that there was an
exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were
not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic. But it
is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is
curiously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance,
and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash of
different national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world,
sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns,
each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linked
together by unity of culture and unity of faith. It had a single mind,
and many pockets. We have a single pocket, and many minds. That is why
the wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into the
Middle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the golden
age of international finance.

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable,
for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very
inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless
to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy a
craving of the mind. An uncritical mediaevalism is the child of
ignorance of the Middle Ages. Sick of vaunting national cultures, we may
recur to an age in which they had not yet been born--the age of a single
and international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that the
strength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness. They were on a low
stage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were on
a low stage of economic development that they found it so easy to
believe in the unity of civilization. Unity of a sort is easy when there
are few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higher
thing, when it is a synthesis of many different elements. The Middle
Ages had not attained a national economy: their economy was at the best
municipal, and for the most part only parochial. A national economy has
a higher economic value than a municipal or parochial economy, because
it means the production of a greater number of utilities at a less cost,
and a richer and fuller life of the mind, with more varied activities
and more intricate connexions. A national economy could only develop
along with--perhaps we may say it could only develop through--a national
system of politics; and the national State, which is with us to-day, and
with