It would be easy to maintain that the organic idea was more potent, both under medieval feudalism and under nineteenth-century industrialism, than it is now.  In former days, economic and social equality were not even aimed at, because it was thought inevitable that in a social organism there must be subordination and a hierarchy of functions.  Essentially, and in the sight of God, all are equal, or, rather, the essential differences between man and man are absolutely independent of social status.  In a few years Lazarus may be in heaven and Dives in hell.  Beside this equality of moral opportunity and tremendous inequality in self-chosen destiny, the status of master and servant seemed of small importance; it was a temporary and trivial accident.  Accordingly, in feudal times, as to-day in really Catholic communities, feelings of injustice and social bitterness were seldom aroused and class differences take on a more genial colour.  In spite of the lawlessness and brutality of the Middle Ages it is probable that men were happier then than they are now.

The French Revolution, which was a disintegrating solvent, pulverised society, and was impotent to reconstruct it.  Yet under the industrial regime which followed it in this country, the nation was conscious of its unity.  The system was the best that could have been devised for increasing the population and aggregate wealth of the country; and even those who suffered most under it were not without pride in its results.  The ill-paid workman of the last century would have thought it a poor thing to do a deliberately bad day’s work.

I am not praising either the age of feudalism or the ‘hungry forties’ of the nineteenth century.  In the latter case especially the sacrifice exacted from the poor was too great for the rather vulgar success of which it was the condition.  But to call that age the period of individualism, and our own generation the period of socialism, is in my opinion a profound mistake.  In Germany, too, the real socialists are not the ‘Spartacist’ scoundrels who have betrayed and ruined their country, but the bureaucracy with their Deutschland ueber Alles.  If I were a little more of a socialist, I could almost admire them, in spite of all their crimes.

The landed gentry (and in honesty I must add the endowed clergy) are a survival of feudalism, as the capitalist is a survival of industrialism.  Both have to a large extent survived their functions.  The mailclad baron, round whose fortified castle the peasants and others gathered for protection, has become the country gentleman, against whom the indictment is not so much that his only pursuit is pleasure, as that his only pleasure is pursuit.  ’The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’ were intelligible while the rich man protected the poor man from being plundered and killed by marauders; but in our times nobody wants a castle or to live under the shadow of a castle.  The clerical profession was a necessity