Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/41

 THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL-REFORM MOVEMENT 27

monopolies, and a frightful increase in the practice of usury. As a natural sequence, by a clearly defined process that space does not permit us here to dwell on, there followed in course of time the establishment of standing armies, the growth of national debts, with the concomitant bond system, national banks, and the general destruction of local liberties, together with the rights in common which had contributed so largely to the temporal welfare of the rural population.

Political absolutism and other pagan theories and practices, together with the divorce of statecraft from other arts and sci- ences, and all the consequent evils, extended even over those lands which still professed to be Catholic. The guardians of faith and morals were only too happy to succeed in preserving the unity of fellowship and the fundamental doctrines of Catholicity, and did not realize that insidious inroads on the time-honored tradi- tions were taking place under their very eyes. Ultimately the same wholesale confiscations of monastic properties and suppres- sion of guilds took place in all the countries of southern Europe that had previously been decreed by the Protestant governments.

All over Europe free thought soon passed from the private interpretation of Scripture to the negation of the whole Chris- tian revelation. Out of the English deism sprang the French philosophy of the Encyclopaedia, which rapidly spread to all parts of the continent. By the middle of the eighteenth century all the nominally Catholic governments were practically infidel, and what is now known as liberalism reigned everywhere supreme.

The guilds and other institutions that had once been the instruments of liberty were very generally transformed, after the Reformation, even in those cases where royal tyranny permitted their continued existence, into corporate monopolies. The French Revolution, that bloody revolt, under the influence of pagan theories, against the evils which had sprung out of those very same principles, broke up the last remnant of the mediaeval social-economic organization, not only in France, but in other parts of Europe, and annihilated the remaining local liberties which had still protected a large part of the provincial popula- tion against the rampant state despotism.