and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under 
 Boman rule ; exactly as in pre-Boman times the great nobles, with 
 their trains of dependents and bondmen to be counted by thousands, 
 played the part of masters each in his own home. 1 
 
 (c) That the vici had a local administration of their own. 2 
 That, where the other conditions allowed it, the vici might 
 enjoy such rights, is proved by the laws ; and that some did 
 exercise them, is proved by the inscriptions. This M. Fustel 
 allows, 3 though not so distinctly as one could wish. But 
 that every vicus enjoyed local self-government is a different 
 matter. Even M. Flach would allow that in many cases the 
 vicus as in the well-worn instance from Cicero's letter 4 
 was nothing but a private estate. 
 
 3. Then comes a brief chapter on 'the villages of the 
 Germans before the invasion ' 5 We have to thank our 
 author for excerpts from a report of the year 1844 upon the 
 state of Algiers, which present some remarkable parallels to 
 the well-known passage of Tacitus concerning the Germans. 
 But the value of M. Flach's own attempt to reconstruct 
 early German society may be not unfairly judged from his 
 treatment of the other locus classicus, the passage from 
 Caesar. To pass over his picture of the ' impenetrable forests 
 and sandy plains (landes) ' separating the peoples for which 
 he boldly refers to Caesar's ' vastatis finibus ; ' 6 what is to be 
 said of this ? 
 
 A 1'interieur de ce territoire, les chefs ou principaux de la 
 peuplade assignent chaque annee a chaque clan (gens) un territoire 
 plus petit que les chefs du clans repartiront a leur tour entre les 
 diverges families (cognationes). 
 
 Caesar's words are : ' Magistratus ac principes in annos 
 singulos gentibus cognationibusque hominum, qui una 
 coierunt, quantum et quo loco visum est agri attribuunt.' 7 
 
 1 The Provinces of the Roman Empire, trans. Dickson, i. 93. 
 
 2 Pp. 36-40. L'Alleu, p. 41, n. 1. 
 
 4 Ad me scribis, mea Terentia, te vicum vendituram. 
 
 5 P. 43. 8 De Bello Gallico, V, 23. 
 7 Ibid. VI, 22.
 
 142 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 It will be seen that for two stages in the process M. Flach 
 has absolutely no authority in Caesar. If we knew certainly, 
 from other evidence, that, first, there was a distribution to 
 gentes ; that the cognationes were parts of the gcntes ; and 
 that there, afterwards, followed a further distribution to these 
 cognationes : we should have to say that Caesar made a 
 singular muddle of his attempt to describe the method of 
 partition. But we do not know all this. 
 
 4. Finally we pass to Frankish Gaul. Here M. Flach 
 draws an important distinction. In the north, north-east, and 
 east of Gaul he believes that the German clans remained 
 united, and that they settled upon unoccupied territories : ! 
 there, apparently, the whole ' mark-system ' grew up. 
 Eeaching this point M. Flach seems to rely entirely on his 
 modern German authorities, especially Waitz ; and he does 
 not deign to consider M. Fustel's detailed examination of 
 their evidence in his ' Eecherches ' and elsewhere ; although 
 he agrees with him as against some of his adversaries that 
 the inhabitants of the villa in the section ' De migrantibus ' of 
 the Salic Law can hardly be regarded as co -proprietors. In 
 the rest of France he supposes that ' the kings and principal 
 chiefs seized the villae, whether still being worked or 
 abandoned, and created new ones ... by the aid of Gallo- 
 Eomans skilled in agriculture and versed in rural economy ; ' 2 
 but he urges that all the ' simple warriors ' cannot be 
 supposed to have become tenants of villae. They entered, 
 he supposes, into the free or composite villages, and revivified 
 them. 3 This seems possible, though M. Flach gives no very 
 definite evidence in support of it. Here, again, the quanti- 
 tative problem forces itself upon us ; and this he does not 
 face. He makes, it is true, a number of positive assertions, 
 as that numerous places can be mentioned which were 
 ' veritable villages,' although they bore the names of 
 individuals with the suffix acus ; 4 and he cites M. Longnon 
 as testifying that places whose modern names contain traces 
 of vicus were ' veritable villages ' from the Frank if not from 
 
 1 Pp. 56-59. 2 P. 55. 3 P. 56. 4 P. 50.
 
 'BEGINNINGS OF ANCIENT PRANCE' 143 
 
 the Eoman period, 1 but he gives us no means of testing the 
 accuracy of the statements. The evidence adduced by M. 
 Fustel certainly raises a presumption that from the first the 
 large properties predominated ; and if so, and if, under the 
 pressure of taxation and invasion, the small proprietors were 
 drawn into the villa vortices, 2 then it would appear proper 
 to see in the fortunes of the villae the main clue to the early 
 economic development of the country. 
 
 M. Flach's criticism is certainly not valueless. It puts us 
 on our guard against the spirit of system which few readers 
 of M. Fustel can have altogether failed to notice in his work. 
 But it also suggests the remark that it behoves future 
 workers in the field to start without prepossessions, and, as 
 far as limitations of space will allow, to produce their own 
 evidence in a shape in which it can be readily criticised. 
 M. Fustel has evidently caused some exacerbation of temper 
 by the rough treatment to which he has subjected certain 
 respected teachers. But if his work is taken seriously, and 
 personal animosities are forgotten, it will be clear that it is 
 no longer enough to defend doctrines that have the support 
 of revered names against what seems iconoclastic attack. 
 The negative criticism of M. Fustel has gone too deep for 
 this to be sufficient any longer. It is fresh constructive 
 work that is now called for. 
 
 1 P. 53. * Of. p. 61.
 
 144 MEDIEVAL AGEAKIAN 
 
 ME. JENKS ON THE STATE AND THE 
 CLAN 1 
 
 ' LAW and Politics in the Middle Ages ' is a brilliant 
 book, and it will be a perfect godsend to many a young 
 student of legal history. It tries to do and, so far as 
 exposition is concerned, in large measure succeeds in doing 
 what Sir Henry Maine did in so masterly a manner : 
 light up the forest of technical detail with a few great 
 generalisations, and make even the forms of legal procedure 
 illustrate social evolution. Fifteen years have passed 
 since the last of Maine's notable books, the ' Early Law and 
 Custom,' was given to the world. During the interval, See- 
 bohm, Maitland, and Bound have made very large additions 
 to our knowledge of early English institutions ; while with 
 Brunner and Schroder, Viollet and Esmein coming to be 
 familiar names to English and American students, a begin- 
 ning has been made in the direction of a Comparative 
 Jurisprudence worthy of the name. Yet if the older genera- 
 tion of law students troubled themselves too little about 
 history, the present generation are in some danger of being 
 overwhelmed by the multiplicity of historical particulars 
 commended to their attention. There might seem to be room 
 for a new venture in generalisation ; and Mr. Jenks, with an 
 experience unusually wide for a comparatively young writer 
 including as it does personal observation of the workings of 
 Australian democracy and with a style both clear and 
 forcible, would seem to be in some ways peculiarly well 
 
 1 [Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, by Edward Jenks, M.A., 
 Eeader in English Law in the University of Oxford. Reviewed in the 
 American Historical Beview, July 1898.]
 
 THE STATE AND THE CLAN 145 
 
 qualified for the task. He has, indeed, produced a fascinat- 
 ing book. Mr. Jenks has not only large ideas and a large 
 way of handling them ; he has also the gift of phrase. ' The 
 Frank Empire was a sham Empire/ ' Trial by Jury gives the 
 death-blow to trial by peers ' phrases like these will cling to 
 the memory. 
 
 Yet, though we congratulate the reader, we cannot but 
 feel some regret that Mr. Jenks should have written the 
 book just at the present stage of historical investigation. 
 What he sets before us is a new key to mediaeval history 
 This he finds in the struggle between the State and the Clan, 
 and almost the whole book is a working out of the thesis. 
 The exception is the first two chapters ; in which he describes 
 the ' sources,' with a view both to explaining what they are, 
 and to showing the inapplicability of the Austinian definition 
 of ' law.' This last would hardly seem necessary for those 
 who have once read Maine's lucid lectures on sovereignty ; 
 but Mr. Jenks doubtless knows his audience. The remaining 
 chapters, four-fifths of the book, are all occupied with an 
 explanation of the way in which this struggle, first of the 
 State against the clan proper and then against feudalism, 
 which our author views as a reversion to the clan type, is 
 reflected in the history of the administration of justice, of 
 land settlement, of legal ideas of possession and property, 
 and of the conception of contract. 
 
 But what is or was a ' clan ' ? This is Mr. Jenks's 
 pet word, and, so far as I know, he is the first writer to 
 make much use of it. One has a right to expect something 
 like a definition; and yet throughout the book there 
 is no more exact account than this ' a body of relatives ' 
 ' larger and somewhat (more) indefinite ' than a ' household.' 1 
 The author takes for granted that everybody knows what a 
 ' clan ' is ; but as a matter of fact we are all very vague on 
 the subject, and our notion of it shifts to and fro between a 
 large ' family ' and a small ' tribe.' It sometimes looks as 
 if this were the case with Mr. Jenks also ; for much that he 
 says about the State ' using the law of inheritance as a means 
 
 1 P. 162. 
 
 L
 
 146 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 of destroying the clan ' l might be regarded equally well as 
 simply steps in the destruction of the agnatic family. The 
 word ' clan ' reminds us, to begin with, of Scotland. But the 
 early history of the Scotch clan has yet to be written ; and 
 any investigator will have to reckon with Skene's view of it 
 as a later development within the tribe, caused by the pressure 
 of economic conditions and effected by something very like 
 contract. Where we are first introduced to the word by 
 Mr. Jenks, we are told that the Teutonic state grew out of a 
 ' league of clans.' This is said to be a common result of 
 war, and we are asked in a note 2 to ' see this idea excellently 
 worked out by Morgan ' in his chapter on the ' Iroquois Con- 
 federacy.' But with Morgan the confederacy was a con- 
 federacy of 'tribes,' on the basis of common gentes (in 
 Morgan's sense of gentes). Instead of being ' not homogene- 
 ous ' and ' based on entirely different principles ' from the 
 clan, 3 Morgan's confederacy arose by ' natural growth,' and 
 ' demonstrates the reality as well as persistency of the bond 
 of kin.' 4 With Mr. Jenks ' clan ' is apparently (in some 
 passages) much the same as the Eoman gens. 5 Then were 
 the ' Tacitean clans, the Chatti, the Chauci, the Cherusci ' 6 
 gentes ? As soon as we begin to ask questions like these we 
 must realise the need for a far more definite terminology 
 than we as yet possess. ' Family ' and ' gens ' and ' phratry ' 
 and ' clan ' and ' tribe ' must all be given a clear connotation 
 before we can make any scientific use of them. Something 
 is being done by Mr. Seebohm in his study of Celtic institu- 
 tions, much by Mr. Baden-Powell in his description of Indian 
 conditions. Both of these, indeed, throw about the adjec- 
 tive ' tribal ' somewhat too freely ; and perhaps even more 
 is to be hoped from anthropology, now that, thanks to Pro- 
 fessor Westermarck, it also has got rid of the spectacles of 
 theory. If Mr. Jenks could have waited until his starting 
 point had been a little clearer, his work, I am sure, would 
 have been of more permanent value. 
 
 1 Pp. 225 seq. 2 P. 99. 3 P. 74. 
 
 4 Ancient Society, p. 134. 5 P. 162. P. 73.
 
 147 
 
 ME. BADEN-POWELL'S 'INDIAN VILLAGE 
 COMMUNITY ' l 
 
 IT may seriously be questioned whether 'the comparative 
 method,' which our fathers were so proud of having first 
 applied to the history of society, has done more good than 
 harm. It has helped to lift history out of mere antiquarian- 
 ism ; it has led to the formulation of sweeping generalisa- 
 tions, which have appeared to bring masses of tedious facts 
 under easy control of the scientific imagination ; it has helped 
 to bridge over the chasm between ' science ' and the studies 
 concerned with human society by facilitating the utterance 
 of the current shibboleth of ' evolution.' But it is now be- 
 coming apparent that some of these generalisations were of 
 the kind that the academic slang of the English Cambridge 
 calls ' hasty.' They are now being, of necessity, either 
 abandoned or profoundly modified ; but meantime they have 
 done a world of mischief. Men have, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, gone out for more than a generation to seek new 
 illustrations for conclusions already assumed ; they have 
 often had eyes only for what, consciously or unconsciously, 
 they wanted to see ; and it has not been altogether a gain 
 that has given us, in the place of the plodding and unspecu- 
 lative scholar, the brilliant and pseudo-scientific essayist. 
 
 One amusing, were it not irritating, result of the recent 
 confidence in certain results of the comparative method we 
 are reminded of by Mr. Baden-Powell's welcome book on 
 India. This is the way in which, as soon as a generalisation 
 
 1 [The Indian Village Community . . . chiefly on the basis of the 
 Revenue -Settlement Records and District Manuals, by B. H. Baden- 
 Powell, M.A., C.I.E. (1896.) Reviewed in the Nation, October 7, 1897.]
 
 148 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 covering all the peoples of the earth, or perhaps only the 
 ' Aryan ' peoples, begins to be called in question in its appli- 
 cation to one particular people, there is a tendency to overbear 
 criticism by an appeal to what it is alleged has been proved 
 elsewhere. That, in apparently similar sequences of pheno- 
 mena, a gap in one series should be provisionally supplied 
 from another ; that language which is obscure in the docu- 
 ments of one people should be interpreted by its significance 
 (when it is clearly the same formulas that appear) in the 
 documents of another this is all very proper. But, to be of 
 any value, the appeal should be from the dubious to the cer- 
 tain ; when it is from the dubious to the equally dubious, it 
 is only waste of time. Yet there has been something like this 
 in some of the recent discussions concerning the origin of 
 property in land. It was taught pretty generally until quite 
 recently that all peoples, or at any rate all Aryan peoples, 
 had gone through a stage in which the ' ownership ' of the 
 soil was vested in a village community. This idea was pro- 
 bably of German origin, and originally applied to Germany 
 only. Then the generalisation was extended to England 
 and, about the same time, to the vast area of Hindustan. A 
 decade or so of popularisation followed. When by-and-by 
 the critical process began, and doubts were raised as to 
 whether the proposition was true in its bearing upon England, 
 nothing was more natural than to refer the inquirer to the 
 example of Germany. Was it its truth as to Germany that 
 was next called in question, the sceptic could be referred 
 to India. And it was not long before in India itself the critics 
 of the theory there were referred back by those, of course, 
 who had not followed the course of the discussion in Europe 
 to what was still regarded as ascertained fact with regard 
 to Germany. So that actually four years after the appear- 
 ance of his own magnificent work, ' The Land Systems of 
 British India,' * which ought to have placed the whole discus- 
 
 1 [A precis of the main results of this book, in relation to the 
 question at issue, was attempted by the present writer in the Political 
 Science Quarterly, for March 1894, under the title of Tlie Village in 
 India*']
 
 INDIAN VILLAGE COMMUNITY 149 
 
 sion on a new footing, Mr. Baden-Powell is obliged to recog- 
 nise that some of his readers will ' be disposed to regard the 
 Indian case as necessarily concluded by a general verdict on 
 the European evidence as to archaic common ownership of 
 land ; ' and it is with the air of one who asks a favour that 
 he ' submits that, under the circumstances of doubt that exist 
 as to the European phenomena, the Indian case may with 
 advantage be dealt with on its own merits.' l 
 
 For more than twenty years almost all those who in 
 Europe or America have had occasion, in the course of their 
 study of the history of institutions, to pay any attention to 
 the Indian village, have had recourse to Sir Henry Maine's 
 ' Village Communities in the East and West ; ' while observers 
 in India itself, called upon, in the course of their official duty, 
 to draw up an account of conditions immediately before them, 
 have been apt to see them through the spectacles of the same 
 book. But Maine's work owed much of its authority to the 
 reputation gained by its predecessor, ' Ancient Law,' to which 
 it is in truth far inferior ; his own range of observation had 
 been curiously limited ; and since his time there has been a 
 vast accumulation of fresh evidence in the way of govern- 
 ment gazetteers and Settlement records, which makes it abso- 
 lutely impossible any longer to be satisfied with ' the abstract 
 and unified conception of the village' suggested by his 
 writings. Mr. Baden-Powell has done us the great service, 
 in the substantial volume closely packed with matter now 
 before us, to bring all this material together. He attempts, 
 and that with no small success, to disentangle its main re- 
 sults and dovetail them into one another, with a perception 
 of their value which is the result at once of his own Indian 
 experience and of his acquaintance with recent English dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 By far the larger part of the volume is taken up with an 
 exposition of existing conditions of land tenure and land 
 cultivation, and of the geographical and ethnological con- 
 siderations which have to be taken into account. He points 
 
 1 P. 5.
 
 150 MEDIAEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 out that there are two very different forms of village-tenure 
 at present in existence. In the one, known as the Haiyat- 
 wari village, the land owners are themselves cultivators, and 
 own their land each in severalty; so that 'the group of 
 holdings in no sense forms a proprietary unit.' This form is 
 characteristic of more than two-thirds of India. In the other, 
 called by the author the joint or shared village, there is 
 something which may in a sense be called a common owner- 
 ship. But this common ownership is that of a ' landlord 
 estate ' ' the growth of some individual over-lordship, or 
 some settlement of conquering clans or expansion of families 
 with their own notions of equal rights ' among themselves 
 ' and of superiority to inferior races,' which latter have usually 
 been allowed to remain on the soil as rent-paying cultivators. 
 He then shows that the Eaiyatwari form prevails in those 
 parts of India which have been least affected by invasion. 
 Finally, after an elaborate examination of the remnants of 
 tribal organisation still to be found in the Punjaub and other 
 provinces, he sets forth tentatively his own conclusions. 
 These are that ' the right to land grows out of two ideas ; one 
 being that a special claim arises to any object, or to a plot of 
 land, by virtue of the labour and skill expended in making 
 it useful or profitable ; the other, that a claim arises from 
 conquest or superior might.' l Of these the first, if we are to 
 call anything ' primitive,' would seem best to deserve that 
 title. All the evidence of early law and of the actual practice 
 of ' aboriginal ' races leads to the conclusion that ' the early 
 tribesman, under sanction of custom, appropriated his field 
 or his share of the tribal land, as he would appropriate a tree 
 to make a canoe or a plough.' This claim or appropriation 
 was perfectly compatible with the existence of a certain tribal 
 control, or better (for it was rather a division of a tribe that 
 held together than a tribe itself) of a certain control by the 
 clan, both as against those within and those without. 
 Neither the vague sense of clan-right nor the stronger sense 
 of individual appropriation can be termed ' property ' without 
 
 1 P. 400.
 
 INDIAN VILLAGE COMMUNITY 151 
 
 creating misapprehensions. Left to itself, however, the de- 
 velopment ran steadily in the direction of what we can call 
 individual property, as seen to-day in the Kaiyatwari village ; 
 unless above the body of original owning-cultivators was 
 imposed, by some one of the score of ways in which such 
 things took place in India, a landlord or group of landlords 
 claiming superiority of race. And in that case a body of 
 non-cultivating joint-proprietors might make its appearance, 
 usually as the result of certain customs regarding family 
 property. In no case does the self-governing village group 
 of cultivating-owners of Maine's hypothesis make its appear- 
 ance as a distinct stage in agrarian history. 
 
 The discussion cannot be regarded as closed. We are 
 still only at the beginning of our analysis of the tribe and the 
 clan ; and the lesson of past controversies is that we should 
 not be in a hurry to suppose we know just what ' tribal con- 
 ditions ' were or are. In the overwhelming mass of particu- 
 lars brought together by Mr. Baden-Powell from provinces 
 so far apart as Mysore and Cashmir, Assam and Sindh, there 
 is abundant opportunity for differences of interpretation. It 
 is perhaps ungrateful to say that there is still room for a 
 statement from Mr. Baden-Powell's pen of the larger results 
 of his studies, set forth in untechnical language, for the bene- 
 fit of the general reader. 1 His volumes are fruitful in instruc- 
 tion to all who will take a little trouble ; still, they present a 
 severe aspect. But nothing can lessen our admiration for his 
 learning, his thoroughness, his caution, and his intellectual 
 candour. The book is a very considerable achievement. 
 
 1 [Mr. Baden-Powell has since prepared such a brief statement in his 
 Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India (Social Science 
 Series) 1899.]
 
 152 MEDIEVAL AGEABIAN 
 
 PEOFESSOE WIGMOEE ON LAND TENUEE 
 IN JAPAN 1 
 
 ONE gets up from the reading of these Notes with a quite 
 uncanny feeling. We had known in a vague sort of way 
 that there had been what was loosely called a 'feudal 
 system ' in Japan ; and M. de Laveleye and other writers 
 had prepared us for finding something that could be brought 
 under the equally vague designation of a ' village commu- 
 nity.' But we were certainly not prepared to find that in 
 most essential points mediaeval society in Japan was the 
 exact counterpart of that in Europe ; that the development 
 was apparently parallel not only in character but also in 
 time ; and that Japanese scholars are confronted by precisely 
 the same historical problems as their western confreres. It 
 is as startling as if we had come upon our ' doubles.' 
 
 Dr. Simmons was a distinguished American physician, 
 who lived some twenty-five years in Japan, and died in 1889. 
 His profession gave him abundant opportunities for observing 
 the daily life of the people, both before and after the ' abo- 
 lition of feudalism.' Towards the end of his life he began to 
 make manuscript collections of notes on social institutions 
 especially in the feudal period notes based on personal 
 observation, on the information of his Japanese friends, and 
 on two collections of provincial regulations and agricultural 
 customs dating from the end of last century. The date and 
 
 1 [Notes on Land Tenure and Local Institutions in Old Japan. 
 Edited from posthumous papers of Dr. D. B. Simmons by John H. 
 Wigmore. Published by the Asiatic Society of Japan (1890). Eeviewed 
 in the Political Science Quarterly, March 1892.]
 
 LAND TENUEE IN JAPAN 153 
 
 character of these works, it may be noticed in passing, at 
 once remind the English student of the reports to the Board 
 of Agriculture. But Dr. Simmons does not seem to have 
 been in a position to give any very minute or critical 
 attention to the mass of documentary material bearing on 
 land tenure ; and, with the exception of the writings of Sir 
 Henry Maine, he appears to have been unacquainted with 
 the European literature on the subject. Accordingly his 
 notes, while of the utmost value as the first serious attempt 
 to deal with the history of Japanese local institutions, and 
 as stating the actual practice among the people in recent 
 times, can hardly be regarded as conclusive. This is pointed 
 out by the editor, Mr. Wigmore, who clearly combines with 
 a wider mastery of Japanese ' sources,' a very adequate 
 knowledge of modern English and German discussions con- 
 cerning the history of European land tenure. 
 
 The main points of resemblance between mediaeval Japan 
 and mediaeval Europe may be briefly enumerated. There 
 was the same distinction between royal domain and the 
 estates of the great nobles ; the cultivated country was 
 divided into shoyen, which may fairly be translated ' manors ; ' 
 the tenants upon these manors were in a condition of more 
 or less servile dependence upon their lords ; they cultivated 
 scattered patches in open fields; they enjoyed the use of 
 common meadows and forests ; they were bound to perform 
 labour services, which at a later period were commuted for 
 payments in money or kind ; there appeared among them 
 social gradations which may be roughly compared to those 
 of free tenants, villeins, and cottars ; and they were under 
 the supervision of officers who were very much like the 
 steward, bailiff, and reeve. It has escaped Mr. Wigmore's 
 notice that the dual position of the nanushi, and his obscure 
 relations to the toshiyori, 1 reproduce precisely the difficulty 
 which confronts the English student in the shifting use of 
 the terms reeve and bailiff. 2 Indeed, M. Fustel de Coulanges 
 has pointed out a like difficulty in the case of the milieus, 
 the procurator, and the actor on Eoman estates much earlier. 
 1 P. 169 ; cf. p. 109, n. [Of. supra, p. 57.]
 
 154 MEDIAEVAL AGEARIAN 
 
 This, however, is but a small suggestion ; a far more con- 
 siderable matter, where Mr. Wigmore has for once missed 
 his opportunity, is the gonin-gumi system. It is thus 
 described by Dr. Simmons : 
 
 The chief feature in the arrangement of the mura (or village) 
 was this gonin-gumi system. Every five families were united in a 
 kumi or company. [Mr. Wigmore adds in a note that ' the kumi 
 often consisted of six householders,' and that hi a certain territory 
 ' some kumi held more than ten householders '].... One of the 
 number was selected by themselves as headman or seal bearer. . . . 
 He was also called kumi-oya (company-parent) or ban-gashira 
 (watch- chief), and was required to be a land owner. ... As a rule 
 the kumi as a body was responsible for the defaults of its members, 
 and even of their wives, children, and servants. The carelessness 
 or evil-doing of a single member meant full responsibility on the 
 part of the other four also. If, however, any member persistently 
 failed to conduct himself properly, he could be reported by his 
 fellow-members to the mura officials. 1 
 
 Mr. Wigmore discusses the theory of certain Japanese 
 writers that this system had originally a military purpose, 
 and was borrowed from China or Corea, but only to reject 
 the idea, and to observe that even at an early date the kumi 
 ' was regarded in the light of an administrative device for 
 securing order and good conduct.' But he does not notice 
 that in its general features it was apparently very much the 
 same thing as the English frankpledge. The frankpledge is 
 an institution of whose practical working we are still waiting 
 an explanation. Eecent English constitutional historians 
 seem to fight shy of it ; perhaps they may find a clue by 
 ' surveying mankind from China ' to Japan. 
 
 The mass of the present population of Japan is, beyond 
 all controversy, descended from the servile population of 
 the middle ages. But the question of the origin of mediaeval 
 serfdom is in the same position in Japan as in Europe. 
 Fortunately the pleasing vision of an original free village 
 community has not made its appearance to divert scholars to 
 
 1 P. 97.
 
 LAND TENUEE IN JAPAN 155 
 
 a mistaken path : they realise that the task before historical 
 science just now is to settle the relations between two 
 phenomena, of the early existence of which there can be no 
 manner of doubt, viz. the tribe and serfdom. Mr. Wigmore 
 himself speaks with an uncertain sound, or rather speaks 
 with two irreconcilable sounds. In one place l he speaks of 
 the manorial system as ' a later development of the ninth 
 and tenth centuries ' influenced here probably by the 
 German constitutionalists ; and he tries to trace the fall of 
 a supposed class of ' smaller freemen,' ' the body of the 
 people/ 2 into subjection by means of processes like commen- 
 dation. Elsewhere, however, 3 he compliments Dr. Simmons 
 for laying emphasis on the 
 
 two historical truths : (1) that the serfs of early times represented 
 the conquered peoples (whether aborigines, strictly speaking, or 
 only earlier immigrants) ; (2) that the mass of the common people 
 of to-day represent the descendants of the early serfs. 
 
 The truth is that, as Mr. Wigmore recognises, there are not 
 yet sufficient data at command to justify an opinion ; and 
 until they have been brought together, European theories are 
 rather a hindrance than a help. It is possible that the 
 solution will be found in the direction suggested by Dr. 
 Morenz's essay on Altjapanische Culturzustande, the 
 substance of which is translated in the appendix. Dr. Florenz 
 declares that the Japanese nation was originally made up of 
 a number of ' uji or clans, that is, patriarchal families in- 
 cluding a number of persons related by blood,' and adds : 
 ' These uji had in their corporate capacity their own landed 
 possessions and their own serf population.' If this is true, 
 the question to consider is that of the relative numbers of the 
 serf dependents and the fully free tribesmen a subject upon 
 which some light may be thrown by the observation of races 
 which are still, in our own day, in the tribal stage. 
 
 I have said that Japanese scholars are hardly troubling 
 themselves with any free-village-community theory : it may 
 be that the wave of anti-mark reaction has reached them before 
 
 1 Pp. 157 et seq. 2 P. 158. 3 P. 132 n.
 
 156 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 they have been carried away by the mark current. But for 
 European and American scholars who are still in doubt as to 
 whether they should abandon the mark hypothesis, there is one 
 of Mr. Wigmore's pages that ought to be of interest. One of 
 the most suggestive results of recent inquiry is that many a 
 practice which at first sight points clearly to an original com- 
 munal ownership of land is shown to have resulted from the 
 pressure of the government. Thus M. Kovalevsky, in his 
 recent work on ' Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of 
 Eussia,' assures us that the custom of periodical redivision of 
 the lands of the mir is not a survival from ancient usage and 
 a transitional stage from common to individual ownership, as 
 Maine supposed, but the outcome of Peter the Great's 
 measures of taxation. And now Mr. Wigmore calls attention 
 to similar dangers of misconstruction in Japanese conditions, 
 and points the moral for Europe. 
 
 The facts of Japanese village life . . . show how many 
 communal customs, apparently purely local in origin, were the 
 result of superimposed laws. It is possible that the numerous 
 instances of this sort may be suggestive and helpful in the 
 examination of Western village communities. Take, for example, 
 the cultivation of the land of a deserting farmer by his Jcumi or by 
 the village. Nothing could at first sight point more clearly to a 
 certain community of property, a corporate holding of land by the 
 village. But on further examination this custom proves to have 
 been commanded by the government with the object of preventing 
 a diminution of revenue. Take, again, the necessity of obtaining 
 the seal of the nanushi for all transfer of land, in mortgage or 
 absolutely. This, we suspect at once, is analogous to the necessity 
 of the consent of the kinsmen or villagers to the alienation of land 
 noticeable in early communities. Yet in Japan a law of the 
 Shogunate reqxiired it ; and even though we may yet discover that 
 the Shogunate merely sanctioned an existing custom (which is 
 unlikely), we have nevertheless seen the necessity for caution, and 
 for a thorough examination of all the apparently local customs having 
 a communal character. 1 
 
 1 P. 171.
 
 157 
 
 PROFESSOE HILDEBEAKD'S LAW AND 
 CUSTOM l 
 
 WHETHER it was a conscious impulse of filial piety which 
 prompted the choice of Professor Hildebrand's subject, we 
 are not told. But it is certainly appropriate that the son 
 of that Bruno Hildebrand who, fifty years ago, pointed to 
 ' the movement of historical evolution ' as the object of the 
 economist's inquiry, should now make an attempt, with the 
 aid of all that anthropology and comparative jurisprudence 
 have given us in the interval, actually to sketch the outlines 
 of that evolution, and to show its dependence upon funda- 
 mental economic conditions. It is an attempt which, from 
 the novelty of its method and the distinctness of its 
 challenge, is sure to attract wide attention. 
 
 A good deal is being said nowadays about ' the material- 
 istic conception of history.' Many worthy persons are 
 rejoicing or lamenting, as the case may be, over the dis- 
 appearance of idealism. The emotion is premature. Before 
 we trouble to ask whether an economic explanation of 
 certain events is adequate, it is commonly worth while to 
 inquire whether the alleged economic phenomena themselves 
 really existed as described. We may thus in most cases 
 relieve ourselves from attacking the larger question ; for it 
 may be doubted whether any ' materialistic conception ' of 
 history has ever condescended to particulars without exciting 
 the derision of the specialist. 2 
 
 [' Becht und Sitte auf den verschiedenen wirtscJiaftlichen Kultur- 
 stufen, by Dr. Eichard Hildebrand. Erster Teil (1896). Reviewed in 
 the Political Science Quarterly, September 1898.] 
 
 * [Cf. supra, p. 27.]
 
 158 MEDLEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 We are, therefore, somewhat taken aback at first by the 
 boldness and sweeping character of Professor Hildebrand's 
 programme : 
 
 At the bottom of the following investigations lies the problem of 
 a history of the general evolution of law and custom. This problem 
 can only be solved when we cease to be content with merely com- 
 paring the separate phenomena of different peoples and periods, 
 and try to arrange or group the materials according to the 
 economic stages to which they belong. For to determine the con- 
 nection and genetic sequence of the several facts, and to be able to 
 say that this law or custom is older or more primitive than that 
 for this we clearly need a criterion which shall rise above and be 
 independent of chronology. Such a criterion is alone furnished by 
 the stage of economic culture ; for this alone shows us a movement 
 of evolution everywhere in its main features alike, or ever moving 
 in the same direction. The reason is that population is always 
 more or less increasing, and that, of all the interests which dominate 
 active life, the economic, from the very nature of things, are always 
 the most mighty. 
 
 This is a large claim, about which a good deal could be said : 
 when Professor Hildebrand comes down to more recent times, 
 he will not find it one easy to substantiate. But if any one 
 has a right to indulge in such preliminary assertions, it is he 
 who sets about his task in the businesslike manner of our 
 author. To every paragraph or so of the text is attached a 
 catena of authorities, quoted most of them in full and drawn 
 from a remarkably wide range of anthropological literature ; 
 and these are not buried in footnotes, but are given all the 
 advantages of decent type and spacing. I know of no book 
 in which it is easier at every point to follow the author's 
 reasoning. 
 
 The work falls into two parts. In the first fifty-six 
 pages we follow the course of social evolution through the 
 hunting and pastoral stages down to the beginning of 
 agricultural life ; and within this brief compass a dozen 
 burning questions are sensibly and sufficiently dealt with. 
 He shows, for instance, that in the lowest stages men do 
 not live together in hordes, but in more or less isolated
 
 LAW AND CUSTOM 159 
 
 families ; that ' horde-marriage ' or ' promiscuity ' is then 
 unknown ; that polyandry, when it makes its appearance at 
 a higher stage, is exceptional and the outcome of individual 
 poverty ; and that then it does not bring with it the conse- 
 quences imagined by enthusiastic exponents of matriarchy. 
 He goes on to point out, as perhaps no previous writer 
 has done, what are the economic, and therefore the insti- 
 tutional, differences between the hunting and the pastoral 
 life ; and he explains the origin, in the latter stage, alike of 
 serfdom and of chieftainship. 
 
 When we have reached this point, we are surprised to 
 find that the rest of the book is given up to a discussion of 
 the condition of the Germans at the time of Caesar and 
 Tacitus, introduced with the remark that they were still in 
 the stage of half-nomadic life just described. We are 
 reminded of Fielding's parson, who by Christianity meant 
 Protestantism, and by Protestantism the religion of the 
 Church of England. With the whole of mankind and of 
 history to choose from, we had hoped to ward off the agri 
 pro numero cultorum a little longer. Still, our author does 
 but follow the wonted course of German investigation. 
 No one can read the early chapters of Mommsen without 
 suspecting that he would hardly have written as he has 
 about Eome, if contemporary scholars had not been confi- 
 dently expatiating on the early German Dorfgenossenscliaft. 
 So now, if we can only get some more satisfactory notions 
 about the early Germans, we may expect in time to reach 
 the Komans and Greeks. 
 
 In a short review it is impossible to set forth as it 
 deserves still less to criticise Professor Hildebrand's 
 theory of the constitution of early German society. It is 
 far removed from the current Germanist doctrine as pre- 
 sented, e.g., by Waitz and Brunner. Professor Hildebrand 
 is, so far as I know, the first notable German scholar who 
 has cut himself altogether loose from the dominant teaching. 
 Accordingly, it is natural to compare him with M. Fustel de 
 Coulanges. With M. Pustel's work he is well acquainted ; 
 but he makes use of it, as it would seem, with perfect
 
 160 MEDIEVAL AGBAEIAN 
 
 independence, utilising an argument here and there, or re- 
 jecting this or that proposition, as he sees fit. And though 
 the two writers agree very largely in their negative polemic, 
 they differ widely in the positive indications they give us. 
 M. Fustel took for his point of departure the Provincial 
 villa ; Dr. Hildebrand takes the Kirghises of modern Asia. 
 The method of the former is archaeological ; that of the 
 latter anthropological. M. Fustel's strength was un- 
 doubtedly in destructive criticism ; and some of us who took 
 the keenest delight in his operations must at the end have 
 been somewhat troubled by the consciousness of a vacuum 
 that nature abhorred. Dr. Hildebrand's present book is a 
 good deal more promising in the way of reconstruction. 
 That lordship, on the one side, and the ' dependence ' of the 
 cultivators of the soil, on the other, existed from the very 
 beginning of tillage, he has at least shown to be highly 
 probable. But much remains to be done to give complete 
 consistency and vraisemblance to his exposition. 
 
 Let us add, to whet the appetite of some readers, that 
 Professor Hildebrand has a new reading, based on an 
 ingenious paleographical argument, to propose in the place 
 of in vices ; that he accepts M. Fustel's explanation of Lex 
 Salica, tit. 45 ; and that he has heard the roll of Professor 
 Meitzen's big guns (Siedelung und Agrarwesen) without 
 blenching.
 
 161 
 
 ON AN ALLEGED ENGLISH FASHION 
 
 PROFESSOR MAITLAND has recently written as follows in his 
 ' Domesday Book and Beyond' (1897). 1 
 
 It was the fashion in England, some years ago, that those who 
 spoke of village communities should say something of the Germanic 
 mark.' What they said seemed often to imply that the German 
 village community was a mark community. This was a mistake. 
 It seems indeed that there were parts of Germany in which the 
 word ' mark ' was loosely used ; but the true MarJcgenossenschaft 
 was utterly different from the Dorfgenossenscliafi, and the lands 
 with which it dealt were just those lands which belonged to no 
 YJUage. In the country which saw the Germans becoming an 
 agricultural race, the lands belonging to the villages were but oases 
 in a wild territory. In later days some large piece of this 
 territory is found to be under the control of a ' mark-community,' 
 whose members are dwelling here and there in many different 
 villages and exercise rights over the land (for the more part it is 
 forest-land) that belongs to no village, but constitutes the mark. 
 Traces of what might have become ' the mark system ' may perhaps 
 be found in England ; but not where they have been usually 
 sought. We read of a tract in Suffolk which is common pasture for 
 the whole hundred of Coleness. Instances in which a piece of 
 land is common pasture for many villa_were by no means uncommon 
 in the thirteenth century. 
 
 For this description of ' the true Markgenossenschaft,' 
 
 Professor Maitland does indeed refer to Dr. Meitzen's 
 
 'Agrarwesen und Siedelung,' i. 122-60 ; 2 but the ordinary 
 
 1 P. 354. 2 Cf. supra, p. 121. 
 
 M
 
 162 MEDIAEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 reader would scarcely gather that this was a use of language 
 peculiar to Dr. Meitzen. And I have known a reader of 
 quite exceptional intelligence and historical knowledge to 
 take away the impression that the English writers referred 
 to must have been inexcusably careless not to have dis- 
 covered what in Germany was a matter of common know- 
 ledge. But if we reflect that this criticism affects not only 
 Sir Henry Maine, 1 but also that most careful of writers, 
 Dr. Stubbs himself, 2 it may perhaps occur to us that the 
 ' fashion ' can hardly be quite so summarily disposed of. 
 
 It would be well worth while for some young scholar, in 
 search of a subject for his doctor's dissertation, to trace, 
 simply as a piece of literary history, the varying shapes which 
 have been taken by the mark doctrine in Germany during 
 the present century. Meanwhile it may be useful to call 
 attention to one or two fairly evident points in its history. 
 I shall use the editions of the several books referred to which 
 happen to be at hand, disregarding for the time what the 
 future historiographer will need carefully to note, the exact 
 date of each footnote or modification of the text. 
 
 Omitting, then, the earlier writers, it will be sufficient for 
 us to begin with Georg von Maurer, ' the great authority ' 
 on this subject, as Dr. Stubbs calls him. In his celebrated 
 ' Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Stadt- 
 verfassung ' (1854), von Maurer maintained, as against 
 Grimm, that the primitive Mark contained more than 
 mere woodland ; it originally included arable land, and, 
 indeed, was synonymous with ' Dorfschaft oder Dor/mark.' 3 
 The early marks were often very large, 4 but they had a village 
 for their centre of activity, 5 and he elaborately describes ' the 
 oldest village settlements or primitive villages' (Urdorfer), 
 with their Feldmarken, and their carefully regulated rights 
 to wood and pasture. 6 After a time this primitive mark 
 system broke up, owing to a number of causes, chief 
 
 1 Village Communities in the East and West (1871) ; see especially 
 
 pp. 78-82. 2 See Constitutional History, i. 53-58. 
 
 3 Einleitung, p. 42. 4 Ibid. p. 46. 
 
 5 Ibid. p. 18. 6 Ibid. pp. 18-171.
 
 THE WOKD 'MAKE' 163 
 
 among them the settlement of daughter villages on the ^^ 
 territory before unoccupied, and the growth of seigneuries : ' '***"' 
 from the partition of the original large mark arose in very m r,-|*u 
 many instances the marks of the later villages and towns, 
 ' Dorfund Stadtmarken.' 2 This forms the point of departure tA 
 of his later ' Geschichte der Dorfverfassung in Deutschlan 
 (1865), where the villages of historic Germany are set forth 
 as possessing marks, and reproducing in small the features/ ~ 
 and history of the supposed original great marks. His whole 
 doctrine is thus summed up by himself in his Table of 
 Contents : ' Die Dorfverfassung ist eine Dorfmarkver- 
 fassung ; die Grundlage der Dorfmarkgenossenschaft ist eine 
 Feld- und Markgemeinschaft ; ' and ' die Geschichte der 
 Dorfmarken ist eine Wiederholung der Geschichte der 
 grossen Marken.' Considering that, whether the mark was 
 large or small, whether of primary or secondary formation, 
 the members of a mark community usually, according to von 
 Maurer, inhabited a village, it was surely very excusable for 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir Eobert) Morier in his Cobden Club 
 Essay (in ' Systems of Land Tenure/ 1870) to lump all early 
 German villages together without troublingTils readers' with \ 
 
 ~TEe" 'distinction between primitive and filial, and for Sir Henry 
 Maine to follow him. In the exposition of Dr. Stubbs, who 
 had evidently read his authority with care, von Maurer's two 
 stages may be discerned by those who look for it ; 3 but he 
 
 ""alscTthTOUghout identifies the primitive village group with 
 the primitive mark, assigns it a 'constant arable surface,' 
 and, as is well known, finds ' traces of the mark ' in the 
 Anglo-Saxon township. 4 
 
 Von Maurer's construction of early agrarian history long 
 remained the most generally accepted among German 
 scholars. Three illustrations will suffice. First we will take 
 an economist but an economist celebrated for the width of 
 his historical learning the late Wilhelm IJoscher. After \ 
 defining the Markgenossenschaft as an association whose \ 
 
 1 Einleitung, p. 174. * Ibid. p. 201. 
 
 3 Constitutional History, i. pp. 53-56. 4 Ibid. pp. 89, 90. 
 
 H2
 
 164 MEDIEVAL AGEAEIAN 
 
 members owned in severalty their arable land, but held 
 
 ^ff^tHff^^ffff^ ffr ^ m m ~ ~ - __ _ _uM " -^ i n J^f in ^_^^_ 
 
 their woodland and meadow as common property, and 
 remarking that it might be composed of isolated home- 
 steads as well as of whole villages, Eoscher proceeds to 
 identify it as a rule with a village group in these words : 
 ' The mark belonging to a primitive village commonly split 
 up later into several marks through the plantation of 
 secondary (or dependent) villages (" Nebendorfer.") ' l 
 
 Next, we will turn to a legal historian and that the 
 writer of the highest repute in Germany in his field during 
 the last quarter of the century, namely Professor Brunner. 
 Dr. Brunner identifies the earliest Markgenossenschaft with 
 the settlement of a clan, Sippschaft, and supposes that it was 
 either conterminous with a village settlement, or, when it was 
 large, contained many village settlements. But in this 
 latter case he declares ' smaller village marks must in course 
 of time have separated themselves from the great mark.' 2 
 
 Our third example shall be the most popular of recent 
 German historians, Professor Karl Lamprecht, whose earlier 
 works are commonly supposed to have given him a right to 
 speak with authority on early mediaeval land-tenure. It will 
 be found that he also presents substantially the same version 
 of the development, though he makes the stages three instead 
 of two. According to Dr. Lamprecht taking"the idea per^ 
 haps from Thudicum the first Markgenossenschaft was the 
 Hundertschaft, the 'hundred.' Then, with the growth of 
 the idea of kinship through males, the several clans (Sipperi) 
 belonging to the hundred settled down within the earlier 
 economic organisation, upon the mark assigned to them, each 
 with its arable lands, pastures, and woods, and thus con- 
 stituted ' the exactest copy of the mark constitution of the 
 hundred ; ' each such Sippe being settled ' sometimes in a 
 single village, sometimes in many hamlets, sometimes in 
 isolated farmsteads.' And then again these Sippenmarkge- 
 meinden in many places broke up into new villages, which 
 reproduced in small the features of the old system, and ' con- 
 
 1 Nationalokonomik des Ackerbaues (12th ed. 1888), 72. 
 
 2 Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (1887), i. 60.
 
 THE WOED 'MABK' 165 
 
 stituted the local communes (Ortsgemeinde) with Germanic- 
 mark-community rights ' of the Middle Ages. 1 In a some- 
 what later handling of the subject, 2 Dr. Lamprecht takes this 
 third stage, described as that of the marJcgenossenschaf tender 
 Dorfer as the starting point for the subsequent development 
 of rural life in Germany. 
 
 This may suffice for what may be called the von Maurer 
 tradition with its amplifications. But this has not been 
 alone in the field ; among von Maurer's contemporaries was 
 a scholar of a far wider range of interests and influence, who 
 could utilise his work without being dominated by it, the 
 distinguished constitutional historian Dr. Waitz. It will be 
 sufficient to remind the English reader how thickly ' Waitz, 
 D.V.G." is sprinkled over the first half of the Bishop of 
 Oxford's first volume. Now, Waitz, describing German 
 conditions in the earliest times, those of Caesar and Tacitus, 
 lays the greatest possible stress on village life as the usual 
 and normal thing. He assigns to these villages arable fields, 
 pasture and woodland ; explains how the word mark means, 
 primal ily the land remaining undivided, and from that 
 Mines to mean the whole territory of the village ; and 
 remarks that for the community so constituted the term 
 Markgenossenschaft has become customary. But in this 
 matter, he says, there was no dead uniformity. There were 
 districts where the community in wood and pasture rights 
 was not limited to the members of a single village. This 
 may be due to the later plantation of additional villages, or 
 several villages may, from the first, have had a common 
 mark ; and in some cases the community may have extended 
 over districts which were large enough to be called hundreds 
 in later times. Such instances cannot ; be treated as ' old 
 village-marks,' as von Maurer would have them. Nor does 
 Waitz follow him in making a general'second stage of develop- 
 ment out of the cases where a number of villages grew ou 
 of a large mark. ' The impulse towards community must 
 be regarded as taking different forms under different 
 
 1 Deutsche Geschichte (1891), i. 142-144. 
 
 2 In Zeitschrift filr Sozial- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte(189S),i.221.
 
 166 MEDIEVAL AGBAEIAN 
 
 circumstances ; but ' and here is the notable pronounce- 
 ment ' most commonly, especially in northern Germany, it 
 realises itself by means of the settlement in villages.' ! 
 
 One last quotation. In the same year as this last edition 
 of Waitz appeared, the veteran Agrarhistoriker, Professor 
 Georg Hanssen, republished an essay written forty-five 
 years before. And there, at the opening of his 'Agrar- 
 historische Abhandlungen ' (1880), the mark doctrine is pre- 
 sented to the rising generation of historical and economic 
 students in the simplest and clearest of forms. ' The mark- 
 constitution is called, from its most important practical 
 feature, the common (arable) field system (Feldgemeinschaft) ; 
 the common-field system created the villages ; and the mark 
 constitution arose from the joint occupation of the arable 
 mark by an associated group of heads of families.' 
 
 My purpose in making these quotations, let me repeat, is 
 not in the least to show that mark in any sense alight to be 
 connected with ^he village, but simply to prove that, as a 
 matter of fact, it has been so connected by a long line of 
 German scholars of high reputation and influence ; so that 
 ' the fashion ' among English writers of doing likewise 
 (whether in upholding or in criticising the mark doctrine) 
 has been a simple copy of a German fashion. Since the ap- 
 pearance of M. Fustel de Coulanges' detailed examination of 
 von Maurer's alleged authorities 2 the mark doctrine, whether 
 as formulated by von Maurer or by Waitz, ought to be too 
 dead to be any longer attacked. Professor Meitzen's attempt 
 to confine the meaning of mark to something very different 
 from what earlier writers had in mind, though not without 
 its difficulties, 3 represents a real advance. He will confer 
 a greater service upon historical science by placing before 
 us the facts as to marks, in this sense of his, with places, 
 dates, and documents definitely set down, than by trying to 
 fit his conception of them into a scheme of evolution for 
 which there is at present no visible evidence. 
 
 1 Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (3rd ed. 1880), i. 108- 132. 
 
 2 Origin of Property in Land (Eng. trans. 1891), pp. 3-72. 
 
 3 See supra, p. 121.
 
 167 
 
 MEDIAEVAL URBAN 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE IN 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 1 
 
 THE economist who seeks to learn something of the social 
 history of the past is not seldom in an embarrassing situa- 
 tion. His first impulse, of course, is to turn to the professed 
 historian for the information he craves ; and, more parti- 
 cularly, when the matter is of a constitutional or legal 
 character, to the historian of law. But, when he does so, he 
 is only too likely to find one of two things. Either the in- 
 formation he receives, while it has a grammatical consistency, 
 yet leaves him quite in the dark as to the daily life of the 
 people concerned he asks for a picture and receives a 
 formula; or, instead of one answer to his inquiry, he is 
 given several, all from eminent authorities and absolutely 
 irreconcilable. Then, probably, he gives up the quest, and 
 falls back on some neat little a priori theory of his own as 
 to what the course of economic evolution must have been. 
 If he does not, but makes up his mind to go to the original 
 sources for himself, he will be fortunate if he escapes an 
 
 1 [The Quarterly Journal of Economics, July 1896.]
 
 168 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 occasional sly thrust from historian and lawyer for venturing 
 beyond his last. His lot, therefore, is not altogether a happy 
 one. 
 
 Eeflections such as these will have occurred to economists 
 who have looked of late into the subject of mediasval town 
 history. That the towns of the Middle Ages were the 
 homes, and the only homes, of trade and manufactures ; that 
 their rise meant the appearance of forces other than, and in 
 large measure hostile to, those of agrarian feudalism ; that 
 their prosperity contributed more than any other cause to 
 the creation of the modern State and the modern conception 
 of citizenship all these are causes enough why their history 
 should be of interest. What mediaeval town life was, when 
 fully developed, let us say in the fifteenth century, is very 
 evident. But how did it begin ? Whence did the towns 
 acquire their characteristic constitution, their characteristic 
 population? And be it remarked that these two latter 
 questions cannot, save provisionally, be kept apart. Con- 
 stitutions working constitutions, that is, not paper ones 
 imply corresponding social conditions. Social conditions 
 vitally affect constitutions. The problem is one which in- 
 cludes constitution and conditions ; as Hiillmann long ago 
 realised when he took ' Stadtewesew' for his theme. 1 
 
 Yet it needs but a glance into contemporary historical 
 literature to discover that there is at present hardly any sub- 
 ject that occasions more animated controversy or on which 
 competent scholars are still so far from agreement. The 
 purpose of this article is to set forth, as impartially as may 
 be, the present state of the discussion. Some observations 
 will perhaps suggest themselves in the course of the exposi- 
 tion ; but it is neither my intention to add one more to the 
 many theories that are before the public, nor to judge them 
 all from the standpoint of any one of the rival systems. 
 
 1 Karl Dietrich Hiillmann, St&dtewesen des Mitteldlters, 4 vols. 
 (Bonn, 1826-30). The example has in these later days been followed by 
 Eudolph Sohm (Die Entstehung des deutschen Sttidtewesens, Leipzig, 
 1890), who observes that 'die wirtschaftliche Entwickelung steht mit 
 der rechtlichen in untrennbarer Wechselbeziehung.'
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 169 
 
 The reader may be spared any long account of the 
 older ' literature ' of the subject ; partly because I can claim 
 but an imperfect acquaintance with it, partly because an 
 admirably clear and fascinating statement has been recently 
 given by M. Pirenne, in the first of the series of articles from 
 his pen to which I propose to call attention. It may be said, 
 in brief, that among German scholars, and with reference 
 especially to German towns though with a side glance 
 now and again at other countries four views as to the 
 origin of the municipal constitution have long struggled for 
 the mastery. There have been those who assigned primary 
 importance to the free element in the early urban population. 
 Thus Arnold, in 1854, 1 explained the constitutional history 
 of the ' free cities ' of the Ehine by supposing the gradual 
 amalgamation of the unfree households of the Rhenish 
 bishops, over which they exercised a domanial (or manorial) 
 jurisdiction, with a free town population, subject only to 
 the jurisdiction of the public courts. These latter fell, he 
 maintained, under the control of the bishops in consequence 
 of the transfer to them by imperial grants of the right of 
 holding the public courts the so-called ' Ottoman privileges.' 
 The result, however, of this association of dissimilar elements 
 under one headship was that the free ultimately predomi- 
 nated over the servile ; and, by the time the different classes 
 had grown into a united burgess-body, the manorial juris- 
 diction had altogether given way to that of the public courts. 
 Others, on the contrary, have seen everywhere a spontaneous 
 development out of servile conditions. Thus Nitzsch, in 
 1859, 2 pictured town life as beginning in great seigneurial 
 establishments, with hundreds of dependents (minister idles), 
 serving their lords in various capacities, who gradually threw 
 aside the restrictions by which they were encumbered, and 
 so converted manorial institutions into municipal ones. 
 There were, in the third place, those, though few in number, 
 
 1 Wilhelm Arnold, Verfassungsgeschichte der deutschen Freistadte, 
 2 vols. (Gotha). 
 
 2 Karl Wilhelm Nitzsch, Ministerialittit und Bilrgerthum im 11. 
 und 12. Jahrhundert (Leipzig). [On Nitzsch, cf. infra, p. 242.]
 
 170 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 who followed von Maurer from 1854 onward, 1 in regarding 
 the mediaeval town as but an outgrowth of an original free 
 mark-community. And, finally, there were some who laid 
 all emphasis on free association as the real source of the 
 later municipal system. With the shape first given to this 
 idea by Wilda in 1831, 2 who traced the civic constitution to 
 the formation of a ' gild ' eo nomine, none remained altogether 
 content. But the wider formulation of Gierke, 3 who insisted 
 only on some sort of conscious combination the one with the 
 other of individuals and groups previously unconnected save 
 by propinquity, commended itself to not a few ; especially 
 as Gierke thought he could still leave room for the action of 
 most of the other forces dwelt upon by previous writers, 
 and so was able to give his version of town history an all- 
 inclusive air which many found attractive. Thus Wilhelm 
 Koscher, who, though not an original investigator of things 
 mediaeval, had a very wide acquaintance with the modern 
 literature of the subject, wrote in 1881 : 
 
 Primitive field- and mark-communities, the seigneurial organi- 
 sation (Hofverfassung) of the dependents of great ecclesiastical 
 and secular lords, the constitution of the public courts with their 
 ScJioffen all these were roots of the town system. From the 
 first two came its communal side : the third gave the town its 
 public character. The new and creative force, however, which 
 produced the amalgamation of all these elements, was the principle 
 of free union (Eimvng) for permitted objects. . . . Wherever, 
 within the same walls, a royal or episcopal subject-community 
 (Hofgemeinde) dwelt side by side with the remnant of a free 
 community, and the most important members of both were united 
 in one body by the additional bond of a free union, there first could 
 
 1 Georg von Maurer's Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, 
 Dor/- und Stadtverfassung (Erlangen), states in brief the conclusions for 
 town history which he supported later by an overwhelming mass of 
 citations in his Geschichte der Stadteverfassung in Deutschland, 4 vols. 
 (Erlangen, 1869-71). 
 
 2 W. E. Wilda, Das Gildenwesen im Mittelalter (Halle). 
 
 * Otto Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, 3 vols. (Berlin, 
 1868-81).
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 171 
 
 a burgess-body come into existence, such as was the result of the 
 creation of a common law for all the town's inhabitants. 
 
 And, in a note, after mentioning von Maurer, Nitzsch, and 
 Arnold, Koscher added, ' The merit of having united these 
 various one-sided theories in an accurate view of the whole 
 belongs to Gierke.' l 
 
 Eoscher was apparently unaware that the school of 
 Wilda and Gierke had just found an ally in an unexpected 
 quarter, in the person of Nitzsch himself. In a couple of 
 papers read before the Berlin Academy in 1879 and 1880, 2 
 just before his death, Nitzsch had pictured every Low- 
 German town as dominated, during the period of struggle 
 for municipal self-government, by a great merchant gild, 
 containing, at first, all who had any occasion to buy or sell. 
 Nitzsch died before he had explained the relation which 
 existed in his own mind between his earlier and his later 
 writings. He probably did not suppose himself to be sur- 
 rendering any part of his former teaching : the comparatively 
 new towns of the north might well have had a different 
 history from that of the older cities on the Ehine. But his 
 example commended as it was by his great reputation, 
 especially among economists, who found something pecu- 
 liarly congenial in his method of approaching history 
 very naturally led to the discovery of gilds in all directions, 
 and a fresh readiness to connect them with the beginnings of 
 municipal government. 
 
 Meanwhile a certain affability has held back French 
 historical scholars as it holds back French scholars in other 
 fields of study from that sharp formulation of antitheses 
 that pleases their German confreres ; and partly for this 
 reason, partly because of the smaller number of historical 
 specialists, there has been nothing like the same diversity of 
 opinion among them as to the early history of French towns. 
 Putting on one side the theory of the survival of Eoman 
 
 1 Nationaldkonomik des Handels und Gewerbfleisses, 6th ed., 3, 
 pp. 12 and 14. 
 
 2 Ueber die niederdeutschen Genossenschaften des 12. und 13. 
 Jahrhunderten, and Ueber niederdeutsche Kaufgilden.
 
 172 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 municipal institutions, which although it had a great 
 attraction for the earlier writers and has even lately been 
 maintained by so considerable a scholar as Glasson l seems 
 to have scarcely affected the view taken of the Middle Ages 
 proper, French historical speculation has continued to follow 
 the direction given it some sixty years ago by Thierry. 
 This, at any rate, is the case so far as the communes of 
 northern France are concerned ; and these have, from the 
 first, drawn to themselves the special attention of French 
 investigators. Thierry's view may be described as a French 
 counterpart to that of Wilda ; and it has undergone modifi- 
 cations not unlike those which Wilda's teaching has received 
 at the hands of Gierke. The word ' gild ' has dropped into 
 the background. It is realised, also, that the communal 
 movement was hardly so ' democratic ' as was once supposed, 
 and that it made up by no means the whole of the town 
 history even of northern France. Nevertheless, a view sub- 
 stantially similar to that of Thierry has been maintained 
 quite lately by Giry, the author of two most important 
 monographs (on the history of Saint-Omer and Saint- 
 Quentin 2 ), and the inspirer of many more, and by Luchaire, 
 the most eminent of the historians of the Capetian centuries. 
 The extreme caution of M. Luchaire in certain directions, as 
 exemplified in his ' Communes Franaises ' (1890), adds but 
 the more weight to his judgment. The question of ' origins ' 
 he regards as ' insoluble.' 3 There is a complete hiatus in 
 our documents, apparently never to be filled up, between the 
 seventh century and the eleventh. Nevertheless, he has no 
 doubt that ' the creative element of the commune,' that 
 which produced the mediaeval town, with its distinctive 
 government and separate jurisdiction, out of ' collections of 
 traders and artisans, all of more or less servile condition,' 4 
 was ' the association of inhabitants formed under the guaran- 
 
 1 See hereon M. Flach's chapter on ' Les Theories Gen6rales ' in his 
 Origines de VAncienne France, ii. 215 and 216, n. 3. 
 
 * Histoire de la Ville de Saint-Omer (Paris, 1877) and Etude sur les 
 Origines de la Commune de Saint-Quentin (Saint-Quentin, 1887). 
 
 3 Communes Frangaises, p. 11. 4 Ibid. p. 29.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 173 
 
 tee of a mutual oath ' l an association which succeeded in 
 obtaining from the lord of the town, by violence or negotia- 
 tion, the franchises it was formed to secure. He goes 
 further: he recognises a 'community' a sense of joint 
 interests and the practice of acting together ' before the 
 commune.' How this was organised, what were its relations 
 to serfdom, whether the common lands of such communities 
 were owned, or merely used, in common again he will not 
 venture to say. Here reigns an obscurity ' which will doubt- 
 less remain impenetrable.' 2 Nevertheless, he believes that 
 among the members of this body, slowly becoming aware 
 of its community of interests, there often grew up partial 
 societies, mercantile and religious gilds and fraternities ; and 
 that these 'partial associations became the germ and the 
 prototype of the general federation ' 3 which constituted the 
 commune. In some, indeed, and these important cases, 
 ' the merchant association ' was itself ' directly transformed 
 into the municipal ; ' and the commune and the gild merchant 
 were in such places for some time identical. 4 
 
 II 
 
 There were thus, in Germany and in France, theories 
 enough and to spare. But the period of the seventies and 
 the eighties was, in both countries, a period of town mono- 
 graphs rather than of general views. The new period of ani- 
 mated discussion in the midst of which we now live was 
 opened by a series of remarkable articles and pamphlets by 
 Georg von Below (first of Konigsberg and afterwards of 
 Munster), beginning in 1887. 5 With extraordinary clearness, 
 
 1 Communes Frangaises, p. 26. 2 Ibid. p. 38. 
 
 * Ibid. p. 26. Ibid. p. 32. 
 
 5 Of these the most important are two articles 'Zur Entstehung der 
 deutschen Stadtverfassung ' in the nistorische Zeitschrift, Iviii., lix. ; Die 
 Entstehung der deutschen Stadtgemeinde (Diisseldorf, 1889) ; and Der 
 Ursprung der deutscJten Stadtverfassung (Diisseldorf, 1892). [For a more 
 detailed account of von Below's writings, see infra, p. 219.]
 
 174 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 vehemence, and occasional scurrility, von Below urged that 
 the only satisfactory explanation of early German town 
 history was, after all, to be found in the theory of von 
 Maurer a theory, as he remarks, now ' almost under the 
 ban.' 1 He makes, indeed, a change of more significance 
 than he realises in his method of formulating it. Without 
 indicating any dissatisfaction with ' the mark theory ' itself, 
 von Below prefers to start with the village as we actually 
 find it in the Middle Ages proper, and to leave untouched the 
 question of the historical relation of the village to its lord. 2 
 Instead of a Markgenossenschaft he prefers to speak of a 
 BauerscJiaft, a peasant group, or, more commonly, of a 
 Landgemeinde, a term untranslatable, but which we may 
 render by ' rural township,' or ' rural commune ' in the 
 modern French sense of the word ' commune.' The German 
 town-community is, he declares, the daughter of a country 
 commune ; the town magistracy and municipal organisation 
 but developments, with amplified functions, from the old 
 village magistracy and organisation. He grants that the 
 town was more than the village, and he allows that it was 
 the growth of trade which brought about the change ; but he 
 maintains that there was never any breach in the continuity 
 of institutions, and that the later town government was a 
 natural growth from germs present from the first in the 
 rural township : it owed nothing fundamental to the public 
 courts of the hundred, or to seigneurial establishments, or to 
 mercantile gilds. 
 
 In Germany the result of von Below's appearance in the 
 field was amusingly unexpected, and very different from 
 what von Below himself anticipated. In 1890 came forth a 
 little pamphlet of a hundred pages, bearing the honoured 
 name of Eudolph Sohm, 3 which changed the whole situation. 
 He began by attributing to von Below the merit of raising 
 anew fundamental questions. He went further, and credited 
 
 1 Stadtgemeinde, p. 1. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 3, n. 2 ; Stadtverfassung, p. 23, n. 1. 
 
 * Die Entstehung des deutschen Stadtewesens : eine Festschrift 
 (Leipzig).
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OP TOWN LIFE 175 
 
 him with having absolutely disproved both the seigneurial 
 view of Nitzsch and the Ottonian-privileges view of Arnold. 
 But on the ground thus cleared he refused to build in the 
 manner of von Maurer. With von Below's positive views, 
 he asserts, it is impossible to agree. On the contrary, he 
 turns into an altogether different path, suggested by two 
 contemporary historical essays, to which he now called 
 particular attention. Schroder's papers on the Weichbild 
 a mediaeval term for a town and its constitution, which 
 Schroder explained as originally meaning 'town emblem,' 
 and identified with the market-cross had 'proved the 
 identity of market-law and town-law, of market-court and 
 town-court." 1 Another scholar, Schulte, with the aid of a 
 hitherto unprinted charter of Kadolfzell of the year 1100, 
 had demonstrated the truth of this proposition in particular 
 cases and had further made it clear that ' town-law grew out 
 of market-law.' 2 Other factors may have contributed to the 
 result ; but the decisive factor was the market with its law. 
 ' Within the merchant class differences of birth disappeared ; 
 and out of this market-community, which knew only of dif- 
 ferences of occupation and wealth, arose the town adminis- 
 tration, the original model of our modern national adminis- 
 tration.' But now what was the market-law? It was 
 originally, and in the main, a code of heavier penalties for 
 breach of the peace than were inflicted elsewhere. In the 
 language of the period, it was a special ' peace.' And this 
 special peace Sohm goes on to explain (and this is his own 
 contribution) as constructively the peace of the king's house 
 or fortified residence, his Burg, Such a peace was, we 
 know, maintained in the king's house in Prankish times. 
 And in after-ages, Sohm maintains, whether a place was 
 fortified or not, the grant of Burgrecht or Weichbildrecht 
 meant the recognition of it as a place specially subject to the 
 king, and therefore under his special protection, the contempt 
 of which involved peculiarly heavy penalties. Such an ex- 
 ceptional position necessarily involved the creation of a 
 special tribunal ; and hence the market-court. 
 
 1 Entstehung, p. 14. * Ibid. p. 15
 
 176 MEDIEVAL UKBAN 
 
 The effect of Sohm's book has, however, not been so 
 much to secure acceptance for this particular explanation of 
 the genesis of market-law, 1 as to commend, with all the weight 
 of his authority, the general view that it was out of market- 
 privileges, in some way or other, that town government pro- 
 ceeded. In spite of the forcible arguments of von Below, 2 
 the market-theory has since been very widely welcomed, 
 especially by jurists. 
 
 Sohm had spoken in general terms of Kaufmannschaft 
 (body of merchants) and MarJctgemeinde (market-com- 
 munity). It wanted but little to suggest to subsequent 
 writers a connection between this body and the merchant- 
 gild which had played so considerable a part in earlier 
 discussions. But just at this time appeared the treatises 
 of Hegel and Gross, which were at once pretty generally 
 acknowledged as decisive on one of the most important 
 of the old issues. Gross's ' Gild Merchant ' 3 is limited in 
 its scope to England. But England had been often re- 
 garded as the peculiar home of gilds. It had furnished 
 some of the most frequently quoted evidence for a direct 
 influence of the gild on the civic constitution. Accordingly, 
 the apparent demonstration that the gild and the burgess- 
 body were always distinct, and that the gild merchant had 
 no influence on the origin of the municipal constitution in 
 England, could not fail to react on German opinion as to 
 German towns. "This was all the more likely to be the case, 
 since his results agreed in the main with those simultaneously 
 reached by Hegel, 4 after an investigation covering the whole 
 
 1 Sohm adduces, as it seems to me, no evidence at all for the alleged 
 connection between the Weichbild and the idea of the king's perpetual 
 presence. Cf. my brief notice of the Entstehung in the English His- 
 torical Review, vii. 340. 
 
 2 Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung, passim, and especially 
 p. 11 seq. 
 
 3 Charles Gross, The Gild Merchant : a Contribution to British 
 Municipal History, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1890). [See also hereon, infra, p. 213.] 
 
 4 Karl Hegel, Stadte und Gilden des germanischen Vb'lker im 
 Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1891). For a fuller account of Hegel's 
 substantial treatise, see my review in the Economic Journal, iii. 684.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OP TOWN LIFE 177 
 
 range of the Teutonic and Scandinavian world. Hegel took 
 occasion, it may be noticed, to oppose the most complete 
 denial to Nitzsch's theory as to the evolution of the craft 
 gilds out of an original all-embracing merchant gild. 
 
 Into the minutiae of the discussion which was imme- 
 diately excited by these writings of von Below and Sohm, 
 of Hegel and Gross, it would be wearisome to enter. In- 
 numerable have been the essays that have appeared dealing 
 with some particular point, such as Weichbild or burgage- 
 tenure, or the regulation of weights and measures, or with 
 the history of particular towns or groups of towns. 1 What 
 will interest us more are the attempts which, after three 
 or four years of such discussion, certain scholars are now 
 making to take a survey of the whole field, and once more 
 to set about a work of construction which shall assign to 
 each element its proper place in the completed structure. 
 Four such attempts stand out from the rest for the distinc- 
 tion of their authors or the thoroughness of the performance ; 
 and this article will be mainly occupied with a statement 
 and comparison of their conclusions. They are, arranged 
 in order of time : (1) the section on ' La Commune Urbaine ' 
 in M. Jacques Flach's ' Origines de 1'Ancienne France ; ' 2 
 (2) three articles ' Zur Entstehung der deutschen Stadtver- 
 fassung,' by Dr. Willi Varges, in Conrad's ' Jahrbucher fur 
 Nationalokonomie ; ' 3 (3) three articles on ' L'Origine des 
 Constitutions Urbaines au Moyen Age,' by M. H. Pirenne, 
 in the ' Eevue Historique ; ' 4 and (4) ' Untersuchungen iiber 
 den Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung,' by Dr. F. 
 Keutgen. 5 Of these, M. Flach concerns himself only with 
 
 1 Long lists will be found in several places ; e.g. at the beginning of 
 Varges's articles, to be shortly referred to, and injBiehard Schroder's 
 Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (2nd ed.), p. 600. 
 
 2 Vol. ii., 1893. The subject occupies 213 pages, or, with the 
 chapters on la sauvete which precede, 254 pages. 
 
 * In the parts for August 31, 1893 ; December 22, 1894 ; and 
 April 30, 1895 in all, 156 pages. 
 
 4 In the parts for September 1893 and January and March 1895 
 in all, 109 pages. 
 
 5 Leipzig, 1895, 236 pages. 
 
 N
 
 178 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 France ; but he recognises that ' the points of comparison 
 and contact, especially in the east of France, between the 
 development of municipal government in France and 
 Germany are so numerous ' that a French scholar cannot 
 afford to disregard what has been done elsewhere. And, 
 as his preliminary survey of ' general theories ' shows, he 
 writes with a constant recollection of German doctrines. 
 Dr. Varges and Dr. Keutgen limit their range to Germany ; 
 and the latter declares that this limitation is one of principle 
 as well as of convenience, on account of the essential dif- 
 ference between the course of affairs in German and Eomance 
 lands. 1 M. Pirenne alone seeks to include both France and 
 Germany in one view, and justifies this procedure by con- 
 siderations capable of even wider application than he himself 
 makes of them. 2 
 
 Ill 
 
 M. Flach divides French towns into two classes : the 
 ' ancient ' or ' old ' cities, or, more strictly, those arising from 
 
 1 ' Man mag einzelne Erscheinungen zum Vergleich heranziehen, 
 aber eine so vollkommene Gleichheit auch durch das frankische Eecht 
 auf einem Teile des deutschen und des franzosischen Gebiets hergestellt 
 worden sein mag, so ware es doch verfehlt, fur die Verfassungsgeschichte 
 diesen Bezirk als Einheit zu nehmen. . . . Im allgemeinen 1st daran 
 festzuhalten, dass die Ausgangspunkte fur die Verfassung auf deutschem 
 und auf romanischem Gebiete wesentlich verschiedene waren. Und 
 trotz aller Parallelen die sieh ziehen liessen, hat sich diese Verschieden- 
 heit spater bewahrt ' (p. 7). 
 
 2 ' Le probleme a ete generalement envisage a un point de vue trop 
 etroitement national. Si, comme la feodalit6 ou le socialisme con- 
 temporain, les villes du moyen age sont avant tout le produit de certaines 
 causes economiques et sociales, il faut, ce semble, les etudier sans tenir 
 compte des frontieres politiques. De me'me qu'on ne distingue pas une 
 feodalit6 franchise et une f6odalit< allemande, de me'me aussi il n'y a 
 pas lieu d'etablir une ligne de demarcation entre les villes allemandes et 
 les villes francaises. . . . Les causes profondes des origines du mouve- 
 ment sont les memes dans les deux parties de la Francia. Dans les 
 bassins de la Seine et du Khin, 1'organisation primitive des villes 
 presente les memes caracteres essentiels.' Revue Historique, liii. 82.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 179 
 
 ' a regeneration and remoulding ' of ancient (Eoman) cities ; 
 and the ' new ' towns, which owed their birth entirely to the 
 Middle Ages. 1 And first as to the former of these two 
 classes. No mistake can be greater, he thinks, than to 
 suppose that the Gallo-Eoman cities in passing through the 
 mediaeval centuries underwent nothing but a slow and 
 gradual modification of their peculiar institutions. All of 
 them were wellnigh ruined by the barbarian invasions and 
 the wars that followed : and, to retain any fragment of their 
 old civic life, their inhabitants were compelled to gather 
 more closely together, and to fortify, with the de'bris of old 
 walls lying round on every side, a small portion of what 
 had once been the city area. This contracted and recon- 
 structed fragment of the old Eoman city was the castrum or 
 civitas (cite) of our early mediaeval documents. Within it, upon 
 rising ground, or with its back upon the city wall, commonly 
 rose a citadel, a castellum, arx, maxima turns, chateau, or 
 castrum (in a narrower sense of the term) ; and outside it, 
 grew up by degrees, in the eleventh century and afterwards, 
 one or more bourgs, usually around some religious house. 
 ' The unity of the ancient city was broken, and with it all 
 real continuity. The later town was not the natural 
 descendant of the old city. It could not come into existence 
 until a new unification had taken place ; and until groups of 
 population hitherto different in character and merely juxta- 
 posed ' (i.e. those of the chateau, the cite, and the bourgs) 
 ' were blended and assimilated as the result of being enclosed 
 within the same walls.' 2 
 
 1 This distinction between ' les villes antiques ' (p. 301), or ' les 
 vieilles cites ' (p. 304), and 'les villes nouvelles ' is not always kept in 
 the forefront ; but it dominates M. Flach's whole argument. 
 
 2 In Book III. ch. iii. M. Flach lays down the general proposition 
 as to ' la distinction entre la cite, le bourg et le chateau ' (p. 250) ; and 
 in ch. iv. he supports it by the instances set forth at length of Eouen, 
 Tours, Bourges, Nevers, Perigueux, Albi, Toulouse, Beziers, Nimes, 
 Montpellier, Narbonne, and Carcassonne. Cf. Mistral's Dictionnaire 
 Prwenqal-Franqais, s.v. Bourg : ' La plupart des villes du Midi, Aries, 
 Digue, Castellane, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Toulouse, Bodez, etc., se 
 divisaient au moyen age en deux parties, la cttuta et lou bourg. La 
 
 N 2
 
 180 MEDLEVAL UBBAN 
 
 But in the eleventh century this unity had still to be 
 created ; and meantime the physical severance of the various 
 parts of what, by anticipation, we may call the 'town,' 
 was paralleled and surpassed by the partition of authority 
 over its inhabitants. The Frankish policy of exercising public 
 authority by means of comites, or counts ; the Carlovingian 
 policy of relying upon and favouring the bishops ; the ten- 
 dency for public offices to become fiefs ; the necessity under 
 which the bishops lay of securing the assistance of advocati, 
 avou6s, Vogte ; the grant of ecclesiastical and lay immunities ; 
 the practice among the great lords of appointing represen- 
 tatives to exercise their authority (vicedomini, vidames) ; 
 the almost endless delegation, reservation, and subdivision 
 of rights both of property and of jurisdiction all these 
 led to an extreme fractionnement of authority, and brought 
 it about that, while most towns had certain large features in 
 common, the details of their government differed in almost 
 endless variety. Thus at Amiens there existed, side by side, 
 a count and a bishop, a vidame and a vicomte, a chdtelain 
 and an avou6. To make the confusion worse, most of these 
 had their own executive officers the vicarii or viguiers, the 
 prepositi or prtvdts, and the like, one or more. The juris- 
 diction exercised by these various seigneurs and officials was, 
 in theory, clearly distinguishable as either public or private ; 
 but, in practice, the line was not easy to draw. Most great 
 lords exercised at the same time a jurisdiction in its origin 
 private, and a jurisdiction in its origin public over different 
 persons, or over the same persons in different capacities. 
 In many towns there were, in addition, a number of little 
 fortresses inhabited by knights or even by wealthy mer- 
 chants, each claiming all the jurisdiction he could get over 
 his handful of retainers or tenants. In these respects there 
 is no conspicuous difference between Prance and Western 
 Germany; and any attempt to draw a sharp contrast as 
 
 cituta, la cite, etait 1'ancienne ville, generalement entouree de murs ; 
 le bourg, forme de maisons elevees peu & peu en dehors de Penceinte, 
 etait separe de la cite par un certain espace ; tandis que la bourgado 
 (faubourg) etait attenante aux murs.'
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 181 
 
 that in France the secular authority of the bishops rested 
 on immunities, while on the Ehine it rested on grants of 
 county jurisdiction is defeated by the evidence. 1 
 
 So much for ' the old towns.' As they grew up around 
 the cit&, so most of ' the new towns ' grew up around a 
 castle or a religious house. The castle brought people 
 together in various ways. Homes were needed for its 
 soldiers' families, and for the artisans who supplied their 
 wants. The castle chapel served as a parish church. The 
 market, which the lord's interest in cheap provisions led him 
 to establish, attracted traders ; and the walls gave protection 
 to refugees from justice or tyranny. That such agglomera- 
 tions frequently became towns is shown by the number of 
 town names partially composed of such words as chdteau, 
 chdtel, chatillon, fert6, roche, &c. In such towns authority 
 was more likely to be held in a single hand than in the old 
 cities ; though it was common enough for one or more 
 ecclesiastical bourgs to grow up outside. 
 
 Monasteries and cathedrals still more frequently served 
 as nuclei for town-formation. Their walls were almost as 
 sure a protection as those of a castle. They needed an 
 equally large body of servants, though some of them were 
 of a different kind. To such as gained a fame for miracle- 
 working relics, first pilgrims came, then traders, then artisans 
 just as to a famous shrine to-day. Very commonly the 
 close enjoyed the right of asylum. Sometimes the right 
 was extended to an area large enough to contain a whole 
 bourg ' a sauvet6, properly so called ; ' and, where that was 
 the case, there was likely to be a continual influx of the 
 distressed and the ruffianly. 
 
