Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal System a different type of society.  A vast hierarchy in Church and State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many gradations to the serf at the bottom.  It was an improvement on the little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and bound them together with common faith and standards.  It prized not the civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience, honor, chivalry.  Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good knight without fear and without reproach.  But a career like his is manifestly possible only to a few.  The agricultural laborer chained to the soil, and the trader—­often the despised Jew confined to the Ghetto—­had no part in the life of chivalry.  Outside of Christendom the Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than converted.

Under the revival of classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed, and the commercial order took its place.  Its cherished virtues are initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence.  As its beau ideal it substitutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man.  It sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable circumstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were accessible to practically every white inhabitant.  The Comte de Segur, one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of Independence, wrote:  “An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and the airs of our young men of fashion—­who has compared the luxury of our upper classes with the coarse dress of our peasants and the rags of our innumerable poor,—­is surprised on reaching the United States, by the entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery.  All Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material.  Their free and frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own rights and respected those of others.”  But under other conditions its ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks capital, or to the man with so large an assured income that he desires no more.  It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society—­those so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and those so lightened that they do not feel them.  It looks upon the so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials needed for its factories—­its rubber, ivory, jute,—­or engage cheap labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products.  It has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government agents, and the exported vices of civilization.