rain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a
balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a
healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of
imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social
justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that
slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant
proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without
any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant
condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to
what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity.
Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediaeval men busy
upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a
craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced
by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an
earthquake.

Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the
egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term to
measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can
only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life
is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words
which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one
example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian
Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to
such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The
puzzling and truncated monosyllable "Esq." is a pathetic relic of a
remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could
well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above
all things an incomplete and probationary position--the tadpole of
knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assured
position--the status of the owners and rulers of rural England
throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates till
they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire
does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remains on
our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable
hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history, which have
turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a
mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar h