OR 
 
 THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION 
 OF HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 LIDA PARCE 
 
 n 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 1913
 
 Copyright, 1913 
 BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 
 
 JOHN F. H1GGINS 
 
 PRINTER AND BINDER 
 
 376-382 MONROE STREET 
 CHICAGO. ILLINOIS
 
 PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 "Economic Determinism" is one of four phrases 
 which are used interchangeably by modern writers in re- 
 ferring to a sociological law which is the joint discovery 
 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and was first given 
 to the world in the year 1848. The other phrases used 
 for the same idea are "The Materialistic Conception of 
 History," "Historical Materialism," and "The Economic 
 Interpretation of History." The classic statement of the 
 principle in the words of Frederick Engels is as follows : 
 
 "That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode 
 of economic production and exchange, and the social or- 
 ganization necessarily following from it, form the basis 
 upon which is built up, and from which alone can be ex- 
 plained, the political and intellectual history of that 
 epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind 
 (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding 
 land in common ownership) has been a history of class 
 struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, 
 ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these 
 class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, now- 
 a-days, a stage has been reached where the exploited and 
 oppressed class the proletariat cannot attain its eman- 
 cipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class 
 the bourgeoisie without, at the same time, and once 
 and for all, emancipating society at large from all ex- 
 ploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class strug- 
 gles." 
 
 The phrase usually employed by the author of the pres- 
 ent work is "The Economic Interpretation of History," 
 but as this exact phrase has been used as the title of a 
 work by Professor Seligman, we have, with the author's 
 consent, used the shorter title for this book.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 II THE PERIOD OF SAVAGERY ...... 16 
 
 III THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 23 
 
 IV EARLY CIVILIZATION 38 
 
 V THE FALL OF ROME 51 
 
 VI THE MIDDLE AGES 59 
 
 VII THE MODERN ERA 97 
 
 VIII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION .... 133
 
 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 r llHE principal uses of the study of history are to 
 JL train the judgment of the student and to place 
 him in possession of facts on which to form his judg- 
 ment. Whether the result of such study is good will 
 depend upon the validity of the facts given and the 
 way in which they are interpreted. 
 
 Until the past few years it has been customary 
 to present as history only certain events in the lives 
 of conspicuous characters, such as kings and po- 
 tentates, to celebrate their political successes, record 
 their wars, and make as much as possible of their 
 pomp and trappings of state. The historian has 
 nearly always written with the purpose of cul- 
 tivating the good-will of those in power, and ap- 
 plauding the nation about which he wrote. The 
 facts presented have been those which would lend 
 themselves to these purposes and the reasoning upon 
 them has been theological in its methods. That is, 
 the whole list of characters who figured in the pages 
 of the historian were assumed to be under the pro- 
 tection of supernatural powers, and the events re- 
 
 9
 
 10 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 corded, whether of bloodshed, chicanery or plunder, 
 were regarded as being providential and for the 
 glory of God. The reader is taught that the same 
 supernatural power will answer his prayers and in- 
 tervene at the proper moment to save him from 
 harm, while at the same time being responsible for 
 his misfortunes in this life. But while this invisible 
 power is at the bottom of his present sufferings, they 
 are all to be atoned for by happiness in a future life, 
 if he will only bear his present burdens with meek- 
 ness and submission. 
 
 The natural result of this sort of teaching upon 
 the mind is that the moral powers of the individual 
 are paralyzed. If his sufferings and his limitations 
 are inevitable, fixed by a power beyond his control, 
 it would be folly to try to save himself from them. 
 If he is saved from worse calamities by his submis- 
 sion, it would be madness to rebel. If by question- 
 ing the right and justice of the present order in 
 either heaven or earth he would jeopardize his fu- 
 ture happiness as well as his present safety from a 
 worse fate, he will not only submit, he will pray, 
 he will grovel, he will kiss the hand that smites 
 him. Thus the powers that be in the high places of 
 the earth are safe in the possession of their special 
 privileges and powers and have every opportunity to 
 increase them, while the people are kept in a state 
 of both material and moral degradation. This sort 
 of history writing has always been a tool, used 
 more or less consciously, by the class of people in
 
 INTRODUCTION 1 1 
 
 power, for keeping the mass of the people quiet 
 while they plundered them. 
 
 The Economic Interpretation of History proceeds 
 by quite different methods; its purpose is simply to 
 get at the truth and the whole truth, and the effect 
 which it produces on the mind is exactly the oppo- 
 site from that wrought by the theological method. 
 It is a study of the development of society, and by 
 society is meant all the people, with their facilities 
 for getting a living, their institutions and ideas. It 
 has very little to do with either special events or 
 particular individuals. An individual has no im- 
 portance at all, excepting in his relation to all the 
 people, and then the people are the important thing; 
 he is merely an incident. And the mainspring of 
 growth and action is found in the nature of the 
 people themselves, and not in any outside power. 
 But above all, it traces the ways in which the races 
 of men get their living, for all other developments 
 depend upon changes and improvements in the ways 
 of producing the food and the clothing of the race. 
 
 When a person sees that the conditions in which 
 he lives are due to causes which can and do change 
 from time to time, and when he sees that such changes 
 are the result of new knowledge put to practical use, 
 or of new inventions or discoveries which have been 
 made by common men like himself, it puts new hope 
 and courage into him. When he sees that improve- 
 ments can be made by people simply getting to- 
 gether and making them, he takes a new attitude al-
 
 12 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 together. Whereas he was a negative and passive 
 creature before, whose life was simply an endurance 
 test, of use to nobody, he now becomes alert and 
 positive. He wants to learn about the facts of 
 life and what they mean^and what opportunities 
 for improvement they offer; then he wants to put 
 his shoulder to the wheel and push. It makes a 
 man of him and he begins to take some satisfaction 
 in life, this life; and he becomes of use to society. 
 But when a man has grown up in the old theological 
 habit of thought and feeling, it is sometimes well- 
 nigh impossible for him to get the new understand- 
 ing of life; to get the wine into his veins, the iron 
 into his blood. 
 
 The cheat of the old history-writing and history- 
 teaching is so coarse and has become so plain and it 
 is intellectually so contemptible that outside of the 
 "divinity" schools you will not find many professors 
 who are engaged in it any more. In fact, teachers 
 of history in the higher institutions of education 
 have become possessed, in the last few years, of a 
 perfect passion for the "economic interpretation." 
 And the zeal of them promises well for social re- 
 generation. No young man or woman who passes 
 under their hands can grow up having the paralysis 
 of the will which results from the old theological 
 teachings. The elementary teaching of history in 
 the public schools has not felt this change to the 
 same extent, because here teaching is more governed 
 by precedent and custom, and the teachers have not
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 the same prominence to stimulate their intellectual 
 pride in progress. And besides, the public schools, 
 at present, are too much under the control of politics 
 and the school-book concerns, to keep up with the 
 march of progress in education as they should. 
 
 The old historical method and the new are ab- 
 solutely opposed to each other, because the one looks 
 for the causes of social conditions outside of society 
 itself, and leaves man a hopeless derelict without 
 oar, sail or compass, upon a sea which has no port 
 in this world; while the other looks to the nature 
 of man himself for both the propelling power and 
 the guidance by which to reach a higher social state. 
 They are opposed because the former refers such 
 actions and changes as do take place to the "will of 
 God," while the latter recognizes the moving power 
 in the needs of man and the means which he uses 
 to secure the satisfaction of those needs. So that 
 if one man says that social progress is due to changes 
 in the processes of production, and another man says 
 that it is due to human feelings, the two do not 
 conflict at all. For the feelings are nothing but 
 the consciousness of need, or pleasure in the satis- 
 faction of needs. And the processes of production 
 are carried on for the purpose of satisfying the 
 needs which constitute the feelings of man. The 
 consciousness of the feeling and the employment of 
 means to satisfy the demands of feeling are simply 
 different steps in the same series. 
 
 The path of progress began a long way back, and
 
 14 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 at first it was a dim and wandering trail. In many 
 different times and places man has taken up this 
 trail; no one knows whence he came nor where he 
 went, only that he dropped out later on, and left 
 only a bone or a mound of earth or an arrow-point to 
 prove that he ever lived. Many tribes have taken 
 up the trail, but most of them dropped out along 
 the road, and only a few kept on until they reached 
 the stage of civilization. Some others might have 
 reached that point if left to themselves for a long 
 enough time; but others who were more advanced 
 have discovered and invaded them and either wiped 
 them out or imposed upon them their own ways of 
 living. When tribes are seen not to have progressed, 
 their customs are not to be taken as illustrations of 
 customs in the main line of culture. They present 
 evidence on the causes of failure, but only negative 
 evidence on the means by which a tribe survives and 
 thrives. Much confusion has arisen among students 
 of primitive life by the failure to make this dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 It is convenient to divide the history of primitive 
 peoples into periods; and one advantage of this di- 
 vision is that it shows that the main mile-stones on 
 the road of progress have been the same throughout 
 the world wherever the tribes of men have lived 
 and advanced. Important inventions or discoveries 
 have been chosen to mark the advance from one 
 period to another, and these come in the same suc- 
 cession wherever tribes of men have lived. In no
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 case, for instance, has the smelting of iron, which 
 introduced later barbarism, preceded the invention 
 of pottery, which marked the lower period of bar- 
 barism. And when you say "the upper period of 
 barbarism" it means not only the invention of the 
 smelting of iron, but all those economic and social 
 changes that go with it. Similarly, when you refer 
 to the middle stage of savagery, the mind instantly 
 pictures, not only the typical invention that has been 
 chosen to identify it by, but the form of the family, 
 the means of subsistence, and all the peculiar fea- 
 tures of life that accompany that invention. The di- 
 vision into periods preserves a grouping of the ele- 
 ments of progress that is very useful in forming con- 
 sistent ideas of social and economic evolution. Pre- 
 vious to the dawn of civilization and slavery, man 
 saved himself from perishing from the earth mainly 
 by yielding to nature and accommodating himself to 
 her. After that period is reached man makes na- 
 ture yield more and more to his demands, he dis- 
 covers many and complex ways of subduing her 
 and making her satisfy his needs. And all his 
 forms of government, social relations and institu- 
 tions are formed in accordance with these processes 
 of wringing a living from an unwilling environ- 
 ment.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PERIOD OF SAVAGERY 
 
 MAN owed his ability to develop from a mere 
 animal into a human being to several physical 
 causes, one of which was his ability to stand erect, 
 to run on two feet and to use his hands, or fore-feet 
 to throw stones and to wield sticks. Another and 
 perhaps greater advantage was in the construction 
 of his throat. For while the other higher animals 
 have throats with which they can make certain in- 
 articulate sounds or cries expressing emotions of fear 
 or anger or sociability, man has a throat with which 
 he can make an unlimited number of articulations 
 with which to express his thoughts. 
 
 His first home was the forest. 1 Here he found 
 fruits and roots and nuts for his food, and trees 
 and caves for shelter. There were no classes and 
 no masses in those days, for all had the same needs 
 for food, shelter and defense. 2 The earth's surface 
 and the rocks show that glacial periods came on, 
 and changed the climate so that the food supply of 
 the forests was destroyed. Then the folk had to 
 
 1 Charles Darwin; Descent of Man, pp. 47, 48. (Revised edition, Merrill 
 and Baker.) 
 
 2 Morgan; Ancient Society, pp. 8, 31. 
 
 16
 
 THE PERIOD OF SAVAGERY 17 
 
 migrate to places where other food supplies could 
 be found. 3 
 
 The oldest skeletons that have been found show 
 that man and woman were equal in stature and 
 strength of build and cranial capacity. 4 
 
 People secured food and protection from animals 
 and enemies by helping one another; by a voluntary 
 mutual aid. 
 
 In order to continue his existence man had to find 
 a temperate climate where he could secure food by 
 working for it. Extremes of climate do not make 
 for progress. In too cold a climate the reward 
 of effort is scant and people do not have the sur- 
 plus energy that is necessary for development. A 
 tropical climate presents man with his food at the 
 cost of very little effort and he does not have the 
 education that comes through effort. 
 
 Man migrated to the rivers and coasts where 
 there was a supply of shell-fish for food. Here he 
 lived for a long period, and the shells of the fish he 
 ate formed heaps covering extensive areas of ground. 
 These heaps are found along the rivers and coasts 
 of every continent, and are known as the shell- 
 heaps or kitchen-middens. Besides the shells and 
 soil, they contain fragments of charred wood, and 
 bone and stone implements. These show that fire 
 was domesticated and used in the life of the folk; 
 
 8 Daniel Wilson; Prehistoric Man, Vol. I, p. 115. 
 
 * M. Manouvrier, of the Paris School of Anthropology, has demonstrated 
 that the females of the stone age had cranial capacity considerably larger 
 than modern Parisian females; while the males of the stone age had cranial 
 capacity nearly, but not quite, as large as modern male Parisians.
 
 i8 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 and that they began to make tools of bone and stone 
 at this early date. This period, when the prin- 
 cipal implements were of stone, is called the stone 
 age. 5 
 
 The discovery of fire and its use in preparing food 
 is said to lift tribes into the second sub-period of 
 savagery. This discovery would have enabled them 
 to smoke and dry and bake their roots and fish, and 
 so to make their supply of food more serviceable. It 
 would practically mean more food, and that would 
 mean that their whole environment was enlarged 
 and they had a better chance to survive. 6 
 
 The folk lived in groups or hordes, formed by 
 the natural increase, by reproduction of its members. 
 The head of the group was its oldest woman, and 
 her oldest daughter succeeded her. This system is 
 called the Matriarchate, and the group of blood re- 
 lations thus formed is called the gens, though the 
 period when its definite form can be detected is not 
 easy to locate. 7 The earliest form of the family, 
 then, is the same as the group which is the gens. 
 The family is the root of the gens and develops into 
 it. It consists of the members of a family relation- 
 ship living together in the marriage relation. This is 
 
 6 Tyler's Anthropology. 
 
 8 Ancient Society, Part one. Chapter two. This is the accepted idea about 
 the first uses of fire, though Wilson in Prehistoric Man, develops a different 
 one, which is extremely interesting. 
 
 7 The majority of writers have not noted the existence of the gens 
 among primitive tribes at all. But this is because few writers have had 
 the intimate relations with primitive tribes that are necessary to enable 
 them to understand the institutions of tribes. And it is only since Morgan 
 wrote Ancient Society that the nature and functions and origin of the gens 
 have been really understood.
 
 THE PERIOD OF SAVAGERY 19 
 
 called the consanguine family. It is the first form 
 of group-marriage. 8 
 
 So long as the people were dependent upon such 
 meager helps in securing subsistence and their tools 
 were so very simple, they were unable to leave the 
 coasts and rivers where they could find shell-fish 
 for food. But at length, after thousands and per- 
 haps hundreds of thousands of years, the bow and 
 arrow was invented. And this one invention which 
 so greatly enlarged the economic basis, the food sup- 
 ply of life, was followed by a complete social revolu- 
 tion. The people were then enabled to leave the 
 coasts and river-courses, and live wherever there was 
 game. It not only gave them greater freedom in 
 the choice of territory, but it gave them also skins 
 for clothing and shelter. They no longer were de- 
 pendent upon the trees and caves for a habitation. 
 It broke up the cave-home. 
 
 While the men learned to hunt with the new 
 weapon, the woman learned to dress the skins. At 
 the same period the women invented the weaving 
 of mats and baskets with the fingers. The baskets 
 would make possible a better handling of the food, 
 and these two inventions raise the tribes into the 
 third sub-period of savagery. 
 
 The work and training of the two sexes now comes 
 to be different. Woman's occupations are the more 
 sedentary, her experience more narrow; and the 
 
 8 Sir John Lubbock was among the first to detect the evidences of 
 group-marriage. See' his Origin of Civilization, p. 60.
 
 20 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 skeletons which are found among relics of this time 
 show that woman now began to deteriorate, as com- 
 pared with man. 9 The woman has really begun to 
 be a slave of the group. The first class-distinction is 
 thus made between man and woman. 
 
 The gens develops, and becomes organized. It 
 has its council composed of both men and women who 
 are elected by the votes of all the members. If the 
 gens becomes over-grown, it divides, but the several 
 branches remain united in the phratry. The pur- 
 pose of the latter is to preserve the peculiar religious 
 rites and ceremonies of the family, and to worship the 
 common ancestors. All of the gentes which speak 
 the same dialect form the tribe; and it, too, has its 
 council, composed of representatives of the different 
 gentes belonging to it. Both men and women serve 
 in its councils and have an equal vote in choosing its 
 councillors. 10 
 
 So long as the meat- food of the folk was restricted 
 to shell-fish, and subsistence was accordingly very 
 meager, the family took no chances. It kept all its 
 own members to help find food, and to defend the 
 group, and it took in no strangers to feed. But 
 when it found itself liberated, as it were, by the in- 
 vention of the bow and arrow, it began to disregard 
 the customs of the ancestors, and to marry outside 
 the family. In short, the consanguine family was 
 broken up. Groups of men from other gentes, hav- 
 
 B J. W. Powell; Geological and Geodatic Survey, Vol IX, pp. 209-210. 
 W J. W. Powell: Wyandot Government, Annual Report Bureau of Eth- 
 nology, 1897-98, pp. 59-63. Charlevoix's Voyages, pp. 23-25.
 
 THE PERIOD OF SAVAGERY 21 
 
 ing other ancestors and different religious rites, were 
 admitted in marriage to groups of women within 
 the gens. This is called the Punaluan family. A 
 group of women who may or may not be sisters is 
 married to a group of men who may or may not be 
 brothers, but the men are not brothers to the women. 
 Even this family shows a tendency to break up into 
 smaller groups. When a man marries, he goes to 
 the home of his wives and is received into their 
 gens. The home and the children belong to the 
 wife's gens and descent is traced through her. He 
 remains with her people during good behavior. One 
 of the functions of the gens is to regulate marriage ; 
 and this custom of marrying outside the gens is 
 called exogamy. It later becomes the rule, and 
 no one is allowed to marry within the gens. 11 
 
 Language, which must have been very simple at 
 first, consisting only of single syllables for the 
 names of objects and actions, has become quite com- 
 plex, with the increasing complexity of life in higher 
 savagery, and words of several syllables are used. 12 
 
 Property always enlarges as industry develops, 
 but in this stage of culture it is held in common by 
 the tribe. Only the most personal equipage be- 
 longs to the individual, and at his death, such ob- 
 jects as he owned revert to the group. 
 
 Religion takes on the varied forms of nature- wor- 
 ship; and the phratry preserves the family tradi- 
 tions of the gentes, which have long since grown 
 
 11 Ward; Pure Sociology, pp. 193, 200, 548. 
 13 Morgan ; Ancient Society, Chapter IV.
 
 22 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 into ancestor-worship. And the sacrifice of cap- 
 tives, as a means of propitiating the gods, has been 
 taken on by religion as a side line.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 
 
 AS the women did the work of domestic manu- 
 facture, it was they who made the inventions 
 of tools and implements and processes for doing 
 that work. Advancement, in primitive times, de- 
 pends more upon the development of the food and 
 clothing industries than anything else; and where 
 tribes have ceased to advance at any stage, it must 
 be supposed that this failure was due to the fact that 
 the women were too much oppressed to make dis- 
 coveries and inventions. 
 
 The matter of climate and natural products and 
 conditions is doubtless back of and connected with 
 the special situations of women in different tribes. 
 Among the aborigines of Australia, who were in the 
 middle sub-period of savagery when discovered, the 
 women were in a most abject state of subjection. 
 The climate where they were found living is such 
 that natural food products are plentiful ; and many 
 writers have expressed surprise that people so 
 favorably situated should have made so little ad- 
 vancement. But when we reflect that these people 
 were able to live in idleness, that nature supplied 
 their wants without effort on their part, we see that 
 
 23
 
 24 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 they were without the educational advantages of 
 labor. And, as Professor Ward says : "It is effort, 
 ... in which the dynamic quality inheres." ["Pure 
 Sociology," p. 142.] This freedom from the neces- 
 sity of labor, alone, is sufficient to account for their 
 backward state. If the women had been doing work 
 without which the tribes could not live, they would 
 have been treated with more respect. And if they 
 had had the training of industry, the entire tribe 
 would have been developed by it. As a matter of 
 fact, these people, whose natural habitat was the 
 most favorable to life, considered simply as life, 
 were the lowest in the social scale of any people who 
 have been discovered in a wild state, by civilized 
 man. 
 
 The lower period of barbarism is distinguished by 
 the invention of pottery, and by the first appearance 
 of the bark canoe and the dug-out. Steatite cooking 
 vessels and a multitude of polished stone imple- 
 ments, formed with great nicety and used with'much 
 skill, were found among the American Indians liv- 
 ing in this stage of culture. 1 Evidences of an ex- 
 tensive commerce in some of these primitive manu- 
 factures have been traced on the American continent. 
 For instance, a quarry of steatite, littered with frag- 
 ments of cooking vessels, and with chisels of a harder 
 stone, with which they were dressed out, has been 
 found in California; and vessels of the same stone 
 and type of shape and dressing, have been found all 
 
 1 Charles Abbott; Primitive Industry.
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 25 
 
 the way from California to the Mississippi river. 
 And a man lived in Alabama who had knowledge of 
 a vein of very fine black marble, of which he made 
 pipes that were highly prized for their color and 
 beautiful polish. He never told where he got the 
 marble, and thus kept a monopoly in his line of 
 business; but these pipes found their way as far 
 north as Minnesota and the Dakotas, where they 
 exchanged for two good robes apiece. The out- 
 door work-shop became a regular institution, and 
 men were beginning to specialize in manufacture. 
 
 The family lived in communal houses or villages. 
 The Seminoles had their long-houses of logs, a great 
 advance in architecture. The Seneca-Iroquois had 
 similar dwellings, in which were several rooms, in 
 each of which a couple lived, with their offspring. 
 Thus the marriage group was breaking up into the 
 pairing or Syndiasmian family. This process must 
 be understood to have been a very slow and prob- 
 ably unconscious one. The pairing family was dis- 
 tinctly developed among some of the Mississippi 
 river tribes, while the Pacific coast tribes still pre- 
 served the group-marriage, or Punaluan family. 2 
 
 Each tribe had its tribal council, the members of 
 which were elected by the membership of the tribe; 
 and this council, composed, in most cases, of both 
 men and women, decided matters of peace and war, 
 and of public policy and acted as a court in trying 
 
 a Schoolcraft: The American Indians. Charlevoix's Voyages. J. W. 
 Powell; Wyandot Government.
 
 26 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 cases between members of the different gentes of 
 the tribe. The laws consisted in the customs of 
 the ancestors, and the decisions of the council. The 
 early explorers all made the same sort of comment 
 upon the "liberty, equality and fraternity" which 
 prevailed, and the efficiency with which justice was 
 secured, as well as the rareness of violations of pub- 
 lic order. Members of the council were elected for 
 life; but there was a custom called "knocking off 
 the horns" of councillors. That is, if a member of 
 the council did not serve to the satisfaction of his 
 constituents, he was "recalled," and another elected 
 to take his place. 3 The efficiency of the tribal gov- 
 ernments may probably be attributed in some meas- 
 ure to this custom. Another cause would have been 
 the fact that there was no "incentive" to corruption 
 in office because of the absence of private property. 
 There were no private interests to be favored by 
 the law-makers and judges at the public expense. 
 
 Language was always developing in accordance 
 with the increasing complexity of life. Among the 
 reports of the Bureau of Ethnology are to be found 
 a number of articles analyzing different Indian 
 dialects, which have advanced so far as to have a 
 distinct orthography, etymology and syntax. And 
 at this stage the first records, in the shape of picture- 
 writing appear, including totem poles and inscrip- 
 tions on rocks. 
 
