s, our
aeroplane, our postal arrangements, and our railways. But this is just
one of those superficial notions that are not confirmed by history. We
are similarly apt to think that there was no age in which travel was
so widespread and formed so great a part of the education of mankind
as at present. There could be no greater mistake. The true age of
travelling was the close of the Middle Ages, or what is known as the
Renaissance period. The man of learning, then just differentiated from
the ecclesiastic, spent the greater part of his life in earning his
intellectual wares from Court to Court and from University to
University, just as the merchant personally carried his goods from
city to city in an age in which commercial correspondence,
bill-brokers, and the varied forms of modern business were but in
embryo. It was then that travel really meant education, the
acquirement of thorough and intimate knowledge of diverse manners and
customs. Travel was then not a pastime, but a serious element in life.

In the same way the spread of a political or social movement was at
least as rapid then as now, and far more penetrating. The methods
were, of course, vastly different from the present; but the human
material to be dealt with was far easier to mould, and kept its shape
much more readily when moulded, than is the case nowadays. The
appearance of a religious or political teacher in a village or small
town of the Middle Ages was an event which keenly excited the interest
of the inhabitants. It struck across the path of their daily life,
leaving behind it a track hardly conceivable to-day. For one of the
salient symptoms of the change which has taken place since that time
is the disappearance of local centres of activity and the transference
of the intensity of life to a few large towns. In the Middle Ages
every town, small no less than large, was a more or less
self-sufficing organism, intellectually and industrially, and was not
essentially dependent on the outside world for its social sustenance.
This was especially the case in Central Europe, where communication
was much more imperfect and dangerous than in Italy, France, or
England. In a society without newspapers, without easy communication
with the rest of the world, where the vast majority could neither read
nor write, where books were rare and costly, and accessible only to
the privileged few, a new idea bursting upon one of these communities
was eagerly welcomed, di