But tides move slowly and by gradual inches. It needed two centuries more before the conditions in which the modern State could flourish had been fully and finally established. Economic conditions had to change—a process always gradual and slow; and a national economy based on money had to replace the old local economy based on kind. Languages had to be formed, and local dialects had to be transformed into national and literary forms, before national States could find the means of utterance. The revival of learning had to challenge the old clerical structure of knowledge, and to set free the progress of secular science, before the minds of men could be readily receptive of new forms of social structure and new modes of human activity. But by 1500 the work of preparation had been largely accomplished. The progress of discovery had enlarged the world immeasurably. The addition of America to the map had spiritual effects which it is difficult to estimate in any proper terms. If the old world of the Mediterranean regions could be thought into a unity, it was more difficult to reduce to the One the new world which swam into men's ken. Still more burdened with fate for the future generations was the vast volume of commerce, necessarily conducted on a national basis, which the age of discoveries went to swell. Meanwhile, men had begun to think and to write in national languages. Already by the reign of Richard II the dialect of the East Midlands, which was spoken in the capital and the universities, had become a literary language in which Chaucer and Wyclif had spoken to all the nation. Still earlier had come the development of Italian, and a little more than a century after the days of Wyclif, Luther was to give to Germany a common speech and a common Bible. It was little wonder that in such times the old unity of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages shivered into fragments, or that, side by side with a national language, there developed—at any rate in England and in Germany—a national Church. The unity of a common Roman Church and a common Romance culture was gone. Cuius regio eius religio. To each region its religion; and to each nation, we may add, its national culture. The Renaissance may have begun as a cosmopolitan movement, and have found in Erasmus a cosmopolitan representative. It ended in national literatures; and a hundred years after Erasmus, Shakespeare was writing in England, Ariosto in Italy, and Lope de Vega in Spain.
In the sixteenth century the State was active and doing after its kind. It was engaged in war. France was fighting Spain: England was seeking to maintain the balance: Turkey was engaged in the struggle. It is a world with which we are familiar—a world of national languages, national religions, national cultures, national wars, with the national State behind all, upholding and sustaining every form of national activity. But unity was not entirely dead. Science might still transcend the bounds of nations, and a Grotius or Descartes, a Spinoza or a Leibniz, fill the European stage. Religion, which divided, might also unite; and a common Calvinism might bind together the Magyars of Hungary and the French of Geneva, the Dutchman and the Scot. Leyden in the seventeenth century could serve, as The Hague in the twentieth century may yet serve, if in a different way, for the meeting ground of the nations; it could play the part of an international university, and provide a common centre of medical science and classical culture. But the old unity of the Middle Ages was gone—gone past recall. Between those days and the new days lay a gulf which no voice or language could carry. Much was lost that could never be recovered; and if new gold was added to the currency of the spirit, new alloys were wrought into its substance. It would be a hard thing to find an agreed standard of measurement, which should cast the balance of our gain and loss, or determine whether the new world was a better thing than the old. One will cry that the old world was the home of clericalism and obscurantism; and another will say in his bitterness that the new world is the abode of two other evil spirits—nationalism and commercialism. One thing is perhaps certain. We cannot, as far as human sight can discern, ever hope to reconstruct unity on the old basis of the Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages. Yet need is upon us still—need urgent and importunate—to find some unity of the spirit in which we can all dwell together in peace. Some have hoped for unity in the sphere of economics, and have thought that international finance and commerce would build the foundations of an international polity. Their hopes have had to sleep, and a year of war has shown that 'a synchronized bank-rate and reacting bourses' imply no further unity. Some again may hope for unity in the field of science, and may trust that the collaboration of the nations in the building of the common house of knowledge will lead to co-operation in the building of a greater mansion for the common society of civilized mankind. But nationalism can pervert even knowledge to its own ends, turning anthropology to politics, and chemistry to war. There remains a last hope—the hope of a common ethical unity, which, as moral convictions slowly settle into law, may gradually grow concrete in a common public law of the world. Even this hope can only be modest, but it is perhaps the wisest and the surest of all our hopes. Idem scire is a good thing; but men of all nations may know the same thing, and yet remain strangers one to another. Idem velle idem nolle in re publica, ea demum firma amicitia est. The nations will at last attain firm friendship one with another in the day when a common moral will controls the scope of public things. And when they have attained this friendship, then on a far higher level of economic development and with an improvement by each nation of its talent which is almost entirely new—they will have found again, if in a different medium, something of the unity of mediaeval civilization.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
W.J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History, vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 3; vol. i, pt. 2, ch. 6. Longmans.
Lord Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. Macmillan.
A.J. and R.W. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. W. Blackwood.
H.W.C. Davis, Mediaeval Europe (Home University Library). Williams & Norgate.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition), articles on 'Crusades' and 'Empire'.
J.N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, Appendix I. Longmans.
Bede Jarrett; Socialist Theories in the Middle Ages. T.C. and E.C. Jack.