arter. To recur once more to the parallel of
Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, the
Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that "recognition" for which
the railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, without
success. By this they had the authority of the King, the central or
national government; and this was of great moral weight with mediaevals,
who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative
escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin
to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the
freedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a
wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church is
something of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread
through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still
merely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saint
long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from
these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were
chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval
experiments: the Parliament.

We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I., when
they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local
taxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read a
little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole
secret of the lost mediaeval civilization. We had only to ask what
burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately
have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of
which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder
that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title
of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective
corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the
explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the
Parliament was the one among these mediaeval creations which ultimately
consented to betray and to destroy the rest.

IX

NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS

If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was
and is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way
of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather the
most commonplace, of all the uses of the word "Christian." There is