Chapter LV: Appendix: III (1)

CRITICISMS, COMMENTS, DOCUMENTS.

HUMAN PROGRESS.

For most people the impossible would apparently be accomplished if a century so far back as the Thirteenth were to be even seriously thought of as the greatest of centuries. Evolution has come to be accepted so unquestioningly, that of course "we are the heirs of all the ages of the foremost files of time," and must be far ahead of our forbears, especially of the distant past, in everything. When a man talks glibly about great progress in recent times, he usually knows only the history of his own time and not very much about that. Men who have studied other periods seriously hesitate about the claim of progress, and the more anyone knows about any other period, the less does he think of his own as surpassing. There are many exemplifications of this in recent literature. Because this was a cardinal point in many criticisms of the book, it has seemed well to illustrate the position here taken as to the absence of progress in humanity by quotations from recognized authorities. Just as the first edition of this book came from the press, Ambassador Bryce delivered his address at Harvard on "What is Progress?" It appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for August, 1907. Mr. Bryce is evidently not at all persuaded that there is human progress in any real sense of the word. Some striking quotations may be made from the address, but to get the full impression of Mr. Bryce's reasons for hesitation about accepting any progress, the whole article needs to be read. For instance, he said:

"It does not seem possible, if we go back to the earliest literature
which survives to us from Western Asia and Southeastern Europe, to
say that the creative powers of the human mind in such subjects as
poetry, philosophy, and historical narrative or portraiture, have
either improved or deteriorated. The poetry of the early Hebrews and
of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever
equaled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the
speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Geniuses like Dante, Chaucer,
and Shakespeare appear without our being able to account for them,
and for aught we know another may appear at any moment. It is just
as difficult, if we look back five centuries, to assert either
progress or decline in painting. Sculpture has never again risen to
so high a level as it touched in the fifth century, B. C, nor within
the last three centuries, to so high a level as it reached at the
end of the fifteenth. But we can found no generalizations upon that
fact. Music is the most inscrutable of the arts, and whether there
is any progress to be expected other {465} than that which may come
from a further improvement in instruments constituting an orchestra,
I will not attempt to conjecture, any more than I should dare to
raise controversy by inquiring whether Beethoven represents progress
from Mozart, Wagner progress from Beethoven."

Perhaps the most startling evidence on this subject of the absence of evolution in humanity is the opinion of Prof. Flinders Petrie, the distinguished English authority on Egyptology, who has added nearly a millennium to the history of Egypt. His studies have brought him in intimate contact with Egypt from 2,000 to 5,000 B. C. He has found no reason at all for thinking that our generation is farther advanced in any important qualities than men were during this period. In an article on "The Romance of Early Civilization" (_The Independent_, Jan. 7, 1909), he said:

"We have now before us a view of the powers of man at the earliest
point to which we can trace written history, and what strikes us
most is how very little his nature or abilities have changed in
seven thousand years; _what he admired we admire; what were his
limits in fine handiwork also are ours_. We may have a wider
outlook, a greater understanding of things; our interests may have
extended in this interval; but so far as human nature and tastes go,
man is essentially unchanged in this interval." . . . "This is the
practical outcome of extending our view of man three times as far
back as we used to look, and it must teach us how little material
civilization is likely in the future to change the nature, the
weaknesses, or the abilities of our ancestors in ages yet to come."

Those who think that man has advanced in practical wisdom during the 6,000 years of history, forget entirely the lessons of literature. Whenever a great genius has written, he has displayed a knowledge of human nature as great as any to be found at any other time in the world's history. The wisdom of Homer and of Solomon are typical examples. Probably the most striking evidence in this matter is to be found in what is considered to be the oldest book ever written. This is the Instructions of Ptah Hotep to his son. Ptah Hotep was the vizier of King Itosi, of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt (about 3650 B.C.). There is nothing that a father of the modern time would wish to tell his boy as the result of his own experience that is not to be found in this wise advice of a father, nearly 6,000 years ago. This was written longer before Solomon than Solomon is before us, yet no practical knowledge to be gained from intercourse with men has been added to what this careful father of the long ago has written out for his son.

THE CENTURY OF ORIGINS.

