, an
artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the
modern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of
my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve.
It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed from
the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild
System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with
the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social
institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent
rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional
countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by
the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that
stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some
power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.

In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universal
landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be
said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilization was on a wholly
new and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions or
apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a
solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least of
outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised
land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if we
go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. There
had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something
unknown to the august civilization of the Roman Empire--a peasantry. At
the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now
grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the
fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors
as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas
even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it,
no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This
startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the
pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making
new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the
mediaeval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as
anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and