Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 227

should supply the objects and zest of the chase.” ?

Within the exclusive circle this attitude of the members to the outside world was repeated and reproduced, in the relation of society itself to that fundamental institution which underlay the whole fabric of its life ; namely, the institution of slaveryin which, in the searching words already used, the central figure was a being to whom society stood absolved from every moral obligation of humanity, and in whom all the deepest degradations were lawful, provided they were commanded by a master.

Now, as we watch the conflict of the new system of belief with the institution of slavery, it has to be noticed here also how partial and incomplete are the still surviving explanations of the change which begins to take place, that attribute the transition principally to the altered economic conditions of the world, or to the growth of humanitarian feeling. The change in the economic conditions in Western Europe, as the slave system became merged in the colonate and serf system,” was of course far-reaching in its effects. But a brief reflection will enable the mind, when it has grasped the character of the evolutionary process as a whole, to see that the economic change, in itself, involved no new principle that could have carried the world a step beyond the ruling conditions of the past under which slavery had been a universal institution. The economic conditions were at most only secondary causes related, in the last resort, to the deeper governing principles of society. Similarly, it was not the influence simply of humani-

1 The Beginning of the Middle Ages, R. W. Church, p- 26. * Cf. History of the Later Roman Empire, by J. B. Bury, vol. I. iv. iii.