ch. xvi. 5.

[63] End of Book I of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_.

[64] Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Age_, pp. 8 and 10.

[65] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, Part I, p. 73.

[66] _Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier_, ii. 276.

VIII

PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY

A. E. ZIMMERN

In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common
life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man
over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer
realization of the ultimate ideal of government--the ordering of the
world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from
this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of
it--to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We
shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human
society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial
history.

It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial
history _is_ a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a
number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an
increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of
economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or
manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what
stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper
pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he
use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he
use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to
flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our
sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of
human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He
measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as
old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a
hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their
social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of
primitive civilization classify races according to their material
equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning
their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it
is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find
histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man
f