 Custom comes to be regarded, first as morality, 
 
 * Morgan ; Ancient Society.
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 27 
 
 and then as religion. The primitive mind comes to 
 attach mystical importance and significance to ar- 
 ticles of traditional use. All this is a part of an- 
 cestor-worship; acts which the ancestors performed, 
 and objects which they used, are considered sacred. 
 And gradually the ancestors come to be regarded as 
 gods, and are thought to rule the destiny of their 
 descendants. The worship of the generative proc- 
 esses, as exemplified both in the vegetable and the 
 animal world, grows apace, and a priesthood grows 
 up in connection with the phratries. 
 
 The middle period of barbarism is marked, on 
 the eastern hemisphere, by the domestication of ani- 
 mals which yield meat and milk, hides and wool; 
 and on the western, by the development of field and 
 garden agriculture. Owing to this difference in the 
 type of artificial food-supply, a different type of 
 social life was developed on the two hemispheres. 
 In Asia, where the people lived on their flocks and 
 herds, a pastoral life, in which the folk wandered 
 from place to place and lived in tents made of skins, 
 grew up. On the American continent, where the 
 folk got their living from the soil, they made per- 
 manent homes, and village life was established. On 
 parts of the American continent irrigation, in which 
 a high degree of engineering skill was displayed, 
 was employed in the cultivation of corn. 
 
 Industry is enlarged in this period by the making 
 of bronze tools, and by the use of charcoal. In- 
 ventions begin to come fast now, and adobe bricks
 
 28 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 are used for housebuilding, paved roads are made, 
 suspension bridges are built and reservoirs to hold 
 waters for irrigation. The shuttle and hand-loom 
 are invented, and everywhere woven fabrics, orna- 
 mental pottery and basketry come into use. 
 
 By this time, specialized industry led to the be- 
 ginnings of personal property. Tribes began to 
 confederate, for the purpose of obtaining peace 
 and security. The Iroquois Confederation, among 
 whom Mr. Lewis Morgan spent many years of his 
 life, is a good illustration of this development in 
 primitive government. With the freedom from the 
 demands of war which came with the confederation, 
 men began to give more attention to economic in- 
 terests. The products of industry had hitherto be- 
 longed to the gens, for the common use. But that 
 was when industry was wholly a woman's affair. 
 Men did not produce commodities for the common 
 use, but for their exchange value; and because pos- 
 session was the road to power. The natural cor- 
 relative of personal ownership was transmission to 
 personal heirs. Descent had always been traced in 
 the female line, but the pairing family now made 
 it possible to trace descent in the male line, and the 
 personal, economic, interests of the man now de- 
 manded it. So from this time on, the Syndiasmian 
 family became the standard of morality. Polyg- 
 amy, however, was permitted. A man could have 
 several wives, but a woman could only have one 
 husband. Thus the double standard of morality
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 29 
 
 makes its appearance in history. Heretofore, the 
 sex relation had never been considered vicious. It 
 was simply a natural fact, and was accepted as other 
 natural facts were; but from this time it becomes 
 vicious. Not because of any inherent quality, but 
 because it might cause confusion in the paternity of 
 offspring. In all the history of tribal government 
 in America, there was no such thing as the death 
 penalty for any crime previous to this change in the 
 family; but after the change of the line of descent 
 the death penalty was inflicted by at least one tribe, 
 on any woman who contracted a sex relation out- 
 side her marriage. 
 
 When descent was changed from the female to 
 the male line the very foundation of the gens was de- 
 stroyed. The matriarchate, with its "freedom, 
 equality and fraternity," the tribal council with its 
 democratic representation, the communal industry, 
 the common food supply, all went with it. 
 
 Records advanced during this period from the 
 picture writing stage to that of hieroglyphics. 
 
 Personal gods and goddesses, representing the ele- 
 ments of nature, and the natural functions, increase 
 in number. Spirits of the earth- and air and demons 
 are seen everywhere, in the imagination. Rites and 
 ceremonies increase in importance, no act is thought 
 to be properly performed without some religious 
 formality and as a consequence the priesthood gains 
 enormously in importance and power. 
 
 On the North American continent, as we know,
 
 30 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the culture of the original inhabitants was destroyed, 
 before it reached the higher sub-period of barbarism. 
 But on the eastern hemisphere two groups of tribes 
 survived until they reached this state. The Aryan, 
 including the Hindu, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, 
 Teutonic and Slavonic; and the Semitic, in- 
 cluding the Hebrew, Babylonian, Assyrian and 
 Arabic. In the western hemisphere the Aztecs and 
 Peruvians reached this stage. 
 
 After the use of charcoal and the smelting of 
 copper and manufacture of bronze came the smelt- 
 ing of iron. Here, at last, was a metal which was 
 so hard and would take so keen an edge that mira- 
 cles, almost, might be performed with it. Things 
 could be done with iron that could not be attempted 
 with the softer bronze. Implements and tools that 
 were unthinkable before now became realities. 
 The plow with an iron point, iron nails to 
 fasten planks with, the wheel with an iron rim, 
 the spear with an iron point, the sickle, and 
 innumerable tools which could do work hitherto 
 impossible. It seems like opening the door to free- 
 dom, like striking the shackles off the hands, this 
 discovery of the smelting of iron. 4 And it raised 
 the entire life of the folk a step nearer to civilization, 
 by making possible the arts of civilization. Ships 
 were now built of planks, and wheeled vehicles were 
 
 * Grote expresses a doubt that iron was in use among the Greek tribes 
 at this stage, because no mention of iron is made in the Homeric poems, 
 which are a reliable clue to the deyelopments of the time. But Tacitus' 
 Germania mentions that the Germanic tribes had iron which they used in 
 the blades of their spears at an earlier stage than this.
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 31 
 
 invented. Animals were harnessed to the iron-shod 
 plow, the potter's wheel and the hand-mill for grind- 
 ing grain were invented. "Professional men, such 
 as the smith, the carpenter, the leather-dresser, the 
 leech, the prophet, the bard and the fisherman ap- 
 pear." 5 In the normal development of agriculture 
 numerous fruits and grains and grasses were added 
 to the resources for food and forage and are men- 
 tioned in the songs of the early poets. Numerous 
 flocks of cattle and sheep grazed on the hills of the 
 Asiatic and Mediterranean countries, while the 
 Peruvians kept herds of llamas, for their wool. 
 
 Personal property and the bequeathing of it to 
 heirs gave another value to labor besides that which 
 it had simply as a means of supplying food and 
 clothing. The ownership of property gave a man 
 influence and power. But the product of a man's 
 own labor was not enough to satisfy his ambition; 
 even if he had many wives and children to work for 
 him it would not make him very rich or powerful. 
 How could he secure more? Slavery was the an- 
 swer. To capture the people of other tribes, or to 
 enslave the people of his own tribe, and make them 
 work for him. Land became valuable, because la- 
 bor was most productive when applied to land, and 
 the fruits of the soil were at the bottom of all 
 production. So the land, that had been owned in 
 common before, was taken by the strongest men and 
 the weaker tribes were captured by the stronger 
 
 B Grote: Traditional Greece, Vol. II.
 
 32 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 tribes, and thus slavery, the private ownership of 
 land and the patriarchal institution all came into 
 being as one great transaction. The social revolu- 
 tion was accomplished. The strong man would 
 hereafter live in a little Utopia, all his own, bounded 
 on all sides by privation, want, misery and vice. 
 
 There is no longer any representation of the peo- 
 ple in government. The patriarch is the govern- 
 ment; he is lawgiver, judge, executioner and high 
 priest. Democracy is dead. An irresponsible, ab- 
 solute despotism has taken its place. The despotism 
 of the patriarch. We are accustomed to think that 
 polygamy was the distinct and peculiar thing about 
 the patriarchal family, but nothing could be farther 
 from the truth. Mr. Lewis Morgan, in "Ancient 
 Society," has described the patriarchal family in 
 these terms: "The chiefs, at least, lived in polyg- 
 amy, but this was not the material principle of 
 the patriarchal institution. The organization of a 
 number of persons, bond and free, into a family, un- 
 der paternal power, for the purpose of holding 
 lands, . . . was the essential characteristic of this 
 family. It was the incorporation of numbers, in 
 servile and dependent relation, before that time un- 
 known, rather than polygamy, that stamped the 
 patriarchal family with the attributes of an original 
 institution." 
 
 The office of the patriarch or chief is now heredi- 
 tary, and the strongest chiefs now grow into little 
 kings. Gradually the kings bring the lesser patri-
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 33 
 
 archs under submission, and the beginnings of na- 
 tionality are formed. Society is commencing to 
 organize large units again, but on the basis of the 
 territory controlled through its owners by the king. 
 But what a difference appears in the character of the 
 people under this new regime. 
 
 The traditions of the Greeks were woven into 
 poetry during this period, and previous to the in- 
 vention of phonetic writing they were handed down 
 orally from generation to generation. Finally they 
 were committed to writing and have come down to 
 the present time as the Homeric poems, though 
 probably no such man as Homer ever lived; or if 
 he did, he did not write the poems. They were the 
 work of a people, and if they do not record the his- 
 tory of their time with veracity, they do show the 
 customs and manners of the period. In Grote's 
 History of Greece, the twentieth chapter is devoted 
 to the "State of Society and Manners as Exhibited 
 in Grecian Legend." The following observations, 
 gleaned from that chapter, will give an idea of the 
 transformation which had taken place in society. 
 
 "We discern a government in which there is little 
 or no scheme or system, still less any idea of re- 
 sponsibility to the governed, but in which the 
 mainspring of obedience on the part of the people 
 consists in their personal feeling and reverence to- 
 ward the chief. We remark, first and foremost, the 
 king; next, a limited number of subordinate kings 
 or chiefs; afterwards, the mass of armed freemen,
 
 34 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 husbandmen, artisans, freebooters, etc.; lowest of 
 all, the free laborers for hire, and the bought slaves. 
 The king is not distinguished by any broad or im- 
 passable boundary from the other chiefs ... his 
 supremacy has been inherited from his ancestors, 
 . . . having been conferred upon the family as a 
 privilege by the favor of Zeus. . . . An ample do- 
 main is assigned to him as an appurtenance of his 
 lofty position. . . . Moreover, he receives frequent 
 presents, to avert his enmity, to conciliate his favor, 
 or to buy off his exactions; and when plunder is 
 taken from the enemy, a large previous share, com- 
 prising probably the most alluring female captives, 
 is reserved for him, apart from the general dis- 
 tribution. . . . The people harken to his voice, em- 
 brace his propositions and obey his orders, not 
 merely resistance, but even criticism upon his acts, 
 is generally exhibited in an odious point of view, 
 and is, indeed, never heard of except from some one 
 or more of the subordinate princes." 
 
 "As in the case of the gods, the general epithets 
 of good, just, etc., are applied to them as euphemisms 
 arising from fear and submission, being not only 
 not "suggested, but often pointedly belied, by their 
 particular acts. These words signify the man of 
 birth, wealth, influence, and daring, whose arm is 
 strong to destroy or to protect, whatever may be the 
 turn of his moral sentiments; while the opposite 
 epithet, bad, designates the poor, lowly and weak;
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 35 
 
 from whose dispositions, be they ever so virtuous, 
 society has little either to hope or to fear." 
 
 Hesiod, with his poem "Works and Days," is next 
 in time after Homer, and Grote says of him that 
 "He repeats, more than once, his complaints of the 
 crooked and corrupt judgments of which the kings 
 were habitually guilty; dwelling upon the abuse of 
 justice as the crying evil of his day, and predicting 
 as well as invoking the vengeance of Zeus to repress 
 it. And Homer ascribes the tremendous violence of 
 the autumnal storms to the wrath of Zeus against 
 those judges who disgrace the agora with their 
 wicked verdicts." 
 
 It appears that human nature was changed beyond 
 recognition, since the days of communal property, 
 communal industry and democratic self-government. 
 
 The agora, ostensibly an assembly of the people, 
 had become simply a means for the king to publish 
 his decisions, and to give the chiefs a chance to talk. 
 But it was so well used for the latter purpose, and 
 the art of public speaking and political discussion 
 developed to such a degree, that the people, that 
 is, the male portion of the people, were able once 
 more to bring their kings under control and reduce 
 them to the position of public servants. 
 
 During this period, women were stripped of all 
 political power and even personal freedom; and the 
 only respect they enjoyed was such as lingered with 
 the traditions of their former position in society. In
 
 36 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the earlier traditions, the greatest of crimes was to 
 kill the mother; but after the revolution was com- 
 plete, it became a minor offense to kill the mother, 
 and to kill the father became the greatest possible 
 crime. In the oldest Aryan traditions the earliest 
 deities are goddesses. The first god is the son-hus- 
 band of the goddess. These traditions owe their 
 origin to the period when woman was the most 
 prominent figure in human affairs and when man 
 owed his importance to her. The son-husband and 
 brother-husband of the early goddesses are survivals 
 of the consanguine family; the imagination would 
 not have produced such deities out of the whole 
 cloth. Life first had to produce the facts, before 
 the imagination could reproduce and perpetuate 
 them. 
 
 If a man has committed homicide, a religious 
 ceremony "purifies" him. If he finds himself in 
 foreign parts, alone, and wanting the protection of a 
 family, he is "adopted" by some chosen family, by 
 a ceremony which makes him of one blood with 
 them. If he wishes to receive the protection and 
 patronage of a powerful man, he goes to his house, 
 sits in the ashes of his hearth, and performs a cere- 
 mony which attaches him by an inviolable tie to 
 his patron; neither one can thereafter disregard the 
 tie without incurring the displeasure and punishment 
 of the gods. Does a man start on a journey; a cere- 
 mony must be performed. Does he embark upon a
 
 THE PERIOD OF BARBARISM 37 
 
 business enterprise; rites are necessary to its success. 
 Is he born, does he marry, does he die 1 ? The good- 
 will of the gods must be secured by offerings, sacri- 
 fices, and other acts of devotion.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 
 
 A NUMBER of ancient races : Egypt, Babylonia, 
 -fJ^. Assyria and perhaps others, reached a stage 
 closely bordering on civilization and then disap- 
 peared. Others, as China and India, reached an 
 early stage of civilization, and instead of advan- 
 cing in culture, crystallized their early institutions to 
 such an extent that they have remained nearly sta- 
 tionary ever since ; and the early conditions thus per- 
 petuated are only now being broken up by the im- 
 pact of other nations upon them from without. 
 These two latter nations have been sleeping, as one 
 may say, the one on its religion, the other on its 
 philosophy, for thousands of years; and it is now 
 by the adoption of the mechanical inventions of for- 
 eign nations, whereby the economic difficulties of 
 life are to be solved, that they are at last waking 
 up. 
 
 The patriarchal family, consisting of slaves who 
 produce goods for the patriarch, and consuming, 
 themselves, only so much of the product as is neces- 
 sary to sustain life and working power, contains the 
 seed of its own destruction. There is bound to be 
 a surplusage of goods, otherwise the patriarch 
 
 38
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 39 
 
 would go out of business. And this surplus of goods 
 must be disposed of. Some member of the family 
 must leave the patriarchal roof-tree in quest of a 
 market; and the accumulation of these marketing 
 persons forms the commercial town. And the pa- 
 triarch has no authority over the town or its inhabit- 
 ants. The people of the town form their own 
 laws, which relate to the conditions of city life, and 
 govern the industries and commerce of the town ; and 
 thus the city law, or civil law grows up. Such laws 
 are a curious mixture of old tribal customs relating 
 to primitive life, in which offenses are regarded as 
 sins against the gods, and statutes for the regulation 
 of the newly developed commercial activities, viola- 
 tions of which are regarded as crimes against the in- 
 dividual and the state. These laws finally get com- 
 mitted to writing; and in this way the old primitive 
 folk-customs and superstitions are perpetuated and 
 handed down to future generations; the ignorant 
 continue to "believe" in them through habit and the 
 crafty make use of them for their private gain. 
 
 The city is a veritable lodestone; it offers varied 
 human association, experience, change, life, personal 
 freedom and a chance for gain, and a movement of 
 the population from the country to the town sets in. 
 The city raises an army for the public defense; it 
 waxes strong with its industries and its commerce, 
 and then it reaches out to control the surrounding 
 country. It sends forth its army and the patriarch 
 submits to its authority, whereupon he becomes sub-
 
 40 
 
 ject to its laws and his patriarchal state vanishes. 
 Thus grew up the city-states of Greece and Rome. 
 The old customary law takes note only of the 
 family as the unit of society; but the city law is 
 obliged to recognize the individual, since it has to 
 control him in his individual capacity. Crimes for 
 which a whole family was formerly penalized are 
 now visited on the offender alone. It is still a popu- 
 lar platitude to say that the family is the unit of 
 the state; but it is wholly untrue. There is a sense 
 in which the family is the unit of society, but it is 
 in no sense the unit of the state, since the state does 
 not deal with the family in any single case, but al- 
 ways with the individual. 
 
 The invention of phonetic writing, that is, writing 
 in which the simple sounds are represented by char- 
 acters which are variously combined to form different 
 words, is the typical achievement which marks off 
 this stage of civilization from the preceding one. It 
 is difficult to realize the extent to which such a sys- 
 tem of symbols for ideas liberates the mind, and en- 
 ables it to arrange its concepts in order, to systema- 
 tize them, to form a train of reasoning, and arrive 
 at judgments. Mechanical inventions for the use 
 of the hands make it possible to construct material 
 things which were impossible before; but this me- 
 chanical invention for the use of the mind was no 
 less necessary as a means of thought construction. 
 The Chinese never invented a phonetic alphabet, 
 their thought-processes have always been burdened
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 41 
 
 with a cumbersome and difficult set of symbols, and 
 this is undoubtedly one reason why they have been 
 so backward in constructive thought. 
 
 The earliest writings about Greece show that for a 
 period of some centuries, though it is not known how 
 long, the country was in a state of turmoil a greater 
 portion of the time, owing to the accumulations of 
 property in the hands of a few men, and the in- 
 ability of the masses to find the means of support. 
 From time to time the rich would become arrogant 
 and ostentatious, the poor would multiply, and the 
 disorders arising from this condition would become 
 so great that at last everyone would become fright- 
 ened and be willing to accept any change that would 
 promise safety. Then a lawgiver would arise, re- 
 allot the lands, extinguish the debts of the poor, and 
 free those who had been enslaved for debt. This 
 would restore peace and order for a time, but the old 
 system of production would continue the same, the 
 laws under which the disorders grew up would be 
 allowed to stand and presently the crafty and un- 
 scrupulous would begin the same process again, 
 events would repeat the same course, and the same 
 remedy would again be applied. In about the ninth 
 century B. C., Lycurgus is said to have made a re- 
 division of lands ; at any rate he established a public 
 mess, at which all the citizens of Sparta were re- 
 quired to eat. Each citizen was obliged to con- 
 tribute a certain portion of produce to the public 
 larder, from his holding of land. If a man became
 
 42 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 too poor to make the contribution he lost his citi- 
 zenship. During the life-time of Lycurgus there 
 were eight or ten thousand citizens. In the time of 
 Aristotle, the number had dwindled to one thousand, 
 and a century later, in 250 B. C., it was only seven 
 hundred. A new redistribution was afterwards 
 made in Sparta, with the hope of rehabilitating the 
 state, but it was too late. Decay, due to ine- 
 qualities of opportunity, had progressed too far, and 
 the once unconquerable Sparta was overcome by 
 foreign arms, a victim to the avarice of its rich and 
 greedy citizens. 
 
 The public table of the Spartans was a last ap- 
 pearance of the old custom of the common food- 
 supply of the gens, with the difference that, in 
 this case it was enforced by the law-giver, by his 
 personal authority. It is recorded that he tried to 
 bring the women also under a similar rule, but they 
 would have none of it. 
 
 In about the year 600 B. C., the disorders in 
 Athens, arising from the concentration of property 
 in a few hands, and the enslavement of the people 
 for debt, became so great and so threatening that an 
 uprising of the population promised to destroy the 
 rich along with their property. In this emergency, 
 Solon, the archon, was urged by all classes to take 
 the helm of state, and steer the ship into quiet waters, 
 if such could be found. The rich, it appears, wished 
 him to make himself a despot and protect their 
 property with his power; while the poor wished him
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 43 
 
 to make another distribution of the lands. Solon 
 took the helm, but he steered a middle course. 
 Those who had been enslaved for debt were freed, 
 the debts of the poor were remitted, and he enacted 
 a law forbidding the enslavement of persons for the 
 payment of borrowed money. Those who had the 
 land were permitted to keep it; and thus, by being 
 freed of one of its worst features, the system of the 
 private ownership of land became established. But 
 that was not all. The ownership of land was made 
 the basis of eligibility to public office. Heretofore, 
 the four Ionic tribes, and the gentes and phratries 
 of which they were composed, had formed the basis 
 of political recognition in the budding state. Now, 
 Solon had a census taken, by which all the citizens 
 were divided into four classes according to the in- 
 come from their lands. The lowest class, embra- 
 cing all those without property and those having only 
 a small income, was much the largest of the four. 
 The highest positions in the state were reserved 
 for those in the highest property class. Inferior 
 offices were given to those of the second and third 
 classes, while those in the fourth were ineligible 
 to any public employment whatever. The fourth 
 class, however, were given votes in the election of 
 the government officials, and the latter were made 
 accountable to the assembly of this fourth class. 
 Solon "gave to the people as much power as was 
 strictly needful and no more." But thus was the 
 so-called democracy of Athens put upon its feet, and
 
 I 
 44 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the old gentile system of political standing accord- 
 ing to race and blood, changed for one in which a 
 man was rated politically according to his property 
 holdings. 
 
 Women have now altogether ceased to be a part of 
 the people. Greece entered upon a long period 
 of development in knowledge, and all the elements 
 of social culture, but her women had no part in it. 
 They were kept in a certain portion of the houses, 
 where they did the domestic manufacturing, in the 
 capacity of slaves; having no education and no 
 social life. The slave mothers of a citizenship 
 whose highest joy and pride was freedom! 
 
 But like the patriarchal family, the political de- 
 mocracy contained the germs of its inevitable decay. 
 Not only Solon but every other law-giver and 
 statesman realized that the state built on private 
 property must be a military state, in order to protect 
 its property. But private ownership of property 
 led to accumulations of property, and these ac- 
 cumulations in turn led to a soft, luxurious, idle 
 life, not compatible with valor and military ideals. 
 They saw also, that the increase of economic wealth 
 depended upon the growth of industry, and . that 
 industry was, equally with idleness, unfavorable to 
 the military spirit. And both these difficulties they 
 tried to meet, with legislation, hoping to overcome 
 the natural laws of society, with the laws of man. 
 
 In Sparta, the citizen was forbidden to engage in 
 industry, while in Athens it was held to be undigni-
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 45 
 
 fied and scarcely respectable for the citizen to work. 
 Slavery was an economic necessity, in order to main- 
 tain and increase private property. War was a 
 necessity, in order to protect the property and to 
 get more slaves. And war meant death to the 
 holder and defender of the property, while slavery 
 meant worse than death. Here then, is the in- 
 soluble difficulty of an all-man regime. Women 
 have no place in a government based on property, 
 because life is worth more than property to women. 
 And when a man's world gets itself well trained to 
 subordinate life to property, like the Dutchman's 
 horse, which he trained so carefully to live without 
 eating, it "up and dies." 
 
 The advancement of society is dependent upon 
 its economic development, but it is not the same 
 thing as economic development. Society can not 
 advance very far unless the wealth of a country is 
 made the servant of all the people, both its men 
 and its women. When any section of the people 
 is made secondary in importance to its wealth, a 
 nation places limits upon its advancement which 
 must in time prove its undoing. And when any 
 section of a nation's people is deprived of a part of 
 the rights and freedom of action which the others 
 enjoy, that society is deprived of a part of the power 
 by which it is propelled onward. In this way the 
 ancient world, both of Greece and of Rome, handi- 
 capped itself hopelessly from the first, by its system 
 of private ownership of the means of producing sub-
 
 46 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 sistence and making human life simply a means to 
 the end of producing economic wealth. 
 