To many readers apparently, it has seemed that the main reason for writing of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries was the fact that the Church occupied so large a place in the life of that time, and that, therefore, most of what was accomplished must naturally revert {466} to her account. It is not only those who are interested in the old Church, however, who have written enthusiastically about the Thirteenth Century. Since writing this volume, I have found that Mr. Frederick Harrison is almost, if not quite, as ardent in his praise of it as I have been. There are many others, especially among the historians of art and of architecture, who apparently have not been able to say all that they would wish in admiration of this supreme century. Most of these have not been Catholics; and if we place beside Mr. Frederick Harrison, the great Positivist of our generation, Mr. John Morley, the great Rationalist, the chorus of agreement on the subject of the greatness of the Thirteenth Century ought to be considered about complete. Mr. Morley, in his address on Popular Culture, delivered as President of the Midland Institute, England, October, 1876 (Great Essays. Putnam, New York), said:

"It is the present that really interests us; it is the present that
we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the least want to
know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my
way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to know
what men thought and did in the Thirteenth Century, not out of any
dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but because the
Thirteenth Century is at the root of what men think and do in the
nineteenth."

EDUCATION.

Many even of the most benevolent readers of the book have been quite sure that it exaggerated the significance of medieval education and, above all, claimed too much for the breadth of culture given by the early universities. Prof. Huxley is perhaps the last man of recent times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the import of medieval education. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual and Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University, after discussing the subject very thoroughly, he said:

"The scholars of the Medieval Universities seem to have studied
grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy,
theology and music. Thus their work, however imperfect and faulty,
judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face
with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For
these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes
it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical
and physical science, and art. _And I doubt if the curriculum of any
modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of
what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does_."
(Italics ours.)

The results of this system of education may be judged best perhaps from Dante as an example. In The Popes and Science (Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1908) a chapter is devoted to Dante as the typical university man of the time, above all in his knowledge of science as displayed in his great poem. No poet of the modern time has {467} turned with so much confidence to every phase of science for his figures as this product of medieval universities. Anyone who thinks that the study of science is recent, or that nature study was delayed till our day, need only read Dante to be completely undeceived.

The fact that the scholars and the professors at the universities were almost without exception believers in the possibility of the transmutation of metals in the old days, used to be considered by many educated people as quite sufficient to stamp them as lacking in judgment and as prone to believe all sorts of incredible and even impossible things without justification. Such supercilious condemnation of the point of view of the medieval scholars in this matter, however, has recently received a very serious jolt. Sometime ago, Sir William Ramsey, the greatest of living English chemists, announced at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, that he had succeeded in changing copper into lithium. This created a sensation at the time, but represented, after all, a culmination of effort in this direction that had long been expected. More recently, Sir William has reported to the British Chemical Society that he has succeeded in obtaining carbon from four substances not containing this element--bismuth, hydro-fluo-silicic acid, thorium and zirconium. An American professor of chemistry has declared that he would like to remove all traces of silver from a quantity of lead ore, and then, after allowing it to stand for some years, have the opportunity to re-examine it, since he is confident that he would find further traces of silver in it that had developed in the meantime. He is sure that the reason why these two metals always occur together, as do copper and, gold, is that they are products of a developmental process, the precious metals being a step farther on in that process than the so-called base metals. It would seem, then, that the medieval scholars were not so silly as they used to appear before we knew enough about the subject to judge them properly. Only their supercilious critics were silly.

It is probably with regard to the exact sciences that most even educated people are quite sure that the Thirteenth Century does not deserve to be thought of as representing great human advance. For them the Middle Ages were drowsily speculative, but never exact in thinking. Of course, such people know nothing of the intense exactness of thought of St. Thomas or Albertus Magnus or Duns Scotus. It would be impossible, moreover, to make them realize, from the writings of these men, how exact human thought actually was in the Thirteenth Century, though the more that modern students devote themselves to scholastic philosophy, the more surely do they appreciate and admire this very quality in the medieval philosophy. For such people, very probably, the only evidence that would have made quite an adequate answer to their objection, would be a chapter on the mathematics of the Thirteenth Century. {468} That might very easily have been made, for Cantor, in his History of Mathematics (Vorlesungen Ueber Geschichte der Mathematik, Leipzig, 1892), devotes nearly 100 pages of his second volume to the mathematicians of the Thirteenth Century, two of whom, Leonardo of Pisa and Jordanus Nemorarius, did so much in Arithmetic, the Theory of Numbers, Algebra and Geometry, as to make a revolution in mathematics. Cantor says that they accomplished so much, that their contemporaries and successors could scarcely follow them, much less go beyond them. They had great disciples, like John of Sacrobusco (probably John of Holywood, near Dublin), Joannes Campanus and others. Cantor calls attention particularly to the spread of arithmetical knowledge among the masses, which is a well-deserved tribute to the century, for it was a characteristic of the time that the new thoughts and discoveries of scholars were soon made practical and penetrated very widely among the people. Brewer, in the Preface to Roger Bacon's works, quotes some of Bacon's expressions with regard to the value of mathematics. The English Franciscan said: "For without mathematics, nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be attained." And again: "For he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedy." The term mathematics, as used by Bacon, had a much wider application then than now, and Brewer notes that the Thirteenth Century scientist included therein Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music.