 M. Flach is the first writer, so far as I know, to assign 
 to the sauvetd (salvitas, salva terra) equivalent apparently 
 to the English sanctuary 2 a part in the creation of the 
 mediaeval city constitution. For his view, set forth at 
 
 1 Origines de I'ancienne France, ii. 281-285. On the identity of the 
 chdtelain and Burggraf, see ibid. p. 294. 
 
 4 As in the cases of Hexham, Eipon, Beverley, Durham, Beaulieu, 
 Westminster, and St. Martin's-le-Grand in London.
 
 182 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 length, we must turn to earlier chapters of the book. 
 He there seeks to show how the sanctuary originated in 
 religious reverence ; how it received the recognition of the 
 secular authorities by a distinct surrender of their juris- 
 diction ; and how complete immunity from external claims 
 was balanced by complete subjection to the sanctuary's lord. 
 The relation between sanctuary and town is illustrated by 
 Chapelle Aude in Berry. In 1058 a local seigneur gave 
 certain lands and dues there to the great abbey of St. Denis. 
 Thereupon a priory was founded ; but, to obtain a popula- 
 tion for the town the monks wished to create, a sauveU had 
 to be established. Four wooden crosses were set up at the 
 corners of a tract of land large enough to hold a bourg (and 
 including something more than the lands which had become 
 the property of the abbey) ; and King Philip I., with the 
 assent of his lords, granted to the tract so marked out 
 complete freedom from external jurisdiction, from toll, and 
 from military service. Fortunately, we possess a charter 
 granted in the year 1073 by the prior to what were already 
 called the ' burgenses ' of the ' villa,' from which we learn 
 that the charges levied upon the inhabitants in return for the 
 advantages thus bestowed were already fixed by mutual 
 understanding. This charter reveals, moreover, the germs 
 of a communal militia in the article which binds every 
 burgess to march out under the prior to ward off tyran- 
 nical assaults ; as well as the idea of a communal treasury 
 in the article obliging the burgesses to maintain, at their 
 common expense, such great personages as might visit the 
 town for its common benefit. It is thus, says M. Flach, a 
 precursor of the communal charters, and it is isolated only 
 because our material is defective. 'Nothing could show 
 more clearly the position of the sauvete as an historic link 
 between the mere village group and the urban commune.' l 
 
 But the rise of new towns was not due in every case to 
 the presence of a castle or religious house. Villages occupy- 
 ing peculiarly favourable situations sometimes grew into 
 
 1 Origines, ii. 202.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 183 
 
 towns. ' Yet mere increase in size was not sufficient to 
 transform them into towns. For that it needed the conjunc- 
 tion of several propitious circumstances. In my opinion, 
 three principal elements distinguish towns from villages : a 
 material protection, resulting from the presence of con- 
 siderable fortifications ; a religious protection, secured by the 
 residence of a bishop, the presence of a church possessing 
 venerated relics or of a monastery belonging to a powerful 
 order ; and commercial activity, shown by the holding of at 
 least a weekly market.' l The absence of any one of these 
 three might suffice to balk the fairest hopes. M. Flach 
 cannot agree with those as, for instance, Hegel who 
 believe that mere fortification by wall and rampart was not 
 essential to a town's being ; that the vital element was the 
 possession of a court of its own (ein eximiertes Stadtgericht). 
 The ' ancient ' towns survived, though they enjoyed no such 
 franchise; and, on the other hand, many places that had 
 received that franchise never succeeded in really becoming 
 towns. 
 
 The earliest transformations of villages into towns go 
 back, as in the case of Bruges, to the invasions of the ninth 
 and tenth centuries, and the building of walls which these 
 occasioned. Oppidum itself commonly meant such a fortified 
 place ; and to fortify a village and ' erect an oppidum ' were 
 synonymous expressions. The new prospect of security 
 usually led in no long time to the appearance of the other 
 elements necessary to make a town ; and, as the seigneurs of 
 such villages (always subject to some lord or other) were usually 
 glad to encourage a conflux of residents for the sake alike of 
 the revenue and of the military strength they brought, they 
 were ready to assist the process by the grant of liberties 
 especially the rights of free alienation of land, and of trial in 
 all matters, civil and criminal, before town 6chevins. The 
 advantages to be derived from authority over a town were 
 so considerable that a lord would now and again set about 
 the creation of one by the proffer of large privileges to 
 
 1 Origines, ii. 329. Cf. ii. 341 : ' Les divers elements que nous 
 consid6rons comme organiques, element religieux, commercial, militaire.'
 
 184 MEDIEVAL URBAN 
 
 all comers. Such attempts illustrate the close connection 
 between the progress of municipal liberties and the self- 
 interest of the seigneurs ; but it must be added that they 
 were rare, and still more rarely successful. 
 
 Nor must the fair words of charters deceive us as to the 
 real position of affairs in all towns, whatever their origin. 
 The lord's castle at all times held the town at his mercy. 
 Arbitrary authority lay behind all his relations with the towns- 
 folk. Hence it was that the destruction of the castle was the 
 first desire of the young communes and the necessary pre- 
 requisite for any real liberation. The monastery weaker, as 
 a rule, in the arm of flesh was supported by the religious 
 sanctions it could invoke. And, whether the lords were lay 
 or clerical, the resistance of the people was weakened by 
 differences of status, by divergence of interests, by depen- 
 dence on different lords, by the tendency to make common 
 cause with one's own lord against all outsiders, and by the 
 prevalence of ' personal ' law. 
 
 Nevertheless, forces were already at work tending 
 towards unity. In a chapter on ' la formation du lien cor- 
 poratif,' M. Flach sets forth the ways in which divers 
 groups within the town acquired a sense of corporate life. 
 These groups he conceives of as the ' cellules ' out of which 
 the later municipality was to grow. Which of them should 
 serve as the nucleus for the others to gather around depended 
 altogether on their relative vitality and vigour. 
 
 There was first the link of common material interests. 
 The castrum may have inherited some fragments of the 
 communal property of the old Eoman city ; the village 
 which had grown into a town retained its old rights of 
 common. Then there was the tie created by the common 
 possession of those privileges of asylum which the townsfolk 
 frequently enjoyed. This asylum might be an extension to 
 the whole town of the special advantages of the royal 
 palace ; but cases so explicable were very exceptional, and 
 all such went back to a special grant, and were by no means 
 the offspring of a mere legal fiction (as Sohm would have it). 
 The real source of town asylum, as a rule, was the sauvete
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 185 
 
 already described. The cross was its symbol, and had 
 originally nothing to do with the market (as Sohm and others 
 maintain). On the contrary, it was the asylum which really 
 gave security to the frequenters of the market : the special 
 market-peace was limited in duration to the market hours, 
 and there is no trace of its extension. 
 
 But there were even closer bonds of union, and three 
 in particular the tie of caste, of religion, and of industry. 1 
 
 As to caste. At the head of the town population were 
 the cJievaliers, serving the lord (or lords) of the town, and 
 usually holding a fortified house within it and extensive 
 domains outside. Next to them was ' the class of free men, 
 the bourgeois proper.' They were marked out by the right 
 to answer only before magistrates appointed from among 
 themselves and representing the old public justice of pre- 
 feudal times to wit, the 6chevins; a fact not peculiar to 
 the north of the country, though that special designation 
 might be. As the number of these ' free burghers ' could be 
 added to by enfranchisement, one might suppose that it 
 would be the echevinage which would serve as a centre for 
 all the non-military (roturiere) population to attach them- 
 selves to. But such an outcome was rare. Usually the 
 burghers (or the richer among them) and the chevaliers drew 
 together, made common cause, and monopolised the town 
 magistracy an alliance facilitated by the position of the 
 intermediate class of minister -idles. When the communal 
 movement began, it was this urban patriciate which placed 
 itself at the head, and reaped the harvest. 
 
 Among the lower people the minores, pkbs, vulgus the 
 most effective bond of union was the parish. The parish 
 created local groups, with a strong corporate sense, out of 
 disconnected dependents of rival lords. And within the 
 parishes grew up the even closer associations of religious 
 gilds, fraternities, ' charities," with mutual assistance for the 
 redress of wrong and the support of the unfortunate, and 
 common obedience to chosen officers. Analogous results were 
 reached by the merchant and craft gilds. All these frater- 
 1 Origines, ii. 368.
 
 186 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 nities, professional and non-professional, may be regarded as 
 going back to three sources Koman (for M. Flach thinks it 
 probable that the tradition of the Eoman collegia never 
 wholly died out), Germanic (marked especially by the mutual 
 oath), and Christian. 
 
 Various corporate groups had thus come into existence. 
 Here a patrician, there a plebeian, association showed most 
 vigour ; and, when the moment came, this association put 
 itself forward, gathered around itself the rest of the popula- 
 tion, impressed upon it its own stamp of a sworn brotherhood, 
 and, lo ! the sworn ' commune.' The token of their success 
 was the acquisition of a charter, by force or by bargain ; and 
 this charter, conferring as it did rights on the whole body of 
 inhabitants, gave them new and strong common interests. 
 Not that they had never possessed any common interests 
 before. M. Flach repeats that the sauvete and the immunite 
 had sometimes served this purpose. In other cases the 
 parochial machinery was strong enough to serve the purposes 
 of municipal administration. 
 
 Where there were no such institutions or none strong 
 enough, the preliminary task of binding together the town 
 population might be accomplished by an institution de paix 
 a voluntary union for the maintenance of the peace or by 
 an amitie or general association of townsmen. But, what- 
 ever unifying forces had previously been at work, it was 
 the sworn confederation of diverse social elements which 
 formed the really original feature in the new communes. 
 The violence of the communal movement in the north of 
 France was the consequence of race temperament reacting 
 against a harsh seigneurial rule. The comparative quiet- 
 ness of a transition substantially similar to it in the south 
 may be explained by a gentler rule over a milder people. 
 The general results, however, were much the same. The 
 divergencies in detail, indeed, between the several con- 
 stitutions were so great, and the number of possible com- 
 binations of particular features so large, that it is very 
 difficult to classify them. Still, the town charters may be 
 roughly arranged in three groups : (1) those granted to
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 187 
 
 sworn communes, whose main significance lay in the recog- 
 nition of an already existing ' urban association ; ' (2) the 
 charters of customs, regulating the obligations of the inhabi- 
 tants towards the lord, with little reference to municipal 
 organisation ; and (3) the charters of franchise, based 
 indirectly on sauvetts, directly on institutions de paix and 
 brotherhoods, and settling at the same time the form of 
 government and the amount of dues. 
 
 As this outline of M. Flach's chapters may have shown, 
 the lucidity which marks the earlier stages of the exposition 
 is hardly maintained in the later. It becomes not in- 
 frequently difficult to discern M. Flach's real meaning ; and 
 I cannot be at all sure that I have not misrepresented him. 
 As he proceeds, he loses control of his material ; until in the 
 last three chapters the several factors of the town constitution 
 not only fail to be put into any distinctly intelligible relation 
 to one another, they are hardly even disentangled. The final 
 impression of the communal movement which he creates 
 seems to be not at all unlike that already traditional with 
 French writers, and stated but shortly before by M. Luchaire. 
 The agreement between M. Flach and M. Luchaire is es- 
 pecially close in regard to the relation of the fraternities 
 and gilds to the sworn commune : what with the latter are 
 ' germs,' constituting ' a community before the commune,' 
 are with the former 'cellules/ forming a 'lien corporatif 
 before the ' lien communal.' What we have chiefly to thank 
 M. Flach for is the attempt to picture the urban ' agglomera- 
 tion ' of the early Middle Ages, and to bridge over the gulf 
 between that and the Eoman city whose site it occupied. 
 He succeeds in making us feel how complex was the develop- 
 ment which lay at the back of the communal movement 
 itself, and the multiplicity of the factors which have to be 
 taken into account in towns of any magnitude. He certainly 
 produces in the reader and this is no small thing a frame 
 of mind indisposed to hastily accept any large and sweeping 
 theory. 
 
 On looking back over his examples one cannot fail to be
 
 188 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 struck by the fact that the ' ancient cities ' include the great 
 majority of the important towns of mediaeval France. And 
 the probability presents itself which would need to be 
 tested by a more strictly chronological arrangement of the 
 material than we find with M. Flach that the development 
 of the new towns took place under the influence of concep- 
 tions of citizenship to which the history of the older towns 
 had already given birth. 
 
 We may single out from his account of each class of 
 towns one feature as calling for special notice. With the old 
 cities it is the relation of the bourg to the cit&, and their 
 subsequent union. That the situation was as he describes it 
 seems abundantly proved for central and southern France ; 
 and there were, as we shall see, precisely analogous cases in 
 Germany and elsewhere. But the use of the term bourg 
 raises some difficult questions to which we shall return later. 1 
 
 As to the new towns, M. Flach, as before remarked, puts 
 forward what looks like a fresh view, in the importance 
 ascribed to the sauvet&. But it must be said that he does 
 not make it quite clear what the sauvete was. In one place, 
 he remarks incidentally that the sauvet6 was ' only an appli- 
 cation of the Truce of God ; ' 2 and he throughout carefully 
 distinguishes it from an immunity. 3 Yet in the examples he 
 produces the sauvett looks remarkably like an immunity ; but 
 an immunity for granting which reasons were given peculiarly 
 appropriate in the case of a religious body in times of violence. 
 And M. Flach does not make it clear that the sauveU was an 
 important factor, eo nomim, in the development of any town 
 of importance. 4 
 
 IV 
 
 Dr. Willi Varges's articles on the origin of the constitu- 
 tion of German towns, to which we turn next, differ in their 
 
 1 See infra, p. 193, n. 2. 2 Origines, ii. 391. 3 Ibid. p. 365. 
 
 4 [The most recent statement of M. Flach's views will be found in his 
 Origine Historiyue de VHabitation et des Lieux Habitts (1899), where, 
 on pp. 53-55, M. Pirenne is subjected to a just criticism.]
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 189 
 
 composition as widely as they well could from the chapters 
 of M. Flach. They make no effort after a pleasant style ; 
 the argument is arranged with the utmost formality ; each 
 paragraph opens with a proposition, and then goes on for a 
 page or more to furnish the proof. While M. Flach refers 
 only to original authorities, Dr. Varges freely employs the 
 modern literature of the subject side by side with the sources, 
 and has no hesitation in borrowing his references. His own 
 studies have apparently been directed to the North-German 
 towns, especially Brunswick ; but his conclusions are stated 
 as if valid for the whole of Germany. They are as follows : 
 
 Towns have commonly grown out of villages ; but, when 
 fully grown, they are marked off from villages by four charac- 
 teristics. Towns are fortified (befestigt) ; they enjoy a special 
 peace (befriedet) ; they possess the right of trade (Verkehrs- 
 recht : usus negotiandi, usus mercatorius, potestas mercandi, 
 mercatus), which meant much more than the privileges of 
 a market; they are corporations of public law, exempted 
 from the jurisdiction of the Gau, and possessing rights equal 
 to those of the Gau. And so the inhabitants are defenders of 
 their stronghold, their Burg, and hence burgenses, burgesses ; 
 they enjoy a higher protection than villagers ; they have the 
 right at all times to carry on trade in the town, and hence 
 are mercatores, merchants or traders ; and they form a com- 
 munity with a court of their own (bilden eine eigene Gerichts- 
 gemeinde), and live under a town-law of their own creation. 1 
 
 1. The town as a stronghold (Festung). This was at first 
 its most important characteristic : as the early use of Burg 
 for town, not replaced by Stadt till after 1100, and the terms 
 burgensis and Burger, clearly indicate. The works of 
 defence consisted of a circuit of walls (at first merely of 
 earth or timber), and usually a moat : a group of houses 
 which merely lay under or near a castle was not a town. 
 As the right to fortify was a royal prerogative (Regal), the 
 towns were originally royal fortresses. Hence the first 
 inhabitants are to be regarded as ' a standing garrison : ' not, 
 
 1 Jahrbilcher fUr Nationalolconomic, Ixi. (F. 3, B. vi.) 164.
 
 190 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 indeed, that they were professional troops they were merely 
 members of the nation to whom had clung the old obligation 
 of military service once resting on the whole people. 1 In- 
 deed, the burghers and the knights formed the two branches 
 of the new military system, now taking the place of the old : 
 the former did garrison duty, the latter served in the field. 
 And the functionary who first appears as exercising authority 
 in the town, under whatever name prafectus, Vogt, Burg- 
 graf is primarily a Constable or Captain of the Castle. 
 
 2. The town as a place enjoying a special peace 
 (Friedeort). The exceptional peace (or Banri) which pre- 
 vailed in the town, involving the punishment of criminal 
 offences committed there by exceptionally severe penalties, 
 was the king's peace ; and the Weichbild, or town emblem, 
 was its peculiar sign. And here Dr. Varges puts forward 
 what is, so far as I know, a quite original explanation of the 
 origin of the town peace ; namely, that it is nothing more 
 or less than the primitive peace of the national army 
 (Heerbannfriede), specialised for the benefit of a standing 
 garrison. Towns, he repeats, were at first essentially mili- 
 tary in their character. They were nothing but fortified 
 villages, whose inhabitants, though peasants engaged in agri- 
 culture, were subject to special military obligations, and 
 therefore enjoyed a special protection. Trade was carried on 
 only in unusually favourable situations, and then chiefly by 
 foreigners and Jews. 
 
 3. The town as a place of trade. As time went on, the 
 characteristics of the town altogether changed. The fact of 
 trade and the right to trade became all-important. The 
 
 1 Jahrbiicher fttr NationalSkonomie, Ixi. (F. 3, B. vi.), p. 175 : 
 1 In den Stadtbewohnern, den Biirgern, hat sich ein Best des alten 
 Volksheeres erhalten,' following von Maurer, i. 485, n. ' Der 
 Kriegsdienst der Burger war immer noch der alte Konigsdienst.' In 
 this connection it is usual to cite the passage of Witukind, describing 
 how Henry I. (the Fowler) selected one out of every nine of the ' agrarii 
 milites ' to dwell in the strong places (urbes) he had erected. This term 
 is very variously interpreted : by Waitz and Giesebrecht as ' konigliche 
 Ministerialen,' by Varges as ' wehrhaftige, heerpflichtige Dorfbewohner,' 
 and by Keutgen by what is the same, ' heerbannpflichtige Bauern.'
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 191 
 
 right to trade rested on a grant by the king, or other lord, of 
 the potestas mercandi or mercatus. Such grants were not 
 originally bestowed only on towns : they were sometimes 
 given to religious houses or villages. The modern terms 
 Markt, market, are doubtless derived from mercatus ; but it 
 is altogether a mistake to limit the meaning of mercatus to 
 the right to hold a market. His contention on this point is 
 Dr. Varges's most original contribution to the discussion. 
 The general right to trade, he declares, had nothing neces- 
 sarily to do with markets, which, on the contrary, interfered 
 with it ; and markets really played a very subordinate part 
 in the building-up of the town constitution. All burghers 
 settled in the town could, if they chose, take part in trade ; 
 and there was no merchant-gild monopoly. 
 
 4. The town as a community of public law. Without its 
 own court and its own law the town was not complete. 
 The appearance of the court was the consequence of the 
 growth of a peculiar town-law ; and this town-law was not the 
 outcome of a merchant-law (itself perhaps growing out of 
 a special king's law), as Sohm and others maintain, but 
 simply the common law of the country modified by new 
 economic needs, and varying widely from place to place. 
 Townsfolk had long been marked off from countryfolk by the 
 town walls, by the special peace, by the obligation of watch 
 and ward. The contrast was now heightened by the activity 
 of trade. At the same time the construction of a peculiar 
 town-law necessarily led to the establishment of a separate 
 tribunal ; and this might come about in any one of several 
 ways by the transformation of a county court (Grafschafts- 
 gericht), by the addition of authority to an assembly of 
 peasants, or by the establishment of a brand-new jurisdiction. 
 
 And now the burgher body, the Stadtgemeinde, what was 
 it ? As a rule, nothing but an enlargement and modification 
 of a Landgemeinde, a village group. The enlargement was 
 brought about in several ways, especially by the union of 
 several neighbouring Ortsgemeinde (' synoikismus '), and by 
 a stream of immigration the volume and effect of which 
 can hardly be exaggerated. An elaborate, and not very
 
 192 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 convincing, argument follows, as to the legal facility of emi- 
 gration from the rural lordships. 
 
 Burgess-rights were bound up with the possession of 
 land or house within the town. But to obtain house or land 
 was not difficult, and it was early facilitated by the institu- 
 tion of Wortzins. In most of the towns, especially the older 
 ones, the land was not the absolute property of citizens : it 
 was held of a lord, but on very beneficial terms. The hold- 
 ing was burdened only by a fixed money rent (becoming 
 nominal in course of time), and it was freely alienable and 
 heritable. 
 
 At first the craftsmen were as much citizens as the mer- 
 chants. Not till later, usually after the establishment of a 
 town council at the beginning of the thirteenth century, did the 
 larger landholders and the ' merchants ' in the modern sense 
 form a patriciate monopolising the government. In earlier 
 times mercator designated the craftsman as well as the mere 
 trader. 
 
 The foregoing abstract will have shown that, as M. Flach 
 substantially follows Luchaire and Giry, so Dr. Varges bases 
 his construction on von Below and von Maurer. The two 
 new features which call for notice are the doctrine of the 
 Burg and the doctrine of the mercatus. 
 
 As to the Burg, it will be seen, on looking up the refer- 
 ences candidly supplied by Dr. Varges, that the idea of the 
 importance of the fortifications an importance so great that 
 they furnished the chief external trait of the mediaeval town 
 had already been forcibly expressed and supported with 
 abundant learning by von Maurer. 1 Biicher, 2 and probably 
 
 1 Stadteverfassung, i. 103. 
 
 2 In a lecture given in October, 1890, entitled Die Entstehung der 
 Volkswirthschaft, and printed in the volume bearing that name in 1893, 
 p. 45 : ' Die mittelalterliche Stadt ist in erster Linie eine Burg, d.h. ein 
 mit Mauern und Graben befestigter Ort. . . . Anfangs sind die 
 dauernden Bewohner der Stadt auch hinsichtlich ihrer Beschaftigung in 
 keiner Weise von den Bewohnern der Landorte unterschieden. . . . 
 Aber ihr Gemeindeleben erschopf t sich nicht in der Eegelung der Allmend- 
 nutzung. . . . Sie sind ja sozusagen als eine stehende Besatzung in die
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 193 
 
 other writers, had described the burghers as a standing 
 garrison. What is new with Varges would seem to be the 
 consequence drawn from his garrison theory as to the 
 genesis of the town-peace. That Burg meant a place of 
 defence, that the oldest ' towns ' were in some way connected 
 with defence, we can hardly doubt. It is well known, also, 
 that in the later Middle Ages towns on the continent of 
 Europe were commonly surrounded by walls and moat. 
 But it is by no means clear to my mind that we are to think 
 of the earlier Burgen as walled towns. The ' burhs ' which 
 Edward the Elder and his sister Ethelfleda were building 
 in Mercia at the very time that Henry the Fowler was build- 
 ing his Burgen in Saxony are usually described and the 
 description seems to be justified by existing remains as 
 earthen mounds, surmounted by wooden stockades. 1 This 
 might be an equally true description of the German Burg. 
 M. Flach has shown us how, from the cluster of cabins 
 around and beneath the citadel of a lord, towns might and 
 sometimes did come into existence in France ; and there 
 seems no reason why the same should not be true of Ger- 
 many. The people defended by, and, if need were, taking 
 part in the defence of a Burg, a Burh, might naturally enough 
 be called Burgliudi (= Burgleute), or in Anglo-Saxon, 
 Buruh-waru, long before they themselves were girdled around 
 by a wall. Dr. Varges's examples of wall-construction around 
 towns all belong to a comparatively late period. 2 
 
 Burg gelegt.' This view Biicher associates with the further theory that 
 the existence of a town implied the formation of a protective association 
 (Schutzverband) among the rural settlements of a more or less consider- 
 able area around, all of whose inhabitants were bound to keep up the 
 fortifications, and take part in their defence^ In return, they had the 
 right to take refuge (zu bergen) behind the walls with wife and child, 
 cattle and goods. ' This right is called Burgrecht, and he who enjoys it 
 is a Bilrger ! ' 
 
 1 English Chronicle, s. a. 913. Hereon see Green's Conquest of 
 England, p. 198 seq. ; Boase's Oxford, p. 3. 
 
 * Writers who have dwelt on the connection of Burg with fortifica- 
 tion have not noticed the doubt cast upon it by the use of boury, clearly 
 the same word, in French. Bourg is popularly used in many parts of 
 
 O
 
 194 MEDLEVAL UEBAN 
 
 As to trade, it is certainly worth observing that in many 
 charters the right is granted in very general terms, without 
 limitation to markets or particular days. 1 Dr. Varges has 
 done well to point this out ; and the whole subject of 
 mediaeval trading usages requires fresh investigation. But 
 it may be asked whether, apart from the sale of food, trade 
 was not, as a matter of fact, usually carried on in markets 
 and fairs ; whether we can suppose that the sale of food by 
 one neighbour to another ever really required permission by 
 charter; whether the benevolence of the grant of trading 
 rights on the lord's part and the value of it to the recipient 
 did not lie in the permission it gave to levy tolls on the 
 frequenters of the market, and especially on outsiders. As 
 to the term mercatus, Dr. Varges'a attempt to free it from 
 association with the market is rendered the more difficult 
 by the fact, to which he does not refer, that in classical 
 Latinity it meant a market-place or mart (among other 
 things), and never trade in the abstract. Some of the earliest 
 
 France, especially in the centre and in Normandy, for ' toute agglomera- 
 tion d'habitations ayant un clocher, fut-elle reduite a un tres petit 
 nombre de maisons,' Jaubert, Glossaire du Centre de la France, with 
 an apt quotation from G. Sand's Valentine. The dictionary-makers, 
 however, define it as ' Gros ' (Littre ' Grand ') ' village ou 1'on tient 
 marche,' Dictionnaire de V Academic ; to which the Academy adds, 
 ' ordinairement entour6 de murailles.' The word was early connected 
 by philologers with the Greek trvpyos and the German Burg ; and this 
 raised the question whether it implied the presence of fortifications. 
 Thus the Dictionnaire de Trevoux (1743), after defining Bourg as ' ville 
 non close ; habitation de peuple qui tient le milieu entre la ville et le 
 village,' adds, ' Quelques-uns le restreignent aux lieux qui ne sont ferrnes 
 ni de murs ni de fosses. D'autres, au contraire, comme messieurs de 
 1'Academie, veulent que ce soit un gros village, ferm6 de petites 
 murailles.' Certainly, as applied to a settlement outside a cite, it sug- 
 gested the absence of walls. See above, p. 179 and n. 
 
 1 Thus in the charter to Magdeburg (A.D. 1201-38), ' Quilibet burgensis, 
 aut propriam habens aream vel domum, quarumcunque rerum venali- 
 tatem habuerit, eas in domo propria libere vendere potest, aut pro aliis 
 rebus commutare.' But it must be noticed that this is comparatively 
 late in town history. It doe3 not follow that the grant of a market may 
 not have had great importance in an earlier century.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 195 
 
 charters, also, use verbs in conjunction with mercatus, 
 which are most naturally interpreted in the more limited 
 sense. 1 Moreover, he weakens his argument by constantly 
 bracketing together Wochenmarkt and Jahrmarkt, market 
 and fair, as if their functions were much the same. The 
 fair involved, as it seems to me, a temporary suspension of 
 the economic system of the town, while the market was an 
 ordinary part of it. 
 
 The articles of M. Pirenne, next in order, combine, as we 
 might expect from a Belgian writer with a German training, 
 the merits of both German and French methods of exposi- 
 tion, like Dr. Varges, he takes pains with the arrangement 
 of his material ; but, fortunately, he also resembles M. Flach 
 in aiming at a certain elegance of presentation. 
 
 M. Pirenne begins by following M. Flach in his account 
 of the fortunes of the Eoman cities in the Dark Ages. They 
 survived, in a sense, huddled up in a corner of their old site : 
 but all the old municipal life died out. Such activity as was 
 still to be seen was usually that of some ecclesiastical esta- 
 blishment, most commonly of a bishop and his minister idles. 
 Meanwhile, in the country around, freedom had disappeared : 
 the whole land was broken up into seigneurial domains, 
 tilled by serfs of various degrees. Trade ceased : the western 
 world ' entered on the agricultural period of the Middle Ages.' 
 Town life was no longer urban : the town was now only a 
 place of ' religion,' and the centre for the administration of 
 great ecclesiastical domains. This was roughly true of all the 
 
 1 ' Mercatum erigere,' Charter to the Abbey of Quedlinburg, A.D. 993. 
 ' Licentiam construendi mercatum,' to the Archbishop of Bremen, A.D. 
 1003. ' Mercatum vero constituat publicum in illis ubicunque abbati 
 placuerit Zocis,' Charter to the Abbey of Corvey, A.D. 946. Cf. ' Mer- 
 catum constituimus in Burch, ut nulluni aliud habeatur inter Stan- 
 fordiaui et Huntendcn,' Charter of Edgar to the Abbey of Peterborough. 
 
 o2
 
 196 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 more considerable ancient towns, in spite of the facts that 
 some towns, relatively few in number, were the residence of 
 lay, and not of ecclesiastical, lords ; that a public jurisdiction 
 survived, in theory at least, by the side of manorial ; and that 
 no town altogether escaped ' the law of dispersion.' The 
 town, in its later legal sense, did not yet exist. 
 
 The great change came with the rise of trade in the 
 eleventh century, and the formation in various places of 
 groups of merchants and artisans. The idea that these men 
 were, in any important sense, brought together by the prior 
 existence at such places of any such local attraction as a 
 religious house, a castle, or a market, M. Pirenne brushes 
 aside. He declares that these aggregations were due to 
 'purely natural causes.' They are to be explained not 
 by history, but by geography. As trade grew up, points of 
 vantage were fixed upon as places of residence, precisely 
 as we see them being occupied in new countries to-day. 
 True, most of these places were upon the sites of old Koman 
 towns ; but this was only because those sites were favourably 
 situated for trade, especially such of them as were at the 
 points of intersection of old Eoman roads. A new economic 
 period opens : trade takes its place by the side of agricul- 
 ture, and 'the towns are the work of the merchants.' 1 
 
 To explain the position of affairs, M. Pirenne turns aside 
 to sketch the previous history of the merchant class. The 
 trader, as he first makes his appearance in the Carlovingian 
 age, whether man of wealth or petty peddler, is ' essentially 
 a wandering being, passing continually from place to place, 
 and both protected and exploited by the sovereign.' The 
 same is true after the restoration of order in Germany by the 
 Saxon kings. Still, wanderers as they were, they must have 
 
 1 ' Les villes sont Pceuvre des marchands ; elles n'existent que par 
 eux. Eomaines ou non-rornaines d'origine, siege d'un eveche, d'un 
 monastere, ou d'un chateau, libres ou soumises au droit domanial, elles 
 ne commencent a acquerir une constitution municipale que du jour ou, 
 a c6t6 de leur opulation primitive, vient se fixer une autre population, 
 vivant essentiellement de commerce et d'industrie.' Eevite Historique, 
 Ivii. 70.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 197 
 
 had resting-places for the winter ; not to mention homes for 
 their families a necessity which M. Pirenne overlooks. 
 Accordingly, settlements of merchants began to be seen at 
 convenient places. But as already explained, such sites were 
 already partially occupied ' by the towns of the agricultural 
 age ' ; and so now, beneath the old walls, grew up the faubourg ', 
 the Vorburg, with its trading population. The faubourg was 
 the starting-point of the town of the new era. Here was to be 
 found the market ; and the primitive burgher-body was not 
 composed of ministeriales or of emancipated serfs, but of a 
 group of settled traders. 1 The land upon which they built 
 their homes might be subject in all sorts of ways to all 
 sorts of lords : they themselves were of diverse origins and 
 of every degree of opulence. But economic forces were 
 working towards the creation of a uniform status ; and they 
 were aided by certain contemporary practices. In the first 
 place, merchants had from early times been taken under 
 royal protection, resulting, as M. Pirenne understands it, in 
 their retention beneath the jurisdiction of the public courts, 
 not, as other writers have it, in their subjection to a special 
 royal jurisdiction apart from the public courts. The right to 
 demand toll from traders was also a royal right ; and, where 
 inferior lords exercised it, it was always in virtue of a royal 
 grant. Accordingly, the traders all remained under the same 
 jurisdiction, and that a public one. Yet, as the persons who 
 exercised it were only too likely to misuse their powers, and 
 the traders as isolated immigrants were devoid of the support 
 of kindred, they were obliged to combine ; and so we account 
 for merchant gilds, hanses, charities, and like associations. 
 These associations may very well have had their first begin- 
 nings in the mutual help, the subordination to chosen leaders, 
 necessary in the bands or ' caravans ' in which during early 
 times traders were obliged to travel for the sake of security. 2 
 
 1 ' Ce faubourg, point de d6part de la ville nouvelle,' &c. ' C'est des 
 marchands que se compose la bourgeoisie primitive.' Eevue Bistoriqtie, 
 Mi. 74. 
 
 2 This idea and the not very appropriate term ' caravan ' first appear, 
 I believe, in an article by Lamprecht in the Historische Zeitschrift, 
 Ixvii. ; and they are repeated in his Deutsclie Geschichte, iii. (1893)
 
 198 MEDIAEVAL UKBAN 
 
 Then follows what we may regard as a combination of the 
 theory of Nitzsch with the traditional French view, modified 
 somewhat in deference perhaps to Hegel and Gross, though 
 scant regard has been paid to their opinion as to the non- 
 identity of merchant and burgher. The merchant gild 
 formed at first ' a vast association,' including all who had 
 anything to sell. Not till later did it become exclusive ; and 
 this was due partly to increasing wealth and the growth of a 
 spirit of monopoly among the richer members, partly to the 
 ' entire absorption of the artisan by industry ' proper (as 
 distinguished from trade). The craftsmen became wage- 
 labourers, and ceased to have any need themselves to sell 
 their produce. The gild in many towns secured a consider- 
 able jurisdiction in matters economic, and controlled the 
 market : it sometimes contributed out of its funds to common 
 town purposes. Yet it remained a voluntary society : and, 
 while it helped in the development of town institutions, it did 
 not create them. Its deacons (aldermen) did not become 
 town magistrates, nor its regulations town-law. Association 
 gave the merchants the strength required to enable them so 
 to transform old institutions as to create the town : it did not 
 furnish the mould into which the new constitution should 
 run. This is illustrated by the history of the jus mercatorum, 
 which appears in the eleventh century, and becomes one of 
 the sources of later town-law. The jus mercatorum is not 
 the handiwork of the gild, though the gild helped to spread 
 and maintain it. It is simply a modification of the old 
 common law under the pressure of the peculiar needs of 
 traders. Accordingly, it is not peculiar to any particular 
 country or town, but, in a sense, international. 
 
 Up to this point what we have seen has been the settle- 
 ment of a new group, the traders, by the side of the old 
 groups of ministeriales and serfs already to be found. The 
 
 27 seq. Thus Lamprecht lays down the proposition that ' der 
 temporaren Form der Kauffahrtgilde war die stetige der Platzgilde 
 gcfolgt.' The view is not in itself improbable ; but M. Pirenne would 
 have done well to pay more attention to von Below's amusing criticism 
 in Ursprung, p. 135 seq.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 199 
 
 next question is, How did the personal privileges of the 
 merchants become attached to the soil ? Here the key is 
 again found in economic pressure. This first made the 
 trader personally free ; then freed the soil, and created the 
 tenure known as bourgage (French), burgage (English), 
 Leihe zu Burgrecht (German) ; then gave freedom from 
 arbitrary toll in return for an annual rent paid to the lord ; 
 then brought about the establishment of a new tribunal, 
 composed of burghers, to administer the new law. But by 
 this time all the other groups living alongside of the traders 
 wished to enjoy the same advantages : and out of the chaos 
 of struggle arose, at last, the new unity, the all-embracing 
 community. What were the chief factors in this last stage 
 of its history ? 
 
 By a new road we come once more to the town-peace. 
 All are agreed that mediaeval towns, in France as in Germany, 
 were under such a special peace. But its origin M. Pirenne 
 attributes neither to the peace of God nor to the peace of the 
 market, nor to the protection enjoyed in an earlier age by 
 merchants as individuals, 1 but, as before, simply to the con- 
 straining force of new conditions. The towns were the 
 resorts of all sorts of shady characters ; and the only way to 
 secure anything like order was to establish a permanent 
 'state of siege." That is what the town-peace was an 
 exceptionally severe criminal code ; and it was the feeling of 
 the need of such a Draconian code which led the townsmen 
 to seek for the grant of a peace from their lord. The limits 
 thereof were the city wall, which now began to be every- 
 where constructed to enclose the faubourg. The space it 
 contained did not necessarily correspond to any previous 
 territorial division, public or private : it was determined by 
 economic causes alone. To secure the peace had needed a 
 common movement of the population, and an oath of mutual 
 support, a conjuratio ; union was also required to secure 
 
 1 Referring to a supposed Kaufleutesonderrecht, on which emphasis 
 has been laid by many writers, notably Inama-Sternegg and Gothein. 
 For an account of their views see Doren, Untersuchungen zur Qeschiclita 
 der Kaufmannsgilden des MittelaUers (1893), p. 25. [Of. infra, p. 224.]
 
 200 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 exemption from seigneurial claims ; and a joint contribution 
 had been necessary for the building of the wall. And so, in 
 all these ways, under the pressure of a triple necessity, the 
 commune gradually became conscious of itself. 
 
 The urban tribunal was, in like manner, the direct con- 
 sequence of the novel requirements of the situation. It 
 was, indeed, a public court ; and it succeeded to the ancient 
 court of the centena (or ' hundred ').' Still, it has a speci- 
 fically urban character : it is composed of burgesses, it is 
 more or less chosen by burgesses. And, as it is not a mere 
 market-court in its origin, so it is not a mere survival and 
 transformation of the court of the centena. It is a new 
 creation, the necessary consequence of the recognition of the 
 principle that the burgesses have a right to be judged in 
 their own town by the customs there established ; and the 
 law it enforces is, on one side, the civil law which grew out 
 of the jus mercatorum, and, on the other, the criminal law 
 born of the town-peace. 
 
 Finally, the town council is, again, no mere survival or 
 transformation of an old institution. It is a 'college of 
 delegates ' acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie, such as was 
 sure to appear as soon as the bourgeoisie became aware 
 of itself. It may be called an executive committee of the 
 burgher body. 
 
 The internal movement by which, within the now united 
 burgher body, a separation arose between the rich and the 
 poor, the majores and minores, and an oligarchical govern- 
 ment was established ruling in economic matters through 
 the machinery of the merchant gild belongs to a later 
 period. 
 
 Up to the point now reached, the thirteenth century, the 
 development had been roughly parallel, with local variations, 
 over the whole of the country between the Elbe and the 
 Seine. Not till now did the lines of evolution begin to 
 diverge ; and the divergence was due not to differences of 
 
 1 ' Maire, ecoutete, avoue, le juge urbain, est le successeur incontes- 
 table de 1'ancien centenier franc ' (Bevue Historique, Ivii. 308) ; though 
 the precise meaning of the remark is not free from doubt.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 201 
 
 race, but to the difference between France and Germany in 
 the strength of the central authority. 
 
 M. Pirenne's whole theory, it will be seen, turns on the 
 ' colony of traders ' ] which made its appearance at the old 
 Eoman town, and on the formation of the association which 
 ' was for them a primordial necessity.' 2 The merchant-body 
 first secured rights for itself, and then brought about the 
 extension of these rights to that older agglomeration of popu- 
 lation by whose side it had settled. M. Pirenne's ' colony ' 
 is none other than the Kaufmannsgemeinde, which had already 
 been made the all-important factor in town development by 
 a succession of German writers. 3 What is original in his 
 exposition would seem to be hjjg freeing the influence of the 
 merchant-community from any necessary dependence on 
 market-privileges. But it suffers from the same weakness 
 as the theory in its German garb ; namely, a failure ade- 
 quately to account for the extension of traders' rights to ' the 
 divers social and juridical groups which coexisted with 
 them.' 4 The motives which are supposed to have led to 
 the establishment of the peace, to the construction of a wall 
 (or rather I' enceinte du faubourg], and to the acquisition of 
 franchises, were all motives primarily affecting the traders ; 
 and, if they could but secure these advantages for themselves, 
 there was hardly any strong reason for desiring to extend 
 them to others. 
 
 1 ' Les colonies marchandes.' Revue, Historique, Ivii. 75. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 81. 
 
 * ' Die Entstehung einer Kaufmannsgemeinde, eines Kaufleute- 
 gerichts, und eines besonderen Gerichtsbezirk, d.h. der Immunitat vom 
 Landrechtsverband, das sind die Grundbedingungen fur die Entstehung 
 der deutschen Stadte, soweit dieselben Kaufmanns- und Marktstadte 
 sind, d.h. dem Handel ihre Entstehung verdanken. Derartige Kauf- 
 mannsgemeinden lassen sich nun in vielen Stadten Deutschlanda noch 
 positiv nachgewiesen ; vor allem hat der Aufsatz Schultes sie wieder in 
 den Vordergrund des Interesses geriickt. Sie siedeln sich in den alten 
 Komerstadten meist vor den Thoren der alten Stadtmauer an. Wir 
 wissen von solchen Kaufmannsgemeinden, z. B. in Koln, Regensburg, 
 Worms, Mainz, Basel, in Goslar, Magdeburg, und Quedlinburg.' Doren, 
 Untersuchungen, 34. 4 Revue Historique, Ivii. 97.
 
 202 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 I cannot help thinking that the light-heartedness with 
 which M. Pirenne has passed over this very real difficulty 
 is due to some vagueness in his own mind as to the situation 
 of these earlier groups. Like M. Flach, and like the recent 
 German writers who have described the Bomerstadte, 
 M. Pirenne begins by thinking of ' the cities of the agricul- 
 tural period ' as themselves watted. l In this view the 
 faubourg was outside the walls, outside la ville* What, 
 then, it would be necessary to do later would be to push out 
 the town wall so as to include the faubourg, or, what came 
 to the same thing, to build an additional wall as a loop 
 round the faubourg. But, when M. Pirenne gets further in 
 his exposition, the town to which the ' colony ' joins itself 
 that which we may call, accepting for the time M. Pirenne's 
 general theory, 'the pre-commercial datum' becomes merely 
 a ' chateau et immunity's.' 3 The new settlement now takes 
 place ' in the town.' 4 Still more surprising, the enceinte du 
 faubourg is not now described as an addition to a previously 
 existing town wall ; but, starting from and returning to the 
 1 chateau seigneurial/ it is the ' enceinte,' the ' mur,' ' de la 
 ville ' itself. 5 Henceforth it is argued about as if it were the 
 first wall the town ever had. 6 
 
 I am, of course, far from maintaining that the pre-com- 
 mercial datum was really always a walled town. In many 
 cases, in all probability, it was simply a castle, in the 
 modern sense, with an unenclosed cluster of cabins at its 
 foot, as M. Flach has pointed out. But it is surely worth 
 
 1 Revile Historique, Ivii. 60. Cf. the ' murs ' and ' portes ' of p. 64. 
 " - In the sense of ibid. p. 62. 
 
 3 ' Une urbs nova, un suburbium, un faubourg commercial, se 
 forme & c&te du chateau et des immunites, dont 1' ensemble constitue la 
 ville de Page agricole ; ' ibid. p. 74. 4 Ibid. p. 75. 5 Ibid. p. 299. 
 
 6 M. Pirenne speaks of the suburbium as built ' sous les murs du 
 castrum primitif,' echoing the language of M. Flach. But, while 
 M. Pirenne gives the impression, in this latter part of his argument, 
 that the castrum was simply a lord's castle, M. Flach, as we have seen, 
 carefully distinguishes between that narrower sense and the wider 
 sense in which it was used for a fortified town area. See supra, 
 p. 179.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 203 
 
 while to pause from time to time, and consider which we are 
 to keep in our mind's eye. We can only arrive at results 
 satisfactory to the social historian by determining to visualise 
 the process we imagine at work ; and this we cannot do so 
 long as the centre of the picture remains in mist. 
 
 VI 
 
 We have now come to the last work upon our list, Dr. 
 Keutgen's ' Untersuchungen ' ; a work, it must be remembered, 
 strictly, and on principle, confined to Germany. It is one 
 that may well be placed by the side of M. Pirenne's for its 
 skilful arrangement of material and its subordination of detail 
 to generalisation. 
 
 In his introduction Dr. Keutgen points out, what is often 
 forgotten or denied, that the only classification of towns of 
 any use for the present purpose must be a chronological one. 
 German towns he divides into three groups : (1) the bishops' 
 towns on the Rhine and Danube, of Roman origin ; (2) towns 
 springing up in inner Germany, from the ninth century on- 
 wards whether beside an episcopal or royal household or 
 otherwise, it matters little ; (3) artificial foundations, from the 
 end of the eleventh century, on which was bestowed an 
 already constructed town law. But this is a classification to 
 which Dr. Keutgen pays little attention in the rest of the 
 treatise. His chief conclusions are conveniently given at the 
 end of this same introduction. Two main lines of develop- 
 ment, he says, have to be kept apart and considered 
 separately the origin of the urban tribunal, and the origin 
 of the organisation of the urban community itself. The 
 German towns formed, in the Middle Ages, separate districts 
 (Bezirke) of the public judicial organisation ; and the organi- 
 sation of these public courts corresponds (entspricht) to that 
 of the public courts in the country at large (auf dcm Lande). 
 The town, however, had sometimes no voice, and often but
 
 204 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 little voice, in the actual appointment of the judges. ' As to 
 the urban community, the question is ' simply ' how the con- 
 stitution which every German local community (Ortsgemeinde) 
 possessed from the first, by virtue of its autonomy in certain 
 matters, followed a peculiar line of development in the towns, 
 and ended in the establishment of the council.' l 
 
 With regard to the town tribunal, Dr. Keutgen abides by 
 the old explanation which traces it back to the centena, the 
 hundred court. He thinks that, as a rule, by the tenth cen- 
 tury the towns had come to form separate jurisdictional 
 districts, and that these were not simply like hundreds, but 
 actually were small hundreds. The Ottoman privileges put 
 them into the hands of the bishops (or, to use a phraseo- 
 logy familiar to students of English constitutional history, 
 made them ' dependent hundreds '). As against Arnold and 
 von Below, Dr. Keutgen has no difficulty in showing that the 
 grants of the Ottos did apply to specifically urban areas. In 
 this town court, however, there was at first no special town 
 law administered. To explain the growth of a special town 
 law, and the legal (as distinct from the political) reasons for 
 a separate town court, Dr. Keutgen proceeds to consider the 
 town as a place of defence (die Stadt als Burg), In much 
 the same way as von Maurer and Dr. Varges, he points out 
 that Burg was the oldest German name for town ; and he 
 remarks on the survival of borough as the technical designa- 
 tion in England. He calls special attention and this was 
 well worth doing to the peculiar importance of the Burgen 
 established in Saxony by King Henry. Though by no means 
 all of them became real towns, the earliest towns that did 
 arise in inner Germany grew up at certain of the points 
 marked by their presence. Having thus prepared the way, 
 he suggests tentatively that the position of the town as a 
 place of defence may have had important legal consequences. 
 We seem to be approaching Dr. Varges's old garrison theory. 
 But no ! Dr. Keutgen's view is really more akin to that of 
 Sohm. Everything connected with the king was, in early 
 
 1 Untersitchungen, p. 9.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 205 
 
 times, under a special peace. The Burg as a fortress (really, 
 not constructively) was itself the king's in theory, if not in 
 fact : hence it was subject to the special king's peace ; and 
 hence the Burgfriede. 
 
 Passing over Dr. Keutgen's elaborate criticism of the 
 market theory, which is very effective, we reach the civic 
 community. This, as before indicated, our author regards as 
 merely an outgrowth from an Ortsgemeinde. Here he is in 
 substantial agreement with von Maurer and von Below. 
 Indeed, he may be regarded, on this side of the subject, as a 
 pupil of von Below. Like him, he objects to von Maurer's 
 terminology, chiefly because it lays, as they think, undue 
 stress on one feature communal management of land, 
 without proper regard to other communal powers. 1 
 
 Burgess rights, as might be expected in towns with such 
 an origin, were bound up with the possession of land, and 
 had nothing necessarily to do with mercantile pursuits. We 
 may omit the long and interesting, but hardly convincing, 
 argument as to the origin of die stadtische Erbleihe, Leihe zu 
 Stadtrecht, zu Burgrecht (i.e. burgage), and reach the con- 
 cluding chapters. Here Dr. Keutgen comes so far to meet 
 the market theorists as to assign great importance to the 
 settlement (Ansiedelung) of traders in various places. With- 
 out them, no town. He accepts a special jurisdiction of the 
 merchants over matters specially concerning themselves. As 
 to weights and measures concerning which there has been 
 an acrid dispute Dr. Keutgen takes the middle position that 
 the commune (Gemeinde) controlled the weights and measures 
 of articles of everyday use, the merchants those of commodi- 
 ties wherein they especially traded. Out of a union of the 
 township and the market the later town grew. Into the 
 
 1 Untersuchungcn, p. 109 : ' Die Dorfverf assung beruhte nicht, oder doch 
 nur ausserlich, auf der Markgemeinschaft, sondern sie beruhte auf dem 
 SelbstbestimmungsrecJit der Gemeinde wirthschaftlich selbst&ndiger 
 Manner.' Cf. p. 110 : ' Wie die Gerichtsverfassung der Stadt auf dem 
 Boden der allgemeinen offentlichen Gerichtsverfassung steht, so beruht 
 auch die Verfassung der Stadtgemeinde durchaus auf den Grundlagen 
 der allgemeinen deutschen autonomcn Gemeindevcrf assung.'
 
 206 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 stages of the process he does not enter at any length. 1 Like 
 M. Pirenne, the council he regards as a mere committee (eine 
 Art Ausschuss) of the burgher body which was formed by the 
 union of these two elements. 
 
 Dr. Keutgen's most original contribution to the discussion 
 is his theory of Biirgbann. But this, it must be observed, 
 he leaves a mere conjecture. He himself recognises that the 
 earlier uses of the term Burgbann are to be explained by the 
 right of the Burggraf or some similar official to compel the 
 residents of the environs to work at the repair of the walls. 
 But he thinks that some confirmation of his theory is to be 
 found in four documents of 1095, 1014, 1024, 1101. 2 The 
 first and third make a fine of sixty shillings payable for the 
 breach of Burgbann ; the second limits the imposition of a fine 
 of this amount to publiccs civitates ; the fourth calls it jus 
 civile. But none of these necessarily connect the peace of the 
 town with a fortress -peace of the king. By this time Burg- 
 bann might very well have meant nothing but town law. 
 
 As to the Ortsgemeinde, it is curious to observe how Dr. 
 Keutgen (in this respect again following von Below) assumes 
 his major premise. The Landgemeinde was ' autonomous,' 
 ' self-determining,' and had such and such Befugnisse (compe- 
 tence). The town community was likewise autonomous, and 
 had a like competence. Therefore, the town community could 
 have been nothing originally but a Landgemeinde. But, if 
 putting on one side the whole question of serfdom and re- 
 lation to a lord we look up the examples of the competence 
 of the Landgemeinde (e.g. in the matter of protection against 
 fire, building regulations, &c.), for which Dr. Keutgen refers 
 to von Maurer, we find that they are all drawn from Weis- 
 thiimer (records of custom) of the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
 
 1 Untersuthungen, p. 218 : ' Man sieht wie in einer aus Dorf- und Markt- 
 ansiedelung zusanimengewachsenen Stadtgemeinde die gewohnheits- 
 rechtlichen Befugnisse der Kaufleute zu den ahnlichen der autonomen 
 Landgemeinde hinzu kamen, um zusammen den Ursprung der stadti- 
 schen Verwaltungsthatigkeit zu bilden.' 
 
 Ibid. p. 57 seq.
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 207 
 
 eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries. 1 From what one 
 knows of village life one may be pretty sure that such powers 
 were not exercised in the Middle Ages. There can hardly 
 be a doubt that these Befugnisse of the Landgemeinde were 
 belated imitations of town practices, and not their source. 2 
 
 VII 
 
 The reader who shall have made his way through the 
 preceding abstracts will probably experience a feeling of 
 bewilderment, for which he may be inclined to blame the 
 writer. It would, no doubt, have been possible to arrange 
 an account of the recent literature of the subject in a different 
 manner to present the chief proposed solutions of the main 
 problems involved, and state the attitude of the various 
 writers to each in a form admitting of easier comparison. 
 But such a presentation would have given little idea of the 
 way in which each writer really approached the subject. 
 The differences in emphasis, the differences in the number 
 and grouping of the several factors recognised, are at least 
 as interesting as positive statements, when we have to do 
 with essays in construction all more or less eclectic in their 
 character. 
 
 It would be rash to attempt to judge between the rival 
 theories thus offered to the inquiring economist by historians 
 and lawyers. The battle must be fought out by the 
 specialists themselves. Yet there are some fundamental 
 questions which even an outsider may press upon the atten- 
 tion of those immediately engaged in the discussion. 
 
 First, then, as to the Landgemeinde, the Ortsgemeinde, the 
 
 1 Maurer, Geschichtc der Dorfverfassung, ii. 11 seq. 
 
 2 Since writing the above, I have noticed the remark of Schroder, 
 Deutsche Rechtsgcschichte (2nd ed.), p. 603 : ' Die politische Befugnisse 
 der Landgemeinden waren zu sparlich und sind wohl auch zu spat zur 
 Anerkennung gelangt, als dass sie schon bei der Ausbildung der altesten 
 Stadtverfassungen batten in Gewicht fallen konnen.'
 
 208 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 rural township or village. That many towns grew out of 
 villages, the agricultural character of the interests of the 
 smaller towns of the Middle Ages, and the survival of 
 agricultural usages and manorial burdens similar to those in 
 rural manors, would seem clearly enough to indicate. But 
 why should we suppose all towns to have so arisen ? Make 
 the breach between the Eoman and the mediaeval world as 
 great as we please, is it not allowable to think of the 
 majority of the inhabitants of the ' old cities ' of M. Flach, 
 the Romerstadte of the German writers, as all along different 
 in their daily occupations from the men of a country manor ? 
 And, limiting our attention to those towns which did spring 
 from rural townships or combinations of townships, the 
 question ought to be faced whether there is any positive 
 evidence at all for the existence of free, ' autonomous,' ' self- 
 determining ' townships in the period of the rise of the towns. 
 Accept, if you will, the view that the lord was a comparatively 
 recent usurper : still, there he was at that time. And, if so, 
 is it well so completely to disregard him as such writers as 
 von Below and Varges and Keutgen in effect do ? But, if 
 he is to be counted with, then the difference between the 
 Landgemeinde view and the Hof-system theory of Nitzsch 
 need not be so very great, after all. The difference would 
 then simply resolve itself into this : that Nitzsch had in his 
 mind the great masses of dependents, most of them not 
 engaged in agriculture, at the large seigneurial establishments, 
 while with the Landgemeinde we begin with a small body of 
 dependents, all of them engaged in agriculture, on a rural 
 estate. 1 
 
 The other part of the subject on which an economist 
 might venture to dwell is the much-vexed question of the 
 relation of the ' merchant ' to the ' craftsman,' with which is 
 closely connected the doubt as to the original meaning of 
 mercator and Kaufmann. Concerning the significance of 
 these terms there is an amusing difference of opinion. Some 
 understand thereby any one who ever had any occasion to 
 
 1 [Cf. infra, p. 221.]
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OP TOWN LIFE 209 
 
 buy and sell in a town, 1 or, indeed, all who had the right to 
 buy and sell i.e. all the townsfolk ; and this is thought to 
 be confirmed by the use of ' mercatores ' and ' burgenses ' as 
 synonymous in many early charters. Others regard the 
 ' mercator ' as a professional trader, like the trader of to-day 
 though his operations might frequently be very small and 
 explain the use of mercatores, negotiatores, institores, for 
 burgenses, as the result of their prominence and their 
 peculiar association with town life. It must be said that the 
 particular bit of evidence which now seems to lead many 
 scholars to accept the widest possible interpretation is 
 singularly weak for such a superstructure. In a charter 
 granted by the abbot of Eeichenau to the peasants of 
 Allensbach in 1075 occurs the phrase, ' Omnibus oppidi 
 villanis mercandi potestatem concessimus, ut ipsi et eorum 
 poster! sint mercatores.' This is usually interpreted to mean 
 that the grant in some sense or other actually turned the 
 villani into mercatores. But why can we not regard it as the 
 expression of a hope ? Dr. Keutgen well points to definitions 
 such as ' mercatores qui causa negotiandi vadunt et re- 
 deunt ' 2 as showing that ' merchants ' were distinguished 
 from persons who stayed at home and occasionally sold their 
 own produce. Moreover, no one seems to deny that the 
 ' mercator ' of Carlovingian times was a wandering profes- 
 sional trader ; and it would be strange indeed if the word 
 afterwards underwent so complete a change of meaning as to 
 rob it of almost all economic significance. 
 
 Whatever else they may think of the meaning of mer- 
 catores, most writers have no difficulty in believing that at 
 
 1 Biicher, in his Entstehung der Volkswirthschafl, p. 47, n., is 
 particularly wroth with those who would make mercator into a ' Berufs- 
 Kaufmann.' He understands thereby ' jeder der mit seiner Waare zu 
 Markte stand.' Indeed, his etymological observation 'Das hervor- 
 stehendste Merkmal des Berufs-Kaufmanns in seiner Verhaltniss zum 
 Publicum ist nicht seine Gewohnheit zu kaufen sondern zu verkaufen. 
 Und doch ist der mittelalterliche " Kaufmann " nach dem Kaufen 
 benannt ! ' would seem to extend the designation to any one who ever 
 bought anything. It is a pity he cannot propose a like etymological 
 interpretation of ' mercator.' 2 Untersuchungen, p. 190, n. 
 
 P
 
 210 MEDIEVAL URBAN 
 
 first it included craftsmen. Suppose we allow that it 
 included all who had frequent occasion to buy and sell. Did 
 the earliest craftsmen have occasion to buy and sell? 
 M. Pirenne, as we have seen, thinks they did ; that later they 
 became mere wage-earners, and then ceased to buy materials 
 or sell finished goods, and so needed no longer to belong to 
 the merchant gild. It must be confessed that there is some- 
 thing in the economic condition of M. Pirenne's own country, 
 Flanders, in the fourteenth century to lend some colour to 
 this explanation. The crowds of weavers and fullers and 
 dyers of Ghent have always seemed rather hard to fit into 
 ' the gild system ' framework. 1 But elsewhere, surely, the 
 movement of things was just the reverse of what M. Pirenne 
 supposes. The latest investigations into industrial history- 
 are rendering it clear that the mediaeval artisan worked at 
 first on the materials of an individual customer, often at the 
 customer's own house. Indeed, down to the close of the 
 Middle Ages and long after, scores of craftsmen never bought 
 materials nor had wares to sell. Nevertheless, after a time, 
 many, if not most, artisans did come to manufacture wares 
 for the general market out of their own materials. That this 
 produced friction with the merchant gild, both in England and 
 Scotland, we have good reason for believing, and the play of 
 economic forces on the Continent could hardly have been 
 essentially different. May not the key to some difficulties in 
 mediaeval economic, and therefore in mediaeval constitutional, 
 history be found in the probability that it was only as and 
 when craftsmen desired to dispense with intermediaries in 
 their buying and selling that any antagonism would arise 
 between merchants and craftsmen as such ? 2 
 
 Reviewing the discussion as a whole, with all its fine- 
 drawn distinctions, the economist will perhaps arrive at the 
 paradoxical conclusion that what is first of all necessary is 
 that distinctions should still further be drawn, and one in 
 particular. It is one of the chief services of von Below that 
 he has impressed upon us the necessity of separating the 
 
 1 [See now infra, p. 240.] z [Cf. infra, p. 226.]
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF TOWN LIFE 211 
 
 question of the forces which led to constitutional change 
 one often of economic history from the question of the 
 structure and derivation of the constitutional forms them- 
 selves, which is one of legal or constitutional history. 1 But 
 we must go further, and distinguish provisionally between 
 the town (Stadt, mile) as a legal conception and the town as 
 an economic conception. Usually, the two meet. What 
 was economically a town was, as a rule, legally (or con- 
 stitutionally) a town. But it was not necessarily nor 
 universally so. And the discussion on both issues really 
 turns, in large measure, on a question of definition. What 
 shall we agree to call a 'town' economically, what con- 
 stitutionally? Until we have come to some common 
 understanding on these points, there is always the danger of 
 arguing in a circle. 
 
 These preliminary notions having been cleared up, the 
 work of historical construction can safely begin. And in 
 this, in spite of the example to the contrary of all the four 
 scholars we have here been following, the path of safety 
 would seem to lie in a rigid observance of chronological 
 limitations. To leap, as some writers do, from a document 
 of A.D. 900 to one of A.D. 1350 is certainly dangerous. Not 
 that there is no weight in the argument that the conditions 
 within small towns in later times must have resembled those, 
 centuries before, in what afterwards became great towns, 
 because ' every town was once small.' 2 It is very probable 
 that there was something like a natural evolution of town 
 life, whereof the early stages are concealed from us, in the 
 case of the greater towns, by our lack of evidence, but fully 
 revealed in the later and smaller. Yet it is clear that the 
 men of later centuries must have lived in an atmosphere of 
 ideas to which the earlier development of the larger towns 
 
 1 Stadtverfassung, p. 12. Von Below hardly, perhaps, recognises 
 that, while this distinction is useful, and indeed essential for clearness 
 of thought, the answer to the one question has commonly a very direct 
 bearing on the answer to the other. 
 
 2 Von Below, Stadtverfassung, p. 4 ; Stadtgcmcinde, p. 114. 
 
 p 2
 
 212 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 had already given rise, and these ideas must have influenced 
 their action. Until, then, the main lines of the earlier history 
 have been retraced from contemporary sources, 1 it will be 
 wise to observe a self-denying ordinance in the matter of 
 using later documents. 
 
 1 [This task will be facilitated for the future by the convenient 
 collection, edited by Dr. Keutgen, of Urkunden zur deutschen stadtischen 
 Verfassungsgeschichte, 1899.] 
 
 [ADDENDUM. Some useful material for the history of English towns 
 will be found in the volume of Norwich Leet Eolls, edited by Mr. Hudson 
 for the Selden Society, 1891. It there appears that but a very small 
 proportion of the ' capital pledges ' who represented their tithings in 1288 
 were ' cives ' in the contemporary Norwich use of the term. The pre- 
 sentment to the Leet Court as unlawful of the gilds of tanners, saddlers, 
 fullers, and cobblers furnishes us also with some of the reasons why such 
 associations were disliked by the municipal authorities. It would seem 
 that the gild of tanners offended in some way in its purchase of hides. 
 For further observations on the significance of this evidence, see my 
 review in the Economic Journal, v. 253.]
 
 213 
 
 PEOFESSOE GEOSS'S 'GILD MEECHANT ' ' 
 
 DR. GROSS'S treatise on the Gild Merchant is an exhilarating 
 example of the growing internationalism in historico- 
 economic studies. A graduate of one of the younger 
 American universities, Mr. Gross went to Germany and took 
 for the subject of his doctoral dissertation an obscure point 
 in the earlier municipal history of England. He then 
 devoted several years to the patient examination of English 
 archives ; the Oxford University Press undertook the 
 publication of the results of his labours ; and Dr. Gross has 
 returned to America, to teach history at Harvard. But 
 apart from this, Dr. Gross's book is significant in another 
 way. It deals almost exclusively with the institutional as 
 opposed to the economic or social side of its subject ; and 
 although such a treatment is apt to be chilling to the general 
 reader, it is certainly the right thing just now. For what 
 has economic or social history usually meant hitherto ? It 
 has meant either statistics about wages and prices, or 
 picturesque details about the cut of our ancestors' clothes 
 and the like. Such facts are very useful when we have an 
 institutional framework to fit them into. But we want to 
 know first what exactly were the relative numbers, the legal 
 position, the usual duties, rights, and burdens, of the various 
 classes of the population. When we know this, we can then 
 find a meaning for such and such a price, or such and such 
 
 1 \Tlie Gild Merchant. A Contribution to British Municipal 
 History. By Charles Gross, Ph.D. (1890.) Reviewed in the Political 
 Science Quarterly, September 1891.]
 
 214 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 a local custom. Institutional history is the bony framework 
 of economic history. 
 
 Our debt to Dr. Gross is hard to realise, because his main 
 results had found their way into economic writing even 
 before the publication of his recent treatise. His conclusions 
 as here formulated do not differ substantially from those in 
 his German dissertation of 1883, in spite of the abundance 
 of hitherto unprinted material which he now appends to 
 them. Moreover, during the three or four years that the 
 present treatise has been in the press, Dr. Gross, with self- 
 sacrificing courtesy, has allowed copies of the proof to pass 
 into the hands of brother scholars, whose writings have 
 benefited accordingly. Some of us had begun to take his 
 main results for granted and almost to forget that Dr. Gross 
 had never yet received the public recognition which his 
 labours deserved. For he has done great things. He has 
 been the first to show that the gild merchant is a characteristic 
 feature in the early history of almost all English towns. 
 Almost without knowing it, and with the greatest anxiety not 
 to speak in general terms, he has forced upon us the 
 recognition of a stage in English economic development 
 which had before been almost entirely disregarded. That is 
 Dr. Gross's substantial achievement ; and much as it may be 
 necessary to supplement, or even in minor matters to correct, 
 his conclusions, his name will henceforth be as indissolubly 
 associated with the gild merchant, as that of Mr. Eogers with 
 mediaeval prices and that of Mr. Seebohm with mediaeval 
 land tenure. Nor is that all : he has definitely established 
 the distinction between gild and borough, and has shown 
 more exactly than ever before wherein the influence of the 
 gild upon the municipal constitution really consisted. And 
 on a score of other matters connected with his subject, he 
 has either cast entirely new light or added greatly to the 
 knowledge we already possessed. To mention only those 
 which happen especially to interest the present writer : 
 the ' companies of merchants ' of the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries, the ' common town bargains,' the organisation 
 of the home staples, and above all the ' affiliation ' of mediaeval
 
 THE GILD MEECHANT 215 
 
 boroughs these are all subjects wherein Dr. Gross has 
 rendered possible a distinct advance in the construction of 
 economic history. 
 
 I have, however, indicated above that I hardly think even 
 Dr. Gross has said the final word on all parts of his theme. 
 The particular part of it which is still, to my mind, obscure 
 is the relation of the gild merchant to the craft gilds. That 
 Professor Brentano has led people to think there was a 
 'general struggle' throughout England between the gild 
 merchant and the craft gilds is, in the eyes of Dr. Gross, one 
 of the gravest faults of that arch-sinner. I may, perhaps, in 
 passing, venture to put in a word of humble remonstrance 
 against the somewhat excessive insistence on Brentano's 
 real or imaginary faults. Granted that Brentano's essay of 
 1868 has abundant defects, and that it has led astray most 
 subsequent English writers, it must still be remembered that 
 its author was but twenty-three when he wrote it. What we 
 have more right to be indignant about is that the study of 
 social history should have been so dead in England that for 
 years no one thought of going to the sources for himself. 
 And as to craft gilds, it is not so clear after all that 
 Brentano is entirely wrong. Suppose we strip his account of 
 its slightly melodramatic phraseology. Suppose we recognise 
 that the craft gilds which were organised in the fourteenth 
 century had scarcely any ' autonomy,' and that when and 
 where they did get a share in municipal government, their 
 victory was hardly 'democratic,' since the gilds themselves 
 had by that time become exclusive. Granting all this is 
 there not antecedent probability, and some apparent evidence, 
 that when the earlier craft gilds made their appearance, in 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a good deal 
 of friction between them and the groups of citizens who 
 governed the towns and monopolised their trade ? It is true 
 that the evidence refers only to the weavers, fullers, and dyers ; 
 and it has been ingeniously suggested that the disabilities 
 under which these craftsmen undoubtedly suffered in certain 
 English towns may be explained by the supposition that they 
 were ' intruding aliens.' But there is scanty ground for such
 
 216 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 an hypothesis. The more natural explanation is that colli- 
 sions occurred in these particular cases because it was in the 
 manufacture of cloth that a considerable body of artisans 
 first came into existence. We may allow that English 
 craftsmen were not ' as a class/ at any rate at first, excluded 
 from the merchant gild or from burghal franchises ; l that is, 
 that they would not be excluded because they were craftsmen. 
 But the question is : Could they fulfil the conditions neces- 
 sary for admission ? Although neighbouring landowners, or 
 other persons living outside the town, were frequently 
 admitted to the gild merchant, the gild was primarily an 
 association of, or among, the burgesses of each particular 
 place. But burgess-ship was bound up with the possession 
 of a burgage tenement. Suppose, as might very well happen, 
 that a weaver had no such tenement, would he be admitted ? 
 Would David the dyer, who paid a mark in the second year 
 of King John that his messuage in Carlisle ' might be a 
 burgage,' 2 have been admitted to the gild merchant of 
 Carlisle, when it was not yet a burgage ? Dr. Gross indeed 
 makes the remarkable statement that 'the gildsmen were 
 generally " non feoffati." ' 3 If he means that they did not 
 hold land, this leads to the conclusion that they were 
 generally not burgesses ! For this assertion he gives three 
 pieces of evidence. One of these, from a modern history of 
 Lyme Eegis, I am unable to examine. But the other two 
 are from his own second volume. 4 The first is a list of 
 members of the Barnstaple gild, in which 92 names are 
 superscribed ' deforinsecis non feoffatis,' and 110 superscribed 
 ' de intrinsecis et feoffatis.' The second is a passage 5 from a 
 ' verdict ' of the Totnes jurors in 1255 to the effect that every 
 merchant in the merchant gild ' non habens tenementum in 
 Totton ' must make an (additional ?) annual payment of 
 six pence, ' et cum tenementum perquisierit quietus erit de 
 predicto redditu.' As burgage tenure was a condition of 
 citizenship, so it was almost certainly, for persons who lived 
 in the town, one of the prerequisites for membership of the 
 gild merchant. 
 
 1 The Gild Merchant, i. 109, 214. 2 Ibid. i. 71, n 3. 
 
 3 i. 72. 4 P. 13. 5 P. 236.
 
 THE GILD MEECHANT 217 
 
 Another question suggests itself. Admission to the gild 
 merchant was dependent upon the payment of certain 
 ' initiation fees.' Dr. Gross charitably conjectures that the 
 charge was proportionate to the means of the new 
 member. But in the only clear and detailed gild rolls which 
 he has been able to print, those of Andover (1279-1348), the 
 usual entrance fee for one who was not the son or husband 
 of a member was sixty shillings. 1 Very few craftsmen at 
 this period owned property worth one-half as much as that, to 
 judge from the Colchester assessments printed in Dowell's 
 ' Taxation.' Elsewhere the fee may have been much lower ; 
 but a fee there was everywhere. Dr. Gross remarks that ' it 
 is necessary to emphasise the fact that craftsmen were freely 
 admitted to the gild in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth 
 centuries.' 2 But the references he gives do not actually 
 prove anything more than this, that several craftsmen are 
 found as members in various places. This does not show 
 that craftsmen were, as a rule, members. The probability is 
 that the entrance fee, of itself, would keep many of them out. 
 
 But if we concede the probability that in some of the 
 towns there were many craftsmen who, for one reason or 
 another; could not get into the merchant gild, is it not also 
 probable that they would come into conflict with the claim 
 of its members to a monopoly of trade ? Take the case of the 
 weavers : were they to be allowed to sell their cloth to whom- 
 soever they pleased, or only to the gild members ? In one of 
 his later ' Additions,' 3 Dr. Gross allows that ' on the continent 
 the merchants seem to have oppressed the weavers and fullers 
 because these artisans competed with them in the cloth trade," 
 and adds : ' This may help to explain similar oppressions in 
 English towns.' But here he concedes one half of my case, 
 and surrenders the far-fetched explanation about 'alien 
 intruders.' 4 
 
 As to the other half of the case the contention that the 
 craftsmen in general, and those employed in the manufacture 
 of cloth in particular, were for some time, as a matter of fact, 
 usually devoid of burgess-rights this is closely bound up 
 
 1 The Gild MercJiant, ii. 289-320 passim. 2 Ibid. i. 107. 
 
 3 i. p. xix. ' i. p. 108.
 
 218 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 with the question of burgage tenure, to which I have already 
 alluded. In any case, the entry in the London ' Book of 
 Customs,' concerning the weavers and fullers of Winchester, 
 Marlborough, Oxford, and Beverley ; the express declaration 
 of the magistrates of Lincoln, in the year 1209, that the 
 fullers had no community (of rights) with the free citizens ; 
 and the readiness of the ' cives ' of London, in 1202, to bribe 
 the king to destroy the weavers' gild are all facts which 
 wait for an explanation. And in seeking for such an 
 explanation, if continental analogy is not to be pressed, it is 
 also not to be disregarded. When we find that there were con- 
 flicts between the crafts and the governing bodies of the towns 
 in all the countries with which England was most closely 
 connected ; in the towns just across the Channel which be- 
 longed to the Hanse of London ; in the towns of the Teutonic 
 Hanse ; in the towns of Scotland, which modelled their con- 
 stitution largely on that of Newcastle, as Newcastle modelled 
 itself on Winchester l is it going too far to say that the 
 burden of proof lies upon those who maintain that the 
 occasional references to apparently similar difficulties in 
 England do not mean what, on the face of them, they seem 
 to mean ? The friction was certainly not so great in England, 
 and it was earlier overcome : it was hardly altogether absent. 
 Without pursuing the argument further, I may send a 
 parting shot and carry the war into Dr. Gross's camp by the 
 remark that even so rigorous an adherent of ' sources ' as he 
 is may sometimes be carried off his feet by preconceived ideas. 
 Thus his assertions surely important ones that the crafts- 
 men, even when associated in separate gilds of each occupation, 
 still remained in the common gild merchant, 2 and that this 
 common gild merchant was afterwards ' resolved into ' the 
 two classes of misteries, mercantile and artisan, 3 are accom- 
 panied by none of those impressive notes which are wont to 
 support his statements. They seem to approach, not 
 distantly, those ' unproved assumptions ' for which Professor 
 Brentano is so justly rebuked. 
 
 1 The Gild Merchant, i. 257. 2 i. 115. 3 P. 127.
 
 219 
 
 PKOFESSOB VON BELOW'S TEACTATES 1 
 
 SOME four or five years ago there appeared in the ' Historische 
 Zeitschrift ' a couple of articles by a writer hitherto little 
 known outside his immediate circle, Dr. Georg von Below, 
 upon the rise of the town constitution of mediaeval Germany 
 ( ' Zur Entstehung der deutschen Stadtverfassung ' ), fol- 
 lowed speedily by a thin volume on the rise of the civic 
 community (' Die Entstehung der deutschen Stadtgemeinde'). 
 
 For some time before, historical work in this field 
 had taken the direction of minute investigation con- 
 cerning particular towns : Dr. von Below's writings would 
 have attracted attention if only because they attempted to 
 survey the whole of Germany and to state conclusions of 
 general validity. He has, moreover, the gift of clear and 
 concise expression ; and the power, which is always so 
 fascinating, of drawing sharp distinctions. But all these 
 causes would have been insufficient to secure for Dr. von 
 Below quite the amount of attention he has received. A 
 further characteristic has to be mentioned the employment 
 of language of extraordinary virulence, ranging from scoffing 
 irony and outspoken contempt to unseemly vituperation. 
 
 The publication of Dr. von Below's essays has been 
 followed by a torrent of controversial pamphlets and reviews. 
 
 1 [Der Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung, by Dr. Georg 
 von Below (1892). Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Kaufmannsgilden 
 des Mittelalters, by Dr. Alfred Doren: in Schmoller's Forschungen, 
 XII. 2 (1893). Reviewed in the Economic Journal, iv. 270, 1894.]
 
 220 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 A dozen or more scholars every year send one or two fresh 
 contributions to the pile of new ' literature.' There are not 
 only divers ' schools/ swearing by their several masters, von 
 Maurer, Nitzsch, Gierke, Sohm ; there are different points 
 of view, that of the legal historian, that of the constitutional 
 historian, and that of the economic historian ; and the 
 lawyer, who has hitherto had almost a monopoly of the 
 subject, can hardly conceal his contempt for the economist. 
 To make confusion worse confounded, after Dr. von Below 
 had, as he thought, removed all competing theories to make 
 room for his own, the distinguished jurist, Professor Sohm, 
 unexpectedly stepped in, and, with language of high regard 
 for the younger scholar, proceeded to seize the ground which 
 he had prepared, and to build upon it a very different sort of 
 edifice equally objectionable to Dr. von Below. It is now 
 Belovius contra Mundum; while his antagonists also have 
 to turn aside from time to time to spar among themselves. 
 
 Two of the latest and most important of these publica- 
 tions are now before us. The reviewer sets about criticising 
 them with trepidation. For either he will seem to imply 
 his acceptance of one of the several competing theories, and 
 in this case he will be set down as an ' Anhanger 'of a par- 
 ticular master and school, and have to bear the burden of all 
 that school's defects ; or else he will be of opinion that no 
 one theory is adequate by itself, and then he will be visited 
 with contempt for his want of discrimination. Dr. von 
 Below warns us that only those can be presumed to have a 
 real interest in inquiries touching constitutional history who 
 feel ' joy in juristic distinctions.' 1 
 
 It must be allowed, however, that even the mere econo- 
 mist can hardly fail to take pleasure in the sharp and clear- 
 cut distinctions which Dr. von Below draws in the present 
 work. If it is the fault of German scholars to distinguish 
 overmuch, it is perhaps the fault of English scholars not to 
 distinguish enough. Even if we ultimately find that our 
 explanation must be of the nature of a synthesis, we shall 
 
 1 Ursprung, p. xii.
 
 PROFESSOR VON BELOW'S TRACTATES 221 
 
 the better understand the character of the elements which 
 go to make up the whole if we begin by analysis. But 
 allowing that in this respect the economic historian must go 
 to school to the lawyer, we must add that the lawyer has 
 often himself to learn the lesson that his task is incomplete 
 until he has made the attempt to form for himself a mental 
 picture of the conditions which his terms denote. That he 
 hardly attempts to do so is a defect in the work of Dr. von 
 Below, as it is a defect in that of the scholar with whom he 
 is most in accord, Professor Hegel. 
 
