teeing order and coöperation; the other, individual initiative necessary to cope with strange and protean circumstance.
At the opening of the seventeenth century it was England, of all the powers of Europe, that was best fitted for this great human task. The English people were at that time far ahead of their Continental neighbors on the road from feudal to bourgeois economy, a long and dusty road marked by toil, revolution, and war. In concrete terms, just what did this mean? First of all, it meant the overthrow, or, at least, the social subjugation of the feudal and military class—a class nourished by landed estates and committed to the ideal that fighting was the noblest work of man.
With the decline of the feudal order went the downfall of the monopolistic clergy similarly sustained by landed property. Correlative with this social change was the emancipation of the smaller landed gentry, the yeomanry, and the peasants from the rigid grasp of their overlords—a process of individualization which affected women as well as men, giving to agriculture new forms of ownership and management. Finally through the dissolution of the old order there rose to power in England a class of merchants, traders, and capitalists, dwellers in towns, or "bourgs," from which, for the want of a more comprehensive and accurate term, the word bourgeois has been derived to characterize modern civilization.
With the decay of feudal and clerical authority went political and legal changes of vital significance. For the successful direction of business enterprise, the wayward and irresponsible conduct of absolute monarchs, accustomed to tax, imprison, and harass their subjects at will, was utterly impossible. Regularity in economy called for regularity in government—the standardization of the monarchy by rules of accountancy; hence the development of constitutional law—of political self-government for the classes capable of grasping and retaining it. Being secular in nature,
