torture.
The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the
gladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merely
their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediaeval, was copied
from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its
application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow
mediaeval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing
common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire
of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle
Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian
communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of
production, of the making, building and growing of all the good things
of life.

For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediaeval
England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing
cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which
affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one
practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may
have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for
worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We
cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch,
even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with
the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government
always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely
imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are
necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or
rather a pattern. The mediaevals not only had self-government, but their
self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of
the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of
state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in
existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local
Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the
same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent
centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate
imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a
thing that breaks things--even if they admit it is right to break them.
But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed