, nor are they
even the most decisive. Political and material conditions fix the limits
at which speculation can do either good or harm. Let us take an
illustration of the impotence of moral ideas to override material
circumstances; and we shall venture to place this illustration somewhat
fully before the reader.

There is no more important distinction between modern civilised
communities and the ancient communities than the fact that the latter
rested on Slavery, while the former have abolished it. Hence there can
hardly be a more interesting question than this--by what agencies so
prodigious a transformation of one of the fundamental conditions of
society was brought about. The popular answer is of a very ready kind,
and it passes quite satisfactorily. This answer is that the first great
step towards free labour, the transformation of personal slavery into
serfdom, was the result of the spiritual change which was wrought in
men's minds by the teaching of the Church. It is unquestionable that the
influence of the Church tended to mitigate the evils of slavery, to
humanise the relations between master and slave, between the lord and
the serf. But this is a very different thing from the radical
transformation of those relations. If we think of society as an
organism we instantly understand that so immense a change as this could
not possibly have been effected without the co-operation of the other
great parts of the social system, any more than a critical evolution
could take place in the nutritive apparatus of an animal, without a
change in the whole series of its organs. Thus in order that serfage
should be evolved from slavery, and free labour again from serfage, it
could not be enough that an alteration should have been wrought in men's
ideas as to their common brotherhood, and the connected ideas as to the
lawfulness or unlawfulness of certain human relations. There must have
been an alteration also of the economic and material conditions. History
confirms the expectations which we should thus have been led to
entertain. The impotence of spiritual and moral agencies alone in
bringing about this great metamorphosis, is shown by such facts as
these. For centuries after the new faith had consolidated itself,
slavery was regarded without a particle of that deep abhorrence which
the possession of man by man excites in us now. In the ninth and tenth
centuries the slave trade was the most profitable branch of the
commerce