e is not great (which is the
case with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to transport
itself out of this nineteenth century which we know so thoroughly, and
which has trained us in all our present habits and modes of thought,
into the fifteenth, four hundred years back in time, and worlds apart
in every custom and action of life. What is there indeed the same in
the two ages? Nothing but the man and the woman, the living agents in
spheres so different; nothing but love and grief, the affections and
the sufferings by which humanity is ruled and of which it is capable.
Everything else is changed: the customs of life, and its methods, and
even its motives, the ruling principles of its continuance. Peace and
mutual consideration, the policy which even in its selfish developments
is so far good that it enables men to live together, making existence
possible,--scarcely existed in those days. The highest ideal was that of
war, war no doubt sometimes for good ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge
injuries, to make crooked things straight--but yet always war, implying
a state of affairs in which the last thing that men thought of was
the golden rule, and the highest attainment to be looked for was the
position of a protector, doer of justice, deliverer of the oppressed.
Our aim now that no one should be oppressed, that every man should
have justice as by the order of nature, was a thing unthought of. What
individual help did feebly for the sufferer then, the laws do for us
now, without fear or favour: which is a much greater thing to say
than that the organisation of modern life, the mechanical helps, the
comforts, the easements of the modern world, had no existence in those
days. We are often told that the poorest peasant in our own time has
aids to existence that had not been dreamt of for princes in the Middle
Ages. Thirty years ago the world was mostly of opinion that the balance
was entirely on our side, and that in everything we were so much better
off than our fathers, that comparison was impossible. Since then there
have been many revolutions of opinion, and we think it is now the
general conclusion of wise men, that one period has little to boast
itself of against another, that one form of civilisation replaces
another without improving upon it, at least to the extent which appears
on the surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace, interrupted
only by occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain lar