ems--I mean the causes which led the nation to
abandon in a couple of generations the whole of its traditions and to
adopt, not spontaneously but at the bidding of a comparatively small
body of wealthy men, a new scheme of society. But it is of value to
consider the economic aspect of the thing, and to show what it was
that Henry desired to seize when his policy of Dissolution was
secretly formed.

The economic function of the monastic system in the Middle Ages, and
especially in the later Middle Ages, is one to which no sufficient
attention has been given by historians.

They collected, as does no modern agency, wealth from very various
sources, scattered up and down the whole of the kingdom, and often
farther afield, throughout Europe, and exercised the whole economic
power so drawn together in one centre, and so founded a permanent
nucleus of wealth in the place where the community resided.

We are indeed to-day accustomed to a similar effect in the action of
our wealthy families. The rents of the London poor, a toll upon the
produce of Egypt, of the Argentine, or of India, all flow into some
country house in the provinces, where it revives in an effective
demand for production, or lends to the whole countryside a wealth
which, of itself, it could never have produced. The neighbourhood of
Aylesbury, the palaces of the larger territorials, are modern examples
of this truth, that the economic power of a district does not reside
in its productive capacity, but in its capacity for effective demand.
And it is undoubtedly true that if there were anything permanent in
modern society we should be witnessing in the wealthier quarters of
Paris and London, in the Riviera in the holiday part of Egypt, and in
certain centres of provincial luxury in England, in France, and in
Western Germany, the foundation of a permanent economic superiority.

But nothing in modern society has any roots. Where to-day is some one
of these great territorial houses in fifty years there may be nothing
but decay. Fashion may change from the Riviera to some other part of
the Mediterranean littoral, and with fashion will go the concentration
of wealth which accompanies it.

In the Middle, and especially in the latter Middle, Ages it was
otherwise. The great religious houses not only tended to accumulate
wealth and to perpetuate it in the same hands (they could not gamble
it away nor disperse it in luxury; they could hardly waste it by
mismanagemen