corporate civilization which got under way in America in the
early 'seventies.

Perhaps European society could have done nothing better for
itself than feudalism in all the circumstances of the time. But
essentially feudalism did not represent an effort at growth. It
might be described as a vast shelter, a refugee haven into which
the harried and starving and disordered masses of the first cen-
turies following the destruction of the Roman Empire fled for
safety. It was an escape from violence and want.

The terror of Europe in those early years was famine. Hallam
records that in the seventy-three years in the reign of Hugh Capet
and his two successors, forty-eight were years of famine and that
from 1015 to 1020 the whole western world was almost destitute
of bread -- a frightful interregnum of barbarism when, as Hallam
records, mothers ate their children and children their parents and
human flesh was sold "with some pretense of concealment" in the
market place. People sold themselves into slavery to escape hunger.
In the presence of persistent hunger the outer crust of civilized
morals crumbles and falls away, leaving only the unclothed savage
man, pining for food. To him a precarious liberty seems a small
price to pay for safety and meat.

Meantime, many of the stronger chieftains took to brigandage.
Not yet emancipated from the ethical concepts of their northern
paganism and the worship of gods who were little more than divine
gangsters and celestial thugs, they broke upon the weak with that
strange outpouring of cruelty that has marked man's journey from
the beginning. The only refuge for the weaker peasant was to sell
himself into the servitude of a stronger feudal baron.

In time, of course, this system became organized, strengthened,
crystallized. And it was this system which was now dying. A new
system that would symbolize not escape and flight but growth and
development was to take its place.

The world of the Middle Ages was a rural world in which men
lived in little clusters of 50 to 500 souls. The unit was the manor.
It was a communal microcosm made up of a small number of

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