FOOTNOTES:

Sismondi, in hisShort History, pp. 147, 148, seems to represent the episode as wholly one of wanton popular caprice and venality, even representing that Duke Gaultier was only by chance in the city. The narrative of Machiavelli explicitly sets forth how he came through the appeal of the Commission of Twenty; how the nobility and some of thebourgeoisieconspired with him; and how the populace were worked upon by the conspirators. The public acclamation, bad as it was, had been carefully subsidised. The middle class, whose war policy, however, had brought the city into such danger, were far more guilty than the mostly unenfranchised populace. Sismondi had latterly an undue faith in the principle of middle-class rule. (Cp. Mr. Boulting's Memoir in his recast of theRépubliques, p. xxiv.) In hisHistoire des républiques italiennes(v, 329-53) he sets forth the financial corruption of the middle-class rulers (p. 330), and recognises that they and the aristocrats were alike dangerous to liberty. Cp. as to his change of front, F. Morin,Origines de la démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, introd. pp. 17-18.

Within a year, partly on the sudden pressure of a scarcity, the tyrant was overthrown, after having wrung from Florence 400,000 florins and infuriated all classes against him and his race. Not the least of his offences was his conclusion of a peace with Pisa, by which she for a given period was to rule over Lucca. The risingagainst him was universal. Three of his henchmen were literally torn to pieces with hands and teeth: a madness of fury which was only too profoundly in keeping with the self-abandonment that had placed the tyrant in power. The political organism was beginning to disintegrate. A new constitution was set up, with a leaning to aristocracy, which was soon upset by the middle class, who in turn established yet another. The nobles, believing the populace to be hostile to thebourgeoisie, attempted anew a revolution, and were utterly crushed. And now began, according to the greatest of the publicists of the Renaissance, the final enfeeblement of Florence, in that the ruin of the nobility, whose one merit had been their fighting power, led to the abandonment of all military exercise.[617]Yet Florence a generation later made vigorous war under a "committee," and in the meantime at least the city tasted domestic peace and grew in civilisation. And though we doubtless exaggerate when we conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days.

Still the process of disintegration and reintegration proceeded. The tyrants of the smaller cities usually established themselves by the aid of professional mercenaries, German and other, whom, when their funds failed, they turned loose to shift for themselves, having in the meantime disarmed the citizens. These companies, swelled by others disbanded after the English wars in France, ravaged and plundered Italy from Montferrat to Naples, and were everywhere bought off save by Florence. Only the Pope and the greater tyrants could keep them regularly in pay; and by their means the Viscontis became lords of sixteen cities of Lombardy, while the Papacy began to build up a military power. Naples, on the other hand, continuously degenerated; while Genoa and Venice exhausted each other in deadly strife for the commercial monopoly of the East; and Pisa leaned to the Viscontis, who ultimately obtained its headship.

Rome, popeless, and domineered over by warring nobles, had its brief vision of a republic under the dreamer Cola di Rienzi, who at last fell by the hand of the masses whom he had for a brief space hypnotised. Neither he nor they were meet for the destiny they fainwould have fulfilled; and had people and leader alike been worthier, they would ultimately have failed to master the forces joined against them. Rienzi's brief, and on some sides remarkably vigorous, administration in 1346-47 was not wholly unworthy of his ideal of "the good estate"; he seems, indeed, to have ruled the Roman territory with an efficiency that recalled the ancient State; and his early successes against the nobles tell of unexpected weakness on their side and energy on that of the people. His dream of an Italian federation, too, remains to prove that he was no mere mob-leader. But had he been as stable in purpose and policy as he was heady and capricious, and had the Roman populace been as steadfast as it was turbulent, the forces of division represented by the nobles and the Papacy would ultimately have overthrown any republican polity. What Florence could not compass, Rome could not maintain. Two centuries before, Arnold of Brescia had fallen, after fifteen years of popularity, as soon as pope and emperor joined hands against him; and the papalism of Rienzi was as fatal to him as anti-papalism had been to Arnold. Had Rienzi had his way, the Pope would have at once returned to Rome; and where the Papacy was, no republic could endure, however strong and sober were its head. And Rienzi was not sober. After his overthrow in 1347 and his seven years of wandering exile, he was restored solely by the choice and as the agent of the Pope at Avignon; and his death in a tumult after four months of renewed office was the end of his cause.

