TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 725 



■countries who have hououred us by joining our gathering to-day. By our inter- 

 course with them we may surely help to correct insular prejudices, which are 

 hastily formed and are not unlikely to affect our assumptions about human nature. 

 It has been from time to time the task of Presidents of this Section to deal, in 

 an opening Address, with some fresh economic problem that had forced itself upon 

 public attention in the immediately preceding year. I must crave your indulgence 

 if I make no such attempt to-day. For the last thirteen years I liave given such 

 time as I could spare from clerical duty and the routine of teaching to the study of 

 English industry and commerce in the past, and I ha\e made no pretence of keeping 

 myself fully informed about the burning questions of the present day. To me the 

 burning controversies of two or three centuries ago are much more fascinating, 

 because we generally know ' how they ended, and we can hope to decide -w-ith some 

 approximation to truth who was iu the right and who was in the wrong, or how 

 far both were in the wrong. But after all English history is continuous, and the 

 economic life of to-day is the outcome of the economic life of the past. I do not 

 think it will be wholly idle if I try to set before you, however broadly and super- 

 ficially, some thoughts about economic affairs to-day, as they appear to one who 

 has spent many hours in trying to habituate himself to the various phases of 

 economic life and opinion in England during stages of her development which have 

 passed away for ever. 



During the century which succeeded the Crusades there seems to have been a 

 Tery rapid development of English industry and commerce ; and if we tried for a 

 little to place ourselves in thought in that period, we should find ourselves in a 

 world that was strangely like and yet strangely unlike our own. The dialect 

 would be unfamiliar, if not unintelligible ; though we might recognise the well- 

 known churches at Westminster, and Salisbury, and Durham, the aspect of the 

 landscape with the open fields would be monotonous, the houses would appear mean 

 and poor, and most of the towns would seem to be big and sleepy villages. While 

 these were the external characteristics, the habits of thought would strike us as 

 equally strange, since each village, and each town, was so curiously isolated from its 

 neighbours. The ideal of good management in every village, controlled as it prac- 

 tically was by a manorial bailiff", was that it should be self-sufficing and supply its 

 own wants from its own resources, that it should only buy from the outside world 

 what it could not produce for itself and could not do without, and should only sell 

 to the outside world what it had to spare as a surplus. In the towns which were 

 becoming centres of trade there was more enterprise, but it was carefully controlled 

 and organised so as to minister to the good of the particular town. No business 

 man had a wider view ; his town was the economic unit, and afforded the means 

 by which he was able to enjoy unimpeded intercourse with the inhabitants of other 

 towns. The prosperity of the town was the economic ideal, and the rivalry of two 

 towns in the same county, like Lincoln and Boston,^ was as keen as the jealousy 

 "between French and English fishermen to-day. There appears to have been some 

 •collective buying of foreign wares for the common advantage of the townsmen,' 

 but all industry and commerce were organised and regulated under municipal 

 authority with the view of making them subservient to the advantage of the town 

 where they were carried on. The manner in which the townsmen contributed to royal 

 taxation rendered them not unnaturally jealous of anyone who tried to evade his 

 fair share of public burdens by taking advantage of the facilities which their town 

 offered for carrying on his trade without helping to discharge the public obliga- 

 tions. The fact remains that in the thirteenth century commerce was intensely 

 municipal, that the legal forms which were iu vogue for recovering debts took this 



' Some few, like the Newfoundland fisheries dispute, never come to an end. It 

 was decided in 1697, and settled in 1713 and 1763 ; it was finally laid to rest in 1783, 

 but it seems as lively as ever. 



^ P. Thompson, Historij of Boston, .54. 



' Quarterly Journal of Jiconomics, V., 313. 