 Fatal results followed from the conditions here 
 set forth; namely, that those who worked were 
 slaves, and the class who were educated and cul- 
 tured, did no work. On the one hand a slave has 
 no incentive for invention or discovery and his con- 
 dition makes it impossible to apply such powers 
 as he has to innovations in his work. And his lack 
 of education, with the narrowness of his experience, 
 cuts him off from both the means and the materials 
 which an inventor must have at his disposal. The 
 result, then, of the slavery of the workers, was 
 that throughout the period of early civilization, no 
 new discoveries or inventions were made, such as 
 are necessary to open the door of a higher social or- 
 der. This society could not go forward, and because 
 it was surrounded by barbarian tribes who were 
 going forward, it could not crystallize as did the 
 oriental societies. It decayed instead and was bat- 
 tered to pieces. 
 
 On the other hand the cultured classes, being cut 
 off from constructive labor, turned their attention, 
 not to the immediate material facts of their exist- 
 ence, but to theories of the universe. And for cen- 
 turies the philosophers busied themselves, necessarily 
 without success, in trying to explain life by the 
 most general and abstract theories. This effort 
 finally produced in the leisure class a morbid, pessi- 
 mistic, hopeless state of mind. They ceased trying
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 47 
 
 to understand the world about them, and either ac- 
 cepted the philosophy of despair, or turned to specu- 
 lation upon the supernatural. 
 
 Some of the observations of the early shepherd- 
 astrologers were made the foundation of an ele- 
 mentary astronomy; but the shepherds were now 
 slaves, and the astrologers fakirs; and so no new 
 facts were observed, and the science of astronomy 
 never passed beyond the elementary stage. In 
 chemistry they got no farther than the theory that 
 the universe is composed of four elements: earth, 
 air, fire and water. In medicine, after all the 
 theorizing of the centuries, nothing was produced of 
 any value, beyond the housewife's practical knowl- 
 edge of a few herbs. 
 
 The trouble with the philosophers was that they 
 did nothing but philosophize; and progress is the 
 result of doing. Of doing things for the satisfac- 
 tion of the wants of the individual. 
 
 This era of early civilization, as said before, was 
 ushered in by the invention of phonetic writing, and 
 the opening of this new door led to all the brilliant, 
 though superficial, culture of the ancient world. 
 First, the epic poems which told the stories of the 
 gods were written down, along with the ancient 
 customs of the people; and these latter constituted 
 the laws. Then came grammar, rhetoric, oratory, 
 logic, philosophy, art, and the drama. And the 
 pursuit of these forms of culture led to a refined 
 and luxurious life. But its enjoyment was limited
 
 48 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 to a minority-group of men. Thought was sys- 
 tematized to an extraordinary degree, but limits 
 were set to its achievements by the fact that it was 
 speculative rather than scientific. It dealt with 
 theories instead of facts. It began at the abstract 
 rather than the concrete end of things. 
 
 In getting civilization established, the form of 
 the family was once more changed, by the elimina- 
 tion of polygamy. That is, the children of all the 
 slaves but one were made illegitimate. A Greek 
 citizen might have any number of female slaves, but 
 he could marry only a Grecian woman, and her 
 sons were his heirs. This is the Aryan family; and 
 along with it an elaborate system of slave prosti- 
 tutes of various orders was maintained by the state. 
 There were the flute-players, who were kept at the 
 public expense, but were hired or loaned to private 
 parties for special occasions of festivity. Then 
 there was a class who were kept in a certain quarter 
 of the town, which they were not permitted to leave ; 
 the concubines, or industrial slave women, and last, 
 the Hetairai, or free women, who were friends and 
 companions of the philosophers but were not neces- 
 sarily prostitutes. Thus the price paid for the 
 "legitimacy" of the wife and the heirs fell pretty 
 heavily on woman in general. 
 
 The laws of Rome, from the earliest period, had 
 a contrivance called "The Perpetual Tutelage of 
 Women," whereby it was provided that all women, 
 even though they were the offspring of free fathers,
 
 EARLY CIVILIZATION 49 
 
 always remained slaves. They belonged to the 
 family estate, like the other slaves and the live 
 stock; and when they were married they were 
 simply transferred from one estate to another. 
 They never, under any circumstances, became free. 
 Later, in medieval Europe, the unmarried woman 
 became emancipated, at a given age, like her 
 brother, but at her marriage the old institution of 
 the Perpetual Tutelage of Women was revived, and 
 she became the slave of her husband. 
 
 By the time of civilization, the male gods had 
 come to dominate Olympus just as man had come to 
 dominate the earth. The worship of the generative 
 processes in nature had become debased; the phallic 
 worship had descended to debauchery. The sacred 
 groves and temples of the male and female deities 
 were schools of vice; and the law was employed to 
 enforce their practices. The chief concern of re- 
 ligion was to secure the gratification of the senses, 
 to control the people through their fear of the 
 unknown and to secure revenues to the priest- 
 hood. 
 
 After the indefinitely long period of years through 
 which the patriarchal family with its absolute 
 despotism prevailed, the Greeks slowly and pain- 
 fully won their way back to a sort of representative 
 government which they called a democracy. But 
 the corruption of the representatives, for the sake 
 of gaining riches and power for themselves, led to 
 oligarchy and monarchy, to national decay, and
 
 50 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 finally to the destruction of the Greek civilization 
 by Rome. 
 
 Rome followed much the same course in the de- 
 velopment of her government, her ideas and her in- 
 stitutions as that which Greece had pursued; with 
 the principal exception that she pushed her military 
 conquests farther and held them longer by following 
 them up with economic developments. She carried 
 her arms as far north as the North Sea and the island 
 of Britain, on the west, as far east as the river 
 Rhine and, east of the Rhine, as far north as the 
 Danube. And wherever she established her political 
 control she built roads leading from the capital of 
 the empire to its farthest boundary and established 
 commerce and encouraged industry, thereby intro- 
 ducing civilization. Even after her military power 
 could be pushed no farther she sent out industrial 
 colonies, with companies of soldiers to protect them 
 and to defend the commerce which arose as a result 
 of the cultivation of industry. Thus the Roman 
 civilization was carried by economic means to terri- 
 tories which had repelled the Roman arms, namely, 
 the country north of the Danube and east of the 
 Rhine; and the commercial cities of the German 
 country, Mayence, Worms, Spires, and Strasburg, 
 Bingen, Coblentz, Bonn, Cologne, Augsburg, Sals- 
 burg, and Vienna, all owe their origin to the period 
 of Roman conquest, either by arms or by commerce.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 IN Greece and Rome, war had been a necessity 
 for so long a time that it came to be regarded as 
 something almost sacred. It was considered the only 
 honorable occupation ; and valor became the national 
 ideal. The military profession, therefore, afforded 
 the only means of illustrating the popular ideal. 
 In Rome, as in Greece, industry was considered de- 
 grading; because it was thought that it had a tend- 
 ency to tame the spirit, and make a man common- 
 place and unheroic. The farming class, which was 
 held in contempt as being beneath the standard of re- 
 spectability, was oppressed with unreasonable taxa- 
 tion for the support of the military establishment, 
 until farming became impossible, and the plains of 
 Italy were abandoned to nature, which reduced them 
 again to a state of wilderness; and the rural popula- 
 tion crowded into the city, where they had to be 
 fed with grain taken from the conquered provinces, 
 either at public expense or by private charity. Un- 
 der these circumstances the government became en- 
 feebled, so that it was unable to carry on further 
 wars of conquest, or even to guard its long frontier 
 from the barbarians of central Europe. 
 
 51
 
 52 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 It is a time-honored fashion of the historian to 
 ascribe the down-fall of Rome to its "dissolute 
 women." This is, of course, a departure from the 
 "economic interpretation" of history. And when 
 the economic causes of the decay of that ancient gov- 
 ernment are so glaringly apparent to even the most 
 casual student, it is only by extreme perversity that< 
 the historian can close his eyes upon them, and go 
 so far out of the way as to hold the alleged im- 
 morality of the women responsible. This, however, 
 has been done even recently, by writers who are 
 ordinarily keen at making the "economic interpreta- 
 tion." It seems hard, indeed, to get away from the 
 old, old habit of saying, "the woman did it." 
 
 Rome being in this enfeebled condition, and its 
 powerful citizen-princes being no longer engaged 
 in foreign wars, they turned their arms against each 
 other; and the country was ravaged and plundered 
 by their depredations, until there was no longer any 
 security for either life or property. The highways 
 became so insecure, and travel so dangerous that 
 commerce became well-nigh impossible; and in- 
 dustry suffered in like proportion. The owners of 
 slaves, having now no employment for them and 
 no means of feeding them, freedom became easy to 
 secure or was willingly bestowed as a gift. 
 
 The Greek philosophers had started with the 
 theory that human nature was perfect, that if a 
 man followed all the impulses of his being he would 
 lead a perfect moral life. One wonders that such
 
 THE FALL OF ROME 53 
 
 a theory was entertained, at a time when all women 
 were industrial and sexual- slaves, and a large ma- 
 jority of the male population were also enslaved. 
 Surely, a slave could not follow the impulses of 
 her or his being. All but a small class of the peo- 
 ple were rendered immoral by the conditions created 
 for them by that small minority who were free, ac- 
 cording to this theory, yet such the theory undoubt- 
 edly was. When the Romans conquered Greece, 
 the victors carried home with them the philosophers, 
 as a part of the spoil of conquest, and quite a fury 
 for the Grecian culture fell upon the Roman leisure 
 class. Philosophy was everywhere; philosophy 
 and logic, rhetoric and art. The very air the Roman 
 citizen breathed was Grecian culture. Thus the 
 theory that human nature was perfect became a 
 part of the Roman's catechism. But that theory 
 was already greatly damaged and brought into dis- 
 credit by the fact that the Greek had come to his 
 own destruction by following the impulses of his 
 own human nature. And by the time of the period 
 of Roman decay, the Roman philosophers had come 
 to the unhappy conclusions that man was not only 
 not wholly good, but that he was, on the contrary, 
 altogether bad. Even his very best was wholly vile, 
 and so hopeless a case was he that, according to the 
 philosophers, the only approach to virtue possible of 
 attainment for him, lay in the ceaseless mortifica- 
 tion of the flesh and the crushing of every impulse 
 of his nature.
 
 54 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 At the same time, speculation, giving up this life 
 and this world as a bad job, turned toward another 
 world and a future life, which was to be so blessed 
 that it would atone for the miseries of this life, if 
 only the flesh were sufficiently overcome here and 
 now. So the "unemployed," for very lack of em- 
 ployment, took up the task of mortifying the flesh, 
 as a profession. Thousands of them, according to 
 the accounts, fled to the deserts of Africa and to the 
 desolate Italian plains, and took up their abode in 
 caves, ruins and old tombs where they lived hermit 
 lives, striving with the spirit, against the flesh and 
 the devil. 
 
 In this state of things temporal and spiritual, the 
 Christian church was founded during the life of the 
 first Roman emperor. The imperial government 
 had nothing to offer to the common man; but the 
 church was organized as a pure democracy, and the 
 disinherited of the earth flocked to it, as to a shelter 
 in a storm. Nonresistance, community of goods, 
 humility, charity, these were the principles on which 
 it was built. In this first organization, woman stood 
 on the same footing as man, in every matter, even 
 to being ministers and going about through the 
 provinces, where they preached to the people and 
 organized the believers into congregations. 
 
 The church adopted rules for worship and the 
 conduct of its members, compliance with which was 
 at first purely voluntary. As it grew, however, and 
 its power spread and consolidated, the rules were
 
 THE FALL OF ROME 55 
 
 made obligatory, and it assumed control over both 
 the worldly and the spiritual affairs of its adherents. 
 Thus it grew into a powerful body of silent protest, 
 a republic within an imperial state. 
 
 As the civil government became increasingly un- 
 able to control its barbarous neighbors on the north, 
 the church began sending out missionaries into their 
 midst, building her chapels on the sites of their 
 pagan worship, at their sacred springs and under 
 their sacred trees, and converting them to her creed, 
 that she might control them through their con- 
 sciences. Meantime, she had adopted the theories 
 of the decadent philosophers regarding the vileness 
 of the flesh, and had improved a thousand times 
 upon their speculations of perfect bliss or complete 
 damnation, in a life to come. Thus she was able 
 to control the barbarians through their fears of a 
 future state, though the civil government was un- 
 able to punish them for sins done in the flesh. 
 Added to this, in the fourth century, the church be- 
 gan to make use of the machinery of the secular law, 
 to execute her judgments upon offenders against her 
 rules. 
 
 Meantime, also, the hermits of the deserts and 
 the tombs had gathered together in groups and 
 formed monasteries, and these monastic orders had 
 been adopted into the church, as a part of her or- 
 ganization. The vow of chastity was added to 
 those of nonresistance, poverty, brotherhood and 
 meekness which the ordinary church member was re-
 
 56 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 quired to take ; and yet the monks were a great pest, 
 both to the communities in which they settled, and 
 to the church. They were extremely undependable, 
 always coming and going and leading idle and useless 
 lives. At last, however, also in the fourth century, 
 the golden remedy for their disorder was found; 
 they were put to work. The vow of industry was 
 added to the other vows, and the monasteries, the 
 church, and the whole of Europe, wherever the 
 church had settled, entered upon a new career, a 
 career of prosperity and real usefulness to civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 A vast development of monasticism, both for men 
 and women, now took place, absorbing throngs of 
 the ex-slave population, as well as many people of 
 rank and wealth. The poor entered the monasteries 
 because they found there food, shelter and protection 
 at the same time that they believed that their spirit- 
 ual inquiries were answered. The rich, because 
 they were safe from being attacked and plundered 
 of their wealth. The able, because there they found 
 opportunity for the exercise of their powers in the 
 administration of the vast estates which the 
 monastic orders acquired; and for many centuries 
 the craftiest politicians and the best executives of the 
 world were found occupying the positions of abbots 
 and bishops in the Roman church. Women entered 
 the monastic life, because there they could not be 
 forced to marry against their will, nor assaulted by 
 the marauders who infested every corner of the land,
 
 THE FALL OF ROME 57 
 
 The monk and the nun worked without remunera- 
 tion, practicing poverty, according to the doctrine 
 of the early church; but the monastery kept the 
 product of their toil, and waxed fat and prosperous. 
 And under this too great prosperity the aims of the 
 church from being wholly spiritual at first, came to 
 be wholly temporal, namely, the acquirement of 
 property and political power. 
 
 The church had by this time, reversed its original 
 attitude toward woman, owing more than anything 
 else to the reactionary doctrine preached by the 
 apostle Paul, and to the general decline of culture. 
 Woman had been deprived of one right after an- 
 other until she was entirely ostracized from par- 
 ticipation in church affairs, excepting as a worshiper, 
 a penitent and a contributor. 
 
 At the same time that Christianity was growing 
 with such strides, the pagan temples and the priest- 
 hood attached to them were multiplying as rapidly 
 in Rome; as impostors will arise where remunera- 
 tive employment is not to be had. 1 
 
 The old ideal of valor was now dead and quite 
 cold, having given place to the negative ideal of 
 virginity. The barbarian overran the Eternal 
 City. Culture and education declined to the vanish- 
 ing point. 2 The Roman language became corrupted 
 by the admixture of the barbarian dialects, until, 
 in the dark ages, there was no longer any Latin 
 
 1 Theodore Mornmsen: History of Rome, Vol. I, p. 559. 
 Hallam: History of the Middle Ages.
 
 58 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 spoken, and the philosophers and writers of antiquity 
 were so far forgotten that they were said to have 
 been great magicians, such being the only kind of 
 greatness which that priestly age could comprehend. 
 
 It was in the year 476 that Odoacer, a Germanic 
 general from the region of the Danube, took posses- 
 sion of the Roman capital, and reigned as a German 
 king. The sun of early civilization had now set, 
 and the long night of a thousand years settled over 
 the continent of Europe. Yet the conquered peo- 
 ple were from the first better off in some respects 
 than they had been before. For the taxes were re- 
 duced and the change from the old imperial system 
 to feudalism relieved the people of many ancient 
 tyrannies. 
 
 The German soldiers who had followed the new 
 king were allotted portions of the conquered lands, 
 and so were made noblemen, and ruled the country 
 as dukes and counts, under the authority of the 
 king. It was their duty to fight for the king, to 
 attend at court, where they were obliged to do 
 homage every so often, and to serve as officers in 
 his household and assist in the administration of 
 the royal domain. They in their turn, bestowed 
 portions of land on other fighting-men, who thereby 
 became their vassals, and constituted a smaller no- 
 bility. In the aggregate there were a great many 
 of these nobles, small and great; but the mass of 
 the people were landless freedmen, serfs, or slaves.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 early centuries of the Christian era were a 
 JL period of migrations, toward the west and 
 south, throughout the continent of Europe. Mi- 
 grations which overflowed into the Island of Britain 
 and exterminated the old population, planting an- 
 other in its stead; and for a time, conquered and 
 held portions of northern Africa. And in the main, 
 it was those tribes living east of the Rhine and 
 north of the Danube, whom the Romans had never 
 been able to conquer, who held the country and re- 
 mained to establish the nations of modern Europe. 
 
 Whenever a migrating king and his soldiers con- 
 quered a tribe and took their territory he gave the 
 land out in allotments to his own people, and the 
 survivors of the native population became "land- 
 less men," or, if taken in battle, they became slaves. 
 The "landless men" or freedmen, as they were also 
 called, had, like the women and the children, no 
 recognition in law, unless represented by some land- 
 owner, who appeared as his guardian. A freedman 
 could bear arms and his death could be avenged, 
 but he had no place in the assembly of the people, 
 
 59
 
 60 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 and could not take part in the administration of 
 justice. 
 
 The land was allotted in two ways : First, every 
 soldier of the conquering band received a tract in 
 absolute ownership, called allodial land. Besides 
 this, the king bestowed other areas, sometimes vast 
 estates, as the duchies, counties and marches, upon 
 the leading men of the tribe, who held them in fee 
 or "fief"; and the holder became the vassal of the 
 king. He was then bound to bear arms for the 
 king on demand, do homage at court at stated in- 
 tervals, assist in the administration of justice, and 
 he was expected to make contributions to the royal 
 exchequer. Such was the feudal system. The vas- 
 sal of the king could in turn give these same lands 
 to other men in the same sort of tenure, and they 
 could repeat the process, so that there might be 
 five or six tenants and subtenants to the same piece 
 of land, and the holdings were often cut up into 
 fiefs so small that three or four vassals were obliged 
 to co-operate to keep one fighting-man ready for 
 the field. The overlord was obliged to defend his 
 tenant, and so it became a common practice for 
 holders of allodial land to yield their holdings to 
 some lord and receive them back again in feudal ten- 
 ure, for the sake of protection. Bishops and abbots, 
 the lords of the church, received large tracts of land 
 in both feudal and absolute tenure; so far had they 
 wandered from the principle of poverty which was 
 one of their original vows. On the other hand,
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 61 
 
 kings and nobles of every degree surrendered their 
 lands to the lords of the church and received them 
 back again in fee, in order to receive the protection 
 of the church. As the Roman civilization retro- 
 graded and the barbarian culture advanced, what 
 with the migrations of the northern peoples toward 
 the south and the scattering of the Romans north- 
 ward, a fusion of the two grades of culture gradually 
 came about. Some of the German chiefs got the 
 customs and laws of their peoples written down 
 in Latin, but not until they had become tinctured 
 with the principles of the Roman jurisprudence. 
 And the priests, who covered the face of Europe 
 with the network of their chapels, carried with them 
 the books of the Roman law in one saddle-bag, 
 while the bible occupied the other. And as priests 
 and "clerks," being the only men of education, they 
 found themselves in a position to give character and 
 direction to the budding jurisprudence of the Euro- 
 pean territories. But it was always necessary to 
 interpret and to apply the civil law in the light of 
 the usages of the people, and to limit it in some 
 measure, to the barbarian understanding. Thus, in 
 the words of Sir Henry Maine, was "modern juris- 
 prudence forged in the furnace of barbarian con- 
 quest." For the states of modern Europe are to 
 this day governed by the civil law, thus grafted onto 
 the primitive customs of the early tribes. 
 
 One secret of the power of the church to impose 
 the Roman law lay in the fact that she had the law
 
 62 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 written down in books, while the northern peoples 
 had no written law; and in the further fact that she 
 adopted the civil law in the administration of her 
 vast establishment. And her constant tendency 
 was to extend her rule over the secular and temporal 
 as well as the spiritual affairs of her subjects. She 
 was assisted in this by the pagan's fear of all the 
 gods. And while the Roman priest permitted only 
 the worship of the one God, he adopted all the more 
 important local deities of the pagans into the cal- 
 endar of the Roman church as saints, and thus an- 
 nexed the pagan worshipers to the "true religion." 
 And so it came about that the church was feared 
 and her laws respected throughout Europe, and her 
 property and that of her vassals was safe from 
 molestation at a time when the king himself, and 
 the feudal barons were subject to attack. 
 
 The handicrafts of the Roman period had all but 
 disappeared, because the craftsman could neither 
 practice his art nor teach it, for lack of physical pro- 
 tection. But the church encouraged the craftsman 
 to take refuge within her zone of calm, and there to 
 produce his wares for her profit, and teach his cun- 
 ning to the brothers. So the handicrafts were pre- 
 served from extinction, during that darkest period 
 until the common man had again so far reclaimed 
 his freedom and his power that he could command 
 safety by his own strength. 
 
 Agriculture was revived again on the broad 
 monastic acres, for there the crops could not be
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 63 
 
 trampled nor the fences thrown down nor the cat- 
 tle driven off, without bringing down the vengeance 
 of the local deities upon the heads of the offenders. 
 
 With so much fighting going on, and no security 
 existing in the open country, the custom of yielding 
 up allodial lands and receiving them back in fee be- 
 came so general that freemen almost disappeared, and 
 the mass of the populatioasank to the level of petty 
 vassals, differing little, if any, from the serfs. In 
 England, by the tenth century, it became a common 
 saying that no man could exist without a lord. The 
 "lordless man" was as helpless as the "landless 
 man." 
 
 When a man surrendered his lands and received 
 them back in feudal tenure, the tribute and service 
 which he engaged to pay in return for protection 
 were written down in the roll-book at the manor- 
 house, and the vassal was given a copy of the same. 
 He thereby became a "copy-holder," and the class 
 of "copy-holders" practically superseded the class 
 of freemen. So much for the effect of the aristo- 
 cratic, land-owning power, on the population in the 
 open country, where there was no other organized 
 power to combat it. 
 
 But elsewhere, quite different forces were opera- 
 ting, undoing the work of subjection, and silently, 
 obscurely, bringing back the freedom of the. race, 
 by the constant irresistible force of evolution in the 
 economic field. 
 
 Nature prods on the "landless man" and the
 
 64 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 "lordless man" to devise means for the satisfaction 
 of his wants, quite without reference to the quarrels 
 of lords or the intrigues of prelates. And while the 
 migrations stirred new currents in the blood of men, 
 acquaintance with, or the echoes of the arts of 
 Roman civilization gave new suggestions and aroused 
 new ambitions in men's minds. So it was that the 
 old Roman commercial towns in the Rhine country 
 and on the Danube commenced slowly to pulsate 
 with a new life, and the stream of commerce began 
 to trickle again along the old highways of trade. It 
 is difficult to trace the revival of industry and trade, 
 for the older historians mention such things only in 
 passing; and the newer historians have only just 
 begun to open the treasury of records. But there 
 was enough commerce between the Italian cities 
 and the east Mediterranean countries to support 
 a goodly number of gentleman-highwaymen and 
 pirates along the coasts, even in the darkest days; 
 and where there is so much piracy there must be 
 some trade. 
 
