Belongs to a wider range of
economic development.
Nor, it would seem, can the new order be regarded with any greater truth as a development from the [p440] germs of any German tribal or 'mark' system imported in the keels of the English invaders. It would seem to belong to an altogether wider range of economic development than that of one or two races. Its complex roots went deeply back into that older world into which the Teutonic invaders introduced new elements and new life, no doubt, but, it would seem, without destroying the continuity of the main stream of its economic development, or even of the outward forms of its rural economy.
This, from an economic point of view, is the important conclusion to which the facts examined in this essay seem to point. These facts will be examined afresh by other and abler students, and the last word will not soon have been said upon some of them. They are drawn from so wide a field, and from lines reaching back so far, that their interest and bearing upon the matter in hand will not soon be exhausted or settled. But if the conclusion here suggested should in the main be confirmed, what English Economic History loses in simplicity it will gain in breadth. It will cease to be provincial. It will become more closely identified with the general economic evolution of the human race in the past. And this in its turn will give a wider interest to the vast responsibilities of the English-speaking nations in connexion with the progress of the new order of things and the solution of the great economic problems of the future.
The communism of the old order a thing of the past,
What are the forces which have produced, and are producing, the evolution of the new order, and to what ultimate goal the 'weary Titan' is bearing the 'too full orb of her fate,' are questions of the [p441] highest rank of economic and political importance, but questions upon which not much direct light has been thrown, perhaps, in this essay. Still the knowledge what the community and equality of the English village and of the Keltic tribe really were under the old order may at least dispel any lingering wish or hope that they may ever return. Communistic systems such as these we have examined, which have lasted for 2,000 years, and for the last 1,000 years at least have been gradually wearing themselves out, are hardly likely—either of them—to be the economic goal of the future.
like the open-field system.
The reader of this essay may perhaps contemplate the few remaining balks and linces of our English common fields, and the surviving examples of the 'run-rig' system in Ireland and Scotland, with greater interest than before, but it will be as historical survivals, not of types likely to be reproduced in the future, but of economic stages for ever past.
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[Contents.]
[Appendix].