Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/11

 far different relations to their superiors from those of the slaves to their masters, still used the agricultural implements and handled almost the same primitive machines as the slave class, who were, so to say, their economical ancestors.

Instead of the combined landlord and capitalist controlling tens, hundreds, or thousands of toilers on his estate through a bailiff, we have the disruption again of village communities of free men—traces of which can be found in all European countries to this day—developing into a system of serfdom where the serfs were bound to the soil, but bound also by direct personal relations to their masters. So, too, as these changes acted and reacted new class-struggles took the place of the old. Oppressors and oppressed, dominant and servile, lord and burgher, master and craftsman, seigneur and serf, stood in antagonism, as mankind were feeling their way to a wider economical development. Centuries of disintegration and reconstruction were needed to bring forth the complete feudal system; and the earliest development of modern trade and commerce took place on the shores of that great inland sea which for ages was the cradle of western civilisation. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, followed in the footsteps of Tyre, Corinth, and Carthage. Rome, instead of being the metropolis of a great empire, became the head-quarters of a religious organisation which exercised an influence that reached the uttermost parts of the western world.

That the influence of the Catholic Church was, in the main, used in the interest of the people against the dominant classes can scarcely now be disputed; nor that the equality of conditions to start with in the