th

mere

and

cal agitation, and his explanation of the Protestant Reformation as a capitalistic conspiracy gave him a vogue in diverse quarters which is not by any means exhausted. It created a popular atmosphere that was sympathetic alike to Catholic revival and to Socialist revolution, and it accounts for much of Mr. Chesterton's history. Better historians succumbed to the lure of a legendary past, and decked out reforming propaganda with pictures of an earlier and a better age. The politics of Freeman were practically a plea for a reversion to an Anglo-Saxondom which he painted in glowing colors; and his history contributed not a little to that restoration of local government which was effected toward the end of the nineteenth century.

tarians invented a mythical Magna Carta, and when trying to harness the Crown protested that they were merely demanding that justice which John had sworn not to deny, delay, or sell. Most of us still believe in those mediæval legends of liberty which Coke and his fellows invented as weapons against the Stuarts; and every fresh movement for reform adds to the stock of historical fiction. The eighteenth century was more philosophical than the seventeenth, and its legends took a wider sweep than national law and history. It revived and expanded the classical notions of nature and fell back on the Rights of Man. The age of reason rejected the dogmas of the divines, but the rights of man were as original to the philosopher as sin had been to the theologian. Man was born free, not as an individual, but as a genus; and if everywhere he was in chains, the fault was not Satan's or the people's, but that of the kings and priests who had corrupted a perfect human nature. The first expression of self-conscious democracy is the hunt for a scapegoat for the sins of which it has inherited the consequences.

But Revolution proved no more a panacea than the Reformation; and restoration and reaction came in with a more logical plea for reversion. The Middle Ages had receded into a distance which lent enchantment to the view, and a little Romanticism might portray them as a golden age. Knowledge of them was not more popular or more exact than the Reformers' acquaintance with primitive Christianity or Rousseau's with the noble savage of prehistoric Nature; but men were as urgent as ever to escape from the ills they knew, and the easiest way was retreat to the past of which they were ignorant. ignorant. Cobbett curiously blended this Romanticism with politi

The latest of these reactions to a golden age is the movement for what is called guild socialism, the invention, it is said, of Mr. Arthur Penty, whose Interpretation of History lies before us.* Its spiritual affinities are obvious:

A frank acceptance [he writes] of the principle of reversion would enable us to arrive at the new social order by means of orderly progression. the danger is that a popular though unconscious movement back to Mediævalism may be frustrated by intellectuals whose eyes are turned in the opposite direction. The average man to-day in his conscious intelligence will subscribe to modernism in some degree, but his in stinctive actions are always in the direction of a return to Medievalism. This fact is illustrated by the arrival of the trade union movment, which was well described by Mr. Chesterton as 'a return to the past by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man who has lost his memory.' The circumstance that the Guild Propaganda finds such ready support among trade unionists is not due to the economic theories associated with it. Such could not be the case, for not one person in a thousand understands economics. The Guild idea is successful because it is in harmony with the popular psychology. . . . And so in respect to all of our

* A Guildsman's Interpretation of History. By Arthur J. Penty, author of The Restoration of the Guild System, Old Worlds for New, Guilds and the Social Crisis. (Allen and Unwin, 12s. 6d. net.)

Mr. Penty's queries about democracy and land nationalization are clear enough indications of the nature of his history, which commends itself to the majority of his readers for the reason by which he frankly explains their acceptance of his economics. They know as little of the one as of the other, but both are 'in harmony with popular psychology,' with that instinctive tendency toward reversion on which Mr. Penty, in his distrust of the 'intellectuals,' relies. This reliance upon the idols of the tribe is not surprising, but Mr. Penty can hardly expect modern intellectuals to view with equal equanimity his appeals to reversionary instincts. There was too much reversion to original type during the late war; and Mr. Penty himself explains that religious persecution in the Middle Ages was, like lynch law, rather 'due to the fanatical outbursts of an over-zealous populace' than 'to ecclesiastical authority.' But why should he, while relying on 'popular psychology' to accept his history and adopt his economics, object to it when it leads to the persecution of pacifist objectors? The State, to which Mr. Penty feels so great a repugnance, would no doubt in any case save him from Frankenstein's quandary; otherwise he might find himself in the position of having evoked in 'popular psychology' a force which he could not control, and the instinct toward reversion might refuse to stop at Mr. Penty's cherished but comparatively civilized Middle Ages.