 In primitive days, at a place where cross-roads 
 intersect, or where a ferry crosses a stream, a smithy 
 will undoubtedly be found. And in a military age, 
 an armorer and a farrier will probably locate near 
 by. Also where wagons loaded heavily with pelts 
 and wool, hay and grain, are passing in both direc- 
 tions the wheelwright will find enough employment 
 to induce him to settle his shop in the vicinity. So
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 65 
 
 many traffickers will require a tavern where man may 
 drink and eat and sleep, and all these people, congre- 
 gating and passing, will create a market for the 
 linsey-woolsey and the serge, the seer-sucker and 
 the crash, which are produced in every farmhouse, 
 the country over. Some enterprising man whose 
 family makes a surplus of these things will open a 
 store for their sale; and there, altogether, you have 
 a little town. And the building of every cathedral 
 gave rise to a city. These germs of cities must 
 have existed, as soon as there was enough security 
 to enable men to plant and garner crops, and enough 
 time for the people of different localities producing 
 other commodities, to learn each other's needs and 
 to produce a surplus above their own requirements 
 with which to supply them. Such are the real proc- 
 esses of social life, the real functions by which 
 society lives. Fightings and governings are the 
 mere aberrations of people more or less insane. 
 Such beginnings are obscure, but there are records 
 to show that they must have been early made. At 
 the close of the eighth century, the emperor Charle- 
 magne opened trade routes from the Baltic Sea to 
 the borders of Greece, and made commercial treaties 
 with cities already in existence, at both extremities 
 of the system, while he built free markets for 
 foreign traders in a large number of German cities. 
 William the Conqueror found thriving towns in 
 Britain when he arrived in the eleventh century; and
 
 66 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 in the thirteenth century there were two hundred on 
 that island. London had 25,000 inhabitants, York 
 and Bristol ten thousand each. 
 
 The towns were subject to the law and justice 
 of the feudal lords on whose desmesne they were 
 situated, just as was an individual tenant. They 
 performed military service, did homage, and paid 
 dues and services. The townsmen of Leicester, for 
 instance, "were bound to reap their lord's corn-crops, 
 to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle 
 from his pound. . . . The justice and government 
 of a town lay wholly in its master's hands; he ap- 
 pointed its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures 
 of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their mar- 
 kets and fairs." * Each borough, however, had its 
 clubs or guilds, for social purposes, charity, religion, 
 and the regulation of commerce; and in the hands 
 of these guilds lay all the internal administration of 
 the town. The merchant-guild became everywhere 
 the most important. At first, any man who made 
 goods for the market might belong to the merchant- 
 gild, and it exercised a general care for all the social 
 affairs of all its members. But as the towns grew 
 and the burghers waxed rich, the merchant-guild 
 gradually limited itself to the more important and 
 larger branches of commerce and became practically 
 an oligarchy, governing both the domestic and 
 foreign affairs of the town for its own profit. 
 
 But before growth reached this stage the eco- 
 
 1 Green's History of the English People.
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 67 
 
 nomic needs 'of the feudal lords had opened the 
 way to freedom, not only to their individual vassals 
 and serfs, but to the towns which stood in the same 
 relation to them. For every time a feudal lord 
 wanted to build a castle or an abbey, to knight his 
 son or marry off a daughter, to go on a crusade or 
 give an entertainment beyond his means, he needed 
 money and he was usually improvident and poor. 
 But the towns invariably had money, their humblest 
 citizen could raise a little coin if it was a case of 
 a chance for freedom; and as time passed there was 
 ever less and less use for their services. So the 
 suzerain would send his sheriff to the town, and to 
 the vassals of high and low degree on his demesne, 
 and publish the fact that for the payment of cer- 
 tain stated sums freedom would be restored. Even 
 the humblest serf, if allowed to go to the town, 
 would be able to earn the money for the purchase of 
 his liberty, and the lord was only too glad to let 
 him go ; for he was always needing money more and 
 service less. Thus, without any legal process or 
 the enactment of any law, and only by virtue of 
 being let alone so that they could work, a nation of 
 "copy-holders" was restored to a nation of free men. 
 The medieval period is marked throughout and 
 everywhere by a struggle of the king to bring the 
 feudal barons under control ; to deprive them of the 
 power of carrying on private wars, of administer- 
 ing private justice, of levying tolls, fines and fees 
 on the population; to organize his own law and jus-
 
 68 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 tice, a national system of taxation and a national 
 military establishment. Under the feudal system the 
 king and the barons maintained their private owner- 
 ship of the land and the means of subsistence, by mu- 
 tual support. But this arrangement was never satis- 
 factory because of the personal ambitions and mu- 
 tual jealousies of everyone concerned. The barons 
 never wanted the king to become powerful enough 
 to control them, and he never wanted them to be- 
 come strong enough to secure independence of him- 
 self. In this case, the king in England had re- 
 course to the old primitive levy of troops among all 
 the men on the land. The emperor of Germany 
 tried the same plan from time to time. The French 
 kings, in order to escape from the power of the 
 barons, tried mercenary soldiers in their wars. But 
 the means employed was always physical; the pope 
 was the only potentate who relied on spiritual 
 weapons, and when it came to a final test of power 
 he also took up the sword. 
 
 But the maintenance of national armies required 
 national money; and the kings were none too scru- 
 pulous about how or where they got it. It made 
 little difference to the working population whether 
 it was king or baron who took their money. But 
 when the king made assessments on the baron, it 
 was another matter. And he had a way of making 
 them early and often, and then spending the money 
 in ways of no interest to the baron. So in England 
 and in the German empire spontaneous movements
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 69 
 
 arose at about the same period to put the king un- 
 der restraint, and to place the taxing power in the 
 hands of those who paid the taxes. Thus the strug- 
 gle for constitutional government began. 
 
 The king of England would, for a payment called 
 "scutage," or shield-money, relieve the baronage 
 from the annual need of military service; he would 
 relieve the shires and the towns for a similar payment 
 called "tallage." Henry II had introduced the 
 "scutage" in 1181. His successor, Richard, had in- 
 creased the amount of it; and after him, John still 
 farther raised the rate, and added thereto fines, 
 aids, and various special assessments. Then came 
 the united resistance of the barons, and their de- 
 mand, embodied in the Great Charter, that the king 
 should yield to the Great Council of the realm the 
 power of levying taxes. John died fighting the 
 charter, and the regents of his son, who signed it 
 immediately after his death, omitted the two sec- 
 tions which gave the taxing power to the Great 
 Council and provided for summoning all the 
 tenants-in-chief of the crown to the meetings of this 
 council. These two sections were afterward re- 
 stored, but only after half a century of blood-shed; 
 so stubborn was the resistance of the English kings 
 to relinquishing control of the taxing power. They 
 knew that the economic power was the controlling 
 power, even if they didn't understand it. Green, 
 in his "History of the English People," gives recog- 
 nition to this principle in the following passage:
 
 70 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 "The Great Charter met this abuse by a provision 
 on which our constitutional system rests. 'No 
 scutage or aid [other than the customary feudal aids] 
 shall be imposed in our realm save by the common 
 council of the realm,' . . . even the baronage seem 
 to have been startled when they realized the ex- 
 tent of their claim; . . . but the clause brought 
 home to the nation at large their possession of a 
 right which became dearer as years went by. More 
 and more clearly the nation discovered that in these 
 simple words lay the secret of political power. . . . 
 It was the establishment of this right which estab- 
 lished English freedom." The "control of the 
 purse," then, by the English people, is at the basis 
 of the English constitution. This "control of the 
 purse" was the weapon with which the English peo- 
 ple wrested from their kings all those limitations 
 upon the royal prerogative which create a constitu- 
 tional government. The German nation never suc- 
 ceeded in bringing their kings under this control, al- 
 though, as said before, they put forth a correspond- 
 ing effort at about the same time; their constitution 
 was disregarded by their monarchs, and the result 
 was that the country fell into an incredible number 
 of small principalities, each trying to maintain a 
 royal state, each supporting a court on the taxes 
 wrung from a handful of' serfs and keeping the coun- 
 try, with their taxation, their tolls at every bridge 
 and their tariffs at every boundary, plunged in intol- 
 erable poverty. Nevertheless, the first step toward 
 that national unity which finally came about in
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 71 
 
 the nineteenth century was an economic one : namely, 
 a national customs-union. 
 
 In France, the matter shaped up a little differ- 
 ently. Here, the king called in the burghers from 
 the towns to sit in the states-general and to devise 
 a national system of administration, which should 
 keep the barons from taxing the people out of ex- 
 istence, on their several dominions. 
 
 In the primitive days, when the country was 
 covered with petty tribes, each having its democrati- 
 cal government, the people came together in folk- 
 mote (or witenagemote) to discuss their common af- 
 fairs, and each man voted "aye" or "no," on the 
 questions that were brought before the assembly. 
 After the migrations and the establishment of na- 
 tional institutions, the free men still met to regulate 
 their local affairs, and the folk-mote became the 
 shire or county court, existing along side of, and in 
 spite of, the newer feudal system. When at length, 
 the English kings gave up trying to collect revenues 
 against the united resistance of the English people, 
 and sent out their summonses to all the tenants-in- 
 chief of the crown to assemble to vote the taxes, the 
 kings sheriff went into the shire court, and gave pub- 
 lic notice to every man of that station, to attend the 
 meeting. But this was most unsatisfactory, be- 
 cause there were such throngs of them, though there 
 were always a great many who did not come. Then 
 those who did come spoke only for themselves, and 
 it was difficult to hold those who were not present
 
 72 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 to the decision of those who were. Besides, they 
 had a disagreeable habit of coming armed. And 
 the lesser nobles always voted as the greater nobles 
 did, and the king had no chance at all of making 
 his will prevail. It gave him the feeling of stand- 
 ing alone against the nation in arms. Many of 
 the nobles were too poor to undertake the journey 
 and to live at considerable expense away from home; 
 and their property yielded only a trifling sum when 
 the tax was gathered. And after they had voted 
 the tax, the king had to dicker separately with the 
 common people of the shires and the towns for their 
 share of the assessment. These practical diffi- 
 culties, all together, demanded some changes in 
 methods. The freemen of the shires were growing 
 prosperous with their herds and their crops; and the 
 burghers of the towns were waxing rich with their 
 commerce. It was necessary to tax these sources of 
 wealth for the royal treasury, and it was very de- 
 sirable to reduce the cost of collection, as well as 
 to deprive the officers of the crown of the oppor- 
 tunity for graft which the prevailing system afforded 
 them. So, in order that all classes of the popula- 
 tion should vote their own tax, and so be willing to 
 pay it without further resistance, all classes were 
 summoned to the Great Council of the realm. But 
 as all the men of England could not assemble in 
 one place for this purpose, it was decided that the 
 people of the shires should elect "two discreet 
 knights" to represent them, the election taking place
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 73 
 
 in the sessions of the shire courts. The people of 
 the towns were at the same time bidden to elect their 
 representatives, the understanding being that these 
 representatives had authority to pledge each and all 
 of their constituents to pay the tax which they 
 should vote. Thus the Great Council was trans- 
 formed into the Parliament of the realm; purely 
 for economic reasons. 
 
 At the same time, that purely democratical gov- 
 ernment, which had survived in England, along- 
 side of the feudal system, in relation to local mat- 
 ters, was transformed into representative govern- 
 ment, in relation to national matters. We have a 
 habit of confusing representative government with 
 democratical government, in a manner which may 
 be flattering to our vanity as being "free and brave," 
 but which is, to say the least of it, very inaccurate. 
 Hallam, in his "History of the Middle Ages," sa*ys : 
 "The principle of representation, . . . can hardly 
 be unknown to any government not purely demo- 
 cratical" ; thus clearly recognizing the difference be- 
 tween democratic and representative government. 
 But the English speaking peoples have come to al- 
 most worship representation in government, as if it 
 were the very essence of democracy itself; whereas, 
 as we have seen, it was simply a makeshift, whereby 
 the people retained an indirect voice in the govern- 
 ment, at a time when it became impossible to retain 
 a direct voice, for want of facilities. 
 
 But for a long time there was great difficulty in
 
 74 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 getting representatives elected, and in getting those 
 thus chosen to attend the sessions of parliament. 
 It cost something to travel and to live away from 
 home, and the delegate had to neglect his own busi- 
 ness while thus engaged upon the public affairs. 
 The shires were required to pay four shillings a day, 
 and the towns two shillings, to their delegates in 
 parliament; and many of them refused to incur this 
 expense, so that it sometimes happened that the 
 sheriffs of populous counties were unable to report 
 the election of representatives from more than one 
 borough. The gradual establishment of a national 
 system of government was suppressing private wars, 
 and bringing the people peace and security under 
 which they were entering upon a period of pros- 
 perity as great as any England has ever seen, and 
 including all the population more truly than has 
 ever since been the case. Yet men were very in- 
 disposed to leave the manor-hall, the counting-house 
 or the plough, in order to support the public order; 
 and, they did not seem to comprehend the oppor- 
 tunity which they had to defend their own rights or 
 promote their own interests under it. But it must 
 be remembered that the very fact of a nation was a 
 new thing to the race mind. The parliament, sit- 
 ting at Windsor or at Oxford, seemed very remote; 
 the king's law and the king's justice appeared to 
 the unaccustomed mind to be a very lofty matter, 
 and so great and powerful as not to be in any way 
 dependent upon the common man. And besides,
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 75 
 
 every freeman bore his share in the shire courts, the 
 immediate machinery of local self-government. 
 
 Still, the theory that the people had a right to 
 regulate the taxes was established. And no sooner 
 did they begin to meet for that purpose, than they 
 proceeded to discuss other questions and to demand 
 redress in other matters. At first, parliament em- 
 ployed the system of voting the taxes, and afterward 
 humbly praying the king to make such laws as they 
 decided they needed. After receiving the royal 
 promise they would confidingly go home to wait for 
 the law. But it didn't take long to learn that a 
 king's promise was of very little value after the 
 taxes had been granted. Then the system was re- 
 versed. Thereafter, parliament passed its own laws, 
 and after they were signed by the king, it voted the 
 taxes; and to this day, the voting of the "budget" 
 comes last on the program of a parliamentary ses- 
 sion as a means of keeping the "power of the purse" 
 in the control of the people, until their demands 
 have received respectful attention. 
 
 But the English kings were very much averse to 
 submitting to this control, and so, repeatedly, they 
 tried the plan of raising money by the old means, 
 without calling parliament together. Yet in the 
 end, they found they could not maintain the throne 
 and carry on their wars, without the consent and 
 help of the people; and parliament passed an act 
 whereby it met automatically, at stated periods, 
 without the summons of the king. Thus point by
 
 76 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 point, slowly and laboriously, the English people 
 wrested from the English sovereigns those limita- 
 tions upon the royal prerogative which constitute 
 what is called "English freedom" to-day, by the 
 "power of the purse"; the power to give or to 
 withhold the economic support without which the 
 throne could not stand. 
 
 While this two-fold struggle on the part of the 
 nation to control its monarchs, and on the part of 
 the rulers to control the people, went forward with 
 varying success in the different nations, another 
 struggle was proceeding in the towns. As said 
 earlier in this chapter, the first town-guilds every- 
 where developed into merchant-guilds, including 
 among their number those engaged in the larger en- 
 terprises of commerce and finance. These guilds 
 set up the internal administrative machinery of the 
 towns, as they passed from the jurisdiction of the 
 feudal lords, placed themselves in charge, arranged 
 matters to their own advantage and developed first 
 class oligarchies, on a municipal scale. It was the 
 guilds that treated with the suzerain in the first 
 place, purchasing the right to administer their own 
 justice, levy their own taxes and regulate their own 
 commerce; buying immunity from tariffs, tolls, and 
 market charges from lord, bishop or king. No step 
 was gained that was not paid for in cash. And 
 there is more than one record, especially in France, 
 of cases in which the immunities purchased by the
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 77 
 
 "communes," or towns, for coin of the realm, were 
 respected no longer than it took the over-lord to 
 spend the money with which they were paid for. 
 And so it was often only after repeated purchase of 
 their freedom, that the towns were secure in their 
 immunities, until the time came when the national 
 governments absorbed them into the larger system. 
 
 During the period of free municipalities, the 
 church was in its heyday; and then, if ever, super- 
 natural power should have exhibited itself to ad- 
 vantage, in decreasing the freedom of towns, the 
 rise or fall of kings. Yet nowhere do we find the 
 fate of populations or of potentates following any 
 other power than the "power of the purse," or ris- 
 ing at any time when the economic processes of pro- 
 duction and exchange were on the wane. 
 
 Each commercial city had many of the char- 
 acteristics of a separate nationality. Inter-munic- 
 ipal trade was foreign trade. It was the policy to 
 monopolize commerce as far as possible, foreign 
 houses were allowed to do business in the town only 
 under strict regulations, and foreign traders were per- 
 mitted to remain only for a specified number of 
 days. But the merchants of all towns, as a class, 
 found it necessary to unite for certain purposes, be- 
 cause the national governments were not then 
 sufficiently developed to perform some of the func- 
 tions which are required by a commercial society. 
 Local co-operation among towns for the improve-
 
 78 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 ment and protection of the highways, and for the 
 abolition of tolls and charges, led to wider combina- 
 tions, and finally to the formation of the Hanseatic 
 League. This league, with its capital at Lubec, and 
 embracing all the commercial cities of northern 
 Europe, controlled and protected commerce by land 
 and sea, levied taxes, maintained armies and navies, 
 established weights and measures, coined money, 
 kept embassies at courts, made treaties with mon- 
 archs, loaned money to princes, made war on na- 
 tions, and dictated the succession of kings. 2 
 
 There seems to have been a strong possibility of 
 the establishment of republican government by the 
 consolidation of this league of commercial cities, at 
 the time of their greatest prosperity and power; 
 for they were really going far beyond the monarchies 
 of the time in some of the functions of government. 
 But the mutual jealousies and rivalries between the 
 cities and the efforts of each town to establish mo- 
 nopolies against every other town, prevented them 
 from developing the necessary solidarity. The bulk 
 of the working capital of the period was invested in 
 its commerce, and it was the consolidation and flow 
 of this capital through definite channels that gave 
 this enormous economic and political power to those 
 in control of it. 
 
 The discovery of a sailing route to India at the 
 end of the fifteenth century diverted much of the 
 trade which had hitherto passed through the cities 
 
 2 Lewis's History of Germany.
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 79 
 
 of north Germany and the Netherlands, and their 
 power began to decline. At the same time, the 
 feudal system had run its course and the general 
 development of civilization was such that the na- 
 tional governments were able to extend their con- 
 trol over the cities by a uniform system, and the 
 opportunity for the establishment of a federal gov- 
 ernment by the cities was past. 
 
 In the meantime, the craftsmen of the towns, be- 
 ing excluded from the merchant-guilds, from the 
 franchise of the towns and participation in the city 
 governments, formed guilds of their own on the 
 lines of their separate crafts. They controlled ap- 
 prenticeships, standardized tools, limited output, 
 regulated working hours; and in general, tried to 
 monopolize industry and industrial opportunity, as 
 the merchant-guilds tried to monopolize commerce 
 and commercial opportunity. At the same time, 
 they raised the standard of living and the social 
 culture of their class far above that of the unskilled 
 laborer. Still they were unable to withstand the 
 tyrannies of the city aristocracy, the merchant 
 oligarchies. But after a certain period of the de- 
 velopment of the separate craft-guilds, a universal 
 movement for the consolidation of the craft-guilds 
 in the separate cities manifested itself, and the 
 crafts in every town formed "one big union," for 
 the purpose of advancing the position of the crafts- 
 man class in the civic and social life. Then came 
 a period of strife between the classes, amounting,
 
 8o ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 in the case of many cities, to a long period of civil 
 wars. The craftsmen raised armies of their own, 
 and demanded a share in the city governments at 
 the point of the sword. And everywhere they won, 
 in some degree, in some places even to the exclusion 
 of the old city oligarchies. Then follows a period 
 of federation between the industrial cities, on a 
 basis of the craft-guilds. As northern Europe was 
 the strong-hold of the merchant-league, so southern 
 Europe was that of the craftsman-league; though 
 the latter never developed the same measure of eco- 
 nomic or political strength. But the league of the 
 industrial cities waged so valiant a war against the 
 princes of southern Europe, that the latter had great 
 difficulty in putting them down. 
 
 The cities of the south seemed for a time, like the 
 cities of the north, almost to be strong enough to 
 establish a federal government. But the moment 
 passed without quite the necessary exhibition of 
 solidarity on the part of the industrial class, and the 
 opportunity was lost. The south German league 
 fell apart for the same reason that had set a limit to 
 the development of the Hanseatic league: the ri- 
 valries and exclusions of its members. The mutual 
 jealousies of the German princes prevented them 
 uniting to form a national government; but their 
 recognition of their class interests impelled them to 
 unite for the crushing of every attempt of the peo- 
 ple to gain their freedom. The king of France sum- 
 moned the towns in his dominion to send representa-
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 81 
 
 tives to the "states general" of the realm, where a 
 uniform system for the government of all towns was 
 organized, and so put an end to the old type of free 
 cities and city leagues in that country. Thus was 
 the "divine right of kings" established, by a very 
 narrow margin. 
 
 The political vigor and aspirations of the cities 
 had been born of their economic prosperity. In 
 France and England these aspirations were in a 
 measure, and after a manner, gratified by their being 
 absorbed into the nation; in Germany they were 
 suppressed by the absolutism of a multitude of petty 
 kings and princes. Before the end of the fifteenth 
 century they had ceased to be of separate political 
 importance. And three centuries were to pass, dur- 
 ing which time their prosperity was to be destroyed 
 by the warfare of their kings, and they were to 
 drench the soil with the blood of millions, before 
 the people were to renew the struggle for freedom, 
 this time on a national scale. 
 
 The economic importance of the church had de- 
 clined with the general revival of industry and com- 
 merce, but she had enjoyed a period of tremendous 
 political power, owing to the fact that she possessed 
 a united international organization, and the super- 
 stition of the age was so great that no ruler could 
 maintain his position against either his people or his 
 enemies, if the excommunication and the ban of the 
 church was pronounced against him. The principle 
 of poverty had been completely forgotten; and she
 
 82 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 had enriched herself by every means in her power, 
 until she had come into possession of one seventh of 
 all the landed property in Europe. Her moral and 
 spiritual degeneracy had become so flagrant that she 
 no longer commanded the confidence or respect of 
 thoughtful and decent people; yet her possession of 
 so much property gave her tremendous political im- 
 portance. Founded on the principle of nonresist- 
 ance, the church had become a military power. Her 
 bishops and abbots mingled the accoutrements of 
 war indiscriminately with the vestments of their 
 holy office, and in this guise led their armies to bat- 
 tle. And it was fortunate for Europe that, in the 
 eleventh century, there was a western power which 
 possessed an international organization, which could 
 appeal to the universal motive of superstitious 
 fanaticism, and which could call to arms the men of 
 Europe, of high and low degree. For there was a 
 western migration of Saracen tribes, from central 
 Asia, on. They had conquered the Arabs, taken 
 possession of Jerusalem, and threatened the Euro- 
 pean emperor of Constantinople. Likewise they in- 
 sulted the Christians doing homage at the holy sepul- 
 chre in Jerusalem. If they had been permitted they 
 would probably have streamed westward into Eu- 
 rope, and the struggle between Saracen and Cau- 
 casian for the possession of the continent would have 
 taken place on European soil. The insults to the 
 Christians, however, and the danger to the throne 
 of the catholic emperor of the east, forestalled this
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 83 
 
 dire event. The pope issued a call to arms. Peter 
 the Hermit, and many other pious men, preached a 
 crusade throughout Europe; and the result was a 
 general outpouring of the hermits, the robber- 
 knights, and all the otherwise unemployed and 
 criminally employed elements. These trooped 
 across Europe or the Mediterranean, and not only 
 absorbed the attention of the invaders, but actually 
 captured Jerusalem and established a government 
 there for a time. Later, better elements of the pop- 
 ulation took up the cause, and for three centuries, 
 the men of Europe continued to dedicate their lives 
 in large numbers, to the enterprise of reconquering 
 the east. They did not succeed in holding any of 
 the country in the end, but the Turks never reached 
 very far east, or north, in Europe. And there were 
 many incidental results of extreme importance, to 
 European civilization. From the first, commerce 
 and industry were benefited in two ways: The 
 highways were cleared of the robber-barons who had 
 afflicted the country as a pestilence. And a trade 
 sprang up between the east and the Italian cities 
 along the highway of the Mediterranean, which 
 brought to them an era of unprecedented prosperity. 
 Moreover, the people of the east had the better of 
 Europeans in the arts of civilization at that time. 
 Their religious ideas and practices were in some re- 
 spects much in advance, knowledge was more de- 
 veloped among them, and European culture received 
 a tremendous impulse from its contact with the
 
 84 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 despised and execrated east. And not the least of 
 these results was, that the Christians began to ask 
 questions about their own religion, to inquire in 
 what way it was superior, and why they were so 
 zealous about it. From this time heresy began to 
 raise its head, the reformation followed, the church 
 lands were secularized, and a period of decline in 
 the position of the church was initiated which has 
 not ceased to the present day. 
 
