I


About two hundred years ago a number of things began to appear in
Europe which were the fruit of the Renaissance and of the Reformation
combined: Two warring twins.

These things appeared first of all in England, because England was the
only province of Europe wherein the old Latin tradition ran side by
side with the novel effects of protestantism. But for England the
great schism and heresy of the sixteenth century, already dissolving
to-day, would long ago have died. It would have been confined for
some few generations to those outer Northern parts of the Continent
which had never really digested but had only received in some
mechanical fashion the strong meat of Rome. It would have ceased with,
or shortly after, the Thirty Years War.

It was the defection of the English Crown, the immense booty rapidly
obtained by a few adventurers, like the Cecils and Russells, and a
still smaller number of old families, like the Howards, which put
England, with all its profound traditions and with all its organic
inheritance of the great European thing, upon the side of the Northern
Germanies. It was inevitable, therefore, that in England the fruits
should first appear, for here only was there deep soil.

That fruit upon which our modern observation has been most fixed was
_Capitalism_.

Capitalism proceeded from England and from the English Reformation;