 Dr. von Below maintains that the origin of the town is to 
 be found in the ' Landgemeinde ' or ' Ortsgemeinde ; ' a 
 view which seems to be identical with the belief of Dr. 
 Stubbs that ' towns were originally no more than large 
 townships or collections of townships, whose constitution 
 cannot be shown to have differed from the general type of 
 the ancient village.' l It is true that Dr. Stubbs profoundly, 
 though insensibly, modifies this conclusion by his insistence 
 on the hundred jurisdiction, an element absent from Dr. 
 von Below's theory ; nevertheless both writers agree in 
 laying the greatest stress on the same institution as the germ 
 of the later town. The main purpose of Dr. von Below's 
 last book is to defend this thesis against the theory of 
 Professor Sohm, who regards the town constitution as the 
 result of the establishment of a market and therewith of a 
 market-tribunal. He has quite overthrown, he supposes, 
 the view that the town constitution arose out of ' Hofrecht,' 
 or, as we should say, the manorial organisation. Yet he 
 turns in passing to deal a further blow at the manorial 
 theory ; and it is here that we may venture to make our first 
 observation. Just as Dr. Stubbs has remarked that the 
 English towns, though they had their origin in the township, 
 had it ' generally in the dependent township which acquired 
 wealth and solidity under the protection of a great earl or 
 bishop, or of the king himself ; ' 2 so Dr. von Below recognises 
 that ' most German Gemeinden (communes, townships) were, 
 
 1 Const. Hist. i. 438, cf. 99. 2 Ibid. i. 442.
 
 222 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 at the time of the rise of the towns, dependent upon a 
 Grundherr (landlord).' ' This dependence did not go so far, 
 he declares, ' as to amount to absorption ' whatever that 
 may mean. ' 4 But the Gemeindeherr (lord of the township) 
 had succeeded in securing recognition of his superior pro- 
 perty rights over the common lands, in laying various 
 burdens on the members of the township, and in making 
 the passing of by-laws and the appointment of officers 
 dependent upon his approval.' ! The phrase ' succeeded 
 in securing,' &c. (war es . . . gelungen .... geltend zu 
 macheri), is of course a trace of the author's acceptance of the 
 Mark or Original Free Village Community theory. But 
 that is not really in question just now ; the point to observe 
 is that when the towns arose the townships were as a rule 
 I should be inclined to ask for any case where they were not 
 in dependence upon lords, however that condition of 
 things may have come about. But when once this is perceived, 
 the question arises whether the township theory is after all 
 so far removed from the manorial theory. It is not neces- 
 sary to follow Nitzsch, either in supposing that the baronial 
 retinues (ministeriales) constituted an important part of the 
 burgess body, or that the burgesses were originally all serfs, 
 or even that the later craftsmen were originally all the serfs 
 of the town lord ; each of these positions may be surrendered 
 without surrendering the idea that the towns grew out of 
 at any rate geographically groups of persons subject to 
 a Hofgericht, or, as we should say, out of manors. Indeed 
 the question is pertinent what we really know of any Land- 
 gemeinde not subject to manorial jurisdiction, at the epoch 
 of the rise of the towns. It is significant that Dr. von 
 Below, to prove township control of weights and measures, 
 has to rely on the records of customs (Weistumer) made ' in 
 the later centuries of the middle ages and the beginning of 
 modern times.' 2 ' There exists no older information as to 
 the competency of the Landgemeinden.' He thinks ' we can 
 without hesitation date back from these to earlier times.' 
 
 1 Unsprung, p. 41. * Ibid. p. 61.
 
 PEOFESSOR VON BELOW'S TRACTATES 223 
 
 Perhaps we may for weights and measures; but for other 
 and more vital matters that is a dangerous procedure. 
 
 The main purpose of the book, to show the untenableness 
 of Professor Sohm's theory as to market rights, is one with 
 which it is more possible to be in complete accord. The 
 present writer has already pointed out in another place 1 the 
 extremely artificial character of Professor Sohm's line of 
 argument. Even the proposition that the market was the 
 one essential factor which made the town apart from 
 Professor Sohm's views as to the origin of the market 
 jurisdiction, which is clearly separable from it is one which, 
 as Dr. von Below clearly shows, cannot be maintained. In 
 England, as we know from Dr. Gross's treatise, the control 
 of the market fell into the hands of the merchant gild, and 
 the merchant gild legally and constitutionally was distinct 
 from the town community. But when that is said, the ques- 
 tion still remains to what extent trade and traders, whether 
 specially organised or not, contributed to create the charac- 
 teristic features of mediaeval town life. Granting that the 
 towns grew out of the earlier local groupings whether we 
 call them ' villages,' ' townships,' or ' manors ' matters little, 
 for there is hardly any dispute as to what the state of affairs 
 in the country actually was yet the towns were something 
 more than townships or manors ; and the question is, what 
 was it made them more? Many things fortification, 
 privileges as to taxation, separate jurisdiction, a market ; 
 but is it not probable that the market (or the existence of 
 a body of traders) was the most important of these, and to 
 a large extent the reason why the rest of them were secured ? 
 Dr. von Below remarks, and it is of the utmost importance, 
 that it is necessary to distinguish the question of the im- 
 pelling motive which caused a constitutional change, and 
 that of the organisation which the innovation affected, and out 
 of which the new institution arose. The latter, he says, is a 
 question of constitutional history, the former of economic 
 history. 2 This is a distinction which it is essential to keep 
 
 1 English Historical Review, vii. 340. 2 Ursprung, p. 12.
 
 224 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 in mind in the progress of an investigation. But when we 
 come to sum up at the end, and speak of the origin 
 ( Ursprung, Entstehung, &c.) of the town system, are we to 
 lay stress only on the answer to one of these questions ? 
 This seems Dr. von Below's practice. Yet, to construct an 
 edifice, it is not enough to have a foundation ; something 
 must be done with it. ' Origin ' suggests a process as well 
 as a starting-point ; and in that process, as Dr. Doren re- 
 marks, there were ' both active and passive elements.' l 
 
 The work of Dr. Doren just mentioned is one of that 
 valuable series of investigations which owes its origin to the 
 inspiration of Professor Schmoller's Berlin ' Seminar.' It is 
 rather a review of the literature of the subject than a really 
 independent treatment of it ; but as an introduction to the 
 discussion it will be extremely useful, and it abounds in 
 suggestive remarks by the way. First comes a chapter on 
 the origin of the Germanic gild system in general ; then one 
 on mediaeval trade and traders ; then a review and this 
 will be extremely convenient to readers outside Germany 
 of recent investigations into the history of eight German 
 and two French towns : then a renewed survey of the whole 
 field, laying especial stress upon the economic elements 
 involved ; and finally an appendix of tables and documents. 
 As to the ' origin ' of the town constitution, Dr. Doren has 
 ventured on a theory of his own which appears to be a 
 combination of the teaching of Professor Sohm with some 
 suggestions from Dr. Inama-Sternegg's ' Wirthschafts- 
 geschichte ; ' he makes it due to ' a combination of the 
 customary privileges of travelling merchants, and the 
 privileges of the local market.' 2 But granting that these 
 two elements coalesced and to the present writer they seem 
 rather to belong to different stages in the evolution and 
 supposing they were of great importance, Dr. Doren's view 
 would seem to err almost as much as Dr. von Below's in laying 
 emphasis only on one set of factors ; for if these were, to 
 
 1 Kaufmannsgilden, p. 25, n. 2 Ibid. p. 32.
 
 PEOFESSOE VON BELOW'S TEACTATES 225 
 
 use his own phraseology, the ' active ' factors, what were the 
 ' passive ' ? Or, in other words, if the action of these forces 
 made the town out of something, what was that something ? 
 Dr. Doren seems to cast Dr. von Below's argument as to the 
 survival of certain traits of the old agricultural group rather 
 too lightly aside. 
 
 In tracing the later progress of events, the economic 
 characteristics of the activity of the merchant gild, and the 
 causes of the marked differences between England, France, 
 and Germany, Dr. Doren is more satisfactory ; and his book 
 ought to be looked at by every one who wants to know how 
 far England pursued a movement of her own, and how far 
 she shared in the greater currents of social life which swept 
 over the whole of Western Europe. To call attention to 
 half the points of interest would involve the writing of 
 another pamphlet; but there is perhaps space to call 
 attention to one. It will be remembered that in reaction 
 against Professor Brentano's somewhat lurid picture of a 
 struggle between merchant and craft gilds in England, 
 Dr. Gross has maintained that the craftsmen were at first 
 themselves members of the merchant gild. It has been 
 urged as against this latter view that to prove that some 
 craftsmen were members of the merchant gild is not the 
 same as proving that all craftsmen were members : that the 
 merchant gild, though it extended its membership frequently 
 to persons outside the town, was primarily an association 
 of burgesses of a particular town, so that to become a member 
 it would be necessary in the case of an inhabitant that he 
 should first be a citizen ; and that it was the general rule 
 that the possession of a burgage-holding was the pre- 
 requisite of citizenship ; so that we need not be surprised 
 if some craftsmen, being burgage-holders, and therefore 
 citizens, became members of the merchant gild, and others, 
 perhaps more, not having such holdings, remained outside. 
 All this argument is more than confirmed by Dr. von Below's 
 insistence on the holding of land as originally the condition 
 of citizenship in Germany, and upon the way in which in 
 various towns craftsmen could acquire citizenship precisely 
 
 Q
 
 226 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 because they could hold land ; l though he hardly sees just 
 how far the proposition carries him. And now comes 
 Dr. Doren, and by comparing his criticism of Dr. Gross's 
 book with his criticism of Nitzsch, another important element 
 in the problem presents itself. It had already been seen 
 that in the monopoly of trade which the gild merchant 
 obtained lay the danger of a serious conflict of interests with 
 any craftsmen there might happen to be outside the gild ; and 
 this opinion Dr. Doren more than confirms. 2 But we have 
 probably been led astray by an impression that craftsmen 
 sold ' wares ' to the general public earlier than they did. As 
 Professor Schmoller and others have recently pointed out, 
 the craftsmen at first worked chiefly in the houses, or at the 
 immediate order, of a customer or employer he may be 
 called either who provided the material. So long as they 
 did not bring goods to market they would not need to 
 become members of the merchant gild. It was only as and 
 when the craftsmen began to desire to bring wares to market 
 that the privileges of the merchant gild would create friction. 
 As Dr. Doren points out 3 it would only be the exceptional 
 and richer craftsmen who would at first manufacture for the 
 general public, and these would probably be already owners 
 of tenements and therefore burghers. It would not be until 
 many craftsmen sought to sell finished wares or to buy their 
 own raw material, and found entry to the merchant gild 
 difficult, that collisions would arise. 
 
 1 Ursprung, pp. 46-47. 2 Kaufmannsgilden, p. 150. 
 
 1 Ibid. p. 133.
 
 227 
 
 MBS. GEEEN'S 'TOWN LIFE IN THE 
 FIFTEENTH CENTUEY ' ' 
 
 Now that so much interest is being taken in social history, 
 there is sure to be a ready welcome for a book which 
 describes the internal life of English towns at the period of 
 their greatest power; especially when that book appears 
 in two comely volumes with the impress of a great 
 publisher, and the reader need only open it to come upon 
 analogies or contrasts to present-day conditions stated in 
 language pointed and highly coloured. The name which 
 the authoress bears ; the dedication of her work to the 
 memory of the author of the 'History of the English 
 People ; ' the statement in the preface that it was under- 
 taken in fulfilment of a promise made to him when his work 
 was over these circumstances all help to make the welcome 
 warmer, for, to most of those who care for English history, 
 John Eichard Green is a cherished name. Starting, perhaps, 
 with some irritation against the ' stylist ' whose success for 
 the time threw his masters into the shade, they have come 
 to feel something like a personal affection for that trans- 
 parent soul who struggled so hard against such odds, and 
 did so much to make the ' island story ' dear to all English- 
 speaking people. They rejoice to see that name once more 
 coupled, by one who bears it, with worthy achievements. 
 
 And, indeed, this book of Mrs. Green's deserves a good 
 deal more than a sweeps d'estime. In the first place, it is the 
 
 1 [Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, by Mrs. J. B. Green. (1894.) 
 Reviewed in the Nation, May 24, 1894.] 
 
 Q2
 
 228 MEDIAEVAL URBAN 
 
 result of arduous labours which have probably occupied 
 several years; though possibly her readers will hardly 
 realise how much the way had been smoothed by earlier 
 scholars, especially Schanz and Gross. And then, secondly, 
 several of the chapters, especially those on the ' Battle for 
 Freedom ' and ' The Battle for Supremacy,' deal, and, on 
 the whole, deal effectively, with topics hitherto strangely 
 disregarded by English writers, though their importance for 
 continental towns has long been recognised by foreign 
 scholars. The contrasted fortunes of towns upon the royal 
 demesne and of towns upon baronial or church estates in 
 their efforts to secure municipal self-government, and the 
 difficulties with which municipalities had to struggle which 
 were confronted with rival jurisdictions within their walls, 
 are here for the first time emphatically set forth. To the 
 serious student of municipal history, in particular, the book 
 will serve as a stimulant if only to controversy ; and even 
 that would be an agreeable exchange for the isolation which 
 has usually been the fate of workers in this field. It will 
 serve also as an indication of the material at his disposal. 
 
 Still, it must be confessed that, in spite of its high 
 purpose and popular language, the book is often not a little 
 wearisome. This is in part the fault of its style, which is a 
 curiously faithful echo of the style of John Eichard Green. 
 Even in the hands of its creator, that style, with its per- 
 petual effort after picturesqueness and emphasis, was apt to 
 become a little trying to the nerves. The ' Short History ' 
 was saved by the very breadth of the space to be covered 
 and the compression which fortunately formed part of its 
 plan. Eapid movement was necessary, and this carried us 
 safely over the epithets, not to mention that in a thousand 
 years of history there were occasions to which a large 
 proportion of the glittering adjectives and resonant verbs 
 could be fitly applied. But the case is different when the 
 same style is applied in eight hundred pages to such a 
 subject as the fifteenth-century borough. A brief, broadly 
 generalised statement of the movement of town life during 
 the hundred years could be made interesting to a reflecting
 
 TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTUEY 229 
 
 mind ; an episode here and there might even be found to 
 have dramatic quality ; but we may be tolerably certain that 
 a true statement of the minutiae of the municipal history of 
 any century the fifteenth as well as the nineteenth must 
 be pretty dull, if for no other reason than that human 
 affairs are intricate, and that intricacy is seldom obviously 
 interesting. And the writer who attempts to make every 
 page sparkling is pretty sure to pay the penalty. So has it 
 been with Mrs. Green. Again and again we come upon the 
 most startling inconsistencies ; and in almost every case the 
 explanation is that the temptation to say a ' strong ' thing 
 to use ' utterly ' and ' altogether ' and ' completely,' to talk 
 of ' a struggle for life ' and ' the drain of taxation,' to exult 
 over ' buoyant and exuberant strength ' or to lament over 
 ' dreary groups seething with inarticulate discontent ' has 
 been too much for sober judgment. 
 
 Yet the book is not sufficiently inconsistent to be im- 
 partial ; and this brings us to an even graver defect. The 
 impression which as a whole it produces is that of panegyric 
 alternating with special pleading. The keynote is struck in 
 the preface, where we are reminded that Mr. Green's own 
 ' brilliant sketch of the early life of English towns ' was 
 ' inspired by ardent sympathy and emotion.' Mrs. Green 
 evidently aspires to continue his work. But until we are 
 pretty certain of the fundamental facts and relations, ' ardent 
 sympathy and emotion ' are precisely the qualities most in 
 the way. The reason why the student of physical science 
 only too often despises history is just this that it has been 
 written with ' emotion.' Even Mrs. Green would agree that 
 the accounts hitherto given of other mediaeval institutions 
 for instance, of the Church are largely vitiated by ' sym- 
 pathy.' When she herself comes to treat of the labour 
 question and the crafts and the gild merchant, in her second 
 volume, she confesses that there is much that is still obscure. 
 Would it not be well to keep our feelings well in hand until 
 we have more light ? As it is, the reader who goes to these 
 volumes must be prepared to find the boroughs always 
 in the right, whether in their difficulties with the royal
 
 230 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 government, the church, or the crafts. To all these powers 
 the meanest motives are freely attributed. And yet, when 
 we reflect that royal administration, church, and crafts all 
 indubitably contributed valuable elements to progress, and 
 that the lot of those countries, like Germany, where the 
 towns gained more of their own way, was not altogether 
 satisfactory, we cannot help feeling that such partisanship is 
 no safe guide.
 
 231 
 
 PKOFESSOE MAITLAND'S ' TOWNSHIP 
 AND BOKOUGH' 1 
 
 THE Mr. Ford who, eight and twenty years ago, left a quite 
 insufficient sum of money to found a 'professorship' of 
 English history at Oxford, built better than he knew ; for a 
 benevolent Court of Chancery has not scrupled to listen to 
 Oxford's representations, and has permitted the application of 
 the endowment to a far wiser purpose to the establishment 
 of an annual lectureship which will doubtless bring to the 
 University, year after year, some of the most distinguished 
 historical scholars of the time. As the first-fruits of the 
 Ford foundation we have already had Mr. Gardiner's 
 ' Cromwell's Place in History ; ' and now the series is worthily 
 continued by a work of a quite different sort, Professor 
 Maitland's lectures on the beginnings of English town 
 history, illustrated by the antiquities of his own borough, 
 Cambridge. To a university where, since the departure of 
 Dr. Stubbs, English institutional history has been com- 
 paratively little investigated, though taught to increasing 
 crowds of undergraduate students, comes the representative 
 of a sister university, who has cast more fresh light 
 on the subject than any of his contemporaries, but who 
 finds at home comparatively few undergraduates to listen 
 to him. 
 
 1 [Township and Borough : Being the Ford Lectures delivered in 
 the University of Oxford in the October term of 1897. By Frederic 
 William Maitland, LL.D., Downing Professor of the Laws of England in 
 the University of Cambridge. (1898.) lleviewed in the Nation, 
 June 30, 1898.]
 
 232 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 The present set of lectures forms a supplement to the 
 chapter on the Boroughs in Professor Maitland's recent and 
 substantial treatise, 'Domesday Book and Beyond.' It 
 contains, probably, no idea that is absolutely new to the 
 careful readers of that book. Mr. Maitland abides by his 
 ' garrison theory,' suggested to him by Dr. Keutgen's essays 
 on German town history the theory that the ' burh ' was 
 first differentiated from the rural village by its establishment 
 as a shire stronghold, wherein the thegns of its shire were 
 bound to keep houses and retainers. But he gets no fresh 
 evidence for this contention from Cambridge, and, in defer- 
 ence to Mr. Tait's criticism, he abandons one supposed piece 
 of evidence. He ' feels bound to confess,' moreover, ' not 
 that he had said too much of the borough as a military 
 centre,' but that he had ' said too little of the borough as a 
 ticn,' i.e., as an agrarian organisation, ' and as the market 
 and moot-stow of a shire.' Accordingly, he now lays great 
 stress on the agricultural basis of the history of Cambridge, 
 on its ' fields ' and meadows and commons. Old Loggan's 
 engravings, showing the ' open fields ' with an almost 
 suspicious clearness, and the ordinance of 1624, defining the 
 pasture rights of 'every occupier of an ancient tenement 
 having of old-time broad gates,' come at the opening of the 
 book, and create a rural atmosphere which clings to it 
 throughout. But Professor Maitland shows, by the aid of a 
 minute analysis of the early terriers, that the ' shell ' of the 
 village community was a shell that was soon outgrown. He 
 finds no trace of 'a knot of land-owning patricians, the 
 successors of old hidesmen.' ' Already in the twelfth century, 
 the burghal society is versatile and heterogeneous. Some 
 wealthy burgesses own land ; others own none. The 
 market has mobilised the land.' 
 
 Of more general interest, however, than the detailed 
 history of a particular English borough, which, after all, 
 tells us little more than we could have guessed, and makes 
 no positive contribution to the vexed question of ' origins,' 
 are Mr. Maitland's observations on the development of 
 certain fundamental ideas which we are still apt to take for
 
 TOWNSHIP AND BOEOUGH 233 
 
 granted. The proposition which Gierke has worked out 
 with so much elaboration in his ' Deutsche Genossenschaft,' 
 that the communitas of the Middle Ages only slowly grew into 
 the unity of the ' corporation,' is here made to unlock many 
 doors, and even furnishes a palliation for the immorality 
 of a certain Cambridge common-councillor in the evil days 
 before municipal reform. ' The village community was not 
 corporate. Corporateness came of urban life ; ' but it would 
 seem that in the minds of some town councillors the evolu- 
 tion of the idea was not complete even in 1833. 
 
 Nor is this a mere sophistic distinction. The idea of the 
 ' corporation ' worked itself out pari passu with the idea of 
 ' property.' As Mr. Maitland makes clear, when King John 
 granted the vill of Cambridge to the burgesses, nobody 
 could have told us whether he conferred ' ownership ' in the 
 soil upon a ' corporation,' for the simple reason that nobody 
 could have understood the terms of our question. For ' what 
 we have to watch in early times is not a transfer of some- 
 thing, some thing, called "ownership," from one sort of 
 " units " ' whether tribe, clan, village community, or indi- 
 vidual ' to another. It is the crystallisation round several 
 different centres and in very different shapes of that vague 
 " belongs " which contains both public power and private 
 right, power over persons, right over things.' This is a view 
 of the matter which, even if it is implicit in Gierke, and 
 suggested in Mr. Baden-Powell's treatises on India, no one 
 has yet stated so pointedly as Professor Maitland ; and if it 
 is confirmed by further consideration, it is bound to have an 
 effect on our notions of the evolution of society which will 
 extend immeasurably beyond the ' green balks ' of ' open 
 fields '
 
 234 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 ME. BOUND'S 'COMMUNE OF LONDON 
 
 i 
 
 THIS volume of rather miscellaneous papers is hardly so 
 substantial as those two earlier books of Mr. Bound, the 
 ' Geoffrey de Mandeville ' and the ' Feudal England,' by 
 which he put all students of mediseval English institutions 
 under such heavy obligations. But it contains at least two 
 contributions of signal interest. One is the paper on the 
 Commune of London, which gives the volume its title. As 
 every one who has paid any attention to the subject is aware, 
 two of the chronicles of the reign of Eichard tell us in 
 almost identical terms that in 1191 the government of the 
 day granted to the citizens of London their communa. 
 What this may mean has hitherto been a matter of con- 
 jecture. If we turn to the cautious pages of Dr. Stubbs, 
 we find, on the one side, that ' the victory of the com- 
 munal principle ' meant ' the establishment of the corporate 
 character of the city under a mayor.' But, on the other 
 hand, we are told that it merely ' gave completeness to a 
 municipal constitution which had long been struggling for 
 recognition.' We are warned against the temptation to 
 suppose that ' commune ' could mean in England just what 
 it meant in France : ' The French charters are in both 
 style and substance very different from the English.' ' The 
 English have an ancient local constitution,' while 'the 
 French communia ' is that most abhorrent of things to most 
 
 1 [The Commune of London, and Oilier Studies, by J. H. Round. 
 (1899.) Reviewed in the Nation, November 30, 1899.]
 
 THE COMMUNE OF LONDON 235 
 
 English constitutional historians, 'a new thing.' Indeed, 
 but for the fact that a Mayor of London makes his appear- 
 ance in 1193, and the further fact that abroad ' commune ' 
 and ' mayor ' went together, we might feel inclined to regard 
 the episode as scarcely creating a ripple on the smooth 
 current of native development. But now comes Mr. Bound 
 with the actual text of the oath sworn to their commune by 
 the Londoners of 1191. How he chanced upon it he does 
 not tell us, but its authenticity seems to be beyond question. 
 And here we find a promise of obedience, not only to the 
 Mayor, but also to the ' skivins ' or ' e'chevins ' officers 
 never before suspected in London, but markedly character- 
 istic of the ' communal ' organisation of Eouen and other 
 towns of northern France. Moreover, the oath of 1191 
 goes on to promise to keep the counsel of ' the Mayor, the 
 6chevins, and the other probi homines who shall be with 
 them.' And when Mr. Bound next produces, from the year 
 1205, the ' oath of the Twenty-Four,' and shows that it was 
 identical in its main features with the oath of ' the Twenty- 
 Four ' of Bouen, he has established a high probability that the 
 London commune of 1191 was simply modelled on that of the 
 Norman capital. At Bouen ' the Twenty-Four ' were divided 
 into two bodies of a dozen each, known respectively as the 
 Echevins and the Councillors (Consultores) ; and the obvious 
 presumption is that the e'chevins and the probi homines asso- 
 ciated with them in London formed a similar body of Twenty- 
 Four, similarly divided. And not only did London obtain ' a 
 fully developed commune of the Continental pattern,' but, as 
 Mr. Bound also shows from the Pipe Bolls, the same year, 
 1191, saw a reduction of the ferm of London from 500/. to 
 3002. Evidently much more happened than the mere 
 introduction of a new name for old liberties. It will be the 
 task of the future historians of London to determine how 
 far the institutions of 1191 survived in the later civic 
 organisation. 
 
 The other paper of special importance is the first in the 
 book, that entitled ' The Settlement of the South- and East- 
 Saxons.' Mr. Bound describes it as merely ' a pioneer
 
 236 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 paper," intended to point the way to a more systematic and 
 critical study of English place-names. But it contains 
 observations which certainly ought to arrest attention. It 
 may be remembered that Kemble started with the assump- 
 tion that in English place-names the suffix -ing had a 
 ' patronymic ' significance. Even the bold Mr. Seebohm 
 accepted this as generally true. Disinclined to accept 
 Mr. Kemble's view that the patronymic involved a ' clan ' 
 and a ' mark-community of kinsfolk,' Mr. Seebohm was 
 reduced to the conjecture that it indicated a ' tribal house- 
 hold ' with a dependent group of servile cultivators. There 
 was such a complete absence of evidence for this con- 
 tention that most readers were naturally inclined to abide 
 by the simpler view of Kemble and Green and Dr. Stubbs, 
 and to believe, in the words of the last-named, that ' all the 
 primitive villages in whose name the patronymic ing occurs, 
 were originally colonised by communities united either really 
 by blood or by the belief in a common descent.' They will 
 hardly feel so sure of this when they have read Mr. Bound's 
 paper. 
 
 To begin with Mr. Bound will permit us somewhat to 
 rearrange his argument they will learn that the long and 
 impressive lists, in Kemble's well-known Appendix A, of 
 ' Marks inferred from local names ' are ' merely a pitfall for 
 the unwary.' It has long been known that in several cases 
 ing is a later modification, for euphony's sake, of some 
 earlier and quite unpatronymic termination. 1 But Mr. 
 Bound points out that misleading ings of this kind are much 
 more prevalent than has been supposed. A mere reference 
 to Domesday shows that in some instances the supposed clan 
 name is nothing more or less than a corruption of the name 
 of an individual owner. How large a number of genuine 
 ings are left on our hands Mr. Bound has not yet ascer- 
 tained ; doubtless there are a good many. But now comes 
 this further and far more important consideration. If we 
 
 1 [The best statement of the matter, from the philological side, is by 
 Mr. W. H. Stevenson, in the English Historical Review, April 1889. I 
 am indebted for this reference to Professor Andrews.]
 
 THE COMMUNE OF LONDON 237 
 
 are going to collect ings, we must not stop at villages ; we 
 must put together all the place-names containing ing to be 
 found scattered over the country. And when we begin to 
 do this, we find that the suffix frequently occurs in the 
 names of farm-houses which are now, and apparently always 
 have been, quite isolated. Ing may have something patro- 
 nymic about it, but evidently from that syllable alone we 
 cannot deduce a clan settlement. Let us give Mr Round's 
 tentative conclusion in his own words : 
 
 Here, then, is the value of these cases of what we may term 
 arrested development : they warn us against the rashness of 
 assuming that a modern or even a mediaeval village has been a 
 village from the first. The village community may be so far from 
 representing the original settlement as to have been, on the con- 
 trary, developed from what was at first but a farmstead. The 
 whole argument of such scholars as Professor Earle here and Dr. 
 Andrews in America is based on the assumption that the land was 
 settled by communities, each of them sufficiently large to have a 
 head, whether civil or military. To that supposition such names as 
 I have mentioned are, I think, fatal.
 
 238 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 PKOFESSOK PIBENNE ON THE FLEMISH 
 TOWNS l 
 
 IN M. Pirenne, Belgium has at last found an historian who 
 combines an adequate knowledge of the local ' sources ' with 
 a large historical culture. Trained in German methods, 
 evidently conversant with the most recent investigations, 
 alike in Germany and France, in the field of mediaeval insti- 
 tutions, and master of a vigorous and lucid style, Professor 
 Pirenne has produced a volume which will appeal both to 
 the general reader in his own country and to the professed 
 historical student there and elsewhere. 
 
 Beyond this general testimony to its interesting and 
 scholarly character, I must perforce, from sheer ignorance, 
 abstain from criticism. But it chances that some seventeen 
 years ago I had occasion to look into the sources for the 
 history of Flanders in the age of the Arteveldes, and to take 
 stock of the then existing modern literature dealing with the 
 period. And it has interested me to revive the recollections 
 of my own juvenile and wooden performance, and to compare 
 some of the conclusions which were natural enough then to 
 the youthful inquirer with M. Pirenne's far more mature and 
 competent judgment. 
 
 In narrating the ' political ' history, in the narrower 
 sense, of Flanders and the surrounding territories in the 
 thirteenth century, M. Pirenne has been unable to make 
 
 1 [Oeschichte Belgiens. Von Henri Pirenne. Band I. : Bis zum 
 Anfang des 14. Jahrhunderts. Deutsche Uebersetzung von Fritz 
 Arnheim. (1899.) Beviewed in the American Historical Revieiv, 
 October 1899.]
 
 THE FLEMISH TOWNS 239 
 
 much advance on the older Belgian writers, chief among 
 them M. Kervyn de Lettenhove ; and this for a couple of 
 reasons. The material is scanty ; and it has already been 
 carefully worked over. M. Pirenne endeavours, and not 
 without occasional success, to supply the lacunae in the 
 evidence of the chroniclers from his own wide knowledge of 
 the general European situation ; but nevertheless the story 
 remains, and probably will continue to remain, full of the 
 most sudden and most inexplicable changes of front or 
 what seem like changes of front on the part of all the 
 chief personages concerned. Even if M. Pirenne did not 
 himself care chiefly for the institutional and economic sides 
 of history, as it is clear he does, he would be thrown back 
 upon them by the impossibility of making any other part of 
 his subject really interesting. 
 
 Turning, then, to the development of institutions, perhaps 
 the first question that will suggest itself is as to the origin 
 of that civic life which so early characterised the corner of 
 Europe we now know as Belgium. It is with some amuse- 
 ment that I observe how trustfully I followed in 1882 the 
 leading of Georg von Maurer, and with the aid and 
 countenance of M. Vanderkindere's little pamphlet, ' Sur 
 1'Origine des Magistrats Communaux,' found the germs of 
 the later town-system in an imaginary mark-community. 
 Since 1882 great has been the discussion on the subject ; 
 and now M. Pirenne, following the prevailing tendency 
 among contemporary scholars, and applying to the Flemish 
 towns the general doctrine of municipal origines which he 
 has recently set forth with so much learning in the ' Eevue 
 Historique,' : finds the true beginning of town life in the 
 settlement of ' colonies ' of merchants and craftsmen beneath 
 the walls of an abbey or castle. 2 This view is probably 
 nearer the truth, or, perhaps one had better say, a larger part 
 of the truth, than the rural-village theory ; but its statement 
 here by M. Pirenne still shows the lack of precision which I 
 attempted to point out in his ' Eevue Historique ' articles. 
 This defect will be remedied, let us hope, in the detailed 
 
 1 [See supra, pp. 177, 195 seq.] a Geschichte Belgiens, i. 200.
 
 240 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 examination of the history of landed property in Ghent 
 which is about to be published by his pupil, M. des Marez. 
 
 Whatever the origin of town life may have been, M. 
 Pirenne's picture of the situation in the thirteenth century 
 agrees in all its important features with the notions one 
 could gather in 1882 from M. Vanderkindere's somewhat 
 rhetorical but yet refreshing and original work on ' Le Siecle 
 des Artevelde.' The key to the period is the struggle 
 between the city oligarchies and the craftsmen ; the former 
 seeking the support of the French king, who was anxious to 
 increase his hold over the vassal county of Flanders, and the 
 latter turning to the count, who was equally desirous, in his 
 more statesmanlike moments, of tightening his authority 
 over the town-magistrates. But on one point M. Pirenne 
 has something fresh to remark. When, in 1882, I came to 
 describe the crafts of Ghent, I felt in an obscure way that 
 there was something in the position of the weavers and the 
 fullers which was rather difficult to fit into the framework 
 of industrial life as it is exhibited to us by the modern 
 describers of ' the gild system.' Nevertheless, I seem to 
 have had no hesitation in saying : ' There was no jealousy 
 between employer and employed, inasmuch as the latter 
 could without much difficulty save sufficient capital to 
 become a master himself.' It is now a comfort to have M. 
 Pirenne point out, what seems very obvious once it is said, 
 that ' the textile crafts in the great manufacturing cities of 
 Flanders and Brabant presented an essentially different 
 appearance from that usually shown by the artisan corpora- 
 tions of the Middle Ages.' 
 
 The cause of this difference is easy to discern. Instead of 
 working, like other crafts, for the local market, they produced 
 wholesale and for export. The weaver, fuller, and dyer did not in 
 the least resemble in position the bakers or smiths, The latter 
 were at once artisans and traders, and they sold direct to their 
 customers the products of their industry, while the former had to 
 restrict themselves to the humble role of mere factory hands 
 (Indusirie-arbeiter). With the public they came not in contact ; 
 they had only to do with the entrepreneurs who employed them,
 
 THE FLEMISH TOWNS 241 
 
 i.e. the cloth-inerchants (drapiers). The cloth-merchants put into 
 their hands the wool to be worked up ; and it was the cloth- 
 merchants likewise who sold the finished cloth in the market. The 
 merchant is a capitalist ; the workman a wage-labourer. 1 
 
 When we realise that the richer cloth-merchants were 
 members of, or closely associated with, the civic oligarchy, 
 we can understand that the quarrel between the craftsmen 
 and the town authorities was probably an economic one as 
 well as a constitutional. 
 
 If the foregoing description by M. Pirenne be true and 
 it certainly fits well enough into what we know of the civic 
 troubles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it is 
 evident that the peculiar conditions of the Flemish cloth 
 industry had even thus early hurried it into a stage of 
 development essentially different from and subsequent to 
 ' the gild system ' in its ' normal ' form ; into a stage such 
 as German economists are wont to designate by the term 
 Hausindustrie, and the English writers of the early part of 
 this century by ' domestic system.' It differed indeed from 
 this, as it is usually seen in later centuries in Germany and 
 England, chiefly in its concentration in the cities ; but it 
 resembled it in the circumstance that though the little meester 
 might still have his journeymen and apprentices, the real 
 employer of them all, in the modern sense, was the merchant 
 through whom the work came to them. M. Pirenne remarks 2 
 as to the weavers and fullers of Ghent, that the specifically 
 craft organisations the Gewerke, or, as they said in mediaeval 
 England, the misteries were far too closely supervised by the 
 echevins to be capable of being used as weapons against their 
 rulers ; ' but it was different with the religious fraternities.' 
 
 Let us hope that when in his next volume he comes to 
 deal with the constitutional changes of the period of the 
 Arteveldes, he will draw more fully on the unpriuted 
 material to which he refers as his authority ; that he will 
 tell us more about these religious fraternities ; and that 
 he will enable us still better to realise the daily life of the 
 Weve Ambachte. 
 
 1 Geschichte Belgiens, i. 305. 2 Ibid. p. 417. 
 
 B
 
 242 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 KARL WILHELM NITZSCH 1 
 
 THE appearance of a new and improved edition of Nitzsch's 
 ' History of the German People ' is a convenient occasion for 
 calling attention to a work which originally appeared some 
 ten years ago. Prepared with loving skill by his pupil, 
 Dr. Georg Matthai, from the fragmentary papers which the 
 master left behind him and from the lecture-notes of his 
 hearers, these three volumes are not only rich in positive 
 suggestion, but also give a vivid impression of the tendencies 
 of recent historical teaching in Germany ; and it is from this 
 latter point of view that they will be of interest to economic 
 students. Nitzsch was one of the first, if not the very first, 
 of the professional historians to make the economic element 
 the dominating one in the story of a nation's life. Dr. 
 Matthai calls attention to the significant fact that, in spite of 
 Nitzsch's own protests against the abolition of the hero the 
 elimination of the influence of personality in history, it was 
 upon the development of the nation as a whole that he him- 
 self laid almost exclusive stress ; and Dr. Matthai is inclined 
 to see in Nitzsch's firm grasp of the conception of evolution 
 ('Entwickelung'), his chief merit. 2 But in this there is 
 nothing new ; of late, indeed, ' development ' has come to be 
 employed in historical writing with so little intermission 
 that it threatens to make itself a nuisance. What was newer 
 
 1 [Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes bis'aum Augsburger Religions- 
 frieden, by Karl Wilhelm Nitzsch. Zweite, durchgesehene und vermehrte 
 Auflage. Three vols. (1892). Eeviewed in the Economic Journal, iii. 
 686 (1893).] l i. pp. vii, viii.
 
 KAEL WILHELM NITZSCH 243 
 
 and more fruitful in Nitzsch's work was that he found the 
 preponderating forces in historical evolution to be economic. 
 Not the manifestation of an abstract idea like liberty, not 
 even the struggle between Church and State, or the progress 
 of intellectual enlightenment ; but the rise and organisation of 
 diverse economic classes and interests, and their shifting 
 mutual relations, furnished him with the guiding clues through 
 the thicket of events. 
 
 The barest outline of Nitzsch's teaching will be sufficient 
 to indicate his mental attitude, and at the same time to show 
 his indebtedness to men whom pace Professor Menger we 
 may still venture to call economists, especially to List and 
 Hildebrand. Nations, he thought, passed normally through 
 three periods : one of agriculture and ' Naturalwirthschaft ; ' 
 one in which trade and ' Geldwirthschaft ' appear by the side 
 of the earlier phenomena ; and finally one in which trade 
 and ' Geldwirthschaft ' gain the upper hand. Of these the first 
 lasted undisturbed in Germany till the end of the twelfth 
 century. ' Naturalwirthschaft ' is perhaps hard to define. 
 Strictly, of course, it means an economic system based on pay- 
 ments in kind as opposed to one in which payments are made 
 in money or ' Geld.' But Nitzsch uses it in a wider sense 
 than this, as indicating all the conditions of an agricultural 
 society bound in the fetters of status ; and, indeed, it may 
 be said to become with him wellnigh synonymous with 
 feudalism. For the picture of the agricultural stage he has 
 ever in his mind is not one of a population of independent 
 farmers, but rather one in which the soil is tilled by serfs 
 upon the estates of lords who devote their own energies to 
 war. Thus, as he sometimes explicitly states and more 
 frequently assumes as a matter of course, an ' agricultural ' 
 society is at the same time an aristocratic and a military 
 one. 
 
 Such a picture as this corresponds undoubtedly with 
 German conditions in the midst of the Middle Ages. But it 
 is significant for those who concern themselves with social 
 ' origins ' that Nitzsch evidently regards serfdom as coming 
 into existence just as soon as a settled agriculture was 
 
 B2
 
 244 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 introduced. It is true that ' the common small freeman ' of 
 the constitutional historians turns up frequently in his 
 pages ; and that he sometimes speaks as if seigneurie and 
 serfdom were due merely to a spontaneous division among 
 the freemen between those whose adventurous spirits took 
 them into the fray and those of a more home-abiding turn who 
 stayed behind to plough. 1 In one place he even tells us that 
 this separation was not complete until after the time of 
 Henry IV. 2 But elsewhere he describes ' the great majority 
 of the free warriors known to Tacitus ' as having entered 
 upon a purely peasant life (' eine rein bauerliche Kultur '), 
 and left ' the honour of arms and the joy of battle, the arts 
 of fight and discussion ' to a number of special families, 
 since the fifth century. 3 And in his chapter on 'Das 
 Taciteische Deutschland ' he makes the process take place 
 even earlier. The Germans were already, he holds, passing 
 from a pastoral to an agricultural stage, by way of a period 
 of 'Feldgraswirthschaft,' or 'extensive ' husbandry ; for this he 
 follows Hanssen in believing to be the meaning of the much- 
 discussed ' arva per annos mutant.' Yet even then ' according 
 to Tacitus, the tilling of the soil was essentially the work of 
 slaves, occupying a position like the Eoman coloni.' ' The 
 free German of the time of Tacitus was not, as Justus Moser 
 supposed, the landowning peasant (" Bauer ") ; for Tacitus 
 says expressly that the free German did no work, and he 
 regards him as occupied entirely with hunting, gaming, war, 
 and discussion ; he was no peasant (or tiller of the soil, 
 " Bauer ") but a warrior.' 4 In another place we learn that 
 the German nobility 'preserved in its purest form the old 
 German character. The administration of justice, warfare, 
 and political deliberation continued as before to form the 
 most honourable occupation of these families, and they had 
 their estates tilled by dependents.' s How far this view is 
 consistent with a mere separation of free men into two pro- 
 fessions as late as the eleventh century we need not trouble to 
 ask ; the chapters were probably put together from utterances 
 
 1 Cf. i. 181. 2 ii. 323. 
 
 4 i. 88. s iii. 327.
 
 KAEL WILHELM NITZSCH 245 
 
 belonging to different dates, and we have no means of 
 knowing what was Nitzsch's latest thought on the point 
 which, moreover, was one to which he gave no special 
 attention. The matter is worth dwelling upon only as 
 showing the impression which mediaeval serfdom made on a 
 man of keen historical insight of having existed among the 
 Germans from the very beginning of a settled agriculture. 
 
 With the later Middle Ages from the eleventh or twelfth 
 century onward Nitzsch had a more intimate acquaintance. 
 His most important contribution to German history, the v 
 work entitled ' Ministerialitat und Burgerthum/ was in large 
 measure an attempt to show how trade and ' Geldwirth- 
 schaft' arose from out of the purely agrarian conditions 
 of earlier centuries. The Minis teriales were the various 
 bodies of household servants and administrative functionaries, 
 chiefly of servile origin, gathered around the persons of the 
 great secular and ecclesiastical magnates at their castles and 
 palaces ; and these, according to Nitzsch, who has been 
 followed by many later writers, constituted a most important 
 element in the nascent citizen body. It is odd, let me 
 remark in passing, that no one has yet, so far as I know, 
 made a serious attempt to apply this theory to English 
 town history. Such a class of Ministeriales certainly does 
 not stare us in the face in the English ' sources,' but we 
 should possibly find them if we looked for them, even if they 
 did not play with us quite the leading part ascribed to them 
 in Germany. 
 
 Germany remained exclusively agricultural down to a 
 comparatively late period, some time after the rest of 
 western (continental) Europe. Why was this ? According 
 to Nitzsch it was altogether a matter of trading routes. It 
 has become a commonplace to ascribe the fall of German 
 commercial greatness to the change of routes involved in the 
 blocking-up of the Levant by the Turks and in the discovery 
 of the Cape passage. Nitzsch traces its origin to similar causes. 
 Down to the thirteenth century, he declares, Germany lay 
 altogether outside the highways of commerce ; or rather they 
 encircled it on the north and south without penetrating it.
 
 246 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 It was the political changes in that century in south-eastern 
 Europe and the rise of the great Italian republics which first 
 put the control of the Oriental trade into the hands of the 
 north Italian towns, and made the cities of southern 
 Germany and the Ehine the natural points of connection 
 between the Mediterranean and northern Europe ; while at 
 the same time the rise of the Hanse gave German merchants 
 the control of the Baltic. 1 
 
 The growth of the cities, the struggle of classes within, the 
 contest with the nobles without, form the main themes of 
 Nitzsch's third volume, and themes which evidently aroused 
 his interest more than any other with which he had to do. In 
 the character and mutual relations of the German nobility 
 and bourgeoisie, affected as both were by the weakening of 
 monarchical power due to the imperial ambitions of the 
 German kings, he finds the explanation of the peculiar 
 features of German history down to the present day. His 
 view is clearly and vigorously expressed in the concluding 
 chapter a chapter which seems to give more insight into the 
 inner political and social movements of modern Germany than 
 any other writing with which the reviewer is acquainted. In 
 the Prussian State of the eighteenth century Nitzsch finds 
 the highest condition and best employment of landowning 
 nobles ; in the cosmopolitan culture of central and southern 
 Germany he sees the natural outgrowth of town-life, brought 
 to its highest point in a ' Frankfurt senator's son/ Goethe. 
 The problem of this century has been to unite these two 
 elements, each admirable and each inadequate, in one 
 national organisation. 
 
 With this indication of the wider bearings of the subject, 
 et us turn back and look at Nitzsch's account of some of 
 the earlier stages in town history. ' By the middle of the 
 thirteenth century the new idea of the " citizen " (Burger) 
 had distinctly formed itself, in contrast alike to the " artisan " 
 and the " peasant ; " the body of citizens (Biirgerschaft) 
 included all those from which the town council was recruited. 
 
 1 ii. 311 ; ii. 62 et passim.
 
 KAEL WILHELM NITZSCH 247 
 
 . . . This German town-patriciate was a landowning one ; 
 but it also took part in trade and money-dealings. The 
 families of which it was composed let their land or their 
 houses to the craftsmen in return for a periodical payment 
 (Zins) ; and so a new practice made its appearance, that 
 of house-letting, and with it came an increasing population of 
 artisans by the side of the civic aristocracy.' ' 
 
 The foundation of the municipal constitution Nitzsch finds 
 in the grant of ' Marktfriede,' the special immunity and con- 
 sequent jurisdiction attached to a recognised centre of trade ; 
 the merchant gild he makes little of, and further diminishes 
 its importance by describing it as ' specifically Low German.' 2 
 And somewhat the same geographical distinction is drawn 
 when he comes to consider the collision between the 
 patriciate and the craft-gilds in later centuries. In the 
 leagued towns of Swabia and the Ehine the gilds everywhere 
 received a share in the government, sometimes even a share 
 greater than that of all other classes ; while in the Hanse 
 towns led by Liibeck they were steadily excluded from 
 power. 3 Nuremberg, with less than a fifth of its council 
 composed of gild representatives, stood midway between the 
 two groups, constitutionally as well as geographically. 4 The 
 difference between the northern and the south-western towns 
 was evidently a real one ; and the more favourable position 
 of the gilds in the latter may be explained in part by the 
 policy of their episcopal lords, who had found in the crafts- 
 men a counterpoise to the burgher patriciate. 5 Yet one 
 cannot help feeling that in all probability the contrast is 
 drawn too sharply ; and in particular that the use of the 
 term ' democratic ' is very possibly misleading. For look for 
 a moment at the somewhat parallel case of London. The 
 enactment which put the city council completely in the hands 
 of the companies has in this case also been interpreted as a 
 democratic victory ; and yet it does not take long to discover 
 that a constitution in which ' the greater companies,' and the 
 
 1 iii. 119. 2 ii. 38. [C/. supra, p. 171.] 
 
 iii. 300. 4 iii. 304. iii. 212.
 
 248 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 wealthier men of those companies, had an overwhelming 
 influence can hardly be described as unqualifiedly democratic. 
 And in a similar way it may have been the case that the 
 reason why in one German town gilds had political power 
 and in another not, was that in the former they repre- 
 sented the wealth of particular trades which in the latter 
 were non-existent.
 
 249 
 
 JOURNEYMEN'S CLUBS 1 
 
 A LITTLE work by Dr. Bruno Schoenlank, entitled ' Social 
 Conflicts Three Centuries Ago,' and published in 1894, 
 deserves attention as being a good deal better than its title, 
 and as making a real addition to our knowledge of the six- 
 teenth century. It is especially interesting in that it suggests 
 some necessary criticism of certain other and more recent 
 works that are likely to receive more notice in America and 
 England. 
 
 The book deals with the Gesellenvereinigungen, or jour- 
 neymen's associations, of Nuremberg in the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries; and, so far as the nature of such 
 organisations is concerned, it adds nothing to what Schanz 
 had said seventeen years before in his c Gesellenverbande,' 
 except some additional and not altogether well-placed 
 emphasis. The opening chapters suffer no little from bad 
 rhetoric : and they are so vague just where definiteness is 
 most called for that it is impossible to make out what the 
 development of Nuremberg industry really was. Dr. 
 Schoenlank tells us, for instance, that Hausindustrie and 
 the Verleger were encroaching on the old Handwerk 
 organisation ; he does not tell us in which crafts in particu- 
 lar that was taking place ; nor does he seem to realise that 
 the picture of poverty-stricken master-craftsmen, dependent 
 on merchants, is hard to reconcile with that other picture of 
 
 1 [Political Science Quarterly, March 1897 ; apropos of Sociale 
 Kampfe vor dreihundert Jahren : Altnilrnbergische Studien, by Bruno 
 Schoenlank, 1894.]
 
 250 MEDIEVAL URBAN 
 
 rich and haughty master-craftsmen exploiting their journey- 
 men. Probably some crafts were entirely transformed ; 
 probably some quite new occupations, organised from the 
 first on the ' domestic system/ sprang up during the same 
 period; and probably some Handwerke survived, with 
 but gradual and imperceptible changes of organisation as 
 time went on. It is this presence, side by side, of the 
 domestic and the gild systems which adds so greatly to the 
 difficulties of economic history in the period between the 
 Eeformation and the great inventions ; and before we can 
 judge of the position of affairs in any particular town or 
 district we want some quantitative notion of the relative im- 
 portance there of each system. 
 
 I have used ' gild system ' in default of any better term 
 in English, although the name ' gild ' was seldom applied to 
 an organised craft in the England of the later Middle Ages. 
 In somewhat the same way modern German writers are apt 
 to speak of Zunftsystem, even where, in the language of the 
 particular time and place, no Ziinfte existed ; though they 
 have hardly so good an excuse, since they have another 
 term, Handwerk, ready to their hand. As Dr. Schoenlank 
 shows, the term Zunft was abhorred by the town-council 
 of Nuremberg, and its use was carefully avoided, until cir- 
 cumstances had altered and the city fathers could afford to 
 be careless in the eighteenth century. The council kept the 
 several crafts under a very tight control, and regarded any 
 unauthorised gathering of their members, or any independent 
 decision by them in matters of trade policy, as ziinftisch 
 and therefore as worthy of severe punishment. In 1592 
 the purse-makers of Nuremberg had to tell the purse-makers 
 of Magdeburg that they were not permitted to communicate 
 with them directly ' because here there are no Ziinfte,' 
 Still, it is evident that the economic significance of the 
 Handwerk was much the same all over Germany, whether 
 it had the constitutional powers of a Zunft or not. Dr. 
 Schoenlank hardly brings this out with sufficient clearness. 
 On the other hand, when he is speaking of the efforts of the 
 journeymen's associations to obtain a certain ' jurisdiction ' over
 
 JOUENEYMEN'S CLUBS 251 
 
 their members, and connects these efforts with ' differences of 
 class interests ' between them and the masters, he sometimes 
 forgets how little jurisdiction the Handwerke themselves 
 exercised, either over masters or journeymen. 
 
 In spite of the author's two chapters on ' the beginnings 
 of the organisation ' and ' the progress of the Gesellenver- 
 bande in the fifteenth century,' there is hardly any firm 
 ground to stand on until we reach the Gesellenordnung of 
 the purse-makers of 1530. Most of the religious fraternities 
 of earlier times, of which he gives any account, were com- 
 posed either of masters alone or of journeymen and masters ; 
 and all alike were dissolved at the Eeformation (1524). By the 
 end of the fifteenth century, however, in those crafts in 
 which ' wandering ' became the rule, the customs had already 
 grown up which were associated with the Schenke ; and it 
 is for the new light it sheds on the history of this peculiar 
 institution that the book of Dr. Schoenlank is chiefly 
 welcome. The Schenke was originally, perhaps, the cup 
 of ale or wine given from the doorstep to a passing traveller : 
 out of this grew the meaning afterwards attached to it in 
 artisan circles, namely, the sustenance provided by his 
 fellows for a travelling journeyman when he had reached a 
 new town and was looking for work ; and those crafts in 
 which there was a regular system of such aid ultimately 
 came to be distinguished as geschenkte Handwerke. In the 
 sixteenth century, however, the term had come to include a 
 good deal more : it meant primarily the periodical meetings 
 of the journeymen, with all the festivity there enjoyed and 
 the business transacted, as in the ordinance of 1530, ' Item, 
 every four weeks they shall have and hold eine Schenke ; ' l 
 and it meant also the tavern at which the meetings were 
 held, and which served as the temporary residence of 
 newly arrived journeymen until work was found for them. 
 In modern German, of course, it simply denotes, in the 
 straightforward language of Whitney's Dictionary, ' a 
 retail liquor-shop' but the word has come down in the 
 world. 
 
 1 Sociale Kdmpfe, p. 58.
 
 252 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 In 1530 the imperial authorities and the Reichstag 
 began an attempt, which we may provisionally describe, in 
 contemporary language, as designed for 'putting an end 
 to' Schenken. The Polizei-Ordnung of 1530 remained, 
 however, without effect even after it was renewed in 1548. 
 In March 1551 the town magistrates of Augsburg and Ulm 
 began to remonstrate with those of Nuremberg upon their 
 laxity, and to urge common action ; and in October 1551 
 the authorities of Nuremberg ventured to call the craftsmen 
 before them and to declare the Schenken abolished. But the 
 1 free ' and 'imperial ' cities were alone in their action : most 
 of the princes, and especially those of the house of Austria 
 itself, continued to disregard the ordinance ; and the journey- 
 men of those towns in which the Schenken were undis- 
 turbed put the artisans of Nuremberg who had submitted 
 to their abolition under so severe a boycott that the master- 
 craftsmen of Nuremberg were reduced to desperation, and 
 persuaded the council, in October 1553, to revoke its resolution. 
 There were fresh imperial Eecesses in 1551 and 1559 ; but 
 no steps were taken at Nuremberg to put them into effect, 
 though the magistrates at Strassburg were so indignant with 
 the sister city for its inaction that for a time they actually 
 excluded Nuremberg men from their fair. The rulers of 
 Nuremberg had learned that they were helpless unless the 
 surrounding powers backed them up ; and they waited until 
 in 1567 they had induced the three circles of Franconia, 
 Swabia, and Bavaria to agree to common action. Then 
 they made a fresh attempt ; again the princes thought 
 only of the immediate advantage of their own territories 
 and deserted them ; again there was a general boycott of 
 Nuremberg and the cities acting with it; and at last in 
 1573 the magistrates were forced to make terms, and to 
 consent to what Dr. Schoenlank calls ' a compromise.' With 
 this the journeymen were content, and came back to work ; 
 and henceforth throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries, in some cases well into the nineteenth, the journey- 
 men retained their Schenken or Herbergen, as they were 
 soon more commonly called.
 
 JOUKNEYMEN'S CLUBS 253 
 
 It is more difficult to judge of the inner significance of all 
 this than to set forth its outward course. Dr. Schoenlank 
 describes it as a struggle on the part of the journeymen for 
 ' the right of coalition ; ' and that to some extent it clearly 
 was. The journeymen clung to their meetings in the Schenke 
 or Herberge, and to their custom of fining absentees ; they 
 jealously guarded the right of Umbfrag, that is, the exclusive 
 right of finding work for newcomers. A newly arrived 
 journeyman had to make his way to the Herberge, where he 
 was given bed and food till he could be provided for ; and 
 then, if he was accepted as redlich (honourable), that is, as 
 bearing a good reputation, the journeymen-officials regularly 
 appointed for this purpose (Wirthe, later Wirthengesellen) 
 went round with him to look for work (um Arbeit schauen). 
 When the Strassburg authorities in 1563 sent to those of 
 Nuremberg what we should now call a ' black list ' of six 
 journeymen who had been fomenters of strife, and asked that 
 it should be shown to the Nuremberg Girdlers, ' so that they 
 should give no work to them/ the latter replied that masters 
 had nothing to do with the finding of work : that was the 
 journeymen's affair. This was the general custom, they 
 went on, in all geschenlcte Handwerke in the chief German 
 towns ; and whomsoever the journeymen might favour or 
 hinder, the masters had to put up with it. If a journeyman 
 hired himself directly to an employer, the journeymen fined 
 him and held him unredlich. This right of the journeymen 
 obviously gave them some advantages in determining the 
 conditions of labour, and the masters would probably have 
 been glad enough to destroy it. It is evidently the same 
 right externally as that claimed by modern organised labour 
 the exclusion of non-union men from employment. But 
 before we decide that the relations of the two parties to the 
 labour contract were the same as in modern times, we have 
 to remember : (1) that these journeymen were almost all 
 unmarried ; (2) that when employed they lived in the 
 master's house ; (3) that the masters had themselves usually 
 been journeymen ; l (4) that the numbers of masters and of 
 1 Cf. Sociale K&mpfe, pp. 139, 141.
 
 254 MEDIEVAL URBAN 
 
 journeymen were much the same in one of the crafts of 
 which we hear most there were ninety masters for one 
 hundred journeymen, and in another fifty for seventy or 
 eighty ; * (5) that the Nuremberg masters certainly displayed 
 no burning anxiety to put an end to the Umbfrag ; (6) that in 
 spite of what Dr. Schoenlank says of the frequency of 
 disputes about wages, he can produce but one example, that 
 of 1601 ; and (7) that the journeymen submitted to a fifteen- 
 hour day and that their efforts for ' the limitation of the 
 hours of labour' were limited to securing 'blue Monday.' 
 Dr. Schoenlank quotes Schanz to the effect that their desire 
 for a long rest after excessive toil was natural enough, and 
 the remark is just : he is perhaps too much occupied with 
 the economic aspects of the holiday to have a word to say 
 about its moral aspects. 2 
 
 This brings us to another feature of the Schenke which 
 may be clearly seen in the documents which Dr. Schoen- 
 lank faithfully reprints, but of which he says nothing. It 
 is over and over again charged against the Schenke that 
 excessive drinking went on there, especially when new- 
 comers were welcomed or old comrades parted with on 
 setting out for their journeys ; that unduly large fines were 
 demanded from absentees, which those who attended used 
 for their own refreshment ; that the 'prentices (Buben] were 
 allowed to be present and given too much to drink. The text of 
 the imperial ' Polizei-Ordnung ' of 1531 does not give us the 
 impression that it was directed against a class separated from 
 the masters by a social chasm : it deals with the ' masters' 
 sons, journeymen, servants, and apprentices ' 3 all alike. It 
 complains of their ' running around in idleness, their guzzling 
 and gorging ; ' 4 and lays down that when a newcomer 
 arrives in a town, he is to go to the bedel of his gild (Zunft- 
 
 1 Op. cit,, p. 91 ; cf. smaller number given on pp. 62, 89. 
 
 2 On this, see the language of the ordinance of A.D. 1550, ibid. p. 132. 
 
 3 ' Von handwerks-sohnen [or, in the body of the ordinance, meister- 
 sohn], gesellen, knechten und lehrknaben.' 
 
 4 ' Wegen des miissigen umgehens, scheiikens und zehrens ' 
 (ibid. pp. 188, 192).
 
 JOUENEYMEN'S CLUBS 255 
 
 oder Stubenknecht), and where there is no Zunft, as in 
 Nuremberg, to the journeymen's Wirth or Vatter (the keeper 
 of the journeymen's tavern), or to some other trusty indi- 
 vidual appointed by the authorities, and this person is to find 
 him work. The journeymen are not to elect officers of their 
 own for the purpose ; and, whatever else is done, ' the whole 
 business of drinking and eating on arrival and departure ' is 
 no longer to be permitted. 1 In the final town -ordinance 
 of 1573, while the journeymen are to have their Herberge 
 where newcomers are to be put up, and the officers of the 
 journeymen (ZuschicJcmeister) are to look round for work 
 for them, it is insisted that this shall not be made the 
 occasion of a drinking. 2 In this Herberge the Gesellen can 
 have a room, and they can meet there once a month, to 
 discuss their affairs ; though care is taken to insist on the 
 presence of one of the elected officers of the Handwerk itself, 
 and the power of the assembly to impose fines is anxiously 
 restricted. But equal care is taken to restrict the amount 
 of drinking, to prohibit indecent songs and gaming, and to 
 prevent brawls. 
 
 The evidence is too large and too consistent through more 
 than a century to allow us to suppose that these moral 
 dangers in the SchenJcen were pure inventions on the part of 
 the masters. They may, of course, have been unduly empha- 
 sised by the latter, to conceal their own economic purpose ; 
 but they ought at least to be mentioned by modern writers, 
 if we are to have a complete view of the situation. One 
 knows with what lofty contempt Marxists regard those who 
 venture to make remarks like these : such things are all bound 
 up with ' the standard of living,' they tell us, and are ' econo- 
 mically conditioned.' But the practice of writing social history 
 with practically no mention of some of its important ethical 
 aspects goes far towards creating from the socialist side 
 
 1 ' Doch soil in und nach dem alien das samtlich schenken und 
 zehren zum an- und abzug oder sonst in andere weiss keineswegs 
 hinfiiro gestattet werden ' (Op. cit. p. 189). 
 
 2 ' Doch soil keine schenke ober zeche desvregen gehalten werden ' 
 (ibid. p. 109).
 
 256 MEDIEVAL UKBAN 
 
 an ' economic man ' almost as unreal as that of the 
 economist. 
 
 It will be remembered that in the recent work of Mr. and 
 Mrs. Sidney Webb on English trade-unionism, the authors 
 declare that they cannot trace beyond the eighteenth century 
 any ' continuous organisations of wage-earners for maintain- 
 ing or improving the conditions of their employment.' They 
 have waved aside the examples of mediaeval yeomen's or 
 bachelors' companies in England ; and though it might still 
 be maintained that some of these are best explained as ' con- 
 tinuous organisations of wage- earners,' Mr. and Mrs Webb 
 have certainly cast some doubt upon this interpretation in one 
 such case, that of the Bachelors' Company of the London 
 Tailors in the sixteenth century. The question of mediaeval 
 journeymen's associations in England must be left open for 
 the production of further evidence ; 1 and meantime those 
 who are interested in it may be referred to Professor 
 Brentano's article interesting, among other reasons, for the 
 glimpse of autobiography it contains in Braun's ' Archiv fur 
 soziale Gesetzgebung ' (vol. viii.). But Mr. and Mrs. Webb's 
 book also contains some information which, looked at from 
 the standpoint now reached, receives a new significance. 
 They call attention to ' the existence ' in the eighteenth 
 century ' of journeymen's associations in most of the skilled 
 trades.' They point out that ' the earliest trade unions 
 arose among journeymen whose skill and standard of life 
 had been for centuries encouraged and protected by legal 
 or customary regulations,' and again that 
 
 the typical ' trade club ' of the town artisan of this time was an 
 isolated ring of highly skilled journeymen, who were even more 
 decisively marked off from the mass of manual workers than from 
 the small class of capitalist employers. The customary enforce- 
 ment of the apprenticeship prescribed by the Elizabethan statutes 
 and the high premiums usually exacted from parents long main- 
 tained a virtual monopoly of the better-paid handicrafts in the 
 hands of an almost hereditary caste of ' tradesmen,' in whose ranks 
 
 1 For a fresh example, see Quarterly Journal of Economics, xi. 214.
 
 JOURNEYMEN'S CLUBS 257 
 
 the employers themselves had for the most part served their 
 apprenticeship. Enjoying, as they did, this legal or customary 
 protection, they found their trade clubs of use mainly for the pro- 
 vision of friendly benefits, and for ' higgling ' with their masters for 
 better terms. 1 
 
 Such trade clubs are regarded by Mr. and Mrs. Webb as 
 altogether new, and as ' due to something peculiar to the 
 century ; ' and they are described as ' springing not from 
 any particular institution, but from every opportunity for 
 the meeting together of wage-earners of the same trade.' 2 
 
 The more we look into these trade clubs, however, the 
 more we are struck by the resemblances between them and 
 those German institutions of an earlier century which Dr. 
 Schoenlank and others have described. That the gatherings 
 were usually monthly in each case might be a mere coinci- 
 dence. But when we find that ' the relief of travelling 
 journeymen was a prominent object of the early unions ' 3 
 in some English industries, the resemblance seems to go to 
 the essence of the institution. And when we are told by 
 Mr. and Mrs. Webb that in some instances ' the journeymen 
 of a particular trade frequented certain public-houses, at 
 which they heard of situations vacant, and the " house of 
 call " became thus the nucleus of an organisation,' 4 the in- 
 ference seems natural that in these ' houses of call ' we have 
 an institution like the German Schenken or Herbergen, with 
 probably a similar past history. 
 
 The ' houses of call ' are mentioned in certain documents 
 referring to the tailoring trade in London ; and these Mr. 
 F. W. Galton, Mr. Webb's assistant in the preparation of 
 material for the 'History of Trade Unionism,' has since 
 published under the auspices of the London School of 
 Economics. 8 Mr. Galton quotes a description of the houses 
 of call given by a contemporary in 1747, from which we 
 
 1 History of Trade Unionism, p. 38. 
 
 * Ibid. p. 21. 3 Ibid. p. 24. 4 Ibid. p. 22. 
 
 s Select Documents illustrating the History of Trade Unionism : 
 I. The Tailoring Trade. (1896.) 
 
 S
 
 258 MEDIAEVAL UEBAN 
 
 learn that 'masters go there to inquire when they want 
 hands,' and ' custom has established it into a kind of law 
 that the house of call gives ' the men ' credit for victuals and 
 drink when they are unemployed.' l As to the character of 
 some of the proceedings at the monthly meetings, we may 
 form some idea from what Samuel Bamford tells us of his 
 visit to the trade clubs of London in 1815 : ' They would 
 generally be found in a large room, an elevated seat being 
 placed for the chairman. On first opening the door, the 
 place seemed dimmed by a suffocating vapour of tobacco. . . . 
 Every man would have his half-pint of porter before him.' 2 
 
 But one need not stop at the beginning of the century. 
 Let any one read, in the last chapter of the ' History of Trade 
 Unionism,' the vivid account of English trade-union life of 
 to-day from the pen of one, who has shared it. In the 
 account of ' going on tramp,' we hear of the footsore traveller 
 making his way to the public-house at which the local lodge 
 is held, and refreshing himself before starting off to find the 
 secretary ; of the secretary writing an order ' to the publican ' 
 to provide the full relief of sixpence and a bed, and telling 
 the tramp to repair to any suitable situation he may know 
 of in the morning ; and of many like details. Let any 
 one enquire how the ' Nonconformist conscience ' of the 
 chapel-going and teetotal workman of the generation now 
 passing away used to look on the lodge-night and its 
 dangers. One will, I think, begin to doubt whether there 
 has not been for centuries more continuity than is commonly 
 supposed in the life of the skilled artisan class in the older 
 trades. 
 
 Apropos of certain trade societies of ~1721, Mr. Galton 
 himself remarks that 'we may infer from the subsequent 
 events that the origin of the organisation was not so recent 
 as the employers supposed,' or rather stated. 3 My own im- 
 pression is that we shall by-and-by find that, like the usages 
 of the German journeymen in the eighteenth century that 
 
 1 The Tailoring Trade, p. 4, n. 
 
 '* Passages in the Life of a Radical (ed. of 1893), ii. 25. 
 
 * The Tailoring Trade, p. xv.
 
 JOUENEYMEN'S CLUBS 259 
 
 centred in the Herberge, the trade clubs of eighteenth- 
 century England were broken-down survivals from an earlier 
 period, undergoing, with the advent of the married journey- 
 man and other causes, the slow transformation from which 
 they emerged in the nineteenth century as the nuclei of the 
 modern trade unions. 
 
 The point is of so little importance in reference to the 
 problems of this century that one is almost afraid to call 
 attention to it, lest it should be supposed that more signifi- 
 cance is attached to it than is really intended by the present 
 writer. The conditions of this century are new in so real a 
 sense that, as has already been suggested in the foregoing 
 criticism of Dr. Schoenlank, they have called forth sub- 
 stantially new institutions. Even if it could be proved that 
 any trade society of to-day is historically a continuation 
 of some definitely constituted society of a much earlier date, 
 the fact would have but slight significance ; and for the 
 present even that much is not maintained. What is sug- 
 gested is only that the habit of acting together in certain 
 ways, which we find to characterise the journeymen of the 
 eighteenth century, had been formed in a much earlier 
 period. 
 
 Since the above was written, I have received from a 
 London artisan a very interesting account of his experiences 
 when he came up from the country to work as a silk-hat 
 finisher in 1856. It describes conditions that have already 
 passed away, and will soon be forgotten ; and these condi- 
 tions present features closely resembling in many respects 
 the usages of the journeymen's societies of earlier centuries, 
 as set forth by Dr. Schoenlank. 
 
 There were then four distinct societies in London, viz. the Blue 
 society (composed of Christy's workmen), the Bull society, the 
 Nelson society, and the Fair Trade. ... In February 1858 the Blue 
 society was reorganised, and I was asked to be secretary. I was 
 so for three months, until the rules were passed. We sat at the 
 ' Anchor and Eight Bells,' Berniondsey Street, to take contributions. 
 While passing the rules, and at all quarterly and general meetings, 
 we were crowded into the large room over the taproom and bar. 
 
 82
 
 260 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 Smoking went on, at least 80 per cent, smoking. From ninety 
 to one hundred and twenty would be present, and some would pay 
 a sixpenny fine and stay away. The President, Committee, and 
 Secretary would sit at one end of the room. . . . Pint pots were 
 very plentiful on the different tables, and at intervals there was a 
 pause, the potman coming into the room crying out : ' Give your 
 orders, gentlemen.' These meetings were held at 8.30 P.M. (no matter 
 what time work ceased at the factory), to give members at Christy's 
 retail shops a chance to be present. I mention this because many 
 of the men would go into the ' turnhouse ' an hour or two early, as 
 it would be too far for them to go home and return. There was 
 therefore a great amount of drinking before the meeting, and a good 
 few would stay after the meeting until closing time. ... It was 
 the landlord of the turnhouse in Bermondsey Street who was 
 treasurer. 
 
 Now that all the societies have been united, the trade turn- 
 house is still at a public-house ; but all delegate and general meet 
 ings are held in the large room of the Southwark Eadical Club ; 
 and there is no drinking during the meetings. Indeed, the leading 
 spirits in the last great strike were lifelong abstainers. 
 
 Of the drinking usages in the workshops themselves my 
 informant also gives some particulars. On the day he began 
 to work, he tells me : 
 
 I found it was necessary to pay ' a maiden garnish ' of five 
 shillings., it being my first shop in London. On this floor there 
 were sixty-six finishers in three ' shops ' or ' batteries : ' twelve men 
 in one, twenty-two in another, and thirty-two in the one in which 
 I worked. To this ' garnish ' twenty-eight men paid twopence each 
 (there being three apprentices and myself, making the thirty-two) ; 
 so to drink my health and wish me well nine shillings and eight - 
 pence was spent in beer, on that account alone, on that day in that 
 battery. I was very anxious about my work coming, as I had, 
 from a country shop and if it had not ' served turn ' (i.e. been 
 passed by the foreman), I should have been ' off ; ' and the twenty- 
 eight men who had partaken of my ' maiden garnish ' would have 
 paid twopence each as ' treatings off ; ' and all I should get would 
 be the right to drink from the four and eightpence worth of beer. 
 I won't moralise, but I must say I thought this a cruel wrong, and 
 I determined to make a dead set against that custom as soon as 
 I got ' the hop of the cage ; ' and in three months I carried in
 
 JOUENEYMEN'S CLUBS 261 
 
 that shop a resolution that any man ' off ' from that battery 
 should receive the twopences in money, which was called ' dry 
 garnish.' 
 
 There were all kinds of other dues. If there was a vacant 
 plank, and a man wished to move to it, he had to pay ' a plank 
 gallon.' If a man had never before put on a silk ' under,' if it was 
 known, there was ' a fancy gallon ' to pay, and many others of a 
 like kind. Moreover, the two publicans, one each side of the factory 
 gates, had the free run of the place ; and they and their potmen 
 came in frequently for orders. There was never much ready money 
 with the men, but there was a man in each shop empowered by a 
 publican to write tickets for beer, to be paid from their wages, with 
 usurious interest, at the end of the week. 
 
 This is, however, almost all a thing of the past. The 
 present ' Eules of the Journeymen Hatters' Fair Trade Union 
 of Great Britain and Ireland ' enact that 
 
 All dues, such as marriage beer, garnishes, maiden garnishes, 
 plank beer, fancy gallons, and wager beer, are done away with. 
 
 My informant tells me that the publican's agent has also 
 been abolished. 
 
 There was and is still, though it is evidently decaying, 
 a curious system of shop jurisdiction, which presents many 
 apparently archaic features. The procedure preserves seve- 
 ral terms on which modern dictionaries give no help. 
 
 When workman A called B by an opprobrious name, which the 
 latter resented, B could ' weigh out the caulker,' by declaring, ' If 
 your name is A, a man of this shop and a shopmate of mine, I caulk 
 you : prove me (to be so and so) before you hat, or pay sixteen - 
 pence for larking.' 
 
 At this the ' constable ' of the shop called out, ' Gentlemen, the 
 caulker is out.' Every man in that battery had ceased work. 
 Now A could either ' call his words in again ' or ' give the wrong 
 insist.' If he did the latter, the constable at once said, ' a garrett 
 in ten minutes.' The garrett was formed by the men of the 
 battery ; and if they decided that A deserved the reproach, he was 
 fined four shillings, which was spent in beer in that battery. The 
 case could, however, have been taken to the higher court ' the 
 dozening,' the men for which would have been selected from a 
 dozen shops.
 
 262 MEDIEVAL UEBAN 
 
 The present rules of the amalgamated society still enter 
 with some detail into ' caulkers,' ' wrong insists,' ' garretts,' 
 and ' dozenings ; ' but their purpose is ' to prevent them as 
 much as possible." The fines now go to the general funds, 
 and drunken men are disqualified from voting or ' insisting.' 
 
 There is one other term used in the hatters' trade, which 
 is so odd and apparently so completely unknown to philolo- 
 gists, that it may be well to mention it here. An apprentice 
 put under a journeyman for a period of six months' instruc- 
 tion is called his ' whimsey,' or said to be ' under whimsey ; ' 
 the instructor is called the ' whimsey-master,' and the occu- 
 pation of the boy is called ' whimseying.' 
 
 It is certainly surprising to come across so many quaint 
 usages in an industry which would seem to have passed 
 through the ' domestic ' or ' sub-contract ' stage in the 
 eighteenth century ; l and which one would have supposed 
 to have been altogether transformed by the substitution 
 of silk for beaver at the beginning of the present century. 
 This account suggests the desirability of securing trust- 
 worthy records of old trade customs, before they are de- 
 stroyed (in many cases very properly destroyed) by tem- 
 perance, book-learning, the newspaper, and increasing 
 freedom of intercourse. 
 
 1 Howell's Conflicts of Labour\and Capital, ch. ii. 55.
 
 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 MONTCHB^TIEN > 
 
 POLITICAL economy and history have this not altogether 
 fortunate characteristic in common, that they attract the 
 incursions of the untrained. There is scarcely any other 
 department of thought, save perhaps theology, ia which it 
 seems so safe for persons entirely without adequate prepara- 
 tion to print their opinions. One would have thought that 
 a common distress would have made all serious students of 
 either of these subjects careful not to make hasty inroads 
 into the other. But it has not always had this effect ; and 
 it must be confessed that of late years economists have been 
 grievous sinners. Some early treatise, let us say, attracts 
 their attention by its title; they find that it anticipates 
 modern doctrine ; and straightway, without any inquiry into 
 its relation to preceding literature, it is elevated into a 
 position of unique importance. Such, for instance, has been 
 the happy lot of Oresme's treatise on money in the four- 
 teenth century. 2 It is still more obviously the case with 
 Montchretien in the edition now before us. Montchr6tien, 
 
 1 [Traictt de I'CEconomie Politique, by Antoyne de Mont- 
 chretien (1615). Aveo Introduction et Notes par Th. Funck- 
 Brentano. Paris : 1889. Reviewed in the English Historical Review 
 1891, vi. 779.] 
 
 2 [On Oresme see the article by the present writer in Palgrave's 
 Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. iii.]
 
 264 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 there seems little reason to doubt, was the first writer to 
 issue a book under the title of ' Political Economy.' This was 
 no inconsiderable contribution to the movement of thought 
 which was gradually separating economics as a distinct field 
 of speculation from theology and philosophy; and, if for no 
 other reason, Montchre'tien deserves to be remembered, and 
 his work to be reprinted. But it does not necessarily follow 
 that, because a man treats of a subject by itself, his remarks 
 will be wiser than those of his predecessors who dealt with 
 it in conjunction with other matters. This does not seem 
 to have occurred to his recent editor, M. Funck-Brentano. 
 To him Montchre'tien is ' the creator of a science in which 
 the conceptions of the old master have never been sur- 
 passed.' l His book ' contains the most complete body of 
 doctrine that has ever appeared. Nothing is wanting, from 
 the most elementary definitions to the exposition of the 
 vastest laws.' 2 ' Of all the economists he is the only one 
 who has understood the solidarity of the principles of free 
 trade and protection.' 3 We need not enter into a discus- 
 sion as to whether this unbounded eulogy would have any 
 justification if Montchre'tien's opinions were really original. 
 We are relieved from that task by the discovery that 
 there is hardly a single argument or proposal in the ' Traict6 ' 
 which is not derived from earlier writers. 
 
 His most considerable, though never acknowledged, obli- 
 gations are, as we might guess, to the great work of Bodin, 
 the ' Six Livres de la E6publique,' which, appearing in 1576, 
 had by the time Montchre'tien set himself to write passed 
 through several editions in both French and Latin, and had 
 indeed become almost a text-book in western Europe. A 
 sufficient proof is found in the passage wherein Montchre'tien 
 gives us what his editor calls la formule parfaite du pro- 
 tectionnisme ; it is almost a verbal quotation. 
 
 'Quant aux mati&res qu'on ' Que VosMajestez . . . ne per- 
 
 apporte des pays Strangers il mettent point que Ton apporte 
 
 1 TraicU, Introduction, p. ii ; cf. pp. xxiii and 129 n. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. xxiii. * Ibid. p. xxvii,
 
 MONTCHK6TIEN 265 
 
 est besoin . . . le (sc. 1'impost) les ouvrages de main, qui pro- 
 
 hausser aux ouvrages de main, cedent de Part des homines, ne 
 
 et ne permettre qu'il en soit que Ton emporte les matieres et 
 
 apporte de pays etrange, ny denre'es crues de ce royaume.' 
 
 souflrir qu'on emporte du pays MONTCHE^TIEN, p. 247. 
 les denrees crues. . . .' BODIN, 
 bk. vi. ch. iii. p. 877 in ed. 1593. 
 
 Moreover it is evident, on looking at the context, that 
 Montchre'tien is not here merely making use of a phrase 
 which may have become current ; he is copying Bodin with 
 the ' Be"publique ' open before him. For the paragraph 
 beginning on p. 239, comparing the 'inexhaustible re- 
 sources ' of France with the mines of other countries, is 
 taken from Bodin, p. 876; and after some four pages of 
 general grandiloquence Montchre'tien returns to his copy 
 on p. 244 with the naive remark, Retournons d'ml nous 
 sommes partis. 
 