With regard to post-graduate education; the best evidence that, far from any exaggeration of what was accomplished in the Thirteenth Century, there has been a very conservative estimate of it made in the book, may be gathered from the legally erected standards of the medical schools and the legal status of the medical profession. In the Appendix of The Popes and Science, two Bulls are published, issued by Pope John XXII. (_Circa_, 1320), establishing medical schools in Perugia, at that time in the Papal States, and in Cahors, the birthplace of this pope. These bulls were really the formal charters of the medical schools. They require three years of preliminary study at the university and four or five years at medicine before the degree of doctor may be granted, and in addition emphasized that the curricula of the new medical schools must be equal to those of Paris and Bologna. These bulls were issued in the early part of the fourteenth century, and show the height to which the standards of medical education had been raised. There will be found also a law of Frederick II., issued 1241, requiring for all physicians who wished to practice in the Two Sicilies three years of preliminary study--four years at the medical school and a year of practice with a physician before the diploma which constituted a license to practice would be issued. This law is also a pure drug law forbidding the sale of impure drugs under penalty of confiscation of goods, and the preparation of them under penalty of death. Our pure drug law was passed about the time of the issue of the first edition of this book.

{469}

Those who ask for the results of this post-graduate training may find them in the story of Guy de Chauliac, the Father of Modern Surgery. His life formed the basis of a lecture before the Johns Hopkins Medical Club that is to be published in the Bulletin of John Hopkins Hospital. It is incorporated in Catholic Churchmen in Science, Second Series (The Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909). We know Chauliac's work not by tradition, but from his great text-book on surgery. This great Papal physician of the fourteenth century operated within the skull, did not hesitate to open the thorax, sewed up wounds of the intestines, and discussed such subjects as hernia, catheterization, the treatment of fractures, and manipulative surgery generally with wonderful technical ability. His book was the most used text-book for the next two centuries, and has won the admiration of everyone who has ever read it.

TECHNICAL EDUCATION OF THE MASSES.

Some of my friends courteously but firmly have insisted with me that I have greatly exaggerated the technical abilities of the village workmen of the Middle Ages. That every town of less than ten thousand inhabitants in England was able to supply such workmen as we can scarcely obtain in our cities of a million inhabitants, and in that scanty population supply them in greater numbers than we can now secure them from our teeming populations, seems to many simply impossible.

What I have been trying to say, however, in the chapters on the Arts and Crafts and on Popular Education, has been much better said by an authority that will scarcely be questioned by my critics. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D. D., who has been for twenty years the Rector of Searning in England, who is an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College and of Worcester College, Oxford, besides being an Honorary Canon in the Cathedral of Norwich, has devoted much time and study to this question of how the cathedrals were built and finished. Twenty years of his life have been spent in the study of the old English parish and of parish life. He has studied the old parish registers, and talks, therefore, not from distant impressions, but from the actual facts as they are recorded. If to his position as an antiquarian authority I add the fact that he is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, to the credit of which so much of this popular education and accomplishment in the arts and crafts of the century accrues, the value of his evidence is placed entirely above suspicion of partisan partiality. In his chapter on Parish Life in England, in his book "Before the Great Pillage" (Before the Great Pillage with other Miscellanies, by Augustus Jessopp, D. D., London. T. Fisher Unwin, Paternoster Square, 1901), he says:

"The evidence is abundant and positive, and is increasing upon us
year by year, that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches,
and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our
churches, such as the woodcarving of our screens, the painting of
the lovely {470} figures in the panels of those screens, the
embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls,
the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the
windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which
existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the
sixteenth century stripped them bare--all this was executed by local
craftsmen. The evidence for this is accumulating upon us every year,
as one antiquary after another succeeds in unearthing fragments of
pre-Reformation church-wardens' accounts.

"We have actual contracts for church building and church repairing
undertaken by village contractors. We have the cost of a rood screen
paid to a village carpenter, of painting executed by local artists.
We find the name of an artificer, described as aurifaber, or worker
in gold and silver, living in a parish which could never have had
five hundred inhabitants; we find the people in another place
casting a new bell and making the mould for it themselves; we find
the blacksmith of another place forging the iron work for the church
door, or we get a payment entered for the carving of the bench ends
in a little church five hundred years ago, which bench ends are to
be seen in that church at the present moment. And we get fairly
bewildered by the astonishing wealth of skill and artistic taste and
aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of
ours, in times which till lately we had assumed to be barbaric
times. Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all
came to a dead-stop in a single generation, not knowing that the
frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and
the outrageous plunder of the parish gilds in the reign of Edward
the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their
detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean
sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich
profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing
what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole
nation, and art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and
Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries."

