Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/16

 placed between the journeyman and independence; besides, the arrangements of the guilds were such that wherever a craftsmen wandered he was received as a brother of his particular craft. Although also the rest of Europe was behind England in the settlement of the people on the soil, the craft-guilds were even more important in the Low Countries and part of Germany in the Middle Ages than in England. Thus it should appear that in the record of the feudal development the period reached in each country when the peasant was a free man working for himself upon the land, and the craftsman was likewise a free man master of his own means of production represents the time of greatest individual prosperity for the people.

England, where this independence was on the whole earliest developed, presented on this very account a marked contrast to France where the risings of the Jacquerie had not resulted so well for the people as our own peasant insurrections. In Germany and Italy the rural population was much behind the townspeople though in Spain, the early communal forms being there retained, the peasants were better off. The really important point is that, under such conditions of production as those described, where the means of production are at the disposal of the individual, who also controls the exchange of the superfluity, perfect economical freedom, as well as political freedom or freedom before the law, is possible and indeed cannot be avoided. Men then had something worth fighting for at home and abroad, and were quite ready to spend their own blood and their own money in fighting for a cause which they held to be their own. Vicarious sacrifice of the