 Over a million men are said by contemporary 
 writers to have perished in the first crusade; and 
 from that time, for two centuries, besides the seven 
 principal crusades, there was hardly a time when 
 larger or smaller parties of men were not journey- 
 ing toward the east, bent on the same errand. Dur- 
 ing the same period there was never any lack of 
 wars, nor any cessation of the shedding of blood 
 on European soil. Yet, strange as it seems on first 
 thought, there was never a time when the female 
 population of Europe was sufficiently in excess of 
 the male population to excite the comment of con- 
 temporary writers or engage the attention of the 
 modern historian. The reason why the ceaseless 
 wholesale slaughter of men did not result in an 
 excess of female population does not appear on the 
 pages of the historical writers. Special research is 
 required to discover it. Nevertheless, enough of the 
 records are accessible to furnish a perfectly clear 
 explanation. And that explanation is fraught with 
 a greater horror than the history of wars and cru-
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 85 
 
 sades; namely, the horror of the witchcraft perse- 
 cutions. 
 
 We owe to Karl Pearson the discovery that the 
 witch of medieval Europe was originally none other 
 than the wise woman or Saga, of the primitive 
 tribes. And Dr. Pearson produces early documents 
 which prove his point. When the earliest mission- 
 aries of the Christian church went northward to the 
 country of the barbarians to establish their missions 
 and introduce the government of the Roman church, 
 they found that every group of the heathen had their 
 "wise woman," who was not only friend, philosopher 
 and guide to the people, but their physician also. 
 She was a person of great influence and authority 
 among them; and she interfered with the plans of 
 the priest. And she was such a universal institu- 
 tion among the folk, and was so deeply rooted in 
 the customs of the people that heroic measures were 
 required to get rid of her, and clear the way for the 
 unhindered authority of the church. Moreover, 
 she was the repository of the tribal lore, and as such, 
 had much knowledge of the healing power of plants 
 and how to use them. To the priest, entirely ig- 
 norant of such matters, this seemed nothing less than 
 magic; black magic. In short, she might be a witch, 
 according to the old Hebrew description. So, in 
 the time of Augustine, in the fourth century, there 
 was a good deal of discussion about witches, in the 
 church, and that Saint gave his authority to the 
 belief in them. And the old Mosaic law: "Thou
 
 86 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 shalt not suffer a witch to live" was quoted as au- 
 thority. There are long blank periods in the rec- 
 ords; but in the year 799 the witchcraft business 
 had progressed so far that the council of Salsburg 
 ordered that the torture be used to secure evidence 
 against witches. Every diocese in Europe had its 
 committee of "witch inquisitors," whose business it 
 was to make complaints against , persons whom they 
 believed to be bewitched. And, in case these failed 
 of their duty toward their neighbors, the church em- 
 ployed a body of "Traveling Witch Inquisitors," to 
 go from place to place, lodging complaints against 
 those whom they might choose for their victims. If 
 the witch was possessed of property, half of this 
 property went to the prosecutor, and the other half 
 to the judge, in case of conviction. As both these 
 worthies were church officers, and, being priests, were 
 unmarried, so that their property went to the church 
 on their death, it becomes clear how so much as one 
 seventh of all the territory of Europe came to be in 
 possession of the church. 
 
 A witch was said to be a woman who had sold 
 herself to the devil, and had become possessed of 
 diabolical knowledge in the transaction. Was a 
 crop blighted was there a disease among the cat- 
 tle did a woman have a child still-born? A witch 
 had done it; she must be sought out and burned. In 
 Scotland a woman was burned for having caused a 
 storm by taking off her stockings. Did a woman
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 87 
 
 refuse submission to her husband did one scoff at 
 the miracles of a priest"? She was a witch. 
 
 The French historian, Michelet, was probably 
 more familiar with the records of the witch prose- 
 cutions than any one else, and referring to a brief 
 period in their history he says: "They were tried 
 in a lump; they were condemned by a single word. 
 Never had there been such a wastefulness of human 
 life. Not to speak of Spain, that classic land of 
 the fagot, where Moor and Jew were always ac- 
 companied by the witch, there were burnt at Treves 
 seven thousand, and I know not how many at 
 Toulouse; five hundred at Geneva in three months 
 of 1513; at Wurtzburg eight hundred, almost in 
 one batch, and fifteen hundred at Bamburg; these 
 two latter being very small bishoprics. ... In the 
 Wurtzburg list I find one wizard a school boy, 
 eleven years old ; a witch of fifteen ; and at Bayonne 
 two, infernally beautiful, of seventeen years." 
 
 Thus the theory that the wise woman was a witch 
 having been accepted, the fathers of the church found 
 no difficulty in extending it to any woman, or even 
 to children. Matilda Jocelyn Gage says that "it 
 is computed from historical records that nine millions 
 of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 
 1484, or during a period of three hundred years." 
 ["Woman, Church and State;" p. 247.] We do 
 not know whether the computation is correct. But 
 when one considers that this witch-burning blackened
 
 88 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the sky of every bishopric in Europe, and multiplies 
 the numbers of the victims given in the records 
 quoted above by any probable number of bishoprics, 
 the result is appalling. The first witchburning 
 probably could not be located as to date, but it was 
 not until 1672 that trials for witchcraft were pro- 
 hibited in France, and not until 1784 that the burn- 
 ing and hanging of witches was abolished in Eng- 
 land. From the council of Salsburg to 1784 is, 
 in round numbers, a thousand years; and at the 
 earlier date, the business was in full swing; it there- 
 fore becomes plain that the number of these ecclesi- 
 astical murders is altogether beyond computation or 
 comprehension. But at any rate, the question of 
 what became of the women while the men were being 
 sacrificed on the field of battle, is disposed of. And 
 the economic motive for it is made sufficiently clear. 
 Wherever we read of men, during this period, it 
 is in connection with some organized body, either 
 church, state, or guild. But we do not read of 
 women at all. One would think that the entire pop- 
 ulation was of the male sex, from reading the pages 
 of written history. The bearing and rearing of all 
 these millions of victims for the torch and for the 
 sword was certainly a task of heroic magnitude; 
 yet because each woman labored, bearing and rear- 
 ing her dozen or so of children, in the "sacred ob- 
 scurity" of her own home, the contribution of 
 women to life has been treated as quite a negligible 
 one. But women should, at last, learn a lesson
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 89 
 
 from these thousands of years of the butchery of 
 their children to satisfy the egotism of the masters 
 of their masters. This lesson is that "sacred ob- 
 scurity" never yet promoted or protected the in- 
 terests of any living being. And it should be plain 
 to all, that wherever man has made any temporary 
 advance he has done so through the organization 
 of his class to defend the interests of his class. 
 And wherever he has lost the ground so gained, 
 he has lost it through the neglect of his class 
 organization. Woman has been the easy prey 
 of every form of aggression and exploitation, be- 
 cause she has had no organization to protect her as 
 an individual. The maxim "divide % and rule" has 
 received its most brilliant exemplification in the 
 case of woman. But her ruler has suffered as much 
 as she has for his rule. 
 
 Under the revival of commerce and industry dur- 
 ing this period, when the members of the family 
 worked in the home producing goods for the market, 
 the patriarchal basis of the family appears again as 
 its vital principle. The husband and father owned 
 all the product of the toil of all the family; even as 
 in the prime of the patriarchal institution. If they 
 worked outside the family, their wages were his. 
 His patriarchal prerogative was still so far intact 
 that he was not accountable for maintaining any 
 standard of comfort in the home, in return for the 
 economic values he took out of the family. 
 
 In the beginning of the feudal period we saw that
 
 QO ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the knight in armor was the fighting-man of the sys- 
 tem. His political power and his social prestige 
 rested on his prowess with the lance and sword, in 
 defense of his lord himself and the king. But later, 
 when the king wanted to be rid of him, he intro- 
 duced the yeoman with his mighty long-bow on the 
 field of battle and the knight was undone. Then 
 the crusaders brought back with them from the east 
 the knowledge of gunpowder; when they "shot little 
 balls with thunder" to scare the horses, on the battle 
 field; and the knight found himself still further to 
 the bad. Presently cannon were made with which 
 the castle walls of lord and prince were battered 
 down ; and then the knight became utterly ridiculous, 
 with his tilting and his capering. Add to this that 
 the money power had passed from the hands of the 
 land-owning class to those of the trading class, and 
 even to the united craftsmen ; and it is apparent that 
 a social revolution had taken place. At the same 
 time, the personal quality and chivalric character of 
 the nobility had deteriorated until they had lost all 
 their power and charm, and had sunk again into a 
 state that some historians have called semi-barbar- 
 ism. The knight had sunk to the level of a poor 
 imitation of his former self, affecting a stiff and ri- 
 diculous formality of manner, and an ostentatious 
 contempt for women. Meantime, with economic 
 comfort, leisure and education, the burgher class had 
 risen to the front rank of culture. 
 
 At the beginning of this period the laboring popu-
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 91 
 
 lation had been bound to the land; but with the de- 
 cline of the feudal system, they were freed and many 
 of them went to the towns to work. They arrived 
 there without money and without a trade and with- 
 out tools. The laborer had to learn to work and 
 he had to make a bargain with some one who owned 
 tools, to work for him and divide the profits. There 
 were many thousands of them and they all had to 
 fight against the guilds for a chance to learn to work, 
 and to compete with each other to get a chance to 
 work, for the man who owned the tools. There 
 were many employers, and they were all trying to 
 get the most men to work the cheapest, and the com- 
 petition between employers tended to keep wages 
 up. And the competition between the workers 
 tended to keep them down. But the tools were 
 simple and easy to make, or cheap to buy, so, after 
 a man had learned to work, it was easily possible 
 for him to acquire his own tools and enter the class 
 of self-employers. Then he would own all that 
 he produced wouldn't have to divide up with any- 
 body. 
 
 We saw that in primitive society, industry was 
 in the hands of the women, that they worked to- 
 gether in a free community and that inventions made 
 a very substantial beginning. The foundation for 
 subsequent progress in the mechanical arts was well 
 laid. Then a social revolution came about, after 
 which all work was done by slaves; and inventions 
 stood practically still during the era of slave pro-
 
 92 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 duction. But now, when men were working in 
 freedom, inventions began to appear again. The 
 tool soon increased in complexity and effectiveness, 
 when it also increased in price and was no longer 
 so easy to possess. Also men began to specialize 
 in industry, each man making only a part of the 
 finished product; for this method was found to in- 
 crease the efficiency of the man and to augment the 
 amount of his day's output. But under this sys- 
 tem numbers of men have to work together. The 
 owner and employer assembled the more complex 
 tools now, in his factory, and here the tools and the 
 workers developed together on specialized lines. 
 After this, it was necessary to produce these things 
 by the factory system, because the individual worker 
 could no longer compete with the factory product in 
 the market. Development went on in this way until 
 the tool became a machine, and the worker merely 
 an operative. 
 
 The inventions and discoveries made at this time 
 are too numerous to be named, but the two of most 
 importance, those which probably did most to liber- 
 ate society into an entirely new field and to mark an 
 epoch in human affairs, are the invention of a proc- 
 ess for making paper, and the art of printing. 
 Hitherto, books had to be written by hand, and on 
 parchment, the expensiveness of which was a se- 
 rious drawback to the spread of knowledge. These 
 two inventions came nearly at the same time, about 
 the middle of the fifteenth century. The time was
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 93 
 
 ripe for them. In the opulent and luxurious cities 
 of Italy, whose commerce and culture had been so 
 stimulated by the crusades, the renascence of the lit- 
 erature and learning of early civilization was already 
 taking place. The languages of Europe were 
 emerging from the jargon of Latin and barbarian 
 dialects, and entering upon a period of literary de- 
 velopment. The writings of the ancients were 
 printed and had a wide distribution, in spite of the 
 efforts of the church to suppress them. The uni- 
 versities of Paris, Bologna and Oxford were 
 founded, and many others soon followed. A pas- 
 sion for education seized upon the people and the 
 youth of Europe thronged to the universities. The 
 knowledge dispensed there was still astonishingly 
 meager, but this was atoned for by the enthusiasm 
 of the students. 
 
 Early in the feudal period, when reading and 
 writing became general among the landed class, and 
 education was spread by private means, the women 
 in the castles of the land received the same educa- 
 tion as the men, and this had everything to do with 
 the worshipful attitude of chivalry toward women. 
 But now that the universities became the means of 
 spreading education, a difference was immediately 
 created in the intellectual development of the sexes, 
 and at the same time, a studied contempt for women 
 made its appearance. The roystering turbulent life 
 of the universities was not suited to women, and 
 even where they were not excluded by law, they
 
 94 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 were debarred by the nature of the situation. So, 
 while the establishment of the universities was in 
 one way an advantage to civilization, in another 
 way it was a hindrance to it, by creating an artifi- 
 cial difference between the sexes, and making way 
 for a long train of those evils which have always 
 followed when any one class is placed at a disad- 
 vantage before another class. 
 
 We saw, in the chapter on early civilization, that 
 the position of woman in society is accurately re- 
 flected in her position among the deities; that when 
 woman was the head of the social unit, the principal 
 gods were of the female sex. We saw also that 
 after the mundane revolution, by which man became 
 the head of the social unit, a corresponding change 
 had taken place in the society of the heavens. 
 At the time of Christ, the Roman jurisconsults were 
 doing all they could, by the construction of the laws, 
 to emancipate woman from her ancient slavery, 
 but the people, still devoted to religion, resented 
 these changes as being contrary to morality and 
 the will of the gods. The teachings of Christ were 
 wholly in favor of the freedom and equality of 
 woman ; and the church at first adopted this position ; 
 but very soon, under the influence of the apostle 
 Paul, it reversed this position and deprived woman 
 of her rights and privileges in the organization. 
 How far this ostracism was carried and how con- 
 temptible the position of woman became under the 
 domination of the church is seen in the fact that the
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 95 
 
 latter established the worship of a "holy trinity" 
 which was entirely male. Mary, mother of Christ, 
 was placed beside the trinity in the worship of the 
 church, by an act of the council of Claremont, in 
 the year 1066; but only after the dogma of the 
 "immaculate conception" had been established. 
 But the worship of one woman in that she is differ- 
 ent from other women is not the same thing as the 
 worship of woman, but is, on the contrary, a special 
 refinement of denunciation. The means by which 
 the legal subjection of woman to the individual man 
 was accomplished, consisted in the revival of an in- 
 stitution of the oldest Roman law, that device 
 known as "The Perpetual Tutelage of Woman." 
 The church was given, in every state in Europe, not 
 excepting England, a free hand in the formation of 
 the laws relating to the position of woman, the posi- 
 tion of children, and the inheritance of property. 
 And while the later Roman law was revived in re- 
 gard to all other subjects, on these points it was 
 the very most archaic of the Roman laws which 
 were applied. But with this one difference: that, 
 while the Roman law vested all the rights of master- 
 ship in the father, and they were transferred by him, 
 as property rights, to the husband, the modern laws 
 vest them, originally, in the husband. 
 
 On looking over the entire field of medieval his- 
 tory, the two great achievements of the period, those 
 which stand out most conspicuously, and are most 
 fraught with meaning for the future of the race are
 
 96 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 these. That man has become, in his social habits, 
 a working animal instead of a fighting animal. And 
 that national governments have been formed in the 
 place of tribal governments; and that they have 
 finally been hammered into such shape that progress 
 is possible under them, by means of his organiza- 
 tions on the lines of his economic interests.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MODERN ERA 
 
 IN the matter of social progress, Italy had the bet- 
 ter of other European nations at the beginning 
 of the modern period, both in the fact that she oc- 
 cupied one of the sites of early civilization, the pul- 
 sations of which had never quite died out, and in that 
 she had a clear waterway to the Mohammedan 
 countries at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, 
 and her commercial relations with them inoculated 
 her directly with their culture. And the ruins of 
 ancient Greece, lying along the shore of this trade- 
 route, did their part in reviving the ancient ideas 
 and aspirations in the minds of modern man. Thus 
 it happened that the new arts of printing and book- 
 making became the means of spreading the classical 
 literature and learning among the Italians, while in 
 the more remote countries the Hebrew literature, 
 the Bible, had a wider popularity, and served to 
 communicate somewhat of the spirit of that earlier 
 patriarchal period to the northern civilizations. 
 But aside from this generalization, it was the more 
 educated classes everywhere who took up the study 
 and adopted the spirit of the classics, while the 
 
 97
 
 98 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 masses found more interest in the literature of the 
 earlier period. 
 
 Now, the political spirit of the renascence was 
 democratic; and the greatest writers of antiquity 
 having lived before the age of pessimism, placed 
 human reason above revelation as a guide to truth, 
 and taught a cheerful respect for human nature. 
 The old studies were revived within the church 
 schools, for the universities were established within 
 the church; but the humanism of the ancients was 
 a direct denial of the theory of the vileness of hu- 
 man nature, on which the entire dogma of the 
 church depended, and of inspiration, the means by 
 which it claimed to receive authority. So the re- 
 nascence was no sooner well under way than the 
 church began to discourage it, and to combat the 
 new views and theories of life which it inculcated. 
 Under the spell of the renascence, people began to 
 believe in the pleasures of this world, and to regard 
 the life of the flesh as a good thing for its own sake ; 
 while the Hebrew literature concentrated the atten- 
 tion upon the supernatural and strove to narrow life 
 to the purpose of preparing for another world to 
 come. For this reason the church favored the lat- 
 ter; but the political tendency of the Bible was 
 no less democratic than that of the classics, for it 
 professed to place every man in communication with 
 the sources of inspiration, on his own account. 
 
 At the same time, the scandalous immoralities of 
 the church, the sale of indulgences, the licencious-
 
 THE MODERN ERA 99 
 
 ness of the monasteries, the open concubinage of 
 the priesthood, all were bringing on a state of popu- 
 lar contempt and rebellion against the ecclesiastical 
 authority. The more conservative spirits had long 
 hoped and striven for a reformation of abuses within 
 the church; but toward the end of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, a priest of Wittenburg, one Martin Luther 
 by name, impatient of the postponement of reform, 
 nailed to his church door a categorical condemnation 
 and defiance of the church, and went about preach- 
 ing rebellion. There was at once a general taking 
 sides on the question. Luther was tried by a coun- 
 cil of the church, and condemned to the stake as a 
 heretic; but the council which condemned him, re- 
 fused to make any reform in the offensive practices 
 of the church, thus adding fuel to the rebellion. 
 Heretical teachings and practices were forbidden on 
 pain of death, and yet heresy spread tremendously. 
 The enthusiasm of the heretics represented more 
 than religious frenzy, it was largely a rebound from 
 tyranny, and for this reason it appeared dangerous 
 to the secular rulers. 
 
 It brought about an independent organization 
 within the state, which claimed authority from 
 powers higher than the state. And for this reason 
 the monarchs of Europe seemed to stand on the side 
 of the church. But if the common people were glad 
 to revolt for the sake of both conscience and liberty, 
 the secular rulers often were as glad to declare their 
 independence of Rome; and thus it happened that
 
 ioo ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 sometimes they ranged themselves on the side of 
 the people, and sometimes on the side of the pope. 
 
 Meantime, John Calvin, a Frenchman living in 
 Switzerland, started another rebellion against the 
 church. His scheme was to set up a rival organi- 
 zation, having all the universal power of the Roman 
 hierarchy, but based on a somewhat different doc- 
 trine. Thus the protestants were divided against 
 themselves. 
 
 In France, the keen intellectual life which had 
 been awakened by the northward spread of the re- 
 nascence was directing itself toward working out the 
 problems of the relation between the church and the 
 state; that between the prince and the people, be- 
 tween monarchy and democracy. Reformers within 
 the church were trying to work out a new system of 
 dogma and discipline; the Calvinists were trying to 
 float their system, but all without any practical re- 
 sult. Religion became a pretext for political quar- 
 rels, and politics for religious differences; and all 
 the time the different groups and parties were wax- 
 ing more vehement. Finally the religious and po- 
 litical parties coalesced on general lines. In an in- 
 definite way, catholics became monarchists, and 
 protestants became political rebels. By the middle 
 of the sixteenth century, vehemence led to plots, 
 counter-plots and murders; massacres of catholics, 
 massacres of protestants, and outbreaks of civil war 
 succeeded one another. 
 
 Philip II of Spain was vigorously applying the
 
 THE MODERN ERA 101 
 
 inquisition and the torch at home and in the Nether- 
 lands. In England, Henry VIII had separated the 
 church from Rome, had taken the title of, "On 
 Earth Supreme Head of the Church," and had sent 
 to the stake many persons who refused to acknowl- 
 edge the title, Sir Thomas More, the author of 
 "Utopia," among the number. The north German 
 and Scandinavian countries, princes and people 
 alike, had gone over to the reformation. South Ger- 
 many was slowly coming over, with much fighting 
 and bloodshed. The empire, under the house of 
 Austria, was catholic, along with Spain and Italy. 
 Catherine de Medici and her sons, who succeeded 
 one another on the throne of France, were trying, 
 with varying success, to maintain a balance of power 
 between the parties. Henry VIII had died, and his 
 son Edward VI had turned the church over to the 
 protestants; he had died, and his sister, Mary, a 
 catholic bigot, had intrigued with the pope, to re- 
 store the church to Rome. She, in turn, had died, 
 after five years of appalling butchery, and her sister 
 Elizabeth had come to the throne. 
 
 Elizabeth was a child of the renascence; and to 
 her, all this blood-shed about religion was a silly 
 and stupid blunder. She restored the church to 
 the state in which her father had left it, made the 
 bishops her servants, and set about developing the 
 economic resources of her little realm, which she 
 found just about the poorest in Europe, without 
 army or navy, and the prey of two fairly well-bal-
 
 102 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 anced parties of infuriated theologians. Her policy 
 in religion remained, throughout her life, one of 
 keeping the balance between the two parties. In 
 Scotland, a violently presbyterian people were try- 
 ing to supervise the worship of a determinedly cath- 
 "olic sovereign, Mary Stuart. Such was the state of 
 Europe, in the middle of the sixteenth century. 
 
