Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/66

56 suspecting as much. The baron of feudal days never imagined the possibility of social arrangements that would serve him far better than the arrangements he so strenuously upheld; nor did he see in the arrangements he upheld the causes of his many sufferings and discomforts. Had he been told that a noble might be much happier without a moated castle, having its keep and secret passages and dungeons for prisoners—that he might be more secure without drawbridge and portcullis, men-at-arms and sentinels—that he might be in less danger having no vassals or hired mercenaries—that he might be wealthier without possessing a single serf; he would have thought the statements absurd even to the extent of insanity. It would have been useless to argue that the régime seeming so advantageous to him entailed hardships of so many kinds—perpetual feuds with his neighbors, open attacks, surprises, betrayals, revenges by equals, treacheries by inferiors; the continual carrying of arms and wearing of armor; the perpetual quarrellings of servants and disputes among vassals; the coarse and unvaried food supplied by an unprosperous agriculture; a domestic discomfort such as no modern servant would tolerate: resulting in a wear and tear that brought life to a comparatively early close, if it was not violently cut short in battle or by murder. Yet what the class-bias of that time made it impossible for him to see, has become to his modern representative conspicuous enough. The peer of our day knows that he is better off without defensive appliances, and retainers, and serfs, than his predecessor was with them. His country-house is more secure than was an embattled tower; he is safer among his unarmed domestics than a feudal lord was when surrounded by armed guards; he is in less danger going about weaponless than was the mail-clad knight with lance and sword. Though he has no vassals to fight at his command, there is no suzerain who can call on him to sacrifice his life in a quarrel not his own; though he can compel no one to labor, the labors of freemen make him immensely more wealthy than was the ancient holder of bondsmen; and along with the loss of direct control over workers there has grown up an industrial system which supplies him with multitudinous conveniences and luxuries undreamt of by him who had workers at unchecked command.

May we not, then, suspect that, just as the dominant classes of ancient days were prevented by the feelings and ideas appropriate to the then-existing social state from seeing how much evil is brought on them, and how much better for them might be a social state in which their power was much less; so the dominant classes of the present day are disabled from seeing how the existing forms of class-subordination redound to their own injury, and how much happier may be their future representatives having social positions less prominent? Occasionally recognizing, though they do, certain indirect evils attending their supremacy, they do not see that by accumulation these indirect evils constitute a penalty which supremacy brings on them. Though