somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into the hands of a
number of men. Washington carried it during the hopeless days of Valley
Forge. It was the only defence of Gordon, when he had refused to desert
the people who had been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his
death in the besieged fortress of Khartoum.

And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in
winning the Great War.

POPE vs. EMPEROR

THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND HOW IT
LED TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN THE POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS

IT is very difficult to understand the people of by-gone ages. Your own
grandfather, whom you see every day, is a mysterious being who lives in
a different world of ideas and clothes and manners. I am now telling you
the story of some of your grandfathers who are twenty-five generations
removed, and I do not expect you to catch the meaning of what I write
without re-reading this chapter a number of times.

The average man of the Middle Ages lived a very simple and uneventful
life. Even if he was a free citizen, able to come and go at will, he
rarely left his own neighbourhood. There were no printed books and only
a few manuscripts. Here and there, a small band of industrious monks
taught reading and writing and some arithmetic. But science and history
and geography lay buried beneath the ruins of Greece and Rome.

Whatever people knew about the past they had learned by listening to
stories and legends. Such information, which goes from father to son, is
often slightly incorrect in details, but it will preserve the main
facts of history with astonishing accuracy. After more than two thousand
years, the mothers of India still frighten their naughty children by
telling them that "Iskander will get them," and Iskander is none other
than Alexander the Great, who visited India in the year 330 before the
birth of Christ, but whose story has lived through all these ages.

The people of the early Middle Ages never saw a textbook of Roman
history. They were ignorant of many things which every school-boy to-day
knows before he has entered the third grade. But the Roman Empire, which
is merely a name to you, was to them something very much alive. They
felt it. They willingly recognised the Pope as their spiritual
leader because he lived in Rome and represented the idea of the Roman
super-power. And they were profoundly grateful when Charlemagne, a