 Considering that it is precisely for his masterly treatment 
 of the question of trade that his editor recommends 
 Montchre'tien to our admiration and imitation, it is hardly 
 necessary to go further. But it may be worth while to 
 point out one or two other instances of plagiarism. On 
 the question of currency * he makes much the same use of 
 Bodin's chapter on that topic as in the case of customs : 
 where he leaves his master, as in the assertion 2 that the 
 influence on prices of the new supplies of the precious 
 metals can be overcome by a state supervision of trade, he 
 falls into mere confusion. An amusing example of un- 
 abashed pilfering is afforded by Montchre'tien 's book iv., on 
 the duties of the prince. He had already said over and over 
 again all he really wanted to say ; but he thought his book was 
 not long enough, and proceeded to pad. One of the most 
 original portions of Bodin's treatise was the opening chapter 
 of book vi., in which he had advocated the establishment of 
 the censure a sort of combined census and statistical 
 survey as a means of exercising control over public morals 
 
 1 Traictt, p. 176 seq. 2 Ibid. p. 257.
 
 266 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 and of introducing reforms into the administration. The 
 proposal had by this time come to be widely known ; it had 
 already been the subject of a treatise by the celebrated 
 jurisconsult Obrecht of Strassburg. Montchre'tien boldly 
 picks out all the more important passages in Bodin's 
 chapter, and transfers them to his own pages. The only 
 precaution he observes is to invert the order. Thus pp. 344- 
 345 will be found to correspond to Bodin's pp. 846-847, 
 pp. 346-348 to Bodin's pp. 841-843, and pp. 351-353 to 
 Bodin's pp. 839-840 (in ed. of 1593). 
 
 The condition of manufactures in France, which occupies 
 Montchr6tien's first book, is barely alluded to by Bodin. 
 We have therefore to look elsewhere for Montchre'tien' s 
 inspiration ; and we have not far to go, for there is hardly 
 one of his proposals which had not been made over and 
 over again by Laffemas and others in the later years of 
 Henry IV. Instead of representing an advance of thought, 
 Montchre'tien often occupies a more reactionary position ; 
 as, for instance, in his evident desire to drive all foreign 
 craftsmen out of the country, while Laffemas would only 
 insist that they should teach Frenchmen their superior 
 methods. 1 
 
 According to his editor Montchre'tien was a genius whom 
 his contemporaries could not understand ; 2 an ardent bene- 
 factor to his country, who threw himself into the Huguenot 
 rising in which he lost his life because he dreamt of the 
 realisation of ' vast aspirations and great views.' It 
 is of course quite possible for a man sincerely to desire 
 to benefit his country and himself at the same time : yet 
 it may create a misleading impression if the personal 
 motives known to exist in any particular case are left 
 altogether out of sight. And there is one significant fact 
 about Montchre'tien's book which would seem to cast no 
 little light on its character : it is that the industry for which 
 
 1 Compare on the Italian glass-works Montchretien, p. 95, with 
 Laffemas, Eecueil, &c. (1604), in Archives Curieuses de VHistovre de 
 France (1837), vol. xiv. 225. 
 
 2 Introduction, p. xx.
 
 MONTCHR^TIEN 267 
 
 Montchr6tien first asks protection an industry to which 
 he devotes more space than to others certainly far more 
 important was the hardware trade, the manufacture in 
 iron and steel of arms, tools, and utensils. 1 This was, as 
 it happens, his own business. 2 
 
 Though Montchretien was not ' a great economist,' his 
 book is not without its interest. True, it is not much more 
 than a thick mercantilist pamphlet : all its leading ideas 
 are borrowed, its rhetoric is often wearisome and common- 
 place, and it displays but little judgment or balance of 
 mind. But it affords a great deal of information as to the 
 conditions of commerce and manufactures, and it shows the 
 direction in which economic forces were going. His denun- 
 ciation of foreign goods, especially Dutch, as cheap and 
 nasty ; his references to the labour of women and children ; 
 his complaint that factors and agents were ousting the old- 
 fashioned merchant ; the importance he attributes to the 
 carrying trade ; his advocacy of the Dutch plan of trading 
 in companies ; on these, and many other points like them, 
 he will always be worth consulting. 
 
 1 Traicte, pp. 46-58. 2 Introduction, pp. xii,|xiii, xv.
 
 268 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 THE TOEY OEIGIN OF FREE TKADE 
 POLICY ' 
 
 THEEE is a group of English writers at the end of the seven- 
 teenth century who have long been understood to stand in a 
 place by themselves among the pamphleteers of the time. 
 Distinguished above them all 2 is Sir Dudley North, of whom 
 Macaulay, 3 instructed by McCulloch, 4 tells us that he ' had 
 thought out a complete and admirable theory of trade, sub- 
 stantially the same with that which, a century later, was ex- 
 pounded by Adam Smith,' and whom Koscher entitles ' the 
 free trader ' par excellence. 5 But by his side we have been 
 accustomed to place two 6 other writers, Sir Josiah Child and 
 
 1 [Quarterly Journal of Economics, July 1 897.] 
 
 2 So it was understood until very recently, when a claim for priority 
 was put forward on behalf of Barbon. See infra, p. 269, n. 5. 
 
 3 History of England, ch. iv. (in 2 vol. ed., i. 253). 
 
 4 A Discourse on the Eise, Progress, . . . of Political Economy 
 (1824), p. 37. The same account reappears in the historical ' Sketch ' 
 prefixed to his Principles of Political Economy (1825), and in many 
 subsequent publications. 
 
 5 ' Der Freihandler North ' is the title of the section in Boscher's 
 Zur Geschichte der englischen Volkswirthschaftslehre im sechzehntcn 
 und siebzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 85 (in Abhandlungen der k&niglich- 
 sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1857). In this treatise of 
 Boscher's from which subsequent German writers have usually drawn 
 all their information concerning the English writers of the period 
 North's Discourses are spoken of as ' ein ebenso tief begriindetes wie 
 consequent ausgefiihrtes System der Freihandels-Politik.' 
 
 6 A hasty reading of Boscher, p. 121 : ' Ihren hochsten Gipfel erreichte 
 die vor-hume'sche Nationalokonomie der Englander in dem grossen
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 269 
 
 Charles Davenant, who, if they were not so thorough-going 
 and are only describable as ' moderate mercantilists,' l or, at 
 best, as ' eclectics,' 2 had at any rate some unusually ' sound ' 
 and 'liberal' views. 3 And now of late we ha,ve been re- 
 minded that we must add the name of Nicholas Barbon 
 to the number. 4 He has even been elevated above North, 
 and we nave been gravely told that we must see in him the 
 first refuter of the mercantilist doctrine. 5 
 
 It is a significant fact, when one comes to think of it, 
 and yet a fact to which hitherto, it would seem, attention 
 has not been called, that these four men, differing completely 
 as they did from one another in training and practical interests, 
 had yet one trait in common besides their ' liberal views ' 
 
 Triumvirat, Petty, North und Locke ' actually led Eisenhart, 
 Geschichte der Nationalb'konomik (1881), to speak of ' die Freihandler, 
 Petty, North, Locke.' That this is altogether a false impression of Petty 
 and Locke is at once apparent to those who have actually read their 
 works. 
 
 1 Cossa's Introduction to the Study of Political Economy (trans. 
 Dyer), p. 203, where, with scanty justification, Temple is placed in th 
 same ' school ' as Child and Davenant. 
 
 2 Ingram's History of Political Economy, p. 49, where also, following 
 Cossa, Temple is added to the company. 
 
 8 ' Sound ' is the favourite term of praise in the English translation 
 of Cossa e.g. p. 203, on Child ; while ' liberal ' is preferred by Eoscher 
 e.g. p. 114, on Davenant. 
 
 4 That Barbon was ' one of the earliest expounders of the fallacies of 
 the balance of trade' (Cunningham, Groivth of English Industry, 
 1882, p. 351) haslong and often been asserted, first probably by McCulloch. 
 Literature of Political Economy (1845), p. 157 ; criticised by Karl Marx, 
 Capital, English translation, p. 120, n., and echoed by Kautz, Diegeschicht- 
 liche Entwickelung der National-b'konomik (1860), p. 318. But his merits 
 have been lately dwelt on at length by Dr. Stephan Bauer, in Conrad's 
 Jahrbilcher filr National- b'konomie, N. F. xxi. (1890), p. 561, and more 
 briefly in Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, s.v. Barbon ; 
 and other treatises assigned (no doubt correctly) to him, besides that of 
 1696 referred to by McCulloch. 
 
 * Dr. Bauer in Palgrave's Dictionary, s.v. Balance of Trade 
 (History of the Theory) : ' The first thorough refutation was given by 
 Nicholas Barbon, and his influence is to be traced in the writings of Sir 
 Dudley North.'
 
 270 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 concerning trade : they were all Tories. North, the most 
 ' enlightened,' was also the most obnoxious to the Whigs. 
 Readers of Macaulay may remember his account of North's 
 services to the Government of Charles II. as Sheriff of London 
 during the Tory reaction, and the humorous touch about 
 ' the great discomposure of his lady ' when the ' carts, loaded 
 with the legs and arms of quartered Whigs, were driven to 
 his fine house for orders.' l Macaulay characterises Davenant 
 as ' a most unprincipled and rancorous politician ; ' 2 which 
 may or may not be historical truth, but is, at any rate, a 
 testimonial to his Toryism. Child, the same writer declares, 
 turned Tory in 1680 to save the privileges of the East India 
 Company. 3 Among the few facts known about Barbon's life 
 is that he was one of the projectors of the Tory Land 
 Bank. 4 
 
 There is evidently an inherent possibility that this 
 common Toryism had some connection with their ' liberal ' 
 views on trade. And this possibility becomes a certainty 
 when we put before ourselves the contemporary political 
 situation in England. The Whig party, arising as it did at a 
 time when the alliance of Charles II. with France was 
 believed to endanger liberty and Protestantism, was from 
 the first marked by a spirit of antagonism to France. The 
 disadvantages of trade with France formed one of its most 
 effective cries. It was in this connection, most commonly, 
 that for half a century Whig orators and pamphleteers called 
 up the spectre of Overbalance. On the other hand, the Tory 
 party set itself from its very birth to preach the blessings of 
 
 1 The incident is taken directly from the account in Roger North's 
 Life of Dudley North, in Lives of the Norths (ed. 1826), iii. 125, which 
 with its phrase ' abscinded members,' and its remark that ' she could 
 never be reconciled to the dog hangman's saying he came to speak with 
 his master,' is at least equally humorous. 
 
 2 History of England, chap. iii. (ed. 1871, i. 153). The unpartisan 
 Ranke (History of England, English translation, iii. 207) simply 
 calls him ' the skilful spokesman of the financial opposition.' 
 
 3 Ibid. chap, xviii. (ii. 306). 
 
 4 See the account of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.
 
 TOBY FEEE TEADE 271 
 
 ' free ' trade, 1 at any rate with France, and to pooh-pooh, even 
 when it could not refute, the theory of Balance. It is clear 
 that Tory writers on trade, however sensible we may suppose 
 them, could hardly fail to have a partisan bias in favour of 
 liberty of commerce, and that, however clearsighted they may 
 have been, they were likely to have their insight sharpened 
 by party prejudice. McCulloch's explanation of North's 
 enlightenment, that on questions of trade 'party interests 
 were not directly affected,' 2 is the very opposite of the truth. 
 We are all familiar with the fate of Bolingbroke's proposed 
 commercial treaty with France in 1713. Mr. Lecky has told 
 us how the opposition ' was vehemently fanned by the whole 
 Whig party,' including ' Halifax, the founder of the financial 
 system of the Eevolution,' and ' Walpole, the ablest of the 
 rising financiers.' 3 But what is not so well known is that 
 each party in 1713 was following traditions of its own which 
 were already forty years old. The real starting-point in the 
 history of Whig policy in the matter of trade is the great 
 Prohibition of 1678. It is an illustration of the way in which 
 historical events even of real importance drop out of the 
 current tradition of later ages that this measure, regarded by 
 so many English writers far into the eighteenth century as a 
 turning-point in the economic fortunes of their country, is 
 to-day as good as forgotten. We may find that ' very accurate 
 and intelligent author of the " Memoirs of Wool," the Eev. Mr. 
 John Smith,' 4 declaring in 1747, with all the impressiveness 
 
 1 In the sense in which the adjective ' free ' was then used. Thus 
 Mun wrote, about 1628 : ' Although it is true that the commerce ought 
 to be free for strangers to bring in and carry out at their pleasure, yet, 
 nevertheless, in many places the exportation of victuals and munition 
 are either prohibited or at least limited to be done by the people and 
 shipping of those places where they abound ; ' England's Treasure by 
 Forraign Trade (reprint of 1895), p. 12. See also the quotations from 
 one of the Commissioners of Trade in 1713, and from Davenant, infra, 
 p. 300, n. 3, and p. 302. 
 
 * Preface (p. xi) to the Select Collection of Early English Tracts on 
 Commerce, printed for the Political Economy Club, 1856. 
 
 3 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, i. 144. 
 
 4 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. viii. (ed. Rogers, 
 ii. 235).
 
 272 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 of capitals, that ' THIS YBAE, MDCLXXVIIL, is to be looked 
 upon as a remarkable ./ERA of the English Commerce.' 1 
 In 1764 that comparatively ' sober and judicious writer, 
 Mr. Anderson, author of the "Historical Deduction of Com- 
 merce," ' 2 still gives entire credence to the statement of ' the 
 authors of the time ' that in the twenty years after the prohi- 
 bition, and mainly because of it, English exports had more 
 than doubled. 3 And yet Macaulay has, so far as I can see, not 
 one word on the subject. Economic historians either make 
 no reference to it or fail to lay any particular stress upon it ; 4 
 and the only indication of its significance in international 
 politics to be found in any recent writer of note is a single 
 brief sentence of Eanke. 5 It may be useful, therefore, to 
 bring together in this place a few of the more noteworthy 
 incidents of a forgotten episode. 
 
 Davenant, writing in 1711, 6 gives this account of the 
 origin of the outcry against France : 
 
 About the year 1660 . . . France became the rising empire. 
 And it rose so fast as to beget just apprehensions to England for our 
 future safety. In the meanwhile several good patriots, perceiving 
 the Court then fatally running into French interest and measures, 
 and finding it would be difficult to engage the people (newly come 
 out of a civil war) to follow and join with them in more national 
 councils, by speculations merely political concerning the progress of 
 the French arms and power, they thought the best course to awaken 
 Englishmen was to alarm them about the danger they were in to 
 lose their trade ; and, for this reason, nothing was so common as to 
 cry ' that England was undone by the prodigious overbalance the 
 
 1 Memoirs of Wool, i. 325. 
 
 2 This encomium from Adam Smith, Book V. chap. i. (ed. Rogers, 
 ii. 329), is, it is true, in comparison with ' the late Mr. Dobbs.' 
 
 3 Apud Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, ii. 593. 
 
 4 A bare mention of the Act of 1678 may be found upon search in 
 many modern books, but usually with some misleading comments ; 
 e.g. ' The prohibition was, it is true, of no long continuance,' Dowell's 
 History of Taxation, ii. 28. 
 
 5 History of England, iv. 42. 
 
 6 Works (ed. Whitworth, 1771), v. 362.
 
 TOEY PEEE TEADE 273 
 
 French had upon us.' . . . This overbalance was made use of 
 
 maliciously by some who had a mind to disturb and defame the 
 
 Government. 
 
 Such scraps of information as we can collect fully bear out 
 
 this account of Davenant's, making due allowance for the 
 
 manifest party colouring of the last sentence. 
 
 That England was being drained of its treasure by 
 French imports began to be maintained by individuals here 
 and there soon after the accession of Charles II. In 1663 
 Samuel Fortrey published a tract on ' England's Interest and 
 Improvement,' l in which he declared, on the basis of ' a 
 particular not long since delivered in to the King of France,' 
 of which he professed to give a translation, that ' our trade 
 with France is at least sixteen hundred thousand pounds 
 a year clear lost to this kingdom.' 2 This estimate was 
 frequently repeated and discussed in later years. 3 There 
 seems to be no evidence that it met with much acceptance at 
 the moment. We may perhaps date the beginning of 
 popular agitation some ten years later, about 1673, when 
 Fortrey found so many friends ' very desirous ' of copies that 
 he reprinted his paper. By that time the situation had 
 greatly altered. The enthusiastic loyalty which had greeted 
 the restored king had passed away, and ' the country party ' 
 was growing into a regular opposition. The alliance of 
 Charles and Louis XIV. was felt to portend danger to Parlia- 
 ment and to Church ; and, in reaction against the French 
 alliance, the country party was clamouring for war with 
 France, and restrained only by its reluctance to trust Charles 
 with an army. The manufacturing and commercial classes 
 had independent and grave reasons for irritation. For some 
 time there had been a large exportation of English cloth to 
 France. 4 In 1667 Colbert introduced a new tariff, which 
 
 1 Reprinted by McCulloch in Early English Tracts on Commerce. 
 * Ibid. p. 234. 
 
 3 E.g. in Britannia Languens (1680), p. 188; Davenant (1698), 
 Works, ii. 90 ; the British Merchant (1713), ed. 1721, i. 232. 
 
 4 SeeMontchr6tien's complaints in 1615, in his Traicte de I' (Economic 
 Politique (ed. Funck-Brentano), pp. 68-72 ; and cf . Fagniez, U Economic 
 Sociale de France sous Henri IV, pp. 137, 138. 
 
 T
 
 274 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 was practically prohibitive, and almost entirely destroyed 
 the market for English goods. 1 There was meanwhile 
 a growing demand in England for certain French com- 
 modities. ' At this time,' says Anderson, ' the laudable 
 English fashions of former times began to alter in favour of 
 Prance. The women's hats were turned into hoods made of 
 French silk, whereby every maid-servant in England became 
 a standing revenue to the French king of the half of her 
 wages.' 2 ' French wine,' wrote John Locke at the time, ' is 
 become a modish drink among us, and a man is ashamed 
 to entertain his friend or almost to dine himself without it.' 3 
 There was, besides, a considerable demand for French linen, 
 brandy, and paper. England must have paid for no small 
 part of these imports with money : whence it must have been 
 getting this money, most men did not pause to ask. It was 
 natural enough that the commercial classes should take up 
 the cry of Overbalance ; natural enough that the political 
 Opposition, anxious to enlist the commercial classes on their 
 side, should at once take advantage of it and, indeed, 
 honestly believe in it. 
 
 Eoger North, the Tory critic in the reign of George II. 
 of the then fashionable Whig tradition, has given us an 
 entertaining account of the solemn deliberations of the 
 London merchants. 4 Among the ' diverse Projects of the 
 Faction that tended to straighten the King ' was one of a 
 Commission of Trade : 
 
 It was by the Duke of Bucks, Shaftesbury, and others repre- 
 sented to the King that his Majesty was too much troubled in 
 
 1 Child, writing about this time (Preface to his first Discourse), says : 
 ' A very great part of the French trade for exportation is lost by reason 
 of great impositions laid there upon our draperies.' For other con- 
 temporary references, see the pamphlets of 1677 and 1678 in Smith's 
 Memoirs of Wool, i. 285, 324. The author of Britannia Languens, p. 159, 
 reckons the value of the cloth previously exported annually to France at 
 600.000Z. 2 Apud Macpherson, s.a. 1668, ii. 534. 
 
 3 Considerations of the Lowering of Interest, written about 1672 ; in 
 Ward, Lock, & Co.'s cheap reprint of Essays, p. 598. 
 
 4 Examen (1740), p. 461.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 275 
 
 Council with dark Questions concerning Trade, which at last were 
 referred to eminent Merchants, and their Advice commonly was the 
 Eule. The Courtiers, for his Majesty's Ease, moved that there 
 might be a Commission to several of the greatest Traders in 
 London to examine all Matters of that Kind, and to report their 
 Opinion to the Council; upon which his Majesty might determine. 
 This plausible Project was put in Execution, and the Leaders of the 
 fanatic party in the city . . . were the Commissioners ; for so it 
 was plotted. The great House in Queen Street was taken for the 
 use of this Commission. Mr. Henry Slingsby, sometime Master 
 of the Mint, was the Secretary ; and they had a formal Board with 
 Green Cloth and Standishes, Clerks good Store, a tall Porter and 
 Staff, and fitting Attendance below, and a huge Luminary at the 
 Door. And in Winter Time, when the Board met, as was two or 
 three Tunes a Week, or oftener, all the Booms were lighted, 
 Coachea at the Door, and great passing in and out, as if a Council 
 of State in good Earnest had been sitting. All Cases, Complaints, 
 and Deliberations of Trade were referred to this Commission, and 
 they reported their opinion. . . . The Characters of the Com- 
 missioners considered, one may conclude that, whatever Interests 
 were regarded, the public Bevenue coming to the Crown out of 
 Trade was not the chief of their Care, unless it were to sink it by 
 all the Ways they could possibly contrive. 
 
 It is obvious that the enjoyment of a customs revenue 
 which was free in large measure from parliamentary control 
 furnished a strong motive to the Government to keep open 
 the trade with Prance. 
 
 It was probably from this body that a document ema- 
 nated that was destined to have a great effect on English 
 policy. This was : ' A Scheme of the Trade, As it is at 
 present Carried on between England and France, In the 
 Commodities of the Native Product and Manufacture of each 
 Country ; Calculated as exactly as possible in Obedience to 
 the Commands of the Eight Honourable the Lords Com- 
 missioners for the Treaty of Commerce with France : and 
 humbly tender'd to their lordships.' l 
 
 1 It is printed in Somers's Tracts (1748), iv. 536; in Cobbett's 
 Parliamentary History, iv., App. xi. ; and in several other places in 
 whole or in part. The polemic over it which fills a large part of the 
 
 T2
 
 276 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 This scheme set forth with great apparent exactitude the 
 details of exports and imports, summing up thus : 
 
 By the Account above, your Lordships may perceive that the 
 Lumen and Silk Manufactures only, Imported from France, amount 
 to upwards of Eight Hundred Thousand Pounds, and the Manu- 
 factures of Wool and Silk exported from England thither do not 
 amount to Eighty Five Thousand Pounds. As also all other 
 Commodities of the Product and Manufacture of England, Exported 
 into France, do not amount to Ninety Thousand Pounds more : 
 Whereas the Wines, Brandies, and other Commodities of the 
 Product and Manufacture of France, Imported into England, 
 amount to upwards of Three Hundred and Twenty Thousand 
 Pounds ; besides an incredible Value of Toys, rich Apparel, Point- 
 Lace, &c. So that it is apparent that the Exports of our Native 
 Commodities and Manufactures to France are less in Value by at 
 least One Million of Pounds Sterling than the Native Commodities 
 and Manufactures of France which we receive from thence. 
 
 It is dated November 29, 1674, and signed by fourteen 
 London merchants. Among the names appear some that 
 Macaulay has canonised for their patriotic support, in later 
 years, of that great Whig undertaking, the Bank of England 
 John Houblon, and his father, James, 1 and Michael Godfrey, 
 with his ' strong and clear mind ; ' 2 together with Thomas 
 Papillon, the violent Exclusionist, whom Child afterwards 
 expelled from the direction of the East India Company. 3 
 
 British Merclwnt and the Mercator in 1713 is not a little amusing. In 
 the 1721 reprint of the British Merchant it becomes ' the Old 
 SCHEME ' in vol. ii., and from ii. 128 onward ' the OLD SCHEME.' 
 The Mercator (as cited by the British Merchant, ii. 33) called the 
 preamble to the Prohibition Act of 30 Car. II. ' a wild preamble to a 
 wild Act of Parliament, because our Legislators were cheated by the old 
 SCHEME ; ' and its writers ' promised their Headers that they would 
 take that Scheme to pieces, and hang it in the Sun a drying, where it 
 shall shrink like a Red Herring, to a size no bigger than the true 
 substance of it.' Ibid. i. 318. 
 
 1 For a brief account of the Houblons, see Rogers, First Nine Tears 
 of the Bank of England, p. 3, n. 1. 
 
 2 Macaulay's History of England, chap, xx., ii. 483. 
 s Ibid. chap, xviii., ii. 305.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 277 
 
 As soon as Parliament met in the spring of 1675 this 
 terrifying document was presented to it ; it is said, 1 by Sir 
 George Downing, one of the Commissioners of Customs, who 
 was probably preparing to crown his long career of self- 
 seeking by returning to the side of the Opposition, if the popular 
 current should become strong enough to make it worth his 
 while. According to a later tradition, 2 it was ' so well 
 received that the scheme was entered into the journals of 
 both Houses of Parliament, and into the books of the Custom 
 House ; ' ' though the Court at that time favoured the interests 
 of France so much, preferably to their own, that the trade 
 went still on.' According to another account, 3 the House of 
 Commons ' ordered a bill to be brought in, which was received 
 with approbation.' Only faint echoes of the debates on trade 
 during these years have come down to us ; but they are 
 enough to show how completely the conclusions of the 
 scheme were accepted by the Opposition. Foremost among 
 them was the Colonel Birch whom Macaulay singles out in 
 1688 for his 'strong sense and mother wit,' and for 'the 
 great talent for business ' which he had ' shown in high fiscal 
 office,' 4 and who now, in 1675, sought to exasperate the 
 Commons by remarking sarcastically, ' You may make war 
 with France, with the money he overbalances you in your 
 trade, which you get, like bees, by industry.' 5 
 
 From November 1675 to February 1677 Parliament was 
 prorogued. When it met again^antipathy towards France was 
 even fiercer than before ; and it was now for the firsTTETme, it 
 seems, that the proposal was brought forward for a complete 
 prohibition of importation from that country. Mr. Harbord 
 
 1 T&ch&rd's History of England (ed. 1720), p. 920. According to a state- 
 ment of the Commissioners (for a treaty of commerce) of 1697, quoted in 
 the British Merchant, ii. 411, Sir George Downing made report to this 
 effect on March 9, 1675, ' to the lords of the Privy Council, then a 
 Committee of Trade.' For the life of Downing, see the Dictionary of 
 National Biography. His education was received in Harvard College. 
 
 * Tindal's continuation of Rapin's History of England (1746), 
 xxv. 14. 3 Echard, p. 920. 
 
 4 History of England, ch. x., i. 633. 
 
 * Parliamentary History, iv. 707.
 
 278 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 afterwards ' one of the most zealous of the adherents of 
 the Prince of Orange ' l reminded the House that ' the 
 French abstract one million yearly from us in trade.' He 
 declared that while that went on France would govern 
 English counsels everywhere ; and accordingly he cried out, 
 ' Make a law to prohibit French trade : you need no wine 
 and few of his commodities ; and France will grow poor, 
 and we shall grow rich.' 2 The advice was taken : an Act 
 was passed in the session of 1678 (29 & 30 Car. II. c. i.) 3 abso- 
 lutely prohibiting the import of 'French Wine, Vinegar, v 
 Brandy, Linnen, Cloath, Silks, Paper, or any Manufactures 
 made of or mixed with Silk, Thread, Wool, Hair, Gold or 
 Silver or Leather, being of the Growth, Product, or Manu- 
 facture of any of the Dominions or Territories of the French 
 King ; ' and this on the ground, set forth in the preamble, 
 that 'the Wealth and Treasure of the Nation hath been 
 much exhausted by the Importation and Consumption of 
 the French Commodities.' The assent of the lords and of 
 the king was secured by the ingenious device of ' tacking ' 
 the Bill to another granting a poll-tax. The honour of having 
 introduced it was attributed in the next generation 4 to 
 William Sacheverell, ' an orator ' who was now beginning 
 to create that reputation for ' great parliamentary abilities ' 5 
 which lingered among Whig traditions far into the eighteenth 
 century. Of the details of the proceedings we know nothing, 
 save what Eoger North informs us of ' the prodigious In- 
 dustry and Diligence, used by the Leaders of the Country 
 Party.' 6 
 
 I was told by one of them that they took occasion, and, with 
 much ado, prevailed, to have certain general Books of the Custom- 
 House Accounts laid before the House, and being desirous to 
 be Masters of them, which could not be in that short Time as 
 was allowed for them to lie upon the Table to be perused by the 
 
 1 Macaulay's History, chap, x., i. 646. 
 
 2 Parliamentary History, iv. 888. 
 
 3 Statutes of the Realm, v. 852. 
 
 4 Davenant, quoted by the British Merchant, iii. 63. 
 
 5 Macaulay's History, ch. x., i. 633. Examen, p. 468.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 279 
 
 Members, they took an Opportunity, and imployed Stationers, who 
 decomposed the Books, and dispersed them to be transcribed by 
 many Hands, and, after the Copies finished, had the Books bound 
 up again, and laid upon the Table in less than forty- eight Hours 
 time : and so the Party had a compleat Inspection in their own 
 Time, and the Matter was never discovered. 
 
 There was more zeal for such investigations then than 
 there would have been a few months later, when every head 
 was full of the Popish Plot. 
 
 Already, however, the cry of alarm was beginning to call 
 forth reassuring argument. An anonymous pamphlet ap- 
 peared in 1677, thus entitled : ' England's Great Happiness ; 
 or a Dialogue between Content and Complaint ; wherein is 
 demonstrated that a great part of our Complaints are cause- 
 less, and we have more Wealth now than ever we had at 
 any time before the Eestauration of his sacred Majestic. By 
 a real and hearty Lover of his King and Countrey.' l This 
 little tract of eighteen pages touches upon all the ' com- 
 plaints ' of the time ' People's over high living, the too many 
 Foreigners, the Enclosure of Commons, and the multitude 
 of people that run into trade ' as well as the ' carrying the 
 Money out of the Nation," though that is put first ; and 
 only a few paragraphs are devoted to the question of trade. 
 But in these few paragraphs, it is not too much to say, appear 
 the germs of most of the ' liberal ideas ' of the better known 
 writings of the end of the century. The author had two 
 main considerations to urge, apparently : first, that the 
 payment of specie to France did not matter, so long as 
 England was able to get it by trade from other nations : 2 
 secondly, that there was no reason for anxiety, so long as 
 the ' signs of wealth ' 3 abounded in every direction. The 
 
 1 Reprinted by McCulloch in Early English Tracts on Commerce. 
 
 2 Comparing the nation with a lawyer who would not refuse to buy 
 meat from a butcher although the latter declined to ' truck ' with him 
 ' for indentures,' he says, ' If you get money enough of others, you care 
 not, though you give it away in specie for these things : I think 'tis the 
 same case.' Ibid. p. 261. 
 
 * This is the marginal abstract of the following passage, which is 
 worth quoting because It anticipates so very distinctly the line of argument
 
 280 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 latter is, of course, the more fundamental consideration. As 
 to the former, it is necessary to observe both that the argu- 
 ment itself is not quite so enlightened as it may look at first 
 sight, especially when summed up in the phrase ' To export 
 money our great advantage ; ' l and also that it is closely 
 affiliated to earlier ' mercantilist ' teaching. 
 
 He still holds that 'that honest way that finds most 
 employment and gets most money is sure the best for 
 any Nation ; ' 2 he still thinks of money received for exports 
 as ' enriching us ; ' 3 as to the French ' I must confess," he 
 says, ' I had rather they'd use our goods than money." 4 
 That is, he still believes in the desirability of a favourable 
 balance on the national commerce as a whole, though he can 
 console himself for an unfavourable balance in the trade with 
 a particular country. Perhaps though this is not quite 
 clear in what he says of France he regarded particular un- 
 favourable balances as sometimes necessary to secure a 
 general favourable balance. But, even thus interpreted, his 
 thought shows scarcely any progress on Mun, whose 
 
 taken by later writers : ' The sum of all is this : If we have brave 
 Magazines for War and multitudes of brave Ships ; if we have a Mint 
 employ'd with more Gold and Silver than in a considerable time they 
 can well coin ; if it be an affront to cause any one to drink in any worse 
 metal than Silver ; if great part of our utensils be of the same ; if our 
 Trade be stretched as far as any Trade is known ; if we have six times 
 the Traders and most of their Shops and Warehouses better furnished 
 than in the last Age ; if we have abundance of more good debts abroad 
 than credit from thence ; if many of our poor Cottagers children be 
 turn'd Merchants and substantial Traders ; if our good Lands be made 
 much better and our bad have a six- fold improvement ; if our Houses be 
 built like Palaces, over what they were in the last Age, and abound with 
 plenty of costly furniture ; and rich Jewels be very common ; and our 
 Servants excel in finery the Great ones of some Neighbour-Nations ; if we 
 have most part of the trade of the World, and our Cities are perhaps the 
 greatest Magazines thereof ; if, after a destructive plague and Consuming 
 fire, we appear much more glorious ; if we have an universal Peace, and 
 our King in such renown that he is courted by all his Neighbours, and 
 these only the marks of poverty, then I have been under a great 
 mistake.' U.s. p. 271. * At the head of the Table of Contents. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 262. 3 Ibid. p. 259. 4 Ibid. p. 261.
 
 TOEY FEBE TEADE 281 
 
 ' England's Treasure by Forraign Trade ' had been printed 
 posthumously in 1664. The prime purpose of that treatise 
 had been to defend the action of the East India Company 
 in exporting silver ; but the ' seed-time and harvest ' argu- 
 ment was capable of much wider application. Mun had him- 
 self declared : ' There are many Countreys which may yield 
 us very profitable trade for our mony, which otherwise afford 
 us no trade at all, because they have no use of our wares ; ' l 
 and at the head of one of his chapters he had laid down 
 the broad proposition, ' The Exportation of our Moneys in 
 Trade of Merchandize is a means to encrease our Treasure.' 2 
 The author of ' England's Great Happiness ' refers to Mun, 
 and follows him in his account of the East India Trade. 3 
 When he goes on to the more burning question of French 
 trade, he is evidently carried along by the same train of 
 thought. But he makes no attempt to connect this with his 
 other argument the appeal to visible prosperity. His first 
 argument, then, is a resort to the idea of a general balance as 
 against that of a particular one : his second argument is a 
 reductio ad absurdum of Overbalance, and not a refutation. 
 
 The Government of Charles II. could do nothing but 
 submit. In his speech at the opening of the session of the 
 new Parliament in 1679, the king expressed the vain expecta- 
 tion that Parliament would ' some way make up the loss I 
 sustain by the prohibition of French Wines and Brandy, 
 which turns only to my prejudice, and to the great advantage 
 of the French.' 4 It is also clear, from the anonymous 
 1 Britannia Languens ' of 1680, that it was now pretty gene- 
 rally believed that English trade was ' sufficiently regulated 
 by our late Prohibition of French Goods ; ' 5 although the 
 
 1 Reprint of 1895, p. 26. * Ibid. p. 19. 
 
 * ' About this India trade you may see more at large by ingenious 
 Mr. Mun ; and a Letter call'd The East India trade a most profitable 
 trade to the Kingdom, printed 1677.' 
 
 4 Parliamentary History, iv. 1086. 
 
 5 P. 276 ; though the author believed it needed positive encouragement 
 in certain ways which he sets forth, even more than mere protection.
 
 282 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 merchants, in anticipation of the prohibition, are said to have 
 ' imported a Store of French Goods to the value of about a 
 Million.' l 
 
 Upon the accession of James II. the opportunity arrived 
 for the Court to get rid of the Act. As originally passed, it 
 was only to last for three years and to the end of the next 
 session of Parliament. But Charles had dispensed with a 
 Parliament since 1681, and it was irksome to wait till the end 
 of the session. The new House, elected in the midst of the 
 revulsion of feeling caused by the Eye House Plot, and after 
 a general reconstitution of borough governments in the 
 interest of the Court, was strongly Tory ; and, apparently, no 
 opposition was offered to the proposal at once to repeal the 
 Act. 2 In its place a heavy, though not prohibitive, tariff was 
 imposed. 3 Yet, if we may trust a later account, ' such were 
 the Apprehensions and Convictions which the House of 
 Commons entertained of the pernicious Consequences thereof 
 that about the same Time they appointed a Committee to 
 consider of the Means to keep up the Price of Wool ; and, 
 to that End, resolved that all Persons should wear the 
 Woolen Manufactures six months in the year.' 4 It is signi- 
 ficant that Sir Dudley North presided over the Committee 
 of the Whole House in Supply, and that he resisted, and, of 
 course, successfully, the proposal to increase the duty on 
 French wines so as to make it prohibitive. 5 It may be 
 noticed also that Charles Davenant (who had been appointed 
 one of the Commissioners of Excise in the Tory reaction of 
 1683, at the age of twenty-seven, and lost office again at the 
 
 For a contemporary expression of satisfaction, see An Account of the 
 French Usurpation upon the Trade of England, &c., in a letter by J. B., 
 1679, quoted in Smith, Memoirs of Wool, i. 330 : ' How the Balance of 
 Trade stands between England and France is worthy of your grave 
 Consideration. The Parliament, with great Wisdom and Judgment, 
 hath prohibited England all Trade or Commerce with France.' 
 
 1 Britannia Languens, p. 379. 
 
 2 1 Jac. II. c. 6 ; Statutes of the Realm, vi. 10. 
 
 3 1 Jac. II. c. 5 ; Statutes, vi. 7. 
 
 4 The British Merchant, as quoted by Smith, Memoirs, i. 378. 
 
 5 Parliamentary History, iv. 1383.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 283 
 
 Eevolution) was among the members of this first Parliament 
 of James II. 
 
 The repeal of the prohibition was followed so the Whig 
 journalists assure us a quarter of a century later l by ' an 
 inundation of French commodities to the value of above four 
 millions sterling, within the compass of less than three years, 
 whereby all the evils formerly complained of were renewed, 
 insomuch that the nation would have been soon beggared, 
 had it not been for the happy revolution in the year 1688, 
 when all commerce with France was effectually barred ' once 
 more. 
 
 The Act of 1688 ' prohibiting all trade and commerce with . 
 France ' was probably passed with practical unanimity. 
 Men of all parties, save a few extreme adherents of James II., 
 were for the time united. They were resolved to resist all 
 the efforts of Louis XIV. to reimpose their fallen sovereign 
 upon them, and those who gave no credence to the cry of 
 Overbalance were ready to acquiesce in the prohibition as a / 
 war measure designed to injure France. The Act makes use 
 for its preamble of the sentences which had introduced the 
 prohibition ' tack ' to the Act of 1678 : ' It hath been found 
 by long experience that the importing of French Wines, 
 Vinegar, Brandy, Linnen, Silks, Salt, Paper, and other the 
 Commodities of the Growth, Product, or Manufacture of 
 France, . . . hath much exhausted the Treasure of this 
 Nation, lessened the value of the native Commodities and 
 manufactures thereof, and greatly impoverished the Eng- 
 lish Artificers and Handycrafts and caused great detriment 
 to this Kingdom in general.' But this is preceded by the 
 war reason : ' Forasmuch as your Majesties . . . have been 
 pleased to declare an actual War with France.' 2 The pro- 
 hibition took effect on August 24, 1689 ; and so well 
 was it enforced that on June 16, 1690, the Commissioners 
 of Customs represented to the Lords of the Treasury 
 that ' by the prohibition of the French trade several of the 
 
 1 Anderson's account (in Macpherson, ii. 620) is from the British 
 Mercliant, and follows the passage quoted in the last note but one. 
 
 2 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 34 ; Statutes, vi. 98.
 
 284 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 ports that be opposite to France are wholly destitute of any 
 receipt.' l 
 
 The Act, like that of 1678, was to run for three years and 
 the following session. It was renewed in 1692 ; but now to 
 the three years' limitation, once more renewed, were added 
 the significant words, ' if the present war with France shall 
 so long last.' 2 The glow of resentment against James had 
 by that time faded away : the Tories were beginning to be 
 tired of the war ; and they, at any rate, were ready to remove 
 the prohibition when the war came to an'end. When the 
 Act lapsed, the war had practically ceased ; and, accordingly, 
 the prohibition was not renewed. In its stead an Act was 
 passed, 1695-96, in its form closely resembling the Tariff Act 
 of 1685, but in reality probably a compromise between the 
 two opposing views. It imposed, for a term of twenty-one 
 years, a duty of 25Z. on every tun of wine, 30Z. on every tun 
 of French brandy of single proof, and 60Z. on every tun of 
 double proof, and 25 per cent, ad valorem on all other French 
 goods all these in addition to such impositions as already 
 stood on the Book of Rates. 3 Duties such as these must 
 have almost excluded French commodities, 4 even though they 
 were no longer prohibited ; and the measure may fairly be 
 regarded as a compromise in which the traditional Whig 
 policy was still predominant. 
 
 Let us now look at the literature of this second period of 
 prohibition, 1688-96. It was a time prolific in economic 
 pamphlets ; but, as we might expect, scarcely any of them 
 were directly called forth by the question of trade with 
 France. This was a matter on which the minds of almost 
 all politicians were, for the time, made up ; and pamphleteers 
 
 1 Calendar of Treasury Papers, 1557-1696, p. 121. 
 
 2 4 Gul. & Mar. c. 25 ; Statutes, vi. 419. 
 
 3 7 & 8 Gul. III. c. 20 ; Statutes, vii. 97. 
 
 4 So also Dowell, History of Taxation, iv. 120, thinks as to wine. 
 He gives some figures, according to which the average import of wine 
 from 1699 to 1702 was: from Spain and the Canaries, 9,039 tuns; 
 Portugal, 6,897; Italy, 1,508 ; and France, 1,245.
 
 TOEY FEEE TKADE 285 
 
 seldom addressed themselves to any but ' living issues.' Two 
 subjects of more immediate interest were the East India 
 Trade and the Currency. But the East India Company was 
 naturally regarded, since Sir Joseph Child had made his 
 peace with Charles II., as a Tory corporation ; ' and the 
 attacks upon it came mostly from Whigs. Its Tory defenders 
 found themselves obliged to repeat over and over again the 
 old argument of Mun that particular trades should not be 
 judged harmful merely because the balances in those cases 
 taken by themselves might be unfavourable. But, while 
 defending the East India Company, it was natural to cast a 
 side glance from time to time on that other trade which 
 common opinion regarded as harmful namely, the French 
 trade. We can readily see how some writers would be 
 tempted to go further, and seek to discredit the very idea of 
 the Balance, even though they were unable to directly dis- 
 prove its validity. The proposed reduction of the legal rate 
 of interest was also a subject of a good deal of concern to 
 many, and the reform of the currency was a matter of press- 
 ing need. It would take too long to show how, even on topics 
 like these, men of different political parties were very apt to 
 take different sides. 2 They were also pretty sure to be drawn 
 on to express their opinions on trade in general ; and, in 
 doing so, they were likely enough to be influenced by the 
 traditional views of their political associates. 
 
 Of all the writers of the time, Sir Josiah Child, whose 
 1 New Discourse on Trade ' appeared in 1690, was the most 
 immediately influential, and contributed more than any one 
 else to discredit the doctrine of the balance. 3 As to ' particular 
 
 1 Cf. Macaulay's History, ch. xviii. 
 
 2 Thus Child and North both disliked the new ' trade of hankering,' 
 as did Hume half a century later ; and North and Locke differed in their 
 proposals for the recoinage. 
 
 3 Child's Brief Observations concerning Trade and Interest of Money 
 was published in 1668. In 1690 it was reissued, with ten additional 
 chapters, including one on the Balance of Trade, as A New Discourse oj 
 Trade. A second edition was called for in 1694. The references here 
 given are to the fourth, undated, edition.
 
 286 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 and distinct Trades," he did but follow Mun and the author 
 of ' England's Great Happiness.' The ' rule ' that the balance 
 of gain in trade could be determined by the comparison 
 of exports with imports is ' fallible and erroneous ' as to 
 particular trades, because ' a true measure of any particular 
 Trade, as to the profit or loss of the Nation by it, cannot be 
 taken by the consideration of such Trade in itself singly, but 
 as it stands in reference, and is subservient, to the general 
 Trade of this Kingdom.' 1 But he does not stop here. He 
 minimises the value of the rule as a test even of the balance 
 of ' the general Trade ' and this for a reason which was 
 likely to have weight with untheoretic and practical-minded 
 Englishmen. ' If the difficulty of the scrutiny whereby to 
 reduce it [the rule] into practice and the many accidents that 
 may accrue be seriously weighed, it will appear too doubtful 
 and uncertain.' 2 He proceeds to point out the inadequacy of 
 the custom-house books as furnishing data whereon to form 
 an opinion. Nor can the rate of exchange be relied upon as 
 a criterion, for reasons of the same practical character 
 because ' it is subject to vary on many accidents of emer- 
 gencies of State and War,' and because there are some 
 countries with which ' great and eminent Trades ' are carried 
 on and yet with which there is no settled course of exchange. 3 
 He concludes, again agreeing with ' England's Great Hap- 
 piness,' that ' the best and most certain discovery of national 
 gain or loss in trade is to be made from the encrease and di- 
 minution of our Trade and Shipping in general ; ' i.e. from the 
 large and obvious facts of commercial prosperity or decline. 4 
 
 1 New Discourse, p. 170. 2 Ibid. p. 165. 3 Ibid. p. 175. 
 
 4 ' Discoursing once with a Noble Lord,' the latter had asked him 
 whether ' the Affairs of a Nation ' and those of a private person did not 
 greatly resemble one another, and, if so, whether a private merchant 
 might not seem to drive a great trade and yet grow poorer. This was a 
 frequent argument of the other side. Thus Locke : ' We may trade and 
 be busy, and grow poor by it,' in Considerations, p. 571; cf. Temple, 
 Observations upon the United Provinces (1672), 7th ed., 1705, p. 230. Child 
 replies (op. cit. p. 177) : ' That man who drives a great Trade, and is 
 Owner or Employer of much Shipping, and does all his days continue and 
 encrease in Trade and Shipping, and his Son or Successor after him,
 
 TORY FREE TRADE 287 
 
 It is fair to say, then, that Child threw the weight of his 
 name in favour, in general, of a, policy of commercial freedom. 
 He even pointed towards the way in which this policy could 
 be realised in practical politics : ' The well contrivement and 
 management of Foreign Treaties may very much contribute 
 to the making it the interest of other Nations to trade with 
 us,' l thus anticipating the subsequent action of Bolingbroke. 
 Moreover, like not a few ' mercantilists,' Child was in favour 
 of the abolition of almost all existing restrictions on the 
 liberty of internal industry. 2 Up and down this Discourse 
 are scattered such gnomic utterances as these : ' Liberty and j 
 property conduce to the increase of trade.' ' The common 
 interest of the Nation in general is to buy cheap.' ' All men 
 are led by their interests.' 3 It would be easy to pick these 
 out, associate them with his advocacy of freedom for those 
 branches of foreign trade in which he was himself interested, 
 and make of him a ' forerunner ' of Adam Smith as, indeed, 
 he was in spirit, though only as the mercantilist movement 
 as a whole was a forerunner of Adam Smith and the school 
 of natural liberty. 4 But, unfortunately, Child did not limit 
 himself to two or three pages, like North. He wrote a whole 
 book, and he has himself made it abundantly clear that he 
 shared the fundamental beliefs of the advocates of restraint. 
 He expressly declares the ' notion ' or ' rule ' as to comparing 
 exports and imports ' not ill grounded,' and says that ' it has 
 much truth in it, was ingeniously and worthily started by 
 him that first published it [Mun ?], and much good has 
 
 and after him his Grandson, &c., this would be an indisputable evidence 
 that such person or family did thrive by their Trade. . . . This is the 
 case of Nations, and this, through God's goodness, is the case of England, 
 as bad as we are at present.' Cf. p. 179 : ' If our Trade in the gross bulk 
 of it ... do still increase for a long tract of years, it is an infallible 
 proof of our thriving by our Trade, and that we are getting more tools, 
 more stock, to trade with.' ' Op. cit. p. 187. 
 
 E.g. Ibid. Preface, pp. Ixi-lxii, 159-161, 182. 
 
 Ibid. pp. 67, 116, 119. 
 
 4 The transition may be observed in, e.g., Gournay's pleasure in the 
 writings of Child and de Witt, as described in Turgot's Eloge de 
 Gournay.
 
 288 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 accrued to the Kingdom by our Law-makers resenting it.' ' 
 As to the other criterion, ' the consideration of the course of 
 the Exchange,' that also ' may be of use and very necessary 
 in many respects.' This might be the language of com- 
 plaisance, meant to disarm criticism ; but when we find 
 Child in favour of ' restraining the trades of our own plan- 
 tations wholly to England,' 2 of preventing the exportation 
 of wool, 3 and, what is more, of discouraging the importation 
 of commodities from Venice and the Canaries because they 
 were, ' for the most part, purchased with ready Money ' 4 
 i.e. the very reason for which others urged the prohibition of 
 the East Indian and French trades we realise that it was 
 not superior insight that distinguished Child from the 
 Houblons and Godfreys. If Child had been a Whig director 
 of the Bank of England instead of a Tory director of the 
 East India Company, we should doubtless have found him 
 writing on the other side. 
 
 To the same year, 1690, belongs Barbon's earliest trea- 
 tise on commerce, likewise entitled ' A Discourse of Trade.' 5 
 In this ' Prohibitions ' are put down as one of the two chief 
 causes of the decay of trade. It is argued that ' the pro- 
 hibition of any foreign commodity doth hinder the making 
 and exportation of so much of the native as used to be made 
 and exchanged for it.' As against ' the common argument ' 
 that the consumption of foreign commodities hinders the 
 consumption of the native, he maintains that the demand for 
 foreign commodities is not due to need, but to the wants of 
 the mind 6 and mere fashion, taking French silk stuffs for his 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 165. For the way in which such language was under- 
 stood by contemporaries, see Davenant, Works, ii. 96. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 183, 209. 3 Ibid. p. 183. 4 Ibid. p. 189. 
 
 5 As Barbon's Discourses of 1690 and 1696 are not at present 
 accessible to me, the following quotations are taken from Dr. Bauer's 
 articles and from the excerpts in Professor Cunningham's Growth of 
 English Industry and Commerce, ii. (1892), 243, 244. 
 
 6 Dr. Bauer has laid stress upon Barbon's ' explanation of value by 
 pyschological motives,' referring to his language about the 'Wants of 
 the Mind.' In his earlier Apology for the Builder (1685), reprinted in 
 McCulloch's Miscellaneous Economical Tracts (for the Political Economy
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 289 
 
 example. To describe this as ' the ablest refutation of the 
 theory of the balance of trade previous to Hume and Adam 
 Smith ' would seem somewhat excessive praise. The first of 
 the two arguments appears perhaps to involve the modern 
 doctrine that in the long run exports pay for imports ; but 
 Child also had said, ' If we would engage other Nations to 
 trade with us, we must receive from them the fruits and 
 commodities of their Countries as well as send them ours,' * 
 without drawing what to us may seem an obvious conclusion. 
 And, as to the second, Barbon was not alone in thinking of 
 foreign commodities as chiefly fashionable luxuries. Herein 
 Locke, for instance, agreed with him ; and this was, in fact, a 
 consideration of practical importance in such a case as that to 
 which Locke applied it namely, to the demand for foreign 
 wines. 2 Barbon himself concedes that, when the importation 
 of foreign wares really hinders the production and consumption 
 of domestic products in his opinion, a rare case then duties 
 may be imposed in order to prevent their being sold cheaper 
 than the native commodities. In the opinion of many of 
 Barbon's contemporaries, and certainly in the opinion of 
 the Spitalfields weavers, this was precisely the case with 
 French silk. 3 Barbon's concession was nominally in favour 
 of protection as against prohibition ; but it is clear that the 
 same principle might logically be appealed to, as in fact it 
 was appealed to, in favour of prohibition, if protection was 
 thought not to suffice. 4 
 
 Club, 1859), the same thought appears, with an indication of the source 
 whence Barbon derived it : 'As their riches increase, so doth their 
 wants. As Sir William Temple hath observed, men are better distin- 
 guished by what they want than by what they enjoy ; ' p. 6. 
 
 1 Discourse, p. 188. 
 
 2 Considerations of the Loitering of Interest, p. 598. 
 
 3 See, e.g., the Petition from the Company of Silk Weavers in Smith's 
 Memoirs, i. 351. 
 
 4 Thus the British Mcrcliant (1713) quoted by Smith, Memoirs, 
 ii. 127 estimates the increase in the manufacture of malt spirits, 
 of linens, and of silks in England and Ireland owing to the prohibition ; 
 and the Atlas Maritimus Commercialis (1727), quoted ibid. p. 202, sets 
 forth the growth of the manufacture of hats, glass, hardware, soap, and 
 
 U
 
 290 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 That Barbon did not conceive himself to be in possession 
 of any very convincing argument for the absolute refutation 
 of the balance of trade doctrine is perhaps sufficiently 
 indicated by the references to the subject in his later 
 ' Discourse on Coining ' (1696). True, he there asserts that 
 ' no sort of Commodities ought to be totally prohibited,' that 
 ' the freer the Trade is, the better the Nation will thrive,' 
 and that ' the Poverty and Eiches of a Nation does not 
 depend upon a lesser or greater consumption of Foreign 
 goods, nor on the difference of the Value of those Goods that 
 are consum'd.' But his only argument, apparently, is an 
 expansion of what we have already found in Child : ' There 
 is nothing so difficult as to find out the Balance of Trade in 
 any Nation ; or to know whether there ever was, or can be 
 such a thing as the making up of the Balance of Trade 
 betwixt one Nation and another ; ' or to prove, if it could be 
 found out, that there is anything got or lost by the Balance.' 
 The only Balance he has in his mind, it would seem, is the 
 balance on particular trades ; and he has special reference to 
 the trade with France. 
 
 Those that rely so much upon finding out the Balance of Trade, 
 do it by taking the Computation of the Trade of several years of one 
 Nation with another, and think it may be done by examining the 
 Accompt of the Custom-House Books, and us'd to give for Instance 
 the French Trade, . . . and therefore us'd to cry out very much 
 against the French Trade : Tho', perhaps if that were throughly 
 consider'd, the French Trade was as profitable to the Nation as any 
 other Foreign Trade ; which might be made to appear, if it were 
 
 bone-lace, as well as of silk, under the same circumstances. These 
 accounts are, no doubt, greatly exaggerated. One result of the pro- 
 hibition was simply to turn the demand in some other direction. This 
 was evidently the case with wine, now obtained from Portugal and 
 Spain ; and it is said to have been the case with linen, now obtained 
 from Holland and Silesia (Macpherson, ii. 693). Such estimates are 
 only referred to here to show how inconclusive Barbon's argument must 
 have seemed to an intelligent Whig. See the speeches in 1713 of 
 Mr. Lechmere and others in Tindal, u.s., p. 18. 
 1 The italics are my own.
 
 TOBY FBEE TKADE 291 
 
 proper for this Debate. But to make up the Balance of Trade by 
 the Custom-House Books is a very uncertain way of reckoning. 
 
 Similarly in the vein of Child, he casts doubt upon the 
 test of the foreign exchanges ; for ' Exchanges rise and fall 
 every week ' according to such events as ' a Vintage, a great 
 Mart, or some Publick Sale.' And his final conclusion is 
 that the balance of trade is not a delusion, but ' a Notion 
 that serves rather to puzzle all Debates of Trade than to 
 discover any particular Advantages that a Nation may get 
 by regulating of Trade.' 
 
 One word more as to the later treatise. Here Barbon 
 asserts also ' that there is no Occasion to send away Money 
 or Bullion to buy Bills of Exchange or Balance accompts,' 
 arid that ' all sorts of Goods of the Value of the Bill of 
 Exchange, or the Balance of the Accompt, will answer the 
 Bill, and Balance the Accompt as well as Money.' But this 
 was not the first time the idea had been put forward : it is 
 to be found in a pamphlet criticised by Locke in 1691. 
 And in both cases it was not so much an anticipation of 
 principles now familiar as at most a vague realisation of 
 the fact that, in the long run, goods pay for goods. But 
 what the mercantilists like Locke saw was the short run : 
 they saw that from time to time there were international 
 balances to be paid in money ; and Barbon was apparently 
 quite unable to demonstrate how it was that the short-run 
 facts were reconcilable with the long-run facts. 1 We may 
 doubt whether he had any inkling of the solution himself ; 
 whether he did not rather stop at the empirical observation 
 of the general result. Certainly, all we know of Barbon's 
 other teachings that the rate of interest ought to be reduced 
 by law, that ' the coin should be raised,' &c. is the very 
 
 1 Locke points out that, if England sells goods worth 1,000,OOOZ., and 
 buys goods worth 1,100,000^., ' it is unavoidable that 100,OOOZ. of our 
 money must go out. ... It is ridiculous to say that bills of exchange 
 shall pay our debts abroad. ... If commodities do not, our money must 
 go out to pay them, or else our credit be lost ' (Considerations, p. 570). 
 A contention like Barbon's, which seemed to deny every-day business 
 facts, could not be conclusive.
 
 292 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 opposite of what we should expect from a man of peculiarly 
 clear insight. 
 
 Far better known for the last three-quarters of a century 
 ' has been Sir Dudley North, whose ' Discourses upon Trade ' 
 ', the titles of all these writings are monotonously identical 
 were printed in 1691, forming a thin pamphlet of thirty- 
 eight pages. 1 There is, however, this in common to Barbon 
 and North, and herein they differ from such writers as Child, 
 Locke, or Davenant that, so far as we can discover, they 
 secured no appreciable notice from contemporaries, and owe 
 their reputation entirely to modern sympathy. 
 
 I have already mentioned North's activity in the Parlia- 
 ment of 1685. He had, before that, served as a Commissioner 
 of Customs, and in that office had shown peculiar skill in 
 ' resolving the enigmas ' proposed by the Treasury, as to 
 ' why this or that branch fell short.' 
 
 He caused all the accounts of the Custom-house, that he thought 
 useful, to be brought to his house ; and there, in a tabular way, he 
 stated all the branches, in the several years, as far back as he 
 thought would be needful ; and, in that manner, he brought the 
 whole state of the revenue of the Customs into a synopsis, upon the 
 inspection of which he could argue and infer ; and so he made clear 
 answer to their queries; viz. that some were mistaken, others 
 impertinent ; some trades had found new channels ; prohibitions or 
 high duties affected others. If some failed, others augmented ; for 
 such concerns perpetually vary. 2 
 
 Such a man was likely to have the empirical knowledge 
 which would cause him to distrust Whig economics ; and, 
 as one of the best hated Tories of the time, he was predis- 
 posed to scoff at them. Accordingly, he does so, in the 
 Preface to his ' Discourses,' in the following terms : 
 
 It is not long since there was a great noise with Inquiries into 
 the Balance of Exportation and Importation ; and so into the 
 Balance of Trade, as they called it. For it was fancyed that, if we 
 brought more Commodities in, than we carried out, we were in the 
 
 1 I quote from the reprint of 1846. 
 
 2 Boger North's Lives of the NortJis (ed. 1826), iii. 147.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 293 
 
 High-way to Kuin. In like manner have we heard much said 
 against the East-India Trade, against the French Trade, with 
 many other like politick conceits in Trade; most of which, Time 
 and better Judgment hath disbanded. 1 
 
 And he goes on to assert a number of propositions, of 
 which the first three are as follows : 
 
 The whole world as to Trade is but as one Nation or People, and 
 therein Nations are as Persons. 
 
 The loss of a Trade with one Nation is not that only separately 
 considered, but so much of the Trade of the world rescinded and 
 lost, for all is combined together. 
 
 There can be no Trade unprofitable to the Public ; for if any 
 prove so, Men leave it off; and wherever the Traders thrive, the 
 Publick, of which they are a part, thrives also. 
 
 North, then, must be credited with having protested 
 against some of the fundamental ideas underlying the Whig 
 policy. But we must take care not to over-estimate his 
 scientific merit in this respect. The first two, for example, 
 of the above propositions, assert little more than the mutual 
 advantage of international trade. But this was a trite obser- 
 vation which many writers made, especially when branches 
 of trade were hampered in which they were themselves 
 interested, without being in the least inclined to draw from it 
 the theoretic conclusions which seem so inevitable to modern 
 free traders. That ' the whole world as to trade is but one 
 people, and therein nations are as persons ' much as the 
 utterance has been commended is not a whit finer than 
 Mun's comparison of the trade of the world to the body, 
 with its members each ' accomodating ' the other ; and no 
 one has yet attempted to make Mun out a theoretic free 
 trader. 2 
 
 1 His own italics. 
 
 2 ' The use of forraign trade is alike unto all nations. ... In some 
 countries we sell our commodities and bring away their wares, or part 
 in money ; in other countries we sell our goods and take their money, 
 because they have little or no wares that fit our turn ; again, in some 
 places we have need of their commodities, but they have little use of 
 ours, so they take our money which we get in other countries ; and thus
 
 294 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 Certainly, one preliminary misconception must be cleared 
 out of the way. His brother, Koger North, tells us that the 
 pamphlet was ' utterly sunk, and a copy not to be had for 
 money,' and remarks, ' If it was designedly done, it was very 
 prudent.' l McCulloch, after characterising North as ' the 
 intelligent advocate of all the great principles of commercial 
 freedom/ mentions the disappearance of the tract in such 
 a way as to imply that it was suppressed on account of 
 its free-trade views. 2 This is the conclusion actually drawn 
 in a work of reference so generally trustworthy as Conrad's 
 ' Handworterbuch,' with the addition that it was North 
 himself that suppressed it, as perhaps McCulloch's account 
 might suggest. 
 
 Supposing that the economic consequences of the Revolution 
 would be a victory of the principle of free trade, he published his 
 treatise in 1691 ; but he was obliged only too soon to yield to the 
 conviction that the result of the Revolution would rather be the 
 extremest intensification of protectionist measures. This turn of 
 affairs induced him, out of regard to his social well-being, ... to 
 get rid of this printed evidence of his free -trade opinions by buying 
 up and destroying the whole edition. 3 
 
 All this does but illustrate the growth of myth. North was, 
 indeed, not impressed by the spectre of Overbalance, as the 
 other party held it up, nor did he favour the Whig policy of 
 prohibition ; and he did not hesitate to say so. Nor, as we 
 have seen, did other people. But the main purpose of his 
 treatise was not to deal with foreign commerce, but, as the 
 title-page plainly tells us, was 'principally directed to the 
 Cases of the Interest, Coynage, Clipping, and Increase of 
 
 by a course of traffic (which changeth according to the occurrents of 
 time) tlie particular members do accomodate each other, and all accom- 
 plish the whole body of the trade, which will ever languish if the harmony 
 of her health be distempered by the diseases of excess at home, violence 
 abroad, charges and restrictions at home and abroad.' England's 
 Treasiire, p. 47 ; my italics. 
 
 1 Lives of the Norths, p. 173. 2 McCulloch's Discourse, pp. 37-39. 
 
 3 S.v. North. The writer adds to the motives a regard for his 
 1 amtliche Unbescholtenheit.' But he was no longer in office.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 295 
 
 Money.' He is very explicit in his preface. After saying, 
 in the passage already quoted, that ' most ' of the ' politick 
 conceits in Trade Time and better Judgment hath disbanded/ 
 he continues : 
 
 but others succeed in their room, according as new Persons find 
 Encouragement to invent. . . . And now we complain for want of 
 Money in specie, that Bullion is Exported or misemployed to other 
 uses than making Money ; and ascribe the deadness of Trade, 
 especially of Corn and CatM in the Country, to this ; and hope 
 by a Begulation of the Bullion-Trade, and stinting the Price, 
 except it be in Money, to make a thorough Reformation. 
 
 It was the problem of the currency, especially in its rela- 
 tion to bullion, that he had in his mind ; as any one can 
 see who takes the trouble to read through the ' Discourses.' 
 The chief practical matter on which he took issue with the 
 administration was the policy of ' free coinage,' and as to 
 this lie did not mince his words : ' The Nation hath been 
 abused, and made to pay for the twisting of straw, for Asses 
 to eat.' l But it was not only or originally the Bevolu- 
 tion government that he found fault with in this matter : 
 it was, as Eoger North makes quite clear, the law passed 
 in 1685 2 (or, rather, continued from 18 Car. II.) that first 
 moved his ire. He was ' scandalised ' also, says his brother, 
 ' at clipped money,' and ' resolved to bid battle to this 
 popular delusion.' 3 These were the main reasons for pub- 
 lishing his pamphlet. And Eoger North explains the dis- 
 appearance of the pamphlet by the circumstance that in the 
 actual reformation of the coinage the government did not 
 follow Dudley's advice. ' Of the two ways, exposed by Sir 
 Dudley North, the fabricators of that bill chose the worse ; 
 for they threw the loss of the clipped money upon the public 
 by a tax.' If the pamphlet was 'designedly sunk,' 'it was 
 very prudent ; for the proceeding is so much reflected on 
 there for the worse, and a better showed, though not so 
 favourable to abuses, as doth not consist with that honour 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 18. - 1 Jac. II. c. 7 ; Statutes, vi. 10. 
 
 * Lives of tlie Norths, iii. 108.
 
 296 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 and eclat as hath been held forth upon the occasion.' l 
 Surely Roger North is hinting that the government sup- 
 pressed the pamphlet ; for the Recoinage Act was not passed 
 till 1695, and North died in 1691. 
 
 When, with these facts in mind, we look at the proposi- 
 tions set forth in the preface, and so lauded by McCulloch as 
 a summary of ' sound views of political economy,' it becomes 
 probable that most of the fourteen have no general reference 
 to commerce at large, but a special reference to the immediate 
 coinage question. To seek to show this at length would 
 involve an excursion into the thorny field of currency history, 
 from which, with the fear of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Walsh before 
 our eyes, we may well recoil. But two examples will suffice. 
 It is hard to read, ' No Laws can set Prices in Trade ' and 
 ' Money is a Merchandise,' without at once interpreting them 
 as we should if we found them in the ' Wealth of Nations.' 
 But what Dudley North meant by them we may learn, from 
 the account given by his brother Roger, who was his intimate 
 companion. 
 
 Another thing which gave him great offence was the currency 
 of clipped money. He looked upon coined money as merchandise 
 only (for better proof and convenience) used as a scale having its 
 supposed weight signed upon it, to weigh all other things by ; or 
 as a denomination apt for accounts. But, if the weight of it 
 differed from its stamp, it was not a scale, but a cheat, like a piece 
 of goods with a content stampt, and divers yards cut off. And, as 
 to the fancy that common currency might reconcile the matter, he 
 thought that when a man takes a thing called a shilling, putting it 
 off, it is also called a shilling nominally true ; but, as to the 
 deficiency, it is no other than a token or leather money, of no 
 intrinsic, by what name soever it be called ; and that all markets 
 will be regulated accordingly; for as money is debased, prices 
 rise, and so it all comes to a reckoning. 2 
 
 Finally, we must not unduly extend the significance even 
 of those propositions which do bear directly on foreign trade, 
 and which have already been quoted. I am not at all sure 
 
 1 Lives of the Norths, iii. 173. 
 
 2 Ibid. The italics are added.
 
 TOEY FEEE TEADE 297 
 
 that North meant anything more by them than what we 
 have already found in Child and others that a particular 
 trade cannot be properly judged of by itself. Eoger North, 
 who surely was likely to know what was in his brother's 
 mind, gives us the following exposition of his views : 
 
 Trade is not distributed, as government, by nations and 
 kingdoms ; but is one throughout the whole world ; as the main 
 sea, which cannot be emptied or replenished, in one part, but the 
 whole, more or less, will be affected. So when a nation thinks, by 
 rescinding the trade of any other country, which was the case of 
 our prohibiting all commerce with France, they do not lop off 
 that country, but so much of then: trade of the whole world as 
 what that which was prohibited bore in proportion with all the 
 rest. . . . And as to pretending a loss by any commerce, the 
 merchant chooses in some respects to lose if by that he acquires an 
 accommodation of a profitable trade in other respects. As when 
 they send silk home from Turkey, by which they gam a great deal, 
 because they have no other commodity wherewith to make 
 returns. So without trade into France, whereby the English may 
 have effects in that kingdom, they could not so well drive the 
 Italian, Spanish and Holland trades, for want of remittances and 
 returns that way. 1 
 
 There does not seem anything more here than a criticism 
 of the particular-balance idea ; and, for the immediate Tory 
 purpose of furnishing an argument against the prohibition 
 either of French or of East Indian imports, nothing more 
 was needed. Even North while explaining that ' no man 
 is richer for having his estate all in Money lying by 
 him ' 2 nevertheless uses language about money being ' a 
 proper Fund for a surplusage of stock to be deposited in/ 3 
 which could easily lend itself to a general-balance argument. 4 
 
 1 Lives of the Norths, i. 352. 2 Discourses, p. 11. 3 Ibid. p. 16. 
 
 4 [Since the above was first printed, I have noticed that Mr. Craik, 
 in his History of British Commerce (1844), ii. 216, had already written 
 thus : ' The immediate object of the work was to oppose the Government 
 plan (which was that ultimately adopted) of throwing the cost arising 
 from the clipt money upon the public ; and Sir Dudley's brother and 
 biographer, Roger North, hints that means were taken to suppress it.' 
 But Mr. Craik goes on to admire his ' statement and elucidation of all
 
 298 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 There is one writer of the opposite political camp who 
 must not be overlooked John Locke. Locke's ' Considera- 
 tions of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest ' were 
 written in the main about 1672 ; but additions were made in 
 1690, and probably the whole revised before it was published 
 in November 1691. In this tractate Locke defends most 
 strenuously the doctrine of the balance ; yet nothing is more 
 curious than the way in which, after he has once embarked 
 on his exposition of the ' quantity theory ' of money, he 
 seems to approach within sight of the conclusion which 
 Hume afterwards drew. An unfavourable balance he sees 
 will make foreign commodities relatively dear ; but, on the 
 threshold of the conclusion that this would set the current 
 flowing the other way, he stops short, and gets back to his 
 mercantilist foundation by means of the weak argument 
 that such an unfavourable balance ' endangers the drawing 
 away of our people, who are apt to go where their pay is 
 best.' l No one would accuse Locke of intellectual dis- 
 honesty. We cannot but remember, however, that he was 
 the intimate friend of Shaf tesbury ; that one of the last acts 
 of his patron before he fell from office was to appoint him 
 Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations ; 
 that he held this office from October 1673 to March 1675 
 the very period when the prohibition policy first took shape ; 
 that his ' Considerations ' were addressed to Lord Somers ; 
 that he was a large subscriber to the Whig Bank of England ; 
 and, finally, that he was ' the presiding genius ' from 1696 
 to 1700 in that new Board of Trade and Plantations which 
 had among its chief duties ' to examine what trades are or 
 may prove hurtful and what beneficial to this kingdom, and 
 by what means the advantageous trades may be improved 
 and those that are prejudicial discouraged.' 2 It is not, per- 
 
 the leading principles of commercial and economical science.' It may 
 be added that to question the wisdom of the procedure of William's 
 government in the restoration of the currency was long the practice of 
 Tory writers: e.g. Hume, Essays, No. 25 (ed. Ward, Lock, & Co., 
 p. 171 n.)]. 
 
 1 Considerations, pp. 591, 592. 2 Macpherson, ii. 682.
 
 TOEY FREE TEADE 299 
 
 haps, unfair to say that, as the eyes of Tory pamphleteers 
 were made more penetrating by party prepossessions, the 
 eyes even of a great philosopher who was a Whig might also 
 be dimmed by party prepossessions. 
 
 We come now to the last stage in the history of the 
 period under consideration. The period of high duties lasted 
 from 1696 to 1704. After peace was signed with France in 
 1697, there were not a few, especially among the Tories, 
 who were ready to carry out the suggestion of Child, and 
 enter into a treaty of reciprocity with France. Negotiations 
 were begun, and a French envoy visited England ; but neither 
 government was ready to make adequate concessions in its 
 tariffs, and the negotiations were fruitless. 1 In 1704, most 
 of the ultra-Tories having been removed from the ministry, 
 and Parliament being once more resolved upon an energetic 
 conduct of the war, the prohibition was renewed, with the 
 old Whig preamble, and to last ' during the present war 
 with France.' 2 As soon as the Tory reaction took place, in 
 1710, the new ministry, reverting to the old policy of the 
 party, began to feel its way both to a peace and to a treaty 
 of commerce. The fate of this treaty is a matter of general 
 knowledge, and has already been referred to. Beyond 1713 
 I do not now propose to follow the progress of events. 
 
 As soon as the commercial articles of the Treaty of 
 Utrecht became known, there was a war of pamphlets and, 
 what was a novelty, of journals, with the ' British Merchant/ 
 subsidised by Halifax, 3 on the Whig side, and the ' Mercator,' 
 subsidised by Bolingbroke and written chiefly by De Foe, on 
 the Tory side. Bolingbroke was ready to avow that, for his 
 part, he entered into these negotiations ' more in the character 
 of a statesman than of a merchant ; ' that his chief purpose 
 was to overcome the long estrangement between the two 
 
 1 Macpherson, ii. 693. 2 3 & 4 Annse, c. 12 ; Statutes, vii. 360. 
 
 8 Preface (p. xvii) of 1721 reprint of The British Merchant or Com- 
 merce Preserved : ' My Lord Halifax was the support and very spirit of the 
 paper called the B.M., . . . out of his Liberality subscribed very largely 
 to this Work, a considerable sum being raised to carry it on,
 
 300 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 nations, which the old commercial jealousy had encouraged. 
 ' Nothing unites like interest ; and, when once our people have 
 felt the sweet of carrying on a trade to France, under reason- 
 able regulations, the artifices of Whigisrn will have the less 
 effect amongst them.' ! But his literary champions had to 
 make out an economic case against the Whigs ; and usually, 
 it would seem, they took the line already pointed out by 
 Child and Barbon, of calling in question the custom-house 
 statistics. 2 It would be worth while to enter in some detail 
 into the arguments of the two sides ; but that task must be 
 postponed to another occasion. 
 
 During the whole period 1695-1712 the writer most 
 worthy of attention was Charles Davenant. Davenant is not 
 only the most voluminous, but also, in my opinion, the most 
 considerable of all the Tory advocates of ' free trade.' 3 To 
 do him justice, it would be necessary to devote a separate 
 essay to him ; while to determine how far he was consistent 
 would involve a more careful examination than has ever yet 
 been made of all the several phases and nuances of what we 
 call ' Mercantilism.' It will be sufficient here to call atten- 
 tion to a few only of the more noticeable features of his 
 writings. 
 
 As with Child, we find in Davenant's writings many 
 utterances which, if they stood by themselves, we should 
 interpret as implying a thoroughgoing free-trade theory in 
 
 1 Bolingbroke's Letters (ed. 1798), iv. 141, 153. 
 
 2 I have been unable to see a copy of the Mercator, but the British 
 Merchant, ii. 49, quotes it as denying ' that any accounts from the 
 Custom House can give a true Scheme of the Trade of France, or so 
 much of a Scheme as to make a rational Conjecture from.' 
 
 3 In the contemporary sense of the term ; as when, in a debate in 
 1713, ' Mr. Arthur Moore, one of the Commissioners of Trade, and whose 
 skill and knowledge the British Ministry had chiefly relied on in drawing 
 up the treaty, endeavoured to show the great advantages that would 
 accrue to the Nation from a free trade with France ' (Tindal, u.s., xxv. 17). 
 It is possibly worth while observing that the term ' free trade ' was also 
 used as a contrast to trade carried on by privileged companies. This 
 had been the commonest use of the term in the preceding century. 
 Some examples will be found in von Heyking's Zur Oeschichte der 
 Handelsbilanztheorie, p. 86.
 
 TORY FBEE TEADE 301 
 
 the modern sense utterances which quite deserve to be set 
 by the side of those of North. Thus : ' Trade is in its nature 
 free, finds its own channel and best directeth its own 
 course ; ' ' ' Wisdom is most commonly in the wrong when 
 it pretends to direct nature ; ' 2 ' We understand that to be 
 wealth which maintains the prince and the general body of 
 his people in plenty, ease, and safety ; ' 3 ' Money is at bottom 
 no more than the counters with which men in their dealings 
 have been accustomed to reckon.' 4 
 
 Then, again, the argument against the balance doctrine 
 as the Whigs held it takes just the same form as with Mun 
 and Child and Barbon and North the appeal from the 
 particular to the general : ' We may seem to lose by the 
 balance in one place, but perhaps that trade may be the 
 cause of another twice as profitable. So that to object 
 against the motion of one wheel without knowing and seeing 
 how the whole engine moves is to no manner of purpose.' 5 
 There is the same recourse as by earlier writers to the obvious 
 facts of industrial and commercial life : ' He that would 
 compute with any good effect in matters relating to trade 
 must contemplate the wealth, stock, product, consumption, 
 and shipping,' as well as the ' exportations and importations 
 of his country.' 6 
 
 These two ideas Davenant applies with much elaboration 
 to the problem of trade with France. He deals with this inci- 
 dentally in a ' Discourse on the East India Trade,' written in 
 ] 698, in which, apropos of the proposed restriction upon East 
 Indian calicoes, he is confronted with the doctrine of the 
 balance, and its most popular example the case of France. 
 He deals with it at greater length when, having been ap- 
 pointed Inspector-General of Exports and Imports in 1705, 
 
 1 Works, i. 98. 2 Ibid. i. 104. " Ibid. i. 381. 
 
 * Ibid. i. 355. * Ibid. i. 147. 
 
 6 Ibid. i. 147. In i. 355-357 is an enumeration of the ' symptoms ' 
 of a nation's ' growing wealthy,' ending with the words : ' What we have 
 here enumerated are not only the signs of a prosperous people, but may 
 be accounted national stock, and as well esteemed riches as our own 
 coined money, foreign coin or imported bullion."
 
 302 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 it became his duty in 1712 to present official reports to the 
 Commissioners for Accounts, in preparation for the proposed 
 commercial treaty. It is a complete misunderstanding, and 
 an injustice to Davenant, to suppose that ' after his return to 
 official employment he did not venture to disturb current 
 economic ideas.' l After his return to official employment 
 he had a unique opportunity to assist in carrying into effect 
 the policy of freer intercourse with France, which he had all 
 along advocated ; and he took full advantage of it. 
 
 In his ' Discourse ' of 1698 he grants that after Colbert 
 imposed his high tariff ' our dealings thither began to grow 
 very disadvantageous to this nation,' but ' whether ' it was 
 ' in the degree commonly reckoned seems,' he remarks, ' at 
 least very doubtful ; ' 2 and this he produces some statistics 
 to show. But, ' now the peace is concluded,' ' it is hoped 
 that, upon mature consideration, both kingdoms will think 
 it their mutual interest to meet upon more friendly terms.' 3 
 He quite accepts what Child says ' in his excellent" Discourse " 
 on the Balance of Trade,' both about the difficulty of using 
 custom-house statistics and the ' usefulness ' of the ' notion ' 
 of the balance, if only all the circumstances are adequately 
 known. 4 And when he comes, thirteen or fourteen years later, 
 to write his ' Eeports,' that is the line he takes. He proves 
 to his own satisfaction, first, that the figures of ' the Old 
 Scheme ' of 1674, and still more those of Fortrey, were grossly 
 exaggerated ; and, secondly, that, ' whatever overbalance 
 France in particular might have upon us, ... it is evident 
 beyond all dispute that England was every year a gainer in 
 its universal trade.' 5 He ends with the conclusion that, ' if 
 both kingdoms can agree upon just and equal duties to be 
 laid on their respective commodities, a free trade with France 
 can never be dangerous to England.' 6 
 
 1 Palgrave's Dictionary, s. Davenant. 2 Works, ii. 97. 
 
 3 Ibid. ii. 98. 4 Ibid. ii. 96. * Ibid. v. 363. 
 
 6 Ibid. v. 385. And yet, like Child, Davenant can, upon occasion, 
 argue the disadvantageousness of trade with a particular country on the 
 narrowest ' balance ' considerations ; e.g. ' The Norway and the Baltic 
 trades have always drained us of money,' ibid. i. 397.
 
