26 THE NEW METHOD 



to admit the light. Their tables and chairs were logs 

 of wood set on end. Their beds were bags of straw 

 seldom renewed, and a log for a pillow. Their clothing 

 was made of leather or the untanned hides of animals, 

 with no underclothing. Their food was chiefly beans, 

 peas, fern roots and the bark of trees. Their houses 

 and door-yards were filthy beyond expression. Only 

 one child in four lived to be twenty. There were no 

 sanitary conditions anywhere. The population was 

 constantly thinned by pestilence, want, and the most 

 appalling barbarities. The church was an organ for 

 extorting money, and the clergy were the most crimi- 

 nal class of people. 



The ignorance, superstition and anarchy that ruled 

 in Europe through the middle ages were not quite 

 but almost universal. A few thousand families, scat- 

 tered here and there over Europe, lived from genera- 

 tion to generation in a civilized way as far as it was 

 possible in the midst of conditions worse than bar- 

 barian. They remembered the achievements of their 

 ancestors in the ancient empires that had passed 

 away, and through their own efforts they had long 

 hoped to see the dawn of a new civilization for the 

 future of Europe. Five centuries of anarchy, war and 

 confusion had been endured, with no change ex- 

 cept increasing violence and barbarism. 



In the tenth century a ray of intellectual light ap- 

 peared in the south-west of Europe but it served at 