In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV, charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now, however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed "The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to the papal side; and at length exhaustion and theabsolute instability of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities, freed from the Papacy—now become an affair of two mutually anathematising heads—fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference.

Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached the stage when the long-ignored populace—the multitude beneath thepopolo—made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders, which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation, theciompi("chums" or "mates," from the Frenchcompère) madetheirinsurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point, was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major arts, three of the minor (1378).

Among other things, theciompidemanded that interest should no longer be paid on the public debt; that the principal be paid off in twelve years, and that no "small people" should be sued for debts under fifty florins for the next two years (see Trollope, ii, 216). The trouble was that the brains in the movement, good as they were, could not permanently control the spirit of riot. Sismondi, after arguing (Short History, p. 182) in the Whig manner that "those who have not learnt to think, those to whom manual labour leaves no time for meditation, ought not to undertake the guidance of their fellow-citizens," amusingly proceeds (p. 185) to point to the capacity of Lando as showing "how much a free government spreads sound sense and elevated sentiments among even the lowest classes of society." Immediately afterwards he has to record how the upper classes fell into fresh disorders.

But where the educated burgesses and nobles had failed in the science of self-government, the mass of untrained toilers[618]could not succeed. Suborned doubtless by the other classes, they rebelled against the man whom they had made leader, and were by him promptly and capably suppressed, many being exiled; whereuponin due course he was himself deprived of his post by the old parties, and the new order was annulled (1382). After fresh strifes and proscriptions among the aristocracy themselves, all traces of the popular rising were effaced, and the aristocracy of wealth was definitely re-established.

What had happened was the attainment of the capitalistic stage and the enthronement of capital in the republican State. In place of strifes between wealth and nobility there had arisen the strife of capital and labour, the new aristocracy of wealth having in large part taken the place of that of descent. The latter transition had occurred nearly simultaneously in the other remaining Republics. Genoa had substituted factions with the names of new wealthy families for the old. In Siena, where thebourgeoisiedispossessed the nobles, they were in turn assailed by "reformers" of the lower class, who were finally defeated in battle and exiled wholesale (1385). Meantime the hereditary tyrants of Milan, the Visconti, with their singular continuity of capacity, had grown stronger than ever, had built up a native and scientific military system, and more than ever menaced all their neighbours. Florence called in aid successively from Germany and France (1390-91); but the Milanese army triumphed over all; and the skilled adventurer Sir John Hawkwood, the hired general of the Florentine troops, could not hold his ground. The Emperor, as usual, was satisfied to take payment for non-intervention; and the reigning Visconti, Gian Galeazza, invested by the Emperor with the titles of Duke of Mantua and Count of Pavia, and the lordship of twenty-six cities, had by the year 1402 further compassed, by all manner of fraud and force, the mastery of Pisa, Perugia, Genoa, Siena, Lucca, and Bologna, dying of the plague at the height of his power. His sons being boys, his power broke up among his generals, to be in large part recovered later, however, by his second son, who first assassinated the elder.