 TORY FREE TRADE 303 
 
 Enough has been said to indicate the natural connection 
 during the whole period, 1673 to 1713, between the advocacy 
 of a ' free trade ' policy and the Tory party. In the course 
 of the exposition something has perhaps been done to show 
 the substantial similarity of ideas in all the Tory writers, . 
 and to render it probable that not one of them really saw his ; 
 way to a ' refutation ' of the fundamental idea of the general 
 balance. This it was left for another Tory, a good deal 
 later, to produce, viz. David Hume ; and it is interesting to 
 observe that his theoretic refutation of the balance doctrine 
 was not suggested by any of his Tory predecessors, but by| 
 the ' quantity theory ' of the Whig Locke. 
 
 The history of economic literature in England in the 
 period 1713 to 1776 has yet to be written ; but it is perhaps 
 even now possible to say of Adam Smith that his significance 
 lies not only in the completeness with which he carried a free- 
 trade theory into all the details of a practical policy, but also 
 in the fact that he did more than any other writer to bring 
 over the free-trade policy from the Tory to the Whig camp. 
 And yet, even after the ' Wealth of Nations ' had appeared, 
 the transition was slow in being effected ; l and when in 1786 
 the Tory Pitt finally secured, and the Whigs Fox, Burke, and 
 Sheridan in vain opposed, a commercial treaty with France, 
 they were on both sides true to the old traditions of their 
 parties. They were but advocating policies which had been 
 adopted more than a century before, at the time of the 
 Prohibition of 1678. 
 
 1 As Burton justly says of this period (Life of Hume, i. 356) : ' These 
 innovating doctrines . . . were more in favour with the Tories than'with 
 the Whigs. Indeed, Archdeacon Tucker, one of the boldest speculators 
 on the economy of trade, was in State politics one of the most uncom- 
 promising Tories of his age.' The remark of Fox is well known : ' Your 
 Adam Smiths are nothing.' The main explanation of the subsequent 
 change in the party programmes is, of course, to be found in the fact that 
 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the commercial classes which 
 supported the Whig party believed their interest to lie in restriction, and 
 in the nineteenth century in freedom, while a change in the opposite 
 direction took place in the desires of the landed classes which supported 
 the Tory party.
 
 304 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 GOUENAY l 
 
 M. SCHELLE'S ' Life of Gournay ' is a little disappointing. 
 From the author of the biography of Du Pont de Nemours 
 and the restorer of the text of Turgot great things were ex- 
 pected. And, indeed, in the 252 exceedingly small pages 
 that are here given to Gournay himself there is a certain 
 amount of new material for which we must be grateful. 
 There seems to be little of Gournay's own writing now in 
 existence, and few fresh particulars to be gleaned about his 
 life ; but what could be got together M. Schelle has now 
 set before us, including a number of important letters and a 
 memoire addressed to the municipal authorities of Lyons con- 
 cerning the corporations des gens de metier. Let us add that 
 we are now enabled for the first time to realise the nature of 
 Gournay's official activity as one of the intendants du com- 
 merce. These are not inconsiderable contributions to the 
 history of economics. What we have to regret is that M. 
 Schelle has not made a better use of his own material. He 
 moves throughout in the uncritical atmosphere of Parisian 
 economic orthodoxy ; Gournay is with him ' un des fondateurs 
 de I'economie politique ; ' and, though in one or two places 
 he suggests a doubt, the general conclusion of his book is a 
 mere repetition of the traditional view of Gournay due to 
 the statements of Turgot and Du Pont. M. Schelle knows 
 of the existence of Professor Oncken's pamphlet on ' The 
 Maxim : Laissez faire et laissez passer," since he refers to it ; 
 but he cannot have studied it carefully. It is difficult to under- 
 stand how any one who had once read Professor Oncken's 
 
 1 [Vincent de Gournay, by G. Schelle. Paris, 1897. Reviewed in 
 the Political Science Quarterly, 1898, xiii. 342.]
 
 GOUENAY 305 
 
 characterisation of Gournay as 'a liberal Mercantilist,' 
 could have been guilty of repeating the wearisome old 
 commonplaces about Mercantilism and Political Economy 
 which make up so much of this volume. 
 
 One or two examples of M. Schelle's method will be 
 sufficient. Gournay, as is well known, was the author of a 
 translation of Child's ' Discourse of Trade ' and of the 
 ' Treatise on Usury ' by Culpepper, which Child reprinted. 
 Child's chief practical object was to bring about by legisla- 
 tion a reduction of the rate of interest. Gournay did not 
 indicate by a single word his dissent from Child's belief that 
 this was possible ; in his preface he even remarked that 
 England had made several attempts to reduce the rate of 
 interest, ' following the principles of this author,' and had 
 succeeded. The presumption, of course, is that Gournay 
 agreed with Child ; and this is strengthened by the circum- 
 stance that even Quesnay was in favour of the intervention 
 of the public authority to reduce the rate of interest. 1 But 
 M. Schelle cannot sacrifice Gournay's orthodoxy so easily. 
 And so, to show that ' il avait sur la question de la liberty 
 du commerce de 1' argent une opinion entierement conformed 
 a ses vues g6n6rales sur 1'incapacite 1 de 1'intervention de 
 1'Etat dans les questions commerciales," 2 he prints what ? 
 A letter to the French ambassador at Eome, suggesting the 
 possibility that the canonist prohibition of usury (i.e. of any 
 demand for payment for the use of money) might be relaxed ! 
 This ' prouve que son auteur, loin de songer a faire inter- 
 venir 1'autorite 1 dans le commerce de 1'argent, voulait au 
 contraire 1'affranchir de toute entrave.' 3 If M. Schelle looks 
 for that kind of consistency in any of the pre-Physiocratic 
 economists of France, he cannot have pushed his studies 
 very far. 
 
 Take another example of M. Schelle's argumentation. 
 He tells us honestly enough : 
 
 Dans les Merits de Gournay, nous n'avons trouv^ pourtant aucune 
 indication au sujet de la liberte" du commerce exte*rieur. On pour- 
 
 1 P. 223' 2 P. 180. " P. 184.
 
 306 ECONOMIC OPINION 
 
 rait rneme infe*rer de quelques passages de ces ecrits que 1'intendant 
 n'avait pas su se debarrasser completement du systems mercantile, 
 et qu'il n'etait pas oppose" & ce que la metropole se re"servat le 
 commerce de ses colonies. 
 
 Very well ; then why not ' infer ' it ? Apparently only to 
 save Gournay's reputation for consistency, M. Schelle thus 
 continues : 
 
 Mais ces le*geres contradictions pen/vent avoir e"chappe a sa 
 plume ou avoir e*te motivees par des considerations du moment. 
 En re'alite' on n'apergoit pas le motif pour lequel celui qui de- 
 mandait [freedom in various other directions] aurait voulu restreindre 
 1' application des verites qu'il soutenait. 1 
 
 Turgot once remarked to Du Pont that ' everybody likes to 
 be himself, even if he is wrong.' And really, on behalf of 
 Gournay, we must remonstrate that, if there is reason to 
 believe he did not hold the doctrine that the foreign trade of 
 a country should be entirely free, he must not have it 
 ascribed to him just because M. Schelle cannot otherwise 
 quite understand his position. 
 
 But, then, Gournay had ' a system.' True, Malesherbes 
 did not think so, and declared that the intendant did nothing 
 but demand the application of ideas that were already 
 commonly accepted in general conversation. This, says 
 M. Schelle, was an illusion : the philosophic Turgot has 
 1 &loquemment montr& I'encJiainement.' 2 Unfortunately, the 
 dloge attributed to Turgot also assigns to Gournay such ripe 
 physiocratic ideas as the impdt unique, which there is not a 
 tittle of other evidence to suggest he accepted. Professor 
 Oncken has already called our attention to the fact that the 
 complete iloge, did not appear till 1808 ; and M. Schelle's 
 own discoveries as to Du Pont's editorial methods might 
 suggest some further reasons for hesitation before accepting 
 the eloge as evidence of Gournay's opinions. 
 
 But the point need not be laboured. Indispensable as 
 the book will be to the student of the economic movements 
 of the eighteenth century, it is a saddening example of the 
 
 1 P. 221. 2 P. 198,
 
 GOUENAY 307 
 
 limitations of view and the unscholarly, even when indus- 
 trious, performance of what may be called the Guillaumin 
 circle. In France, says M. Chailley-Bert, in the introduction 
 to the ' Nouveau Dictionnaire,' political economy (i.e. the 
 political economy of the Dictionary) has exposed its adepts 
 ' a 1'impuissance et presque au ridicule.' Books like these 
 go far to explain the fact. And it is the greater pity, since 
 the best hope for the future of the Parisian economists lies 
 in the direction of historical study.
 
 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA 
 
 1660-1760 
 
 THE COMMEECIAL LEGISLATION OF 
 
 ENGLAND AND THE AMEKICAN 
 
 COLONIES, 1660-1760 
 
 WITH the impressive rhetoric of which he was a master, 
 Adam Smith, in the very year of the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence, thus passed judgment upon the system of control 
 which for more than a century England had exercised over 
 the economic activity of her colonies : 
 
 To prohibit a great people from making all that they can of every 
 part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and their 
 industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to them- 
 selves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind. 
 
 Some such opinion has probably been expressed or im- 
 plied by nearly every writer on the subject from that time 
 to this. A period in which, to begin with, the old colonial 
 system was apparently discredited by its failure, and in 
 which, soon afterwards, all the dominant forces in political 
 society began to tend towards emancipation, towards libera- 
 tion from restraint, was not an age in which Adam Smith's 
 
 1 [A lecture before the University of Oxford, February 4, 1899 ; 
 printed in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1899.]
 
 310 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 summary appeal to ' the most sacred rights of mankind ' 
 was likely to be seriously called in question : nor shall I 
 seek to controvert it to-day. But, starting from such a pre- 
 conception, it has seemed to many a natural inference 
 though, as we shall see, Adam Smith took care not to draw 
 it that so seemingly manifest an iniquity must have been 
 actually hurtful to those who were subjected to it ; that 
 what was mistaken in principle must have been mischievous 
 in operation. We cannot be surprised that the first genera- 
 tion of American historians should think so ; writing, as 
 they did, before the passions provoked by the great struggle 
 had had time to subside. Thus Bancroft did not hesitate 
 to pronounce ' the effects of this system ' ' baleful ; ' and he 
 proceeded to justify this statement by an argument which was 
 designed to show that it robbed the colonists in two ways : 
 it compelled them to pay more than their ' fair value ' for 
 the commodities they imported, and to accept less than their 
 'fair value' for the commodities they sold. But a like 
 opinion is not confined to American historians : it has come 
 to be very generally accepted by English writers ; and upon 
 its side it has the authority of the most painstaking and 
 the most widely read of the historians of the eighteenth 
 century the judicious Mr. Lecky himself. In two well- 
 known passages in his second and fourth volumes, Mr. Lecky 
 leaves no doubt as to his conviction. Though ' the country ' 
 i.e. the American colonies 'was,' he says, 'growing 
 rapidly richer,' yet 'its progress was seriously retarded,' 
 and ' many of its natural capacities were paralysed by law.' 
 ' It is,' he elsewhere remarks, ' undoubtedly true that the 
 commercial policy of England had established a real oppo- 
 sition of interest between the mother country and her 
 colonies.' If so, it would have demanded an unwholesome 
 degree of patience for the Americans to have submitted with 
 cheerfulness. Commerce must, in the words of Bancroft, 
 have been ' converted into a source of rankling hostility : ' 
 in the more subdued language of Mr. Lecky, 'political 
 alienation ' could not have failed to be ' the inevitable 
 consequence.' Mr. Lecky's philosophy of the American
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 311 
 
 Eevolution is, therefore, this though the passage is almost 
 too familiar for quotation : 
 
 If the policy which was the proximate cause of the American 
 Revolution was chiefly due to the king and to the landed gentry, the 
 ultimate cause may be mainly traced to the great influence which the 
 commercial classes possessed hi British legislation. The expulsion 
 of the French from Canada made it possible for the Americans to 
 dispense with English protection. The commercial restrictions alone 
 made it their interest to do so. 
 
 I propose to set forth what seem to me adequate reasons 
 for believing that this view of the case is altogether mis- 
 taken ; that, whatever may have been the objects it had in 
 view and these objects, I shall not attempt to deny, were 
 largely selfish the policy of England was not, as a matter 
 of fact, economically disadvantageous ; that, on the contrary, 
 it was beneficial to the American colonies. Adam Smith's 
 principle of natural rights I shall leave untouched. I shall 
 not even criticise the short and easy syllogism which in- 
 volves the colonial policy in the same condemnation with 
 mercantilism. Yet I cannot but anticipate that a more 
 accurate knowledge of the facts of the case may put us into 
 a better position to deal fairly even with these ultimate 
 questions of political principle and economic theory. 
 
 The laws of England, affecting the trade and industry 
 of the American colonies, fall, with one notable exception 
 to be dealt with by-and-by, into three groups ; and it is 
 essential to bear in mind the differences between them. 
 There were, in the first place, the Navigation Laws proper ; 
 in the second place, what we may conveniently christen the 
 Enumeration Laws ; and lastly, and, as we shall see, of far 
 less significance, the Laws concerning Manufacture. We 
 will look at them in this order. 
 
 I. The Act of 1660 directed, as we all know, primarily 
 against the Dutch, who seemed likely to monopolise the 
 carrying trade of the world enacted that no commodities 
 should be imported into or exported from any British 
 plantation in Asia, Africa, or America, except in British
 
 312 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 ships. 1 'British' I use for the sake of brevity. The 
 phraseology of the Act was more cumbrous : it was, ' Ships 
 which truly . . . belong only to the people of England or 
 Ireland, Dominion of Wales or town of Berwicke upon 
 Tweede,' or ' are of the built of, and belonging to any 
 of the said . . . Plantations or Territories . . . and whereof 
 the Master and three fourths of the Mariners at least are 
 English.' Students of the history of the period need hardly 
 be told, though the earlier American historians and some 
 English historians have occasionally forgotten, that the word 
 ' English ' included all subjects of the English crown, and 
 therefore the colonists. If there were any doubt, it would 
 be removed by an early Act of Charles II. 2 It would be 
 correct, then, to say that by this Act a monopoly of the 
 ' English ' colonial trade was given to ' English ' ships ; but, 
 to avoid ambiguity, it may be well to keep ' English ' for the 
 island and ' British ' for the empire. 
 
 That this restriction was felt as a grievance at first by 
 the Virginians, who had, for some years past, put large 
 quantities of their tobacco on board Dutch ships, and that 
 it created some annoyance here and there in other colonies, 
 
 1 [In order to simplify the subject I did not go back to the Ordinance 
 of 1651, passed by the Long Parliament under the leadership of Sir 
 Harry Vane, himself at one time governor of Massachusetts Bay. The 
 Act of 1660 did but carry a little further the policy of the Ordinance. 
 The details of the legislation may be conveniently studied in American 
 History Leaflets, No. 19, ed. Channing.] 
 
 2 1662. 14 Car. II. c. 11, 5 (Statutes of tJie Realm, v. 395). 
 ' Whereas it is required by the said Act ' the Navigation Act of 1660 
 ' that in sundry cases the Master and three fourths of the Mariners are 
 to be English, it is to be understood that any of His Majesty's Subjects of 
 England, Ireland and His Plantations are to be accounted English and 
 no others.' The same clause also enacted that ' no Forreign built ship 
 (that is to say) not built in any of His Majesty's Dominions of Asia, 
 Africa or America or other than such as shall be bought before Oct. 1, 
 1662, shall enjoy the privilege of a ship belonging to England or Ireland, 
 although owned and manned by English.' Professor Channing was, 
 I believe, the first among recent writers to call attention to the clear 
 meaning of this Act ; in his paper on the ' Navigation Laws,' in Proceed- 
 ings Am. Antiquarian Soc., 1889.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 3& 
 
 cannot be doubted ; just as the other clause of the Act 
 which prevented the importation of any commodities into 
 England from other European countries, except in British 
 ships or in ships of the producing country, sent up the cost 
 of freight and caused some temporary irritation among 
 English traders. Adam Smith justly observes that these 
 clauses ' were not favourable to foreign commerce, or to the 
 growth of that opulence which can arise from it : ' he omitted 
 to explain that this need only be true for a comparatively 
 short period after the passage of the Act. We might be 
 content to share his position that, even if the law were 
 economically disadvantageous both to England and the 
 colonies, it was nevertheless wise, on the ground that ' de- 
 fence is of much more importance than opulence.' But, for 
 the colonies at any rate, we are not shut up to this non- 
 economic consideration. It is certain that, under the opera- 
 tion of the Act, shipbuilding soon became the chief industry 
 of New England. In less than twenty years New England 
 ships began to be sold in Old England. During the next 
 few decades the business sprang up in every town along the 
 New England coast and in many a riverside village for miles 
 inland. About 1720 Massachusetts alone launched 150 ships 
 a year ; and in 1724 the master-builders of the Thames com- 
 plained to Parliament that they were seriously injured by 
 colonial competition, and prayed for protection. In view of 
 the language which Franklin got into the habit of using in 
 his later years about ' the interest of all America ' being 
 ' lightly estimated ' in England ' when the interests of a few 
 of the inhabitants of Great Britain happened to have the 
 smallest competition with it,' it may be worth noticing that 
 the request of the Thames shipbuilders was not granted. 
 In New England timber was cheap and easily accessible ; and 
 it may be plausibly conjectured that, even without any such 
 protection for colonial-built shipping as the Act afforded, 
 these advantages would have enabled the colonists after a 
 time to compete with the Dutch, who had to fetch their ship 
 timber from the Baltic. But when we recall Child's lamen- 
 tations over the inferiority of English ships in point of
 
 314 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 construction and ease of navigation, and the much lower 
 freight rates which the Dutch were able to offer for this and 
 other reasons, it certainly seems very probable that, but for 
 some such forcible exclusion of foreign ships, the develop- 
 ment of New England shipbuilding would have been re- 
 tarded by half a century or more. Accordingly, the younger 
 generation of American historians are beginning to point out 
 that a much larger place must be assigned to this industry 
 in the economic history of the American people than has 
 hitherto been customary; and, further, to assert, in the 
 words of a Harvard colleague of mine, that ' the restriction 
 of trade to English and colonial vessels ' actually ' stimu- 
 lated shipbuilding and the shipping interest in the colo- 
 nies.' l The complaints of the Virginian planters soon died 
 away. English-built and colonial-built shipping competed 
 for the privilege of carrying their tobacco, and they were 
 too obviously prosperous to be effective grumblers. 
 
 To this immediately economic consideration we may add 
 two others of a mixed political and economic character. 
 The one is that the rapid expansion of American commerce, 
 carried on, as we have seen, largely in American-built ships, 
 took place and under the circumstances of the time could 
 only take place beneath the protection of the English naval 
 power. To the direct support of this power the colonies 
 contributed only to an inappreciable extent, by grudgingly 
 furnishing a few masts for the navy. 2 This fact can be dis- 
 regarded only by one who supposes that the colonies could 
 have stood alone, and does not remember that colonial hopes 
 and fears contributed in no small degree to involve England 
 in each of the great wars of the period. 
 
 The other consideration is that colonial enterprise largely 
 benefited by the opportunities opened to it by the naval 
 
 1 A. B. Hart. Formation of the Union, p. 46. 
 
 2 E. L. Lord, Industrial Experiments in the British Colonies of 
 North America, pp. 105-123. It should be added that sailors in America 
 were expressly exempted in 1707 from impressment for the royal navy by 
 6 Anne, c. 64, 9 (Statutes of the Realm, viii. 806). This noteworthy 
 privilege was not withdrawn till 15 George III.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 315 
 
 successes of the mother country. A recent American 
 historian, unsympathetic towards the colonial system, but 
 acquainted with the details of American business, observes, 
 in passing, that, ' whenever a political change in the foreign 
 relations of England opened a port, or admitted commerce 
 with any country, it quickened the commercial movement 
 along the whole New England line.' l 
 
 II. Now we pass to the enumerating enactments. The 
 statute of 1660 forbade the exportation from the colonies 
 to any country save England and the other plantations of 
 certain enumerated articles whence the term ; namely, 
 ginger, sugar, tobacco, cotton wool, indigo, fustic, and other 
 dyeing woods. The list sounds a formidable one ; but the 
 only commodity among them put upon the market by 
 the American continental colonies was tobacco, the staple 
 product of Virginia, and later of Maryland also. Eice, 
 which began to be raised in the Carolinas towards the end 
 of the century, was added to the list in 1706, together with 
 the group of articles known as ' naval stores ; ' and copper 
 and beaver skins were inserted in 1722. 
 
 None of the staple articles of the trade of New England 
 were ever enumerated during the century 1660 to 1760 
 neither fish, nor vessels, nor timber, 2 nor rum ; and during 
 the whole of the period before us they could be carried 
 wherever a market might be found. 
 
 The historical order of enumeration is also the order of 
 importance ; but it will be convenient to take it backwards, 
 and so get the insignificant articles out of our way. By 
 1722 the fur trade of the English colonies, which had for 
 some time been practically confined to the province of New 
 York, had almost come to an end. For quite sufficient 
 geographical reasons, it had passed into the hands of the 
 French of Canada. The ' Enumeration ' was grumbled at, 
 of course ; but it was accompanied by a reduction to one- 
 
 1 W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 
 ii. 643 ; referring more particularly to the second quarter of the eight- 
 eenth century. 
 
 2 Except masts and bowsprits after 1706.
 
 316 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 third of the duties levied on importation into England : and 
 neither restriction nor favour had any substantial effect on a 
 branch of trade bound speedily to disappear. The enumera- 
 tion of copper was intended for the benefit of the navy. It 
 was suggested by certain wildly exaggerated reports of 
 mineral discoveries ; but hardly any copper was mined in 
 America until the present century. 
 
 The case of rice calls for more notice. In consequence 
 of its enumeration in 1706, Carolina lost for a time a great 
 part of the Portuguese market, which had been recently 
 carrying off one-fifth of the total output. In 1730, however, 
 the English Parliament so far relaxed the restriction as to 
 allow of rice being shipped directly to any country south of 
 Cape Finisterre. Henceforth, in an average year, Carolina 
 exported some 50,000 barrels. Of these 10,000 went direct 
 to Portugal. Spain and the other Mediterranean countries 
 seem to have been supplied by an inferior Turkish article ; 
 while France excluded British rice altogether except on rare 
 occasions. The other 40,000 barrels were taken to England, 
 but only some 3,000 of them were there consumed. The rest 
 were re-exported, with a drawback of the duty paid, to 
 Holland and North Germany. The questions raised by this 
 transhipment will be considered in dealing with tobacco. 
 It is evident that during the years 1706 to 1730 the demand 
 for rice was somewhat interfered with; but we may so 
 far anticipate our subsequent argument as to venture the 
 assertion that after that date even complete freedom could 
 hardly have secured a larger European demand than was 
 actually enjoyed. 
 
 Naval stores we will postpone till we come to the matter 
 of bounties ; and so now we reach tobacco, which was the 
 foundation of the social system of the southern provinces, 
 and formed one-half of all the colonial exports. From 1660 
 onwards, all the tobacco of Virginia and Maryland sent to 
 Europe had first to be carried to England. But this did not 
 mean that it stayed there. On re-exportation, sometimes the 
 whole, sometimes very nearly the whole, of the import duty 
 was repaid as a ' drawback ; ' and the proportion of the
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 317 
 
 crop re-exported to other European countries was between 
 two-thirds and four-fifths. Thus the enactment, though 
 obviously designed to put profit into the hands of English 
 merchants acting as middlemen, did not by any means shut 
 the American planter out of the European market ; at most, 
 it involved some additional freight charges. Even if so 
 though the incidence of freight is as tangled a subject as the 
 incidence of taxation I imagine the burden would have 
 been borne to some extent by the continental consumer. 
 But, when we see where the foreign market was to be found, 
 we may well doubt whether any cheaper method of doing 
 business with the European continent would have been 
 likely to grow up, even under conditions of absolute liberty. 
 The Mediterranean was supplied with Turkish tobacco ; 
 Spain and Portugal only admitted the tobaccos of their own 
 colonies ; and accordingly American tobacco could expect to 
 find a market only in northern and central Europe. But, 
 as is remarked in an almost forgotten early work of Lord 
 Brougham, the mother country was constituted by her very 
 situation the natural entrepot between America and the whole 
 of this area. Brougham's ' Inquiry into the Colonial Policy 
 of the European Powers ' appeared in 1803 ; too early for 
 its criticisms of Adam Smith to secure the attention they 
 deserved. Do not forget that even if American ships could 
 have gone direct to Hamburg, and had been permitted to 
 ship German commodities which they were not they 
 would have found it hard to secure a return cargo. Woollen 
 cloth, the chief article imported from Europe, they could not 
 have got more cheaply than in England ; for English cloth 
 was at this very time flooding the German market just 
 because it was cheaper. From the French ports, it is true, 
 they might have obtained cheaper silks. But, on the whole, 
 we can have little doubt that the differentiation of employ- 
 ments, by which the planters in Virginia, Maryland, and the 
 Carolinas undertook the production of tobacco and rice, and 
 English merchants found a market for them at home and 
 abroad, was advantageous to both parties. The Enumera- 
 tion probably only hastened the introduction, and somewhat
 
 318 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 stiffened the outlines, of a method of doing business which 
 would have grown up in any case. As Brougham says, 
 ' The restrictive policy . . . only secured, by a superfluous 
 and harmless anxiety, that arrangement which would of 
 itself have taken place, if things had been left to their 
 natural course.' 
 
 Grant, however, the bare possibility that the interests of 
 the tobacco colonies may have been injured to some trifling 
 extent by the Enumeration, we have now to set against it 
 two weighty considerations : first, that from the year 1660 
 onwards the growth of tobacco in England was absolutely 
 prohibited. The main motive of this measure was probably 
 fiscal : a duty at the ports was easier to collect than an 
 excise. But the Act also put forward as a reason the 
 desirability of leaving the business to the colonies. That 
 this was a secondary motive is no reason for doubting that it 
 was a genuine contributory motive. Writers like Bancroft 
 used to ridicule the notion that the suppression of tobacco- 
 raising in England could be regarded as in any degree an 
 offset to the Enumeration. But, had they lived to know of 
 the modern German crop of tobacco, or had they been 
 acquainted with what was actually going on in the seven- 
 teenth century in England, they would hardly have spoken so 
 contemptuously. In fact, the cultivation of tobacco was 
 spreading very rapidly during the Protectorate, especially in 
 the west-midland counties ; and it was put a stop to only by 
 vigorous measures on the part of the executive. And, more- 
 over, as if it were not enough that the Englishman should 
 be prevented from smoking home-grown tobacco, grave 
 obstacles were put in the way of his smoking Spanish 
 tobacco. Duties were levied upon it three times as high as 
 upon American ; so that the latter almost monopolised the 
 English market. The conclusion is not susceptible of exact 
 proof ; but surely there is a high degree of probability in the 
 assertion that a proposal to establish freedom all round 
 would not have been welcome to the Virginian planter. 
 
 The vitality of an historical grievance when once it is 
 sent forth into the world is illustrated by the circumstance
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 319 
 
 that even the careful investigator from whom I have drawn 
 many of the foregoing facts is still inclined to think that 
 Enumeration contributed, though ' but slightly,' to the sharp 
 fall in the price of tobacco during the first half of the period 
 before us ; * the main cause being, evidently, as he points 
 out, over-production. With this let us compare the diame- 
 trically opposite opinion expressed in the 'Wealth of 
 Nations.' 
 
 Had France and all other European countries been at all times 
 allowed a free trade to Maryland and Virginia, the tobacco of those 
 colonies might by this time have come cheaper than it actually does, 
 not only to all those other countries, but likewise to England. The 
 produce of tobacco, in consequence of a market so much more exten- 
 sive than it has hitherto enjoyed [we have seen that this is exceed- 
 ingly dubious,] might, and probably would by this time, have been 
 so much increased as to reduce the profits of a tobacco plantation to 
 their natural level with those of a corn plantation, which it is sup- 
 posed they are still somewhat above. The price of tobacco might, 
 and probably would by this time, have fallen somewhat lower than 
 it is at present. 
 
 The planters had the sense soon to leave off grumbling at 
 the Enumeration. If they had continued to be dissatisfied, 
 it would have been but cold comfort they would have got 
 from Adam Smith. 
 
 With the Enumeration of certain exported commodities, 
 we may conveniently consider the limitation put upon the 
 business of importation into the colonies by a statute of 1663, 
 which enacted that all commodities of the growth or 
 manufacture of Europe should be shipped in England and 
 in British bottoms. The avowed intention was to make 
 England the ' staple ' for the plantations, and so to secure to 
 English merchants the profits of intermediaries. But, if the 
 preceding argument is sound as to England's position as 
 entrep6t for colonial products, it is equally sound with regard 
 to the supply of European wares. Ships unloading in 
 
 1 G. L. Beer, The Commercial Policy of England towards the 
 American Colonies, p. 51.
 
 320 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 England and getting a return cargo mainly of English 
 commodities would, economically enough, fill up what space 
 remained in their holds with such European commodities as 
 were in demand. Wellnigh the whole of the English import 
 duty on these commodities was usually returned as a draw- 
 back ; and, as the duties imposed by the colonial governments 
 themselves were mostly light, 1 ' many different sorts of 
 foreign goods ' it is Adam Smith who assures us ' might 
 have been bought cheaper in the plantations than in the 
 mother country.' So far was the English Government from 
 pursuing, in this matter, either its fiscal interest or the imme- 
 diate advantage of Englishmen, that the same great writer 
 actually criticises its policy on the ground that it was likely to 
 be injurious to both. Thus he remarks : 
 
 The mother country might frequently suffer, both in her revenue, 
 by giving back a great part of the duties which had been paid upon 
 the importation of such goods, and hi her manufactures, by being 
 undersold in the colony market in consequence of the easy terms 
 upon which foreign manufactures could be carried thither by means 
 of these drawbacks. 
 
 And he gives a specific example : 
 
 The progress of the linen manufacture of Great Britain, it is 
 commonly said, has been a good deal retarded by the drawbacks 
 upon the re-exportation of German linen to the American colonies. 
 
 III. The third class of restrictions, those upon manu- 
 factures, have lent themselves even more easily to rhetorical 
 denunciation, though their effect, I believe, was altogether 
 insignificant. Let us see, first, exactly what they were, and 
 notice the dates in each instance. There were just three 
 cases. In 1699 it was enacted that no wool, yarn, or woollen 
 cloth produced in the English plantations should be ' loaded 
 or laid on board in any ship or vessel ; or loaden upon any 
 horse, cart, or other carriage, to the intent and purpose to be 
 exported, transported, carried, or conveyed out of the said 
 English plantations to any other of the said plantations, or to 
 
 1 The subject of Colonial Tariffs is worked out by W. Hill in the 
 Quarterly Journal of Economics, vii. 78 seq.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 321 
 
 any other place whatsoever.' l The object was to prevent all 
 manufacture for a distant market, while not interfering with 
 manufacture within the family, or for purely local needs. In 
 1732 it was enacted that no hats should be exported to England, 
 Europe, or other colonies ; manufacture for sale within each 
 particular colony was again left free, except that it was now 
 placed under the same rules of apprenticeship as English 
 hatters were subject to under the statute of Elizabeth. 
 Finally, in 1750 almost at the end of the period it was 
 enacted that no steel furnaces or slit mills should be erected in 
 the colony, the country forges which made bolts and nails 
 and common farm implements remaining untouched. 
 
 We are not now engaged, I would remind you, in passing 
 judgment on the motives of the framers of these Acts, or of 
 the English manufacturers who petitioned for them. Our 
 sole task is to determine what significance, if any, they 
 possess in the economic development of America. Two 
 questions at once occur : to what extent had the industries 
 in question been actually set on foot before the Acts ? and 
 how far were the Acts obeyed ? Unfortunately, our evidence 
 is conflicting. The great woollen interest of Englandi 
 which supplied more than half the exports to the colonies, 
 was easily alarmed. The idea soon gained currency that 
 the way to prevent the colonists from interfering with the 
 vent of English cloth was to turn their attention towards 
 the production of naval stores. Thereupon, all those persons 
 in England and America who anticipated some advantage to 
 themselves if the government would only subsidise the pro- 
 duction of naval stores, were tempted to join in the cry of 
 danger. Governors' reports are hardly more trustworthy : 
 they often know but little of their provinces outside the chief 
 towns ; and either they wanted to insure the vote of their 
 salaries by keeping on good terms with their assemblies, and 
 
 1 10 & 11 Wm. III. c. 10, xix. Mr. Weeden in two places (op. cit. 
 pp. 388, 722), not observing that ' to any other place ' is conditioned by 
 ' out of the plantations,' gives a misleading impression of the purpose of 
 the Act. He was probably misled by the loosely worded account of the 
 Act in Adam Smith, Bk. IV. ch. vii. 
 
 Y
 
 322 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 were therefore inclined to pooh-pooh English alarms, or 
 they were at feud with their assemblies and saw everything 
 colonial through clouded spectacles. So, as ' the historical 
 method ' is risky here by itself, let us have recourse to a 
 little ' deduction ' from the principle of self-interest. There 
 is a celebrated pamphlet, known as ' The Canada Pamphlet,' 
 which Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1760, when he wanted to 
 persuade the English public that it would be better to retain 
 Canada than Guadeloupe among the spoils of war. In this 
 he roundly asserted that hitherto the English manufac- 
 turers' monopoly of the colonial market had not been 
 seriously threatened, since 
 
 No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by 
 his labour to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a 
 manufacturer and work for a master. Hence, while there is land 
 enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures 
 to any amount or value. 
 
 And again : 
 
 Pennsylvania is the colony the most suspected of carrying on 
 manufactures, on account of the number of German artisans who 
 are known to have transplanted themselves into that country, though 
 even these, in truth, when they come there, generally apply them- 
 selves to agriculture as the surest support and most advantageous 
 employment. 
 
 And once more : 
 
 The colonies are so little suited for the establishing of manufac- 
 tures that they are continually losing the few branches they acciden- 
 tally gain. The working braziers, cutlers, and pewterers, as well 
 as hatters, who have happened to go over from tune to time and 
 settle in the colonies, gradually drop the working part of their busi- 
 ness, and import their respective goods from England, whence they 
 can have them cheaper and better than they can make them. They 
 continue their shops, indeed, in the same way of dealing ; but 
 become sellers of braziery, cutlery, pewter, hats, etc., brought from 
 England, instead of being makers of those goods. 
 
 It will have been noticed that Franklin, like other 
 economic writers, passes unconsciously to and fro between
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 323 
 
 deductive argument and historical statement. He not only 
 argues that the inhabitants of the colonies would follow 
 their self-interest, and therefore pursue agriculture rather 
 than manufactures : he asserts that as a matter of fact that 
 is what they did. As a man of the people and as Agent for 
 Pennsylvania, Franklin must have been acquainted with the 
 facts. A few years later, indeed, he was writing pamphlets 
 which gave at any rate a different impression ; but we can 
 hardly think so meanly of him as to suppose this argument 
 of 1760 an altogether baseless invention. 
 
 Adam Smith had probably read or heard about this 
 pamphlet. At any rate, it is exactly in the same strain that 
 he expresses himself. In one place he asserts that 
 
 In our North American colonies, where uncultivated land is still 
 to be had upon easy terms, no manufactures for distant sale have ever 
 yet been established in any of their towns. When an artificer has 
 acquired a little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own 
 business in supplying the neighbouring country, lie does not, in 
 North America, attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more 
 distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of 
 uncultivated land. From artificer he becomes planter ; and neither 
 the large wages nor the easy subsistence which that country affords 
 to artificers can bribe him rather to work for other people than for 
 himself. He feels that an artificer is the servant of his customers, 
 from whom he derives his subsistence ; but that a planter who 
 cultivates his own land and derives his necessary subsistence from 
 the labour of his own family is really a master, and independent of 
 all the world. 
 
 The other passage comes to the same conclusion for a 
 different reason. Immediately after the remarks about the 
 ' sacred rights of mankind ' already quoted, he continues 
 thus : ' Unjust, however, as such prohibitions may be, they 
 have not hitherto been very hurtful to the Colonies.' 
 Readers unacquainted with Adam Smith's modes of thought 
 may not suspect that ' not very hurtful ' is his Scotch 
 cautious way of saying ' not hurtful at all.' For he goes on : 
 
 Land is still so cheap, and, consequently, labour so dear among 
 them, that they can import from the mother country almost all the 
 
 T2
 
 324 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 more refined or more advanced manufactures cheaper than they 
 could make them for themselves. Though they had not, therefore, 
 been prohibited from establishing such manufactures, yet, in their 
 present state of improvement, a regard to their own interest would 
 probably have prevented them from doing so. ... Those prohibi- 
 tions, perhaps, without cramping their industry or restraining it from 
 any employment to which it would have gone of its own accord, 
 are only impertinent badges of slavery imposed upon them, without 
 any sufficient reason, by the groundless jealousy of the merchants 
 and manufacturers of the mother country. 
 
 This is a passage which heightens one's respect for 
 Adam Smith. He is so bent upon crying, ' Edward ! 
 chains and slavery ! ' And yet he has the scientific con- 
 science. 
 
 When now we come to look into the evidence concerning 
 the particular industries, it is found to harmonise pretty well 
 with the conclusions of Franklin and Smith. In the southern 
 colonies no manufactures were ever attempted, except the 
 production of pig iron : the commonest and cheapest articles 
 of daily use were all imported from the Old Country. It 
 was Pennsylvania, New York, and New England which 
 aroused the jealous fears of English merchants and artisans. 
 The climate of New England is not at all suitable for sheep- 
 breeding, and the transportation of wool from the middle 
 colonies was expensive. Nevertheless, both in New England 
 and in the middle colonies, some attempts were made here 
 and there by small capitalists to play the part of English 
 clothiers. This was in the closing years of the seventeenth 
 century and the opening years of the eighteenth^ They 
 soon abandoned the business ; not on account of the prohibi- 
 tion, but because the conditions became more favourable for 
 other investments. The colonies evidently had had some 
 difficulty at first in obtaining ' returns,' to use the language 
 of the period, for the goods they wished to import ; and for 
 a time they had, perhaps, to go rather short of the finer 
 fabrics. But in the years of peace which followed the great 
 settlement at Utrecht in 1715, what with the rapid growth 
 of the ship-building business and of the fisheries, the opening
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 325 
 
 up of a new trade with the West Indies, and the extension 
 of the two allied occupations of rum-distilling and slave- 
 trading, this difficulty quickly disappeared ; and the capi- 
 talists of the towns found remunerative opportunities for 
 investment. As to the country weaver, who might con- 
 ceivably have grown into something like the West of England 
 clothier, Adam Smith's remark that he would be far more 
 likely to put his savings into land is true enough, and very 
 pertinent. Accordingly, the state of affairs in the period 
 1715-60 was somewhat like this : the farmers' wives and 
 daughters themselves spun the wool which they got from 
 their own few sheep ; many farmhouses had their own 
 looms where, if the farmer or his servants were without the 
 necessary skill or time, an itinerant weaver worked up the 
 yarn into cloth ; and then the farmer put a bundle of this 
 cloth into his buggy and drove over to a neighbouring fulling 
 mill. If he did not happen to own a loom, he took his yarn to 
 a weaver's cottage in the next village. Meanwhile the 
 townspeople were all clad in English manufactures; the 
 merchants and professional men liked them better, and, as 
 all the towns were on the coast, the working classes got 
 English stuffs more cheaply than they could have bought 
 up-country woollens. Possibly some of Emerson's 'em- 
 battled farmers,' 
 
 Who fired the shot heard round the world, 
 
 were clad in American homespun ; but it is more certain 
 that Adams and Otis and Franklin wore English broad- 
 cloth. And so, ' in general, the Act of Parliament was well 
 obeyed, since it carried no hardship with it in the eighteenth 
 century.' l It is an American economic historian from whom 
 I quote. 
 
 The law of 1732 as to hats was the result of the alarm of 
 the London Company of Hatters, who saw in their mind's 
 eye thousands of American hats being shipped to England. 
 There is a paper drawn up by Franklin in London at the 
 end of 1767, in which he endeavours, as he puts it, to 
 
 1 Beer, op. cit. p. 81.
 
 326 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 1 palliate ' certain recent proceedings in Boston which, he 
 confesses, gave him ' great concern,' by a sympathetic 
 account of what he alleges to be the American frame of 
 mind. He represents the Americans as arguing that ' there 
 cannot be a stronger natural right than that of a man's 
 making the best profit he can of the natural produce of his 
 lands ; ' that ' beaver furs are the natural produce of that 
 country ; ' and ' yet the hatters of England have prevailed to 
 obtain an Act in their own favour, restraining the manu- 
 facture of hats in America.' This argument as to the natural 
 right of a people to work up their own produce has been 
 echoed by Bancroft and Mr. Lecky, and it is very telling ; 
 but they have taken Franklin too much au s&rieux. He was 
 careful, we may observe, not to commit himself. The argu- 
 ment is given in oblique oration ; and Franklin hedges at 
 the end by the ironical comment, ' These are the wild ravings 
 of the half-distracted Americans.' I gravely doubt whether, 
 as a matter of fact, the ' half-distracted ' Americans were 
 ' raving ' to this effect. The argument is quite inconsistent 
 with what we have already learnt as to the decay of the fur 
 trade in the English colonies. And the truer impression is 
 certainly that which Franklin himself gives in his pamphlet 
 of 1760, before cited, that the hat-making industry had been 
 brought to an end not by the pressure of law, but by 
 economic causes. 
 
 It is true [Franklin then said] there have been, ever since the 
 first settlement, a few hatters in New England, drawn thither 
 probably at first by the facility of getting beaver while the woods 
 were but little cleared and there was plenty of those animals. The 
 case is greatly altered now. The beaver skins are not now to be 
 had in New England, but from very remote places and at great 
 prices. The trade is accordingly declining there ; so that, far from 
 being able to make hats in any quantity for exportation, they cannot 
 supply their home demand; and it is well known that some 
 thousand dozens are sent thither yearly from London, Bristol, and 
 Liverpool, and sold cheaper than the inhabitants can make them. 
 
 Finally, we come to the iron industry. The statute of 
 1750 enacted that no mill or other engine for rolling or
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 327 
 
 slitting iron, no plating forge to work with a tilt hammer, 
 nor any furnace for making steel, should be erected in the 
 colonies. This, I confess at once, is the one weak point 
 in my argument. There were, perhaps, at this date, some 
 half-dozen slitting mills in New England, and possibly two 
 or three tilt hammers and two or three steel furnaces. 1 It 
 cannot be denied that they would probably have enjoyed a 
 certain moderate prosperity, and that they could readily get 
 all the iron they needed from the southern colonies. More- 
 over, the Act did cause them to be shut up. It can only be 
 pleaded that, after all, it was not a large matter ; and one 
 might perhaps make something out of the fact that the 
 owner of one of the largest of the slitting mills, so far from 
 never getting over his grudge, was conspicuous a few years 
 later as one of the leaders of the Loyalists. 2 Yet there is 
 another side to the account, which, if it does not balance it, 
 ought not to be quite forgotten. The same Act favoured 
 American bar iron and pig iron by removing the duties to 
 which they had hitherto been subject on importation to 
 England, while leaving intact those on Swedish and other 
 foreign iron. This was done for immediate political motives, 
 in the hope of rendering England independent of foreign 
 sources of supply ; and also for mercantilist motives, to 
 check the supposed drain of specie. But to the credit of the 
 government it may be remarked that the concession was 
 granted in the teeth of much opposition from English iron- 
 masters and owners of woodlands, and even from English 
 farmers. The consequence of the removal of the duties was 
 that in four years the quantity of colonial pig iron imported 
 into England increased by one-half ; and that it began, for 
 the first time, to be profitable to carry over bar iron. But, 
 unfortunately, while it was New England which chiefly 
 suffered from the new restriction, it was Virginia and Mary- 
 land which profited by the new favour. 
 
 With the exception still to be dealt with, we have now 
 1 Weeden, ii. 682. 2 Ibid. ii. 499.
 
 328 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 come to the end of all the possible grievances ; and we have 
 seen how slender are the grounds for supposing that the 
 measures in question did, to any notable extent, inflict real 
 injury on the American colonies. But, as we have already 
 seen in the case of iron, the action of the English govern- 
 ment was not always of a restrictive character : it sometimes 
 took the form of encouragement ; and these two elements in 
 English policy cannot be separated. Because it restricted, it 
 felt bound to encourage ; because it encouraged, it felt the 
 more justified in restricting. This is strikingly illustrated by 
 the efforts to promote the production of ' naval stores ' of 
 tar and pitch, of masts and hemp. These were enumerated 
 in 1706; and, if the restriction had stood by itself, the 
 colonies might conceivably, though this is very doubtful, have 
 lost some small foreign sale for their masts. The other 
 enumerated stores were not produced at that time in America 
 of sufficiently good quality to attract a foreign demand. But 
 in 1705 the English government definitely adopted the policy 
 of offering a considerable bounty on the importation into 
 England of all these stores from the colonies ; and, with but 
 slight interruption, this policy was followed down to the end 
 of the colonial period. One estimate makes the amount 
 thus paid more than a million and a half pounds. Of course, 
 the purpose of the government was not primarily the welfare 
 of the colonies. It desired : (1) to make the British empire 
 independent of foreign sources of supply for what were 
 really munitions of war ; (2) to circumvent the Stockholm 
 Tar Company, which had obtained a monopoly of Baltic 
 pitch and tar, had put up prices, and had excluded English 
 ships from the trade ; (3) to prevent a supposed drain of 
 specie from England ; and (4) to enable the colonies to 
 provide themselves with ' returns,' so that they should not be 
 tempted to manufacture for themselves. But, after all, it did 
 honestly and with reason believe that the industries in 
 question were suited to America. It did take a world of 
 trouble about investigating the whole subject, and about 
 teaching the colonials better methods of preparing their tar 
 how much trouble the recent monograph of Miss Lord of
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 329 
 
 Bryn Mawr College, based upon imprinted English state 
 papers, 1 has made sufficiently clear to us and, finally, it did 
 meet with a fair measure of success. The bounties on hemp 
 and on masts had little effect, but the production of pitch and 
 tar throve exceedingly. In 1704 nearly 43,000 barrels of 
 pitch and tar were imported into England from Sweden, 
 something like 18,000 from the rest of Europe, and only 872 
 from the plantations. In 1718 the Swedish product was 
 dispensed with, the supply from the rest of Europe had 
 fallen to 10,000, that from the plantations had risen to 82,000 
 barrels. After that the increase was slower, but it did not 
 cease. In 1770 the figures were, for pitch and tar, 103,000, 
 together with 41,000 barrels of turpentine. The colonies 
 which profited the most were the Carolinas, with their great 
 pine forests. The industry was thoroughly suited to the 
 physical conditions of the country; but it could not have 
 maintained itself without some such assistance against the 
 competition of Sweden, as was at once apparent when the 
 bounties were temporarily withdrawn. Adam Smith remarks 
 that the joint effect of the enumeration and of the bounties 
 was to ' encourage the clearing of land ' in America, which he 
 regarded as the great prerequisite to improvement. How far 
 this may be true I should not like to say ; but I may perhaps 
 observe that, besides its effect on the Carolinas, the bounty 
 policy must indirectly have benefited New England. Cheap 
 tar must have contributed to the prosperity of ship-building 
 and the commerce dependent upon it. I hasten to add, lest 
 my orthodoxy should be suspected, that no general economic 
 argument on behalf of bounties can be drawn from this ex- 
 periment, since it was America that benefited and England 
 that paid the price. 
 
 I have postponed to the end the one great exception, the 
 one Act which was altogether and unmistakably ill-advised, 
 the one Act which, had it been enforced, would have hampered 
 American trade, or rather would have thrown it into complete 
 
 1 E. L. Lord, Industrial Experiments in the British Colonies of 
 North America, Johns Hopkins Studies, extra volume xvii. 1898.
 
 330 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 confusion. This was the ' Molasses Act ' of 1733. By this 
 Act duties were imposed on the importation of sugar, 
 molasses, and rum from foreign plantations i.e. from the 
 foreign, and especially the French, West Indies into any of 
 the British colonies ; duties high enough to be, and intended 
 to be, prohibitory. But the Act was easily evaded with the 
 connivance of the Customs officers, and no serious attempt was 
 made to enforce it throughout our period. 1 When a little 
 later it did become a practical grievance, it was as part of a 
 quite new policy, which aimed, primarily, not at controlling 
 trade, but at securing revenue. 
 
 The statement that the enforcement of the Molasses Act 
 would have been disastrous calls for some explanation. New 
 England, as we have seen, imported very largely fine manu- 
 factured goods from England. For these it had little of its 
 own to send in exchange, but it could get molasses very 
 cheaply from the French West Indies more cheaply than 
 from the English, because the French islands could produce 
 sugar at a lower cost ; and, as they were prohibited from 
 importing rum into France, they had their molasses left on 
 their hands. As a pamphleteer naively puts it, ' Melasses was 
 of little or no value to the French planter, because rum was 
 detrimental to France, as interfering with the consumption 
 of their brandy.' 2 The molasses were converted into rum in 
 the ' still-houses,' which sprang up from 1720 onwards in 
 great numbers in New England. 3 The most thriving centre 
 was Newport in Ehode Island, which had 22 distilleries. 
 The rum was consumed in large quantities by the people of 
 the New England States, especially by those engaged in the 
 fisheries, to mitigate the hardships of their life ; it was freely 
 employed in barter with the Indians ; but the larger part of 
 the demand for it arose in connection with the slave trade. 
 For thirty years Ehode Island sent some 18 vessels annually 
 to the slave coast, carrying 1,800 hogsheads of rum ; and 
 Massachusetts was not far behind. The ' rum-men,' 4 as the 
 
 1 Beer, pp. 131, 137, 138. 2 Anderson, iii. 178. 
 
 3 Weeden, i. 459. 4 Ibid. i. 462.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 331 
 
 New England slavers were called, found that ' a prime man 
 slave ' could be bought for about 110 gallons. An employer 
 at home, in one case at least, instructed them : ' Water your 
 rum as much as possible, and sell as much by the short 
 measure as you can.' l The West Indies and, increasingly as 
 the century went on, Virginia and Maryland, readily bought 
 the black cargoes, and paid either in specie or in bills 
 drawn upon tobacco exported to England. With these New 
 England could pay its debts to the English manufacturer, 
 and so ' the circle of commerce ' was complete. With justice 
 did the Americans complain that to enforce the Molasses Act 
 would cut the ground from beneath their feet. As it was 
 not enforced, any further observations are perhaps super- 
 fluous. Yet observe that the one Act, which, if enforced, 
 would have had an effect on the course of affairs, was not 
 passed to satisfy the clamours of any protected English 
 interest, and cannot even be construed as a corollary of the 
 mercantile theory of the balance of trade. It was passed for 
 the sole benefit of other American colonies, though these 
 were insular and not continental. By the strange irony of 
 history, it was passed, we learn at last, mainly ' at the instance 
 of a Boston merchant who was interested in sugar-growing 
 in the British West Indies.' 2 
 
 Our survey of English commercial legislation and of 
 its probable effect, or rather absence of effect, upon the 
 American colonies, is now complete. But a moment's reflec- 
 tion will show that the larger question of the effect upon the 
 economic development of the colonies of their connection 
 with the mother country cannot be answered from a con- 
 sideration of the legislation alone. There were other large 
 forces at work, outside and independent of all legislation. I 
 can only touch on one of them. In his celebrated speech on 
 American taxation, delivered in 1774, Edmund Burke, after 
 
 1 Weeden, i. 465. 
 
 2 E. Channing, Student's History of the United States, p. 155. It 
 is to be hoped that Professor Channing will soon make public the 
 information upon which he bases this interesting statement.
 
 332 ENGLAND AND AMEKICA, 1660-1760 
 
 noticing that the Americans had tolerated the system of com- 
 mercial restraint, proceeds to give this explanation : 
 
 They were indemnified for it by a pecuniary compensation. 
 Their monopolist happened to be one of the richest men in the 
 world. By his immense capital (primarily employed not for their 
 benefit, but his own) they were enabled to proceed with their 
 fisheries, their agriculture, their ship-building (and their trade, too, 
 within the limits), in such a manner as got far the start of the slow, 
 languid operations of unassisted nature. This capital was a hot-bed 
 to them. Nothing in the history of mankind is like their progress. 
 
 Evidence of English capital in American business meets 
 us, indeed, at every turn. Thus an estimate of the year 1731 
 places the value of ' the tobacco ships alone ' at 240,0002., 
 ' the greater part thereof, by far, being English-built, con- 
 tinually and constantly refitted and repaired in England.' 
 On this point Adam Smith agrees with Burke. In that 
 Book III. of his treatise which is so little read, he remarks 
 that ' the progress of our North American and West Indian 
 colonies would have been much less rapid had no capital 
 but what belonged to themselves been employed in exporting 
 their surplus produce.' And, when we turn to his set argu- 
 ment against the colonial system, we find that his main 
 position is not that it was bad for the colonies, but that it 
 was bad for England, in that it sent into the direction of the 
 colonial trade an undue proportion of her capital. This may 
 or may not be true ; but that it did attract a great deal of 
 English capital can hardly be doubted. 1 And, although the 
 case is somewhat different to-day, as American railways 
 and Argentina sufficiently demonstrate, undoubtedly in the 
 eighteenth century capital to a very large extent followed the 
 
 The English commercial legislation, I conclude, did the 
 colonies no harm prior to 1760 ; and the English connection 
 
 1 For some account of the way in which English capital was ' brought 
 over to reinforce that of the Boston merchants,' in 1722, see Weeden, 
 ii. 553.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 333 
 
 did them much good. Under these circumstances, it is no 
 wonder the Americans were neither indignant nor restive. 
 I know of no evidence, during the century under review, for 
 Bancroft's ' rankling hostility ' or for Mr. Lecky's ' political 
 alienation ' as ' the inevitable consequence.' Individuals here 
 and there felt themselves hampered in their operations, and 
 were naturally annoyed ; but there is absolutely no evidence 
 of any widespread irritation. When one reads Mr. Lecky, 
 one thinks of a movement of popular thought comparable to 
 the opposition to Laud's ecclesiastical policy or to the agita- 
 tion which led to the great Keform Bill. But, when one 
 comes to look into the American sources, one has to search 
 very minutely indeed to find any reference at all to the re- 
 strictions. The lawlessness produced by the half-smuggling 
 molasses business did, in a sense, contribute to the Eevolu- 
 tion, but it was a very minor element among many others : 
 to be put by the side of the irritation of the New Hampshire 
 backwoodsmen at the attempts to enforce the claims of the 
 Crown to masts for the navy ; to be put much below in im- 
 portance the alarm which New England Puritanism felt 
 before the anticipated inroads of the English Church. So 
 far as I can see, the trade grievance was first formulated by 
 Franklin. But the pamphlet in which he did so, that of 
 1767, already quoted, was hardly expected to be taken 
 seriously ; and even there the economic grievance was put 
 on a level with grievances of another kind. 1 It was not till 
 some years after the conflict had begun, when imagination 
 was already playing tricks with memory, that the commercial 
 
 1 Even after all the friction of the years 1760-67, the London agent for 
 Massachusetts, in a memorial to the English government concerning the 
 commercial grievances, regards them as inferior in importance to the 
 restraint which had been recently imposed upon the fisheries. ' But the 
 grand matter of Complaint is the Restraint laid on their Fishery, no 
 American being suffered to take Cod in the Straits of Belisle, or on 
 Labrador shore, and thereby rendering our new watery acquisitions 
 entirely useless. . . . Your Memorialist takes the liberty to lay before 
 your Lordship a few sentiments relating to the Fishery,' &c. Printed in 
 Hart, American History told by Contemporaries, ii. 415.
 
 334 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 restrictions were put in the foreground and represented 
 as positively oppressive. 1 
 
 The final assertion of Mr. Lecky that ' the commercial 
 restrictions made it to the interest of the Americans to dis- 
 pense with English protection,' you will have already 
 gathered, is quite unsupported by evidence. A careful his- 
 torian, Professor Coit Tyler, of Cornell, has recently said in 
 print what has long been known, that 'probably a vast 
 majority of those who stood for the commercial interests and 
 for the capital of the country ' were opposed to the Revolu- 
 tion. 2 After the war was over, the economic condition of 
 the country remained almost stagnant, if it did not retro- 
 grade : no more trade sprang up than before between the 
 several states ; no more manufactures were set on foot. 
 Economically, the colonial period ends, not with 1776 or 1789, 
 but with the embargo of 1808, which brought entirely new 
 forces into operation. 
 
 Holding as I do a professorship in an American univer- 
 sity, it may perhaps have seemed somewhat ungracious on 
 my part to destroy what is often regarded as part of the 
 American case for the Revolution ; but I am in excellent 
 American company. The last ten years have seen the 
 establishment of the first really critical school of American 
 historians ; and the outspokenness with which they have 
 assailed some widespread historical superstitions does honour 
 to their impartiality. In this particular matter the first 
 distinct note of dissatisfaction with the current opinion was, 
 I believe, struck in 1888 by that very competent Massa- 
 chusetts antiquary, Judge Mellen Chamberlain. He has been 
 followed by many of those younger scholars who are now 
 being put in charge of departments of American history at 
 the larger universities. It is very significant that in his 
 
 1 Mr. Goldwin Smith has already remarked (The United States, 
 p. 80) that the commercial and industrial grievances 'are not put forward 
 as a ground of revolt in the Declaration of Independence ; ' but he has 
 not drawn the obvious inference. 
 
 2 Literary History of the American Revolution, i. 58.
 
 ENGLISH LEGISLATION 335 
 
 ' Student's History of the United States/ which seems likely 
 to become a widely used text-book in the best high schools 
 of the country, Professor Channing does not hesitate to lay 
 down that ' it is impossible to say that the system was to 
 the disadvantage of the colonists.' The work of such men 
 evidently tends to promote a kindlier feeling between America 
 and England; for, while they leave untouched the great 
 principle of No Taxation without Eepresentation, they re- 
 move the notion, which has naturally created soreness, that 
 for a century England was inflicting an actual injury upon 
 the American colonies. It may be that the objects of the 
 legislation must still be regarded as preponderatingly selfish, 
 though as to that some qualification and charitable explana- 
 tion will probably be necessary : it is a great gain to realise 
 that no harm was done. I have but summarised some of 
 this recent historical work and arranged in order the con- 
 clusions to which it points ; and for this reason. In the 
 utterances of Englishmen concerning America, I do not 
 know which has done more harm an ignorant contempt, 
 unjust to America, or an ignorant sympathy, unjust to 
 England. The latter is now, perhaps, the more common. 
 Yet I cannot but hope that the efforts of American scholars 
 to spread among their own people more accurate views of 
 their past will not be impeded much longer by extravagant 
 assertions on the part of Englishmen.
 
 336 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING, 1660-1760 
 
 THE foregoing argument has met, I am glad to say, with the 
 approval of most of the American historical scholars to 
 whom I have submitted it ; and I may be allowed the satis- 
 faction of mentioning among them the distinguished name 
 of Mr. Mellen Chamberlain. Some few, however, have 
 hesitated to admit the full force of my plea ; and with them, 
 as with some of my Oxford hearers, the obstacle seems to 
 be an impression as to the wide prevalence of smuggling in 
 the American Colonies. One critic, an eminent Oxford tutor, 
 who has made the eighteenth century peculiarly his own, has 
 recently formulated his objection in the following terms : l 
 As to the Navigation Acts proper, the Enumeration, and the 
 restrictions on manufactures, he allows that the foregoing 
 argument has ' proved its point ; ' and in an admirably 
 concise form he restates the considerations on which the 
 conclusion is based. Very probably ' there were indications 
 even here that the system would not last ; ' the immediate 
 question before us, however, is only whether it inflicted any 
 considerable hardship while it did last. 
 
 But, the critic proceeds : ' when we turn to the regulation 
 with regard to European imports, this argument to a great 
 extent fails.' He very properly observes that my one page 
 on the subject is rather 'an d priori argument' as to 
 England's natural position as an entrepot than an appeal to 
 historical evidence. Accordingly, it is with this particular 
 point that he proposes to deal ; and after citing various 
 
 1 Mr. Arthur H. Johnson, in the Economic Journal for March 1900 
 (x. 96-103).
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 337 
 
 contemporary statements about smuggling, he concludes 
 that ' from the very first ' the restriction ' was held to be a 
 grievance ; from the very first it was violated.' I may be 
 allowed to follow his example and address myself to this one 
 contention. 
 
 Let me begin by reminding the reader of the most im- 
 portant exception which I allow in the matter of the non- 
 enforcement of the Molasses Act. I expressly grant that 
 this Act was never enforced during the period under con- 
 sideration : it is part of my case that it was not even seriously 
 attempted. But the importation of molasses and sugar from 
 the foreign plantations to supply the distilleries was one of 
 the chief businesses of New England ; l and it is well known 
 how great a ferment was created when at last an effort was 
 made to suppress the trade in 1763. ' It has caused/ wrote 
 Governor Bernard, ' a greater alarm than the taking of Fort 
 William Henry ' by the French. 2 
 
 A very large part, therefore, of the smuggling that is 
 complained of by contemporary officials must have been 
 concerned, both before and after the Act of 1733, with this 
 particular branch of trade. How large a part of the whole 
 this may have constituted it is impossible to estimate until 
 the economic history of New England has been subjected to 
 more thorough and scholarly investigation than it has yet 
 received. Evidently, however considerable its magnitude, it 
 would need to be deducted from the total for the purposes of 
 the present argument, which has to do with European pro- 
 ducts. Of course it may be argued that the non-observance 
 of the Molasses Act creates a presumption that the other 
 Acts were disobeyed. This is cogent enough, if the colonists 
 had a similarly strong economic motive for disobeying them. 
 But it is a capital point of my argument that, with regard to 
 
 1 Governor Bernard reckoned that, in 1763, 15,000 hogsheads of 
 molasses were imported into Massachusetts alone, 'all of which, 
 except less than 500, came from Ports which are now foreign. 
 Bernard, Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America, 
 written in the years 1763-1768 (1774), p. 10. 
 
 2 Bernard, Letters, p. 9. Cf. supra, p. 330. 
 
 z
 
 338 ENGLAND AND AMEKICA, 1660-1760 
 
 European commodities, it suited the colonists on the whole 
 to get them from England. The necessary qualifications to 
 this statement, to which I shall call attention later, show 
 conclusively that if the colonists had had a strong induce- 
 ment to purchase goods directly in France or elsewhere in 
 Europe, no statutes would have restrained them. The ' well 
 known indulgence ' to the West India ' branch of illicit trade ' 
 the phrase is Governor Bernard's and Lieut.-Governor 
 Hutchinson's l was expressly justified by the economic 
 ' necessity ' that commerce should take that direction. 
 
 That, after making this deduction, a good deal of illegal 
 trade still remains to be accounted for, cannot be denied. 
 Yet it is very necessary to be on our guard, and not hastily to 
 jump to the conclusion that every reference to ' illicit trade ' 
 or to smuggling implies a defeat of the Navigation Acts. It 
 is my impression, after turning over great masses of evidence, 2 
 that undifferentiated ' illicit trade ' really tells us nothing, and 
 that the first requisite for a scientific treatment of the matter 
 is an analysis of the different types of transaction comprised 
 under that elastic term. This is a task for some future 
 American historian ; meanwhile a few facts lie on the surface. 
 Thus it is apparent that the repression of the profitable traffic 
 which a number of American skippers carried on with the 
 pirates of Madagascar had nothing to do with the Acts of 
 Trade. Yet this was a branch of ' illegal trade ' which 
 engaged the serious attention of Governor Bellomont, of New 
 York, towards the end of the seventeenth century. 3 In like 
 manner we may dismiss the occasional invasion by certain 
 enterprising colonials of the East India Company's monopoly 
 of trade in the Eastern seas : 4 they were excluded like all 
 
 1 Bernard, in Dec. 1763 (Letters, p. 5), and Hutchinson, in Sept. 1763 
 (in Mass. Archives ; quoted by Gray in Quincy's Mass. Reports, 1865, 
 p. 430). 
 
 2 Kindly put at my disposal by my colleague Professor Hart, and by 
 one of my former pupils, Dr. Fish, now Instructor in American History 
 in the University of Wisconsin. 
 
 3 New York Colonial Documents, iv. 317, 413, 458, 532, 538. 
 
 4 New Jersey Archives, 1st Series, v. 47.
 
 AMBEICAN SMUGGLING 339 
 
 other Englishmen not members of the Company. Then, too, 
 there were import duties imposed by the several colonies, 
 especially upon some of those commodities, such as wines 
 and spirits, in which the eighteenth-century smuggler took 
 most interest ; and there is reason to believe that these were 
 evaded whenever there was an opportunity. 1 
 
 Incomparably more important is the consideration that 
 for many years at different periods of the century under 
 consideration the British Empire was at war with France, 
 and that it was at these periods that illicit trade was carried 
 on most briskly. Mr. Lecky has called attention to the 
 military importance of this treasonable assistance to the 
 enemy in the Seven Years' War. ' At a time when 
 the security of British America was one of the first objects of 
 English policy, and when large sums were remitted from 
 England to pay the colonies for fighting in their own cause, 
 it was found that the French fleets, the French garrisons, 
 and the French West India Islands were systematically 
 supplied with large quantities of provisions by the New 
 England colonies.' 2 And it has been recognised by Bancroft 
 himself that the repressive measures of Pitt in 1760 were 
 intended, not to harass the American trader in the interests 
 of England, but solely, ' in time of war, to distress the enemy 
 by famine.' 3 It was these measures which, as Bancroft says 
 
 1 W. Hill on Colonial Tariffs, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 
 vii. 98. 
 
 2 History of England, iii. 303. 
 
 History, iv. 376, 377. Pitt's instructions of Aug. 23, 1760, to the 
 provincial governors, are given by Mr. Gray in his Appendix to 
 Quincy's Mass. Reports, p. 407. The main purpose of the Government 
 is so often passed over without due emphasis by modern writers, that it 
 may be well to reprint the preamble. ' The Commanders of His Majesty's 
 Forces and Fleets, in North America and the West Indies, having 
 transmitted repeated and certain Intelligence of an illegal and most 
 pernicious Trade, carried on by The King's Subjects in North America 
 and the West Indies, as well to the French Islands, as to the French 
 Settlements on the Continent of America, and particularly to the Rivers 
 Mobile and Mississippi, by which the Enemy is, to the greatest Reproach 
 and Detriment of Government, supplied with Provisions and other 
 
 z2
 
 340 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 caused 'the first strong expression of discontent in New 
 England,' and which suggested to the Crown the employment 
 of ' writs of assistance.' Yet it has hardly been sufficiently 
 realised that what is true of the Seven Years' War is true 
 also of the earlier wars of the century. Thus, in 1748, we 
 find Governor Belcher, of New Jersey, informing the Home 
 Government that a 'vile illicit trade has been carried on 
 (in too public a manner) between His Britannic Majesty's 
 subjects of several of the King's provinces on this continent 
 and the subjects of the French (and Catholic) King, in a 
 plentiful supply of provisions and other things to the King's 
 enemies, whereby they have been enabled to make great 
 depredations on the King's subjects, and have much ruined 
 the English markets abroad, as well as supplied the ships 
 of war of the King's enemies in the West Indies.' l The 
 desire to obtain European commodities cheaply at the French 
 West India Islands, or at the Dutch and Danish islands 
 which were also centres of this illegal enterprise may have 
 contributed in some measure to encourage the intercourse 
 complained of ; though reason will be given subsequently for 
 believing that this motive could hardly have been of much 
 weight. But in the main it was the outcome of unprincipled 
 greed. And once more it has to be deducted from the sum 
 total of ' smuggling ' before we reach that residue with which 
 alone we have here to deal. 
 
 Necessaries, whereby They are principally, if not alone, enabled to 
 sustain and protract this l<yn,g and expensive War ; And it further 
 appearing that large Sums in Bullion are also sent, by The King's 
 Subjects, to the above Places, in Eeturn whereof Commodities are 
 taken, which interfere with the Produce of the British Colonies Them- 
 selves,' i.e. of the English West Indies, ' in open Contempt of the 
 Authority of the Mother Country, as well as to the most manifest 
 Prejudice of the Manufactures and Trade of Great Britain ; In order 
 therefore to put the most speedy . . . Stop to such . . . Practices . . . 
 so highly repugnant to the Honour and Well-being of This kingdom, It is 
 His Majesty's express Will . . . that you do forthwith make the strictest 
 . . . Enquiry into the State of this dangerous and ignominious Trade.' 
 
 1 New Jersey Archives, 1st series, vii. 134. For an example of trade 
 with the enemy in 1698, see New York Col. Doc. iv. 413.
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 341 
 
 What, then, was this residue ? what was its amount, and 
 what its character ? It is, after all, a question of the propor- 
 tion of the illicit importation of European goods to the total 
 importation. Here I must once more express my admiration 
 for Mr. Beer's treatment of the subject. After looking into 
 the evidence with some attention for myself, I find, on re- 
 turning to his treatise, that he has wellnigh exhausted the 
 contemporary material, and reached conclusions which are 
 only confirmed by additional evidence. 1 ' In the main the 
 colonies consumed English manufactures ; few goods were 
 imported directly from the European continent.' 
 
 It will be noticed by any one who looks at the information 
 collected by Mr. Weeden, that by far the greater part of it 
 refers to the latter part of the seventeenth century and the 
 opening years of the eighteenth century ; three out of four 
 references are to the reports of Edward Eandolph (ap- 
 pointed Collector, Surveyor, and Searcher for all New Eng- 
 land in 1675), and of the Earl of Bellomont (Governor of 
 New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hamp- 
 shire, 1698-1701). It is curious how very few are the in- 
 stances of European goods smuggled into the country during 
 the period 1715-60 which that diligent collector has been 
 able to get together. The explanation may be that the 
 years following the Eevolution were ' years of confusion in 
 the governmental service in England and the colonies ; ' 2 it 
 
 1 The Commercial Policy of England, pp. 189-143. I may venture to 
 add that on parts of the subject to which Mr. Beer has not given so much 
 attention, as e.g. the drain of specie, his observations are sometimes open 
 to question. 
 
 2 As Professor Channing suggests, Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc. Oct. 23, 
 1899. As to Edward Randolph's reports, it may be noticed (1) that the 
 Navigation Acts proper must have caused some irritation at first and led 
 to a certain amount of evasion, until the shipping of England and of 
 New England had been so increased as to offer freights as cheap as the 
 Dutch ; see supra, p. 313 ; and (2) that Randolph's general statements 
 must be received with caution. English readers to whom his American 
 reputation is unfamiliar may conveniently acquaint themselves with it 
 in Mr. Fiske's Beginnings of New England. Even American writers, in 
 their eagerness to prove that the Acts of Trade were never obeyed, are apt
 
 342 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 may be that the desire to evade the statutes diminished with 
 the growth of a more remunerative as well as legal trade ; 
 or it may be, as Mr. Weeden maintains, that the authorities 
 recognised their impotence and grew tired of complaining. 
 But, in this latter case, we should expect the illicit trade to 
 have left more numerous traces of itself in the private business 
 papers of American merchants. Mr. Weeden writes of the 
 great merchant Peter Faneuil, with a contagious confidence 
 that has apparently infected some of his readers, that ' he 
 shipped foreign brandy in false New England rum casks, 
 and smuggled Barcelona handkerchiefs as coolly as he took 
 snuff in the streets of Boston.' l But the really surprising 
 thing, when one comes to look through the records of his 
 business during 1725-32 and 1736-42, as Mr. Weeden 
 describes it, 2 is the very scanty trace of illicit transactions to 
 be found in them. Such as they are they are quite petty ; 
 and his caution in regard to them, concealing them in one 
 case even from the skipper, certainly would not lead one to 
 suppose they formed part of the ordinary business of Boston 
 merchants. This is the more noteworthy because much of his 
 business was precisely in those directions which led to most 
 of the disregard of the statute. The pessimistic Joshua Gee 
 the purpose of whose ' Trade and Navigation of Great 
 Britain considered ' (1729) was to persuade the English 
 nation that it was on the high road to ruin 3 objected to 
 ' the trade drove between the plantations, Portugal, Spain, 
 and the Straights,' 4 on the ground that after disposing of 
 their cargoes from New England ' they frequently invest 
 part of the produce in goods, which they meet with in those 
 
 to forget that, as Professor Hart remarks in another connection (American 
 History told by Contemporaries, ii. 30), 'Bandolph was sent to the 
 colonies with the mission of finding something wrong, and was bound to 
 justify his employment.' 
 
 1 ii. 658. 2 ii. 607-636. 
 
 3 Hume, in his essay Of the Balance of Trade, makes a satirical 
 reference to the influence of his writings, which ' struck the nation with 
 an universal panic.' 
 
 4 Fish and timber were carried out and salt brought back.
 
 AMERICAN SMUGGLING 343 
 
 places, as Italian silks, French silks, stuffs, druggets, India 
 silk, calico, French, Dutch and Hambro' linens, and the 
 money which should be brought to us is laid out in foreign 
 manufactures.' l 
 
 The question which must be asked concerning Faneuil's 
 illicit trade must be asked, as I have already remarked, con- 
 cerning American illicit trade as a whole : what proportion 
 did it bear to the legal import trade ? And if weight is to 
 be attached to general statements on the one side, weight 
 must be attached to equally confident statements on the 
 other. Thus, the Swedish traveller, Peter Kalm, writes of 
 the province of New York in 1748, that ' they import from 
 London stuffs and every other article of English growth or 
 manufacture, together with all sorts of foreign goods,' 2 and 
 concludes in the true mercantilist spirit, ' from hence it 
 appears how much a well-regulated colony contributes to the 
 increase and welfare of its mother country.' And the same 
 testimony is given by Gee himself, in spite of his alertness to 
 discover grounds for alarm. As to ' the tobacco plantations,' 
 they 
 
 take from England their clothing, household goods, iron manu- 
 factures of all sorts, saddles, bridles, brass and copper wares ; and 
 notwithstanding their dwelling among the woods, they take their 
 very turnera' wares and almost everything else which may be 
 called the manufacture of England. 
 
 The growth of the trade of Pennsylvania with the Spanish 
 West Indies by way of Jamaica 
 
 has very much enlarged their demands upon us for broad- 
 cloth, kersies, druggets, serges, stuffs, and manufactures of all 
 sorts. 
 
 As to New Jersey and New York, 
 
 their traffic is much the same ; we have what money they can 
 raise to buy our manufactures for their clothing ; 
 
 1 Chap. xv. (6th ed. 1760, p. 50). 
 
 2 Travek, 1 198-9, 201.
 
 344 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 while New England 
 
 takes from us all sorts of woollen manufactures, linen, sail-cloth, 
 and cordage for rigging their ships, haberdashery, &C. 1 
 
 Fortunately, as it happens, we are exempted from the 
 hazardous undertaking of balancing vague general state- 
 ments one against the other, by a piece of evidence which I 
 do not remember to have seen referred to, although it would 
 seem to be conclusive. And that is, the circumstance that 
 American imports from England, far from diminishing when 
 the War of Independence was over as we should expect if 
 the obligation to buy in England had been a serious grievance 
 actually increased. 2 This was prophesied by shrewd ob- 
 servers while the conflict was still raging. 
 
 It is notorious that at this very juncture, when the American 
 rebels have absolutely prohibited the direct importation of any British 
 goods, they admit, sorely against theirwills, various English manu- 
 factures, through the intervention of the Dutch, French, and 
 Spaniards. But why ? Because they cannot do without them ; 
 and therefore must have them, even with all this additional 
 expense. 3 
 
 And Dean Tucker's anticipations were confirmed by ex- 
 perience. If we may trust official figures, the United States 
 ' consumed annually of British produce, according to a six 
 years' average ending with 1792, 2,807,306Z., while, on the 
 six years' average ending with 1774, they consumed only 
 2,216,824Z.' 4 
 
 1 Trade, &c., chaps. xv.-xix. 
 
 2 I am indebted to my former pupil, Dr. G. S. Callender, now Pro- 
 fessor of Economics in Bowdoin College, for calling my attention to the 
 significance of this fact ; which, indeed, he has treated in his recent 
 lectures at Harvard as the starting-point of United States economic 
 history. 
 
 3 Dean Tucker's Series of Answers to certain Popular Objections 
 against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies (1776), p. 45. 
 
 4 These are the figures from the Ledger of the Inspector-General of 
 English Imports and Exports, as given by George Chalmers, Estimate of 
 the Comparative Strength, &c., Dedication, p. xxx, to the edition of
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 345 
 
 It would be easy to cite scores of contemporary American 
 comments on a sequel to the great war so surprising to 
 many. One will suffice : James Madison wrote, in 1785, 
 ' Our trade was never more completely monopolised by 
 Great Britain, when it was under the direction of the British 
 Parliament, than it is at this moment.' And foremost 
 among the reasons he assigns is that 'our merchants are 
 almost all connected with that country, and that only.' l 
 
 The situation may be further illustrated by the chagrin 
 
 1794. They are open to much criticism (which will be found clearly set 
 forth by Dr. P. Lohmann in Sitzungsberichte der kon. preuss. Akademie 
 der WissenscJiaften zu Berlin, 1898, liv. 859 seq.) ; but, as no change 
 took place in the system of entry during this period, the figures for each 
 period are subject to the same defects, and therefore trustworthy enough 
 for purposes of comparison. The statistics from the same sources for 
 every decennial period from 1700 to 1780, showing a steady and rapid 
 rise until 1770, will be found in the Appendix to Sheffield's Observations, 
 ed. 6 (1784), No. ix. p. 24 ; for each of the years 1764-1782, ibid. No. xiv. ; 
 and for 1784 in Chalmers's Estimate, p. 147. The commercial difficulties 
 caused by the excessive importations in the first year of peace may be 
 studied in W. Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United 
 States, Publ. Am. Econ. Assoc. vol. viii. No. 6, p. 64 seq. The figures 
 given by Sheffield and Chalmers do not clearly distinguish, as a rule, 
 between English manufactures and the products of other countries im- 
 ported into the American colonies by way of England. I know of only 
 two estimates of these latter during the period before us. One will be 
 found in New York Colonial Documents, 617 ; London Documents xxii, 
 table 2. This gives 294,8862. as the value of British manufactures and pro- 
 ducts on an average of the three years 1714-1717 (whereof about one-half 
 consisted of woollen manufactures), and 136,1412. as the value of foreign 
 goods, thus distributed : linens, 86,4132. ; calicoes, 10,1022. ; ' prohibited 
 East India goods ' (prohibited, that is, by recent legislation, for English 
 use), 10,5232. ; wrought silks, 1,1892. ; iron and hemp, 6,1522. ; ' in other 
 foreign goods,' 21,7602. The other is in Sheffield's Observations, p. 230, 
 and is the average for the four years 1767-1770. ' Our exports amounted 
 to 1,839,6922. : of this 352,6372. was the amount of foreign goods exported, 
 about two-thirds of which, or the sum of 211,5812., was the value of East 
 India goods, and the remainder was in various articles, chiefly from the 
 northern kingdoms, but more particularly low-priced linens from Ger- 
 many and Bussia. The balance, being the sum of 1,487,0552., was 
 wholly in British produce and manufactures.' 
 1 Madison's Works, i. 156.
 
