It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion that in the popular histories of three hundred years hence, all this will have been changed and that the Sozzinis shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter of their own and that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be relegated to the bottom of the page. They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing in footnotes. CHAPTER XVIII MONTAIGNE In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom. That was true. A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and priest. A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility, another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest. Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for tolerance.” You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on Sunday in any part of our country. Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general, there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair. The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who visited her market place and drive them to Wisby. A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy. A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called “loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states. Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to their own particular religion.