My argument is that a century which produced such artist-artisans everywhere, had technical schools in great profusion, though they may not have been called by any such ambitious name.

HOW IT ALL STOPPED.

To most people it seems impossible to understand how it is that, if artistic evolution proceeded to the perfection which it now seems clear that it actually attained in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are only just getting back to a proper state of public taste and a right degree of artistic skill in many of these same accomplishments at the present time. That thought has come to many others who, knowing and appreciating medieval progress in art and literature, have tried to work out the reasons for the gap that exists between medieval art and modern artistic endeavor. Some of these explanations, because they serve to make clear why art evolution stopped so abruptly and we are retracing our steps and taking models from the past rather than doing original work that is an advance, must be quoted here. Many people will find in them, I think, the reasons for their misunderstanding of the old times.

{471}

Gerhardt Hauptmann, who is very well known, even among English-speaking people, as one of the great living German dramatists, and whose "Sunken Bell" attracted considerable attention in both its German and English versions here in New York, in a recent criticism of a new German book, declared that the reason for the gap between modern and medieval art was the movement now coming to be known as the religious revolt in Germany in the sixteenth century. He said:

"I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our
freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high
a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of
personal life, we destroyed a whole garden of fancy and hewed down a
virgin forest of aesthetic ideas. We went even so far in the
insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls
the fruitful soil that had been accumulating for thousands of years,
or else we plowed it under sterile clay.

"We have to-day, then, an intellectual culture that is well
protected by a hedge of our personality, but within this hedge we
have only delicate dwarf trees and unworthy plants, the poorer
progeny of great predecessors. We have telegraph lines, bridges and
railroads, but there grow no churches and cathedrals, only sentry
boxes and barracks. We need gardeners who will cause the present
sterilizing process of the soil to stop, and will enrich the surface
by working up into it the rich layers beneath. In my work-room there
is ever before me the photograph of Sebaldus' Tomb (model
Metropolitan Museum, New York). This rich German symbol rose from
the invisible in the most luxuriant developmental period of German
art. As a formal product of that art, it is very difficult to
appreciate it as it deserves. It seems to me as one of the most
wonderful bits of work in the whole field of artistic
accomplishment. The soul of all the great medieval period encircles
this silver coffin, wrapping it up into a noble unity, and enthrones
on the very summit of death. Life as a growing child. Such a work
could only have come to its perfection in the protected spaces of
the old Mother Church."

Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in his book, already cited, "The Great Pillage," does not hesitate to state in unmistakable terms the reason why all the beauty and happiness went out of English country life some two centuries after the Thirteenth Century, and how it came about that the modern generations have had to begin over again from the beginning, and not where our Catholic forefathers of the medieval period left us, in what used to be the despised Middle Ages. He says:

"When I talk of the great pillage, I mean that horrible and
outrageous looting of our churches other than conventual, and the
robbing of the people of this country of property in land and
movables, which property had actually been inherited by them as
members of those organized religious communities known as parishes.
It is necessary to emphasize the fact that in the general scramble
of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the Anarchy in the days
of Edward the Sixth, there was only one class that was permitted to
retain any large portion of its endowments. The monasteries were
plundered even to their very pots and pans. Almshouses in which old
men and women were fed and clothed were robbed to the last pound,
the poor alms-folk being turned out into the cold at an hour's
warning to beg their bread. {472} Hospitals for the sick and needy,
sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose
very raison d'etre was that they were to look after and care for
those who were past caring for themselves--these were stripped of
all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into some
convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some
barn or hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of consequences,
by some kindly man or woman who could not bear to see a suffering
fellow creature drop down and die at their own doorposts.

"We talk with a great deal of indignation of the Tweed ring. The day
will come when someone will write the story of two other rings--the
ring of the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the reign of
Henry the Eighth was the first; but the ring of the robbers who
robbed the poor and helpless in the reign of Edward the Sixth was
ten times worse than the first.

"The Universities only just escaped the general confiscation; the
friendly societies and benefit clubs and the gilds did not escape.
The accumulated wealth of centuries, their houses and lands, their
money, their vessels of silver and their vessels of gold, their
ancient cups and goblets and salvers, even to their very chairs and
tables, were all set down in inventories and catalogues, and all
swept into the great robbers' hoard. Last, but not least, the
immense treasures in the churches, the joy and boast of every man
and woman and child in England, who day by day and week by week
assembled to worship in the old houses of God which they and their
fathers had built, and whose every vestment and chalice and
candlestick and banner, organs and bells, and picture and image and
altar and shrine they looked upon as their own and part of their
birthright--all these were torn away by the rudest spoilers, carted
off, they knew not whither, with jeers and scoffs and ribald
shoutings, while none dared raise a hand or let his voice be heard
above the whisper of a prayer of bitter grief and agony.

