EVOLUTION OF MODERN SOCIETY. 515 



see men, as Campbell puts it, " Yoked to the brutes and fettered to the 

 soil." We hear the ceaseless tumult of war, see from every point the 

 lurid glare from burning homesteads, or the dead, black emptiness of 

 devastated fields. 



Although we say that indirectly the feudal system was a beuefit to 

 the world iu the end, yet, regarding it in itself, we can not but acknowl- 

 edge its evil effects at the time of its greatest power. It tended to 

 obliterate the individual ; to choke all spirit of independence, of pride or 

 patriotism, in the people; to elevate a few at the expense of the many. 

 What there was of pride or patriotism was rather a blind devotion to a 

 particular head, and where the pride or patriotism of that head inclined, 

 there the devotion of his servants followed. 



Yet the people themselves were to blame for this unnatural state of 

 society. They, in common with their masters, were under the despotic 

 rule of custom, styled by Pindar " King over all mortals." If they 

 made no eftbrt to free themselves, it is not likely their masters would 

 do it for them. 



Iu this connection we have Shelley's splendid lines, iu his Ode to 

 Liberty : 



He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever 



Can he between the cradle and the grave, 

 Crowned him the King of Life. Oh, vain endeavour! 



If, on his own high will, a willing slave, 

 He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor. 



Iu the Middle Ages, too, when life depended practically on the prod- 

 uce of the soil, the constant warfare and feud formed an insuperable 

 obstacle to social XDrogress. When the summer was far advanced, the 

 air clear and warm, and everything giving token of the time when the 

 face of the country should have been golden with ripe, waving corn, 

 and the air melodious with the songs of the reapers, then perchance 

 there would be a wide expanse of blackened fields and ruined home- 

 steads. The lord's bugle had summoned his vassals from the plow, 

 and the harrow lay rusting and neglected. 



lmi)rovement can only come Avhen men have time and liberty to 

 think. I would especially emphasize the significance of the latter of 

 these terms — viz, liberty. Prof. Sheldon Amos, in his treatise on the 

 Science of Law, has very well expressed what I am desirous of impress- 

 ing here. "It implies," he says, "rest, meditation, imagination, slow 

 and steady culture of the faculties, combinations and associations for 

 all vsorts of purposes, and especially that slowly formed belief in the 

 certain power of carrying resolutions into action on which so much of 

 human greatness depends. Liberty, in itself, is a negative term denot- 

 ing absence of restraints; on its iwsitive side it denotes the fullness of 

 individual existence." This privilege was, all the time of which we are 

 treating, in the hands of a few secluded hermits — dead to the world, 

 yet living factors iu its history. Under the protection afforded them 

 by ignorance and superstition in the cloak of religion, these pursued 

 their labors and their studies unheard, unheeded, and unseen. 



