298 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



of the ecclesiastical army, and was insufficient to overcome 

 and kill the dominant evils. Slavery, despotism, oligarchy, 

 injustice, violence, rapine, cruelty, war were supported by 

 churchmen as things belonging to Caesar, and were therefore 

 represented as natural and lawful rights. It was reserved to 

 science to overcome these at last. Other factors, and fore- 

 most among them literature, naturally worked in the same 

 direction as science, and preceding it, powerfully assisted 

 it; but of these factors some owed their very existence to 

 the growth of science, so that the latter has been on the 

 whole the most potent and ubiquitous mainspring of human 

 elevation. 



It has been already pointed out that Industry, by 

 the very fact of its coming into being, brought about 

 SOCIAL CHANGES of great importance, the principal of 

 which were the emancipation of Europe from serfdom ; next, 

 decrease of violence ; then municipal liberties ; next, in- 

 crease of population; then the disappearance of the 

 stigma attached to labour. But as industry depends on 

 machinery chiefly, and machinery is an application of 

 scientific principles, whether these be properly reduced to 

 law or empirical only, it follows that ordinary knowledge 

 at first and the sciences afterwards were the causes of the 

 social changes just recited, the Crusades being the para- 

 mount event which accelerated them and strongly co- 

 operated in several ways to bring them about. The 

 progress, however, goes much further. Industry has, ever 

 since the Xllth century, knit into greater and closer com- 

 mercial intercourse nations of different creeds, amongst 

 whom a feeling of reciprocal amity arose in consequence, 

 in the place of the unreasoning animosity which was 

 prevalent before. From the same period also date the 

 great mercantile companies and enterprises; also the com- 

 mercial leagues of great cities, which grew powerful enough 

 to become independent republics. Social order, too, began 

 to grow, despite the popular disturbances due to the 

 aggression of the aristocracy, for it was felt that prosperity 

 and that of the working class especially depended upon 

 the stability of the state, property, and capital, if we may 