"One class was spared. The clergy of this Church of England of ours
managed to retain some of their endowments; but if the boy king had
lived another three years, there is good reason for believing that
these too would have gone."

Graft prevailed, and the old order disappeared in a slough of selfishness.

COMFORT AND POVERTY.

A number of friendly critics have insisted that _of course_ the Thirteenth Century was far behind later times in the comfort of the people. Poverty is supposed to have been almost universal. Doubtless many of the people were then very poor. Personally, I doubt if there was as much poverty, that is, misery due to actual want of necessaries of life, as there is at the present time. Certainly it was not emphasized by having close to it, constantly rendering the pains of poverty poignant by contrast, the luxury of the modern time. They had not the large city, and people in the country do not suffer as much as people in the city. In recent years, investigations of poverty in England have been appalling in the statistics that they have presented. Mr. Robert Hunter, in his book Poverty, has furnished us with some details that make one feel that our generation should be the last to say {473} that the Thirteenth Century was behind in progress, because so many of the people were so poor. Ruskin once said that the ideal of the great nation is one wherein there must be "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human creatures." I am sure that, tried by this standard, the Thirteenth Century in Merrie England is ahead of any other generation and, above all, far in advance of our recent generations.

By contrast to what we know of the merrie English men and women of the Thirteenth Century, I would quote Mr. Hunter's paragraphs on the Poverty of the Modern English People. He says:

"A few years ago, England did not know the extent of her own
poverty. Economists and writers gave opinions of all kinds. Some
said conditions were 'bad,' others said such statements were
misleading; and here they were, tilting at each other, backward and
forward, in the most ponderous and serious way, until Mr. Booth, a
business man, undertook to get at the facts. _No one, even the most
radical economist, would have dared to have estimated the poverty of
London as extending to 30 per cent of the people_ (as it proved).
The extent of poverty--the number of underfed, underclothed in
insanitary houses--was greater than could reasonably have been
estimated."

Some of the details of this investigation by Mr. Booth were so startling that some explanation had to be found. They could not deny, in the face of Mr. Booth's facts, but they set up the claim that the conditions in London were exceptional. Then Mr. Rountree made an investigation in York with precisely the same results. More than one in four of the population was in poverty. To quote Mr. Hunter once more:

"As has been said, it was not until Mr. Charles Booth published, in
1891, the results of his exhaustive inquiries that the actual
conditions of poverty in London became known. About 1,000,000
people, or about thirty per cent of the entire population of London,
were found to be unable to obtain the necessaries for a sound
livelihood. They were in a state of poverty, living in conditions,
if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it. In many
districts, considerably more than half of the population were either
in distress or on the verge of distress. When these results were
made public, the more conservative economists gave it as their
opinion that the conditions in London were, of course, exceptional,
and that it would be unsafe to make any generalizations for the
whole of England on the basis of Mr. Booth's figures for London.
About ten years later, Mr. B. S. Rountree, incited by the work of
Mr. Booth, undertook a similar inquiry in his native town, York, a
small provincial city, in most ways typical of the smaller towns of
England. In a large volume in which the results are published, it is
shown that the poverty in York was only slightly less extensive than
that of London. In the summary, Mr. Rountree compares the conditions
of London with those of York. His comments are as follows: 'The
proportions arrived at for the total populations living in poverty
in London and York respectively were as under:

London--30.7 per cent
York--27.84 per cent

{474}

The proportion of the population living in poverty in York may be regarded as practically the same as in London, especially when we remember that Mr. Booth's information was gathered in 1887-1892, a period of only average trade prosperity, whilst the York figures were collected in 1899, when trade was unusually prosperous.'"

He continues: "We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty in London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equalled in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are faced by the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty."

Most of us will be inclined to think that Mr. Rountree must exaggerate, and what he calls poverty most of us would doubtless be inclined to think a modest competency a little below respectability. He fixed the standard of twenty-one shillings eight pence ($5.25) a week as a necessary one for a family of ordinary size. He says:

"A family living upon the scale allowed for in this estimate, must
never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go
into the country unless they walk. They must never purchase a
half-penny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular
concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they
cannot afford to pay the postage. They must never contribute
anything to their church or chapel, nor give any help to a neighbor
which costs them money. They cannot save, nor can they join sick
club or trade union, because they cannot pay the necessary
subscription. The children must have no pocket money for dolls,
marbles or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco nor drink no
beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes for herself or
for her children, the character for the family wardrobe, as for the
family diet, being governed by the regulation, 'Nothing must be
bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of
physical health, and that which is bought must be of the plainest
and most economical description.' Should a child fall ill, it must
be attended by the family parish doctor; should it die, it must be
buried by the parish. Finally, the wage-earner must never be absent
from his work for a single day."

