personage; with his own independence, his own activities, his own rights
and duties. No one, I believe, would have talked of the masses in the
old feudal times; for then each individual was someone's man, bound to
his master by ties of mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base,
but still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and dividing him
from his class.

Dividing, I say. The poor of the Middle Age had little sense of a common
humanity. Those who owned allegiance to the lord in the next valley were
not their brothers; and at their own lord's bidding, they buckled on
sword and slew the next lord's men, with joyful heart and good
conscience. Only now and then misery compressed them into masses; and
they ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog. Some wholesale
wrong made them aware that they were brothers, at least in the power of
starving; and they joined in the cry which was heard, I believe, in
Mecklenburg as late as 1790: "Den Edelman wille wi dodschlagen." Then,
in Wat Tyler's insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they
proved themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking for awhile,
by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimless--soon to be
dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact
aristocracy. Yet not always dispersed, if they could find a leader; as
the Polish nobles discovered to their cost in the middle of the
seventeenth century. Then Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not
without his sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski and the
Poles, found that the neighbouring noble's steward had taken a fancy to
his windmill and his farm upon the Dnieper. He was thrown into prison on
a frivolous charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his wife
dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest
son scourged for protesting against the wrong. And he returned, at the
head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free