It is not hard to trace the steps of the development. Magna Charta was signed in 1215. The First English Parliament met in 1257. The representative nature of that parliament became complete in the next twenty years. The English Common Law was put into form about the beginning of the last quarter of the century and in 1282 Bracton published his great digest of it. The principle there shall be no taxation without { 419} representation, our own basis for the Declaration of Independence five centuries later, was proclaimed as early as 1260 and was emphasized by the great Pope Boniface VIII at the end of the century. Early in the century, the great Lateran Council decreed that every diocese in the world should have a college and that the Metropolitan Sees at least should have such opportunities for post-graduate study as we now call universities. The first great Pope of the century, Innocent III, laid the foundation of a great City Hospital in Rome and required that every bishop throughout the world should have one in his See and that the model of it should be that of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Leprosy was an epidemic disease among the people, somewhat as tuberculosis is now; measures were taken for the segregation of lepers, leper hospitals were built for them outside of the town, and these great generations solved a problem in hygiene as difficult as is ours with regard to tuberculosis.
Above all, the rights of the people were assured to them. At the beginning of the century probably the most striking thing among the population of the various towns, if a modern had a chance to visit them, would be the number of the maimed and the halt and the blind. We would be apt to wonder where were the industrial and manufacturing plants responsible for all this maiming of the people, and look in vain for the belching chimneys of factories or trains. It was { 420} another form of selfishness that produced cripples in the twelfth century. Punishment was by maiming. For offences against property a man lost an eye, or a hand, or a leg. Very often the offences were of a kind that we would resent punishment for in the modern time. If a man were caught poaching on a nobleman's preserves of game, and sometimes it was the hunger of his children that drove him to it, he lost a hand. For a second offence, he lost an eye. For failures to pay various taxes, if the offence were repeated, maiming was likely to be the consequence. All this was in as perfect accordance with law as our fellow-servant or contributory-negligence doctrines. So that the sight of the maimed person might deter others from following this example of recalcitrancy, it was hoped that these cripples would not die, though in the imperfect surgery of the time they often did. Always the selfish pleasures of the upper classes so-called, when they are thoughtless, mean the loss of all possibilities of happiness for the lower classes. The ways of it all may be different from age to age, the results and the responsibility are always the same.