It is also a modern phenomenon to find the masses so numerous that the land in which they live is unable to supply them with sufficient food and in which the conditions of life of the majority are so favourable that the consumption of goods demands intense productivity. Until, at earliest, the sixteenth century, if we regard Europe alone, agriculture was by far the greatest industry. Under the feudal system, and for some centuries after it had begun to decline, the land-worker was not simply an agricultural labourer, he was also a peasant proprietor. Industry was not organized. Trade and commerce were in their infancy. The population was small.

Of the changes which came over society with the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions we shall speak at length hereafter. It has sometimes been represented that the position of the worker after those revolutions was worse than before. There can be no doubt that the fundamental alterations that were then made in the whole fabric of society bore very hardly upon many industrious men and women. There can be little doubt that the birth of the modern industrial system caused much suffering to the generations in which it occurred. He would, however, be adventurous who attempted to sustain the view that the lot of the masses in the seventeenth century was in any way the equal of that to which they have attained in the twentieth century; we would go further and say that it is plain that even as most of our problems have arisen from the revolutions of the eighteenth century, so also have most of the industrial advantages which the working classes to-day possess.

The period of which we now write under the title The Past' is intended to embrace historic times up to the development of representative government on a popular basis. We are not concerned with dates, as we view the general trend of events not only in England, but in foreign countries also. It is manifest, however, from a general survey of political institutions that the dividing line was laid down in the first half of the nineteenth century. By that time the masses had become something more than

amorphous masses. They had been drawn together by the fact of contiguity, by manifest wrongs, by the slow spread of education, and by the existence, at first secret and later open, of widespread organizations. Even before they had attained the vote they were beginning to possess political power. Once that stage was reached the way was

open.

To-day the masses are as powerful politically as they care to be. Their very powerfulness induces other problems, some of which are grave. It will be the purpose of the later parts of this book to consider the nature of those problems. One thing, however, we say at the outset. All history shows with signs clear enough for all to see, will they but look, that most of the sorrows of mankind have been caused by thrusting understanding on one side and by relying on superstition and violence. Ignorance, ambition, and violence, what evils have they not dragged in their train? The myriads that have suffered those evils are dead. We are alive. It is for the living to see that not the ignorance, not the ambition, not the violence of a man, or a class, or a race shall again deflect the course of progress, but that men shall at last be ruled by reason, that propositions of vital importance to the generality of men shall be accepted only when acceptable to the good sense of the majority. If that be not so, then all sense is dead and those are right who say man rises only to fall.

R

CHAPTER I

THE UNFREE

EAD no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory." With those words Contarini Fleming dismisses as worthless any attempt to depict the history of the masses, for biography concerns itself only with the most eminent of men.

But

is life' composed of the doings of the eminent? Is it desirable that, to paraphrase the words of Mr and Mrs Hammond, a hundred should know everything about the scenes of high politics and high play that formed the exciting world of the upper classes in the eighteenth century for every one who knows anything about the Agrarian Revolution which so vitally affected the lives of the people in that century? We think not.

As Macaulay once observed, the historian too frequently has been content to resign to others some of the most important of his duties.

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist. On the other hand, to extract the philosophy of history, to direct our judgment of events and men, to trace the connexion of causes and effects, and to draw

from the occurrences of former times general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers.

We know not, indeed, within what category our present story falls, for though history may be defined as the story expressive of the experiences and conditions of social units, the story as usually told descends not to the servants' halls. We are permitted to overhear the whispers of the court and council chambers and follow the victorious general, but our historians so often regard mankind from the eminence of the throne, are so commonly dazzled by the splendour of great names, and are led aside so frequently by the glowing sentences of highly-placed orators or courtly chroniclers, that we, reading the resulting story, almost forget that the social units whose experiences and conditions they are depicting were composed almost entirely of homely men and women and children, who toiled and struggled and at length died, having left nothing but their deeds to speak for them to posterity. And yet we to-day are the descendants of those men and women who through the centuries have trod their humble path and passed by. Our present rights and duties, our benefits and our difficulties form the legacy which they have left to us. It is, therefore, worth pausing awhile, even amid our present anxieties, to look backward, not upon the hero or the demigod, but upon the ordinary man.

The history of the working man, broadly viewed, shows, despite relapses sometimes extending over centuries and connected always with war or the breakdown of centralized governments, a general upward tendency. The words Thou shalt and Thou shalt not, given at first by man (whether prophet or priest or prince) to man tend to be given by men to man, and with that change freedom arises. As the trend of society is from status to contract, so the trend of the political framework of society is from despotism to democracy, and thus the sword is placed in the hands of justice.

SLAVERY

A history of the ordinary man, however slight and imperfect it may be, must therefore commence with a consideration of the lowest status, and work upward. It must visualize man as marching upward to the heights, not as sliding downward to the abyss. Thus our story commences with the slave, a status as old as human nature and based in origin upon the simple desire "to use," in the words of a Victorian, "the bodily powers of another person as a means of ministering to one's own ease or pleasure." As Sir Henry Maine pointed out many years ago :

There seems to be something in the institution of Slavery which has at all times either shocked or perplexed mankind, however little habituated to reflection, and however slightly advanced in the cultivation of its moral instincts. The compunction which ancient communities almost unconsciously experienced appears to have always resulted in the adoption of some imaginary principle upon which a defence, or at least a rationale, of slavery could be plausibly founded. Very early in their history the Greeks explained the institution as grounded on the intellectual inferiority of certain races, and their consequent natural aptitude for the servile condition. The Romans, in a spirit equally characteristic, derived it from a supposed agreement between the victor and the vanquished, in which the first stipulated for the perpetual services of his foe, and the other gained in consideration the life which he had legitimately forfeited. Such theories were not only unsound, but plainly unequal to the case for which they affected to account. Still they exercised powerful influence in many ways. They satisfied the conscience of the Master. They perpetuated, and probably increased, the debasement of the Slave. And they naturally tended to put out of sight the relation in which servitude had originally stood to the rest of the domestic system.1

If we look at a civilization even more ancient than the Greek, we see among the Hebrews signs of a form of slavery which shows this relationship much more clearly. The Hebrews, indeed, did not at first recognize what may be termed compulsory and perpetual slavery. The stranger

1 Ancient Law.