_More than one in four of the population living below this scale!_

Conditions are, if anything, worse on the Continent. In Germany, industry is at the best. Conditions in Berlin have been recently reported in the Daily Consular Reports by a U. S. Government official. Of the somewhat more than two millions of people who live in Berlin, 1,125,000 have an income. Nearly one-half of the incomes, however, are exempt from taxation because they do not amount to the minimum taxable income, though that is only $214--$4 per week. Of the 600,000 who have taxable incomes, nearly 550,000 have less than $700 a year; that is, get about $2 a day or less. Less than sixty thousand out of the total population get more than $2 a day. It is easy to say, but hard to understand, that this is a living wage, because things are cheaper in Germany. Meat is, however, nearly twice as dear; sugar is twice as dear; bread is dearer than it is in this country; coffee is dearer; and only rent is somewhat cheaper.

{475}

It is easy to talk about the spread of comfort among the people of our generation and the raising of the standard of living, but if one compares these wages with the price of things as they are now, it is hard to understand on just what basis of fact the claim for betterment in our time, meaning more general comfort and happiness, is made.

People always refuse to believe that conditions are as bad as they really are in these matters. Americans will at once have the feeling, on reading Mr. Hunter and Mr. Rountree's words and the account of the American Consul at Berlin, that this may be true for England and Germany, but that of course it is very different here in America. It is extremely doubtful whether it is very different here in America. In this matter, Mr. Hunter's opinion deserves weight. He has for years devoted himself to gathering information with regard to this subject. He seems to be sure that one in seven of our population is in poverty. Probably the number is higher than this. Here is his opinion:

"How many people in the country are in poverty? Is the number yearly
growing larger? Are there each year more and more of the unskilled
classes pursuing hopelessly the elusive phantom of self-support and
independence? Are they, as in a dream, working faster, only the more
swiftly to move backward? Are there each year more and more hungry
children and more and more fathers whose utmost effort may not bring
into the home as much energy in food as it takes out in industry?
These are not fanciful questions, nor are they sentimental ones. I
have not the slightest doubt that there are in the United States ten
million persons in precisely these conditions of poverty, but I am
largely guessing, and there may be as many as fifteen or twenty
millions!"

Perhaps Mr. Hunter exaggerates. As a physician, I should be inclined to think not; but certainly his words and, above all, the English statistics will give any one pause who is sure, on general principles, that the great mass of the people are happier now or more comfortable, above all, in mind--the only real happiness--than they were in the Thirteenth Century. After due consideration of this kind, no one will insist on the comparative misery and suffering of the poor in old times. England had less than 3,000,000 in the Thirteenth Century, and probably there was never a time in her history when a greater majority of her people fulfilled Ruskin's and Morris' ideals of happy-hearted human beings. The two-handed worker got at least what the four-footed worker, in Carlyle's words, has always obtained, due food and lodging. England was not "a nation with sleek, well-fed English horses, and hungry, dissatisfied Englishmen."

COMFORT AND HAPPINESS.

There is another side to the question of comparative happiness that may be stated in the words of William Morris, when he says, in "Hopes and Fears for Art," that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time (and of course _a fortiori_ a medieval of the Thirteenth Century) would {476} stare astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of a well-to-do middle-class house. This expression is often re-echoed, and one is prone to wonder how many of those who use it realize that it is a quotation, and, above all, appreciate the fact that Morris made the statement in order to rebut it. His answer is in certain ways so complete that it deserves to be quoted.

"When you hear of the luxuries of the Ancients, you must remember
that they were not like our luxuries, they were rather indulgence in
pieces of extravagant folly than what we to-day call luxury--which,
perhaps, you would rather call comfort; well, I accept the word, and
say that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time would stare
astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of
a well-to-do middle-class house.

"But some, I know, think that the attainment of these very comforts
is what makes the difference between civilization and
uncivilization--that they are the essence of civilization. Is it so
indeed? Farewell my hope then! I had thought that civilization meant
the attainment of peace and order and freedom, of good-will between
man and man, of the love of truth and the hatred of injustice, and
by consequence the attainment of the good life which these things
breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of incident; that was
what I thought it meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cushions,
and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat and drink--and
therewithal more and sharper differences between class and class.

