King, Georgiana Goddard: A brief account of the military orders in Spain (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1921)

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MILITARY ORDERS
Practical
advantages
Mutual
service a
commodity
in the
market
The gulf
advantages: men travelling in search of
work, or on other secular business, would
not be frozen to death or exhausted by
starvation, who could scarcely have car-
ried the price of their hotel bills at a time
when money was scarce and much of the
exchange of the world was carried on in
other commodities. The brothers knew
how to protect their institution and con-
serve their resources, getting returns in
kind, or labour, or other service, or in that
care for the humanity that needed it which
the Middle Age recognized as a good like
any other goods. And indeed there was
probably less deliberate graft in any one
century in Spain (for instance) from the
ninth to the fifteenth inclusive, than in
enterprises which governments paid for
between 1914 and 1919. Between the last
pilgrim’s hospice and the first penny
night-refuge yawns a gulf of centuries:
a black gulf that pride cannot bridge;
therein lie the Protestant Reformation and
the Council of Trent and the Industrial
Revolution.
It rested with those in charge, as I have
HISPANIC NOTES