The supremely great accomplishments of this time however, the true, good and great deeds of the century, were what it did for men. This is the period when there was more organization for social help and uplift than at any other period that we know. Every social need was responded to by the guilds. There were old-age pensions, disability wages, insurance against fire, accident at sea, burglary, highway robbery, the destruction of crops, the death of animals and all the other developments of mutual protection against the unexpected which we have been inclined to think were developments of our time. There were 30,000 guilds in England, it is said, when they were suppressed by Henry VIII, and the money in the treasuries, many millions of pounds, confiscated on the plea that they were religious organizations. They maintained grammar schools, had burses at the universities, arranged for technical training and apprenticeships, cared for orphans, provided entertainments for the people of the town, brought the membership together in friendly meetings and banquets several times each year, held athletic contests, encouraged social life and innocent amusements in every way and represented an ever vital nucleus of fraternal interest among men. Our chapter on this shows too how seriously the moneyed men of the time took their duty of philanthropic care for their townsmen by various institutions. A period that did so much for social needs could scarcely be expected to have neglected its hospitals and as a matter of fact some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world were built in this period, and everywhere that a hospital was built it was worthy of its purpose. The hospitals of a later time, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were little better than jails and were eminently unsuitable. At this time citizens, instead of thinking that anything was good enough for the ailing poor, felt that the honor of the city was concerned, and the hospital, being a municipal building, was {xxxix} constructed with as much care for its beauty externally and its utility internally as the famous town halls or churches of the time. We know how well patients were cared for, since we have abundant evidence of the clinical teaching of medicine at the bedside. Whenever hospitals are well built and the attendant physician takes students with him on his rounds, the best possible treatment of patients is assured. They cared finely for the insane also and for the weak-minded. The awful abuses in this regard that came in the eighteenth century, and from which our own happier though far from satisfactory conditions represent a reaction, were a lamentable, almost incomprehensible degeneration from the magnificent work of the earlier time.