At this stage Venice once more intervenes, taking up the cause of Verona against the tyrant of Padua, whom, having defeated him by her carefully-chosen and supervised mercenaries, she put to death (1406). He had been the ally of Florence; but Florence let him fall, being now wholly bent on reconquering Pisa, her natural seaport. Pisa, in turn, always invincibly opposed to Florentine rule, was on commercial grounds backed by Genoa, now under the nominal rule of a representative of the King of France, who, however, sought to sell Pisa to the Florentines, and did receive from them 200,000 florins. Still resisting, the Pisans recalled an exile to lead them; and he in turn sold them for 50,000 florins, thistime to their complete undoing. Refusing all Florentine favours, the bulk of the ruling middle-class abandoned the city for ever, taking much of its special commerce with them. Meantime, the kingdom of Naples, under an energetic king, Ladislaus, had acquired most of the States of the distracted Church, menaced Florence, and was pressing her hard, despite French support, when Ladislaus died (1414). By this time the new Visconti was establishing himself at Milan by means of mercenaries, commanded for him by well-chosen captains. Six times were the Florentines defeated by his forces; till his capable general, Carmagnola, whom he had disgraced, revealed to the Council of Venice his master's intention to attack them; and Venice joined Florence to crush the tyrant. Carmagnola, acting slackly, met ill success, and was therefore executed by his Venetian masters. But the Visconti too finally died defeated, leaving his power to a new adventurer, Francesco Sforza, who had married his daughter, and had fought both for and against him in the endless imbroglio of Italian conspiracy.

Florentine republicanism was now near its euthanasia. By the fatal law of empire, the perpetual enterprise of destroying other men's freedom left Florence unfit to use or to defend her own; and the tyrants of Pisa became meet for the yoke of tyranny. The family of Medici, growing rapidly rich, began to use the power of capital as elsewhere less astute adventurers used the power of the sword. From the overthrow of theciompiparty in 1382 to 1434, the Republic had been ruled by a faction of the new commercial aristocracy with substantial unity; and the period is claimed as the most prosperous, intellectually and materially, though not the most progressive, in Florentine history.

See above, p. 226-27. Perrens (Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 171-72, 202) thinks otherwise, but does not blame the oligarchy. Sismondi, in his larger and earlier work (Républiques, ed. 1826, xi, 2), represents that Florenceceasedto be great under the Medici; cp. however, xii, 52, and the different note in the reactionaryShort History(p. 224), where he deems that in this period were born and formed "all those great men" whose glory is credited to the Medici. This holds good of Brunelleschi the architect, Masallio the artist, and Ghiberti the sculptor, as well as of Poggio and other scholars. Cp. Zeller,Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309, and the list given by Perrens,Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, p. 456. M. Perrens pronounces that under Lorenzo "the decadence of sculpture is visible, and still more that of architecture," both being too rapidly produced from motives of gain (La civilisationflorentine du 13e siècle au 16e, 1893, p. 190). Here he follows Romohr (seeHistoire de Florence, last cited). Lorenzo, he notes, had the reactionary belief, odd on the part of a merchant, that only nobles could produce perfect work, they only having the necessary leisure. He accordingly ignored all plebeian genius, such as that of Leonardo da Vinci.

Cosimo de' Medici, descendant of a democrat, was grown too rich to be one in his turn; and between him and the Albizzi, who led the ruling faction, there grew up one of the old and typical jealousies of power-seekers. Exiled by a packedbalia, Cosimo's wealth enabled him to turn the tables in a year and exile his exilers, taking their place and silently absorbing their power. "The moment was come when the credit of the Medici was to prevail over the legal power of the Florentinesignoria." Thus when the Visconti died, Cosimo and the doge of Venice combined their forces to prevent the recovery of the republican independence of Milan, whose middle class, divided by their own jealousies, speedily succumbed to the fraud and force of Sforza, the Visconti's heir.

For thirty years Cosimo maintained at Florence, by the power of capital, prosperity and peace under the semblance of the old constitution, the richer of the ever-renewed capitalist class accepting his primacy, while the populace, being more equitably governed than of yore under the old nobility, and being steadily prosperous, saw no ground for revolt. Capital as "tyrant" had in fact done what the tyrants of early Greece and Rome are presumed to have often done—favoured the people as against the aristocracy; Cosimo's liberality giving employment and pay at the same time to the artisans and to the scholars. Under Cosimo and his political colleagues, doubtless, the subject cities were corruptly governed; but Florence seems to have been discreetly handled. Attempts to break the capitalistic domination came to nothing, save the exile or at a pinch the death of the malcontents.

