sum of God's purpose in arranging the occupations
of men. Yet into this trinity the _bourgeois_ had intruded his unwelcome
presence. The secret of his rise was the skill of his hand to fashion
material things, and his practical intelligence to care for them.
Neither personal service nor personal prowess was the source of his
power. Untouched by the principle of homage or of _noblesse oblige_, he
commanded, or was himself commanded, through the medium of material
values. He put money in his purse because it was the measure of his
independence, the symbol of his worth; and he kept it there, guarding it
as the priest guarded his faith or the noble his honor. Long occupation
with the concrete world of affairs had given his mind a peculiar
quality; his intelligence was direct and firm, his thinking clear and
dry, without atmosphere, unrelieved by poetic imagination or the play of
fancy.

Set apart by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little
in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common
with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his
wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent,
too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church;
little with the peasant who renounced him as a renegade or ignored him
as a _parvenu_. All these benefits the _bourgeois_ returned in full
measure, despising the peasant for his ignorance and servility resenting
the inquisitiveness of the clergy and the condescension of the nobility,
at the same time that he aspired to the power of the one and the
superior position of the other. And from the outside world the
_bourgeois_ had secured a measure of protection. With his money he had
purchased corporate independence and enfranchisement from feudal
obligation. The gild, at once an industrial enterprise, a religious
association, and a charitable foundation, bound him to his fellows and
rounded out his life.

At the close of the fifteenth century many circumstances had contributed
to identify the interests of the small country gentry with those of the
moderately well-to-do townsman, and to set them both in opposition to
the higher nobility and the wealthier merchants and promoters. The
control of trade was passing from the master merchant to the
capitalist, from the city to the state. Powerful financial monopolists
like the Fuggers and the Welsers, in alliance with the territorial
prince or