 346 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 of the French government at so unwelcome a proof of the 
 advantages which England continued to enjoy from purely 
 economic causes. France had expected to supply America 
 with manufactures as soon as that country was freed from 
 political fetters. It found that it was able to do nothing of 
 the kind. ' The usual topic ' of Vergennes's conferences with 
 Jefferson in Paris in 1785 was precisely this : ' that the trade 
 of the United States had not yet learnt the way to France, 
 but continued to centre in England, though no longer obliged 
 by law to go there.' l And finally the magniloquent Citizen 
 Genet, Plenipotentiary of the new French Eepublic, de- 
 clared to Jefferson in 1793, and with a great deal of truth, 
 that ' the ties of France with your nation have served only 
 to ruin her national commerce, without obtaining the smallest 
 encouragement to her manufactories. ' 2 
 
 We are now in a position to look at a book which, if we 
 can but rely upon it, will conclude the discussion by exhibiting 
 to us just what the legal and the illegal import trade of the 
 American colonies before the war respectively consisted in. It 
 is the ' Observations on the Commerce of the American States,' 
 by Gibbon's friend Lord Sheffield. This was a work which 
 appeared in 1783, and immediately ran through several 
 editions ; of which the sixth, enlarged (1784), is now before 
 me. Its purpose was to argue against the proposal of some 
 of the politicians of the time, prompted by the West Indian 
 interests, to throw open the trade of the English West 
 Indies to the United States ; and the line it takes is that the 
 disastrous consequences which were predicted if this were 
 not agreed to and especially that the United States would 
 dispense with English manufactures were not likely to 
 result, because the Americans could not buy what they 
 wanted on better terms elsewhere. This occasions a survey 
 of English trade with America before the war, and it 
 is that which I now propose to make use of. We might 
 justly suspect evidence thus offered ; but, as events showed, 
 
 1 Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ix. 230. 
 
 2 Letter of September 30, 1793, in American State Papers, Foreign, 
 ii. 243.
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 347 
 
 Sheffield's prognostications were entirely correct. He was, 
 moreover, in a position to obtain the most accurate infor- 
 mation procurable ; he certainly had access to the statistics 
 of the Inspector General. He assures us that ' the best judges 
 in each article of exports and imports have been separately 
 consulted, their several opinions have been carefully weighed 
 and compared, and the same interesting questions have again 
 been submitted to a second and more rigorous scrutiny.' 1 I 
 see no sufficient reason to doubt his good faith ; so far as I 
 can judge, what Gibbon said of another work of his is 
 applicable to this : ' His materials are copious and correct, 
 and he leaves on his paper the impression of an active and 
 vigorous mind.' 
 
 Sheffield begins his survey of the imports into America 
 from Europe 2 with ' Articles in which there will be scarce 
 any Competition.' Among these he places Woollens first : 
 
 In this great and capital article Great Britain will have very 
 little competition, except in fine cloths made in France. . . . But 
 the demand of the superfine cloths from America will be very 
 inconsiderable ; the consumption of that country is chiefly of 
 cloths under 12s. per yard ; the quantity of those of a higher price 
 bears no proportion to that of any one of the inferior qualities 
 down to the coarsest and cheapest ; therefore, as the bulk of the 
 woollens must be bought in England, it will be seldom worth 
 while to send to France for the small quantity they may want of the 
 cloths of 13s. Qd. and 14s., and they will rather take the English 
 superfines. ... It is certain that all coarse woollens are at this 
 time at least 15 per cent, dearer in France than in England. . . . 
 The following fact is a striking proof of the superiority of our 
 woollens to the French, in the opinion of the Americans. When 
 France granted a sum of money to Congress for clothing the 
 American troops, Mr. Laurens, jun., was employed to provide it ; but, 
 instead of laying out the money in France, he went to Holland and 
 so bought English cloths, and sent them to America. The French 
 minister was instructed to complain to Congress of this transaction, 
 so ungrateful and injurious to France ; but Mr. Laurens justified 
 himself by saying it was his duty to do the best he could with the 
 
 1 Advertisement to the Second Edition. 
 
 2 Observations, p. 7 et seq.
 
 348 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 money, and that the English cloths, of equal price with the French, 
 were much better. And further ... we need only recollect that 
 the importation of goods from this country, through a variety of 
 channels, was so great during the war, that the French minister 
 . . . remonstrated against it more than once. . . . An act was then 
 made prohibiting the manufactures of this country ; nevertheless, 
 they continued to be imported to so great a degree, that a remon- 
 strance from the Court of France was presented to Congress, 
 threatening to withdraw their aid if more effectual means were not 
 taken to prevent the importation of British goods. 
 
 Under the same head Sheffield places Iron and Steel 
 Manufactures as to which, however, conditions had so 
 greatly changed since 1760 that his observations have little 
 bearing upon our present subject and then passes to 
 Porcelain and Earthenware : 
 
 The importation has been, and must be, from Great Britain, on 
 account both of the quality and the price. . . . East India china is 
 sometimes cheaper in Holland than in England. America gets of 
 the coarse kinds from St. Croix ; but the consumption of china in 
 America is inconsiderable, in comparison to that of British earthen- 
 ware. . . . Earthenware, procured on long credit from Britain, 
 was a considerable article in the American contraband trade with 
 Spanish South America. 
 
 As to Glass : 
 
 The importation of looking glasses, drinking glasses, and other 
 glass furniture, though it rose to a large amount, bore no proportion 
 to the importation and consumption of window glass. Except the 
 looking glasses made in Holland . . . there is no article of glass in 
 any part of Europe but the British which will answer in the 
 American market. 
 
 Similarly as to Stockings : 
 
 The great consumption of stockings in the American States is 
 of worsted, thread, and cotton ; that of silk will never bear any 
 proportion ; the worsted, thread, and cotton have been, and most 
 probably will be, imported from Great Britain. 
 
 As to Shoes : 
 
 The importation of men's shoes, except into Virginia, Maryland, 
 the Carolinas, and Georgia, was never to any great amount ; but of
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 349 
 
 women's it was and must continue to be considerable, and will be 
 made from Great Britain principally, until some other nation in 
 Europe shall learn the art of manufacturing and working leather as 
 well. 
 
 Passing over what he says under the same head con- 
 cerning Buttons, Hats, and the new Cotton or Manchester 
 Manufactures, we come to Haberdashery : 
 
 Fine linen tapes, incles, and fine thread, are best from Holland 
 or Flanders ; but the commonest British tapes are cheapest, and 
 also all kinds of worsted bindings, garters, coarse threads, and 
 sewing silks. 
 
 From the other minor articles which Sheffield believes 
 will still be imported from Great Britain tin in sheets, 1 
 lead in pigs and sheets, painters' colours, cordage and ship- 
 chandlery, Sheffield and Birmingham manufactures, mate- 
 rials for coach-builders, saddlers, and upholsterers, medicines 
 and drugs, goods for the Indian trade, and books it may 
 suffice to select painters' colours : 
 
 The dwelling-houses . . . are mostly built of wood, which 
 circumstance causes a large demand for oil and painters' colours. 
 Oil is made in some of the provinces, from the refuse of the flax 
 seed ; the quantity is trifling compared to the consumption, but 
 the articles for colouring must be imported. The ingredients, 
 whiting or chalk and white lead, . . . being cheaper in Great 
 Britain than elsewhere, must come most reasonably from thence. 
 . . . Considerable quantities of Unseed oil went from Britain to 
 America before the war. 
 
 Sheffield next proceeds to consider the articles in which 
 ' there may be competition.' Most important among them is 
 linen. He points out that there had been a marked increase 
 in the American demand for British and Irish linens 
 especially in the coarser sorts since the bounty given in 1742 
 had enabled British ' Osnaburghs,' for the wear of slaves, to 
 
 1 What Sheffield says of this commodity may be compared with 
 Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, s.a. 1740.
 
 350 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 drive out the German goods of the same name. 1 But he 
 allows that, nevertheless, there were great quantities of 
 foreign linens used in America. But he takes it for granted 
 as too obvious to require explanation that these have hitherto 
 usually been supplied through England : which is all that is 
 needed for the present argument. We might have concluded 
 the same thing from the observations of Adam Smith, already 
 quoted. 2 Passing over his accounts of some other less 
 important articles, as giving but little information about 
 earlier conditions, 3 we come to some especially noteworthy 
 statements about Tea and East-India goods. Much has 
 commonly been made of the smuggling of tea into the 
 American Colonies ; it is interesting now to learn if, as I 
 believe, we can trust Sheffield exactly how this came about ; 
 especially as he tells us of some other commodities which were 
 brought in with the tea : 
 
 The Dutch used to purchase in China a kind of black tea (of a 
 quality inferior to any we import), which was purchased by the 
 lower class of people in the northern States on account of its being 
 cheaper than that which, came through England. A number of 
 merchants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, were concerned 
 in a clandestine trade, either directly from Holland, or by the way of 
 St. Eustatia. These merchants imported low-priced teas, canvas, 
 and certain kinds of Russian and German linens. . . . The middle 
 and southern States use, in common, a finer kind of tea ; and as 
 our India Company can afford to sell this tea on full as good, if not 
 better, terms than the Dutch, or any nation in Europe, there is no 
 danger of losing the American markets. 
 
 1 Compare Macpherson, iii. s.a. 1742 ; and for the growth of the 
 Scotch linen manufacture, 1740-1760, p. 336. The value of the ' bounty 
 linens ' shipped from England alone to all the colonies in 1758 amounted 
 to over 200.000L ; ibid. 342, n. 
 
 2 Supra, p. 320. The quantity of ' all kinds of linen imported into 
 the port of London alone, in only the year 1731, from Holland, Germany, 
 and the East Country, the greatest part of which is again exported to our 
 plantations in America and our factories in Africa, &c.,' was estimated 
 at 14,000,000 ells. Macpherson, iii. 182. 
 
 8 Though the figures for the average exportation to America of 
 English silk goods during the years 1770-1775, on p. 47, are not without 
 significance.
 
 AMEKICAN SMUGGLING 351 
 
 East India muslins, chintzes, and other piece-goods of 
 which ' the consumption has always been very considerable 
 in America ' had hitherto been obtained through England ; 
 and likewise pepper, ' the greatest object in the spice trade/ 
 and china earthenware. The finer spices could be furnished 
 to greater advantage by Holland, but ' the value of these 
 articles consumed in America is not great.' 
 
 Finally we come in Sheffield's list to those ' articles 
 which cannot be supplied by Great Britain to advantage.' 
 Wine is, of course, the first of these. There was undoubtedly 
 a certain amount of French claret smuggled into the 
 colonies. 1 It may be remembered that from 1678, and more 
 persistently after the Methuen Treaty of 1703, it was the 
 steady policy of the government to exclude French wines 
 from England, a policy which was maintained until Pitt's 
 Commercial Treaty with France in 1786. 2 This exclusion 
 was one of the main weapons of Great Britain in its long 
 struggle with France, and the Home Government could 
 hardly have been expected to allow to the colonials what it did 
 not allow to its subjects in England. Nevertheless, it is well 
 to learn if we can to what extent claret really was smuggled 
 into America. Sheffield's statement is as follows : 
 
 The wines consumed in America are Madeira (generally an 
 inferior sort called New York wine, or rather Teneriffe wine, under 
 the name of Madeira), Lisbon, Fayal, and some sherry, These have 
 hitherto composed nineteen-twentieths of the whole ever consumed 
 in the American States. The quantity of port and claret has been 
 comparatively inconsiderable. 
 
 This is in complete accord with the report of Governor 
 Bernard in 1763 : 
 
 The wine generally used in this country heretofore has been 
 Madeira ; but of late that has grown so extravagantly dear that 
 few people can afford it. The wines of the Western Isles are now 
 in the general use of this country, but some gentlemen prefer 
 Portugal wines. French wines can never be an article of trade 
 
 1 An example in Weeden, ii. 558, under 1719. 
 
 2 Cf. supra, p. 278 seq.
 
 352 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 here, as what comes to America is in general bad and very 
 perishable ; and when it is good it comes as dear as Madeira, and 
 is not near so much esteemed. And though there is now here, 
 under prosecution, a small vessel of 130 tons, laden with French 
 wines, said to be bound from Bordeaux to Eustatia : yet this will not 
 conclude for the frequent use of French wines here. For though 
 this vessel were intended to be unladen on this coast, she would be 
 a singular instance for some years past, and her cargo would 
 supply the demand for French wine in New England for two or 
 three years. 1 
 
 What Bernard and Sheffield tell us is confirmed by much 
 other evidence. 2 
 
 But the direct importation of wine from Madeira and the 
 Azores was expressly permitted by statute throughout our 
 period. 3 In addition to this, 'an indulgence time out of 
 mind allowed ' had been to permit wine from the ' Portu- 
 guese continent ' in small quantities to pass as ship's stores. 
 This, said Governor Bernard, he had ' always understood to 
 be well known in England, and allowed as being no ways 
 injurious to the trade of Great Britain.' 4 
 
 As to the other articles which Great Britain could not 
 supply, cambrics, says Sheffield, were ' not consumed to a 
 considerable amount ; ' and the importation of sweet oil, 
 
 1 Letters, p. 3. 
 
 2 Thus Kalm, in 1748 : ' Most of the wine .vhich is drunk here 
 and in the other colonies is brought from the 1 die of Madeira, and is 
 very strong and fiery.' And even Peter Faneuil left in his cellars at his 
 death Madeira to the value of 900Z. and claret to the value of only 150Z. 
 Weeden, ii. 909. 
 
 How early the use of Madeira commenced in New England may be 
 illustrated from the account of his voyage to New England in 1638, 
 written by John Josselyn in 1673, and presented by him to the Eoyal 
 Society (An Account of Two Voyages to New England, 1673 ; second 
 edition, 1674 ; reprinted 1865, and in Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc. 3rd ser. iii.). 
 Off the coast of New England they came upon ' a Barke of 300 Tuns, 
 laden with Island Wine . . . bound for Eichmond's Island.' Wine from 
 ' Phial, Madera, Canaries ' was freely drunk in the colony when he 
 visited it again in 1663-1671; pp. 41, 211-212. I am indebted to 
 President Eliot for a reference to this curious narrative. 
 
 3 The details in Beer, p. 37. 4 Letters, pp. 2, 4.
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 353 
 
 raisins, figs, olives, and other fruits was chiefly supplied by 
 smuggling from the Spanish peninsula and Italy, but was 
 ' not of a capital amount.' l Concerning brandies his remarks 
 are more significant. The fact that Peter Faneuil on one 
 occasion in 1738, with every circumstance of secrecy, 
 smuggled two casks of brandy into Charleston concealed in 
 the midst of a great cargo of rum, has been treated as if it 
 implied a flourishing contraband trade in brandy. 2 But if we 
 may trust Sheffield 
 
 there has never been any great consumption of brandy in the 
 American States, nor will there be, so long as good West India rum 
 can be had from Is. 3d. to 2s. per gallon, which was the case, and 
 the people preferred it. 
 
 And this is confirmed, singularly enough, by the record of 
 Fanueil's own property, made on his death in 1743. He 
 left behind him, besides a large quantity of Madeira and 
 a moderate allowance of claret, five tierces of rum and 
 twenty-five gallons of arrack, but apparently no brandy 
 whatever. 3 
 
 1 Mr. Weeden (ii. 660) prints the following letter from a certain 
 Boston official to a prominent merchant of Salem in 1759 : ' I shall 
 esteem it a favour you'll take an opportunity to inform all your mer- 
 chants and others, concerned in shipping up wine, oil, olives, figs, 
 raisins, d;c., that I am determined publicly to inform the collector of this 
 port of any those articles I can find out are on board any vessel com- 
 manded by Captain Ober, in order they may be seized. I shall not 
 concern myself about any other coaster, let them bring up what they will ; 
 but this Captain Ober has cheated me in such a manner . . . that I'm 
 determined too keep a good look out on him ; therefore would have all 
 those concerned in that trade regulate themselves accordingly ; and if they 
 will risk any such prohibited goods in said Ober's vessel,' &c. This is, 
 of course, evidence that the importation of certain prohibited goods was 
 usually winked at. But it is also evidence of what these prohibited goods 
 were likely to be at a place like Salem. And it can scarcely be supposed that 
 ' wine, oil, olives, figs, raisins, <fec.,' were the staples of Salem import trade. 
 The importation of fruits ' in small parcels ' as ship's stores, was a well- 
 understood ' indulgence.' Bernard, Letters, p. 4. 
 
 2 Weeden, ii. 627, 635, 658. 
 
 3 The inventory for probate is given in Weeden, ii. 909. 
 
 A A
 
 354 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter ? It 
 is that with the exception, as always, of the molasses 
 business the great bulk of the American import trade was 
 strictly legal, because the colonials had no interest that it 
 should be otherwise. In one way or another there was a 
 good deal of illicit trade, no doubt ; yet it formed but a small 
 proportion of the whole. Sheffield, predicting that the 
 American states would ' in future, as they did before, give 
 the preference to British manufactures over all others,' makes 
 this just comment : 
 
 For the preference formerly given was not the effect of our 
 restrictions ; nothing was easier for the Americans than to evade 
 them, and it is well known that from the first they uniformly did 
 evade them whenever they found it to their interest. 1 
 
 The important thing is that they did not find it to their 
 interest to any (comparatively) large extent. 
 
 And the reasons are not far to seek. The staple require- 
 ments of New England, and, first of all, woollen clothing, could 
 be supplied more cheaply in England than elsewhere. It was 
 the quality and cheapness of English cloth which enabled 
 it in the first half of the seventeenth century to secure the 
 North German market, and would have given it the French 
 market but for Colbert's high tariff of 1667. As soon as the 
 barrier was removed by the Commercial Treaty with France 
 in 1786, English cloth again beat down the competition of the 
 French domestic product. And as to such commodities of other 
 European countries as could not be produced so cheaply in 
 England, everything tends to confirm the a priori argument 
 of the previous paper. To quote Sheffield for the last time : 
 
 It is certain many foreign articles will go to America through 
 Great Britain as formerly, on account of the difficulty the American 
 merchant would find in resorting to every quarter of the world to 
 collect a cargo. The Americans send ships to be loaded with all 
 sorts of European goods. A general cargo for the American 
 
 1 Observations, p. 234.
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 355 
 
 market cannot be made up on such advantageous terms in any 
 part of the world as in England. In our ports all articles may be 
 got with despatch a most winning circumstance in trade. 1 
 
 It would be worth while for some American scholar to 
 determine just when the Acts of Trade first came to be looked 
 upon by Americans as constituting or having constituted 
 a grievance after the first irritation had subsided which 
 the Navigation Laws had occasioned in the third quarter of 
 the seventeenth century. Doubtless, when once the breach 
 with the mother country had taken place, American writers 
 and speakers described the system as a grievance, and 
 imputed a like feeling to earlier generations. Bub certainly 
 it is not easy to find any expression to that effect in the 
 twenties, thirties, forties, or fifties of the eighteenth century. 
 It is well known that American politicians, during the earlier 
 years of the controversy with the British Government, con- 
 stantly drew a sharp distinction between legislation for the 
 control of trade and legislation for the securing of revenue, 
 and declared again and again that with the former they had 
 no quarrel. As late as 1768 we find the shrewd Franklin 
 expressing his regret that such a position was still pretty 
 generally taken, and arguing for a more sweeping denial of the 
 
 1 Op. cit. 251. For other references to ' well-assorted general cargoes ' 
 see pp. 39, 43. Cf. Chalmers, Opinions on interesting subjects . . . 
 arising from American Independence (1784), p. 116 : ' We ought to learn 
 from the New Englanders . . . how to form those miscellaneous cargoes,' 
 <fec. Another reason, to which all contemporaries conversant with the 
 circumstances refer, as explaining why American importers preferred to 
 buy their European commodities in England, is the long credit that was 
 allowed. Thus Dean Tucker writes (A Series of Answers, 1776, p. 30) : 
 ' The trade of Great Britain with the Colonies rests on a much firmer 
 Foundation than that of a Nominal Subjection by means of Paper Laws 
 and imaginary Restrictions a Foundation so very obvious, as well as 
 secure, that it is surprising it hath not been taken Notice of in this Dis- 
 pute. The Foundation, I mean, is the Superiority of the British Capitals 
 over those of any other Country in the Universe. As a signal Proof of 
 this, let it be observed that the British Exporter gives long Credit to 
 almost every Country to which he sends his Goods ; but more especially 
 he used to do so to North America.' Cf. Sheffield, p. 248. 
 
 A A 2
 
 356 ENGLAND AND AMERICA, 1660-1760 
 
 legislative authority of the British Parliament. 1 In not going 
 at first beyond an objection to taxation without consent, 
 the American leaders were doubtless influenced by weighty 
 political considerations ; yet it is hard to believe that they 
 would have been so restrained in their utterances if, during 
 the preceding hundred years, the Acts of Trade had really 
 been felt to be galling restraints. 
 
 It used to be said that James Otis, in his argument in 
 court against Writs of Assistance in 1761, protested against 
 the Acts of Trade as a whole ; and herein the significance of 
 the episode has often been supposed to consist. This is the 
 version of the matter which Mr. Lecky has followed. 
 ' James Otis,' he tells us, ' signalised himself by an impas- 
 sioned attack on the whole commercial code, and on the 
 alleged oppression of Parliament, which excited great 
 enthusiasm in the colonies, and was afterwards regarded by 
 John Adams and some others as the first step towards the 
 Revolution.' 2 But it is now recognised that the ' impas- 
 sioned attack on the whole commercial code ' was the off- 
 spring of John Adams's senile imagination in much later years. 
 In the only contemporary account of the argument, preserved 
 in certain fragmentary notes of Adams himself, there is no 
 trace of any protest against the system as a whole. The 
 argument was mainly technical, and turned on the distinc- 
 tion between general and special writs ; the only point of 
 principle raised was the alleged invasion of an Englishman's 
 ' privilege of house.' 3 A contemporary article in the ' Boston 
 Gazette,' very probably from the pen of Otis himself, expressly 
 
 1 Franklin's Works, vii. 391-394. 'I know not what bounds the 
 Farmer ' Dickenson, Author of Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania 
 ' sets to the Power he acknowledges in Parliament to regulate the trade of 
 the colonies. ... In my opinion the grievance is that Britain forbids 
 us to buy manufactures from any other country. This she does, however, 
 in virtue of her allowed right to regulate the commerce of the whole 
 empire, allowed I mean by the Farmer, though I think whoever would 
 dispute that right might stand on firmer ground.' 
 
 2 History of England, iii. 304. 
 
 3 The literary history of the matter would be comic had it not been 
 so serious in its consequences. The whole matter was cleared up in 1865,
 
 AMEEICAN SMUGGLING 357 
 
 distinguishes between the policy of issuing writs of assistance 
 and ' all just restraints of the laws of trade.' 
 
 by Mr. Justice Gray (now Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ; 
 formerly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts), in the 
 elaborate discussion of Writs of Assistance which he contributed as an 
 Appendix to Quincey's Massachusetts Reports, 1J61-1J72 ; but it was 
 some time before the significance of his work was perceived by popular 
 writers. 
 
 Adams's contemporary account will be found in his Works, ii. 523 
 (reprinted by Hart, Contemporaries, ii. 375) ; the original notes, taken in 
 court, upon which the account was based, have been reproduced by 
 Gray, op. cit. p. 469. 
 
 Fifty-seven years later Adams was asked by William Tudor to give 
 him an account of the speech of Otis, with a view to a Life of Otis, which 
 he proposed to write. Adams modestly replied that he could not reproduce 
 from memory ' an argument of four or five hours ; ' but as ' some of the 
 heads of his discourse ' were ' indelibly imprinted ' on his mind, he 
 would endeavour to ' give some very short hints on them.' It is almost 
 incredible, but true, that this is followed by eight-and-thirty pages of 
 supposed reminiscence, including an elaborate account and criticism of 
 the Acts of Trade, beginning with an exposition of the rights of man in a 
 state of nature, and ending with the reproaches which his hero hurled 
 at the English ' nation, parliaments, and kings ' for their ' injustice, 
 ungenerosity, ingratitude, cruelty, and perfidy in all their conduct 
 towards this country.' (Works, x. 314-362.) 
 
 So extraordinary a memory was too much even for his grandson and 
 editor, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, and he felt moved to make this 
 entertaining remark : ' By comparison of this sketch of Mr. Otis's speech 
 with that taken at the time, as well as with Mr. Otis's published writings, 
 it is difficult to resist the belief that Mr. Adams insensibly infused into 
 this work much of the learning and of the breadth of views belonging to 
 himself. It looks a little as Raphael's labour might be supposed to look, 
 if he had undertaken to show how Perugino painted.' (Ibid. 362 n.) Mr. 
 Justice Gray, in less flowery language, describes Adams's ' elaborate 
 narrative ' as ' rather a recollection of the sentiments of the colonists 
 between 1761 and 1766 ; ' I should myself be inclined to give an even 
 later date. 
 
 As soon as these letters were printed in 1856 the untrustworthy 
 character of the account was at once apparent to every one who read 
 them. But, unfortunately, Tudor had already printed a summary of 
 Adams's lucubrations as an abstract of the speech of Otis, in his Life of 
 Otis, published in 1823, and thereby given wide currency to the story. 
 And it is this work from which Mr. Lecky has obtained his information,
 
 358 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 I have sometimes heard it asked, especially by English 
 readers under the influence of Mr. Lecky and the late Sir 
 John Seeley, ' If the Acts of Trade were not felt to be a 
 grievance before the attempt to enforce the Molasses Act and 
 to raise a revenue for the Crown, what was the cause of the 
 American Eevolution ? ' Well, there were a number of 
 causes of discontent in various parts of the country, each 
 of which is now being allotted its share in bringing about the 
 collision. I have already referred ' to the irritation of the 
 New England lumbermen at the attempt to preserve the best 
 mast trees for the royal navy ; 2 and to the alarm of the New 
 England ministers at the supposed encroachments of the 
 English Church. It is the merit of Mr. Mellen Chamberlain 
 to have shown the importance of this latter element in the 
 problem. It explains the fact, to which he calls attention, 
 that 'the clergy of New England, alone of all the pro- 
 fessional or propertied classes, arrayed themselves on the 
 popular side.' 3 To these causes has been lately added, by 
 that indefatigable student of the tangled currency history of 
 Massachusetts, Mr. Andrew McFarland Davis, the action 
 of the home government in suppressing the Land Bank. The 
 legislation of the English parliament was, indeed, as he 
 shows, passed in answer to the appeals of ' the capitalists 
 and intelligent business men ' of the province. Yet the 
 anger which it aroused is sufficient, in his judgment, to 
 
 and which he speaks of as ' a remarkable work from which I have 
 derived much assistance ' ! (History of England, iii. 304 n. 1). 
 
 1 Supra p. 333. 
 
 2 For this see Miss E. L. Lord, Industrial Experiments in the 
 British Colonies, pp. 101-123. 
 
 3 See the paper reprinted in John Adams, with Oilier Essays (1899), 
 pp. 20-35. Some account of the action of the English ecclesiastical 
 authorities and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which 
 caused so much alarm, may be found in a paper by Mr. A. L. Cross, in 
 the Report of tJie Am. Hist. Assoc., 1896, i. 231. It is understood that 
 a more considerable work on the subject may shortly be expected from 
 the same hand. The anxiety of the English authorities to avoid giving 
 offence, and their utter failure to escape criticism, may readily be seen in 
 the documents reprinted in Hart, Contemporaries, ii. pp. 289, 418,
 
 AMEKICAN SMUGGLING 359 
 
 explain ' the sympathy of the agricultural community ' with 
 the revolutionary cause. He cites with approval the obser- 
 vation of John Adams, that ' the Act to destroy the Land 
 Bank scheme raised a greater ferment in the province than 
 the Stamp Act did ; ' and he throws this curious sidelight on 
 the character of the other Adams : 
 
 As we look over the list of Directors of the Land Bank we see 
 the name of Samuel Adams, and in later Eeports of Committees 
 his estate is classed among the delinquents. It is known that the 
 harassing proceedings taken against the estate of the father were 
 a source of annoyance to the son, whose prominence in the political 
 affairs of the Province just before the Revolution has made us 
 familiar with the name. The defiance by the latter of the Sheriff 
 who was trying to levy upon his father's estate, was published in 
 the News-letter in 1758. Who shall measure the effect of these 
 proceedings upon the mind of the future inspirer of the Committees 
 of Correspondence the indefatigable and persistent leader in the 
 revolutionary movement ? ' 
 
 1 ' The Currency and Provincial Politics ' (reprinted from Publica- 
 tions of tlie Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. vi. 1900), pp. 15-17. 
 It may be well to add a list here of Mr. Davis's previous writings on 
 colonial currency : 
 
 1. ' Provincial Banks : Land and Silver,' Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. iii. 
 1895. 
 
 2. ' Legislation and Litigation connected with the Land Bank of 
 1740,' Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc. 1896. 
 
 3. ' Currency Discussion in Massachusetts in the Eighteenth Century,' 
 Quarterly Journal of Economics, xi. 1896 and 1897. 
 
 4. ' The General Court and Land Bank Litigants,' Proc. Am. Antiq. 
 Soc. 1897. 
 
 5. ' Certain Considerations touching the Coinage of the Colony and 
 the Public Bills of Credit of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay,' 
 Proc. Am. Academy of Arts and Sciences, xxxii. 1898. 
 
 6. ' A Connecticut Land Bank of the Eighteenth Century,' Quarterly 
 Journ. of Economics, xiii. 1898. 
 
 7. ' A Search for a Pamphlet by Governor Hutchinson,' Proc. Mass. 
 Hist. Soc. 1899. 
 
 8. ' The Massachusetts Bay Currency, 1690-1750,' Proc. Am. Antiq. 
 Soc. 1899. 
 
 9. ' Previous Legislation,' Publ. Col. Soc. Mass. vi. 1899.
 
 360 ENGLAND AND AMEEICA, 1660-1760 
 
 Further research will probably reveal causes of discontent 
 special to the Middle and Southern Provinces. But to 
 assign the Eevolution to any one particular grievance, even 
 were it Taxation without Eepresentation, or to any number 
 of grievances, is altogether too superficial a view of the 
 event. It was the inevitable outcome of the conditions; 
 and the policy of England, even had it been guided by the 
 supremest wisdom and the tenderest regard for the feelings 
 of the colonials, could only have postponed the schism. For 
 it was the expression of that drifting-apart which mere 
 geographical separation was in that age bound to produce, 
 and of that determination to manage their own affairs which 
 centuries of self-government had implanted in Englishmen on 
 both sides of the water. Those of us who have lived in any of 
 the greater English colonies of our own time are aware that 
 the real danger to the imperial tie lies not in the stupidity of 
 Downing Street, much as it may deserve blame but in the 
 want of mutual knowledge and of common interests of every- 
 day life. And if, even with the present, enormously greater, 
 ease of communication, the permanent cohesion of the British 
 Empire is still a matter rather of hope than of assurance, no 
 1 old colonial system ' is necessary to explain why one of its 
 distant members fell away from it a hundred and forty 
 years ago.
 
 INDUSTRIAL 
 ORGANISATION 
 
 THE CANADIAN SUGAE COMBINE 1 
 
 MY purpose in the present paper is to examine one, but that 
 one of the two most important, of the combinations dealt 
 with in the recent Eeport. With two preliminary remarks, I 
 will plunge into the midst of the subject. The first is, that 
 my own bias when I began to examine the subject was 
 strongly against all such combinations of trades, and that I 
 had been strengthened in that feeling by a recent vigorous 
 article on American and Canadian Trusts and Combines by 
 Professor Andrews, of Cornell, in the ' Quarterly Journal of 
 Economics.' The second is, that while I shall put before 
 you some considerations which may lead us to take a more 
 charitable view of the Sugar Combine than is usual, I do not 
 
 1 [The following paper was written in the spring of 1889, to be read 
 before a small private society in Toronto, and was printed in the 
 University Quarterly Review (Toronto), February 1890. Although I am 
 unable to bring the account ' up to date,' this paper may still prove of 
 some interest as a description of a typical form of industrial combina- 
 tion. It is based upon the Report of a Select Committee of the Canadian 
 House of Commons, dated May 16, 1888. I may add that the publica- 
 tion of this paper gave rise in some quarters to the assertion that I had 
 been ' bought by the Combine,' in others to the conviction that I wrote 
 under direct inspiration of the Devil 1]
 
 362 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 wish to be regarded as defending every sort of combination ; 
 for though there are forces at work which tend naturally in 
 the direction of such methods of industrial organisation, 
 these methods are obviously full of dangers to the com- 
 munity. It must be remembered that I am here dealing 
 only with a small part of a great subject. 
 
 Let me first ask your patience while I give you an outline 
 of the external history of the Canadian association ; and then 
 we will turn to some of the economic considerations which 
 the subject suggests. 
 
 It appears that it is the practice with the vast majority 
 of retail grocers in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec to 
 buy their wares not directly from the various producers, but 
 from middle-men, known as ' wholesale grocers.' All these 
 wholesale grocers, with, as far as I can learn, only four 
 exceptions out of eighty-eight two firms in Montreal, and 
 one each in Quebec and Toronto have united in making, 
 and in maintaining, since April, 1887, a certain agreement 
 with the Canadian sugar refiners ; who, owing to the present 
 tariff, possess what is, practically, a monopoly of the Canadian 
 market. They pledge themselves, in selling to retail grocers 
 those grades of sugar which form the staple demand in that 
 commodity, to make neither less nor more than a fixed 
 advance on refiners' prices. In return, the refiners promise 
 to charge such wholesale grocers as wish to buy from them, 
 but will not conform to the arrangement as to the prices just 
 mentioned, a price higher, by a certain fixed amount, than 
 that which they charge to grocers in the combination ; and 
 also to refuse to allow them the ordinary trade discount : so 
 that sugar costs the non-combiner some thirty cents per 
 hundred pounds more than it costs the combiner. ' There is 
 no evidence,' says the Eeport, ' of any combinations among 
 the refiners to fix uniform prices at which they should sell.' 
 The Eeport does not point out, as it might, that so far as 
 this is true it is not due to any superior sense of public duty 
 on the part of the refiners, but to the fact that circumstances 
 already give them the advantages of a combine. There are 
 but four refineries in Canada the Canada Sugar Eefineryat
 
 CANADA 363 
 
 Montreal, the St. Lawrence Befinery, a refinery at Moncton, 
 New Brunswick, and another at Halifax. The first of these 
 has much the largest capital, plant, and production ; the 
 refineries in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are at some 
 disadvantage in the trade of Quebec and Ontario on account 
 of distance ; and I am informed that the Moncton sugar is 
 regarded as of inferior quality. At the time of the inquiry, 
 while the St. Lawrence refinery was temporarily idle, owing 
 to a recent fire, the Canada Sugar Befinery supplied, said the 
 president of the company, perhaps two-thirds of the total 
 output of sugar in the Dominion. One large retail grocer 
 told me that in his opinion 75 per cent, of the sugar used in 
 Toronto was supplied from this refinery. Now it is 
 beginning to be remarked that the existence of possible 
 competitors by no means always implies actual competition 
 in prices. When one undertaking has got possession of the 
 greater part of the market, smaller manufacturers will usually 
 prefer to benefit by the prices it fixes, rather than invite 
 extinction by an attempt to undersell it. Accordingly we 
 find that the Canada Sugar Befinery practically fixes the 
 prices for the whole country. The arrangement is substan- 
 tially as follows : The Secretary of the Wholesale Grocers' 
 Combine goes to the office of the C.S.B. once a week, receives 
 its price list, and then telegraphs it to the wholesale grocers 
 all over the country as the standard upon which they are to 
 make the advances agreed upon. The result is that sugar is 
 purchased at uniform prices at any particular time by all the 
 wholesale men in the combine, and again sold by them at 
 any particular time at uniform prices to all retailers. But, 
 even with this explanation, the remark in the Beport is 
 scarcely accurate ; for there does exist an understanding 
 among refineries to cut down production in equal proportions 
 if the production exceeds the demand, i.e. to prevent a glut 
 in the market and an excessive fall in price. 
 
 The object of the combine was to fix a uniform price at 
 which the wholesale men should sell to retailers. Such an 
 agreement they would have found it impossible to maintain 
 had they not obtained the assistance of the refiners. The
 
 364 INDUSTKIAL OEGANISATION 
 
 refiners agreed to sell on the more favourable terms only to 
 those grocers whose names appeared on a list furnished to 
 them by the secretary of the combine. This gave the combine 
 an easy means of inflicting penalties on those who would 
 not abide by their agreement, viz., by striking them off the 
 list. The four firms who either refused to join or have 
 since withdrawn from the combine, have to balance the 
 pecuniary advantage of selling their sugars cheaper than the 
 other firms in order to secure trade on other articles, against 
 the pecuniary disadvantage of having to pay more for their 
 sugar. Besides this, the combine has struck off its list a 
 number of dealers whose business was wholly or in part 
 retail. This was in deference to the remonstrances of the 
 great mass of the retailers, who urge that all retailers should 
 be placed on the same footing and compelled to purchase 
 from wholesalers. To add the final touch of gloom to the 
 picture, the consumer, the idol of orthodox economists, has 
 suffered from higher prices probably to the extent of a cent 
 a pound. 
 
 But now let us penetrate a little farther back, and seek 
 the causes that led to the combination being set on foot. 
 The reason of course was that the wholesalers thought they 
 were not making sufficient profit on their sugars. This is an 
 opinion which dealers often entertain with respect to their 
 wares ; but in the case of sugar there were peculiar circum- 
 stances which seemed to justify the belief. What is known 
 as cutting prices, i.e. selling at a price which barely covers 
 original cost, was a growing feature in their trade. Whether 
 this was due chiefly to the competition of the wholesale 
 grocers with one another, or to the pressure of the retailers, 
 it is hard to say. Probably it began with the retailers. It 
 is the frequent practice of certain grocers, especially, as I 
 learn, in some of the large stores in the artisan quarters of 
 the town, to offer sugar at an unusually low price ; either 
 on condition that some other article, usually tea, should be 
 bought at the same time, or else merely in the hope of 
 attracting custom. It is obvious that, if they have to pay 
 the same price for their sugar as other grocers, one of four
 
 CANADA 365 
 
 things must happen Either they must be content with a 
 smaller profit than other grocers, which is not likely ; or 
 they must succeed in making so large a business as to be 
 able to turn over their capital more quickly than other 
 grocers, which is seldom likely to be the case ; or the other 
 articles must be either inferior in quality or dearer than 
 those sold elsewhere. Doubtless one or other of these latter 
 alternatives often results, but neither is safe ; and therefore 
 such a grocer will generally turn his attention to getting his 
 sugar cheaper. The same sort of motives will induce whole- 
 sale grocers to meet him halfway to agree to sell sugar at 
 some especially low rate, on condition that he will purchase 
 other goods from them. The next stage is reached when our 
 enterprising store-keeper's cheap sugar gets to be heard of by 
 neighbouring grocers. They turn round on the wholesale 
 men, and demand to have their prices also reduced. As a 
 large retail grocer, doing what we might describe as a highly 
 genteel trade, and certainly under no special temptation to 
 cut prices, said to me : ' I say to the traveller, " Look here ! 
 So-and-so is selling his sugar at such and such a price. He 
 must have got it cheap somewhere, and I intend to have 
 my sugar cheap too." ' 
 
 Such then was the condition of affairs ; what my friend 
 described as ' a go-as-you-please,' which seems to be the 
 politer Canadian equivalent for ' the devil take the hindmost.' 
 This feature of the question is somewhat inadequately touched 
 upon in the Eeport. It says that ' the alleged demoralisation 
 of the sugar trade was but the same condition of this trade 
 as had existed for many years owing to the custom of selling 
 sugar at a low rate of profit.' But no serious attempt was 
 made during the inquiry to show that this unhealthy cutting 
 of prices was not, as the combiners alleged, an increasing 
 evil. Indeed, there are reasons for believing that evils of 
 this sort will in the absence of combination go on increasing. 
 There is a marked tendency for the number of stores to 
 increase more rapidly than population. One effect of the 
 present position of the artisan class, and of the facilities for 
 elementary education, is to tempt the sons of artisans to try
 
 366 INDUSTEIAL OEGANISATION 
 
 to lift themselves into the class of shopkeepers. The same 
 tendency shows itself in the country, where, as I am informed, 
 a quite unnecessary number of stores are started by the 
 ambitious sons of farmers, only to meet with speedy failure. 
 Stores increasing faster than population, the competition 
 among them becomes keener, and the temptation increases 
 to bribe customers by offering them some staple article at a 
 very low price. The same effect is produced by the increasing 
 aggregation of large masses of consumers in towns. With 
 many rivals within a stone's throw, and a large trade 
 possible if he can but attract it, it is no wonder that the 
 grocer looks around for some attraction to offer. 
 
 The sacrifice which the retailer could shift on to the 
 wholesaler, the latter could not escape. As before explained, 
 one refinery practically commands the market ; and it fixes 
 its prices according to the fluctuations in the prices of sugar 
 in America and Europe, so as to be just below what might 
 prompt dealers to import. Under these circumstances the 
 suggestion that an agreement should be made between 
 refiners and wholesalers came from the latter. If ever they 
 had threatened, as they told the commission, not to buy and 
 sell sugar at all unless the refiners would help them to put 
 a stop to cutting, it was a threat they were not very likely to 
 carry out. But evidently there was a very keen dissatisfac- 
 tion among most of the customers of the refiners, and it was 
 natural that each of the refineries should be willing to make 
 the arrangement we have described. 1 Besides, however 
 large might be the market commanded by the Canada 
 Sugar Eefinery, if it had refused to make terms with the 
 wholesale grocers the latter would probably have come to 
 terms with the three other Canadian refiners and have left 
 it in the lurch. It does not appear that the refiners have 
 made use of the combine to secure higher profits for them- 
 selves. It was alleged by some of the witnesses that they 
 had taken advantage of it to lower the quality of the sugar ; 
 but no evidence was offered in support of the charge. 
 
 1 As one of the hostile witnesses said, ' the merchant has no longer the 
 necessity of worrying the refiner on the prices he pays him ' (Report, p. 18).
 
 CANADA 367 
 
 The witnesses examined in opposition to the combine 
 were all either wholesale or retail grocers. The wholesale 
 men, whom we will call Messrs. A and B, 1 both of Montreal, 
 took up the position that they had a right to cut sugar if they 
 pleased, and that the refiners had no right to charge them 
 any more for their sugar because they would not agree to 
 maintain uniform prices. Says Mr. B, ' I maintain the right 
 to conduct the business I have to do with as I think proper ; ' 2 
 and again, ' I have been a long while in business : longer 
 than any of these gentlemen who came to me ; and to be put 
 at the disposal of any committee who might come into my 
 house and say "We will fix the price of this thing" . . . 
 was one of the reasons why I distinctly opposed it. ... 
 I also had a long experience given me to understand that 
 matters of this kind never came to anything. There are 
 always ways of defeating it.' 3 If he once believed it 
 innocuous, he no longer deems it so, but rather ' a conspiracy 
 of a most unlawful and outrageous character.' 'If any 
 British subject had been in the middle of Africa and had 
 been treated in connection with a matter of this sort as we 
 have been treated, it would have been crushed at once by a 
 British fleet sent for the purpose ' 4 a fine figure of speech, 
 which reminds one of Shakspere's reference to the sea 
 coast of Bohemia. 
 
 The other dissentient wholesale grocer, Mr. A, took up 
 the same ground, and expressly said it was to ' the principle 
 of the thing ' that he objected to his being dictated to as to 
 the price at which he should sell his goods. Indeed, he 
 readily confessed that the arrangement did not secure the 
 wholesale man more than a fair profit. 5 He maintained, 
 however, that while they were justified in making an agree- 
 ment among themselves, they were not justified in making 
 one with the refiners. ' The refiners exist by the protection 
 
 1 It is not necessary to introduce the actual names. They can be 
 easily ascertained by any one who will take the trouble to consult the 
 Report. 
 
 2 Report , p. 29. * P. 30. * P. 32. 
 
 5 Pp. 17, 18. Cf. also the evidence of a retail grocer, p. 63.
 
 368 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 which they receive from the people." ' The gild have the 
 right to do their business as they see fit, and the refiners 
 have not that right.' l He sometimes refers to the con- 
 sumer not that he believed the consumer had as yet been 
 injured, but he thought he might be. ' There is nothing to 
 prevent these sugar combinations, which are satisfied with 
 5 per cent, to-day, not being satisfied with 15 per cent, 
 next year.' But he frankly told the committee that it was 
 not in the consumer he was interested, or in the question of 
 right or wrong. 2 What he objected to was his not being 
 allowed to go on cutting prices, a procedure which he thought 
 would be more for his advantage than agreeing to the rates 
 of the association. 
 
 ' Q. Is it not better for a business man to have a decent 
 profit, so long as it is not too much, than to cut and slash 
 into trade ? A. If I thought that were a better way of 
 doing business, I should be a member of the gild. 
 
 ' Q. But so long as the consumer does not suffer ? A. 
 I have told you that my objection to this is on a business 
 stand, not on the moral right or wrong of the agreement ; 
 that as a business man I claim that it is not in favour of our 
 business, and therefore I object to it.' 3 
 
 And in answer to a leading question of the chairman, 
 which gave him a last chance to take up an unselfish attitude : 
 ' Q. As a business matter, you make more by being in a 
 sugar combination than by being out of it? A. I claim 
 that it is better to be out of it, and therefore I object to be 
 (forced ? ) into it. 
 
 ' Q. It does ensure you a profit. A. It might pay me 
 to do my sugar business without a profit.' 4 
 
 The opposition was joined by many of the retail grocers, 
 especially in Quebec and Montreal. Three reasons for 
 objecting to the combine were brought forward by them : 
 (1) that they had to pay more for sugar; (2) that they 
 were hindered from dealing directly with the refineries ; and 
 (3) some of the petitioners just remember to mention that the 
 consumer also has now to pay a higher price. Most of them 
 
 1 Report, p. 18 ; cf. p. 24. 2 Pp. 19, 20. 3 P. 20. 4 P. 23.
 
 CANADA 369 
 
 felt that it was not wise to insist on this last point, for if the 
 consumer paid more it meant that the retail dealer shifted 
 over to him the increased cost, so that in that respect he had 
 little to grumble about. We may readily conjecture that the 
 source of the irritation of some of the retail grocers was the 
 same as of Mr. A the fact that they were hampered in 
 their efforts to secure trade by cutting prices. 
 
 The second grievance, that the combination prevented 
 them from dealing directly with the refineries, was urged 
 chiefly by the Montrealers. They were especially touched 
 by the exclusion, because, having their business near the 
 great refinery, it would pay them to deal directly when it 
 might not pay most retailers elsewhere. It does not appear 
 that any considerable number of retailers had, prior to the 
 combine, been in the habit of buying from the refiner. It 
 has been explained to me, by the grocer to whom I have 
 before referred, that in the days before the combine, sugar 
 was ' cut so low ' by the wholesale men that there was no 
 inducement to the retail men to go to the refinery ; it was 
 only after the combine had been formed and the combiners' 
 prices had gone up, that it became profitable to deal directly 
 with the refiner. I have no doubt that the exclusion bore 
 hardly upon a small number of large storekeepers, or men 
 who were partly wholesale, partly retail ; but it may be 
 noticed that the demand that they should be excluded came, 
 in the first instance, from the great mass of the retailers, and 
 not from the wholesale men. When the list was first drawn 
 up, the refiners caused to be put upon it the names of all 
 those persons who had been in the habit of buying from them 
 in any considerable quantity. Whereupon the associations 
 of retailers remonstrated, and it was to satisfy them that the 
 refiners and wholesale men removed the names of all retail 
 dealers from the list. 
 
 It will be objected, and with truth, that the exclusion of 
 the storekeeper from dealings with the producer means that 
 there shall remain a class of middlemen perpetually quartered 
 upon the public, a class which might conceivably be dispensed 
 with. But it must be noticed that such a class had come 
 
 B B
 
 370 INDUSTKIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 into existence long before the combine: it is the natural 
 product of modem methods of carrying on business; and 
 when the public is aroused to get rid of it, as by such a 
 movement as that of the Co-operative Societies of England, 
 the public is apt not to stop there, but to get rid of the retail 
 storekeeper also. And it is clear from the evidence that the 
 great body of retailers were just as anxious to retain their 
 position between the public and the wholesale men. The 
 retail associations had sent deputations to the wholesale men 
 remonstrating with them for occasionally selling tea and 
 sugar to family customers. Said one of the witnesses : ' I 
 did not individually object,' but yet he joined the deputation 
 on the subject ' in order to give a sort of weight to it.' l Said 
 another : ' My idea is that the retailer should have control of 
 the consumer.' 2 What this might mean is curiously illus- 
 trated by an example referred to in the evidence. The Grey 
 Nunnery in Montreal is apparently supplied direct by the 
 wholesaler. Its consumption is doubtless so considerable 
 that it is convenient to buy in large quantities : nevertheless, 
 the retail grocer feels aggrieved that it is not obliged to come 
 to him and pay him retail prices. 
 
 No retail grocers from Toronto were examined probably 
 because they had tried to form a combine themselves. It 
 was organised at the same time as the wholesale combine, in 
 the spring of 1887, with the object of securing uniformity of 
 retail prices, and preventing underselling. The informant 
 of whom I have already spoken attributed its break-up, after 
 weathering the fruit season of 1887, to the influence of the 
 ' Globe.' 3 ' You see the " Globe " wanted to attack the N.P., 4 
 and so it took up this combines business, and made a great 
 row about it, and some of the men who wanted to get out of 
 it made that an excuse.' ' Well, what is your opinion of 
 
 1 Report, p. 85. 2 P. 61. 
 
 3 [The chief Liberal newspaper of Toronto.] 
 
 4 [The ' National Policy,' the current term for the protectionist 
 policy of the Conservative Government headed by the late Sir John 
 Macdonald.]
 
 CANADA 371 
 
 the wholesale combine, as it is now ? ' I asked as I came 
 away. ' It suits me all right it makes business easier, now 
 I know that nobody can get sugar cheaper than me. Though 
 of course the consumer pays the higher price. But personally 
 I am a free trader and against the N.P., and I think there 
 oughc to be free competition in everything,' His fervour as 
 he made this confession of faith was perhaps a little sus- 
 picious. I am afraid he had an impression that Political 
 Economy enjoined competition as a moral duty, and that it 
 was expedient to conciliate one who was both a professor 
 and a consumer. 
 
 Having seen what the facts are in the case of the sugar 
 combine, let us try to see how they might present themselves 
 to an economist. There are one or two initial misconcep- 
 tions as to the position of the economist which it may be 
 well to clear out of the way. They are so evident that I 
 must apologise for touching upon them at all ; and I would 
 not do so, had I not found that opinions, that few would 
 assent to when nakedly stated, exercise a more or less un- 
 conscious influence when left in comfortable vagueness at 
 the back of the mind. In the first place, then, no modern 
 economist of repute teaches that absolutely free competition 
 either between individuals or between nations is a rule 
 which ought to be observed at all times and places, or even 
 that it has necessarily a claim to be observed at any parti- 
 cular time or place. The modern economist deals with the 
 force of competition in two connections : either as an abstract 
 assumption used for a particular purpose, or as the means 
 best employed in certain cases to reach certain results. 
 First as an assumption : orthodox economists believe that it 
 is useful to obtain certain generalisations, sometimes called 
 ' laws,' about rent, wages, and prices. They argue that it is 
 impossible to take into account all the varying motives which 
 influence men ; that it is better to take one great motive, 
 confessedly of much greater importance than any other, and 
 follow out its consequences ; and then they say that, though 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 the result may not exactly fit every individual case, it is on 
 the whole and roughly speaking true ; so that we may, at 
 any rate, use it as a standard of comparison. Take for 
 instance the question of rent. They say that, given free 
 competition, supposing the landlord insists on the highest 
 rent any one will pay, and the tenant pays as little as he can 
 get the landlord to take, and there are other persons offering 
 to let land, and other persons ready to take the farm if one 
 man will not, and there is no combination on either side, then 
 the rent will be all the surplus produce over and above cost 
 of production (including such average profits as will keep 
 farmers in their occupation). But economists do not say 
 that there ought to be this competition. As individuals they 
 would doubtless in many cases, as in England, think that a 
 landlord is acting in a commendable manner if he does not 
 take all he can ; and even as economists they might point 
 out, as did Mr. Mill in the case of Ireland, that the operation 
 of unrestricted competition had certain disadvantages. 
 
 Secondly, economists point to free competition as the 
 means to be employed in certain circumstances to reach 
 certain results or rather as the means which will secure 
 those results if they are desired. Thus, to take an example 
 which no one I think will controvert in the form I 
 state it. In a new colony, in which agriculture is for 
 the time the most profitable occupation, if what the state 
 wants is the largest possible increase of wealth in the 
 present and near future, then free international com- 
 petition or ' free trade ' (the colony devoting itself to 
 agriculture and exchanging its corn for the manufactures of 
 countries which, for the time, have advantages in manu- 
 facture) will usually bring about that result. But the 
 economist does not commend free trade or free competition 
 absolutely : he only points to it as the means which will 
 tend to a certain end. If the nation does'not desire that end, 
 or does not desire it so strongly as it desires other ends, that 
 particular plan is no longer appropriate. Competition there- 
 fore the unchecked pursuit of self-interest by isolated 
 individuals is, to the economist, like the forces of nature, in
 
 CANADA 373 
 
 itself neither good nor ,bad ; and he studies its effects just 
 as he would study the effects of non-human natural forces. 
 
 Like us, the lightning fires 
 
 Love to have scope and play ; 
 The stream, like us, desires 
 
 An unimpeded way ; 
 Like us, the Libyan wind delights to roam at large. 
 
 Streams will not curb then- pride 
 
 The just man not to entomb, 
 Nor lightnings go aside 
 
 To give his virtues room ; 
 Nor is that wind less rough that blows a good man s barge. 
 
 Nature, with equal mind, 
 
 Sees all her sons at play ; 
 Sees man control the wind, 
 
 The wind sweep man away ; 
 Allows the proudly riding and the foundering bark. 
 
 So is it with competition. It gave England, fifty years 
 ago, cheap cloth and cheap cotton ; it gave it also a huge, 
 miserable, and discontented working population that brought 
 it to the verge of a social revolution. It gives us to-day, in 
 London, cheap ready-made clothes ; and on the other side 
 the sweating system. 
 
 But economists did not always hold this view. Partly 
 owing to various practical evils around them due to govern- 
 mental action, partly owing to the philosophy of the time 
 which believed in a laio of nature which, transcending all 
 human institutions, worked out its beneficent results when 
 men were left to themselves, Adam Smith, and most of his 
 successors down to about 1848, believed not only that free 
 competition was the best way to arrive at certain ends, not 
 only that if there were free competition certain results would 
 follow, but also that there ought to be free competition. Not 
 only that if there were free competition, wages and prices 
 would be so and so, but that they ought not to be regulated
 
 374 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 by anything else. Even among thoughtful people of the 
 middle class who were not manufacturers, there was a sort 
 of idea that workmen, merely in agreeing together not to work 
 except at a certain wage, were doing something both stupid 
 and wicked. As has been wittily said, they felt 'as if an attempt 
 to alter the rate of wages by combination of workmen was 
 like an attempt to alter the weight of the air by tampering 
 with barometers.' l With all reasonable economists this 
 feeling has long ago passed away. But the result of all this 
 insistence for almost a century upon the idea of free competi- 
 tion has been to create an impression in the public mind that 
 any interference with competition is itself wicked. Even 
 when particular classes and individuals make an exception 
 for themselves, they are honestly inclined to believe that the 
 rule holds good in the case of every one else. Traces of this 
 idea, from which scientific support has long been withdrawn, 
 are still continually cropping up for instance, in Mr. 
 Wallace's bill, as originally presented to the Dominion 
 Parliament, when it proposed to declare guilty of a mis- 
 demeanour every person who made agreement with any 
 other person for ' restricting competition in the production, 
 manufacture, sale, or transportation ' of ' any commodity 
 which is an object of trade ' ! 
 
 Recognising, then, that competition is in itself neither 
 good nor bad, but may be either, what are the evil or bene- 
 ficial features of the sugar combine, as it now exists ? The 
 first result is an increase of roughly one cent per pound 
 in the price of standard white granulated sugar. This 
 sugar is not much used by the working classes, who use 
 yellow sugar instead. We probably should not err in sup- 
 posing that the Ontarian bricklayer, who according to the 
 tables of the Bureau of Industry earns about ,$500 a year 
 and whose cost of living is, according to the same authority, 
 $400, represents the poorest class of those who are regular 
 purchasers of this sugar for family use. I am informed by a 
 competent housewife, that with a couple of children of school 
 
 1 Stephen's History of Criminal Law, iii. 211.
 
 CANADA 375 
 
 age a family would get on well enough with two pounds a 
 week. The combine means to them, therefore, an increased 
 expenditure of 100 cents a year = $1, i.e. an increase from 
 $400 to $401, or per cent. The burden upon the skilled- 
 artisan class would be much heavier of course than that upon 
 classes enjoying a larger income for the consumption of 
 sugar by no means increases in the same proportion as 
 income. A family of the professional class, spending $2,000 
 a year, and consuming the lavish amount of four pounds 
 weekly, would find its expenditure increased by one tenth of 
 1 per cent. 
 
 Secondly, it has prevented some four or five wholesale 
 grocers, who refused to join the combination, from getting 
 rich quite so soon as they otherwise might. The Eeport 
 says that ' thus establishments, which, in some cases, are 
 the growth of half a century of toil and honourable dealing, 
 and rich in valuable experience and public confidence, are 
 threatened with extinction.' The evidence seems hardly to 
 warrant this appeal to our sympathies. One of the large 
 firms that have stood out declares that its sugar now costs it 
 $1,000 a year more than before ; while the combiners reply 
 that it cannot prove an increase of more than $500. But it 
 is not so much of the loss on sugar that this firm com- 
 plains, as of its no longer being able to ' cut sugars ' and 
 so attract business. 
 
 This leads us to a third result and one not quite so clear 
 on the surface. There can be no doubt that there is a 
 tendency under unrestricted competition for businesses 
 carried on with large capitals to drive lesser undertakings 
 out of the field. It is unnecessary to point out why 
 this is so, or the way in which it is taking place all around 
 us. But, evidently, the practice of cutting assists this 
 tendency in the grocery business, both wholesale and retail. 
 A wholesale grocer with a large capital can better afford to 
 sell sugar at a sacrifice and so to win custom than a 
 man with a smaller capital ; and the same is true in the 
 retail trade. So far, therefore, as uniformity of prices 
 has been secured, the average wholesale man and the
 
 376 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 average retailer have been to some degree protected against 
 the big man. To those who see one of the greatest dangers 
 of modern economic development in the destruction of the 
 trading and manufacturing middle class and the growth on 
 its ruins of a few colossal businesses, the tendency of the 
 combine will, in this respect, seem conservative in the best 
 sense of the word. 
 
 Fourthly, by making it difficult to offer an attraction in 
 cheap sugar, it has put some slight obstacle in the way of the 
 excessive multiplication of little shops. 
 
 Fifthly, the arrangement has introduced greater steadi- 
 ness in the business of wholesaler and retailer, with the 
 result of lessening jealousy and suspicion all round. Nowa- 
 days we are very apt to worship the consumer ; with but 
 little thought of the worry and laceration of spirit, and of 
 the vulgarisation of business, which are involved in the per- 
 petual effort of the retailer to win custom by outselling his 
 fellow. But the benefit does not stop with the dealer him- 
 self. I know not how the business of wholesale grocers is 
 conducted, but I imagine they employ a few score clerks, 
 warehousemen, porters, and carters, and some of these 
 probably find themselves in the enjoyment of more regular 
 and continuous employment than if their masters were still 
 cutting one another's throats. 
 
 But I must confess, finally, that there does seem some 
 force in the argument that though the wholesalers have not 
 obtained too high profits as yet, the combination may pos- 
 sibly enable them to exact too high a price by-and-by. If 
 all the wholesalers should combine, this might take place : 
 though they would find it inexpedient to make any very 
 considerable increase of price, as it would certainly lead to 
 the diminution of demand in a much greater ratio. If I 
 have spoken somewhat slightingly of Messrs. A and B in 
 the earlier part of this paper, in the conviction that they have 
 possibly received from others more than their due share of 
 commiseration, I will make my apology to them by express- 
 ing the confident anticipation that they will save us by their 
 enterprise from this contingency. Even as things are now,
 
 CANADA 377 
 
 it almost pays a man to import his sugar. If prices went 
 up very little more, without any change in the existing tariff, 
 it would become profitable. 
 
 After these criticisms it will be seen that in my opinion 
 it is impossible wholly to condemn or wholly to praise the 
 sugar combine. The economist will stand by, and see what 
 takes place.
 
 378 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 AMEEICAN TKUSTS l 
 
 ALTHOUGH a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, I have, for 
 the last few years, been entrusted with a share in the 
 teaching work of a great American university ; and, before 
 that, I acted for some time in a like capacity in one of the 
 universities of Canada, a country whose economic conditions 
 present in some respects a close similarity to those of the 
 neighbouring republic. It has accordingly been suggested 
 that some American topic would not be inappropriate as 
 my theme this evening ; and it has even been intimated that 
 some observations on the subject of ' Trusts,' which are now 
 engaging so much attention on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 would not be unwelcome to this assembly. 
 
 I cannot, indeed, profess to have myself investigated in 
 any detail the actual working of any of the great organisa- 
 tions known by that name. My sources of information are 
 the books and articles accessible to any student of economics. 
 But to have lived for ten years in the economic and psycho- 
 logical atmosphere of America may perhaps enable one, in 
 some measure, to disentangle the larger and deeper forces 
 which are at work from the merely superficial; and 
 American phenomena may, perhaps, gain in significance 
 when they are compared with like movements on this side of 
 the Atlantic. I shall limit my field by omitting from con- 
 sideration combinations or monopolies of a purely commercial 
 or speculative character, like the recent Leiter corner in 
 
 1 [An Address at the Annual Dinner of the British Economic Associa- 
 tion, on March 22, 1899 ; printed in the Economic Journal, June 1899.]
 
 AMEEICA 379 
 
 wheat, important as they are ; and I shall confine myself to 
 industrial combinations combinations, that is, entered into 
 by companies or individuals themselves engaged in pro- 
 duction. 
 
 A dozen years ago the American public suddenly awoke 
 to the fact that tha.. supply of some of the commodities of 
 commonest use had come to be controlled by a number of 
 organisations which seemed to be able to fix prices without 
 regard to competition. Two or three of the largest and 
 most conspicuous had assumed the peculiar juridical form, 
 to be described later, known as a ' Trust.' The word at once 
 seized upon the popular imagination ; it soon drove out all 
 rivals from everyday speech, such as ' Combine ; ' and it 
 has continued to be commonly used for all capitalistic com- 
 binations of a supposed monopolistic tendency, whether they 
 take that peculiar legal form or no. The discovery of their 
 existence led to a great outcry. A popular demand arose 
 that the several governments of the States and of the Union 
 should enforce what the lawyers declared to be the principles 
 of the common law with regard to conspiracy in restraint of 
 trade ; and that, if this proved insufficient, new legislation 
 should be enacted distinctly declaring the formation of such 
 combinations a criminal offence. Anti-Trust laws were 
 passed by some twelve or more State legislatures ; and in 
 1890 by the United States Congress itself with regard to 
 inter-state commerce, which alone falls within its powers. 
 
 In the commercial crisis of 1893 more than one of the 
 so-called Trusts came to grief ; and the dull and stagnant 
 years which followed were not propitious to large enterprises. 
 Moreover, the Venezuelan Message, the Silver campaign, and 
 more recently the Cuban question, culminating in the war 
 with Spain, gave people other things to think about. But 
 now, in the new wave of business confidence which is passing 
 over the country, there is a fresh movement on the part of 
 capitalists engaged in industry towards far-reaching, all- 
 embracing combinations. Telegraphic reports tell us on this 
 side of the water that hardly a day passes without the 
 formation of some new Trust ; and yet it is undoubtedly the
 
 380 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 case that, in the original and exact sense of the word, there 
 is not to-day a single Trust in America. 
 
 For the Trust properly so called, was nothing but an 
 easy legal mechanism for arriving at an end which could 
 equally well, though with somewhat more difficulty, be 
 achieved by other means. It was the invention in 1882, so 
 it is said, of the presiding genius of the greatest of all the 
 organisations, the Standard Oil Trust, viz. Mr. Rockefeller ; 
 and it was simply this. The shareholders of a number of 
 joint-stock companies all handed over their stock, and with 
 it their voting powers, to a small board of trustees, receiving 
 in return certificates representing the amount deposited. 
 Externally each company, or 'corporation,' retained its 
 independent constitution ; but henceforth its management 
 was in the hands of the trustees, who acted nominally 
 on behalf of the shareholders of that particular company, 
 but really directed the operations of all the establishments 
 according to a general plan. 
 
 In spite of the ability of ' corporation lawyers,' and the 
 extreme deliberation with which the State-Attorneys and 
 Attorneys-General set about enforcing the law, it was soon 
 apparent that this particular form of organisation could not 
 be maintained. It was held by the courts that, even on the 
 principles of the common law, the several bodies of share- 
 holders were acting ultra vires in handing over to trustees 
 powers which, in the intention of their charters of incor- 
 poration, they were to exercise themselves. Besides, it might 
 save the managers of the undertakings some annoyance to 
 bow before the storm ; and, accordingly, one after another of 
 the great combinations declared that they had abandoned 
 their Trust, that the several companies had regained their 
 old independence, and that the public had nothing further 
 to fear. But, economically, the situation in the case of most 
 of the larger combinations is substantially unchanged ; where 
 changed at all, it is only in the direction of consolidation 
 and amalgamation. In the case of the Standard Oil there 
 has been no Trust since 1892 ; but the nine persons who 
 once directed operations as trustees now do precisely the
 
 AMEEICA 381 
 
 same in virtue of the fact that one or other of them has, 
 somehow or other, become the owner of a majority of shares 
 in every one of the nominally independent companies. In 
 other cases, notably that of the Sugar Trust, there has been 
 an actual amalgamation of the constituent corporations in 
 one enormous new company. In another instance, that of 
 the Steel Eail Pool not so close-knit an arrangement as 
 a Trust, but aiming at the same end the break-up of 
 the pool, to which the new legislation in some measure con- 
 tributed, has enabled one of its members, Mr. Carnegie, to 
 swallow up or destroy many of his old Pennsylvania 
 associates, and to dominate, though not yet to monopolise, 
 the market by an alliance with Mr. Eockefeller, who controls 
 the mining region of Lake Superior. 1 That is to say, the 
 attempt to enforce the supposed common law and the 
 invention of new penalties in obedience to popular outcry 
 have resulted in making it impossible for a number of 
 companies or individuals to enter into formal contracts of 
 certain particular kinds to restrict production and fix prices. 
 They cannot prevent either a private conversation among a 
 number of gentlemen, or a voluntary amalgamation of busi- 
 nesses, or a victory of a large producer over a smaller one 
 through the mere preponderance of capital resources. What 
 we have to look at, therefore, in the United States is not a 
 particular form of association, but all such capitalistic 
 monopolies or (where the control of supply does not 
 amount to a monopoly) all such market-dominations as 
 are able so far to govern supply as to have the power of 
 fixing prices without any immediate fear of competition, either , 
 domestic or (thanks to the tariff wall) foreign. The mere 
 external shape of the capitalistic edifice is of very small 
 importance. 
 
 Now it is very clear, in the first place, that such 
 monopolies or market-dominations in the United States are 
 
 1 It is now (May, 1899) being stated in the American journals one day 
 and denied the next, that a ' consolidation ' of ' the entire iron and steel 
 trade ' in the United States has lately been effected by the diplomacy of 
 the Carnegie Company.
 
 382 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 no merely temporary and ephemeral phenomena. Of course 
 a good many attempts to secure such power have broken 
 down sooner or later, and ruined their promoters ; but, on 
 the whole, there is a distinct tendency towards the extension 
 either of combination or of more or less complete amalgama- 
 tion of interests to more and more branches of industry, as 
 well as toward the growing solidification of that increasing 
 number of combinations which manage to survive. The 
 development is, however, a good deal slower it has more 
 complexity, and also more inevitableness, so to speak, in its 
 movement than the public commonly suppose. A case in 
 which a number of businesses, really competing against one 
 another for a considerable period, are suddenly brought into 
 a successful combination by the business genius of one man 
 such a case, I will venture to say, is almost unknown. 
 Almost every one of the large combinations has behind it a 
 significant history of fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years' 
 duration ; a history first of flourishing business, then of cut- 
 throat competition, and then of depression, and finally of 
 recuperation, and so on da capo ; a history of alliances and 
 understandings and agreements, made time after time, and 
 renewed afresh after each failure. The newspapers report 
 just now that Mr. Pierpont Morgan has secured the assent 
 of the English stockholders of the Eeading Eailroad to a 
 combination of all the eastern railroads owning coal-mines. 
 But if he secures his object, it will be but the outcome of a 
 tendency in anthracite coal mining which began to show 
 itself as long ago as 1872, and of a series of attempts which 
 have come nearer and nearer to success as the years have 
 gone on. The student of the operation of the force of self- 
 interest under modern conditions of production on a large 
 scale can find no more instructive reading than the series of 
 monographs which American economists and their pupils 
 have devoted to the history of a number of the monopolised 
 industries. 
 
 In the next place, the Trusts must not be looked upon 
 as altogether exceptional or as sharply distinguished from 
 the rest of the operations of the American business world.
 
 AMEEICA 383 
 
 There is, indeed, a vast amount of direct competition of the 
 most old-fashioned type still to be found in the country. 
 Putting on one side the small industries and those that have 
 not yet passed into the factory or mill form, there are still 
 whole departments of manufacture in which, at any rate on 
 the surface, there appears little tendency towards combina- 
 tion, e.g. the whole group of textiles. 1 Nevertheless the 
 movement towards some mitigation of the influence of 
 competition in the determination of price is very widespread 
 in American industry. It is one of the chief directions in 
 which the force of self-interest, which but recently made 
 only for individualist competition, is now making itself felt ; 
 and it takes a hundred forms, varying in durability and 
 thoroughness. The Trusts represent but the culmination 
 of this movement ; and to isolate them, as is so often done, 
 from the general economic environment, is to give a 
 thoroughly false idea of their real significance. 
 
 This last consideration has a direct bearing on the ques- 
 tion of the ' origin ' or ' causes ' of the ' Trust ' movement. 
 There are economists who, not content with pointing out the 
 part which competition has hitherto played and still plays, 
 exhibit a sort of jealous regard for its future vitality ; and 
 these are very much inclined to argue away the significance 
 of American Trusts, and to attribute them to peculiar local 
 political conditions. Thus one recent French observer con- 
 cludes, to his own satisfaction, that Trusts have arisen in 
 the United States because the Government of that country 
 has ' either done too little or too much ; ' too little, in the 
 control of railways, so enabling, e.g., the Standard Oil people 
 to crush their rivals by securing preferential rates ; too much, 
 by the adoption of a protective policy which has sheltered, 
 e.g., the Sugar Trust and the Steel Eail Pool, from foreign 
 competition. His implication is, that monopolies will not 
 
 1 This is no longer true of all branches of the group. According to 
 the New York Commercial Bulletin for April 25, 1899, the United States 
 Worsted Company, recently incorporated, has ' options on about thirty- 
 five worsted yarn mills, which will absolutely control the worsted yarn 
 industry of the country.'
 
 384 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 arise where the Government hits the happy mean, and never 
 strays from the narrow path. This is cold comfort, if true. 
 
 The argument as to protection has, prima facie, a good 
 deal to be said for it. It is confirmed by the circumstance 
 that precisely those combinations which have recently in 
 Europe attracted the most attention curiously enough, in 
 two of the same industries as in America the iron and 
 sugar combinations in Austria-Hungary, have likewise been 
 protected by a high tariff. Evidently protection has often 
 been an important favouring and accelerating condition. 
 But as a fundamental explanation it cannot, I am sure, 
 satisfy any one who is acquainted with what I have ventured 
 to call ' the economic atmosphere ' of the United States. 
 
 It is a commonplace but none the less true on that 
 account that the ' great industry ' of modern times, so long 
 as it is carried on under conditions of individualist compe- 
 tition, has certain inevitable consequences of the gravest 
 character. When a number of separate undertakings, not 
 only without concert, but on the contrary in rivalry one with 
 another, are engaged in supplying commodities or services to 
 a market difficult completely to survey and subject to fluctua- 
 tion, then there are bound to be, from time to time, periods 
 of over-production, with its consequences in depression of 
 trade, diminution of employment, suspension of production, 
 and destruction of capital. Crises may, it is true, be occa- 
 sioned by bad harvests, by international complications, by 
 unsatisfactory conditions of currency, and even by stock- 
 jobbing ; but, even if all these causes could be removed, 
 crises would still be produced, as it were automatically, by 
 the ' normal ' working of the competitive system. It is also 
 now generally recognised American economists treating of 
 the Eailroad problem have been among the first to point this 
 out that this tendency to periodical crises, due to a want of 
 coincidence between supply and demand, has been reinforced 
 by the increasing use of fixed capital. Time was that when 
 the profits were out, the business would die. But under- 
 takings employing a large amount of fixed capital, of which the 
 value would be seriously impaired or even destroyed by a
 
 AMEEICA 385 
 
 period of disuse, do not now go out of the field of competition 
 when they cease to obtain what the economists used to call 
 ' the average rate of profit.' They usually remain in operation 
 for years after, and reduce their charges, if necessary to 
 obtain business, so long as they can earn anything, however 
 little, above prime cost, and obtain any contribution whatever 
 towards their fixed charges. And thus competition becomes 
 more and more acute ; the agony of rate wars and ' cut 
 prices ' more protracted ; the ill effects more widespread, 
 and the recovery more slow. 
 
 All this is illustrated on a vast scale in the United States. 
 Fifty years ago England was ' the classic home of the great 
 industry ; ' to-day it is certainly America that occupies that 
 position. The home market is far larger ; it is constituted 
 by a population living on the whole more comfortably, 
 and able to furnish a stronger ' effective ' demand ; both 
 capital and labour are more mobile ; and, finally, but quite as 
 important as any other consideration, the individualist spirit 
 is more generally diffused and more deeply penetrating. 
 No country ever before offered such opportunities for making 
 a fortune to those who can manage to attract towards them- 
 selves the purchasing power of the public. Accordingly, all the 
 phenomena resulting from competitive production on a large 
 scale have been exhibited in America with an intensity and a 
 reverberating publicity such as was never known before. 
 And the Trusts are, in the main, simply an attempt to lessen 
 and, if it may be, avert altogether the disastrous and 
 harassing effects of cut-throat competition, after a completer 
 experience of what that competition means than any country 
 has ever been through before. Their formation has, in most 
 instances, followed upon a period of over-production and 
 consequent depression. For the nerves of the American 
 business man have at last revolted and demanded some 
 decently comfortable measure of stability. This, I am con- 
 vinced, is the underlying cause of the movement towards 
 combination, of which the Trusts, as I have already re- 
 marked, are but the culminating examples. 
 
 A word or two as to the effects of the Trusts. In the 
 
 c c
 
 386 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 case most commonly cited, that of the Standard Oil organisa- 
 tion, its formation has been followed chronologically by a 
 pretty continuous fall in prices. Owing to improved methods 
 of refining and of transportation, the public has obtained a 
 very good article at a low price, while the combination has 
 reaped enormous profits. Whether without combination 
 prices would have fallen as low or lower, is a question upon 
 which much has been written, but which I see no way to 
 solve. In some other cases combination has undoubtedly 
 been succeeded by a rise in prices ; but this is as compared 
 with previous periods when, owing to glut or rivalry, prices 
 had fallen very low ; as compared, that is, with a state of 
 things which could not be permanent, and which itself by 
 reaction produced the combination. Of course the Trusts 
 do not carry on business from philanthropic motives ; but 
 the public has a greatly exaggerated idea of their power to 
 determine prices. Their object must be to secure the largest 
 net returns, and they are shrewd enough to see that a large 
 sale at a low price may pay them better than a small sale at 
 a higher price. 
 
 So far as labour is concerned, the formation of a capital- 
 istic combination undoubtedly puts the employers in a 
 position of advantage in the bargaining for wages ; an 
 advantage which can only be neutralised by the formation of 
 a firm combination on the side of the employees. This is 
 often exceedingly difficult to bring about ; and some of the 
 industrial magnates, like Mr. Carnegie, have been very 
 successful in freeing themselves from trade-union pressure. 
 On the other hand must be weighed the consideration that 
 the combinations have, on the whole, increased the stability 
 of industry : and, so far as the workmen's material condition 
 is concerned, continuity of employment and steadiness in the 
 rate of remuneration are really more important than tem- 
 porary high wages. It may be added that, as a matter of fact, 
 most of the greater combinations have had little trouble 
 with their workmen. 
 
 Undoubtedly, however, the success of the combinations 
 tends at present towards the creation of a regime of what
 
 AMERICA 387 
 
 the French call patronage, I know of no attempt in America 
 to bring unions of workmen into the arrangement, giving 
 them a voice in the fixing of prices and using them as 
 additional weapons against manufacturers who break away 
 from the ring. There is, so far, nothing like what has been 
 effected in that most significant and hitherto successful 
 organisation of the Bedstead Manufacturers of Birmingham, 
 or like what was proposed in Sir George Elliot's magnificent 
 scheme for an English Coal Trust. But the great captains 
 of American industry are not all of them mere money- 
 grubbers. Many are in their way industrial statesmen ; and 
 although the business atmosphere of America is not, it must 
 be confessed, at present very congenial to trade unionism, it 
 is not unlikely that they will perceive by-and-by how greatly 
 they might strengthen their position by taking their work- 
 men into their counsels. 
 
 It might be rash to regard the present posture of affairs 
 in America as justifying any large generalisation as to the 
 ultimate issue of industrial development. It seems as if an 
 effective combination were only possible between a compara- 
 tively small number of large businesses ; that is, after con- 
 siderable progress has already been made towards the elimi- 
 nation of the small producer under the operation of the 
 ordinary forces of competition. And such combinations, as 
 we have already seen, have sometimes been but stages 
 towards a completer amalgamation or consolidation. 
 Several may fairly be taken as illustrations of the teaching 
 of Proudhon, that competition is bound to destroy com- 
 petition. We might even add that, in the case of the 
 Standard Oil monopoly, the development has already reached 
 a point at which, on the purely economic and administrative 
 side, there could be little objection to the Government 
 taking over the business if only there were a Government 
 politically capable of the task. But, on the other hand, we 
 may observe that many of the combinations, especially the 
 looser confederacies known as 'pools' or 'understandings/ 
 are clearly in the interest of the undertakings of the second 
 rank, and restrain or hamper the greater ones in their efforts to 
 
 c c 2
 
 388 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 win trade from their competitors. They indicate, as has been 
 well said, the existence for the time of a certain equilibrium 
 among the contracting parties, none of which feels itself 
 strong enough to conquer the whole field. 
 