[Under all of the Medici, it appears, "the fiscal legislation adhered to the principle of burdening the old nobility of the city" (Von Reumont,Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 33). They however built up a fresh public debt, and their finance had very crooked aspects, especially under Lorenzo, who lacked the mercantile faculty of his grandfather (id.pp. 31-33. Cp. Perrens,Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 55-60, 288, 408-13, 416-17). Lorenzo was even accused of appropriating the dowries of orphan girls; and it seems clear that he defrauded themonte delle doti, or dowry bank.As regards fiscal policy, it may be interesting to note thatin Florence taxes had been imposed alternately on capital or income from the thirteenth century onwards, both being taken at the lowest values, and rated at from one-half to three per cent. according to theestimo(Esquiron de Parieu,Traité des impôts, 2e édit. 1866, i, 417). These taxes in turn were probably suggested by the practice of ancient Athens, where extraordinary revenue for war purposes was obtained "partly from voluntary contributions, partly from a graduated income or property tax." In 1266 a fresh income-tax of ten per cent. on an already heavily taxed city incited the decisive rising against the rule of the Ghibelline Count Guido. The earlier historians of Florence, like most others, pay little attention to the history of taxation; but details emerge for the later period.In 1427 Giovanni de' Medici imposed on Florence a tax called thecatasto—apparently not, like earlier taxes of the same name, based on a survey of land, but on disposable or movable capital—and also one of ½ per cent. on income over what was necessary to support life. Further, he levied a super-tax, which was paid by 1,400 citizens out of the 10,000 who came under thecatasto. At a pinch, thecatastowas levied several times in the year. Yet further, a regularly graduated income-tax was imposed by Cosimo de' Medici, in 1441, and raised in 1443; but, in this case, the salutary principle of sparing the amount of income necessary to sustain life seems to have been departed from, since incomes of from one to fifty florins paid 4 per cent., the rate gradually rising thereafter to 331/3per cent. for incomes over 1,500 florins. By reason of bad finance, further, taxes had now to be levied even ten and fifteen times a year. Cp. Perrens, as last cited. It is yet further noteworthy that, from 1431 to 1458, traders were required to show their books to the revenue officers for the purpose of fair assessment. The abandonment of this provision seems to have been partly due to the evasions practised by the traders, partly to the irritation and the abuses set up by it.]

As regards fiscal policy, it may be interesting to note thatin Florence taxes had been imposed alternately on capital or income from the thirteenth century onwards, both being taken at the lowest values, and rated at from one-half to three per cent. according to theestimo(Esquiron de Parieu,Traité des impôts, 2e édit. 1866, i, 417). These taxes in turn were probably suggested by the practice of ancient Athens, where extraordinary revenue for war purposes was obtained "partly from voluntary contributions, partly from a graduated income or property tax." In 1266 a fresh income-tax of ten per cent. on an already heavily taxed city incited the decisive rising against the rule of the Ghibelline Count Guido. The earlier historians of Florence, like most others, pay little attention to the history of taxation; but details emerge for the later period.

In 1427 Giovanni de' Medici imposed on Florence a tax called thecatasto—apparently not, like earlier taxes of the same name, based on a survey of land, but on disposable or movable capital—and also one of ½ per cent. on income over what was necessary to support life. Further, he levied a super-tax, which was paid by 1,400 citizens out of the 10,000 who came under thecatasto. At a pinch, thecatastowas levied several times in the year. Yet further, a regularly graduated income-tax was imposed by Cosimo de' Medici, in 1441, and raised in 1443; but, in this case, the salutary principle of sparing the amount of income necessary to sustain life seems to have been departed from, since incomes of from one to fifty florins paid 4 per cent., the rate gradually rising thereafter to 331/3per cent. for incomes over 1,500 florins. By reason of bad finance, further, taxes had now to be levied even ten and fifteen times a year. Cp. Perrens, as last cited. It is yet further noteworthy that, from 1431 to 1458, traders were required to show their books to the revenue officers for the purpose of fair assessment. The abandonment of this provision seems to have been partly due to the evasions practised by the traders, partly to the irritation and the abuses set up by it.]

