The New Review February 1937

Thus the society of antiquity came to consist of two strata the one of citizens owning the means of production and sharing in the government of the State the other of the slaves dispossessed of those means and compelled by positive law to forced labour. [...] Though the full programme of the reformers could not be carried out owing to the oppostion of the vested interests of the territorial churches the Investiture question brought to the fore new principles and ideals which transmuted the whole character of western civilization.110 THE NEW REVIEW the Frankish kingdom and similar triumphs marked their activities in Anglo-Saxon England. [...] Scholasticism based its central doctrine on the idea of God as the source of all things and on the principle that everything in nature by its very essence orientates towards the source of its being—a principle which sufficiently explains the universality of medieval institutions from the Papal monarchy and the Roman Empire down to the coperation of the medieval burghers in the communes of the [...] Writing in the twelfth century John of Salisbury said wisely : The difference between the prince and the tyrant lies above all in this that the prince rules in accordance with the law while the tyrant violates and destroys it and the law which the prince obeys is not an arbitrary rule either of himself or of the community but the reflection of the law of God whose justice is equity'. [...] In the middle of the thirteenth century the bishops in England organized such loans with the approval of the Pope and two centuries later the Franciscans led the movement for the creation of Monts de Piete which starting in Italy quickly spread to the other countries of the Continent and supplied a topic for frequent comment and eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.