_a
priori_ principles. It is his knowledge of the people among whom he had
laboured so long which fits him to speak of the real sufferings of the
poor. But experience requires for its being effectually put to the best
advantage, that it should be wielded by one whose judgment is sober and
careful. Now, St. Antonino was known in his own day as Antonino the
Counsellor; and his justly-balanced decision, his delicately-poised
advice, the straightness of his insight, are noticeable in the masterly
way in which he sums up all the best that earlier and contemporary
writers had devised in the domain of social economics.

There is, just at the close of the period with which this book deals, a
rising school of reformers who can be grouped round More's _Utopia_.
Some foreshadowed him, and others continued his speculations. Men like
Harrington in his _Oceana_, and Milton in his _Areopagitica_, really
belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and
already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had
had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the
simple justice which St. Antonino and his fellows judged to be
sufficient to set things back again as they had been in the Golden Age.
The new writers are rather political than social. For them, as for the
Greeks, it is the constitution which must be repaired. Whereas the
mediaeval socialists thought, as St. Thomas indeed never wearied of
repeating, that unrest and discontent would continue under any form of
government whatever. The more each city changed its constitution, the
more it remained the same. Florence, whether under a republic or a
despotism, was equally happy and equally sad. For it was the spirit of
government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers,
made the State what it happened to be.

In this the modern sociologist of to-day finds himself more akin with
the mediaeval thinkers than with the idealists of the parliamentary era
in England, or of the Revolution in France. These fixed their hopes on
definite organisations of government, and on the exact balance of
executive and legislative powers. But for Scotus, and Wycliff, and St.
Antonino, the cause of the evil is far deeper and more personal. Not in
any form of the constitution, nor in any division of ruling authority,
nor in its union under a firm despot, nor in the divine right of kings,
or nobles, or people, was security to be found, or t