"If that be what it is, I for my part wish I were well out of it and
living in a tent in the Persian desert, or a turf hut on the Iceland
hillside. But, however it be, and I think my view is the true view,
I tell you that art abhors that side of civilization; she cannot
breath in the houses that lie under its stuffy slavery.

"Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must
clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in
our way, conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but
make work for servants and doctors. If you want a golden rule that
will fit everybody, this is it: 'Have nothing in your houses that
you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'"

COMFORT AND HEALTH.

A comment on William Morris's significant paragraphs may be summed up in some reflections on the scornful expression of a friend who asked, how is it possible to talk of happiness at a time when there were no glass in windows and no heating apparatus except the open fireplace in the great hall of the larger houses, or in the kitchen of the dwelling houses. To this there is the ready answer that, in the modern time, we have gone so far to the opposite extreme as to work serious harm to health. When a city dweller develops tuberculosis, his physician now sends him out to the mountains, asks him to sleep with his window wide open, and requires him to spend just as much of his time as possible in the open air, even with the temperature below zero. In our hospitals, the fad for making patients comfortable by artificial heat is passing, and that of stimulating them by cold, fresh air is gaining ground. We know that, for all the fevers and all the respiratory {477} diseases this brings about a notable reduction in the mortality. Surely, what is good for the ailing must be even better to keep them well from disease. Many a physician now arranges to sleep out of doors all winter. Certainly all the respiratory diseases are rendered much more fatal and modern liability to them greatly increased by our shut-up houses. The medieval people were less comfortable, from a sensual standpoint, but the healthy glow and reaction after cold probably made them enjoy life better than we do in our steam-heated houses. They secured bodily warmth by an active circulation of their blood. We secure it by the circulation of hot water or steam in our houses. Ours may be the better way, but the question is not yet absolutely decided. A physician friend points to the great reduction in the death-rate in modern times, and insists that this, of course, means definite progress. Even this is not quite so sure as is often thought. We are saving a great many lives that heretofore, in the course of nature, under conditions requiring a more vigorous life, passed out of existence early. It is doubtful, however, whether this is an advantage for the race, since our insane asylums, our hospitals for incurables and our homes of various kinds now have inmates in much greater proportion to the population than ever before in history. These are mainly individuals of lower resistive vitality, who would have been allowed to get out of existence early, save themselves and their friends from useless suffering, and whose presence in life does not add greatly if at all to the possibilities of human accomplishment. Our reduced death-rate is, because of comfort seeking, more than counterbalanced by a reduced birth-rate, so that no advantage is reaped for the race in the end. These reflections, of course, are only meant to suggest how important it is to view such questions from all sides before being sure that they represent definite progress for humanity. Progress is much more elusive than is ordinarily thought, and is never the simple, unmistakable movement of advance it is often thought.

HYGIENE.

The objection that medical friends have had to the claims of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries is that it failed to pay any attention to hygiene. Here, once more, we have a presumption that is not founded on real knowledge of the time. It is rather easy to show that these generations were anticipating many of our solutions of hygienic problems quite as well as our solutions of other social and intellectual difficulties. In the sketch of Pope John XXI., the physician who became Pope during the second half of the Thirteenth Century, which was published in Ophthalmology, a quarterly review of eye diseases (Jan., 1909), because Pope John wrote a little book on this subject which has many valuable anticipations of modern knowledge, I called attention to the fact that, while a physician and professor of {478} medicine at the medical school of the University of Sienna, this Pope, then known as Peter of Spain, had made some contributions to sanitary science. Later he was appointed Archiater, that is, Physician in charge of the City of Rome. As pointed out in the sketch of him as enlarged for the volume containing a second series of Catholic Churchmen in Science (The Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909), he seems to have been particularly interested in popular health, for we have a little book, Thesaurus Pauperum--The Treasure of the Poor--which contains many directions for the maintenance of health and the treatment of disease by those who are too poor to secure physicians' advice. The fact that the head of the Bureau of Health in Rome should have been made Pope in the Thirteenth Century, itself speaks volumes for the awakening of the educated classes at least to the value of hygiene and sanitation.

Their attention to hygiene can be best shown by a consideration of the hospitals. Ordinarily it is assumed that the hospitals provided a roof for the sick and the injured, but scarcely more. Most physicians will probably be quite sure that they were rather hot-beds of disease than real blessings to the ailing. That is not what we find when we study them carefully. These generations gave us a precious lesson by eradicating leprosy, which was quite as general as tuberculosis is now, and they made special hospitals for erysipelas, which materially lessened the diffusion of that disease. In rewriting the chapter on The Foundation of City Hospitals for my book, The Popes and Science (Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1908), I incorporated into it a description of the hospital erected at Tanierre, in France, in 1293, by Marguerite of Bourgogne, the sister of St. Louis. Of this hospital Mr. Arthur Dillon, from the standpoint of the modern architect, says:

"It was an admirable hospital in every way, and it is doubtful if we
to-day surpass it. It was isolated, the ward was separated from the
other buildings; it had the advantage we often lose, of being but
one story high, and more space was given to each patient than we now
afford.

