Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/17

 lives of mercenary troops and posterity's money was nowise to their minds; they took note that such methods of warfare were at once cowardly and mean.

The Church as a collective body supplemented the needs of this thoroughly individualist society. The services rendered by the monasteries, priories, and nunneries to the people in the shape of constant employment on their estates, of almsgiving, maintenance of hospitals, schools, inns, maintenance of roads, have been systematically depreciated by middle-class historians; but these semi-socialist bodies were of the highest value in the economy of the middle-ages, more especially in England, and the lands which they held were used and their revenues applied in such manner that during their most flourishing period the noblest institutions were kept up by their aid. Permanent pauperism was unknown, and vagrancy was charitably restrained so long as these institutions were existence. The vices rendered by them in the direction of art and letters it is needless to recount.

But at the risk of being compelled to repeat later what is urged here, it is well to consider at this point the effect which the full development of the individual man and his power over his own tools, materials, and the objects he worked upon, had upon art. The ordinary opinion seems to be that art is bred and sustained by the luxury resulting from the present state of society, with its monstrous contrasts of riches and poverty. A very brief survey will be enough to show the falsity of this notion. The slave-served society of the classical peoples intellectual and highly-refined but simple in life and free, in Greece at any rate, from what