At Cosimo's death there was dynastic strife of capital, as elsewhere of blood; but the blundering financier Pitti went to the wall, and the invalid Piero de' Medici kept his father's power. At his death the group of his henchmen kept their hold on it; and in time his son Lorenzo ousted them and engrossed all, escaping the plot which was fatal to his brother. The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere, sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny" either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with public gifts. Thus he hadlittle difficulty in cutting down every institution that restricted his power, whether popular or oligarchic.[619]Italian republicanism had always been a matter of either upper-class or middle-class rule; and when the old upper class of feudal descent was superseded by one of commercial descent, the populace had nothing to gain by supporting the bourgeoisie. A capitalistic "lord," most of whose wealth was in its nature unseizable, was thus a more stable power than any mere swordsman among swordsmen; and Lorenzo de' Medici not only crushed all the conspiracies against him, but held his own against the dangerous alliance of the republican Pope Sixtus IV and the King of Naples—the menace of Turkish invasion helping him. When, early in his reign, he joined in and carried through the plot for the confiscation of Volterra, chiefly in order to secure a hold on its rich alum mines, his popularity at Florence was in the ratio of the baseness of his triumph. As always, imperialism and corruption went hand in hand, and the Florentines ensured their own servitude by their eagerness to compass the fall of others.[620]

After Lorenzo's death (1492) only the incompetence of his son Piero at the hazardous juncture of the new French invasion under Charles VIII could upset the now hereditary power of the house; but such incompetence at such a crisis was sufficient, Savonarola having now set up a new democratic force, partly analogous to that of Puritanism in the England of a later age. The new party, however, brought no new political science.[621]Republican Florence in its interim of self-government proceeded as of old to make war on indomitable Pisa, with which it could never consent to live on terms of equality. Time after time, vanquished by force and treachery, the Pisans had again cast loose, fighting for independence as fiercely as did their fathers of a previous generation. Savonarola, who had no better light for this problem than was given to the other Florentines of his age, "staked the truth of his inspiration on the recovery of Pisa"; he had not a grain of sympathy for the Pisans, and punished those who had;[622]and though his party had the wisdom to proclaim a general amnesty for Florence (1495), the war against Pisa went on, with the French king insensately admitted as a Florentine ally. Savonarola in his turn fell, on his plain failure to evoke the miraculous aid on the wild promise of which he had sodesperately traded; his party of pietists went to pieces; and the upper-class party which succeeded carried on the war, destroying the Pisan harvests every year, till, under the one-man command of Loderini, Florence triumphed (1507), and the staunch sea-city fell once more. Even now the conquering city consented to pay great bribes to the kings of France and Aragon for leave to take her prey. And once more multitudes of Pisans emigrated, refusing to live in subjection, despite all attempts at conciliation.[623]

Slowly the monarchic powers closed in; France, after several campaigns, decisively defeated and captured Lodovico Sforza, lord of Milan, and proceeded by a secret treaty with Spain to partition the kingdom of Naples—a rascals' bargain, which ended in a quarrel and in the destruction of two French armies; Spain remaining master of Naples and the Sicilies, while France held the Milanese and Liguria, including Genoa. For a few years Cesare Borgia flared across the Italian sky, only to fall with his great purposes unfulfilled; and still the foreign powers encroached. France, with Swiss support, proceeded in turn to make war on Venice; and the emperor, the pope, Spain, and the smaller neighbouring despots, joined in the attack. Against these dastardly odds the invincible oligarchy of Venice held out, till Pope Julius, finding his barbarian friends worse than his Italian enemies, changed sides, joined the republic, and after many reverses got together an anti-French league of English, Swiss, and Spanish. Finally the emperor betrayed his French allies, who were once more driven out of Italy, leaving their ally, Florence, to fall into the hands of the Spaniards (1512).

