heir of Europe. In the West a vast Atlantic civilization was begin-
ning to emerge. In the East, centred on the Soviet Union, the mas-
sive, still relatively primitive, foundations of a Eurasian supra-
national society.

During this tentative and gradual evolution civilization had neces-
sarily been confined to minorities. They had lived off the land; off
small-scale mining and commerce. The rule of the warrior and the
priest had been slowly modified by commercial oligarchies; after the
liberal revolution of 1789, the middle class were to translate economic
into political power. But it was not until the rise of great industry
that one could even imagine the extension of a minority civilization
to the masses. Under pre-industrial methods of production wealth
was narrowly limited. The price of the culture and initiative of
elites was paid by lives of toil and monotony for the vast majority.
Naturally, in so varied an environment, the social pattern had
differed widely. The early farmers of Attica, Latium or Wessex,
attained the rudiments of self-government. In more elaborate and
far flung societies, exploitation became more pronounced. The
peasants of the Forest cantons about Lucerne, or the fishermen of
Friesland or Scandinavia might assert an independence which
reflected their isolation from the centres of European power; the
great cities of Flanders and North Italy a parochial civic vitality.
But in pre-industrial times the masses were generally submerged.
On its higher levels, this society was more dynamic and varied than
the only other contemporary civilization which could compare with
it -- the vast agricultural empire of China whose rulers in the nine-
teenth century still regarded interlopers from the West with con-
tempt. But the horizon of the great peasant majority was strictly
bounded by the confines of their village and their market town.

In this preponderantly static picture there is one element of con-
trast. The status of the rural masses of Eastern and Western Europe
was becoming different. Already by the twelfth century, in the
West, the rise of cities had altered the primitive social pattern which
survived the decline of civilization of Antiquity. The emancipation
of the serfs was slowly but inevitably to proceed. With the expansion
of commerce and administration, medieval society needed new
blood. Not only the Church, but the secular world, called for talent
and enterprise. The bourgeoisie of England, France and the Nether-
lands, the military and commercial adventurers of Italy and Portugal
and Spain, came predominantly from the land. The interaction of a
maritime and continental environment -- the key to Western Euro-

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