"The ventilation by the great windows and ventilators in the ceiling
was excellent; it was cheerfully lighted, and the arrangement of the
gallery shielded the patients from dazzling light and from draughts
from the windows, and afforded an easy means of supervision, while
the division by the roofless, low partitions isolated the sick and
obviated the depression that comes from the sight of others in pain.

"It was, moreover, in great contrast to the cheerless white wards of
to-day. The vaulted ceiling was very beautiful; the woodwork was
richly carved, and the great windows over the altars were filled
with colored glass. Altogether, it was one of the best examples of
the best period of Gothic architecture."

In their individual Hygiene there was, of course, much to be desired among the people of the Thirteenth Century, and it has been declared that the history of Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century might, from the hygienic standpoint, he summed up as a thousand years without a bath. The more we know about this period, however, the less of {479} point do we find in the epigram. Mr. Cram, in the Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (Pott & Co., N. Y., 1907), has described wonderful arrangements within the monasteries (!) for the conduction of water from long distances for all toilet purposes. There was much more attention to sanitary details than we have been prone to think. Mr. Cram, in describing what was by no means one of the greatest of the English abbeys of the Thirteenth Century, says:

"Here at Beaulieu the water was brought by an underground conduit
from an unfailing spring a mile away, and this served for drinking,
washing and bathing, the supply of the fish ponds, and for a
constant flushing of the elaborate system of drainage. In sanitary
matters, the monks were as far in advance of the rest of society as
they were in learning and agriculture."

WAGES AND THE CONDITION OP WORKING PEOPLE.

What every reader of the Thirteenth Century seems to be perfectly sure of is that, whatever else there may have been in this precious time, at least the workmen were not well paid and men worked practically for nothing. It is confessed that, of course, working as they did on their cathedrals, they had a right to work for very little if they wished, but at least there has been a decided step upward in evolution in the gradual raising of wages, until at last the workman is beginning to be paid some adequate compensation. There is probably no phase of the life of the Middle Ages with regard to which people are more mistaken than this supposition that the workmen of this early time were paid inadequately. I have already called attention to the fact that the workmen of this period claimed and obtained "the three eights"--eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for recreation and bodily necessities. They obtained the Saturday half-holiday, and also release from work on the vigils of all feast days, and there were nearly forty of these in the year. After the vesper hour, that is, three in Summer and two in Winter, there was no work on the Eves of Holy-days of Obligation. With regard to wages, there is just one way to get at the subject, and that is, to present the legal table of wages enacted by Parliament, placing beside it the legal maximum price of necessities of life, as also determined by Parliamentary enactment.

An Act of Edward III. fixes the wages, without food, as follows. There are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for our purpose:

[Price in Shillings and Pence; s. d.] s. d.

A woman hay-making, or weeding corn for the day--0 1

A man filling dung-cart--0 3-1/2

A reaper--0 4

Mowing an acre of grass--0 4

Threshing a quarter of wheat--0 4

{480}

The price of shoes, cloth and provisions, throughout the time that this law continued in force, was as follows:

[Price in Pounds, Shillings and Pence; s. d.] L. s. d.

A pair of shoes--0 0 4

Russet broadcloth, the yard--0 1 1

A stall fed ox--1 4 0

A grass fed ox--0 16 0

A fat sheep unshorn--0 1 8

A fat sheep shorn--0 1 2

A fat hog two years old--0 3 4

A fat goose--0 0 2-1/2.

Ale, the gallon, by proclamation--0 0 1

Wheat, the quarter--0 3 4

White wine, the gallon--0 0 6

Red wine--0 0 4

An Act of Parliament of the fourteenth century, in fixing the price of meat, names the four sorts of meat--beef, pork, mutton and veal, and sets forth in its preamble the words, "these being the food of the poorer sort." The poor in England do not eat these kinds of meat now, and the investigators of the poverty of the country declare that most of the poor live almost exclusively on bread. The fact of the matter is, that large city populations are likely to harbor many very miserable people, while the rural population of England in the Middle Ages, containing the bulk of the people, were happy-hearted and merry. When we recall this in connection with what I have given in the text with regard to the trades-unions and their care for the people, the foolish notion, founded on a mere assumption and due to that Aristophanic joke, our complacent self-sufficiency, which makes us so ready to believe that our generation _must_ be better off than others were, vanishes completely.