it is a synthesis of many different elements.  The Middle Ages had not attained a national economy:  their economy was at the best municipal, and for the most part only parochial.  A national economy has a higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, because it means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost, and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activities and more intricate connexions.  A national economy could only develop along with—­perhaps we may say it could only develop through—­a national system of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, and with some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary condition of economic progress.  With the coming of the national State the facile internationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economics and politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit, hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and national religions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were duly born.  But a national economy, a national State, a national Church were all things unknown to the Middle Ages.  Its economy was a village economy:  its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by a universal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with a universal Church the only possible culture was necessarily international); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixt and between—­sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew to himself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose in Israel; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international.

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the point in question.  Here again we may trace the same isolation and the same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics.  There was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle Ages.  One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family.  Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages.  Just as there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets.  But here again isolation was compatible with uniformity.  There were perhaps only two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers.  First there was Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the Church, the language of learning.  Scholars used the same language in Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity.  Besides Latin the only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance.  To Dante, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, Romance was still one idioma—­even