demarcation between German and French towns,’ says a famous Belgian historian, ’just as one cannot distinguish between French and German feudalism.’[16] The historian of the economic and institutional life of the Middle Ages will err unless he proceeds on the assumption of its general uniformity.  But the uniformity of the fief, like that of the manor and the town, was compatible with much isolation.  Each fief was a centre of local life and a home of local custom.  The members of the feudal class lived, for the most part, local and isolated lives.  Fighting, indeed, would bring them together; but when the ‘season’ was over, and the forty days of service were done, life ran back to its old ruts in the manor-hall, and if some of the summer was spent in company, much of the winter was spent in isolation.  On a society of this order—­stable, customary, uniform, with its thousands of isolated centres—­the Church descended with a quickening inspiration and a permeating unity.  Most of us find a large play for our minds to-day in the competition of economics or the struggles of politics.  The life of the mind was opened to the Middle Ages by the hands of the Church.  We may almost say that there was an exact antithesis between those days and these latter days, if it were not that exact antitheses never occur outside the world of logic.  But it is as nearly true as are most antitheses that while our modern world is curiously knit together by the economic bonds of international finance, and yet sadly divided (and never more sadly than to-day) by the clash of different national cultures and different creeds, the mediaeval world, sundered as it was economically into separate manors and separate towns, each leading a self-sufficing life on its own account, was yet linked together by unity of culture and unity of faith.  It had a single mind, and many pockets.  We have a single pocket, and many minds.  That is why the wits of many nowadays will persist in going wool-gathering into the Middle Ages, to find a comfort which they cannot draw from the golden age of international finance.

But retrogression was never yet the way of progress.  It is probable, for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach in order to satisfy a craving of the mind.  An uncritical mediaevalism is the child of ignorance of the Middle Ages.  Sick of vaunting national cultures, we may recur to an age in which they had not yet been born—­the age of a single and international culture; but we must remember, all the same, that the strength of the Middle Ages was rooted in weakness.  They were on a low stage of economic development; and it was precisely because they were on a low stage of economic development that they found it so easy to believe in the unity of civilization.  Unity of a sort is easy when there are few factors to be united; it is more difficult, and it is a higher thing, when