AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 55 



What is the history of persecution which, wielded iu turn by men 

 of every creed, has in all ages perpetrated the most abominable 

 cruelties'? What is this frightful catalogue of horrors other than 

 the natural result of ignorance of the great fundamental law of 

 our being, namely, that civil and religious freedom were never des- 

 tined to flow in two separate channels, that the attempt to sepa- 

 rate them is unnatural and impossible, that they mutually 

 reproduce each other, and cannot exist asunder 1 Of the Scandi- 

 navian hordes that over-ran Europe during the early part of the 

 middle ages, little could be expected in the direction of social or 

 intellectual progress. Their arts and inventions were rude, their 

 passions and pursuits were violent. We yet retain in the names 

 of the days of the week the traces of their mythology. Nor were 

 the victorious followers of Mahomed more disposed to the culti- 

 vation of the arts of peace. While all Europe was convulsed 

 with the wild agitation of the Crusades, could it be expected that 

 fanaticism would give way to the spirit of useful progress in those 

 arts which tend to the promotion of human comfort ? 



Commencing at a time of the profoundest ignorance, that blind 

 and fanatical devotion to the will of the priesthood, in which the 

 Feudal system originated, and without which the people could 

 never have been seduced into enterprises so wild, mad and dis- 

 astrous, continued undiminished, unbroken by the remotest glim- 

 mering of a perception that there was nothing in the wars of the 

 Crusades, and in the sacrifice of two millions of lives to compen- 

 sate for. acquisitions that never could be realized, or to justify a 

 struggle in which the human mind had first renounced its free- 

 dom. The military resources of the most powerful nations of 

 Europe were with unexampled bigotry and servility, placed for 

 this purpose at the disposal of a class that in all ages have held 

 in subservient vassalage the intellects of mankind. At the bid- 

 ding of Peter the Hermit, the warrior unsheathed his shining blade, 

 and deluged for two centuries this fair earth with blood, leaving 

 this only memento, that, neither to the military nor to the priestly 

 power regarded as dominant must man look for the advancement 

 of Social Progress. Nor would it be during the existence of the 

 feudal system that we should naturally look for the exemplifica- 