 We saw in the last chapter, that during the mid- 
 dle ages men had learned to work in a state of free- 
 dom, and that national governments had developed 
 which were able to secure some measure of protec- 
 tion to people in their work. The people had, in 
 turn, secured control of the taxing power, and, by 
 the use of this, had been able to place many restric- 
 tions upon the absolutism of princes. All these con- 
 ditions were accompanied by an increasing comfort 
 and plenty. Reading and writing became common, 
 the ancient learning was revived, printing and pa- 
 per-making were invented, and the manufacture of 
 books gave a wide circulation to the classical litera- 
 ture. Commerce was highly developed, and the 
 free interchange of goods stimulated manufactures. 
 The new world was discovered; a sailing route to 
 the orient had been found. The tool was growing 
 toward the machine, factory methods were begin- 
 ning to displace individual production, and the in- 
 creased efficiency in the individual which resulted 
 therefrom was helping on the general prosperity and 
 the increasing culture. It seemed as if the golden 
 age was just about to dawn. So many wonders had
 
 THE MODERN ERA 103 
 
 never transpired in all the world before. That was 
 at the end of the fifteenth century. In the middle 
 of the sixteenth, we see a race whose attention is 
 centered on the supernatural, tearing at each other's 
 throats, each immovably determined to make his 
 fellow believe as he does, for his soul's salvation. 
 The golden age has not arrived. On the contrary, 
 wars of a political-religious nature have constantly 
 broken out, here and there, over the face of Europe. 
 The pope had seen one country after another go over 
 to protestantism until his cause seemed lost. Re- 
 form, the only thing which would have put a stop 
 to the general defection, was steadfastly denied. 
 Finally, in 1562, an international appeal to arms 
 was made. All the catholic countries of Europe 
 sent their armies to France, where under the leader- 
 ship of the Duke of Guise, heresy was to be wiped 
 out in blood. An international army of protestants 
 undertook to contest the field ; but the next year the 
 assassination of the Duke of Guise put an end to the 
 attempt, and the armies fell apart. Catherine de 
 Medici and Elizabeth returned to their system of 
 balance, Germany resumed the building of Lutheran 
 churches and secularizing the church lands; Philip 
 of Spain resumed the burning of heretics in his un- 
 happy peninsula and in the Netherlands. But 
 France was too near to Rome for balance to be suc- 
 cessfully maintained. The catholics intrigued, the 
 protestants were driven to a frenzy of apprehension, 
 edicts of Toleration and edicts of Pacification were
 
 104 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 issued without avail. The people would neither 
 tolerate nor be pacified, so long as their neighbors 
 refused to agree with them in matters relating to 
 the supernatural. At length, in the hope of putting 
 an end to the struggle, Catherine and her son gave 
 their consent to a plot which the catholics had 
 hatched, for a nation-wide massacre of protestants. 
 The death of the Duke of Guise had terminated the 
 war, perhaps the death of the leading protestants 
 would reduce their followers to submission. The 
 massacre took place on St. Bartholomew's day, 1572. 
 Different estimates place the number of killed all 
 the way from 10,000 to 100,000. But there is no 
 difference of opinion as to the results. Pandemo- 
 nium worse confounded, broke loose in France. Na- 
 tional parties went to pieces. People gave up trying 
 to work out problems. The intellectual inter- 
 ests of the nation were forgotten. Again the chaos 
 of civil war devastated the land; and it was only at 
 the end of another year that the country would ac- 
 cept an edict of Toleration, being by that time so ex- 
 hausted that it was impossible to longer keep up the 
 fight. Catholicism was saved for the time, but the 
 process of building up the Huguenot organization 
 began again immediately. And it was in this or- 
 ganization that the difficulty lay, from the stand- 
 point of the monarchy. An organized people was 
 sure to become conscious of itself as a social entity 
 and a political power, even if it was organized for 
 religious purposes, and the protestant churches were
 
 THE MODERN ERA 105 
 
 constantly carrying on political discussions which 
 kept the country in an uproar. So long as organiza- 
 tion was only local and scattering, it could be ig- 
 nored, but the protestants knitted up their system 
 with a diabolical persistency. The States General 
 were convened, and deliberated for months together, 
 without being able to suggest any means to pacify the 
 country. So in 1585 an edict was issued against the 
 protestant worship, and again the dogs of civil, re- 
 ligious war were let loose, not only involving all 
 France, but the protestant countries of north Ger- 
 many as well. Henry IV became king of France in 
 1589, a strong resourceful man, and determined 
 upon peace; but though he made concessions and of- 
 fered toleration to both sides, it was not until 1 598 
 that he could publish the Edict of Nantes, by which 
 the war was terminated. And even then, peace was 
 possible only because the country was exhausted to 
 the point of prostration. Even then he dared not 
 convene the States General, because he knew that 
 neither the catholic nor the protestant delegates 
 would consent to the peace, which secured toleration 
 for all. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this religious frenzy, honesty 
 was never at a lower ebb. Notwithstanding the 
 prostration of the country, the tax-gatherers con- 
 tinued to ply their trade with zeal and success; but 
 little of the money collected reached the king. In 
 1596 he wrote to his friend Rosny: "My poverty 
 is incredible." "My shirts are all torn, my doublets
 
 106 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 out at elbows; my cupboard is often bare, and for 
 the last two days I have been dining and supping 
 with one and another." He begged Rosny to in- 
 vestigate where the trouble lay, which the latter 
 agreed to do. And it is recorded that, "When he 
 went on his inspection, the treasurers of France, re- 
 ceivers, accountants, comptrollers, either absented 
 themselves, or refused to produce him any register; 
 he suspended some, frightened others, . . . and he 
 proved from the principal items of receipt and ex- 
 penditure at those four general offices, so much and 
 such fraudulence that he collected 500,000 crowns, 
 . . . had these sums placed in seventy carts and 
 drove them to Rouen where the king was." 
 
 Between 1593 and 1609 the protestants of 
 France held seven national synods for the discus- 
 sion of religious questions, and eleven national as- 
 semblies for the discussion of their political inter- 
 ests and attitude, and this fact reveals them acting as 
 republicans, and having an organization which 
 might have been tremendously valuable to them, 
 and equally dangerous to the monarchy, for political 
 purposes. But nothing came of it. The founda- 
 tion of successful democracy was not yet laid, as 
 we shall presently see. The discussion of political 
 questions was doomed to failure for yet another sea- 
 son. Political questions were not to be decided on 
 the basis of speculations about the supernatural. 
 
 The economic prostration of the country was 
 made worse by the tolls and duties which were still
 
 THE MODERN ERA 107 
 
 charged at the boundaries of every county and 
 duchy in the kingdom, and by the neglected condi- 
 tion of the highways ; but neither the States General 
 nor the protestant assemblies attacked these evils. 
 The vast destruction of personal property, tools, 
 utensils and implements of every kind; the difficulty 
 of finding seed for the crops, the scarcity of domestic 
 animals, all made the daily life of the people hard 
 to the last degree; and on the basis of this national 
 prostration, Richelieu, the minister of the widow 
 and son of Henry IV, built up a system of absolu- 
 tism such as France had never known before. The 
 States General were no longer convoked, all power 
 and authority were gathered into the hands of the 
 king. 
 
 When Philip II came to the throne of Spain in 
 1556, he was the strongest monarch in Europe. 
 Possessed of vast territories in the new world, from 
 which he drew enormous wealth, hereditary ruler 
 of Spain, the Low Countries and large provinces in 
 Italy, possessing armies and a navy which were 
 reckoned invincible, he devoted his entire life, 
 his wealth, his military and naval power, to the sup- 
 port of Catholicism. He signed death warrants in 
 blank by the trunkful for the use of his inquisitors 
 in the Netherlands, he instigated and paid for a long 
 generation of ceaseless wars in the name of religion. 
 In Spain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, the army 
 was the only honorable profession. The ancient 
 cities of Spain had, indeed, bodies of far-famed
 
 io8 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 craftsmen; but so little sense of values had Philip, 
 thatjie drove a large proportion of them to Eng- 
 land, by the inquisition. It sufficed for his most 
 catholic majesty to bring over the gold of the Incas, 
 and pour it into the lap of the manufacturing cities 
 of Europe. For him, it served for one or two ex- 
 changes of merchandise; for them, it was the life- 
 blood of commerce and of industry, for generations. 
 Yet nobody realized that he was not still the mighti- 
 est monarch in the world, even when his Invincible 
 Armada was put to flight by the sailors and mer- 
 chantmen of Elizabeth. 
 
 When Elizabeth came to the throne, England 
 was scarcely considered an European power. She 
 had lost all her possessions on the continent, she 
 possessed neither an army nor a navy. Her treasury 
 was drained. Her shipping was insignificant, her 
 woolen manufacture of very inferior quality to that 
 of Flanders. Her population was distracted by 
 the constant changes in the religious creed of her 
 sovereigns and the ruthlessness with which these 
 changes had been forced on them. The New Learn- 
 ing had died out, smothered by the Reformation, 
 with its endless disputations upon points of specula- 
 tion. The universities had declined, students had 
 fallen off, the libraries were scattered. People 
 seemed to care only about the forms of religious wor- 
 ship. Both catholics and protestants, by turns, had 
 been whipped into a state of hysterical nervousness, 
 and apprehension fed their zeal, until each side was
 
 THE MODERN ERA 109 
 
 ready to send the other "to the fire." Elizabeth 
 made the Church of England as good a compromise 
 as she could between the warring elements; and re- 
 quired conformity of worship, on pain of fines, but 
 she let it be known that no man would be ques- 
 tioned, as to his conscience. From the first, this 
 arrangement was an economic benefit to the country ; 
 the persecuted artisans from Spain and France and 
 the Netherlands flocked to her cities, and gave to 
 commerce and industry an impulse which greatly 
 assisted in establishing a state of prosperity. The 
 cities of Bruges and Antwerp were the markets of 
 the world. Philip besieged and captured Antwerp 
 and ruined both. The inhabitants, with their capi- 
 tal, their industry, their trade and shipping, were 
 transferred to London and it became the greatest 
 trading city of Europe. The silks and cottons and 
 spices of the orient, the gold of the Guinea coast and 
 the sugar of the West Indies all found their greatest 
 market in the city on the Thames. For a century, 
 England had been filled with crowds of "broken 
 men," a vast army of the unemployed. An increase 
 in the value of wool had produced an "agricultural 
 revolution," in which the old small land holdings 
 had been consolidated into large sheep ranges and 
 the old, agricultural population had been evicted. 
 Comparatively few men were required to tend the 
 sheep, and the rest were turned out to starve. It 
 had been the custom to round them up in batches 
 and hang them as vagrants to the nearest gibbet.
 
 no ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 But the new increase in population demanded larger 
 supplies of food; Elizabeth had a large number of 
 new food plants introduced from Italy, a more in- 
 tensive system of cultivation was adopted, and a 
 large part of the unemployed population was re- 
 absorbed by the farms. A ray of domestic comfort 
 began to find its way into the homes of the poor; 
 they began to build chimneys in their cottages, the 
 use of window glass became more general, and 
 pillows were seen on the beds of common people. 
 
 Portugal had established itself in the India trade; 
 Philip of Spain made war on her, conquered the coun- 
 try, and the trade fell into the hands of the Nether- 
 land cities. Philip then made war on them, and the 
 trade fell into the hands of the English. He sent 
 his Invincible Armada together with the navy of 
 Portugal, against the tiny navy of England, re- 
 enforced by the battered ships of the Hollanders and 
 her own merchantmen. The merchant companies 
 sent ships that rivaled those of the government in 
 power. Country squires and burghers put to sea 
 in tiny vessels armed with a gun or two; every vil- 
 lage on the coast sent its little tub with a crew to 
 have a brush with the Spaniard. The Armada was 
 beset as with a swarm of gnats. Its men were 
 picked off by innumerable marksmen from all di- 
 rections. Half of its seamen were killed before it 
 could really offer battle ; a storm at sea did the rest. 
 The Armada was defeated by the enthusiasm of a 
 people who were enjoying economic prosperity, and
 
 THE MODERN ERA ill 
 
 who knew that it would be saved or ruined on the 
 issue of the battle. Philip took his defeat with great 
 resignation, not knowing that the empire of the seas 
 had passed to the one nation which had been cultiva- 
 ting its economic resources while he had been making 
 war in the name of religion. Thirty years before, 
 England had not been considered a factor in Euro- 
 pean politics; she now had laid the foundation for 
 and entered upon that career which made her mis- 
 tress of an empire in America, an empire in India, 
 another in the Pacific ocean, and yet another in 
 Africa. 
 
 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, gram- 
 mar schools were established, wherever there were in- 
 tervals of peace. In England, they taught both the 
 classics and the New Learning, based on the Bible. 
 In Germany they were frankly established for the 
 purpose of "training up a generation of believers in 
 the bible." In France they had made almost frantic 
 efforts to introduce order into thought, before the St. 
 Bartholomew. Men were trying to "justify faith 
 by reason," as if that would, in some way, clear the 
 difficulty. At the end of the century, Gallileo and 
 Kepler were teaching the astronomical theory of 
 Copernicus, Descartes was discovering the laws of 
 motion, Harvey discovered the circulation of the 
 blood, Gilbert was studying magnetism; natural 
 history collections were being classified and sys- 
 tematized. Order was being introduced into 
 thought, but men did not quite realize it, until Sir
 
 112 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 Francis Bacon promulgated his system of inductive 
 reasoning; in which faith had no part whatever. 
 
 Modern history is said to begin with the year 
 1480; but the modem mind did not make its ap- 
 pearance until a group of men appeared, who are 
 best represented by William Shakespeare and Francis 
 Bacon. These two men had really the same type of 
 mind, the only difference being one of temperament. 
 Shakespeare raised no question of faith; he was 
 neither optimist nor pessimist. He accepted life for 
 what it was worth and studied it without prejudice. 
 Bacon affirmed the unity of knowledge, which he 
 classified into many departments; but he had no de- 
 partment for theology. Knowledge was to be built 
 up by the process of practical experimentation; hy- 
 pothesis was always to yield to fact. Reason itself 
 was without authority, except it was based on 
 demonstrable fact. 
 
 But the mind of the masses of the people had not 
 been reached by the new philosophy; indeed, all the 
 forces of the church, of whatever denomination, were 
 opposed to this new theory and all its works. A 
 denial of the authority of faith; any faith what- 
 ever, was a new kind of heresy, against which all de- 
 nominations could unite. At the same time, the 
 public mind was again completing the old weary 
 circle of material comfort, intellectual cultivation, 
 hope, despair, decay. It had now come again to the 
 stage of despair. During the period of Shakespeare 
 and his contemporaries, eighteen theaters had been
 
 THE MODERN ERA 113 
 
 opened and did a thriving business in London. That 
 was the age of intellectual cultivation and hope. 
 During the next fifty years, they were all closed, in 
 order to compel the people to think on the wrath to 
 come. And they were closed at the demand of the 
 people. That was the beginning of the age of 
 despair. Sunday festivities were forbidden. Mince 
 pies were cut out of the diet of the pious, as being 
 delightful, and therefore tending to make people for- 
 get God. The ills of the world and the vices of 
 the flesh were again the prevailing subject of con- 
 templation. In short, England had turned Puritan. 
 But this time, puritanism was not destined to sink 
 the ship; for inductive reasoning was at last at the 
 helm and the methods of modern science were sup- 
 plying the human mind with materials to build a 
 way out ; the way of neither optimism nor pessimism, 
 but of meliorism. This time the world went right 
 on. While the religious and the uninstructed con- 
 centrated their attention upon the horrors or the 
 meaningless bliss of an imaginary hereafter, and 
 clutched weakly at the straws of unsupported faith, 
 small groups of men, here and there, were trying, 
 verifying, classifying and generalizing upon the 
 simple, concrete, immediate facts of this world. 
 The ancient philosophers and the theologians said: 
 The rules of the universe are thus and so; any facts 
 which do not accord with these rules are vicious and 
 must be suppressed. The scientist, proceeding by 
 the rules of inductive reasoning said : We will first
 
 114 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 prove our facts, and then we will make our rules in 
 accordance with them, and these rules shall lead us 
 to the discovery of new facts, but our rules shall al- 
 ways be subject to revision, to make them conform 
 to such new facts as we shall discover. It may be 
 said that the older method, that of beginning with 
 the remote and the abstract for the purpose of find- 
 ing out the immediate, is the mode of the mascu- 
 line mind ; while that of beginning with the concrete 
 and the immediate and proceeding from that to the 
 general, is the method of the feminine mind. And 
 the long and difficult way that humanity had to 
 travel before it picked up the trail of truth was un- 
 doubtedly much more long and difficult than it 
 would otherwise have been, by reason of the fact 
 that women were excluded from participation in 
 intellectual pursuits by their domestic isolation. 
 However little it may have appeared, at that time 
 or since, the age of Francis Bacon introduced the 
 era of feminism. 
 
 But we have to turn yet again to the seat of war ; 
 religious war. In the early part of the sixteenth 
 century, the peasants of south Germany determined 
 that they would have neither princes nor palaces, 
 priests nor convents, in their midst. And in pur- 
 suance of this resolve, they rose in multitudes and 
 proceeded in the most practical ways to get rid of 
 the intruders, by fire and the sword. Thus far, they 
 did effective work; but they failed to follow up in- 
 stantly with the organization necessary to hold what
 
 THE MODERN ERA 115 
 
 they had gained ; and they were dispersed with great 
 slaughter; it is recorded that the vengeance which 
 was wreaked upon them obliterated the memory of 
 their cruelties. Now the Lutheran reformation was 
 just getting under way, and Luther put himself on 
 the side of the princes, saying in the gentle priestly 
 fashion of the time, that the peasants "must be ex- 
 terminated like mad-dogs." Ah! This was a ref- 
 ormation worth having. Ever since the year 800, 
 when the pope had crowned the German king "Em- 
 peror of the Romans," the church had received grants 
 of land of the utmost liberality at the hands of the 
 Germans. Every time a new emperor was to be 
 crowned, of course new lands had to be given to the 
 church. But for a long time now, the German 
 princes hadn't wanted any emperor; and when they 
 had one, they did all they could to limit his authority 
 and enlarge their own freedom. So now it came 
 about that the church was holding enormous terri- 
 tories all over Germany, and the Germans no longer 
 had anything to gain from remaining on good terms 
 with the pope. What could be simpler than for the 
 princes to throw off the claims of the church, annex 
 the church lands to their several domains, and so 
 gain wealth and freedom at the same time 4 ? And 
 especially was this true, since the reformation, while 
 it freed them from the pope, was not to free the 
 people from them. Luther would attend to that. 
 So here we have the economic reason for the religious 
 reformation in Germany. The process had been go-
 
 ii6 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 ing on uninterruptedly and peaceably for half a cen- 
 tury. The prince would annex the lands of the 
 church, turn out the priests and put preachers in their 
 stead, and there you are. Germany was thickly 
 populated, well tilled, prosperous, educated; and in- 
 deed, it almost seemed that the golden age had really 
 come, here. 
 
 The empire had become a shadowy affair now, yet 
 the princes of the house of Austria claimed the im- 
 perial crown, and Austria was catholic. There was 
 a dispute about the succession to the crown of 
 Prussia, and the emperor seemed to be intending 
 to appropriate it himself; so, in this state of a,ffairs, 
 the protestant princes, who were greatly in the ma- 
 jority, formed a "Protestant Union," in 1608. In 
 1609, the catholic princes formed a "League." 
 The heirs of the house of Prussia appealed to the 
 Union, and France, and the Emperor, turned to the 
 League. Then followed the "Thirty Years' War." 
 We will not attempt to follow its tortuous course; 
 but will note some of the general features of it in 
 passing. 
 
 The protestants were much the more numerous; 
 but the catholics were under the one head, the em- 
 peror, while the protestant princes were prevented 
 from acting with any efficiency by their jealousies 
 and rivalries. Each was mortally afraid that the 
 other would make something at his expense, or 
 would come out ahead in the end. So the emperor 
 gained one victory after another, and gradually
 
 THE MODERN ERA 117 
 
 strengthened himself until, in 1629, he felt strong 
 enough to issue a decree that all the church lands 
 which had been secularized should be restored. 
 Here, at last, was a common ground on which all 
 the protestant princes could unite. The emperor 
 was dependent for his success on his general, Wallen- 
 stein, and Wallenstein now proclaimed that the 
 separate states of Germany must go. The emperor 
 must be absolute, like the king, in Spain and France. 
 This, at last, woke the princes up. The Swedish 
 king, Gustavus Adolphus, came over at this time, 
 to save the protestants, and though the Germans 
 rallied to him but slowly, he succeeded in turning 
 the tide, and after that the war went more in favor 
 of the protestants. Gustavus Adolphus was killed 
 in battle ; but by this time, the emperor and Wallen- 
 stein were quarreling, and at last, the latter was as- 
 sassinated, to rid the emperor of him. The em- 
 peror now was free, but he had lost his fighting 
 power. Peace negotiations had been begun in 1640; 
 but it was not until 1648 that a treaty could be com- 
 pleted, in which all the multitude of petty sovereigns 
 would concur. By this treaty, the Peace of West- 
 phalia, the church lands were to remain as they were 
 when the war broke out, the different states were to 
 choose their own religion. France got a slice of 
 territory along the Rhine, Switzerland and the 
 Netherlands became free of Germany. Nobody 
 gained anything. But in some parts, only one of 
 the inhabitants in ten was left. The entire popula-
 
 ii8 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 tion was reduced to one fourth of its former num- 
 bers, and the material wealth was reduced in a much 
 larger proportion. Scarcely any one was alive who 
 had ever seen a condition of peace. Those who were 
 left were stupid, brutal, ignorant and without spirit. 
 Cowed, broken, only caring to hide from their tor- 
 mentors; it was two years before the remnant of the 
 population could realize what peace was. And it 
 took two hundred years for Germany to recover the 
 lost ground in material wealth and the arts of life. 
 Wajlenstein had brought into the country hordes 
 of bandit-soldiers, of every nationality under the 
 sun. But the emperor had no money to pay them 
 and they were commissioned to get their pay in 
 plunder, from the country. They did; and before 
 they were disbanded, the country had been so cleaned 
 of every particle of food, that the soldiers themselves 
 were dying of starvation. They had carried off 
 every removable thing that would bring a piece of 
 money, and what could not be carried had been 
 destroyed. The dishes and pewter pots and copper 
 kettles of the housewife, the farming implements, 
 every cow and horse and chicken, had been consumed. 
 The whole country was starving. Fields and or- 
 chards and vineyards were wilderness. The Han- 
 seatic towns, once the scene of so rich and busy a 
 life, were drained of wealth and almost of popula- 
 tion. The vessels rotted at the wharves, grass grew 
 in the highways, whole blocks of houses were torn 
 down, whole streets without a single inhabitant.
 
 THE MODERN ERA 119 
 
 And here, as in France, after 1598, a system of 
 absolutism was built on the prostration of the people. 
 Some of the popular assemblies were called together, 
 but they had nothing to propose; they were power- 
 less and useless. So popular government was 
 abandoned, altogether. At the courts of the princes, 
 hysterical gaieties, affectations of frivolity, ostenta- 
 tious displays of wealth took the place of the refine- 
 ment that had existed before the war. The rich 
 civilization of Germany, given over wholly to re- 
 ligious speculation and unleavened by any seed of 
 scientific thought, had all but extinguished itself in 
 a single generation. 
 
