dities at a level price, and
in a spirit of collectivism endeavoured to prevent the making of corners
and the practice of undercutting. Governments refused to recognize the
'laws' of demand and supply, and sought, by Statutes of Labourers, to
force masters to give, and workman to receive, no more and no less than
a 'just' and proper wage.

It was not only by the regulation of trade and commerce that the Church
sought to penetrate the life of the towns. The friars made their homes
in the towns in the thirteenth century; and the activity of the
friars--Franciscan and Dominican, Austin and Carmelite--enabled the
Church to exercise an influence on municipal life no less far-reaching
than that which she sought to exert on the feudal classes. Towns became
trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders
of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to
attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits
of lay life. A mediaeval town--with its trade and commerce regulated,
however imperfectly, by Christian principle; with its town council
acting as trustee for religious orders; and with its members attached as
Tertiaries to those orders--might be regarded as something of a type of
Christian society; and St. Thomas, partly under the influence of these
conditions, if partly also under the influence of the Aristotelian
philosophy of the [Greek: polis], is led to find in the life of the town
the closest approach to the ethics of Christianity.

The control of learning and education by the Church is the most peculiar
and essential aspect of her activity. The control of war and peace was a
matter of guiding the estate of the baronage; the control of trade and
commerce was a way of directing the estate of the commons; but the
control of learning and education was nothing more nor less than the
Church's guidance of herself and her direction of her own estate.
_Studium_ may be distinguished from _sacerdotium_ by mediaeval writers;
but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the
curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All
knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of
knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle,
and for the same object--_ad maiorem Dei gloriam_. Here, as elsewhere,
the penetrating and assimilative genius of the Church moulded and
informed a matter which was not, in its