Principles of western civilisation

242 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

struggle to which the essential meaning of the whole period of the Middle Ages is related; a struggle in the development of which the history of every Western country for nearly 500 years becomes scarcely more than a subordinate and contributing chapter.

Now, as soon as the mind, after prolonged study of the development which sets towards the modern world from the Middle Ages, is able to withdraw itself to a position of detachment, from which alone it is possible to get the proper focus to view the outlines of the antinomy in Western history with which we are about to be concerned, there is presented to it a phenomenon the first view of which is likely to take it completely by surprise.

Students of the writings of the late Sir Henry Maine will remember, that almost from the earliest of the works of this jurist down to his latest criticisms of politics, there runs the influence of a conviction often clearly and strongly expressed by him in words; namely, that the modern philosophy of society had not as yet given us the explanation of the difference between the recently developed and rapidly progressing societies of our Western world and that almost stationary social state which he perceived to have been normal to the race throughout the greatest part of its past... The cause of this difference Maine held to be “one of the great secrets which inquiry has yet to penetrate.” *

In an early chapter of the treatise on Anczent Law, in which this subject is first discussed, Maine called attention to the fact that in the history of

1 Cf Ancient Law, pp. 22-24, and Popular Government, p. 170. 2 Ancient Law, p. 23.