 During the reign of Henry VIII, when the re- 
 ligious strife was at its hottest, parliament had lost 
 interest in the development of the constitution, and 
 had passed a law that proclamations of the king 
 should have all the power of statutes. The Tudor 
 kings had all been alert to extend the prerogative of 
 the crown at the expense of that of parliament; but 
 even so, parliament had, during the long period of 
 peace and prosperity of Elizabeth's reign, extended 
 its own power in a number of directions. This 
 growth of the constitution is inevitable, where there 
 is a large middle class which is increasing all the 
 time in wealth and power. But the successor of 
 Elizabeth, James I, king of Scotland, had no idea 
 of the principles of government; he was first and 
 last a theologian. But he had all the Tudor eager- 
 riess fpr extending the power of the crown. Hi
 
 120 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 idea of the courts was, that they were to render judg- 
 ments according to his wishes, regardless of the law 
 of the land; the church was to receive its law and 
 doctrine, and accept its bishops and preachers by his 
 appointment. In order not to be hampered in his 
 designs by parliament, he laid duties on a large num- 
 ber of articles which had never been taxed before, 
 the revenue from which would make him independ- 
 ent. His efforts to force the church back into the 
 catholic fold resulted in the migrations of thousands 
 of his subjects to North America, where they estab- 
 lished the colonies along the Atlantic coast. James 
 fought the constitution as long as he lived; but 
 parliament was then too well established, and the 
 people too strong to allow any king ever to estab- 
 lish his independence again in England. His son, 
 Charles I, succeeded him ; but he had not learned the 
 lesson of his father's reign. Moreover, he had fallen 
 under Spanish influence, and he was enamored of 
 the absolutism which the other monarchs of Europe 
 had been able to establish over their impoverished 
 people. He imagined he could establish the same 
 system over a people not impoverished. 
 
 Charles levied taxes without parliamentary en- 
 actment, caused arrests without due process of law, 
 forced conformity with his changes in the religion 
 on pain of imprisonment. Parliament required him 
 to sign the Petition of Right, which confirmed all 
 the constitutional liberties of the people. It de- 
 manded that he should dismiss Buckingham, a friv-
 
 THE MODERN ERA 121 
 
 olous and extravagant minister, and redress griev- 
 ances, before it would vote the taxes. But the 
 Petition of Right failed to bind the king; the parlia- 
 ment repeatedly refused to vote the taxes, parlia- 
 ment was dissolved, and for eleven years no other 
 parliament was called. Then the Scottish people 
 rose against the religious changes, and Charles was 
 obliged to summon parliament again. But still 
 neither side would yield. A "Triennial Bill" was 
 passed, by which parliament was to meet once in 
 three years, regardless of the summons from the 
 crown. The houses refused to grant supplies for 
 the war, feeling that the Scottish people were fight- 
 ing their battle. The king undertook to arrest five 
 members of the house contrary to the constitution; 
 and the break between king and people became hope- 
 less. Parliament now demanded the right to ap- 
 point and dismiss the ministers of the crown, to ap- 
 point guardians for the king's children, to control 
 the army, and all civil and religious affairs. The 
 king refused his consent to these demands, negotia- 
 tions were broken off, and civil war between the 
 parliament and the king was declared. The war 
 broke out in 1642; we need not follow its fortunes, 
 but in 1648 the king was taken by the puritan 
 army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell. 
 Even now, after six years of bloody war, he refused 
 to yield on any important point; and the question 
 of what to do with him became a terrible one. 
 Should the results of the war be lost and the freedom
 
 122 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 of the English people surrendered to save a stubborn 
 king 1 ? The parliament decided that it should; it 
 could not bring itself to vote for his deposition. Par- 
 liament had not shed its blood in the war. Not so 
 with the army. And the next morning an officer 
 was stationed at the door of the house of commons, 
 who excluded from the house a sufficient number of 
 the adherents of the king, to destroy the majority in 
 his favor. A commission was then named to try 
 the king, and he was condemned as a tyrant, traitor, 
 murderer and enemy of his country, and beheaded on 
 January 3oth, 1640. 
 
 Thus ended the attempt to establish absolutism, 
 in a rich and prosperous country. The next thing 
 in order was to establish another government. A 
 Commonwealth, or republic, was proclaimed, and for 
 four years an effort was made by Cromwell and his 
 supporters, to put it on foot, but without success, 
 the remnant of parliament refused to dissolve, or 
 provide for its successor, and Cromwell drove it out, 
 as he had driven out the other members, four years 
 before. 
 
 Francis Bacon had declared that political science 
 could have no value, unless based on the findings 
 of physical science; and his secretary Hobbes had 
 written a work, the "Leviathan," in which he an- 
 nounced the theory that governments rest their au- 
 thority on the consent of the governed and that they 
 must be justified by reason instead of faith. These 
 theories were being much discussed, and they were
 
 THE MODERN ERA 123 
 
 creating a revolution in political thought. Now, 
 when Cromwell drove out the "rump" of the parlia- 
 ment, he summoned what he called a Constituent 
 Convention, to draw up a form of government. 
 The Assembly met and entered upon its delibera- 
 tions, in the light of the new doctrines. The more 
 it discussed, the more light it saw, and the longer 
 it sat, the farther it got away from the common un- 
 derstanding of the people. It proposed measures 
 which posterity has been ever since enacting; but to 
 the people it seemed as if the Assembly was a body 
 of dangerous mad-caps. The protest against their 
 proposals rose to a great pitch ; Cromwell himself be- 
 came alarmed at their extravagance, and once more 
 he went in and cleared out the assembly hall. 
 Again a parliament was elected, whose task it was 
 to be to "settle" the government. And meantime, 
 Cromwell enacted a large number of ordinances, for 
 the government of the realm. Parliament met, as 
 competent a body of men as the time afforded. But 
 instead of leaving Cromwell's ordinances as it found 
 them, and passing on no other matters, it proceeded 
 gravely with the discussion of them, adopting some 
 and rejecting others. Once more parliament was 
 driven out of the hall ; and England settled down to 
 a military dictatorship. 
 
 The army was a body of "Godly men," puritans. 
 And puritanism was forced on every phase of life. 
 Festivities were forbidden, the theaters were closed, 
 everybody was forced to be good according to the
 
 124 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 ideas of the puritan party. But the administration 
 was the best since the days of Elizabeth. The coun- 
 try was not merry but it was prosperous, and peo- 
 ple were patient for fear worse would befall them. 
 At length, however, a reaction came on. People 
 got tired of having to be good in such a dry and 
 narrow way ; everybody came to hate the very name 
 of "Puritan." Then plots began to hatch for re- 
 calling the son of the deposed king, Charles II. 
 Cromwell died, and, almost immediately, the king 
 came back to England. He was welcomed with wild 
 enthusiasm by everyone. Cromwell was reviled, and 
 his body was taken from the grave and exposed upon 
 a gibbet. 
 
 The theaters were opened again, festivities were 
 revived, exaggerated revelries, debaucheries and 
 license made up for the time lost during the pro- 
 tectorate. Science became the fashion, and the 
 Royal Society, and the Oxford Society, for the ad- 
 vancement of science were established. The king 
 was a man of modern mind, but he had no mind to 
 submit forever to the restrictions which the constitu- 
 tion put upon him. And the constitution was re- 
 vived in its most advanced state. He was good 
 natured and seemed like a rather indolent, harmless 
 fellow ; but he proved to be probably the most adroit 
 politician who had ever sat upon the English throne ; 
 he was a catholic, for purely political purposes, and 
 in a short time it was seen that he was reviving all 
 the old controversies of politics and religion, with a
 
 THE MODERN ERA 125 
 
 view of freeing himself from constitutional limita- 
 tions. People now recalled the name of Cromwell 
 with reverence, and referred to the good days of his 
 reign. 
 
 It is not necessary to trace the details of English 
 history further; we have seen enough to illustrate 
 the hopeless confusion, the loss, the plot and counter- 
 plot, which mark the struggle between a people and 
 a monarchy, even at its best. Sir Thomas More 
 said, during the reign of Henry VIII, that govern- 
 ments are simply a conspiracy of the rich against 
 the poor, the strong against the weak; which con- 
 spiracy is carried out under the forms of law. After 
 following the course of the history of any nation for 
 a few centuries, one sees that this is the best possible 
 characterization of it; simply an unending, ever 
 changing, kaleidoscope of conspiracy. But we 
 seldom see the price which the poor and the weak, 
 made poor and weak by this very conspiracy, pay 
 for the ignoble victories of the conspirators. 
 
 In France, after the edict of Nantes, by which re- 
 ligious peace was secured, Richelieu, and after him, 
 Mazarin, applied themselves to the administration 
 of the country and strengthening the monarchy. By 
 the time of Louis XIV, grandson of Henry IV, 
 France had become the overshadowing power in Eu- 
 rope. What peace and order had done under Eliza- 
 beth, for England, was now done for France, on a 
 much larger scale, and in a country of richer natural 
 resources. With this difference: that in England,
 
 126 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 the parliament was well established before the 
 period of great growth set in, and its isolated posi- 
 tion protected it from invasion and removed it from 
 the center of popish plots, and the strength of the 
 nation was the strength of its people. In this way 
 the middle class was able to keep abreast of the 
 crown. The great finance minister of Louis XIV, 
 Colbert, created undreamed-of sources of revenue for 
 the crown, by developing the industry and com- 
 merce of the country. He constructed roads, canals, 
 bridges; he planted new industries and removed 
 tariffs, tolls and charges. Under this administra- 
 tion, prosperity received such an impulse as had 
 never before been even suggested ; but it was mostly 
 drained into the coffers of the king. The national 
 strength of France was the strength of the monarch ; 
 not its people. The splendor of his court and the 
 magnificence of his armies became the wonder of the 
 world. The smaller powers of Europe were obliged 
 to combine their forces to protect themselves against 
 his schemes of conquest. But now the conscience 
 of the king of France began to trouble him. He 
 was neglecting to defend the interests of religion as 
 he should. There were fifteen hundred thousand 
 protestants in his realm. It would never do. So 
 the people were commanded to become converted; 
 conversions were bought where that was possible. 
 Where they resisted, dragoons were quartered upon 
 them, with instructions to annoy, torture and abuse 
 them until they would yield. The protestant
 
 THE MODERN ERA 127 
 
 churches were all torn down, the people forced to 
 go to mass. They were forbidden to leave the king- 
 dom on pain of the galleys and slavery. Many 
 thousands, nevertheless, did escape, and took up 
 arms with the enemies of France. The industries 
 were abandoned, the country was desolated by the 
 civil wars which broke out in many parts, the wealth 
 and power of the monarchy disappeared and France 
 sank to her old level among the European powers. 
 
 The States General had not been called together 
 since 1614; and the people had no governmental 
 machinery of their own. It was the genius of Col- 
 bert which created and set up that economic system 
 on which the monarchy depended for its splendor. 
 But now Colbert was dead, and he left no successor. 
 And when the glittering exterior of France collapsed 
 it was found to be very hollow inside. In the reign 
 of Louis XV, the local judicial bodies, called parlia- 
 ments, showed a disposition to unite and form some 
 sort of national organization; but they were 
 promptly dismembered and suppressed, while the 
 king stated his position in these words: "In my 
 person alone resides the sovereign power, of which 
 the special characteristic is the spirit of council, 
 justice and reason: it is from me alone that my 
 courts have their existence and authority. It is to 
 me alone that the legislative power belongs, with- 
 out dependence and without partition. My people 
 are but one with me, and the rights and interests of 
 the nation whereof men dare to make a body separate
 
 128 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 from the monarch are necessarily united with my 
 own and rest only in my hands." But with all the 
 king's "sovereign power," the economic foundations 
 of the nation's prosperity were allowed to decay. 
 The king, for a time, renewed the military prestige 
 of the nation in foreign wars; but this did not re- 
 duce the price of bread. The nobility and the 
 church were exempt from taxes, the entire burden 
 of which was borne by the poor. A system of road 
 improvement was begun, but the peasants were put 
 to forced labor, to get the work done. Food was 
 scarce and the price of grain was raised by a corner 
 of the market; it was known that the king was in- 
 terested in the monopoly. Such was the economic 
 condition of France and the economic efficiency of 
 the "sovereign power," at the time when the new 
 philosophical and political ideas were breaking 
 down men's ideas of the holiness of the church and 
 the divine right of the monarchy. 
 
 The French Academy had founded itself, by the 
 spontaneous organization of a company of friendly 
 philosophers and writers, for their own pleasure. 
 But it had pleased Cardinal Richelieu to give it his 
 official patronage and sanction; and it continued 
 afterward a rallying-point for French thought and 
 letters. All through the reign of Louis XIV ra- 
 tionalism and the old ideas struggled in confusion. 
 The Academy brought forth the Encyclopaedists, 
 and a concerted effort was made by them to sys- 
 tematize knowledge according to the new ideas.
 
 THE MODERN ERA 129 
 
 But it was not until the time of Voltaire, in the 
 reign of Louis XV, that a thinker arrived who was 
 able to tear away the last shreds of the veil of su- 
 perstition. Voltaire and the group of philosophers 
 who gathered around him dominated the political 
 thought of the world, just at the time when the 
 economic decay of France was driving her people 
 to despair; when the American colonies of Great 
 Britain were realizing that their industries and their 
 commerce could never thrive until they could make 
 and enforce their own laws; and when Germany 
 had regained the ground, in population, wealth and 
 culture, lost in the thirty years' war, one hundred 
 and fifty years before. 
 
 The philosophers boldly declared the doctrine of 
 freedom, equality and fraternity, and denied the 
 divine right of kings. This doctrine was very use- 
 ful to the burgher class, who would naturally feel 
 inclined to claim any political privileges which 
 they could pay for, and their support could earn 
 from the powers in control. It also had a mar- 
 velous fascination for the man lower down. In it 
 he saw the restoration of his humanhood to its nat- 
 ural estate, for which he longed as a captive for 
 his home. And it was, in the main, the energy 
 generated in the common man by this golden dream, 
 which won the right to rule, for the wealthy middle 
 class, in the century to come. 
 
 The war for independence, in America, excited 
 the most intense enthusiasm among the philosophers
 
 130 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 and dreamers of the European states. The en- 
 thusiasm reached such a height in France that the 
 king was compelled to declare war in behalf of the 
 American colonies, and the entire continent watched 
 the struggle with breathless eagerness. America was 
 to be the test of their ideals; in her their dreams 
 were to come true. And those dreams were cher- 
 ished with a devotion in proportion to their lack of 
 freedom. 
 
 Louis XV died in 1774, two years before the 
 Declaration of Independence on the part of the 
 American colonies. He left an absolute monarchy, 
 with a very poor economic administration and totter- 
 ing under a heavy load of ancient sins against its 
 people. He left a people frantic with resentment 
 and intoxicated with the smell of battle wafted from 
 America; and, he left all to a son who was a simple, 
 kindly gentlemen, without the slightest comprehen- 
 sion of the situation or its needs. 
 
 The successful issue of the war in America and 
 the establishment of a republic fed the flame of pop- 
 ular enthusiasm in France; as something having 
 special meaning for their own people. In Ger- 
 many, it was watched as a new planet discovered in 
 the far-off heavens. 
 
 The situation in France growing worse all the time, 
 and the democratic enthusiasm becoming stronger, led 
 to a clamor for the restoration of the States General, 
 which had not been called together since 1614. 
 It was called in 1789, resolved itself into a Constit-
 
 THE MODERN ERA 131 
 
 uent Assembly, and after two years' labor brought 
 forth a constitution for the monarchy. But it was 
 simply a political system and not an administrative 
 machine, which was what the country needed. The 
 ship of state remained stuck in the mud ; the clamor 
 became constantly worse. In 1791 the Constituent 
 Assembly dissolved, the constitution was torn up, 
 a new Assembly was called, the monarchy was 
 abolished and a republican constitution was drawn 
 up. Still the ship of state refused to budge. 
 Orators orated, political theorists declaimed; yet 
 no economic administration was established. A na- 
 tional convention was elected by universal suffrage 
 in 1792; the royalists were thrown into prison, the 
 prison doors were thrown open and the prisoners mas- 
 sacred by the mob while the convention sat ; there was 
 no head to the government. The king and queen 
 were beheaded, the royalists were guillotined, then 
 the moderate republicans were sent to the block. 
 Now the ship of state listed badly to port, and the 
 fires went out under the boilers. Of the crew which 
 remained, everybody suspected everybody else, and 
 to be "suspect" was to be beheaded. The Reign of 
 Terror was followed by the Directory, the Directory 
 by the Consulate, and the Consulate by the Empire 
 of Napoleon. Then France abandoned itself for 
 ten years to the worst vices of kings; to wars of re- 
 venge and of conquest. The allied European 
 powers came to the gates of Paris, drove out the 
 military dictator and restored the Bourbon dynasty.
 
 132 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 After this, revolution and counter-revolution suc- 
 ceeded fast and furiously in France, until the mid- 
 dle of the igth century. But in the meantime, an- 
 other revolution had begun, of a kind which knows 
 no turning back; namely, the economic revolution. 
 
 The courts of the German states had long been 
 centres of philosophy, science and art, at the same 
 time that political aspirations were sternly repressed 
 and the systems of absolute monarchy were main- 
 tained. But as the middle of the ipth century ap- 
 proached, the peoples of both Germany and France, 
 with one common universal impulse, burst their 
 political bonds, and by the irresistible power of 
 inward growth, each people raised itself one step 
 higher on the ladder of political freedom. France 
 became a republic and Germany a collection of con- 
 stitutional monarchies, which later coalesced into 
 the German Empire. 
 
 Parliamentary government, or that type which 
 prevails along with the lodgment of wealth in the 
 hands of the middle class, was now established 
 through the more important states of the western 
 world. Again it would seem as if the golden age 
 was about to appear. But no! Practical vices 
 immediately began to manifest themselves in the 
 system; and at the same time, new forces were set 
 at work by the economic revolution, which were 
 destined to overturn the parliamentary system of 
 government, and establish the industrial democracy 
 in its stead.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 
 
 IT is impossible to follow all the developments of 
 manufacturing implements, by means of which 
 the tool grew into the machine; but about the year 
 1770 a number of inventions were made which 
 placed the spinning and weaving processes on a new 
 footing. The steam engine was at the same time 
 developed to such a point of efficiency that it be- 
 came possible to use it to supply power for the 
 turning of machinery. The possibility of using 
 steam for power, in turn, gave a tremendous im- 
 pulse to the invention of machinery of every kind. 
 The steam engine was soon used for purposes of 
 navigation and not long after, for traction. And 
 these inventions mark again the opening of the 
 door to a new state of social life. It will now be 
 our business to outline briefly some of the changes 
 which followed. 
 
 In earlier times, the workman owned his own 
 tools, and he didn't have to divide up with any one 
 else, when his product was sold. But now, with 
 every new advance in invention, the machine be- 
 came more difficult for the worker to own. It was 
 now practically impossible for the workman to be- 
 
 133
 
 134 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 come a self -employer; for he could neither make nor 
 buy the machine, nor could he complete the article 
 made by working alone. 1 As machines became 
 more expensive it became necessary for employers to 
 combine their capital for the building of larger and 
 more efficient plants; and thus the company is 
 formed. Before forming the company the em- 
 ployers were obliged to compete with each other in 
 the labor market; but now competition between 
 them ceased, and one cause which had operated to 
 keep wages up, disappeared. In earlier times, the 
 large aggregations of capital had been engaged in 
 commerce, and the commercial class had gained the 
 upper hand in politics. But from this time, in- 
 dustrial enterprises claim a constantly larger share 
 of capital, and the owners of the industries gain a 
 corresponding share of political control. 
 
 By improvements in machinery and combinations 
 of capital a great; gain in efficiency is produced. 
 More goods are turned out by the same number of 
 men. But these men can not buy back the in- 
 creased quantity of goods they make; because they 
 do not get any more wages than they did before 
 at least not more in proportion to their increased 
 product. And so another market must be found 
 for the goods. 
 
 Wars and explorations in America consumed a 
 considerable amount of goods and yielded a certain 
 amount of gold, thus helping the market. Com- 
 
 iKarl Marx: Capital, Chapters XIII, XIV, XV.
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 135 
 
 merce with India and the forcible administration 
 and control of her affairs served to drain fabulous 
 sums of gold from her industries into the private 
 coffers of Europe; though the amount of European 
 goods returned to the Orient was not comparatively 
 large. But the commercial relations of manufac- 
 turing Europe were extended and the field for a 
 wider market began to open. The big corporation, 
 able to buy better machinery with its larger funds, 
 drove out the small producer. It could undersell 
 him in the market. At the same time the market 
 expanded and the corporation followed it up. 2 
 Goods were so cheapened that as long as people had 
 money to buy with, the large demand for goods 
 kept wages up pretty well and thus increased the 
 buying power of the workers. America was col- 
 onized. Its buying power helped the market; but 
 soon it very perversely began to manufacture for its 
 own needs and for export, in spite of restrictive 
 laws. And finally, tired of foreign made laws, it 
 threw off its allegiance to England, primarily, so 
 that it could control its own industry and com- 
 merce. 3 With the spreading of population in the 
 United States, with the millions of people who were 
 assimilated and their buying power increased, it took 
 some time to satisfy the demand for commodities. 
 But after a time the inevitable happened. Surplus 
 goods, goods which the workers could not buy back 
 
 2 Karl Marx: Capital, Chapter XV. 
 
 A. M. Simons: Class Struggles in America, pp. 17-18.
 
 136 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 with their wages, piled up. There was no demand 
 for them, and so the factories closed down, and 
 there was a "panic." Manufacturers who had bor- 
 rowed money that they could not pay, failed. And 
 the banks they had borrowed of failed. The ac- 
 cumulated profits of manufacture, no longer find- 
 ing profitable investment, rested in the banks. 
 There was an overproduction of goods and an over- 
 supply of money. Men who wanted to work, to 
 earn the money to buy the goods, were locked out 
 of the factories. Their families starved while the 
 money was idle, while the goods deteriorated. Pro- 
 duction could not be resumed until commodities, 
 bought with the savings of the more provident, were 
 reduced to such a level that the demand exceeded 
 the supply on hand. A war, or some great catastro- 
 phe, such as a fire, a flood or an earthquake any- 
 thing that causes an extraordinary consumption of 
 goods will retard the approach of a "panic" or re- 
 lieve one already in existence at a cost of human 
 life. Otherwise, the expenditure of the savings of 
 the thrifty, while the unfortunate suffer destitution, 
 is the only remedy. 4 
 
 The machine having reached a high state of de- 
 velopment, successful competition among producers 
 
 *Gunton: Principles of Social Economics, Chapter V. Professor Gun- 
 ton's theory of crises is excellently put; with the exception that his idea 
 of the reason why the workingman fails to buy back the equivalent of the 
 goods he produces is rather curious. In conjunction with this, Chapter 
 XXV of Marx's Capital should be read. Under the heading, "Effect of 
 crises on the best paid part of the Working Class," a correct idea of the 
 causes of the workingman's failure to consume is given.
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 137 
 
 came to depend upon the control of large financial 
 resources and upon the organization of selling fa- 
 cilities. Large financial institutions came to be al- 
 lied with the large industrial concerns. The of- 
 ficials of the one often being the same persons that 
 officered the other. And under the financial sys- 
 tem the smaller banking institutions became simply 
 feeders for the larger ones, so that the whole of so- 
 ciety sent its contributions, in the form of deposits 
 and savings, to the support of the large financial 
 and industrial concerns. 
 
 Competitive selling proved wasteful and so the 
 big corporations in the same lines of production com- 
 bined and formed the trust. In this process of con- 
 solidation small producers are forced to sell to the 
 combination by being subjected to a disastrous com- 
 petition which proves fatal to the weaker party. 
 The smaller units of production are then closed 
 down at the pleasure of the trust; and those that re- 
 fuse to come in are ruined and their competition 
 eliminated. Thus a condition is created that ap- 
 proaches ever more nearly to monopoly. As the 
 condition of monopoly develops it becomes more 
 possible to control both the selling price of the prod- 
 uct and that of raw materials entering into it. 
 The price of the latter is depressed until the profit 
 in it is almost or quite abolished, and thus the pro- 
 ducers of it are put out of business, or reduced to a 
 low level of living. At the same time the price of 
 the finished product is so advanced that the con-
 
 138 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 sumption of it is restricted. Thus, people are 
 thrown out of employment at both ends of the series, 
 and the consuming power of the public is reduced 
 both by the increase in the price of the finished prod- 
 uct, and by the loss of wages to the workers. 
 
