structive philosophy. Other books are All Things Considered, What's Wrong with the World, and Alarms and Discursions. He has written a defense of "penny dreadfuls," and his own very original detective stories are not the least amazing products of his pen. His two essays in fiction, The Man Who was Thursday, which he called a nightmare, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, are topsy-turvy novels permeated with the characteristic wit of G. K. C.

GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON

Dickinson deserves high praise for a distinguished style and an unusually fine critical quality. The Greek View of Life penetrates in a marvellous manner into the Greek spirit. Letters of a Chinese Official is a trenchant criticism of English society in the fashion of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World and Montesquieu's Lettres Persannes. His most perfect work of art, however, is A Modern Symposium, in which the Liberal, the Conservative, the Socialist, the Anarchist, the Man of Business, the Poet, the Humanist, the Quaker, and others give their points of view in a manner that makes this little book one of the most distinguished bits of modern prose.

Other essayists of distinction are HILAIRE BELLOC, a man of French birth and a representative of modern Catholic thought, HAVELOCK ELLIS, the distinguished psychologist and a thoughtful writer upon modern life, and A. C. BENSON, author of Upton Letters, and From a College Window, the reflections of a master in one of the great English public schools.

APPENDIX I

MEDIEVAL SOCIETY

TH

FEUDALISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

HE Middle Ages, in building its central social structure, the feudal system, combined the relation of the Roman patron to his client with the German organization of chief and warriors. The first of these involved the position of the Roman father as head of a family and his relation to its immediate members and the host of dependents upon his favor; the second is the comitatus which Tacitus observed in his travels among the barbarian hordes beyond the Rhine. As the new system developed on the Continent of Europe, it became a system of political organization based on the holding of land in feus or fiefs for which military service was paid in compensation. In default of such service, the superior lord could reclaim the land. He might be either the sovereign or some subject who held of the sovereign. According to the pure feudal system, the lord was entitled to the fealty of his tenants but not that of his sub-tenants, every man looking only to his immediate lord for the discharge of his feudal duties. This peculiarity made the great lords on the Continent practically independent of their nominal sovereigns, who could command their allegiance only through force; and therefore kings were often powerless before their vassals, who in turn possessed absolute con

trol over their tenants. The first of these facts gave rise to the great feudal wars in France and Germany, and the second was one of the direct causes of the French Revolution, for as monarchy grew and the great lords lost their influence in the state they tended to exercise their tyrannical power over their tenants, often exacting from them the last ounce of taxation. French feudalism was abolished only by the Revolution in 1789.

William the Conqueror, however, avoided these extremes, neither creating any great fiefs to become dangerous to the Crown nor permitting any exclusive adminstrative control over them but requiring every holder of land to render allegiance first of all to the king. This system developed out of the simpler AngloSaxon custom of a strong tie binding lord and vassal with a pride in service toward the liege lord. This practical spirit, which has ever since been one of the essential qualities of the English public character, showed itself very early. William surveyed the whole of England and embodied a record of the great estates in the famous Domesday Book. As time passed, under William and especially under his great successor Henry II, English common law, consisting of a large body of statutes and precedents, grew into shape, and courts of justice were organized to become the bulwark of English liberties.

Gradually the sovereign arrogated to himself more power and abused the privileges he already possessed. On the 15th of June, 1215, King John was compelled by the great barons of the realm to sign the Great Charter (Magna Carta), by which certain rights were forever granted to the people of England. From among the Nobles and Clergy was appointed a Council of the Realm, which, though representing but the great feudal barons,

may truthfully be said to mark the beginning of parliamentary government in England. A careful distinction. however, needs to be made between this forcing of a king's hand in the interest of the feudal aristocracy and the rise of democracy. It was not until the nineteenth century, after the French Revolution had spread the teaching of the "Enlightenment" throughout Europe, that any thought likely to have practical results in behalf of the common people, the Third Estate, entered the minds of men. Magna Carta, however, was a very real advance in establishing the basis for dispensing justice to all freemen. Justice, free and unbought, became the inalienable right of every freeman, punishments were made proportionate to the offense, and no man could be punished without a fair trial. Of course many abuses of the rights of Englishmen grew up in the course of time, but here at least these rights received definite statement as fundamental in any conception of a free state.

Social life was built around the ancient Anglo-Saxon village, with its stockade and its common land. The manor-house, where the lord or the squire resided, became the center of this life. About the house of the squire or franklin were grouped the manor-farms and homesteads of the laborers, and in this place justice was dispensed and taxes levied and collected. Abuses inevitably crept in, and the distinctions between gentlemen and villeins deepened, the latter falling almost into the position of serfs. The Black Death in 1348 and the subsequent labor troubles led in 1381 to the terrible Peasants' Revolt. The reflection of this event in Piers Plowman and in Chaucer and Gower proves the grave impression it made at the time.

Life in the cities developed somewhat differently. The