Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/249

Rh law of the demesne, they began to acquire a municipal organization only at the moment when, along with the primitive population, a foreign population became established that maintained itself by industry and commerce." Because of the absence of the fighting populations of Europe during the Crusades, the pacific and industrial populations left behind gained the strength and wealth that enabled them to break the chains of feudal despotism, and to purchase the liberties that make the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the gateways to modern civilization. It was after the slow recovery from the devastating wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the agitation in behalf of freedom ended in the terrific explosion of the French Revolution and the restoration of the rule of the despots. Again, it was after the long peace following the Napoleonic wars that the agitation was renewed, and, in England, led to the passage of the Reform Bill, and, on the Continent, to the demand for popular constitutions.

Peace is also the progenitor of intellectual freedom. The forces that shattered the despotism of the autocrat and aristocrat shattered the despotism of the ecclesiastic. Since the power of the latter grew out of the same conditions that produced the power of the former, the establishment of the new conditions was certain to be fatal to both alike. As soon as men began to think and act for themselves in industrial matters, they began to think and act for themselves in ecclesiastical as well as political matters. Accordingly, we find everywhere that the revolt against the church as well as the state started in the industrial centers. "In European history," says Thorold Rogers, "discontent with existing religious institutions and the acceptance of heresy on speculative topics have always been characteristic of manufacturing regions. It was the case in Toulouse in southern France, in Flanders, in eastern England. The French Huguenots were the manufacturers and merchants of the country in the seventeenth century, and when they were expelled carried with them their skill and capital. Only Italy is an exception," he adds, "and Italy profited so greatly by the papacy that it was not disposed to quarrel with the institution, although it had no love for the representative of it." The era of comparative peace that began with the establishment of feudalism and the opening of the Crusades and ended with the conflicts between Charles V and Francis I gave a powerful impulse to industry and commerce, and these again to the human intellect. Without the cessation of the anarchy that followed the downfall of Rome, the awakening of the minds of men that flowered in the Renaissance and the Reformation would not have been possible. But before they could gain their freedom, the mediæval conception of the duty of the individual toward the