 The improved machinery requires less strength 
 and skill in its operation. A woman can operate 
 it as well as a man, and she will work for lower 
 wages than he. A child can often fill the place 
 of either a man or woman, and will work for lower 
 wages than either. So men are driven out by 
 women, and women by children. Thus the unem- 
 ployed problem arrives; and the child-laborer ap- 
 pears. And social conditions have produced the 
 woman who works in the factory, bears children, 
 cares for the children and the home, all at the same 
 time. So long as their domestic relations fail to 
 yield support to them women must seek support by 
 work outside of domestic relations. And so long as 
 the employer can play these women against the man 
 laborers he will reduce the wages of the men, in 
 view of the lower wages of the women. 
 
 These conditions arise in all the industrial coun- 
 tries at the same time and they are constantly work- 
 ing toward an industrial crisis by reducing the 
 purchasing power of the workers, so that the goods 
 produced can not be bought back and consumed. 
 Then we have "over-production." As machinery 
 becomes more perfect, and industrial organization 
 more efficient, the conditions which cause crises
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 139 
 
 a breaking down of the system of production 
 operate with more swiftness, so that one crisis suc- 
 ceeds another with shorter intervals between. The 
 process of concentration would be perfect when the 
 international trust is formed and its monopoly of 
 the world-market becomes complete. It would 
 then control the finances of the world, as it now 
 dominates those of the nation; and it would be the 
 absolute arbiter of the production of the raw ma- 
 terials which enter into its product. It could then 
 withhold its money in its vaults, refuse to pay a liv- 
 ing price for its raw materials or a living wage to 
 its workers, thus making both production and con- 
 sumption impossible. Both the monopoly and so- 
 ciety would be brought to a standstill. This 
 result will be accomplished in the natural sequence 
 of events, by pursuing the course of competition, 
 concentration and monopoly. The thing that the 
 trust now sighs for is new markets to conquer. As 
 long as new buyers can be found who derive their 
 money from some source outside this series of opera- 
 tions, the wheels of manufacture can continue to 
 turn. The spread of population over new areas 
 of the United States has caused a constant expan- 
 sion of the market in this country. But the fron- 
 tier has now been pushed over into the Pacific, and 
 the unfilled areas between are comparatively un- 
 important. Thus the expansion of the market has 
 almost reached its limits. The Orient is opening 
 up a world-market, but is at the same time enter-
 
 140 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 ing the world-competition as a producer and seller. 
 No more new markets of ultimate importance are 
 now to be found. The question has become one of 
 enabling the same people who make the goods to 
 consume the goods. This can only come about 
 when the workers receive in wages a value equiva- 
 lent to that which they produce. When this is 
 done there will no longer be a profit to the owner 
 of the machinery of production. He will no longer 
 have an "incentive" to own and operate the ma- 
 chinery. Production will have to be conducted 
 for the sake of consumption. And the producers 
 and consumers will have to conduct it. Whether 
 the course of evolution shall be permitted to work 
 out to the end, or how far it shall be permitted to 
 go in that direction must depend upon the workers, 
 and those who realize the nature of the process. 
 If they come to an understanding of the operation 
 of the system, and if it is their will to take over 
 the machinery of production at an intermediate 
 stage, they will thereby save society from the whole- 
 sale wretchedness and sacrifice of life that would 
 been entailed in the working out of the process. 
 
 As the capitalist system of production works it- 
 self out, the functions of government come to con- 
 sist more and more in the regulation of industry 
 and commerce and less in the subjection and con- 
 trol of persons. A political democracy tends to 
 become an industrial democracy. Under monarchi- 
 cal governments women have no political impor-
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 141 
 
 tance because they can not bear arms for the king, 
 and as their function of giving birth to soldiers 
 is a necessary incident of getting their living and 
 is performed involuntarily, their support of the gov- 
 ernment is a foregone conclusion. So they have no 
 political rights whatever. Under a political democ- 
 racy the conditions in regard to women are prac- 
 tically the same. But as capitalist production 
 brings woman into the industrial world, her imme- 
 diate industrial relations place her on the same foot- 
 ing as the men in society. Bearing arms has ceased 
 to be an important function of the citizen, and 
 woman is as important in the industrial world as 
 man, hence her claims and her needs are the same. 
 The working women of the world are now begin- 
 ning to realize what their position and their needs 
 are, and to demand recognition in the government, 
 in keeping with their just claims. 
 
 The stage of domestic manufacture, with the 
 simple tools, is favorable to the unity of the patri- 
 archal family. The patriarch conducts the com- 
 mercial relations of the family, the money return 
 for the industry of the family is received by him 
 and owned and controlled by him. This keeps the 
 interests of the family united, in their dependence 
 upon the good will and complaisance of the patri- 
 arch. But, when the family go into the factory 
 to work, their wages come to them as individuals, 
 in return for individual labor, not as members of 
 a family acting through a head. To be sure, he
 
 142 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 owns their wages, legally; but is he entitled to take 
 them"? Perhaps he is. But the question will sug- 
 gest itself; and at any rate he no longer appears 
 quite in the role of generous dispenser that he for- 
 merly did. The family is no longer dependent upon 
 its head for a chance to work; and this fact is a 
 great leveler of patriarchs. Under the old regime 
 of domestic production, the planting, the growing 
 and reaping of crops, the preparing of materials, 
 the mutual pride in the product which was the joint 
 reward of co-operative labor formed many intimate 
 associations of interest which bound the family to- 
 gether in its feelings and habits. These ties are 
 disrupted by the change to factory labor. 
 
 Under the domestic system of production the in- 
 dividual was dependent upon the family for a 
 chance to work. Under social production he is de- 
 pendent upon society for a chance to work. At 
 present, while the machinery of social production 
 is in the hands of the corporations, the individual 
 is dependent on the corporation. But this is only 
 a transition stage. If he can not find work for the 
 corporation in the place where his family lives, he 
 must leave the family to follow the work. There 
 is nothing inscrutable about the reason why the fam- 
 ily began to disintegrate at the time when the 
 application of steam power to machines enabled the 
 manufacturers to gather in the towns. Then many 
 people whose families remained at home followed 
 the factory to the town for work.
 
 H3 
 
 We have seen how the ties of mutual interest 
 and common experience are disrupted by the trans- 
 ference of industry from the home to the factory. 
 We have seen members of the family forsake the 
 roof-tree in pursuit of work. We have seen the 
 wife and child receiving their pay for work done, 
 not through the patriarch, and in uncertain quan- 
 tity, as formerly, but from the corporation, in 
 definite, fixed wages. We now see the patriarch, 
 no longer a "liberal provider," out of work per- 
 haps, while his family support themselves, and even 
 him. He is utterly bereft of every substantial pos- 
 session and power upon which his state of patri- 
 archal privilege was originally based. The attitude 
 of the family toward him and toward each other 
 inevitably undergoes a change. And he, necessarily, 
 views his own position in the family in a different 
 light from what he formerly did. To his wife the 
 following considerations present themselves: The 
 woman who marries may not escape the necessity 
 of working for wages. She incurs the possibility 
 of having a large family for whom she must care 
 on means that are scant and uncertain at best. She 
 may at any time have to add the labor of the wage 
 worker to the responsibilities of motherhood, the 
 pains of maternity and the care of the household. 
 Is she justified, from the standpoint of her own in- 
 terests or the interests of her possible children, in 
 creating such a situation*? As for the children, 
 they are bom into a world whose domestic and so-
 
 144 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 cial arrangements are formed, very poorly, on an 
 adult scale, to serve the special interests of a small 
 class of adults. They are launched into a vortex 
 of tumult and nerve strain. The atmosphere of 
 tranquillity, affording alternate exercise and repose, 
 which is necessary for normal and healthy develop- 
 ment, is wholly denied to them. The home shifts 
 from time to time. Light, food, air, space, all are 
 inadequate or polluted. The parents are irritable 
 from the constant friction and anxiety of the pre- 
 dicament in which they live. Naturally, none of 
 them can love "the home" very deeply. The chil- 
 dren feel little reverence for the parents whose help- 
 lessness exposes the family to such a life. There 
 are few common activities and interests between the 
 members of the family, hence there are few strong 
 ties. The companions of the alleyways and streets 
 form the social circle of the young, and the cheap 
 theatres which offer their attractions at short in- 
 tervals along the city streets fill up that vacuum in 
 their experience which the nature of man abhors. 
 Children living in these conditions do not have a 
 reasonable chance to grow up with strong minds in 
 sound bodies. Nor can this kind of youthful life 
 develop those ideas of fair and right conduct, that 
 honorable and 'dignified attitude of mind which are 
 essential to good citizenship. Born into such a 
 world, growing up in such an environment, why 
 should they respect any thing or any body? They 
 do not. And the family disintegrates as soon as
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 145 
 
 the children are old enough to declare their inde- 
 pendence. Society has deprived the family of the 
 means of securing normal living conditions for its 
 future citizens. It is now confronted by the im- 
 mediate and urgent problem of providing those con- 
 ditions outside the family. The domestic home 
 having been destroyed, a social one must be pro- 
 vided. 
 
 Such is the state of home and the family in the in- 
 dustrial centers. In the agricultural districts the 
 condition is the same to a degree. There also, 
 the production interests have largely gone out of 
 the home. The family is no longer united by its 
 common experience. The city streets and cheap 
 shows are not present to take the place of the once- 
 crowded domestic experience. The factory and 
 shop are not there to provide employment for all 
 the family; so, one by one, they take the road to 
 the city in search of work, of diversion, of experi- 
 ence, of life. So much the worse for them if the 
 life they find is not a normal and wholesome one. 
 
 We saw the universities established at the end 
 of the middle ages, the grammar schools, in the 
 middle of the sixteenth century, and at the begin- 
 ning of the nineteenth, elementary public schools 
 were at last established; but girls were not admit- 
 ted to them until after the lapse of some time, and 
 after a determined struggle had been made. The 
 ideal of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" did not 
 apply to women.
 
 146 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 The education imparted in the public schools, 
 formed under the influence of theological and aris- 
 tocratic thought, and at a time when political con- 
 trol and not industrial administration was the end 
 sought, has proved to be unsuited to the present 
 needs of society. It is in no way related to indus- 
 trial life, and industrial life is the basis of society. 
 It seeks to train the mind to ideals which are out- 
 grown and it does not equip the student for the 
 business of making a living. And one must make 
 a living before one can live. The home has ceased 
 to train for industrial life ; it has no means of doing 
 so. But the public school does not fill the place 
 thus left vacant. For this reason a revolution in 
 education will necessarily follow the revolution in 
 industry. 
 
 Women have now won their way into nearly all 
 the institutions of learning of high and low degree; 
 and they have there abundantly proven their ability 
 to perform every sort of intellectual labor; they have 
 made themselves at home in every sort of situation 
 which requires intelligence, reliability, and general 
 good character. But, strange anomaly as it is, the 
 ancient institution of the Perpetual Tutelage of 
 Women, which we noted in the earliest period of 
 Roman history, at the time when Rome was a col- 
 lection of mud huts, is still in operation in the con- 
 dition of the married woman. But there is now 
 hope that society will shortly throw off this yoke 
 of barbarism, in the fact that women have at last
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 147 
 
 begun to organize. The idea of their first organiza- 
 tions, some forty years ago, was self-culture; their 
 present ideal is social service, but it can not be long 
 before they will embrace the purpose of self-de- 
 liverance. And when they do, they will also deliver 
 society from an incubus which is probably the great- 
 est impediment to personal happiness that the world 
 has ever seen. 
 
 It has been found that, in a political democracy, 
 the class that are conscious of their interests, the 
 class who have large property interests at stake, who 
 are experienced in organization and the control of 
 affairs, control the votes of the workers, by the 
 methods of befogging the issues, by corrupting both 
 the legislative and the judiciary powers. Political 
 democracy proves to be a system of controlling 
 people, for the personal interest of a small class, 
 in order that this class may make profits from the 
 labor of the people. It is only feasible so long as 
 the people remain ignorant of the way the system 
 operates; for, though the people can not correct the 
 evils of the system so long as it is in operation, they 
 can, with their votes, change the system, as soon 
 as the industrial foundation of life is ready for the 
 change, and the majority of the people understand 
 the situation. 
 
 The political revolution in Germany and France, 
 in 1848, gave birth to a new development in 
 thought, which, accompanying the industrial revo- 
 lution, has been preparing the way for another po-
 
 148 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 litical revolution. When modes of life change, the 
 laws must, in time, change correspondingly. And 
 a development in thought which enables society to 
 understand the change as it progresses, will, of 
 course, facilitate the change. But if, in addition 
 to an intelligent understanding of the transforma- 
 tion, society can rise to the task of directing it into 
 channels chosen on the basis of scientific knowl- 
 edge, then we may, indeed, look for the Golden 
 Age. 
 
 Sir Thomas More spoke truly when he said that 
 society is a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, 
 which conspiracy is carried out under the forms of 
 law. But when a knowledge of social science shall 
 have become general, and society shall undertake 
 the conscious task of directing its own development, 
 the conspiracy of the rich against the poor, of the 
 strong against the weak, will change into a con- 
 spiracy of all mankind against nature, for the pur- 
 pose of producing out of the natural elements the 
 largest amount of material wealth, for the satis- 
 faction of the needs of man. Along with this will 
 go a simplifying of processes, a straightening of 
 crooked paths, and a giving up of personal control, 
 together with a higher order of economic administra- 
 tion. The watchword of the political philosophers 
 of the eighteenth century was "freedom, equality, 
 fraternity." "Social efficiency and personal happi- 
 ness" is that of the social economists of the twenti- 
 eth century.
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 149 
 
 The formulation of the Economic Interpretation 
 of History is the great distinctive development of 
 thought which can be dated from the middle of the 
 nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twen- 
 tieth century this principle had been pretty well 
 comprehended and adopted by the teachers in the 
 institutions of learning. This theory, and that of 
 evolution, in physical science, have followed in the 
 trail of the industrial revolution and are now pre- 
 paring the way of another political revolution. 
 And now, for the first time, society is becoming con- 
 scious of its own growth and striving to direct it. 
 In the year 1913, even the politicians of all po- 
 litical parties are adopting the new theories to some 
 extent, and making them the justification of their 
 bid for support. 
 
 The direction in which the development of in- 
 dustrial processes is carrying us, is toward greater 
 integration and co-ordination. Competition has 
 been found too wasteful and destructive, and co- 
 operation is taking its place. 
 
 The main part of the machinery of the coming 
 social state, will be in the nature of industrial or- 
 ganization and administration. Political theories 
 are constantly losing weight, and economic or- 
 ganization is continually gaining ground in social 
 importance. A considerable portion of this ad- 
 ministrative machinery is a new growth in society; 
 and is now being set up for the first time by the 
 working class. It consists in methods of collective
 
 150 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 bargaining, and the control of working conditions 
 by the workers. The weak and the poor are now 
 doing some conspiring on their own account, and the 
 rich and the strong are learning that they have them 
 to reckon with. It is a wholesome lesson, and as 
 it proceeds, fair and square dealing will become 
 more and more necessary until the strong, not be- 
 ing able to take advantage of the weak any longer, 
 and finding no profit any longer in the conspiracy, 
 will be glad to give it up and make such terms as 
 they can. 
 
 Since the change from common ownership to pri- 
 vate control of the means of production, there has 
 never been a real revolution. The bloody encoun- 
 ters that have occurred from time to time, have 
 only resulted, at most, in some slight readjustments 
 in the system. The conspiracy for the control of 
 the means of subsistence has gone on afterward, as 
 before. But the revolution which is now approach- 
 ing will probably not be a bloody encounter at all. 
 The workers of the world will build up their ad- 
 ministrative machinery, by constantly enlarging the 
 area of their activities. They will use their ballots 
 to place their own people in control of their own 
 machinery. 
 
 The scientist, the artist, the teacher, the inventor, 
 will all line up with the workers, for the creation 
 of a social order in which every kind of product, 
 whether of hand or brain, will receive its just com- 
 pensation, and in which every human being will have
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 151 
 
 an opportunity to live his own life and pursue his 
 own happiness, in peace and plenty. 
 
 The great purpose of the absolute monarchies was 
 to extend their territorial boundaries; the great pur- 
 pose of constitutional monarchies is to extend their 
 commercial relations and control the world markets. 
 The armies of both types of governments are used 
 for the selfish purposes of the ruling class, and the 
 men are induced to fight, by an appeal to their 
 "patriotism." Under a political democracy there 
 is no theoretical justification for an army, except- 
 ing for purposes of defense; but as capital is trans- 
 ferred from commercial to industrial investments, 
 and as the exploitation of the workers becomes ever 
 more intense, strikes follow which the employers 
 are not personally able to quell, and the army or 
 militia of the state is used against the working class 
 of the state, in the private interest of the employers. 
 In case of strikes it is marched to the scene, and 
 its guns are trained against the workers. The ap- 
 peal to patriotism is still used, however, to induce 
 the working men in the army to shoot the working 
 men on strike. 
 
 In the meantime, the workers are being forced 
 into solidarity by the conditions of their work. 
 We saw that in the medieval towns, the craft guilds 
 were powerless to better the condition of the work- 
 ers until they all joined in one big organization, 
 for the interests of their class. Then they gained 
 political power in the towns. Craft unions of the
 
 152 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 same type were in existence the world over at the 
 time when the industrial revolution set in. But 
 they were no longer organized in big bodies for 
 political purposes, because the towns had been ab- 
 sorbed by the state, and the political relations of 
 the individual were with the state. So there were 
 unions of the old craft type, in every industrial 
 country. But, as the machine is perfected, it takes 
 over the job of the skilled artisan, and all there 
 is left for him to do is to pull a lever or press a but- 
 ton; and by this process the separate craft lines 
 are obliterated and all workmen are leveled down 
 to the plane of operatives. Thus the aristocracy 
 of skill disappears from the world of labor. Physi- 
 cal strength is no longer an element, a woman can 
 pull a lever or press a button as well as a man, and 
 the aristocracy of sex disappears. A black, brown, 
 or yellow man is as good an adjunct to a machine 
 as a white man, and the aristocracy of color van- 
 ishes. Race, creed, all are of no account to the 
 working class. Instead of maintaining innumerable 
 craft unions, the logical thing has now come to be 
 for all to belong to one big union. The logic of the 
 situation is now producing its results; craft unions 
 are disintegrating and the union on the large lines 
 of related industries is growing up. When all the 
 operatives in an industry go on strike, the employers 
 will naturally be brought to terms much more quickly 
 than they will if only those skilled craftsmen who 
 are still in some way related to the industry, go
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 153 
 
 on strike. If a strike of operatives in one city calls 
 out the operatives in all other cities, so that the 
 sources of supply for trade are stopped, so much 
 the better. When, added to this, international 
 boundaries are obliterated, the workers will be in 
 a position to dictate terms to their exploiters. They 
 will also be in a position to take over the control 
 and operation of the industries, for their own pur- 
 poses. 
 
 Consolidation of capital and management has 
 gone so far on the part of the owners of the ma- 
 chines, that they have been able not only to keep 
 wages down in the face of rising prices, but have 
 been able to raise prices to such an extent that a 
 general feeling of alarm has spread throughout the 
 country, lest an uprising of the underpaid operatives 
 will follow. Annual dividends soaring into the 
 hundreds per cent, have become common, and a 
 general campaign of "trust-busting" by the gov- 
 ernment has set in. But at the beginning of 1913, 
 though a number of trusts have been "busted," in 
 no case had the price of the product been reduced. 
 
 The control of money and credit has gone so 
 far that a congressional committee is now conduct- 
 ing an investigation into the same. And J. Pier- 
 pont Morgan has gravely testified as a witness be- 
 fore this committee that credit can be cornered, 
 and that at the present time, no man can borrow 
 capital in this country unless the "character" of that 
 man suits those in control, of whom he is the head.
 
 154 ECONOMIC DETERMINISM 
 
 Mr. Morgan's basis of estimating "character" is 
 not revealed. It is now proposed that congress 
 shall pass laws which will "bust" this combination 
 in control of credit; but the results of the effort to 
 prevent the monopolizing of commodities do not 
 afford a basis of much hope that the effort will be 
 successful. 
 
 The consolidation of labor is progressing rapidly, 
 but is not yet abreast of that of capital. Yet the 
 conflict is becoming so sharp that employers all along 
 the line are beginning to make concessions on minor 
 points. Moreover, within the last few years, the 
 principles of evolutionary science have been ap- 
 plied to the field of psychology and sociology, as 
 they never were before, and the result has been a 
 revolution in that field also. So that it is now 
 understood, by at least the most intelligent, that 
 egotistic exploitation is not only antisocial, but is 
 destructive of personal welfare, even of those who 
 get the profits; not as a matter of sentiment, but 
 as a matter of hard fact. In this way, the scientist 
 is joining forces with the industrial union in recom- 
 mending a course of moderation to the exploiters 
 of labor. The cost of this moderation, however, 
 will not nearly absorb the profits which will accrue 
 from the constant increase in efficiency, so that, 
 while the condition of the workers will improve, 
 and they will become better able to maintain the 
 class struggle, there will be an ever wider gulf be- 
 tween them and their employers. And as the work-
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 155 
 
 ers can never cease to struggle so long as any part 
 of the reward of their labor is taken from them, the 
 result must necessarily be a revolution, by which 
 the machinery of production will pass into the col- 
 lective possession of the workers, and the industries 
 will, thereafter, be carried on for the purpose of 
 satisfying human needs, and not for the private 
 profit of any persons. Hours of work will then 
 be reduced so that every one will have his share 
 and a means of earning a living. Then every one 
 will have time to read, to play, to travel, to dream 
 and invite his soul. Consumption will be vastly 
 increased, transportation will be developed, and the 
 congested populations of the cities can spread out 
 over the land. Every artist, poet and genius will 
 have a chance to develop, and the country will be 
 dotted over with art galleries, libraries, concert and 
 lecture halls. Grand opera will be for every one, 
 the cheap and the tawdry will disappear, since no 
 one will need to make money out of perversions and 
 depravities. Parks and pleasure grounds will take 
 the place of slums, and social centers will be pro- 
 vided, where a happy and healthy people can come 
 together for the delights of refined and inspiring 
 human intercourse. This will be the Revolution. 
 
 THE END
 
 PURITANISM 
 
 What is the economic basis for the demand, 
 which we se_e occasionally cropping out even 
 now, to limit the length of a girl's bathing 
 suit by law? 
 
 Perhaps you have never thought of it, but 
 the pious horror of a short bathing suit is 
 closely related to early rising, political reform, 
 Sunday baseball games, religous revivals, the 
 "double standard of morality," the nude in 
 art, woman suffrage, and the consumption of 
 
 MINCE PIE 
 
 If such a statement seems to you far- 
 fetched, then you will derive instruction as 
 well as enjoyment from a close reading of 
 Clarence Meily's new book, "Puritanism," 
 which is just off the press. 
 
 This little book will enable the 1 American 
 people, and the British as well, to understand 
 themselves as they never have before, because 
 we have inherited a large share of our ideas 
 from our Puritan ancestors. It presents a 
 fascinating study in that theory which has 
 done so much to make clear to Socialists the 
 meaning of life the theory, nay, the fact, 
 that the way people make their living largely 
 determines their notions of what is right and 
 moral and proper. No American should fail 
 to read this book. It will enable him to 
 understand the history of this country better 
 than a library full of ordinary text books. 
 It will clean out of his brain any remaining 
 infection left there by past teachings and will 
 enable him to see clearly through problems 
 out of which our capitalist-minded lawmakers, 
 preachers, professors, and editors are making 
 a mess. A reading of this book will forever 
 prevent any Socialist legislator from meddling 
 with middle class "moral reforms." Attrac- 
 tively bound in cloth and well printed. Price, 
 60 cents postpaid. 
 
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY, 
 118 West Kinzie St., Chicago.
 
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