 We may not see our way to prophesy ; but yet we are 
 bound to recognise that these combinations are ' with us ' in 
 America, and that in all probability they will continue for an 
 indefinite period to increase in number and extent. So far 
 as they succeed, they remove the determination of prices out 
 of the range of competition; and the self-interest of the 
 monopolists, though it is some protection, is yet an inadequate 
 protection of the interests of the consumer. For the greatest 
 net returns may be secured by fixing prices at a point con- 
 siderably above what would return an adequate profit. Thus 
 the recent legislative proposals of the Austrian Government 
 are dictated by a belief that certain monopolies, affecting 
 articles of large general consumption, have already lessened 
 the taxability of the population. For a large part of the 
 Austrian revenue is derived from indirect taxes, and the 
 Kartelle by increasing prices have diminished the consumption 
 of the taxed articles. 
 
 The removal of protection from a monopolised commodity 
 has already been adopted as a policy by the Dominion of 
 Canada, and it has been proposed in the United States and 
 elsewhere. It may furnish a temporary and even necessary 
 relief ; but it will not apply to commodities not exposed to 
 foreign competition ; and it will not prevent such interna- 
 tional combinations as that which has been negotiated, if 
 not yet effected, between the Standard Oil Trust and the 
 interests which control the oil fields of the Caucasus and 
 Galicia, or that, to take another example, which seems to have 
 been actually brought about between the English Sewing 
 Cotton Company and the American Thread Company. 
 
 I see nothing for it but that, in countries where the 
 monopolising movement is well under way, the Governments 
 should assume the duty of in some way controlling prices. 
 The principle of public determination of maximum rates and 
 maximum dividends has already been recognised in various
 
 AMEEICA 389 
 
 countries in various directions ; and it will doubtless have 
 to be carried a good deal further. But before this can be 
 done with any chance of tolerable success, any country which 
 thinks of attempting it must provide itself with a fairly 
 efficient administrative service. 
 
 Meantime, in view of contemporary conditions, I venture 
 to think there are two duties incumbent upon the economist. 
 One is to give more thought to the theory of monopoly, and 
 by this I mean more than the study of monopoly as it mani- 
 fests itself in the midst of a society still mainly competitive. 
 I mean rather the anticipation and formulation, by an effort 
 of the economic imagination, of the sort of problems which 
 are likely to arise in a society where prices generally are 
 no longer determined by competition. It may be a result of 
 my own penchant for things mediaeval ; but I cannot help 
 thinking that the economist may soon find himself con- 
 fronted in modern life with some of the ideas underlying the 
 old demand for ' just prices ' and ' reasonable wages ' which 
 he has been accustomed to regard as quite out of place in 
 political economy. When in the great coal strike of a few 
 years ago the men demanded that ' a living wage ' should be 
 treated as a first charge, and that wages should determine 
 prices rather than prices wages, the demand was commonly 
 regarded as obviously foolish. But you may have noticed 
 that the fundamental idea of the successful Birmingham 
 combination, already referred to, is precisely ' the taking out 
 of costs ; ' the idea that prices should never be set lower than 
 the ordinary cost of production, including a fair profit for the 
 entrepreneur and a fair wage for the employe. The subject, 
 I know, is full of enormous difficulties, which every tyro in 
 economics can set forth at a moment's notice. But I do not 
 see how it will be possible, in future attempts on the part of 
 the State to assign maximum prices, to avoid dealing very 
 seriously with ideas of this kind. It will not escape the task 
 even if it does nothing but tax the monopolies ; for to know 
 how heavy a tax can be properly imposed, it must have 
 some notion how much profit the monopolists should be 
 allowed to earn. Long before we reach the socialist state
 
 390 INDUSTEIAL OEGANISATION 
 
 if indeed we ever reach it the fundamental difficulty of 
 socialism, the distribution of the social product without the 
 aid of competition, will have, in some form or other, to be 
 dealt with even by ' the practical politician.' 
 
 And, in the second place, it does seem to me the duty of 
 the economist to ascertain, for the guidance of the public, 
 what the actual conditions are in his own country in the 
 matter of industrial organisation. A promising beginning has 
 been made in this direction in the United States, partly owing 
 to the immediate and burning interest of the subject, partly 
 owing to the abundant, if somewhat uncritical, material 
 presented by the United States' Censuses. There is some 
 useful literature to be found in Germany on Kartelle and 
 Unternehmerverbande, and the movement has its own 
 journal in the Berlin ' Industrie- Zeitung.' Perhaps it is my 
 ignorance of recent economic work in England ; but I 
 confess I should not know where to look for a systematic 
 account of the structure of any of the great English 
 industries of to-day. Formal combinations are probably 
 rare ; and the ill-success of the Salt Union is the standing 
 consolation of those who believe they cannot take root 
 in England. But informal agreements and undertakings 
 are, I should imagine, by no means unknown ; ! and of 
 course the attention of the inquirer, on the look-out for 
 the weakening or elimination of competition, would not 
 be limited to combinations. An amalgamation, like that of 
 the Coats Company in the thread manufacture, or of the 
 Armstrong and Whitworth engineering businesses, 2 might 
 under propitious circumstances have much the same conse- 
 quences. When we know a good deal more than we do at 
 present about the actual facts, then we may be able to judge 
 in some measure how rapidly the elimination of competition 
 
 1 Since writing the above I have noticed the article by Mr. H. W. 
 Macrosty on 'The Growth of Monopoly in British Industry,' in the 
 Contemporary Review for March 1899, which might serve as a point of 
 departure for further investigation. 
 
 2 Or the amalgamation now (May 3, 1899) reported between Bickett, 
 Smith, & Co. and Cory & Son, in the coal trade.
 
 AMEEICA 391 
 
 is progressing; what are the industrial conditions which 
 retard or favour it ; and, in short, how large is the problem 
 we have on our hands. And when he can answer that 
 question, the advice of the economist may perhaps be of 
 some use to the statesman. 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I HAVE thought it best to leave the address as originally 
 written. None of the statutes or judicial decisions of the 
 last year have substantially affected the situation, and the 
 process of consolidation goes steadily forward. But the 
 economic student now has at his disposal (or will have 
 when the volumes, at present obtainable only with difficulty, 
 are put within the reach of the general public) a vast mass of 
 information in the ' Preliminary Eeport on Trusts and In- 
 dustrial Combinations, together with Testimony, Eeview of 
 Evidence, Charts showing Effects on Prices, and Topical 
 Digest,' presented by the Industrial Commission created by 
 Act of Congress in 1898 [Fifty-Sixth Congress, First 
 Session : House of Eepresentatives, Doc. No. 476, Part I. : 
 Washington, 1900]. This contains an elaborate treatise 
 from the pen of Professor Jenks of Cornell upon the Effects 
 of Combination on Prices, and a most useful Digest of 
 Evidence somewhat like that prepared for the English 
 Labour Commission drawn up by Professor Durand of 
 Stanford University. It is accompanied by a volume of 
 1 Statutes and Decisions of Federal, State, and Territorial 
 Law,' compiled under the supervision of Professor Jenks, 
 with a ' Digest of Corporation Laws ' by the well-known 
 legal authority, Mr. F. J. Stimson [Doc. No. 476, Part II.]. 
 The preliminary recommendations of the Commission are 
 directed chiefly to the safeguarding of the interests of 
 investors ; and the paucity of names of any considerable
 
 392 INDUSTEIAL OEGANISATION 
 
 weight among the members of the Commission will probably 
 prevent any serious attention to their utterances. Two 
 passages, however, may well be quoted from the Eeview of 
 Evidence. One is as follows : 
 
 Among the causes which have led to the formation of industrial 
 combinations, most of the witnesses were of opinion that compe- 
 tition, so vigorous that profits of nearly all competing establish- 
 ments were destroyed, is to be given first place. 
 
 The other runs thus : 
 
 Nearly all the combinations whose representatives appeared 
 before the Commission manifest no hostility to labour organisations, 
 but are on the whole inclined to favour them. The Standard Oil 
 Company believes in trade unions. The National Steel Company, 
 the American Steel Hoop Company, the American Tin Plate 
 Company, and the Federal Steel Company, all employ union labour 
 largely, though not exclusively. They deal regularly with the 
 Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, and pay 
 as a rule to the non-union men wages which are substantially based 
 upon the Amalgamated scale. 
 
 Some of the witnesses were of opinion that in case of a conflict 
 between employers and employees the large organisation would have 
 a decided advantage . . . chiefly from the fact that, having a 
 number of establishments in different sections of the country, it 
 would be possible to close two"or three without materially affecting 
 the prosperity of the organisation. . . . Leaders of labour organi- 
 sations have testified that they do not fear the industrial combinations 
 on the ground that has been mentioned. . . . They are further of 
 opinion that if the combinations are able, by virtue of their savings, 
 to increase the profits of their industry, the labourers can perhaps 
 by pressure maintain or increase their wages quite as readily as 
 before the combinations were made. The testimony is practically 
 universal that the combinations have had little or no trouble in the 
 way of strikes. 
 
 And it may be added that Mr. Samuel Gompers, also, 
 the President of the American Federation of Labour, has 
 recently expressed his conviction, in his annual address to 
 the Federation on December 11, 1899, that ' the state is not 
 capable of preventing the development or the natural con-
 
 AMERICA 393 
 
 centration of industry.' After the experience of the last few 
 years he represents organised labour as, naturally enough, 
 looking with apprehension on proposed measures to prevent 
 combination ; since the most considerable effort in that 
 direction, the Act of Congress of 1890, has been directed with 
 much greater effect against combinations of labour than 
 against combinations of capital. 
 
 That the indiscriminating popular antipathy to Trusts is 
 losing some of its force is illustrated by the language of the 
 Trusts Plank in the Eepublican Platform of 1900. It 
 repeats the sweeping language of customary denunciation : 
 
 We condemn all conspiracies and combinations intended to 
 restrict business, to create monopolies, to limit production, or to 
 control prices. 
 
 It makes the usual promises of remedial legislation : 
 
 We favour such legislation as will effectively restrain and pre- 
 vent all such abuses, protect and promote competition, and secure 
 the rights of producers, labourers, and all who are engaged in 
 industry and commerce. 
 
 But it has the courage to preface these well-worn phrases 
 with the following significant sentence : 
 
 We recognise the necessity and propriety of the honest co- 
 operation of capital to meet new business conditions, and espe- 
 cially to extend our rapidly increasing foreign trade. 
 
 The new formula is significant of much in the present 
 temper of the American people.
 
 394 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 ME. SMITH'S 
 NEW TEADES COMBINATION l 
 
 DURING the last seven or eight years a most significant 
 movement has been making headway in business circles in 
 England, especially in the Midlands, around Birmingham 
 a movement which has hitherto hardly attracted in this 
 country all the attention it deserves. A certain Mr. E. J. 
 Smith, evidently a man of original and masterful character, 
 who had made his way up to the position of an employer 
 through all the grades of journeyman, foreman, manager, 
 and traveller, has managed to induce almost all the manufac- 
 turers in his own line of business, the metallic bedstead trade, 
 to form a close combination of an altogether novel type. So 
 successful has this ' Alliance ' proved, and so persuasive has 
 been Mr. Smith's advocacy of his plan as applicable to any 
 industry and a blessing to all concerned, that he has been 
 invited to organise some half a dozen others among the 
 smaller trades on the same lines. Now every few months 
 some fresh combination or other is launched under his 
 auspices. 
 
 All this has not happened without a great amount of 
 opposition from recalcitrant manufacturers, and also of 
 sweeping and bitter criticism in the public press. The edi- 
 tors of the English ' Economic Eeview ' were quick-sighted 
 enough to perceive the possible significance of the movement. 
 
 1 \Tlie New Trades Combination Movement : its Principles, Methods, 
 and Progress, by E. J. Smith ; with an introduction by the Eev. J. 
 Carter, M.A., Bursar of Pusey House, Oxford. (1899.) Reviewed in 
 the Nation, January 18, 1900.]
 
 BIRMINGHAM 395 
 
 Mr. Smith was nothing loth to appeal to economists, and 
 contributed a series of articles in explanation of his plan, the 
 first on its general principles, the others on its relation to 
 the workmen, to the foreign competitor, and to the consumer, 
 respectively ; and it is these articles which have now been 
 collected in a handy little volume, with an introduction by the 
 Eev. John Carter, the able and energetic secretary of the 
 Christian Social Union. 
 
 Mr, Smith is of opinion that the main cause of business 
 distress in all its forms, and of the effort to reduce wages to 
 make up for falling profits, or to ward off bankruptcy, is to be 
 found in the temptation, to which manufacturers are exposed 
 by the pressure of competition, to sell below cost. He asserts 
 that, absurd as it may seem, a large number of manufac- 
 turers have in fact no definite and accurate notion of the cost 
 of producing the articles they deal in. The first principle, 
 therefore, on which he insists is the necessity of correctly 
 ' taking out costs.' This is largely a matter for the 
 accountant, though it involves several interesting questions 
 to be referred to later. The next step is to induce all the 
 manufacturers of a particular trade, after following certain 
 common rules of cost-taking adjusted to the average business, 
 to agree to fix the price of each article by adding a certain 
 definite percentage of profit. So far there is nothing 
 particularly new in the scheme. The difficulty has always 
 been to hold the members of an association to the agreement : 
 it has never seemed possible to get out of them a guarantee 
 payment sufficiently large to make its forfeiture a serious 
 consideration. One of the expedients to which similar com- 
 binations have had recourse in this country, namely, a 
 compact with the transportation agencies, is impracticable in 
 England ; another, to wit, a system of discounts to buyers, 
 is commonly inadequate. Mr. Smith's invention to over- 
 come the difficulty is nothing more or less than an open 
 and avowed coalition with the workmen in the trade. He 
 insists that where the men are not already organised they 
 shall be formed into a union, and that the masters shall en- 
 gage to employ no non-unionists, in return for the agreement
 
 396 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 of the union to work for no employer not belonging to the 
 Alliance. Accordingly, a manufacturer who breaks away 
 from the Alliance has to reckon, at the very outset, with a 
 strike of his employes. 
 
 The assistance of the men is not obtained for nothing. 
 The bargain between the two associations of employers and 
 employed contains elaborate provisions for a bonus on wages 
 in proportion to an increase in prices, and for a Joint 
 Conciliation Board to settle all possible matters of dispute. 
 According to a late Lord Mayor of Birmingham, the in- 
 crease in remuneration has amounted in the bedstead trade 
 to as much as 25 per cent. The general results have been 
 thus summed up in a characteristic speech by Mr. Joseph 
 Chamberlain : 
 
 In a trade in which every one, whether workman or employer, 
 was dissatisfied, he has brought contentment. Wages, I believe, 
 have been increased, profits have become larger, and, curious to 
 relate, the demand and the production have increased at the same 
 time. This experiment, I believe, is capable of great development. 
 I understood, when I was last in Bradford, that a great trade in that 
 city has agreed to adopt the principles upon which Mr. Smith has 
 secured success. ... I am always glad that a new light should 
 proceed from Birmingham. 
 
 Even the Bedstead Alliance, however, is not yet out of 
 the woods. It is true that the outcry against it would seem 
 to have proceeded, not from the general public, but from the 
 ironmongers and other middlemen who have hitherto been 
 able to play off one manufacturer against another. For 
 months there has been talk of the establishment of an opposi- 
 tion factory at Antwerp ; but it is probably only talk. Yet 
 it would be strange if a neighbourhood so characterised by 
 individual initiative as the Midlands submitted without a 
 murmur to so singularly complete a system of regulation. 
 And as it is, two manufacturers, one in Birmingham and the 
 other near Manchester, were holding out at the date of our 
 last advices. 
 
 Without speculating as to the distant future, it may be
 
 BIRMINGHAM 397 
 
 recognised that the new movement has hitherto enjoyed a 
 very considerable measure of prosperity. Moreover, no one 
 can have moved in English business circles of late, especially 
 in Yorkshire and Lancashire, without realising that combina- 
 tion is in the air. And as there are many masters who 
 really value trade-unionism, and still more who feel they 
 cannot get rid of it, it is very probable indeed that the early 
 decades of the coming century will witness in England a 
 whole series of attempts to create what may be called a 
 vertical organisation of the industrial field to harmonise 
 and formally associate all the interests in particular indus- 
 tries, from top to bottom, in the face of the rest of the world. 
 We see no reason to question Mr. Smith's genuine regard for 
 social welfare, and especially for the interests of the work- 
 men ; we are ready to allow that the consumers affected 
 by his alliances have so far suffered inappreciably : but the 
 plan is so full of potentialities that he must be patient 
 with us if we insist on its weak point. 
 
 That weak point is the interest of the consumer. Mr. 
 Smith is perfectly right in saying that the older school of 
 economists paid too exclusive an attention to the consumer ; 
 he is right in urging that the workmen are themselves 
 consumers. What is even more to the point, he is justified 
 in his contention that in unrestricted competition there is no 
 necessary safeguard for the consumer, inasmuch as recent 
 experience goes to show that competition itself tends to the 
 creation of monopoly. But the moral of all this is neither 
 that the consumer can be disregarded, nor that the alliance 
 plan is to be condemned. It is rather that the public should 
 be given a good deal more definite information than they 
 have yet received as to the details of the mechanism. What 
 is the way in which the consumer tends to be protected 
 under competitive conditions ? It is that when the profits of 
 a particular occupation are noticeably higher than in other 
 industries, new capital and even new men are likely to be 
 drawn into it ; and if prices still continue too high, over-pro- 
 duction will ensue, and prices at last fall. This is cold comfort 
 in the case of those industries in which only a large capital
 
 398 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 finds an opening, and much of that is necessarily ' fixed ; ' 
 but with the Birmingham trades, where businesses are still 
 comparatively small, where there is a great deal of enterprise 
 and money always on the watch for fresh opportunities, and 
 where exceptional men can still rise from the ranks, it is a 
 solid satisfaction. Will not Mr. Smith convince us of the 
 persistence of this salutary check on excessive prices, in the 
 bedstead trade for instance, by telling us the exact financial 
 conditions of membership in his Alliance ? Is it easy for a 
 new man to enter the association? In order that the 
 equalising forces of individual enterprise should work at all 
 rapidly, it must be possible to find out what profit is 
 actually being made in the several trades. Will not Mr. 
 Smith tell us what is the ' fair interest ' which must, in his 
 scheme, be reckoned among costs of production ? Will he 
 not tell us how he reckons the ' wages of management ' 
 which are similarly counted in ? Will he not say what is 
 the profit the Alliance adds to the production-cost of each 
 article ? As a bedstead-maker, Mr. Smith may hesitate to 
 satisfy our curiosity ; as a social reformer, we are convinced 
 it would be his best policy in the long run. Certainly, if 
 combinations continue to flourish, publicity of accounts will 
 be the only alternative to State interference ; and if it is not 
 voluntary, it will be compulsory.
 
 399 
 
 CO-OPEEATIVE PBODUCTION IN ENGLAND l 
 
 THE prospects of co-operative production, in the only 
 sense which to many of us seemed worthy of the epithet, 
 were gloomy indeed when I first came in contact with the 
 co-operative movement at the Oxford Congress in 1882. 
 The undertakings founded by F. D. Maurice and his group of 
 Christian Socialists had long ago disappeared ; the co-opera- 
 tive cotton-mills of Lancashire had become mere joint-stock 
 companies ; the Wholesale Society, resting upon the support 
 of hundreds of retail stores, and establishing one factory after 
 another on completely ' capitalistic ' lines, seemed to be carry- 
 ing all before it ; and enthusiasts like Hughes, Vansittart 
 Neale, and Greening, protest as they might at each successive 
 Congress, were apparently voices crying in the wilderness. 
 It seemed but too evident that the self-employing workshop 
 was an impossibility in the midst of modern industrial 
 conditions ; and very soon Miss Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney 
 Webb) came forward with her brilliantly written book to 
 persuade us that it was not only impracticable, but also 
 undesirable. Production carried on by the Wholesale 
 Society, even though it gave its workers a share neither in 
 profits nor in management, was really more democratic, it 
 was urged, than when engaged in by independent groups of 
 workmen ; because it was controlled in the last resort by 
 the great body of consumers in the distributive stores, to 
 whom also fell ultimately all the profits. As if to confirm 
 
 1 [A letter from London, dated August 15, 1899, printed in the 
 Nation, No. 1785, September 1899.]
 
 400 INDUSTKIAL OEGANISATION 
 
 this argument, most of the little ventures set on foot about 
 this time by ardent idealists (the shirtmakers in London are 
 a case in point) came to grief after a brief period of in- 
 effectual struggle. 
 
 Coming back to England in 1898, one of the most 
 unexpected phenomena that confronted me was the greatly 
 changed position in the co-operative world of co-operative 
 production of the independent type. I had known that a 
 new and convenient term had meantime been invented, viz., 
 ' Labour Co-partnership ; ' a term wide enough to include 
 even profit-sharing businesses still financed by individual 
 employers. I knew, also, that a new propagandist society, 
 the ' Labour Association,' had been founded, with a very 
 active secretary in the person of Mr. Henry Vivian. But 
 what I was not prepared to find was a considerable and 
 increasing number of really thriving productive societies, 
 with a capital of more than two and a half million dollars, 
 and selling goods in the year 1898 to a value of more than 
 four and a half million dollars. 
 
 During the present week (August 14 to 19), the co- 
 operators of Great Britain are holding their annual festival 
 at the Crystal Palace; and the Labour Association has 
 taken the opportunity to arrange for an exhibit there of the 
 products of labour co-partnership undertakings. Though 
 the number of stalls is not large, no one can wander among 
 them and converse with the men in charge without being 
 greatly impressed. There is, of course, the old ardent 
 co -operative faith which has complete confidence in its power 
 of moving mountains ; but this is no longer pathetic, for all 
 around are the evidences of actual prosperity. The ' litera- 
 ture ' most liberally provided takes the convincing form of 
 balance-sheets. 
 
 The movement is certainly large enough to engage our 
 respectful attention. But the first thing one has to do is to 
 discriminate ; lump statistics are quite valueless in a matter 
 of this kind. One must begin by putting on one side the 
 various flourishing farmers' societies in Ireland for obtain- 
 ing supplies or marketing produce. They are exceedingly
 
 CO-OPERATION IN ENGLAND 401 
 
 interesting, and deserve an article to themselves ; but they 
 cast no light on industrial co-operation. Then we must put 
 on one side the Scotch co-partnership undertakings, which 
 are mainly organisations of consumers that allow a bonus to 
 the workpeople in their factories. And finally, when we 
 come to England, we must observe that by far the greater 
 number of the flourishing societies are to be found in the 
 Midlands, and that most of them are in Leicestershire and 
 Northamptonshire, and are concerned with the manufacture 
 of boots, hosiery, and ready-made clothing. The two 
 typical towns are Leicester and Kettering. The latter, with 
 its great co-operative store and its five thriving co-partner- 
 ship businesses for the manufacture of boots, clothing, 
 and corsets, and also for undertaking building contracts, 
 will for some time be the worthy Mecca of the co-operative 
 world. 
 
 What, then, is the secret of their success so far? Or is 
 there no secret ? Were the critics of the older productive 
 movement altogether wrong, and did it simply need greater 
 intelligence and perseverance on the part of the workmen to 
 succeed ? The answer is, I think, this : the older productive 
 societies thought to find their market among the general 
 public ; the newer find 90 per cent, or more of their market 
 within the co-operative world, i.e. in the ' distributive ' stores. 
 They have appealed, and not in vain, to the co-operative 
 spirit, to co-operative ' loyalty ; ' and had there been nothing 
 else to commend them than their co-operative character, they 
 would almost certainly have secured some trade, especially 
 as they attempted to manufacture only staple articles for 
 which there was a steady popular demand. But they have 
 obtained a much greater trade than mere ' loyalty ' would 
 have given them, owing to certain striking elements in their 
 constitution. They have provided the distributive societies 
 which had larger sums of money (their members' savings) 
 in their hands than they knew what to do with, with an 
 attractive field of investment ; and, having invested, mere self- 
 interest will induce the distributive societies to buy as largely 
 as they can in order to insure the payment of their interest. 
 
 D D
 
 402 INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 And not interest only. The newer productive societies are 
 distinguished from the old by their more businesslike atti- 
 tude, alike towards capital and towards the consumer. The 
 older societies aimed at putting together their own capital ; 
 if they were compelled to obtain capital from outside, they 
 thought they offered enough when they promised a certain 
 fixed interest. The new societies usually obtain a great 
 deal of capital from outside ; and, recognising that capital 
 needs something more than an ' average interest ' to induce 
 it to run risks, they offer, over and above an interest of five 
 per cent, (which is a great deal to begin with), a bonus on 
 capital dependent on profits. And as to the consumer (who 
 is usually in the first instance a distributive store), they allure 
 him by the device which the universal store practice suggests, 
 i.e. by offering him a bonus on purchases. On the side of 
 the productive society, it may be noticed, trade with co- 
 operative stores has the two great further advantages, that 
 it is pretty steady all the year round and that it leads to no 
 bad debts. 
 
 The conclusion, therefore, which is borne in upon the 
 observer from every side, is the absolute dependence of the 
 new productive movement on the existence of a very large 
 ready-made market in the co-operative retail stores. This is 
 so evident that I am surprised it has not impressed certain 
 American spectators more forcibly than it seems to have 
 done. To found on the example of England an exhortation 
 to American workmen to set up co-operative workshops 
 before their market is ready is, in my opinion, little short 
 of criminal. 
 
 And the English movement itself will find itself face to 
 face with grave difficulties as it grows out of its first stage 
 of self-sacrificing ardour. Already, in most of the larger 
 societies, the amount of capital contributed by the stores in 
 the form of shares is much greater than that contributed by 
 the workers. Thus, in the Leicester Hosiery Society, out of 
 a share capital of some $150,000, only about $15,000 are 
 owned by the workers, and three-fourths of the rest belong 
 to retail societies. Probably the workman's ' bonus on
 
 CO-OPEBATION IN ENGLAND 403 
 
 labour ' is safe enough ; but it is very doubtful whether the 
 workers will long retain a preponderating voice in the 
 election of committee and managers, if they provide the 
 smaller part of the capital. And if they do not, there is 
 nothing in the bonus, or in the right of electing two or three 
 committeemen to be outvoted on the board, to maintain the 
 feeling of ' self-employment ' in the minds of the workmen. 
 There are signs that the leaders are becoming aware of the 
 dangers ahead. They are compelling the workers to become 
 shareholders by withholding the bonus on wages until it 
 reaches the amount requisite for a share ; and they are 
 paying off those individual shareholders who are not workers. 
 But if they are to carry on business on a large scale, there 
 seems no prospect that they will be able to dispense with 
 the shareholding societies. They can neither provide an 
 adequate capital of their own, nor dare to offend their best 
 customers. 
 
 Moreover, the point is being neared at which productive 
 societies will begin to compete among themselves. Hitherto 
 the co-operative market has been so large that it could easily 
 furnish trade both for the factories of the Wholesale and for 
 all the independent societies set up in opposition to it. But 
 already the travellers (or drummers) of the boot-making 
 societies are bidding against one another. Mr. Maddison, 
 the very able labour member of Parliament who is President 
 of the Labour Association, does not seem to view the pro- 
 spect with any alarm. In his reaction against the ' central- 
 ising ' and ' monopolising ' policy of the Wholesale, he uses 
 language which sounds unusual in a co-operator, and would 
 have perplexed both Owen and Maurice. He relies on ' the 
 free play of economic forces ; ' he regards ' the horror of 
 what is called competition ' as ' groundless ; ' and he would 
 leave the number of productive societies to ' natural selec- 
 tion.' I am not here concerned with the criticism of either 
 ideal of either ' centralisation ' or ' decentralisation.' But 
 it may be safely predicted that the increase of competing 
 societies will add increasing cogency to the arguments of the 
 adherents of the Wholesale, and, what is more to the point, 
 
 D D 2
 
 404 INDUSTKIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 tend to a fall in wages and a loss of bonus on the part of the 
 workpeople. 
 
 As it is, the larger productive societies of the new type 
 are by no means so sharply distinguishable from the Whole- 
 sale as the enthusiasts for labour co-partnership might lead 
 one to suppose. They are in the main themselves federa- 
 tions of distributive societies. The Wholesale has but to 
 give its employees a bonus on labour, however small, and a 
 share in the management, however nominal, and it becomes 
 a ' labour co-partnership ' society also. This being so, the 
 time has come for the Labour Association, not to slacken in 
 its propaganda, but to add to its assertion of the principle of 
 labour co-partnership some more precise analysis of the 
 nature and extent of that co-partnership in the societies 
 already established.
 
 405 
 
 THE ECONOMIC ATMOSPHEKE OF 
 AMEKICA ! 
 
 THE longer I have lived in America the more it has been 
 borne in upon me that most of the social difficulties which 
 confront the observer of industrial conditions in that country 
 are little more than simple deductions from a few fundamental 
 data of character and temperament in the American people. 
 The purpose of this paper is to attempt to set these forth, with 
 some of their causes. 
 
 The main stock of the American nation the native popu- 
 lation of English descent, and such of the first, second, or 
 third generation of recent Irish and German and Scandina- 
 vian origin as have been thoroughly Americanised are the 
 most individualistic people that have ever lived on the earth, 
 with an individualism which runs through every possible 
 degree and combination, from manly independence and 
 quick-witted originality to an utterly impracticable idealism 
 on the one side, and an undisciplined restiveness and 
 childish self-satisfaction on the other. This is the atmo- 
 sphere we all breathe ; the environment in which all action 
 takes place ; the fundamental fact for the economist. ' Indi- 
 vidualism ' has come to have a bad name nowadays, 
 perhaps deservedly ; but I do not now use it necessarily in a 
 bad sense at all. If any one can give me a better term for 
 that self-reliance which may be the highest wisdom or the 
 
 1 [A lecture delivered before the Christian Social Union in the Hall 
 of Lincoln College, Oxford, on March 8, 1899 ; and at the London School 
 of Economics on May 8, 1899.]
 
 406 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 deepest folly, for that tendency to dispense with or disregard 
 external control which may, according to circumstances, be 
 a duty or a sin, I will gladly take it. Meanwhile the hard- 
 worked ' individualism ' has to serve our purpose. And for 
 any further judgment upon it, I will content myself with the 
 nursery rhyme : 
 
 When it is good, it is very very good, 
 But when it is bad, it is horrid. 
 
 Let me also repeat it the other way for fear of miscon- 
 ception : 
 
 When it is bad it is horrid, 
 
 But when it is good, it is very very good. 
 
 Into the historical sources of this spirit I cannot fully 
 enter. The circumstances of the Puritan migration to New 
 England ; the Puritan theology, with its emphasis on the 
 individual soul and its low estimate of external means of 
 grace ; long separation, during the colonial and provincial 
 periods, from the centres of culture ; the circumstance that, 
 as feudalism was not transplanted to the New World, there 
 was no need for the strong arm of a central power to destroy 
 it, as in Europe ; these are the evident ' origins ' of ' the 
 American spirit.' We may, however, easily go too far in 
 ascribing to pre-revolutionary New England and New York, 
 ideas and habits of social equality ; we must not fail to ob- 
 serve that such individualistic tendencies as there were, 
 were greatly strengthened, or rather their operation was 
 largely freed from check, by the expulsion of the loyalists 
 who refused to support the new republican government. They 
 represented the majority of the propertied class, the con- 
 servative class in the country ; that element of the popula- 
 tion in which regard for authority and tradition, and the 
 habits of guiding and governing, were most strongly im- 
 planted. The essayist who philosophises on the effect of 
 forcible expulsions of valuable elements from a state, might 
 profitably add to the well-worn cases of the Moors of Spain 
 and the Huguenots of France this of the United Empire
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIRIT 407 
 
 Loyalists. 1 The new state needed a written Constitution ; 
 and a constitution drawn up at the end of the eighteenth 
 century, under the influence of the social philosophy of 
 Locke and the Physiocrats, could not fail to be indi- 
 vidualistic. The American Constitution is accordingly a 
 classical document of individualism. What is more, it has 
 profoundly influenced the thoughts of the American people ; 
 it is learnt by heart in school with the Declaration of In- 
 dependence to explain it ; it is a final authority for the Su- 
 preme Court ; it has been imitated by the constitutions of the 
 several States ; and until recently most Americans regarded 
 it as an evident expression of undeniable political wisdom. 2 
 And then came two new and vast forces : the immigration 
 of millions of Irish and Germans, and the opening up 
 of the West. Given human nature and the institution of 
 private property, I do not think even the English govern- 
 ment of Ireland was so bad as it has sometimes been 
 painted; still it was natural enough that to the Irish im- 
 migrant ' law and order ' should mean absentee landlords, 
 insecurity of tenure, and the constabulary. In the same 
 
 1 Channing's Students' History, p. 225, refers cautiously to ' some 
 students who are inclined to think that some of the evils which beset 
 the nation in the course of the next few years were owing to the loss 
 of this conservative element in its population.' 
 
 * The individualistic character of the Constitution is shown rather 
 by the spirit of the document as a whole than by any express provision. 
 According to ' the doctrine laid down by Chief Justice Marshall and on 
 which the courts have constantly since proceeded,' ' every power alleged 
 to be vested in the national government or any organ thereof must be 
 affirmatively shown to have been granted. There is no presumption 
 in favour of the existence of a power ; on the contrary, the burden of 
 proof lies on those who assert its existence to point out something in 
 the Constitution which, either expressly or by necessary implication, 
 confers it ' (Bryce, American Commonwealth, ch. xxxiii.). It may be 
 worth while to quote the well-known language of the Declaration of 
 Independence : ' We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 
 are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain 
 unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit 
 of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted 
 among Men.'
 
 408 INDUSTETAL OBGANISATION 
 
 way I am inclined to think the Prussian bureaucracy 
 one of the noblest creations in the history of civilisation ; 
 still it was natural that the German immigrant should be 
 pretty tired of the ' Obrigkeit,' and ' streng verboten.' Even 
 more influential was the movement westward. Hundreds 
 of thousands of men faced the wilderness alone ; to do the 
 best they could by themselves, or starve. As it happened, 
 it was not a country, as some countries have been, in which 
 the settler was obliged to rely on the arm of the State ; the 
 physical difficulties w r ere not usually insurmountable by the 
 separate family. But the process called forth self-reliance ; 
 a strength which if ignorant, and ill-mannered because 
 ignorant, was still effective. This has set the tone in the 
 states of the west : in the nearer west, when manufactures 
 began to spring up, as in Ohio and Illinois, it was naturally 
 transferred from agriculture to industry ; and the indus- 
 trialists of the west, by example and personal intercourse, 
 have affected the industrialists of the east. And the pro- 
 cess is not yet over. Within the last decade a state so 
 entirely agricultural as Indiana has hitherto been, has begun 
 to develop into a seat of mining and manufacture. 1 
 
 So much for certain historical and general forces. Let 
 us now come more particularly to the entrepreneur class, the 
 men of business enterprise, and look at the economic 
 influences playing upon them to-day. To simplify matters) 
 let us look at the manufacturers only ; though similar things 
 might be said of the transportation interests. To the 
 American manufacturer to-day, protected from outside com- 
 petition by a tariff wall, and adequately served by railroads, 
 the United States offers such a market as never was before. 
 Whatever the cause may be, the fact remains that there is a 
 vast population, living in greater comfort than ever any 
 equally large population before, desirous to house and 
 clothe and feed themselves well, and able to pay for what 
 they demand able, that is to say, millions of them, when 
 prices are high ; able, millions more, with every fall in price. 
 
 1 Turner, in Atlantic Monthly, Ixxix. 438.
 
 THE AMBEICAN SPIEIT 409 
 
 For the manufacturer who can produce some article of 
 popular demand, say stoves or carpets or clocks, either just 
 a little cheaper or just a little more attractive than his com- 
 petitors, there is a fortune waiting. The prize was never so 
 big or so evident. Hence mass production has been carried 
 to a very high point. 
 
 Every successful business manager aims at lowering the 
 cost of production, not commonly by directly lowering 
 wages he is usually too shrewd to do this and he usually 
 realises that the gain would be too petty but by devices 
 for saving labour, for substituting machinery for handwork 
 and, as far as may be, for brain-work also. New machinery, 
 for instance in the textile business, is introduced with far 
 greater promptitude than in England ; mills and factories 
 get antiquated and have to be restocked with improved 
 machinery in a much shorter period. Many and many a 
 manufacturer puts in quite new machinery knowing perfectly 
 well that he will have to repeat the operation in ten years. 
 Of course very many fail ; but the successful man must turn 
 over his capital very quickly, must reap within a short time 
 a profit sufficient for the replacement with interest of all his 
 plant. And as scores of others in the industry are doing the 
 same, the competition is a good deal keener even than in 
 Europe competition not only in introducing new machinery 
 and in cutting down prices, but in advertising, and in the 
 bargaining with railroads for rates of transportation, and 
 with merchants or producers for raw materials. Such 
 severe competition is now more and more working itself out 
 in the direction of combination ; but there is still a very 
 great deal of it, and the temper it created remains even 
 when the struggle in its old form has become a thing of the 
 past. The successful business man feels that an enormous 
 amount we can pardon him if he thinks all of the success 
 of the undertaking is due to his brains ; the labourer's claim 
 for consideration he can hardly be patient with ; to him it 
 seems that the labourer ought rather to be thankful for the 
 chance of employment; and anything like an attempt to 
 hamper or control him in the conduct of his business arouses
 
 410 INDUSTEIAL OKGANISATION 
 
 a genuine moral indignation. Of course a strike for higher 
 wages usually does hamper a man in the control of his 
 business, and a manufacturer is apt to regard a strike as a 
 general regards a mutiny of his troops in face of the enemy. 
 The large industrialists, like Mr. Pullman (a man who 
 really represents some of the finer and higher qualities of 
 the best Americans), when confronted by a great strike, in- 
 variably say that a principle is involved that only they can 
 survey the field of competition with sufficient knowledge to 
 tell what they can afford to pay ; that they cannot be expected 
 to show their books to the public ; and that, anyhow, they 
 propose to ' manage their business as they think fit, and not 
 to submit to dictation.' All this is very familiar in England ; 
 but I am sure it is never said with such an air of common- 
 sense rectitude, and with so complete a support from business 
 and professional public opinion, as in the United States 
 and so excusably under the circumstances. Let us add 
 that the successful business man cannot look forward in 
 America to securing a baronetcy, buying a country estate, 
 founding a family, and ending his days with the rustics 
 bobbing to him and a Debrett on the study table. He gets 
 his reward mainly in the sense of power ; and to weaken his 
 autocratic control ever so little over his undertaking is to 
 take from him a sensible part of his only reward. 
 
 All this would be true if we could confine our attention 
 only to the older parts of the country, or if the whole of the 
 country suitable for industry had already been filled up- 
 But it is not. The history of the factory system in New 
 England is but two or three decades shorter than its history 
 in England ; and we might there look for a stable and firmly 
 settled organisation. But even New England is now called 
 upon to struggle for the retention of one of its staple manu- 
 factures, cotton weaving and spinning, against the south, 
 into which capital is now beginning to flow, and which in 
 the proximity of the raw material has a positive advantage, 
 and in the cheapness of negro labour has an apparent 
 advantage over the north. Here is a vast economic transi- 
 tion, as it would seem, about to work itself out : the exact
 
 THE AMEEICAN &PIBIT 411 
 
 outcome no man can prophesy, but it is pretty sure to pro- 
 foundly affect social conditions both in the south and in the 
 north. Is it to be wondered at that the captains of industry 
 in the north should demand a free hand ? The recent wide- 
 spread strike in the cotton industry of New England was 
 caused by the announcement of the employers that they 
 must reduce wages to meet southern competition. The 
 workpeople may have been justified in striking, even if the 
 assertions of the employers were accurate ; but they were 
 beaten, and beaten to some extent because the public 
 opinion of New England shared the employers' alarm. 1 
 
 In most other cases, perhaps, the new competitor has 
 not any such marked natural advantages as in the case of 
 the cotton industry of the south. But many an industry in 
 many a state has to meet the competition of rivals who 
 enjoy equally good, natural opportunities, but are simply ten 
 or twenty years behind them in starting, and are aided in 
 overcoming even this disadvantage by remissions of taxation 
 
 1 The Southern Railway has recently issued a circular giving a list of 
 cotton mills along its line, and the number of looms and spindles in 
 each. According to this list the equipment on January 1, 1899, consisted 
 of 74,953 looms and 2,846,168 spindles; while on January 1, 1900, the 
 numbers had risen to 92,010 and 3,268,218 respectively. The circular 
 contains the following significant paragraph : ' The proximity of this 
 section to the raw cotton, supply of efficient, intelligent, and loiv-priced 
 labour, longer working hours, liberal labour laws, &c., all combine to 
 make textile manufacturing successful.' With this may be compared 
 a passage in a review of Mrs. Robinson's Loom and Spindle, or Life 
 among the early Mill Girls (of Lowell), 1898, in the Nation of 
 January 5, 1899 : ' If the New England factories hold their own at all 
 now, it is because they have the " right of way " the possession of the 
 market, the control of abundance of skilled and highly trained labour, 
 the momentum of enormous capital, the inertia of heavy investments in 
 costly plants. The Southern mills have, in many cases, coal on the 
 spot at one-third the price in Lowell, and cotton on the spot, the fibre of 
 which remains one ' grade ' higher than after packing and transportation 
 to the North. They have labourers who are at present glad to work 
 longer hours for lower wages ; they are less trammelled by Legislatures 
 and the meddling of guilds. Who can fight long against the bounty and 
 the favouritism of nature ? The New Hampshire farms no longer raise 
 wheat ; the New England factories may have to abandon cotton.'
 
 412 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 for a term of years by municipal authorities who seek to 
 encourage local manufactures. This is particularly true 
 with the group of industries which grow up out of the 
 presence of iron. Thirty years ago Ohio began to compete 
 with Pennsylvania ; now Indiana and Minnesota are begin- 
 ning to compete with Ohio. Similarly the coalfields of 
 Missouri are entering into competition with those of 
 Pennsylvania. The new businesses naturally find part of 
 their demand in the immediate neighbourhood as it begins 
 to fill up ; but for staple articles of general consumption 
 they aim from the first at the whole American market. And 
 here the railroad plays its usual part in minimising the dis- 
 advantage of distance. Terminal expenses the cost of 
 getting the goods on and off the cars are usually so large 
 when compared with haulage, that on articles sent in large 
 quantities it often makes very little difference whether they 
 are forwarded a hundred miles or a thousand. And so both 
 the new man in a new locality and the long-established man 
 in an older state are very conscious of the reality of the 
 competitive struggle, and very likely to believe that it is on 
 their business skill and enterprise that the prosperity of their 
 town depends. 
 
 There is an antithesis which some American economists 
 are fond of applying to Europe and America the antithesis 
 between a static and a dynamic condition. The terms are 
 not perhaps very well chosen, and there are, of course, no 
 sharp or absolute contrasts in this regard between England 
 and the United States ; it is simply a matter of degree. But 
 with this caution it may be permitted one to say that the 
 United States is in a far more dynamic condition than 
 England : methods of industry are more rapidly changing 
 and industry is continually moving into new territory. But 
 in a highly dynamic society the functions of the business 
 entrepreneur approach their maximum of importance ; and the 
 more important the function of the entrepreneur the more 
 highly developed, inevitably, is industrial individualism. 
 
 We have not yet done with the influence of environment 
 on the entrepreneur. All that we have so far said would have
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIRIT 413 
 
 been true with an entirely homogeneous population. But 
 since the forties a great stream of foreign immigration has 
 been pouring in ; first Irish, then Irish and German, then 
 Irish, German, French, Canadian, and Scandinavian, and of 
 late years all the foregoing, though in lessening streams, 
 together with crowds of Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, 
 Bohemians, and Eussian, or rather Polish, Jews. These 
 foreigners have long done and still do almost all the unskilled 
 or but slightly skilled work there is to do in the mills and 
 forges and mines of America ; in a real sense they consti- 
 tute ' the labouring class.' Many of the Scandinavians and 
 Germans, it is true, have settled upon the land ; but the 
 Italians are the navvies of the Eastern states ; the Hun- 
 garians and Bohemians have gone largely into the mines of 
 Pennsylvania ; and the Eussian Jews are still chiefly in the 
 sweat-shops of New York. But of all these waves the Irish 
 who came first have been the most considerable, and the most 
 disturbing to the older American conditions. They flooded 
 the textile mills of New England and soon took the place 
 of the native hands. Up to that time there had existed a 
 very general feeling of personal equality between employers 
 and operatives : the weavers and spinners came from New 
 England farms ; they were neat in dress and careful in speech. 
 Those were the halcyon days when the girls of the Lowell 
 mills conducted their own magazine and wrote not despicable 
 poetry for it, and Dickens was so charmed with what he saw. 
 But now the natives gradually disappeared ; not that they 
 were underbid by the new-comers, but simply because they 
 would not work side by side with persons whom they thought 
 inferior in habits of life. Eemember that during this time 
 production was rapidly increasing, and the ablest of the 
 native male employees could and commonly did become 
 overseers and managers. Manual labour very generally 
 ceased to be respectable. Of course in time a few of the 
 Irish prospered and became employers, but very few have 
 become considerable employers; and in New England, 
 where the cotton and woollen corporations (or companies) 
 are largely family affairs, the large employers have remained
 
 414 INDUSTKIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 exclusively native American. They were cut off from 
 the first generation of their Irish hands by differences of 
 culture and of temperament ; and though, with the Ameri- 
 canisation of the children, these differences have somewhat 
 diminished, there remains the great barrier of religion. The 
 employers more or less unconsciously felt that they had to 
 do with a rather shiftless set of workpeople, whom they were 
 justified, by their own possession of what are called Anglo- 
 Saxon virtues and by their own superior religious enlighten- 
 ment, in regarding as irrational. When it came to a dispute, 
 the Celtic emotionalism, the Celtic imagination, the Celtic 
 rhetoric, were all distasteful to them. As time went 
 on, the Irish improved in their dress and in the neatness of 
 their homes : but now came into the mills of New England, 
 especially of New Hampshire, the immigration of French 
 Canadians, and the whole process of amelioration had to 
 begin over again. The two races, Irish and French, are to be 
 found now in varying proportions from place to place ; in 
 some manufacturing towns the Canadians predominate, 
 and on the platform of the railway station of Concord, New 
 Hampshire, crowded with hundreds of people one Satur- 
 day evening, I could hardly hear a word of English 
 Here the differences of temperament are not perhaps so 
 great, but there is the new barrier to sympathy in the 
 presence of a different language. The manufacturing 
 towns of New England present extreme cases; but ^every- 
 where now the great majority of the manual labouring 
 class, in industry and in mines, are foreign or of foreign 
 parentage. The army of labour is not unlike a Sepoy regi- 
 ment, except that even the non-commissioned officers the 
 foremen and superior clerks are of the economically superior 
 race, or of the second generation of the foreign element. How 
 enormously these racial differences must affect the relations 
 of the employing and employed classes must be very evident. 
 Now turn to the employees, and look at some of the 
 traits with which they seem to be marked. What we said 
 some time ago about the individualist spirit, the tendency 
 to act for and by oneself, the dislike to act in concert with or
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIRIT 415 
 
 in subordination to others, applies of course in a measure to 
 them also, so far as they have been of native stock or have 
 been thoroughly Americanised. And this spirit was en- 
 couraged, long after the middle of the present century, 
 by the economic conditions. It was easier, speaking in 
 general terms, for an able or a particularly thrifty (or selfish) 
 man to rise in life than it was in England, and those 
 who were discontented with the life of the factory could 
 often manage to go West and become farmers, if they had 
 the necessary physical strength and agricultural aptitude. 
 It is, of course, a gross exaggeration to say that every man 
 could have a farm if he pleased ; still in this way, and by 
 rising to higher industrial positions, many men left the 
 ranks of manual labour who in an older country would 
 have become its natural leaders. Hence the slower growth 
 of class feeling, the weaker esprit de corps of such trade unions 
 as were formed down to the seventies, and the poorer calibre 
 of their officials. Unionism has evidently grown in strength 
 during the last twenty years ; and this has been the result 
 of several concomitant causes : (1) the growing capitalisa- 
 tion of business, making it harder for workmen to rise into 
 the position of employers, and so keeping a larger proportion 
 of men in the ranks of labour ; (2) the complete exhaustion 
 of the supply of free land ; (3) the advent of many English 
 workmen steeped in the traditions of English unionism ; 
 (4) the Celtic clannishness of the workpeople of Irish origin. 
 It needs but a glance down the list of presidents and 
 secretaries of the leading American unions to see how large 
 is the Hibernian element. The Germans furnish the next 
 largest contingent, but the Irish preponderate. And the 
 Celtic temperament, warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, splendidly 
 buoyant as it is, is not perhaps the best suited for the hum- 
 drum business of keeping a labour organisation alive when 
 there is nothing stirring to be done. 
 
 There is one feature of ' the American spirit,' which the 
 history of labour organisations abundantly illustrates, and 
 which one might be inclined to attribute to the Celtic influ- 
 ence, were it not that it is abundantly present in other than
 
 416 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 labour ranks. I cannot think of any term for it but one some- 
 what disrespectful, megalomania. Probably it is the mere 
 physical size of the country which makes so many Americans 
 so much in love with bigness. Certain it is that hardly does 
 any useful idea get started in any place than, instead of being 
 content to try it there quietly, and, if it succeeds, then to in- 
 troduce it gradually elsewhere, there is at once a demand 
 that the same movement or reform or what not should be 
 tried everywhere. The different local groups are at once 
 organised as an American Society for this, that, or the other, 
 with its annual congress and its organ in the press. When 
 ideas ' catch on/ as the phrase goes, they are apt to spread 
 like wildfire, and to disappear with equal rapidity when 
 enthusiasm begins to be baulked by the paucity of results. 
 I have seen this in the realm of the higher education, and in 
 the ardours of cultivated middle-class ladies perhaps it 
 would be safer for me not to particularise. Exactly the 
 same is true of labour movements. The Patrons of 
 Husbandry or Grangers, the Knights of Labour, the Henry 
 George propaganda; all have grown with extraordinary 
 rapidity and died down almost as fast. The most striking 
 example is that of the order of Knights of Labour, which 
 twelve years ago seemed about to take over the government of 
 the United States, and now is an almost negligible quantity. 
 The moral is on the surface and I will not labour it. The effect 
 of such phenomena on the elderly hard-headed American 
 capitalist is what we might expect. ' I have known four and 
 twenty leaders of revolt/ he might say with Browning's 
 Legate. The news that the numbers in this or that new 
 labour organisation are running up into the hundreds of 
 thousands does not affect him as it might his Yorkshire or 
 Lancashire rival. He has been through it all before. It is 
 the most encouraging feature of the last few years that the 
 more slowly growing strength of the Federation of Labour has 
 meant the diffusion among the working classes of a type 
 of trade unionism more nearly like that of England not so 
 idealistic as earlier movements, a little narrow perhaps, but 
 much more substantial so far as it goes.
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIRIT 417 
 
 These, then, are some of the larger economic forces at 
 work affecting both employers and employed ; this is, so to 
 speak, the economic atmosphere in which they all live. It 
 will be worth while to look, though even more hastily, at 
 some of the characteristics of the political environment. In 
 every society of the modern type, industry and government 
 must inevitably come in contact with one another ; and even 
 if, by the adoption of a laissez-faire policy for the state, the 
 number of these points is severely restricted, it cannot be a 
 matter of indifference to the classes engaged in industry 
 what kind of government they have to deal with. 
 
 There has been a disposition of late years in certain circles 
 in England to look with favour upon those features of the 
 American political system wherein it differs most markedly 
 from our own such as the existence of a written constitu- 
 tion, which it is very difficult to change, or the fixed term 
 of executive office. We are not all of us any longer quite 
 content with Bagehot's classic exposition of the difference 
 between the two systems, which summed up so unmistak- 
 ably in favour of the British. But now I' would remind you 
 that, whatever Bagehot may have left unsaid about the 
 American political system, what he actually said of it was 
 and is quite true, and of the utmost significance in the 
 present connection. Bagehot pointed out, you will re- 
 member, that the separation between the executive and 
 the legislative had the effect of dividing, and therefore of 
 weakening the sense of, political responsibility. This would 
 be true if there were but one executive magistrate and one 
 legislative chamber, and these acting together were legally 
 omnipotent. But in an American State there is first of all 
 the written Constitution, interpreted by the Supreme Court 
 of the particular state ; then there is the state Executive ; 
 then there are two chambers of the Legislature, each inde- 
 pendent of the other, and neither necessarily of the same 
 political party as the head of the executive ; and on top of 
 all this, for all that concerns inter-state commerce, there are 
 the Federal Constitution, Federal Legislation, the Federal 
 Supreme Court and Circuit Courts, the Federal Executive, 
 
 E E
 
 418 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 and the Federal Congress with its two equally powerful 
 houses. The result of the English system we are all familiar 
 with. The Ministry of the day is accountable for everything ; 
 and it may lose office dramatically any evening over wellnigh 
 anything, large or small, from old-age pensions to the flash- 
 point of petroleum. And this not only strengthens the sense 
 of responsibility, but it makes Parliament the focus of public 
 interest on almost every conceivable topic. Whether it be a 
 widespread strike in a great industry, or a letter-sorter dis- 
 missed in a remote Scotch post-office, some occupant of the 
 Ministerial front bench has to get up and say something or 
 nothing about it. This, of course, is apt to seem very 
 comic ; but it certainly has some advantages when compared 
 with a system under which it is almost impossible to fix re- 
 sponsibility anywhere. There is some large problem, let us 
 say, which requires to be tackled ; for instance, the reform of 
 the banking system. Whose particular business is it to worry 
 himself about it? or who can look forward to a political 
 career so long and of such a kind that it is likely to matter 
 what attitude he adopts towards it ? Or in a particular state 
 there is an agitation for some extravagant legislation : Why 
 should not the Legislature pass it ? Most of the members are 
 not likely to be returned again in any case ; then perhaps 
 the governor will refuse to assent, and he will have to bear 
 all the odium. But why should not the governor give his 
 assent ? He has probably got to the highest office he can 
 hope to reach, and he probably will not be in power when the 
 act has to be enforced ; and then, perhaps, the law courts 
 will declare the act unconstitutional, and they will have to 
 bear all the odium. We cannot wonder that in some states 
 it is becoming increasingly the practice to pass statutes with 
 the anticipation that they will be declared unconstitutional. 
 
 And now another feature of the American situation. It 
 is a commonplace to say that while in Germany the govern- 
 ment gets most of the best brains, and industry and commerce 
 relatively few, in America it is industry and commerce that 
 are most attractive. So far as mechanical progress in the 
 production of wealth is concerned, the advantage is evidently
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIEIT 419 
 
 on the side of America. But when the state really has a 
 part to play in relation to industry, it cannot be satisfactory 
 that its representatives should almost constantly be of inferior 
 mental calibre. Some causes of this are obvious especially 
 ' the spoils system.' But there are many other concurrent 
 causes. Let me make the difficulty concrete by pointing to one 
 particular set of cases. To enforce the laws which are con- 
 stantly being passed by the Federal Legislature and by the 
 State Legislatures with regard to business enterprises (for 
 our present purpose it is indifferent whether the law is what 
 I regard as unwise, e.g. prohibiting combinations of the 
 nature of trusts, or what I regard as wise, e.g. prohibiting 
 truck), the Federal Government and the several states need the 
 services of first-class lawyers. But the capitalist companies 
 can and do offer iacomparably higher remuneration to stand- 
 ing counsel than are provided by official salaries. The 
 most highly paid ' professional ' men in the United States are 
 what are called ' corporation lawyers,' i.e. company lawyers, 
 and their business in large measure consists in devising 
 forms of contract which will secure the business ends of their 
 employers without violating the law. There is a phrase 
 about driving a coach and four through an Act of Parliament : 
 to drive an express train through an Act of Congress is a most 
 reputable and highly recompensed occupation in New York. 
 Suppose either the United States, or, still more cheerful to 
 contemplate, one of the individual states, secures a first-rate 
 lawyer as its Attorney. Why should he be energetic in 
 enforcing a particular law that affects the business corpora- 
 tions ? Probably he honestly thinks the statute is a piece of 
 folly. Politics do not promise him a career : the chances of 
 the supreme bench are very small, and there is nothing like 
 the dignity and knighthood of the English bench to look 
 forward to, let alone the Chancellorship and the House of 
 Lords. Public office is but a brief passing stage in his 
 career. Why should he by a fussy activity annoy the great 
 corporations whose legal business he did before he took office, 
 and expects to resume when he has left office ? The optimist 
 will, perhaps, regard it as a fortunate circumstance that the 
 
 E E 2
 
 420 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 forces of commercialism are strong enough to prevent popu- 
 larly elected Legislatures doing much harm. That may be so ; 
 meanwhile, however, the political education of the com- 
 munity is obviously delayed. Surely the best way to diminish 
 the amount of bad legislation is to enforce what there is. 
 
 In some localities, however, a further stage in economico- 
 political development has been reached, which to a large 
 extent relieves the corporations from the troublesome business 
 of violating or evading the law by preventing such laws 
 from being passed or by securing their passage in an unwork- 
 able form. This stage is bound up with the appearance of the 
 political boss. There are bosses and bosses ; but it is only 
 during the last twenty years or so that Mr. Eichard Croker has 
 risen to the full height of the opportunity in the city of New 
 York. Political analysis follows political evolution at some 
 distance ; it was not till the age of the Italian despots was 
 almost over and had reached its fine flower in Caesar Borgia 
 that Machiavelli wrote his ' Prince ; ' and the nature of the 
 American boss is only just now being subjected to scientific 
 scrutiny. He is a many-sided phenomenon, and I shall not 
 seek to explain his genesis. But, however he came into 
 being, it seems clear that the great boss, like Mr. Eichard 
 Croker, derives his strength from the mutual interaction of 
 these two conditions : (1) that being supposed to be able 
 to control a majority in an important legislative body (in this 
 case a city council, but a state legislature would be just the 
 same), he is able to obtain large supplies of money from 
 those who expect him, in return, to control his majority so 
 that they shall not be inconvenienced ; and, (2) that having 
 large supplies of money thus placed at his disposal, he is the 
 better able to keep his majority under control. The power of 
 Mr. Croker is not therefore due entirely to the character of the 
 electorate ; it is due to the conjunction of an electorate, such 
 as exists in New York, with great business interests which 
 deem it worth while to ' placate ' the party chief. It is 
 believed that at the last municipal election in New York all 
 the great financial concerns in that city contributed to the 
 Democratic Campaign Fund, i.e. to Mr. Croker's resources.
 
 THE AMEEICAN SPIRIT 421 
 
 Now, perhaps as scientific observers we ought not to be 
 squeamish about this. We might say that, given such an 
 electorate, and a legislative body which might play the most 
 foolish tricks and upset a nation's trade, it is on the whole 
 not an unsatisfactory thing that somebody should arise 
 strong enough to put a bit into the mouth of Behemoth. 
 This is a casuistry not unknown among clever young lawyers 
 in New York who want to get on. We must all recognise 
 that unbridled legislatures have done mad things, and will 
 probably go on doing them. But my purpose is not to pass 
 sentence or acquit : it is merely to point out the growing 
 likelihood that in any large question between a great private 
 business enterprise and a public legislative authority e.g. 
 a question of the terms on which a company is to run a 
 street railway, or a hundred others there will be some one 
 man who will in one way or another control that authority 
 in return for campaign subscriptions. The subscriptions may 
 be given under widely varying conditions of political zeal on 
 the part of the givers, ranging from genuine personal political 
 conviction to sheer bribery; they may be used for every variety 
 of purpose, from the hiring of halls for political meetings to 
 the purchase of votes ; and the boss's power may be used to 
 defeat or prevent action both good and bad. But the bilateral 
 function of the boss remains his distinguishing characteristic 
 in every case. 1 
 
 1 [The Machiavelli of the new Prince is Mr. John Jay Chapman ; 
 see especially his article on ' The Capture of Government by Com- 
 mercialism ' in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1898. The rule of 
 ex- Senator Quay in Pennsylvania is a phenomenon at bottom of precisely 
 the same character as Tammany. The Nation for September 8, 1898, 
 gives the following abstract of a speech by Mr. John Wanamaker, the 
 ' Whiteley ' of America, who has made himself the leader of the anti- 
 Quay revolt : ' The principal allies and partners of the machine are the 
 corporations. The 15,000 national and State office-holders and the 
 thousands of other officials connected with State institutions form a 
 small part of the whole number of obedient machine men who are 
 constantly at the command of Senator Quay, the admitted boss of the 
 machine ; the corporation employees of the State who are controlled for 
 Quay's use increase the number to the proportions of a vast army.'
 
 422 INDUSTEIAL ORGANISATION 
 
 Going into detail, he finds that the steam railroads employ 85,117 men, 
 and the great street railways, which ' have received valuable legislative 
 concessions for nothing,' 12,079 ; ' that monopoly of monopolies,' the 
 Standard Oil, 3,000, ' who are taught fidelity to Senator Quay ; ' the 
 Bethlehem Iron Works, whose armour plates are sold to the Govern- 
 ment for nearly double the contract price offered to foreign countries, 
 ' influence their employees to such an extent that it has been found 
 difficult to get men to stand as anti-Quay delegates ; ' the thousands 
 of working men of the Carnegie Iron Works ' are marched to the 
 polls under the supervision of superintendents and foremen, and voted 
 for Quay candidates under penalty of losing their jobs ; ' while the great 
 express companies, with their thousands of men, can be counted on for 
 great service to the machine ; and the telegraph companies, whose State 
 officials can be found at the inner Quay councils, with the thousands 
 of employees distributed at every important point throughout the State, 
 and before whom a large share of all important news must pass, consti- 
 tute ' one of the most dangerous parts of the Quay machine.' 
 
 I have thought it well to omit, as too slight and inadequate to be 
 printed, the survey of the situation in the several industries with which 
 this lecture concluded. This will explain the somewhat abrupt manner 
 in which these ' Prolegomena ' come to an end. The English student of 
 American conditions may be referred to the recent work of M. Emile 
 Levasseur, L'Ouvrier Am6ricain, which contains a mass of well-digested 
 material, and to the quarterly Bulletins of the Bureau of Labour.]
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 SIB GEOKGE NICHOLLS > 
 
 THERE is a singular appropriateness about this new edition 
 of Nicholls's well-known history. It appears at a time when 
 the strongest Conservative Government of this generation is 
 firmly established in power in England, pledged up to the 
 eyes to ' do something ' in the direction of old-age pensions ; 
 a time, therefore, when the question of the relation of that 
 modern poor law which Nicholls did so much to create to 
 the industrial conditions of a country like England is being 
 reconsidered in all its aspects. That the criticism of Mr. 
 Chamberlain's and Mr. Charles Booth's proposals should be 
 left entirely to the Charity Organisation Society is, it must 
 be confessed, not altogether satisfactory ; and even those 
 who feel most strongly the narrowness of its principles, will 
 be glad to see it reinforced by the experience of the strong 
 men of 1834. 
 
 There is another reason for welcoming the present reissue. 
 Every one who knows anything of the actual administration 
 of poor-law relief in England is aware that the Bradfield 
 
 1 [A History of the English Poor Law, by Sir George Nicholls, K.C.B., 
 Poor-Law Commissioner and Secretary to the Poor-Law Board. New 
 edition, containing a biography by H. G. Willink, Chairman of the 
 Bradfield Poor-Law Union. '1898.) Reviewed in the Nation, June 2, 
 1898.]
 
 424 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 Union, first under the chairmanship of the late Mr. Stevens, 
 the creator of Bradfield School, and then under that of the 
 late Mr. Garland, has for a good many years been the model 
 for rural unions all over England. It has been thought to 
 show the possibility of almost entirely putting an end to out- 
 door relief even in a purely agricultural district, and that 
 without driving larger numbers into the workhouse or 
 causing serious distress. To the present chairman of that 
 union, himself the grandson of Nicholls, we now owe the 
 sober and well-written account of Nicholls's life which is 
 prefixed to these volumes, and which by its reticent brevity 
 contrasts so favourably with much of the biographical writing 
 of the day. 
 
 We could, indeed, have tolerated further particulars, for 
 the man is more interesting than his book. Daniel O'Connell 
 once tried to raise a laugh by assuming the absurdity of 
 setting ' a sea-skipper to regulate poor laws.' A thorough 
 old skipper Nicholls was to the end, as one may see from the 
 excellent portrait here given. Mr. Willink describes him, 
 from his own boyhood's recollections, as ' a well-knit, alert old 
 man, with keen grey eyes under extremely bushy eyebrows, 
 rather austere, but with a genuine smile,' and, it may be 
 added, with the firm chin and mouth of one who would carry 
 either a ship or a public measure through every kind of 
 storm. A life so varied in its activities as his deserves a 
 passing glance. 
 
 The son of a Cornish farmer, George Nicholls got into 
 the naval service of the East India Company, and was in 
 command of a ship by the age of seven and twenty. He 
 had made skilful use of the opportunities for trade on his 
 own account which the Company allowed its officers, and 
 when he married in 1813 he seemed on the high road to 
 wealth. The year after, he lost his ship by fire, and, though 
 exonerated from blame, he retired from the service with im- 
 paired fortunes, 'a broken man.' The next few years he 
 spent in quiet country life ; then, as his spirits returned, he 
 began to throw himself into local administration, and in 
 1821, being just forty years of age, he accepted the unpaid
 
 SIE GEOEGE NICHOLLS 425 
 
 office of overseer of the poor in the little town of Southwell. 
 This was the turning-point of his life : his vigorous and suc- 
 cessful measures to diminish outdoor relief and apply ' the 
 workhouse test' made Southwell a useful object-lesson to 
 all poor-law reformers. But before he was called upon to 
 apply the same principles to the whole country, his career 
 had taken another unexpected turn. Asked to advise a 
 friend about the Gloucester Canal, he showed such business- 
 like qualities that he was made superintendent of its con- 
 struction, and moved to Gloucester in 1823. When the 
 monetary crisis of 1826 brought with it the ruin of the old 
 Gloucester private bank, he induced the Bank of England to 
 open a branch, and so impressed the directors with his 
 capacity that in a few months he was intrusted with the 
 delicate task of establishing a branch at the much more con- 
 siderable town of Birmingham. He had set the Birmingham 
 office on its legs, and was getting a little tired of it for 
 ' mere banking,' he declares, ' i.e. the receipt and payment of 
 money and the discount of bills, is, of all the associations 
 with which it has been my lot to be connected, the least 
 interesting and intellectual, the most narrowing and restric- 
 tive in its influence on character ' when Lord Melbourne, 
 invited him to become one of the Commissioners under the 
 New Poor Law Act of 1834. 
 
 Granting that the policy of the Act was a necessary one, 
 there can be no question of the wisdom of the choice. What 
 the Act aimed at was to put an end to the universal and 
 most demoralising practice of granting outdoor relief from 
 the rates, very largely ' in aid of wages.' A man of firm 
 character was needed to meet the outcry which the measure 
 was bound to produce. That the purpose of the Act was in 
 the main effected is matter of history. When we look back 
 on the angry denunciations of the new system, with its 
 ' Poor-Law Bastilles,' and of the ' three Bashaws of Somerset 
 House ' who introduced it, we may wonder whether any 
 such measure could possibly have been earned out under the 
 democratic government of the England of to-day. As to the 
 subsequent disputes with Sir James Graham concerning
 
 426 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Nicholls's measures for the introduction of the new Irish 
 poor law, the evidence here given is too scanty and (in no 
 bad sense) one-sided to enable us to form an opinion. 
 Ireland has always been a peculiarly difficult field for the 
 English administrator, and festina lente was never Nicholls's 
 motto. When the Commission was reorganised in 1847, 
 Nicholls was made the scapegoat of the Government, and 
 sank from being senior Commissioner to being permanent 
 Secretary. But this post still furnished him with congenial 
 employment till he retired with his K.C.B. in 1851. Still 
 unsatiated with work, he spent the last fourteen years of his 
 life in writing his histories of English, Irish, and Scotch 
 Poor Law and in guiding, as chairman, the deliberations of 
 the Birmingham Canal directorate. 
 
 No one can read Mr. Willink's sketch without feeling 
 that Nicholls deserved well of his country. Things had got 
 to such a pass in 1834 that rough surgery was doubtless 
 necessary. But it may be questioned whether Nicholls and 
 his colleagues made sufficient allowance for human nature. 
 The recent practice of ' boarding out ' on the one hand and 
 the establishment of the casual ward on the other not to 
 speak of the return of a good deal of outdoor relief are alike 
 departures from the simplicity of the programme of 1834. 
 The scale on which the new workhouses were planned 
 which now contain in most cases not half the anticipated 
 number of inmates shows that they were expected to 
 play a much larger part than has since been assigned to 
 them. 
 
 After what we have said of the author, the reader of 
 Nicholls's history will hardly expect to find in it any par- 
 ticular breadth of view, extensive historical knowledge, or 
 literary skill. The first half follows Sir Frederick Eden and 
 the Statutes of the Eealm in a leisurely jogtrot fashion, 
 taking statute after statute just as they come in the statute- 
 book, so long as they have anything to do with ' the condition 
 of the people,' and commenting upon them in a sensible, 
 though often imperfectly informed, fashion. Thus his 
 chapters present a convenient summary of all the economic
 
 SIR GEOEGE NICHOLLS 427 
 
 legislation of England down to the middle of last century, 
 and they breathe an optimism that is very cheering after the 
 lamentations of Professor Thorold Eogers and his disciples. 
 He even believes that the justices' assessment of wages in 
 the sixteenth century kept pace with the rise in the price of 
 food! 
 
 The latter part of the book, dealing with the evils that 
 called forth the great reform of 1834, and with the first 
 twenty years' administration of the Act, is much more origi- 
 nal, and still forms the most complete account of the poor-law 
 history of the period. It is also much narrower in its scope 
 than the earlier part ; the reader will not learn from it of the 
 existence of Malthus or of his ' Essay upon Population,' 
 which first turned the attention of thoughtful men to the 
 inevitable consequences of the allowance plan ; and he will 
 not suspect that the period was one of profound changes in 
 the structure of industrial society. The history becomes a 
 sort of glorified Blue-book, with the usual limitations of such 
 performances ; but it is a permanently useful Blue-book, for 
 all that.
 
 428 BIOGKAPHICAL 
 
 AENOLD TOYNBEE 1 
 
 IT was a happy thought on the part of Professor Adams to 
 request, and it was a wise decision on Mr. Montague's part 
 to allow, the publication of this sketch of the life of Arnold 
 Toynbee in the 'Johns Hopkins Studies.' England and 
 America have both to gain by a closer sympathy and fellow- 
 ship between the economists and social reformers of the two 
 countries. The very appearance of this memoir, and of the 
 account of Toynbee Hall in London and the Neighbourhood 
 Guild in New York by which it is accompanied, is a tacit 
 confession that the circumstances of the Old and New 
 Worlds are no longer so entirely dissimilar as they but lately 
 seemed. 
 
 Mr. Montague has performed his labour of love faithfully 
 and with delicacy. Purposely avoiding strong contrasts of 
 light and shade, and using the quietest colours, he has 
 painted for us the picture of a man who even in our own 
 time, though breathed upon by all the influences of the 
 modern spirit and restrained in all his work for his fellow men 
 by the scientific conscience, could yet live the saintly life. It 
 is the highest praise that can be given to the memoir to say 
 that it is not unworthy of its subject. 
 
 Yet welcome as it is, it fails, in the judgment of the 
 present reviewer, to bring into due prominence those features 
 in Toynbee's life and action wherein above all lies his 
 
 1 [Arnold Toynbee, by F. C. Montague. Johns Hopkins University 
 Studies in Historical and Political Science, 7th Series, I. Baltimore. 
 (1889.) Beviewed in the Political Science Quarterly, September 1889.]
 
 AENOLD TOYNBEE 429 
 
 importance in the recent history of English thought. Toyn- 
 bee is important, not so much as a philanthropist or as an 
 example of unselfishness, still less as a ' church reformer,' 
 but as an economist, as the initiator of a new and fertile 
 development in English political economy. To many even 
 of his personal friends, and in no place more than in Oxford, 
 this is a hard saying. So much was expected of him and he 
 left behind so little ! What fragments of his writings and 
 teachings were put together after his death are so disjointed, 
 so full of apparent inconsistencies and changes of opinion ! 
 It is so clear that both in his discussion of theory and in his 
 practical proposals he did but follow other men Comte, 
 Cliffe Leslie, Walker, Bagehot, Mundella, Sedley Taylor! 
 Even his historical work might after all seem rather an 
 indication of what he might have done than in itself any con- 
 siderable achievement. But a man's importance is to be 
 measured not by his consistency nor by the bulk of his 
 writings, but by the impression he has been able to produce. 
 That impression in Toynbee's case may perhaps be defined 
 somewhat as follows : 
 
 First, at a time when the study of political economy had 
 sunk to its lowest point in England, he did perhaps more 
 than any other man to create a new interest in it, a new 
 belief in its seriousness as" a scientific discipline, a new hope 
 that in it might be found some help towards the solution of 
 pressing economic problems. 
 
 Secondly, he turned this new interest in the direction of 
 the historical investigation of social development, and of the 
 direct examination of existing phenomena. His merit in this 
 respect is none the less because he himself spoke with 
 diffidence of the historical method and did his best to 
 convince himself that the traditional method of deduction 
 was indispensable. The whole bent of his mind was toward 
 history and toward the concrete descriptive presentation of 
 social facts. Any one who compares, for instance, the 
 account of the economic changes of the later part of last 
 century and the earlier half of this in his lecture on ' Industry 
 and Democracy,' with his attempt at constructing a theory of
 
 430 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 wages in his lecture on ' Wages and Natural Law,' will see 
 how much more successful he is in the former, how much 
 more the former contributes to the understanding of modern 
 difficulties. This is the direction in which the influence of 
 Toynbee's example is likely to be most effective. It is seen 
 already in the character of the work undertaken by the 
 ' Toynbee trust.' And it must not be forgotten that, 
 fragmentary as are the lectures on the ' Industrial Revolution,' 
 they still form the only history we possess in English of 
 that momentous change ; and that, to mention only one 
 authority, they seemed sufficiently valuable to that eminent 
 publicist, M. Boutmy, for him to base upon them a great 
 part of his recent work on England. 
 
 Thirdly, Toynbee was the first professed economist in 
 England to distinctly recognise the element of good in 
 modern socialism, and to see in a cautious extension of the 
 functions of the State one of the most effectual preventives 
 of revolution. 
 
 Toynbee's resemblance in these two last respects to the 
 historical school in Germany, and in especial to the Katheder- 
 Socialisten, is, of course, too marked to escape notice. It is 
 therefore necessary to observe that Toynbee was but scantily 
 acquainted with German economic discussions, and that 
 whatever impulses from outside affected him came rather 
 from Comte, from Ruskin, from Stubbs, and from Maine. 
 
 The reviewer may perhaps be allowed, before bringing 
 this notice to an end, to add a word or two of personal 
 reminiscence to Mr. Montague's account of his friend. He 
 had read through one or two of the ordinary text-books when 
 he went to Toynbee for advice as to how to continue his 
 economic studies. The advice was characteristic : ' Take 
 some one subject, e.g. wages, and, beginning with Adam 
 Smith, read in chronological order what each noteworthy 
 English economist has said upon the subject, and see if you 
 can make out the way in which various doctrines have arisen 
 and been modified.' The reviewer may be wrong, but it is 
 his impression that few, if any other, economists would then 
 have been found in England who thus made the historical
 
 AENOLD TOYNBEE 431 
 
 development of theory the governing principle in their 
 teaching. 
 
 He remembers again how for three terms, during 1881 
 and 1882, he with sixty or seventy others, mostly under- 
 graduates, but some few graduates like himself, listened 
 Saturday after Saturday in Balliol Hall to Toynbee's lectures 
 on the Industrial Eevolution ; and how that slim, graceful 
 figure seemed to tremble and his hands were nervously 
 strained together, as he tried to make us realise how vast 
 and awful a revolution it had been. And then from the 
 spacious hall and pleasant college garden his thoughts go to 
 a dingy room in a miserable tavern, where, amid smoke and 
 the clatter of alepots, the sensitive and overwrought scholar 
 presented himself for the suffrages of his fellow-citizens, and 
 told them how much might be done, even with our existing 
 social machinery, if those who guided it did but understand 
 of what it was capable.
 
 432 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 EDWAKD A. FBEEMAN 1 
 
 DEAN STEPHENS has performed his task in a workmanlike 
 fashion, and Freeman was a considerable figure in the intel- 
 lectual and political history of the last half -century ; yet we 
 put down the two volumes of the ' Life and Letters ' 
 Letters and Life they should rather be named, since the 
 letters form their larger and more interesting half with a 
 certain unreasonable disappointment. Eecent biographies 
 have accustomed us to expect, in works of this kind, some 
 revelation of men's private lives of those feelings, too 
 sacred or too petty, which most of them in their lifetime 
 have instinctively withheld from exhibition to the world. 
 Whether it be the wise judgment of Mr. Freeman's family, 
 or the good taste of Mr. Stephens, or a singular unity in Mr. 
 Freeman's public and private life, or all three, to which it is 
 owing, it is certainly the case that these volumes reveal no 
 privacies and tell us scarcely anything of their hero as a son, 
 a husband, or a father. And we are bound to acknowledge 
 that we have no right to look for more. Interest is a good 
 thing, but it may be purchased at too high a cost. 
 
 Then, again, Mr. Freeman's life was what people call 
 1 uneventful.' He failed in his efforts to enter Parliament : a 
 welcome and stalwart ally in more than one public move- 
 ment as in the agitation occasioned by the Bulgarian atro- 
 cities he was not exactly a leader in any : his professorship 
 
 1 [The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, by W. B. W. 
 Stephens, Dean of Winchester. (1895.) Reviewed in the Nation, 
 July 18, 1895.]
 
 EDWAED A. FEEEMAN 433 
 
 e obtained only when he was too old and too set in charac- 
 ter and opinions greatly to influence academic thought. 
 Even the promise of the preface, that the reader will find here- 
 in ' a record of the growth of his opinions,' is hardly realised. 
 Some opinions, it is true, he came to hold a trifle more 
 loosely, as the years went on, and he certainly became aware 
 of the existence of fields of thought outside his own and yet 
 bordering upon them ; but in the main he arrived at his 
 opinions in early life, and pretty quickly, and held to them to 
 the end. 
 