This book is not, however, an exposition of Mr. Penty's gilded dreams.

He has exhibited in earlier volumes his mediæval paradise of a 'guild-system,' partly based, like Mr. Chesterton's history, on the exploded theories of Thorold Rogers and Brentano, but mainly evolved out of his own antipathy to modern social conditions and desire to find a haven in some antithesis. It has been shown often enough that there is no more evidence for the existence of the medieval state of society of which Mr. Penty dreams than there is for the Garden of Eden, or Rousseau's idyllic state of nature. Nor does he here seek to substantiate it. This 'interpretation of history' is rather a discursive attempt to support the particular attack by diversions over almost the whole field of history, law, and economics, and the keynote is the complaint of a 'conspiracy against Mediævalism' and of 'the horrible nightmare conjured up by lying historians, interested in painting the past as black as possible, in order to make modern conditions appear tolerable by comparison.' The chief villains of the piece are the Roman Law and the Protestant Reformation, though, if Mr. Penty had pursued his researches a little farther, he might have discovered a third and a more effective miscreant in the Renaissance.

It is a familiar part for the Protestant Reformation; was not Cobbett's History burned, according to Mr. Penty, by the public hangman 'because it was more than a history because it exposed a conspiracy'? But the Roman Law is newer to the stage, introduced apparently by Mr. Ramiro de Maeztu. Maitland has taught us that the significant feature of English legal history is the successful resistance of English to Roman law; but Mr. Penty, ignoring Maitland's book on the subject, knows better, and sets out to challenge the opinion of. the legal profession that

The main thing about Paradise is of course the general idea, and precision is a mistake. To attempt to locate historically this communal heaven of the Middle Ages would be as futile as to send a column from Mosul to survey the Garden of Eden; and Mr. Penty wisely eschews the task. He does not define the phrases which flow so readily from his pen. He is apparently under the impression that a medieval commune was a guild, and a craft-guild too; and is unaware that any body of men might call themselves a commune, even the select few who composed a shire-court and the still more eclectic body of barons who substituted an oligarchy for the rule of Henry III. He does not know that canon law was Roman law, and says that of course the people would in those days have the Church on their side' (p. 51), omitting from his account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 the fact that their chief victim was an archbishop who had imprisoned their leader, and from his notice of the German revolt of 1524-5 the circumstance that abbey lands were the scenes of

the bitterest discontent. Similarly he is under the impression that the capitalists of the sixteenth century were all Protestants, and describes the majority of the Marian martyrs as 'the scoundrels who had plundered the monasteries,' although Mary's Parliament itself had specially protected these spoliators, and not one of them was burned.

To do Mr. Penty justice he does not call this history, but 'a guildsman's interpretation of history'; and it has. no more relevance to history than a guildsman's interpretation of anatomy or astronomy would have to those two sciences. It has been said that, if Hobbes had been told that his account of the Social Contract was not history, he would have retorted that the criticism was irrelevant; and Mr. Penty is entitled to the same defense. History is not his concern any more than it was Hobbes's or Rousseau's. Like them, he is not writing history, but inventing a panacea and recommending it on the ground that it is not new. The fact that they are not history is no more fatal to his books than it is to other political speculations; and they may convince his followers as completely as Rousseau did the Jacobins. The practical moral is that the provision of historical training and research for those who can influence and exercise votes is not so much a matter of indifference to the community as is commonly supposed. Both the French and the Russian revolutions broke out because there was little historical sense in the governments or the communities of either country; and while