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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII., No. 168 



was what might be called the age of collectivism. 

 There the state reigned supreme : the individual 

 as such was swallowed up. His time, his prop- 

 erty, his life, belonged in the last instance to the 

 state, which might demand it at any time. The 

 only occupation worthy of a full citizen was that of 

 attending to public affairs. Statecraft and poli- 

 tics, athletics and military exercises, engrossed 

 the chief moments of every Grecian, and left him 

 neither time nor inclination for the pursuit of 

 manual labor. This conception of the state was 

 perhaps carried to an extreme in Sparta, where, 

 as is well known, the meals were eaten in com- 

 mon, the children educated together under the 

 superintendence of the state, and the marriage 

 relation subordinated to considerations of imagined 

 political necessity. 



In Rome the matter was not far different. The 

 economic conditions were for many centuries es- 

 sentially the same as in Greece, and the ideas, 

 even as advanced in the code of Justinian, bear 

 evidence of the incomplete development of eco- 

 nomic theory. Slavery, the low estimation of 

 manual labor, and imperial absolutism, were the 

 distinguishing characteristics of national life ; and 

 under such conditions a science in the modern 

 sense was rendered impossible. The Romans, 

 however, had their physiocratic school, during 

 the empire, in the shape of the agrarian writers, — 

 scriptores de re rusticd, such as Varro, Columella, 

 etc., — who attempted to stem the tide of national 

 decay, and to recall the Romans to a sense of their 

 former strength, by sounding the praises of agri- 

 culture, and by proving the economic as well as 

 moral shortcomings of the system of servile labor. 



2. The growth of the Christian church — the sub- 

 stitution of a great monotheism for the numerous 

 polytheisms of antiquity; the change from the old 

 cults, which were but national religions or conse- 

 crations of the national idea, to the new worship, 

 which was international, not national, and in- 

 tended to embrace all humanity — brought in 

 its train the most cardinal changes. This is, of 

 course, not the place to recount the changes pro- 

 duced in economic relations by the church teach- 

 ings : it will suffice barely to mention the total 

 alteration in the treatment of the poor, the im- 

 provement in the condition of woman, the con- 

 ception of the dignity of labor hand in hand with 

 th<- institution of holidays for the workmen, and 

 the efforts for emancipation of the slaves. The 

 patristic authors even went so far as to preach 

 practical communism, although their object, far 

 from being that of inciting the rabble to resist- 

 ance, or of sowing the seeds of discord, was simply 

 to recall the wealthy to a sense of their own obli- 

 gations, to preach the gospel of fraternal love and 



charity, to remove some of the hideous moral 

 enormities with which the later imperial civiliza- 

 tion was honeycombed. 



But it was not until the scholastic age that any 

 distinctive economic doctrines were formulated. 

 The increase of industry and commerce in the 

 eleventh and twelfth centuries, the rise of the 

 municipalities and the growth of the town-guilds, 

 craft as well as merchant, lent an increased im- 

 petus to the consideration of economic topics, — 

 an impetus still further strengthened by the dis- 

 covery and annotation of Aristotle's 1 Politics and 

 economics.' The subject of money, for instance, 

 received a careful treatment, and the so-called 

 Gresham's law was as well known to the authors 

 of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as it is 

 to-day. The two great doctrines, however, that 

 dominated all mediaeval economy, were those of 

 usury and of reasonable price. The prohibition 

 of interest was founded, not on Aristotle's plea 

 that money was barren, nor even, except at the 

 very first, on the injunction of St. Luke, Mutuum 

 date, nihil inde sperantes, but on a complicated and 

 artificial legal distinction, drawn from the Roman 

 law. The theologians based themselves on the 

 glossators and legists, and the wordy strife about 

 ' fungible ' and ' consumptible ' things continued 

 for several centuries, until finally settled by 

 Salmasius, Turgot, and Bentham. But the doc- 

 trine influenced all mediaeval speculation : it was 

 applied not only to loans, but to transactions of all 

 kinds ; it was the pivot about which the theories 

 of price, of exchange, of banking, and of trade, 

 swung ; and an acquaintance with its provisions 

 is indispensable to a correct comprehension of 

 mediaeval economic life. 



Of still greater importance, however, was the doc- 

 trine of justum pretium (' reasonable price ') as ex- 

 pressed in the writings, and exemplified in actual 

 life. The middle ages were a period of customary, 

 not of competitive prices ; and the idea of per- 

 mitting agreements to be decided by the individ- 

 ual preferences of vender or purchaser was 

 absolutely foreign to the jurisprudence of the 

 times. The ' higgling of the market ' was an im- 

 possibility simply because the laws of the market 

 were not left to the free arbitrament of the con- 

 tracting parties. Under the supposition that the 

 interests of the whole community would be best 

 subserved by avoiding the dangers of an unrestrict- 

 ed competition, the government interfered to ordain 

 periodical enactments of customary or reasonable 

 prices — reasonable, that is, for both producer and 

 consumer. Tabulated tariffs and official regula- 

 tions of all things, from beer to wages, filled 

 the statute-books ; and it would have seemed pre- 

 posterous for the producer to ask as much as he 