 In these volumes, then, we have the Freeman of the 
 printed books which had already come from his pen. He is 
 here looking around for his materials, rather than presenting 
 results ; he is indulging freely in playful exaggeration ; he is 
 giving never-ceasing expression to the affection he felt for 
 some of his fellow-workers, like ' Johnny ' Green, and the re- 
 spect in which he held others ; still it is everywhere the 
 Freeman (though with his coat off, so to speak) that we 
 knew already. The ' unity of history,' the ' Eternal City,' 
 the ' unspeakable Turk,' the never-to-be-allowed Austrian 
 ' Empire,' Earl Godwin and Harold and the battle of 
 ' Senlac,' the Landesgemeinden, and primitive Aryan insti- 
 tutions they are all here only in a briefer and usually a 
 more jocular form ; for the letters are very commonly articles 
 in brief. And so, though these volumes may, perhaps, soften 
 some hearts that have been hard to him, by making them 
 realise how intensely conscientious he was and how despe- 
 rately hard he worked, they are likely to leave unaffected the 
 attitude the world is inclined to take towards his work as a 
 scholar. 
 
 This is not the place, and" indeed it were much too early, 
 to attempt to estimate Freeman's career as a whole, to add 
 to the many essays thereat by Mr. Bryce and others which 
 appeared at the time of his death. But it may be worth 
 while to take this opportunity to set down some of the 
 causes which tended, especially in his earlier years, to secure 
 public attention for his work, and some of those, especially 
 in his later years, that diminished that attention ; and to seek 
 
 FF
 
 434 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 our illustrations from these new letters rather than from the 
 books already in our possession. Of course the main reasons 
 why Freeman has deservedly won a considerable reputation 
 are that he possessed learning and talent and style ; while 
 the reasons why he will doubtless not be reckoned in the 
 future among the great historians are, that he was devoid of 
 genius, and that his style was not of the first order. But 
 there is a harmony or want of harmony between a scholar's 
 work and the Zeitgeist, which, in no slight degree, adds to or 
 detracts from the applause of contemporaries. Taken at 
 the flood, the tide leads on to fortune in the world of ideas 
 as well as the world of affairs. 
 
 Freeman began his serious study of history in 1848 ; the 
 last volume of the work which has done most to give him 
 fame, the ' Norman Conquest,' appeared in 1876. This was 
 the period during which ' the movement of nationality ' 
 reached its high- water mark and changed the face of Europe ; 
 and Freeman was both touched by, and gave expression to, 
 the enthusiasm of the time. A fervid belief in the rights of 
 nationalities to govern themselves gave purpose to much of 
 his writing. With Liberals all over the world the principle 
 had won its most glorious recognition in the resurrection of 
 Italy; Freeman insisted upon applying it to the less evi- 
 dently attractive cases of Greece and Servia, and supported 
 the bare assertion by a profusion of historical reminiscences. 
 Nothing could more delight those who were inclined to shout 
 for freedom, nothing more irritate 'practical' politicians. 
 Unfortunately, however, for Freeman's hold upon men of a 
 later generation, the problem of nationality where it now 
 presents itself is hardly so simple as it used to be. Nationali- 
 ties are so inconveniently mixed ! And in such cases even 
 Freeman was inclined to give it up as a bad job. As he 
 writes to Professor Ihne in 1880, when working at his ' His- 
 torical Geography : ' ' The Czechs are a nuisance. I think 
 I could draw a map as I should like to see things, but for 
 them.' * 
 
 1 Life, ii. 209.
 
 EDWAED A. FREEMAN 435 
 
 Freeman's nationalist enthusiasm was both deepened and 
 banked in by the intellectual influences that just then no 
 English historical scholar could escape. It was a time when 
 almost the only solid work in the field of history was being 
 done by German investigators. It is not so now : Freeman 
 wrote very justly in 1891 that ' the French of Paris have 
 been lately doing work much better than they had ever done 
 for some ages.' He hits the point of time, if not of cause, 
 when he jokingly adds : ' I always fancy that in the war 
 the Germans knocked some of their Geist into the Frenchmen's 
 heads, and so lost some of their own.' l And he had long 
 been alive to one of the weaknesses of the German pro- 
 fessorial historian : ' Don't be angry if I say,' he writes to 
 Professor Ihne, ' that so many of your German scholars write 
 as if history was a matter of theory, as if they never saw any 
 of it going.' 2 Nevertheless, he could not escape from the 
 wave of Teutonist enthusiasm ; and, as every one knows, it 
 reached its height in his treatment of Old English history. 
 Even a Welshman could smile at his raptures at Anderida. 
 Eeferring to the oft-cited entry in the English Chronicle 
 under the year 491, he writes to Professor Boyd Dawkins 
 in 1868 : ' At Anderida to-day I wellnigh forgot William, and 
 thought mainly of .ZElla and Cissa, and that jolly smiting of 
 Brets, leaving not one remaining.' 3 With so incorrigible a 
 boy we cannot be cross ; but it was hardly a judicial frame 
 of mind. 
 
 His Teutonism happened to fit in well with another 
 tendency of public thought. The period was one in which 
 parliamentary government was making headway in western 
 Europe generally, and in which parliamentary reform was 
 seldom out of the public mind in England. Now, Freeman 
 was to all intents and purposes a good Liberal, but he gave 
 much more to the Liberal cause than his personal adhesion. 
 He satisfied that deep-rooted craving of the English mind for 
 precedent for some assurance that the claims of reformers 
 are only for the restoration of ancient rights. ' We have 
 
 1 Life, ii. 437. 2 ii. 262. 3 i. 415. 
 
 v F 2
 
 436 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 made changes from time to time/ he wrote in 1872 in his 
 ' English Constitution ; ' ' but they have been changes which 
 have been at once conservative and progressive. . . . They 
 have been the application of ancient principles to new cir- 
 cumstances ; they have been the careful repairs of an old 
 building.' This may or may not be true ; it was undoubtedly 
 comforting. We will not quote again the well-known 
 Landesgemeinde passage ; but there is a reference to it here 
 that sounds a little pathetically now. ' To stand/ he writes, 
 ' with the clear heaven above and the snowy mountains on 
 either side, and see the descendants of the men of Sempach 
 and Morgarten discharge the immemorial rights of Teutonic 
 freemen, is a sight which may well make us doubt whether 
 we are in the common world or in some historical paradise 
 of our own imagination.' l Unluckily, the recent investiga- 
 tion of the sources seems to show that the popular assembly 
 of Uri has grown out of, and cannot be traced earlier than, 
 the manorial courts of the Middle Ages. As an example of 
 ' immemorial democracy ' it is only too likely to be relegated 
 to the ' paradise of imagination.' 
 
 To large learning and a vigorous style, then, add enthu- 
 siasm for nationality and for ' immemorial ' democracy, and 
 Freeman's earlier reputation is in large measure explained 
 In noticing the more recent currents of thought that have 
 dealt hardly, too hardly, with that reputation, we shall be 
 more brief. 
 
 By the two great intellectual movements, conveniently 
 indicated by the terms Evolution and Socialism, that have 
 in these latter days, for good or for ill, shaped and coloured 
 men's thoughts, Freeman was entirely untouched. Take 
 the latter first. We now concern ourselves far more than 
 we ever did before with the economic condition of the 
 masses of the people, and this necessarily reflects itself in 
 historical literature. Freeman used to quote with amuse- 
 ment the remark of Green, 'Freeman, you are neither 
 religious, literary, nor social ' meaning that he gave little 
 
 1 Life, i. 296.
 
 EDWAED A. FEEEMAN 437 
 
 space in his writings to the history of religion, of literature, 
 or of society ; but he hardly realised how enormously this 
 limitation of range lessened his interest for men at large. 
 Freeman always maintained, 1 following his master Arnold, 
 that ' history was the biography of a political society," and, 
 putting external relations and wars on one side, that it was 
 ' primarily concerned with forms of government, institutions, 
 and laws.' 'History is past politics.' This was a view 
 natural enough and interesting enough in Arnold's time, 
 when all the world was bent on constitution-making, but it 
 has to be very liberally interpreted indeed to make it equally 
 interesting now. An easy illustration may make this clear. 
 Freeman maintained as a young man and seems to have 
 held much the same view to the end that the story of 
 ancient Greece was of 'incomparable' value because its 
 ' institutions developed and decayed ' with ' astonishing 
 rapidity.' ' Thus the history of a few generations became 
 an epitome of the history of political society, and was a 
 sufficient school for instniction in all the principles of an 
 historical philosophy.' 2 But when once the fact of ancient 
 slavery is driven well into our heads, this incomparable 
 value of Greek history insensibly disappears. With almost 
 all the manual labour of society done by slaves, the freest 
 Greek democracy was a narrow oligarchy. With the manual 
 labourers within the citizen body, as to-day, the problem of 
 government is fundamentally changed. 
 
 And then as to Evolution. It is a word we are perhaps 
 getting a little tired of ; but whether we use that word or 
 not, there can be little doubt that the thought of slow but 
 never-ceasing change, of the appearance of new conditions 
 out of the bosom of the old, a thought set before us in differ- 
 ent forms by Hegel, Darwin, and Comte, is dominating the 
 most typical historical work of the day. But Freeman was 
 contentedly ignorant alike of philosophy and of biology, and 
 was never possessed by the idea of development. And this 
 it is which, added to the limitation of his view to ' politics,' 
 
 1 Life, i. 108. i. 122.
 
 438 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 makes his application of the idea of the ' unity of history ' 
 seem sometimes so mechanical. One large fragment of the 
 drama of history he saw clearly enough in some of its 
 aspects the rise and long-abiding influence of the Eoman 
 Empire. But, for the rest, the continuity of history was 
 very apt to be with him only geographical. Such and such 
 things had happened centuries ago in such a place, and 
 accordingly so the argument might seem to run we ought 
 to regard with such and such views events happening there 
 now. ' The enslavement of Greece,' says his biographer, 
 ' by the alien and infidel Turk was to him the most melan- 
 choly and distressing event in all history.' l How it came 
 about that Greece was enslaved, he made no serious attempt 
 to answer. History to him was full of the irrational or the 
 unrational ; and to a generation that sees, or thinks it sees, 
 more and more meaning in the world outside man, his 
 utterances concerning mankind could not but be unsatis- 
 fying. 
 
 And yet we would not leave the matter thus. Freeman 
 was moved too greatly by the intellectual fashions of his 
 early manhood, he was moved too little by the intellectual 
 fashions of the present day, to obtain many eager readers 
 just now. He wrote so very much that his style inevitably 
 suffered Mr. Stephens's vindication of him from the charge 
 of ' diffuseness ' rests on an odd confusion between diffuse- 
 ness and minuteness 2 and he has probably left nothing that 
 will live as literature. He produced, however, a vast amount 
 of solid work ; and a future generation, not quite so blas& 
 as our own and not quite so familiar with his catchwords, 
 will find that it can hardly take up a bit of it anywhere 
 without being instructed and stimulated. And, after all, his 
 everlasting insistence on the great external facts of the 
 history of the western world erred chiefly in going no further. 
 To have a firm grasp upon them is, indeed, the beginning of 
 wisdom ; and if some of us have grumbled in the past 
 because he kept us at the ' vile rudiments,' we cannot help 
 
 1 Life, i. 107. * ii. 473.
 
 EDWAED A. FEEEMAN 439 
 
 seeing that only too many people nowadays are ready to 
 skip the necessary preliminaries. We are inclined to say 
 that, if we had our way, we would set every student who was 
 about to take ' a course in Sociology ' through a pretty stiff 
 examination in Freeman's ' General Sketch of European 
 History.'
 
 440 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 LOKD ACTON 1 
 
 THE newly appointed Eegius Professor of Modern History 
 in the University of Cambridge is one of the most interesting 
 figures in English society. The old Catholic gentry of 
 England have honourable and pathetic traditions of loyalty 
 to a lost cause which give them a place apart from the 
 humdrum conformities of neighbouring squires; and from 
 such a family in Shropshire is Lord Acton descended. When 
 the time came, these Catholic gentry were faithful, from 
 interest and sentiment, to that other lost cause, the Stuart 
 monarchy ; and it was from Charles I. that an ancestor of 
 Lord Acton received his baronetcy. And to these family 
 memories have been added others equally remote from the 
 commonplace. His grandfather was Prime Minister and 
 Commander-in-chief of the forces of Naples under the Bona- 
 partes ; his father married the heiress of that Duke of 
 Dalberg who throve on the favour of the first Napoleon, 
 acted as his go-between with the court of Vienna, and 
 abandoned him with the turn of the tide ; his cousins have 
 been generals and ministers, or have married generals and 
 ministers, for the last half -century of Italian history. 
 
 Out of such a family one might look either for a d&vot or 
 a diplomat. That Lord Acton is neither must be ascribed 
 to the fortunate chance or wise choice which brought him 
 in his early years under the influence and into the com- 
 
 1 [A Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge 
 June 11, 1895, by Lord Acton, LL.D., D.C.L., Eegius Professor of Modern 
 History. Beviewed in the Nation, January 9, 1896.]
 
 LOED ACTON 441 
 
 panionship of Dr. Dollinger, then at the height of his reputa- 
 tion at Munich. Dollinger's teaching made of him a scholar 
 and a Liberal, and it is said to have been Lord Acton who 
 organised the opposition in Eome and Germany in 1870 to 
 the acceptance of papal infallibility by the Vatican Council ; 
 and when his friend Mr. Gladstone from whom he had 
 received his peerage in 1869 attacked somewhat later 'the 
 Vatican decrees,' Lord Acton boldly placed himself by his 
 side. He has remained within the Eoman Communion ; the 
 strength of family tradition has probably kept him from 
 joining in the heroic but hopeless Old Catholic movement : 
 but his intellectual attitude towards the church of his fathers 
 on the one hand, and, on the other, towards the world of 
 free historical investigation in which he habitually lives, 
 has continued to present a psychological enigma. As 
 Browning makes one of his shrewdest characters remark, 
 ' Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things ; ' 
 
 and Lord Acton draws to himself the same sort of curious 
 attention as Mr. Mivart. 1 
 
 Lord Acton had long been known for his exhaustive 
 acquaintance with historical literature when, in 1886, he 
 contributed the opening article, on 'German Schools of 
 History,' to the first number of the ' English Historical 
 Eeview.' Of that unique piece of work those thirty-six 
 pages of brilliant characterisation and comment, bristling 
 with epigram, caviare to the vulgar alike from their all- 
 pervading allusiveness and a style as of a George Meredith 
 turned historian this only need be said here : that it is per- 
 haps the only magazine article that has ever served as a 
 justification for appointment to a chair in a great university. 
 When in 1894 the filling of Sir John Seeley's chair became 
 the task of Her Majesty's Government, it was not unnatural 
 that, if Mr. Gladstone hinted at Lord Acton's willingness to 
 accept the honour, Lord Eosebery should feel a certain 
 gratitude towards one of the scanty band of Home-Eule peers. 
 But those who cared for historical scholarship rather than 
 
 1 The reader in 1900 will remember that this was written in 1895.]
 
 442 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 for historical pedagogy recognised that a choice had been 
 made which was not likely to do discredit to the reputation 
 of Cambridge. 
 
 And now Lord Acton's inaugural address is before us. 
 Considering what difficulties have arisen with the Church of 
 Eome in many a university over the teaching of history, 
 considering that a Eoman Catholic was here stepping into 
 the only professorship of modern history in a university 
 still almost completely Protestant, there was abundant occa- 
 sion for curiosity. The impression produced was, in many 
 quarters, one of mystification and bewilderment. At first 
 reading and few will give more than a first reading there 
 seems no clear pronouncement on anything. Many of the 
 paragraphs, and still more of the separate sentences, look as 
 if they had no connection with what precede or follow ; and 
 the London ' Times ' confessed solemnly that to some pas- 
 sages it could assign no probable interpretation. Moreover, 
 when a proposition does, apparently, stare us in the face, it 
 is a mere commonplace say other critics. But any one who 
 had considered Lord Acton's career and his essay of 1886 
 might have anticipated that he would be careful to use a 
 convenient colloquialism not ' to give himself away ; ' that 
 he would see both aspects of every question, and try to ex- 
 press them at the same time ; and that the expressing of 
 them, in sentences packed with thought and unassisted by 
 connecting particles, would not make easy reading. 
 
 It is, however, after all, not so very hard, on a second 
 reading, to catch the drift of the discourse. After distin- 
 guishing ' modern ' history from ' contemporary,' and claim- 
 ing a broader field for history than mere politics, for 
 'politics and history are interwoven, but not commensu- 
 rate,' l he argues that modern history is clearly distinguished 
 from mediaeval by that sudden ' forward movement ' which 
 initiated modern progress towards liberty of thought and 
 action. Modern history is intensely interesting because it 
 1 touches us so nearly,' 2 and affects our vital interests first 
 
 1 Lecture, p. 5. 2 P. 74.
 
 LOED ACTON 443 
 
 among them Eeligion. 1 ' Whatever a man's notions of these 
 later centuries are, such, in the main, the man himself will 
 be. Under the name of History, they cover the articles 
 of his philosophic, his religious, and his political creed.' 2 
 Beligion, furthermore, has played a great positive part in 
 relation to ' the significant and central feature of the historic 
 cycle before us ' ' the progress of the world towards self- 
 government.' 3 For, ' but for the strength afforded by the 
 religious motive in the seventeenth century,' that progress 
 would have been arrested. Lord Acton fails not to give a 
 passing word to those who refuse to see progress in increas- 
 ing liberty ; but his own opinion is clear enough. The con- 
 stancy of progress is the tribute of modern history to the 
 theory of Providence ; 4 it is ' the action of Christ who is 
 risen.' 5 After showing how the modern Historical Move- 
 ment arose 'directly and indirectly, by development and 
 reaction,' 6 from the storm of the French Eevolution, he 
 describes the characteristics of ' the present order of things ' 
 in historical writing the use of original sources, the appli- 
 cation of criticism, and the dogma of impartiality ; and this 
 leads up to a criticism of the method of Eanke, ' the repre- 
 sentative of the age which instituted the modern study of 
 history,' and ' taught it to be critical, to be colourless, and 
 to be new.' 7 He ends with a powerful and even touching 
 appeal to the men before him not to yield to the modern 
 temptation to identify explanation with justification. ' The 
 weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to 
 debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of recti- 
 tude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your 
 own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the 
 undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on 
 wrong.' 8 
 
 These, then, are the 'commonplaces' of Lord Acton's 
 address : That liberty, on the whole, means progress ; that 
 in the past, as in the present, black is black and white 
 
 1 Lecture, p. 21. P. 73. P. 27. 4 P. 28. 
 
 P. 81. P. 36. T P. 48. P. 63.
 
 444 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 white. Is it objected that the only significance in the first 
 proposition lies in its coming from a Eoman Catholic? 
 Surely it is something that a man of sixty years, one who 
 has seen ' many men and cities,' one who is bound by strong 
 ties to the past, and who knows all that can be said of the 
 seamy side of modern life, should thus confirm the faith that 
 we indolently suppose ourselves to hold. And as to the 
 second, no one who has immersed himself in historical litera- 
 ture will refuse to recognise the grave dangers which do in 
 sober earnest beset our moral judgment. 
 
 Lord Acton is not, so far as we are aware, an original 
 investigator ; he is content to read and ponder with all the 
 shrewdness of a man of affairs and of the world over the 
 historical works of others ; and he is as far as possible removed 
 from the popular lecturer or entertaining essayist. But 
 there is certainly need of men of his type ; and if he does 
 not exactly stimulate Cambridge undergraduates either to 
 begin to read or to begin to make research, he will probably, 
 to those who have already made some way with reading and 
 research, be a wise counsellor and a helpful critic.
 
 ACADEMIC 
 
 JOWETT AND THE UNIVEKSITY IDEAL 1 
 
 THE expansion of American universities which has been so 
 conspicuous a feature of the last quarter of a century is 
 evidently slackening just now under the strain of business 
 depression. Academic revenues are shrinking ; new endow- 
 ments are rare ; the number of students, instead of advancing 
 by leaps and bounds, is wellnigh stationary; and it is pretty 
 generally recognised that any enlargement of teaching or 
 improvement of surroundings that calls for further ex- 
 penditure must be postponed to a more propitious season. 
 
 During this quarter of a century of expansion there has 
 not only been material growth ; new ideals of study, new 
 methods of instruction, have been introduced, which have 
 already exerted no small influence on several generations of 
 undergraduates. Yet one cannot mingle much with the men 
 now coming to the front in professorial circles without per- 
 ceiving a certain uneasiness among them as to some features 
 of the new system, a certain tendency to revert to older and 
 apparently abandoned conceptions of academic duty. The 
 lull in things external seems likely to be utilised for re- 
 flection on things internal. In this time of halt, of return 
 upon ourselves, we cannot fail to greet with peculiar interest 
 the record of the lifework of a great academic in another 
 
 1 [Atlantic Monthly, July 1897.]
 
 446 ACADEMIC 
 
 land. 1 It is from this point of view, and this only, that I 
 shall here consider Jowett. 
 
 First, a word or two as to the chronology of his life. 
 Born in 1817, he received his early education at St. Paul's 
 School, and, after winning a Balliol scholarship in 1835, 
 went up to Oxford in 1836. In 1838, while still an under- 
 graduate, he was elected to the Balliol fellowship, which he 
 held until he became Master. After taking his degree in 
 1839, he became assistant tutor of his college in 1841 ; was 
 ordained in 1842, and was appointed to the tutorship which 
 thenceforward engaged most of his attention until he ex- 
 changed it for the Mastership itself, in his eyes, a sort of 
 glorified tutorship. In 1855 appeared his edition of three 
 Epistles of St. Paul, and in the same year he was appointed 
 by the Crown to the Eegius Professorship of Greek. The 
 theological antagonism awakened by his book on the Epistles 
 led to the withholding for a decade of the salary which was 
 attached in equity, if not legally, to the Greek chair. Clerical 
 hostility was inflamed still further by the appearance of 
 ' Essays and Eeviews ' in 1860, which contained a paper 
 from Jowett's pen on the ' Interpretation of Scripture.' In 
 1870 he was chosen Master of Balliol ; and the translation of 
 Plato's Dialogues, which was his most considerable literary 
 work, appeared on the very day of his election. In 1881 was 
 issued his translation of Thucydides ; in 1885 his translation 
 of the Politics of Aristotle ; and from 1882 to 1886 he served 
 the usual term of four years as Vice-chancellor of the 
 university. He died on October 1, 1893. 
 
 The reader who has glanced over this short list of land- 
 marks in Jowett's life may be surprised to learn that in the 
 Oxford and England of our own time his reputation rests 
 almost entirely on his activity as Master of his college. His 
 theological writings first attracted to him the notice of the 
 world at large ; his translations have opened the treasures 
 of Greek thought to thousands who could profit by them, 
 and to whom they would otherwise have remained sealed. 
 
 1 The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, 
 Oxford. By Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell. 1897.
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 447 
 
 But more than thirty years before his death Jowett aban- 
 doned all attempts to guide the religious thought of the 
 country. He long dreamt of writing a life of Christ; but 
 when, in his later years, he was asked why he did not carry 
 out the plan, ' he replied, falling back in his chair, with tears 
 in his eyes, " Because I cannot ; God has not given me the 
 power to do it." ' And his biographers assure us that ' after 
 the harsh reception of his theological work, he was haunted 
 by the fear that, by writing, he might do harm as well as 
 good." His translations, again, appeal more to the general 
 public than to the scholar ; Jowett was not a great classical 
 scholar, in either the German or the English sense of the 
 word. In the field of university politics, moreover, he does 
 not seem to have initiated any one movement of the first 
 importance. But as Master he was a great and brilliant 
 success ; and in the college and through the college he exer- 
 cised enormous influence. Early in his reign he wrote to a 
 friend, ' I want to hold out as long as I can, and hope to 
 make Balliol into a really great college if I live for ten years." 
 He lived for twenty years, and died knowing that he had 
 accomplished his purpose. Never was there a Head so bound 
 up with his college, so keenly attached to its interests, its 
 members, and its associations. Without wife or child, and 
 for the last few years of his life without a single near 
 relative, the college was his only home, and took the place 
 of family ties. Never, in return, was there a Head of whom 
 his college was so proud as Balliol was of ' old Jowler,' or 
 who was regarded with the same mingled feeling of awe and 
 admiration and protecting affection. 
 
 How, then, did Jowett esteem his own work ? What did 
 he consider the peculiar functions of the university or the 
 colleges ? It will be observed by every attentive reader of 
 the Life, first, that Jowett hardly assigned any specific 
 function to the university as such, as distinct from the 
 colleges ; and, secondly, that both for the college and for the 
 university he laid almost exclusive stress on the two tasks 
 of promoting education and of bringing about social inter- 
 course. In his first sermon in Balliol Chapel after his
 
 448 ACADEMIC 
 
 election to the Mastership, he spoke of the college, ' first, as 
 a place of education ; secondly, as a place of society ; thirdly, 
 as a place of religion.' He was accustomed to use very 
 similar language about the university : ' There are two things 
 which distinguish a university from a mere scientific institu- 
 tion : first of all, it is a seat of liberal education ; and 
 secondly, it is a place of society.' Both education and 
 society he conceived of nobly. He sought to impress upon 
 each generation of undergraduates ' the unspeakable import- 
 ance of the four critical years of life between about eighteen 
 and twenty-two,' when the task before each young man is 
 to improve his mind, to eradicate bad mental habits, to 
 acquire the power of order and arrangement, to learn the 
 art of fixing his attention.' ' The object of reading for the 
 schools' the final honour examinations 'is not chiefly to 
 attain a first class, but to elevate and strengthen the cha- 
 racter for life.' As against those who declare examinations 
 injurious, he maintained that ' they give a fixed aim, towards 
 which to direct our efforts ; they stimulate us by the love of 
 honourable distinction; they afford an opportunity of be- 
 coming known to those who might not otherwise emerge ; 
 they supply the leading-strings which we also need. Neither 
 freedom nor power can be attained without order and regu- 
 larity and method. The restless habit of mind which passes 
 at will from one view of a subject or from one kind of know- 
 ledge to another is not intellectual power.' On the value of 
 social intercourse he laid almost equal stress. ' His ideal 
 of the work and office of the university' was that it should 
 form 'a bridge which might unite the different classes of 
 society, and at the same time bring about a friendly feeling 
 in the different sects of religion, and that might also connect 
 the different branches of knowledge which were apt to 
 become estranged one from another.' He was anxious ' to 
 bring men of different classes into contact,' for the benefit 
 especially of those who had had no social advantages. ' Jowett 
 observed that men of very great ability often failed in life, 
 because they were unable to play their part with effect. 
 They were shy, awkward, self-conscious, deficient in manners
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 449 
 
 faults which were as ruinous as vices.' And the supreme 
 end which Jowett kept in mind for all this training of every 
 kind was ' usefulness in after-life.' 
 
 Towards promoting social intercourse much was done by 
 college life itself, by the mere juxtaposition of undergra- 
 duates in hall and chapel and quadrangle, by spontaneous 
 association in sports and debating clubs ; towards education 
 much was done by the stimulus and guidance of a properly 
 devised scheme of examination. But both together were in- 
 sufficient, left to themselves ; another force was necessary, 
 and that force Jowett found in the tutorial system. 
 
 I doubt whether it is possible to give anything like an 
 accurate impression of the Oxford tutorial system to those 
 who have not seen it at work. There is the initial difficulty 
 of framing any brief generalisation which shall be reasonably 
 true for all the studies of the place and all the colleges. The 
 practice varies from college to college, and in several colleges 
 it has not seemed possible to extend tutorial supervision to 
 the recently introduced studies in physical and biological 
 science. It may be said with sufficient accuracy that all 
 save a small minority of undergraduates, during the greater 
 part of their university career, work under the immediate 
 oversight and direction of a college tutor, whether he actually 
 bears that name or the more humble designation of ' lecturer.' 
 The system is more highly developed with honour men than 
 with pass men, and it can be best studied in the two ' honour 
 schools ' of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which 
 attract perhaps four out of five honour students. Colleges 
 prefer to appoint their tutors from among their own fellows ; 
 and in spite of all the recent changes, the majority of the 
 tutors still reside within the college walls. 
 
 The tutors of the last fifty years have been among the 
 most industrious of men, taking their duties very seriously, 
 and watching with sedulous care the progress of their pupils 
 from week to week, and from term to term. As a rule, each 
 undergraduate has a regular appointment with his tutor 
 every week ; he is seen alone for half an hour or three- 
 quarters, and exhibits a piece of work, usually in the form of 
 
 G G
 
 450 ACADEMIC 
 
 an essay, which is then and there read and criticised ; and 
 these weekly pieces of work are so arranged that the under- 
 graduate may acquaint himself, during the allotted time, 
 with the whole field on which he proposes to be examined. 
 
 This conception of tutorial duty has been a growth of 
 the present century, and indeed would seem first to have 
 made itself visible about 1830 and in Oriel College. Very 
 different was the condition of things when Gibbon went up 
 to Magdalen in 1752. His first tutor, he tells us, was ' one 
 of the best of the tribe,' but even ' he was satisfied, like his 
 fellows, with the slight and superficial discharge of an im- 
 portant trust.' When the young Gibbon began to make 
 excuses, they were received with smiles. ' The slightest 
 motive of laziness or indisposition, the most trifling avoca- 
 tion at home or abroad, was allowed as a worthy impedi- 
 ment ; nor did my tutor appear conscious of my absence or 
 neglect. No plan of study was recommended for my use ; 
 no exercises were prescribed for his inspection.' His next 
 
 tutor was even worse. ' Dr. well remembered that he 
 
 had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty 
 to perform. Excepting one voluntary visit to his rooms, 
 during the eight months of his titular office the tutor and 
 pupil lived in the same college as strangers to each other.' 
 
 Even after the reformed scheme of examination for degrees 
 was introduced in 1802 largely owing to the efforts of 
 Eveleigh, the Provost of Oriel some time elapsed before 
 college teaching came to be directed towards fitting men to 
 obtain honours. ' That was the day,' says Mark Pattison in 
 his ' Memoirs/ speaking of 1830, ' of private tutors ; it was 
 the " coach," and not the college tutor, who worked a man 
 up for his " first." ' The originality of the first set of ener- 
 getic college tutors at Oriel Newman, Hurrell Froude, and 
 Eobert Wilberforce consisted precisely in this, as a con- 
 temporary put it : that ' they bestowed on their pupils as 
 much time and trouble as was usually only expected from 
 very good private tutors. 
 
 When Jowett went up to Balliol, the new tutorial 
 enthusiasm had already made its way thither, and his
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 451 
 
 predecessor as tutor, A. C. Tait (afterwards Archbishop of 
 Canterbury), had made a great impression on the college by 
 his assiduity and his charm of manner. Jowett, in spite of 
 the shyness which hampered him throughout life, applied 
 himself with extraordinary energy to the tutorial task ; and 
 it was thus that, after a few years, he began to gain influence, 
 and to win for himself the enthusiastic esteem of scores of 
 undergraduates. Varying accounts are given of his early 
 tutorial years; but it is certain that 'his devotion to his 
 pupils was, at this time, something unique in Oxford.' One 
 distinguished pupil of his between 1852 and 1854 tells us 
 that he ' often took composition to Jowett at half -past twelve 
 at night.' Jowett early established the custom of taking 
 half a dozen men of ability away with him in the vacations, 
 to work under his eye for a few weeks a practice he main- 
 tained till almost the end of his life. Such zeal soon pro- 
 duced a crop of first classes for Balliol, and raised the 
 intellectual reputation of the college; the infection was 
 caught by such of his own pupils as became tutors at Balliol 
 or at other colleges ; and tutorial ardour, once introduced, 
 was fanned by intercollegiate rivalry. As soon as he became 
 Master, Jowett added the coping-stone to the fabric by ' esta- 
 blishing weekly tutorial meetings, at which he never failed 
 to attend, going through the whole list of undergraduates, 
 and satisfying himself by inquiry about the work of every 
 man ' two hundred or more ; and other colleges, again, 
 imitated, with various modifications, the new machinery. 
 Among the qualities desirable in the Head of a college, set 
 down in some curious memoranda of Jowett' s, occurs this 
 requirement : ' He should know how to " put pressure" upon 
 everybody.' His own Mastership left nothing to be desired 
 in this respect. 
 
 Jowett was thus, in large measure, the creator of the 
 modern tutorial ideal. What that involves may be readily 
 gathered from a phrase used in passing by one of the writers 
 of the Life, himself an eminent Balliol tutor. College tutors, 
 he tells us, are held ' responsible for the position of a pupil 
 in the class list.' 
 
 GO 2
 
 452 ACADEMIC 
 
 Yet as tutor he was more than an instructor. He wished 
 to know his undergraduates personally, to influence the 
 development of their characters in every possible way for 
 good, to promote sociability, and bring men together. Hospi- 
 tality was therefore a duty as well as a pleasure, and ' he 
 was the most hospitable of men.' ' When his stipend as 
 Greek professor was increased, the fact was brought home 
 to us his pupils by the increase in the plates and dishes 
 which his servant piled up on the stairs leading to his room. 
 He had undergraduates with him at almost every meal ; he 
 wished to know as much of them as possible.' What Jowett 
 did, his disciples who were tutors did in their turn ; when 
 he became Master, he ' urged the Balliol tutors to do the 
 same.' In later years, he rejoiced to fill the Master's Lodge, 
 from Saturday to Monday, with visitors of distinction, and 
 many a joke has been cracked about this little hobby. But 
 ' he never, in anything that he did, forgot the college or the 
 undergraduates, and nothing was more remarkable in him 
 than the pains which he took about the future careers of his 
 " young men." This was, in his opinion, one of the chief 
 duties of the head of a college.' 
 
 So the ideal of the tutor was still further enlarged, and 
 grew to be what we know it : that combination of authority 
 and comradeship, of dignity and bonhomie, which is often 
 presented in forms of infinite attractiveness, and which has 
 excited the longing admiration of so many American ob- 
 servers. 
 
 There is a significant passage in Pattison's ' Memoirs ' 
 where he explains the reasons which led the Provost of Oriel 
 to get rid of the three energetic and successful tutors before 
 mentioned : ' Newman insisted upon regarding his relation 
 to his pupils as a pastoral one. Unless he could exercise 
 the function of tutor on this basis, he did not think that he, 
 being a priest, could be a tutor at all. . . . The Provost's 
 proposal that all undergraduates should be entered under 
 one common name, and no longer under respective tutors, 
 interfered with Newman's doctrine of the pastoral relation. 
 This was the point which Newman would not give up, and
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 453 
 
 for which he resigned.' Pattison remarks, in his unsym- 
 pathetic fashion, that if Newman had succeeded, ' a college 
 would have become a mere priestly seminary." But seven 
 or eight years later we find Tait, at Balliol a most un- 
 priestly tutor turning over in his mind ' what can be done 
 to make more of a pastoral connection between the tutors 
 and their pupils.' In fact, through all the changes that the 
 last sixty years have brought, with most of the tutors laymen, 
 and many by no means orthodox, with every effort to wear 
 velvet gloves and to keep serious purposes well in the back- 
 ground, the ideal of the relation has continued to be, in a 
 very real sense, a pastoral one. 
 
 So much, then, for the theory; now as to the results. 
 None but a fanatical and unobservant adversary can deny 
 that the system is in many respects highly beneficial to the 
 undergraduates. The abler men are taught to work rapidly 
 and consecutively ; they acquire a great deal of information ; 
 they learn the art of presenting their knowledge in lucid and 
 forcible shape. The stupid and the idle are made to do some 
 systematic work ; and an enthusiastic tutor will succeed in 
 striking a spark of genuine interest out of perhaps one in ten 
 even of them. But there are some deductions to be made 
 from the verdict of success. The tutorial system often does 
 for the undergraduate more than is good for him. In one of 
 his sermons of 1885, Jowett compares the present Balliol 
 undergraduate with his predecessor forty or fifty years ago, 
 not altogether to the advantage of the former: 'There is 
 greater refinement and greater decorum ; there is also more 
 knowledge and steady industry. On the other hand, there 
 was more heartiness and originality and force among the 
 youth of that day.' In that entertaining and witty book, 
 ' Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a Mere Don,' there is the 
 same lament : ' There are certain indications that the under- 
 graduate is less of a grown-up person than he was in the 
 brave days of old. It takes him a long time to forget his 
 schooldays. Only exceptionally untrammelled spirits regard 
 independent reading as more important than the ministra- 
 tions of their tutor.'
 
 454 ACADEMIC 
 
 If the intellectual results are not wholly satisfactory, what 
 of the social ? Under Jowett, Balliol grew in numbers, till it 
 outstripped all other colleges except Christ Church ; and the 
 undergraduate body became more and more composite in 
 social origin from the earl down, or up, to the clever son of 
 the artisan. Jowett's dream was that the earl and the artisan's 
 son should fraternise ; but, as a matter of fact, they did not. 
 It was notorious in Oxford that Balliol was one of the most 
 cliquy of colleges. Jowett did his best to fight against the 
 growing evil. He induced Mr. John Farmer to come from 
 Harrow and establish Sunday evening concerts of classical 
 music, and Monday evening smoking concerts with college 
 songs, as a means of binding the college together. But, with 
 all his shrewdness, he failed to realise that a large and 
 diversified college is incompatible with real acquaintance 
 with one another on the part of the undergraduates. No 
 quantity of college songs or tutorial ' tea and toast ' can make 
 headway against the centrifugal forces. 
 
 This is the undergraduate's side of the account ; now for 
 the tutor's. The Oxford tutor his admirers, like ' a Mere 
 Don,' regretfully acknowledge it has become a schoolmaster, 
 with the qualities and the defects of the qualities. Other 
 and external causes have contributed to make him the over- 
 worked schoolmaster he is ; for the number of tutors has by 
 no means increased, as it should have done, in proportion to 
 their labours. Professor Freeman used to point out as his 
 recent biographer tells us that ' the university was be- 
 coming less and less a centre for learning, and sinking more 
 and more into a mere educational machine ; ' and that ' mean- 
 while the ablest works in philosophy and history proceeded 
 from university men, indeed, but not, as a rule, from those 
 who were resident, but from the cabinet minister, the banker, 
 or the country clergyman.' This is not hard to account for. 
 Let any one read the humorous Diary of a Don, in ' Aspects 
 of Modern Oxford,' with its picture of perpetual bustle from 
 morning to night, and he will understand how exceedingly 
 difficult it must be to get much time for steady reading or 
 quiet thought.
 
 THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL 455 
 
 Did Jowett realise any part of this ? Hardly. And still 
 there are some significant phrases in his letters. Writing to 
 Stanley in 1852, and urging him to take the headship of a 
 proposed ' Balliol Hall/ he was careful to point out that the 
 position was ' not that of a drudging college tutor.' In 1870 
 he confessed to the same friend that he was glad to reach 
 the Mastership, ' because I want more rest and leisure to 
 think, and I have been overworked for many years past. 
 Among his Memoranda has been found a little set of ' Maxims 
 for Statesmen and Others,' wherein ' Never spare' and ' Never 
 drudge' stand cheek by jowl. 
 
 The pressure of duty upon the tutor has been very con- 
 siderably increased by the growth of the ' combined lecture ' 
 plan. Many of the tutors, besides giving instruction to their 
 college pupils, lecture two or three times a week, to all under- 
 graduates who choose to attend. As a result, some of them 
 perform what one may describe as ' professorial ' functions in 
 addition to their strictly tutorial ones. As Freeman put it 
 less kindly, they have ' become mongrel beings neither pro- 
 fessor, nor college tutor, nor private coach.' It needs but 
 little reflection to see how severe must be the strain upon 
 the teacher who, besides being responsible for the examina- 
 tion feats of a couple of dozen undergraduates, tries to keep 
 abreast of the latest investigations in the special subject on 
 which he is lecturing. 
 
 Jowett viewed the outcome of these tendencies with much 
 disquietude, but, characteristically enough, on account of the 
 hearer, not of the lecturer. The substitution of ' preelections ' 
 for the older catechetical instruction, he declared in his later 
 years, was ' utterly bad for the students, though flattering to 
 the teacher.' Often the mere listening to a lecture is ' no 
 intellectual discipline at all.' Yet the ' combined lecture ' 
 was in two ways the result of Jowett's action and that 
 of men like him. It was the inevitable result of intercol- 
 legiate co-operation ; it was also the outlet which the pro- 
 fessorial instinct, irrepressible in a great modern university, 
 found for itself under the tutorial regime. In his evidence 
 before the University Commission in 1877, Jowett urged the
 
 456 ACADEMIC 
 
 necessity of enlarging the professoriate in order to create ' a 
 career to which college tutors can look forward/ now that 
 they no longer look to preferment in the Church. But now- 
 adays men are hardly likely to be appointed to professorships 
 unless they have done some more or less original work in 
 the subject of the chair. How men are to do that original 
 work, and at the same time be college tutors of the kind 
 Jowett would have had them, it is not easy to see. 
 
 Up to this point, it will be observed, I have abstained 
 from criticising the tutorial ideal as Jowett cherished it, and 
 the preceding remarks as to its deficiencies have been based 
 chiefly on Jowett's own observations. The readers of this 
 paper probably do not need to be told that another university 
 ideal has had its champions in Oxford, and that the tutorial 
 system has not been without its critics. Of these the most 
 vigorous and emphatic was Mark Pattison, the late Eector of 
 Lincoln. According to Pattison, the colleges were never in- 
 tended by their founders to be ' establishments for the educa- 
 tion of youth/ ' schools for young men who had outgrown 
 school/ but rather to be 'retreats for study/ The original 
 object of their foundation was ' the promotion of learning/ 
 ' the endowment of knowledge.' ' So far from its being the 
 intention of a fellowship to support the Master of Arts as a 
 teacher, it was rather its purpose to relieve him from the 
 drudgery of teaching for a maintenance, and to set him free 
 to give his whole time to the studies of his faculty.' It was 
 the Jesuits who first introduced ' the principle of perpetual 
 supervision, of repeated examinations, of weekly exercises/ 
 that is, the tutorial method at first greeted as a reform, 
 but found in the end to produce ' starved and shrivelled under- 
 standings.' Pattison demanded a return to the old ideals, 
 an ' endowment of research ' in some shape or other, even if 
 it could take no better form than the creation of a body of 
 professors whose true purpose was ' veiled from the sneers 
 of Philistinism by the thin disguise of setting them to deliver 
 terminal courses of lectures to empty benches.' That Oxford 
 should do nothing but educate, and educate for examinations, 
 was bad, he declared, for both teacher and taught, and fatal
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 457 
 
 to the university as a place of learning. He had himself 
 been a highly successful tutor, and in his earlier days had 
 done for Lincoln something like what Jowett, his con- 
 temporary, was doing for Balliol. ' I have never ceased,' he 
 declared in the closing days of his life, ' to prize as highly as 
 I did at that time the personal influence of mind upon mind 
 the mind of the fully instructed upon the young mind it 
 seeks to form. But I gradually came to see that it was 
 impossible to base a whole academical system upon this 
 single means of influence.' Jowett, meanwhile, as his bio- 
 graphers tell us, ' had no sympathy with the organised en- 
 dowment of research, and he was strongly opposed to any 
 measures which were likely to lessen the influence of the 
 colleges.' Nor was he afraid to exclaim, ' How I hate 
 learning ! ' 
 
 Whatever the purposes of the original founders may have 
 been, we may be pretty sure that the English universities 
 will never become primarily places of original investigation 
 or homes of learned leisure. There is the crowd of under- 
 graduates to be dealt with somehow ; there is the obvious 
 benefit that can be conferred upon the students, and the in- 
 fluence for good that can be exercised through them upon 
 the nation. On the other hand, it can hardly be maintained 
 that Oxford does as much as might fairly be expected of her 
 for the advancement of knowledge ; and it is scarcely seemly 
 for her to be so very dependent for fresh ideas and new con- 
 clusions upon German universities and 'private scholars.' 
 Of course it is good for most scholars to be compelled from 
 time to time to take stock of their labours and to put their 
 results into teachable shape. It is equally true that aca- 
 demic teaching is bound, in the long run, to deteriorate unless 
 it is inspired by the consciousness of widening knowledge 
 and the hope of personally advancing the cause of science. 
 No Oxford man who has had any experience in American 
 universities will be inclined to underestimate the incalculable 
 service done to the undergraduate by collegiate life and 
 discipline. It is rather a case of ' These ought ye to have 
 done, and not to leave the other undone.' Perhaps even
 
 458 ACADEMIC 
 
 now forces are at work which will restore the balance. The 
 professorships established by the last university commission 
 are beginning to make themselves felt ; the number of 
 ' schools,' or curricula for honours, is being increased ; two 
 scholarly journals, comparable with the best of any country, 
 the English Historical Review and the Economic Journal, 
 are being edited in Oxford ; and the ideas of ' graduate studies ' 
 and ' research degrees ' are in the air. Oxford has already 
 much to offer the serious American graduate student ; and 
 perhaps his resort thither will in some slight measure help 
 Oxford herself to return to her older traditions. 1 
 
 When we turn from Oxford and Jowett to the university 
 problem in America, our first impression, maybe, is of the 
 total dissimilarity of conditions, and of the hopelessness of 
 deriving any lessons from English experience. Yet the Ame- 
 rican reader of Jowett's biography will be singularly irre- 
 sponsive if it does not prompt some consideration of the 
 functions of the university in this country. In what I have 
 left to say, I shall confine myself to Harvard, with which 
 alone, among American universities, I have any intimate 
 acquaintance. 
 
 The peculiarity in the position of Harvard is that while 
 the professorial ideal has definitely triumphed among the 
 teaching body, the tutorial ideal is still cherished by the 
 ' constituency.' Most of the professors care first of all for 
 the advancement of science and scholarship ; they prefer 
 lectures to large audiences to the catechetical instruction of 
 multiplied ' sections,' and they would leave students free to 
 attend lectures or neglect them, at their own peril; they 
 would pick out the abler men, and initiate them into the 
 processes of investigation in small 'research courses' or 
 ' seminaries ; ' and, to be perfectly frank, they are not greatly 
 interested in the ordinary undergraduate. On the other hand 
 the university constituency represented, as I am told, by 
 
 1 [A great deal has been done in Oxford since this article was written 
 to encourage the resort of graduate students to Oxford. American 
 readers may be referred to the clear account of the whole academic legis- 
 lation by Mr. Louis Dyer in the Nation, June 7, 1900.]
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 459 
 
 the Overseers insists that the ordinary undergraduate shall 
 be ' looked after ; ' that he shall not be allowed to ' waste his 
 time ; ' that he shall be ' pulled up ' by frequent examinations, 
 and forced to do a certain minimum of work, whether he 
 wants to or not. The result of this pressure has been the esta- 
 blishment of an elaborate machinery of periodical examina- 
 tion, the carrying on of a vaster bookkeeping for the regis- 
 tration of attendance and of grades than was ever before 
 seen at any university, and the appointment of a legion of 
 junior ' instructors ' and assistants, to whom is assigned the 
 drudgery of reading examination-books and conducting ' con- 
 ferences.' 
 
 So far as the professors are concerned, the arrangement 
 is as favourable as can reasonably be expected. Of course 
 they are all bound to lecture, and to lecture several times a 
 week ; they exercise a general supervision over the labours 
 of their assistants; they guide the studies of advanced 
 students ; they conduct the examinations for honours and 
 for higher degrees; they carry on a ceaseless correspond- 
 ence ; and each of them sits upon a couple of committees. 
 But they are not absolutely compelled to undertake much 
 drudging work in the way of instruction, and if they are 
 careful of their time they can manage to find leisure for their 
 own researches. As soon as a ' course ' gets large, a benevo- 
 lent Corporation will provide an assistant. The day is past 
 when they were obliged, in the phrase of Lowell, ' to double 
 the parts of professor and tutor." 
 
 But the soil of America is not as propitious as one could 
 wish for the plant of academic leisure. It is a bustling at- 
 mosphere ; and a professor needs some strength of mind to 
 resist the temptation to be everlastingly ' doing ' something 
 obvious. The sacred reserves of time and energy need to be 
 jealously guarded, and there is more than one direction from 
 which they are threatened. University administration oc- 
 cupies what would seem an unduly large number of men 
 and an unduly large amount of time ; it is worth while con- 
 sidering whether more executive authority should not be 
 given to the deans. Then there is the never-ending stream
 
 460 ACADEMIC 
 
 of legislation, or rather of legislative discussion. I must 
 confess that when I have listened, week after week, to Faculty 
 debates, the phrase of Mark Pattison about Oxford has some- 
 times rung in my ears : ' the tone as of a lively municipal 
 borough.' It would be unjust to apply it ; for, after all, the 
 measures under debate have been of far-reaching importance. 
 Yet if any means could be devised to hasten the progress of 
 business, it would be a welcome saving of time. Still another 
 danger is the pecuniary temptation hardly resistible by 
 weak human nature to repeat college lectures to the women 
 students of Eadcliffe. That some amount of repetition will 
 do no harm to teachers of certain temperaments and in 
 certain subjects may well be allowed, but that it is sometimes 
 likely to exhaust the nervous energy which might better be 
 devoted to other things can hardly be denied. The present 
 Eadcliffe system, to be sure, is but a makeshift, and an 
 unsatisfactory one. 
 
 The ' instructors ' and assistants, on their part, have little 
 to grumble at, if they, in their turn, are wise in the use of 
 their time. It is with them, usually, but a few years of 
 drudgery, on the way to higher positions in Harvard or else- 
 where ; and it is well that a man should bear the yoke in his 
 youth. Let him remember that his promotion will depend 
 largely upon his showing the ability to do independent work ; 
 let him take care not to be so absorbed in the duties of his 
 temporary position as to fail to produce some little bit of 
 scholarly or scientific achievement for himself. I have occa- 
 sionally thought that the university accepts the labours of 
 men in the lower grades of the service with a rather step- 
 motherly disregard for their futures. 
 
 Come now to the ' students/ for whose sake, certainly, 
 Harvard College was founded, whatever may have been the 
 case with English colleges, and whose presence casts upon 
 those responsible for academic policy duties which they 
 cannot escape, if they would. Grant that education and 
 education as Jowett understood it, the training of character 
 as well as mere instruction is the main business of a uni- 
 versity, what is to be said of the situation of affairs ? That
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 461 
 
 we do as much here for the average man as the Oxford 
 tutorial system accomplishes, it would be idle to affirm. 
 The introduction of the tutorial system, however, is out of 
 the question : it needs the small college for its basis ; it 
 requires that the tutor should enjoy a prestige which we 
 cannot give him ; and it is still further shut out by ' elective ' 
 studies. Yet in its way the Harvard practice suffers from 
 the same defects as the Oxford ; it does too much for the 
 men. Take the matter of examinations, for instance. Surely 
 it would be better to relax the continuous pressure which 
 after all is not in any worthy sense effective and to rein- 
 force it instead at special points. It was the conviction, we 
 are told, of Professor Freeman that ' if examinations were 
 necessary evils, they should be few, searching, and complete, 
 not many and piecemeal.' At present, there are so many 
 ' tests,' of one sort or another, that no one examination suffi- 
 ciently impresses the undergraduate mind. The kind of 
 work done by a student who is so persistently held up by 
 hour-examinations and conferences that he must be an ab- 
 normal fool to ' fail ' at the end, cannot be regarded as really 
 educational in any high sense of the word. By a great many 
 men, the help showered upon them is regarded merely as the 
 means of discovering just how little they can do, and still 
 scrape through. To sweep away all examinations except 
 the final annual one ; to leave the student more to himself ; 
 to set a higher standard for passing, and ruthlessly reject 
 those who do not reach it, would undoubtedly, in the long 
 run, encourage a more manly spirit on the part of under- 
 graduates, and a deeper respect for the university. This I 
 say with the fuller confidence because, when I left Oxford, 
 now (1900) some twelve years ago, I could see nothing but 
 the evils of the examination system as it there affects 
 students of promise. I am convinced that it would be pos- 
 sible and salutary in Harvard to add greatly to the awfulness 
 of examination ; and that much could be done in this direc- 
 tion without approaching within measurable distance of any 
 results that need be feared. 
 
 From a natural distrust of examinations and a desire to
 
 462 ACADEMIC 
 
 encourage independent thought, it has of late become the 
 practice to prescribe two or more theses during the progress 
 of a ' course.' The result is that many a man has half a 
 dozen or more theses to write during the year, for two or 
 three different teachers. This undoubtedly ' gets some work 
 out of the men.' But the too frequent consequence, with 
 students who take their work seriously, especially with gra- 
 duates, is that they have no time for anything but to get up 
 their lectures and prepare their theses. Any parallel reading 
 by the side of their lectures they find impracticable. But 
 one of the best things a student can do is just to read intelli- 
 gently. Certainly the graduate students, if not the under- 
 graduates, would sometimes be the better for being left more 
 to themselves. 
 
 These are, however, relatively minor matters. A good 
 deal could be said about that corner-stone of Harvard aca- 
 demic policy, the ' elective ' system. I must confess that I 
 have hitherto failed to see the advantage of the completely 
 elective plan (for any but exceptional students) over the plan 
 of ' groups,' or ' triposes,' or ' schools,' with some degree of 
 internal elasticity to suit particular tastes. That the elective 
 system is an improvement on the old compulsory curriculum 
 is likely enough ; but I do not know that any great American 
 university has ever yet fairly tried the group arrangement. 
 This, however, is too large a subject for the end of a paper, 
 and I hurry on to my last point. 
 
 Of all the educational agencies at Oxford, Oxford itself is 
 the most potent. 
 
 That sweet city, with her dreaming spires ; 
 She needs not June for beauty's heightening. 
 
 Harvard, indeed, is truly ' fair ' at Commencement, and in 
 the evening lights the Yard has always a sober dignity. But 
 Harvard in the daytime sadly needs May or October for 
 beauty's heightening. The disadvantages of youth and 
 climate may not be altogether surmountable ; yet Cambridge 
 surroundings could doubtless be made more comely and rest- 
 ful with comparatively little trouble. There must be a certain
 
 THE UNIVEESITY IDEAL 463 
 
 atrophy of the aesthetic sense when luxuriously furnished 
 dormitories have no difficulty in securing tenants though 
 they face rubbish dumps, when rowing-men can practise with 
 equanimity beneath a coal-dealer's mammoth advertisement, 
 and when the crash and jangle of street-cars are permitted 
 to destroy what little remains of the quiet of the Yard. 
 What is to be desired for every student most of all for 
 those from homes of little cultivation is that he should live 
 in the presence of grace and beauty and stateliness. The 
 lesson of good taste cannot be learnt from lectures, and 
 is imbibed unconsciously. Here we must turn to our 
 masters, the Corporation, and to the worshipful benefactors 
 to come. Is all the thought taken that might be taken, 
 all the pressure used that might be exerted, to increase the 
 amenity of the neighbourhood ? And, further, is it Utopian to 
 imagine that some benefactor will yet arise who will enable 
 Harvard to imitate the noble example of Yale, and erect 
 dormitories that shall delight the eye ? Is it too much to 
 hope that the university may soon be enriched with at least 
 one more building such as Memorial Hall ? For many a 
 Harvard student his daily meals in Memorial Hall, in that 
 ample space, beneath the glowing colours of the windows 
 and surrounded by the pictures of the Harvard worthies of 
 the past, constitute the most educative part of his university 
 career, though he may not know it. Only half the students 
 can now be brought within this silent influence. A second 
 dining-hall, of like dignity, is perhaps the most urgent edu- 
 cational need of Harvard, and the need most easily supplied. 1 
 
 1 [I leave this sentence, for obvious reasons, in spite of the recent 
 erection of Randall Hall. The desirability of a large infusion of other 
 than immediately utilitarian elements in the policy of the Corporation is 
 emphasised, I think, by the increasingly evident tendency towards social 
 segregation in the student body. The English reader who desires to 
 know more of the atmosphere of the greater American universities may 
 be referred to Mr. Bliss Perry's article on ' The Life of a College 
 Professor' in Scribner's Magazine for October 1897 ; while the American 
 reader who is interested in Oxford may with advantage consult Mr. 
 F. C. S. Schiller on ' Philosophy at Oxford ' in the Educational Eevieio 
 for October 1899.]
 
 464 ACADEMIC 
 
 SCHOLAESHIPS, 
 AT OXFOKD AND AT HAEVAED ' 
 
 THERE were few things which struck me more when I came 
 to Harvard than the position or rather the want of position 
 of the holders of scholarships in this University, as com- 
 pared with the state of things to which I had been accus- 
 tomed as an undergraduate and as a tutor at Oxford. The 
 Oxford teacher is accustomed to find that most of the students 
 of ability with whom he comes into contact are ' Scholars of 
 their colleges : ' they are marked out from their comrades by 
 gowns of larger amplitude : and the first piece of informa- 
 tion which a teacher receives of a man is that he is a Scholar 
 of such and such a college a circumstance regarded as 
 creditable in every case, and peculiarly creditable when the 
 college is one of intellectual distinction. In the University 
 Calendar (which corresponds to the American Catalogue), 
 the list of the scholars of each college is printed after the list 
 of fellows and before that of commoners (or undergraduates 
 ' not on the foundation ') ; in the chapel the scholars have 
 their own special place, and in many colleges wear surplices 
 on Sunday like the Fellows. From the ranks of the Scholars, 
 with the rarest exceptions, is derived in the course of years 
 the teaching force of the university college tutors and 
 university professors and readers ; they contribute most of 
 the upper masters to the great schools ; and the most suc- 
 cessful among these, becoming head-masters, acquire a social 
 dignity unknown to their profession in America. And when 
 
 1 [The Harvard Monthly, January 1900.]
 
 SCHOLAESHIPS 465 
 
 a man of any sort of distinction dies in England, if he 
 happens to have been a Scholar of his college in his youth, 
 as is often the case, that is a fact which no newspaper editor 
 would dream of omitting from the obituary notice. 
 
 I need hardly say that I did not find the ' holders of 
 scholarships' at Harvard anything like so conspicuous, so 
 marked out from the rest of the undergraduates. I found 
 that most of the undergraduates of ability with whom I came 
 into contact did not hold scholarships ; that many men held 
 scholarships who were ill-educated and stupid, however well- 
 meaning ; and once or twice, when I was very new to the 
 place, and happened to ask a man whether he held a scholar- 
 ship, the question was received with surprise, and, if I am 
 not very much mistaken, with a certain annoyance. 
 
 The editors of the Harvard Monthly seem to think that 
 some explanation of this striking contrast may be of interest 
 to their readers ; and their request must be my apology for 
 what follows. But let me make it plain at the outset that 
 my praise of the English system does not necessarily involve 
 condemnation of the American. It could readily be shown, 
 if there were opportunity, that each is bound up with the 
 social organisation and social ideals of the country to which 
 it belongs ; and I fully recognise the inestimable benefits 
 which Harvard scholarships have conferred upon very many 
 individuals, and through them upon the community. More- 
 over, the contrast with which I started would perhaps be 
 just a little misleading if applied to English academic life 
 as a whole in comparison with American. What I have 
 said of Oxford would, I am told, require some modification 
 for Cambridge ; and even in some Oxford colleges there are 
 certain 'exhibitions' (i.e. scholarships of small amount), 
 which are bestowed on deserving persons of no very marked 
 intellectual attainments. Still the contrast with Oxford 
 remains visible enough, and to that I shall confine myself. 
 
 The fundamental explanation is to be found in the fact 
 that at Oxford the scholarships are thrown open to 
 general competition by all comers, without regard to the 
 pecuniary means of their parents. Let me add at once that 
 
 H H
 
 466 ACADEMIC 
 
 ' appointments ' are not made as in American universities for 
 one year only, but as a rule for four years in practice, if 
 not always in theory. Each college announces a year before- 
 hand the date of its scholarship examination, and the schools 
 send up most of their cleverest boys for one or more of the 
 competitions. I suppose a duke or a millionaire might feel 
 some scruple about his son's taking a scholarship ; but the 
 duke or millionaire has probably but rarely any occasion to 
 perplex himself with the case of conscience. Very occa- 
 sionally a wealthy parent who wishes that his clever boy 
 should enjoy the distinction of a scholarship privately declines 
 or repays the allotted stipend. With these quite unimpor- 
 tant exceptions, the scholarships are freely competed for and 
 gained by representatives of all social classes ; and this has 
 come to be so much a matter of course in England that I do 
 not remember ever to have heard it criticised. The highest 
 dignitaries of the church, country squires, Her Majesty's 
 judges, headmasters of great schools, lawyers with large 
 practices, popular physicians, celebrated artists, are all over- 
 joyed when their sons win scholarships at a famous college. 
 Dr. Arnold had been headmaster of Rugby twelve years when 
 Matthew was elected at Balliol. Among the Balliol scholars 
 a little junior to me was the son of the great violinist 
 Joachim. When I was in England last year, the son of my 
 old history tutor at Balliol, Mr. A. L. Smith, one of the best- 
 known of Oxford dons, was elected to a scholarship at his 
 father's college. As soon as the announcement appeared in 
 the papers, everybody in Oxford went about making pretty 
 speeches about the appropriateness of the distinction. But 
 if my son were ever to present himself as a candidate for a 
 Harvard scholarship, I should certainly be referred to p. 484 
 of the Catalogue, and the severe words : ' A student who is 
 not in need of aid cannot honourably apply for a scholarship.' 
 Now I am perfectly aware how absurd the Oxford usage 
 invariably appears to the common-sense American when he 
 first hears of it. What ! spend a large part of the income 
 of a college in stipends to students whose fathers are per- 
 fectly well able to pay for them themselves ! But this is not
 
 SCHOLAESHIPS 467 
 
 yet a logical world ; and many a comical absurdity has its 
 practical advantages. And the Oxford system has two most 
 important results. In the first place, it prevents the scholar- 
 ship from being associated with poverty, or with the defective 
 breeding which unfortunately poverty too often brings with 
 it. When most of the scholars of a college are just as much 
 ' gentlemen ' in the conventional sense of the word, and many 
 come from the same great schools, as other undergraduates, 
 the holding of a scholarship cannot of itself involve any social 
 stigma. I do not for a moment wish to imply that such a 
 stigma is involved in America. I know how indignantly, 
 and with what justice, this would be denied. But it cer- 
 tainly would be the case in England, if scholarships were 
 restricted to men ' in indigent circumstances.' If any one is 
 inclined to shake his head, and blame or lament English 
 snobbishness, I can only say that I also would make English 
 society something very different from what it is, if I had the 
 making of it. Meanwhile, the ' indigent ' student who gets 
 a scholarship at Oxford and every year quite poor men do 
 win scholarships receives an amount of social esteem which 
 no other system could there secure for him. He is known 
 by all to have won his place by his brains, in a keen com- 
 petition with men who have enjoyed every social advantage, 
 and he is respected accordingly. 
 
 A word of further explanation, however, is necessary. 
 The amount of a scholarship is usually a good deal larger 
 than in America. Four hundred dollars is the usual amount, 
 and this goes somewhat further in England than the like 
 sum over here. And, then, many of the men who win 
 scholarships at the colleges bring with them also scholarships 
 from their schools, tenable at the university ; three hundred 
 dollars is a common amount. Thus every year sees the 
 arrival in Oxford of a number of quite poor men, sometimes 
 from the very humblest classes, who combine with first-class 
 abilities (so far as any human tests can ascertain) the enjoy- 
 ment of an income which enables them to dress like their 
 associates, to have comfortable rooms, and to give all their 
 working tune for four years to the studies of the place. The 
 
 n H 2
 
 468 ACADEMIC 
 
 fact is that if a man does not see his way to pay his expenses 
 at the university without ' outside work ' in term time, he 
 does not come. The man who is ' working his way through 
 college' is almost an unknown figure in Oxford. Many a 
 man in America and Scotland has in this manner won an 
 education for himself with a persistence and a self-denial 
 which have done honour to human nature. And yet I have 
 received circulars from Harvard students asking my help 
 practically, my alms in ways of earning a livelihood which 
 have made me blush for the university. I think I would 
 rather that my son did not go to college at all than that he 
 should go on such terms. 
 
 The second good result of the Oxford system is that it 
 gives the schools something to work for incomparably higher 
 than the examinations which correspond to the American 
 entrance examination. 'Fitting for college' in America is 
 apparently a synonym for preparing men to satisfy the 
 ' entrance requirements.' When, as is now occasionally the 
 case, an intelligent boy taught at a good school is ' ready for 
 college' at sixteen or seventeen, as he ought to be, neither 
 his masters nor his parents know what to do with him for 
 a year or even two. In the English schools, on the other 
 hand, it may be said with substantial accuracy that the 
 object is to prepare boys to win scholarships, and that inci- 
 dentally, and on the road to this, the average boy is got 
 ready to satisfy the requirements of mere entrance. The 
 announcements in the newspapers of elections to scholarships 
 invariably give the name of the schools from which the 
 several boys come ; and to be successful in getting scholar- 
 ships with your boys is one of the surest ways to make 
 the reputation of a school. Clifton, under Dr. Percival, the 
 present Bishop of Hereford, and the City of London School, 
 under Dr. Abbott, the well-known New Testament critic, are 
 brilliant cases in point. I know what can be said of the 
 iniquity of introducing ideas of competition into education : 
 when I left Oxford I was myself in the full current of re- 
 action against it. But one cannot help seeing the unfortunate 
 results of the lack in America of any effective educational
 
 SCHOLAESHIPS 469 
 
 ideals for the clever boy other than those set before the 
 average boy; and, after all, boys are not so sensitive and 
 nervous as high-minded theorists sometimes imagine. 
 
 It is curious that at the very time when educational 
 reformers in England are busily occupied in completing the 
 scholarship system by introducing its principles into secondary 
 education, and so providing a ' ladder from the board school 
 to the university,' the state of affairs in regard to ' pecuniary 
 aid' in the American colleges should be calling forth ex- 
 pressions of concern from the most eminent academic autho- 
 rities. I have certainly not had the experience which would 
 justify me in expressing any very strong opinion on the 
 subject ; and I should be sorry if any one supposed that I 
 advocated the wholesale ' introduction of the English system.' 
 But I have had the honour to serve for two or three years 
 on the committee for undergraduate scholarships in Harvard 
 College, and there are one or two impressions which have 
 been gradually left on my mind, and which those who know 
 more about the difficulties of the situation may take for what 
 they are worth. 
 
 My impression, then, in the first place, is that, as things 
 are at present, there are too many scholarships and grants 
 of aid in Harvard College. By ' too many' I mean that some 
 time before the committee gets to the bottom of its list of 
 assignments it is obliged to content itself with the most 
 meagre evidence of knowledge or ability on the part of the 
 beneficiaries. There are not enough ' indigent ' men of ascer- 
 tainable intellectual power applying for scholarships to make 
 up the number. Another impression is that the scholarships 
 are of too small amount ; that there are far too few of four 
 hundred dollars and far too many of one hundred and fifty 
 or less. It is surely a wasteful employment of a nation's 
 most valuable resources the intellectual powers of its 
 citizens to compel men who ought to be giving to their 
 studies the whole of the time not needed for rest or recreation 
 to expend half their energies in scraping together a livelihood 
 by typewriting. For this reason I cannot agree with the 
 proposition of President Hadley in his Inauguration Address
 
 470 ACADEMIC 
 
 if I understood him rightly that the wise policy of the 
 university is to aim at the multiplication of the means of 
 self-maintenance open to indigent students. If a man is 
 worth helping at all, I cannot but think that he is worth 
 helping adequately. Certainly I know of no more pathetic 
 figure than the gaunt and ill-clad student who 'can't get 
 more than C because he has to do so much outside work.' 
 At Harvard, as elsewhere, there are doubtless difficulties in 
 the way of any far-reaching change ; though I should have 
 thought, by the accumulation of two or more scholarships 
 on one head or otherwise, the obstacles could be surmounted. 
 But if only some little progress could be made in this 
 direction, while the total amount of pecuniary aid remains 
 unchanged, this would of course pro tanto diminish the 
 number of scholarships, and so enable, or rather compel, the 
 appointing committee to insist on a tolerably satisfactory 
 standard of attainment on the part of every one of the 
 recipients. 
 
 My last suggestion must be even more tentative and hesi- 
 tating. When I served on the scholarship committee, it was, 
 I think, only our well-grounded confidence in the acumen of 
 the dean of the college, our chairman, which gave us any 
 reason, in many cases of ' Price Greenleaf aid,' for believing 
 in tbe wisdom of our awards. The dean seemed to possess 
 an unerring instinct as to just how much was meant by a 
 testimonial to ' exceptional ability ' from a master who had 
 never sent up a boy before, accompanied by a commendatory 
 letter from the young man's mother's most intimate lady 
 friend. I have wondered since whether the university can 
 count upon having acumen of this order always at its service, 
 and whether it would not be possible to make use of the 
 entrance examinations to provide data more easily interpret- 
 able. If the grants of Price Greenleaf aid were raised in 
 amount and lessened in number; if pains were taken to 
 make them known in every part of the country, and 
 examinations were held in every state of the union, it is at 
 any rate possible that the competition would be more keen 
 and fruitful than at present. Examination is an evil, but
 
 SCHOLAESHIPS 471 
 
 a necessary one ; and it seems to me that in this connection, 
 as in others, the university may find itself led to make more 
 use of it, and to treat it more seriously. 1 
 
 1 [In the few months that have elapsed since the above was written, 
 a Fellowship has been founded in the Department of Classics in the 
 award of which it is expressly laid down by the donor that no regard 
 shall be paid to the pecuniary needs of candidates, and also a Scholar- 
 ship in the Department of Economics which is not only subject to the 
 same condition, but is assigned after a written examination. It is to be 
 hoped that future endowments will follow these precedents. If there 
 are any further gifts for the benefit of indigent students, they should 
 take the form of increasing the present stipends in amount, and not in 
 number. But there are many better ways of assisting poor students 
 than by the multiplication of scholarships restricted to poverty. Among 
 these may be mentioned the provision of duplicate copies of expensive 
 text-books in the library, and the adornment of Eandall Hall.]
 
 472 ACADEMIC 
 
 THE UNIVEKSITY OF FEIBOUKG 
 IN SWITZEBLAND 1 
 
 THE tourist in Switzerland can hardly have failed to observe 
 how very conspicuous a place has been given this summer 
 in the bookshop windows to certain pamphlets about the 
 new university at Fribourg. If he has read the newspapers, 
 he will also have come across occasional obscure intimations 
 as to what the German universities are going to do to mark 
 their sense of Fribourg's enormities. The matter is worth 
 looking into. 
 
 In 1889 the great council of the Canton of Fribourg voted 
 to establish a university. To this resolution, doubtless, 
 diverse motives contributed, foremost among them cantonal 
 pride. But religious zeal also played a large part. All the 
 other universities of Switzerland Basel, Bern, Zurich, 
 Geneva, Lausanne are in Protestant cantons ; and we 
 cannot be surprised that the people of Fribourg, one of the 
 chief strongholds in Switzerland of the Koman Catholic 
 faith, should be unwilling to subject their sons to what they 
 naturally regard as dangerous influences. The faculties of 
 theology, besides, at all these universities are either Pro- 
 testant or Old Catholic; and Eoman Catholic Switzerland 
 has for some time been obliged to content itself, for the 
 education of its theologians, with ill-equipped episcopal semi- 
 naries. Fribourg saw its chance to become the intellectual 
 centre of Eoman Catholic Switzerland. For a little state, 
 with a population of but 120,000, to undertake to have a 
 
 1 [A letter from Switzerland to the Nation, September 29, 1898.]
 
 FEIBOUEG 473 
 
 university of its own was, indeed, a bold thing perhaps an 
 unwise thing; nevertheless, the Government set to work. 
 An initial capital of two and a half million francs was pro- 
 vided by the conversion of the existing public debt ; the 
 cantonal law school was enlarged, and made into a faculty 
 of jurisprudence ; some nineteen scholars were invited from 
 other parts of Switzerland, from France, and, above all, from 
 Germany, to form a faculty of philosophy, and in November 
 1889 the university was opened. Next year the cantonal 
 Government made an arrangement with the General of the 
 Dominican order, in accordance with which some eight or 
 nine members of that order were sent to Fribourg to form a 
 theological faculty, and were received as colleagues by the 
 professors of the other faculties. Finally, in 1896, a faculty 
 of natural science, composed, like that of philosophy, of 
 scholars drawn from Germany and other countries, was 
 called into existence ; supported partly from the profits of 
 the state bank, partly from those of the state electric works. 
 Thus in seven years a teaching force of some sixty persons 
 has been brought together, while the concourse of students 
 was steadily increasing. From 30 in 1889-1890, the number 
 had grown in 1897 to 301127 from Switzerland, 112 from 
 the German Empire, 24 from Bulgaria, 10 from Eussia, and 
 28 from other countries. The canton is bilingual almost 
 equally divided between a French-speaking and a German- 
 speaking population and not only have some of the lectures 
 in the university been given in French and some in German, 
 but the Dominican fathers have given their instruction in 
 Latin. The cantonal Government might fairly congratulate 
 itself on its success ; it has created, it would seem, an in- 
 stitution well suited to the peculiar conditions of the canton, 
 and it has given it a certain cosmopolitan character which 
 attracts students from far beyond the cantonal boundaries. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, the internal history of the uni- 
 versity has been by no means so encouraging. The relations 
 of the members of the professorial body to one another and 
 still more to the Director of Public Instruction, representing 
 the Fribourg government, have been marked almost from
 
 474 ACADEMIC 
 
 the first by a long series of misunderstandings and con- 
 tentions, growing more and more acute until they have 
 culminated in the present crisis. In December of last year 
 eight of the professors, all of them ' Eeichsdeutschen,' i.e. 
 subjects of the German Emperor, resigned in a body ; the 
 educational journals of their fatherland have for the last few 
 months been filled with their grievances ; and the ' Denk- 
 schrift" (Munich: Academischer Verlag), in which they have 
 set forth their version of the circumstances, has reached its 
 second edition. 
 
 When we come to read the ' Denkschrift ' we find, if we 
 may trust its narrative of events, that the university of 
 Pribourg has been a sort of cockpit in which has been fought 
 out anew almost every one of the battles that have engaged 
 the attention of the academic world from the early days of 
 the university of Paris to the most recent state foundation 
 in the American West. The interest of the pamphlet is not 
 diminished by its authors' ignorance of this so to speak 
 microcosmic significance of their experience. The Director 
 of Public Instruction, with the best intentions in the world, 
 authorising promises to win professors which he is afterwards 
 unable to perform, and so little acquainted with the best 
 university traditions that he is continually rubbing the teach- 
 ing body the wrong way by apparent or real interference 
 with academic autonomy how familiar a modern figure he 
 is ! The suspicion, whether well or ill founded, which the 
 lay professors of Fribourg, all good Eoman Catholics, be it 
 observed, felt towards their Dominican colleagues how it 
 reminds us of many a long struggle in the mediaeval uni- 
 versities against the pretensions of the religious orders ! Just 
 below the surface we seem to discern the everlasting problem 
 how to harmonise the claims of ecclesiastical authority with 
 those of scientific independence. And, finally, the racial 
 antagonisms within the professorial body which even the 
 neutral atmosphere of Switzerland could not dissipate, sound 
 like faint echoes from the halls of the university of Prague, 
 whether in Huss's time or our own. 
 
 The reader is so likely to have his mind made up on the
 
 FEIBOUEG 475 
 
 several issues apparently involved that he is pretty sure to 
 be carried away by the ' Denkschrift,' and to take its authors 
 at their own valuation, as deserving champions of the cause 
 of science and academic independence. But it is fair to add 
 that the ' Antwort ' (Fribourg : Universitatsbuchhandlung, 
 Veith) prepared by the Government, puts a good many of the 
 circumstances in a somewhat different light. ' Six of one 
 and half a dozen of the other ' is a dull verdict, perhaps ; 
 and unless one could call for further evidence and cross- 
 examine the witnesses, one would hardly be justified even 
 in saying so much as that. But we cannot but suspect that 
 the band of young German scholars, most of them with little 
 previous experience, who had been brought into the sleepy 
 little Swiss town, scarcely suffered from an insufficient sense 
 of their own importance. We may even conjecture that, 
 in their dealings alike with the Dominicans and with their 
 French colleagues, their conduct was not unfailingly cha- 
 racterised by modesty or consideration for others. 
 
 It would be wearisome to enter into the details of the 
 controversy. A couple of incidents may be worth citing as 
 examples of gravamina. The story of each is, at any rate, 
 full of human nature, and the adequacy of the governmental 
 explanation may be left as a problem for the reader. 
 
 The first is of a certain student who prepared for his 
 doctoral thesis a history of education in the Canton. He 
 took occasion, it appears, to narrate inter alia the scandalous 
 ecclesiastical conditions which once prevailed in the Canton. 
 The Dominicans got wind of this, and, according to their 
 critics, sought to have the dissertation modified, just out of 
 a stupid desire to cover up clerical ill-doing, no matter in 
 what period, at any cost to scientific freedom. To this the 
 Government replies that the publication of these scandals 
 was likely seriously to annoy certain wealthy ecclesiastical 
 corporations and certain wealthy families still established in 
 Fribourg ; that these had it in their power greatly to help or 
 injure the young university ; and that the dissertation might 
 have been just as valuable a contribution to scientific history 
 if it had shown a little more 'tact.'
 
 476 ACADEMIC 
 
 The second incident illustrates the national antagonisms 
 which, according to the same critics, the Director actually 
 fomented. An association of German students in Fribourg 
 held a Commers on the birthday of the German Emperor. 
 One of the German professors proposed the toast of the 
 emperor, and this was so ill received by a French lecturer 
 present that he actually threw his glass under the table ! 
 The Director replies that the speech of the German professor 
 proposing the toast dwelt so complacently on the superiority 
 of the Germans to all the world as to be inevitably offensive 
 to the non-Germans present. The French lecturer in question 
 was polite enough to rise at the toast, but he was so excited 
 that when he sat down he accidentally spilled his glass over 
 the table-cloth and over the trousers of his neighbour ! ' The 
 great conspiracy of the French thus reduces itself to a tact- 
 less speech, a nervous listener, and a bespattered pair of 
 trousers.' All this is solemnly set forth, together with the 
 elaborate letter of apology and self-exculpation which the 
 nervous Frenchman sent to his dean on the occasion. A pair 
 of trousers has never, perhaps, symbolised so much inter- 
 national antipathy unless when Mr. Balfour confiscated the 
 garments of Mr. William O'Brien. 
 
 The places of the outgoing professors have been filled, 
 and the work of the university will proceed. It is to be 
 hoped that the cantonal authorities have received a lesson 
 to go rather more slowly in the future ; to take more care 
 what promises their representatives make to the new comers, 
 and to make up their minds just what sort of place they 
 want their university to be. There are several ideals of a 
 university, each good from its particular point of view, but 
 not all compatible one with another. Let us add that when 
 the authorities of the German universities have had time to 
 digest the Director's ' Antwort,' they will probably not be in 
 quite so great a hurry to boycott little Fribourg as the out- 
 going professors may have expected. 
 
 Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London.
 
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