Now came the restoration of the family of Medici, soon followed by the elevation of Giovanni de' Medici to the Papacy as Leo X; whence came yet more wars, enough to paralyse Italy financially had there been no other impoverishing cause. But Leo X, now the chief Italian power, misgoverned in secular affairs as badly as in ecclesiastical; and the wars, so barbarous in themselves, were waged upon dwindling resources. Venice, pressed afresh by Maximilian, made alliance with Louis, who was defeated by the Swiss, as defenders and "lords" of Milan; whereupon the Spanish, papal, and German forces successively ravaged the Venetian territories. Francis I zealously renewed the war, grappled with the Swiss in the desperate battle of Marignano in such sort as to get them to come to terms,and compassed the sovereignty of Milan. On the succession of Charles V to the throne of Spain and the Empire (1519), war between him and Francis set in systematically, and continued under Adrian and Clement VII as under Leo, both combatants feeding on and plundering Italy. The defeat of Francis at Pavia (1525) brought no cessation to the drain; a new league was formed between France, the Papacy, Venice, and Sforza; and soon, besides the regular armies, a guerilla horde of Germans on the imperial side, receiving no pay, was living by the plunder of Lombardy. At length, in 1527, came the sack of Rome by the imperial forces, Germans and Spanish combining for nine miserable months to outdo the brutalities and the horrors of all previous conquests, Christian or heathen. Two years' more fighting "only added to the desolation of Italy, and destroyed alike in all the Italian provinces the last remains of prosperity."[624]When a fresh German army entered Lombardy, in 1529, there was "nothing more to pillage."[625]

The curtain now falls rapidly on every form of "independence" in Italy. Pope Clement VII, freed of his barbarian conquerors, sent them against Florence, which fell in a fashion not unworthy of its great republican tradition, after tasting three final years of its ancient and thrice-forfeited "freedom." With the dying Machiavelli to frame the ordinances of her revived military system, and Michel Angelo to construct her last fortifications, she had in her final effort bound up with her name as a republic two of the greatest Italian names of the age of the Renaissance. Then came the vengeance of the Medicean Pope, Clement VII, the ducal tyranny, and the end of a great period.

The prolonged life of the maritime and commercial-aristocratic republics of Genoa and Venice, interesting as a proof of the defensive powers of communities so placed and so ordered, was no prolongation of Italian civilisation, save in so far as a brilliant art survived at Venice till the close of the sixteenth century. It is sufficient to note that what of artistic and intellectual life Venice and Genoa had was dependent first on Venetian contact with Byzantium, and later on the fecundity of freer Italy. The mere longer duration of Venice was due as much to her unique situation as to her system. On the other hand, it seems substantially true that the Venetian oligarchy did rule its subjects, both at home and on the mainland, with greater wisdom and fairness than was shown by any other Italian power. WhenCastruccio Castracani drove nine hundred families out of Lucca in 1310, thus destroying some of its chief manufactures, Venice gave the silk-weavers among them a politic encouragement, and so widened her commercial basis.[626]Her rulers, in short, had the common sense of men of business, who knew the value of goodwill. There is thus an unwarrantable extravagance in the verdict of the young Macaulay, that in Venice "aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius and virtue";[627]and in his outburst: "God forbid that there should ever again exist a powerful and civilised State which, after existing through thirteen hundred eventful years, shall not bequeath to mankind the memory of one great name or one generous action." Such actions are not rife in any history, and in mere civic selfishness of purpose the rulers of Venice were on a par with most others.[628]As citizens, or as a caste, they seem to have been not more but less self-seeking as against the rest of the community, despite their determined exclusiveness, than the same class in other States.[629]Their history does but prove that an astute oligarchy, protectively governing a commercial and industrial State, is not helpful to civilisation in the ratio of its power and stability, and that the higher political wisdom is not the appanage of any class.

When all is said, the whole Italian civilisation of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance represents a clear political gain over that of ancient Hellas in that it had transcended slavery, while failing to attain or to aim at the equality and fraternity which alone realise liberty. Despite, too, all the scandals of the Renaissance in general, and of papal Rome in particular, the life of such a city as Florence was morally quite on a par with that of any northern city.[630]But the later States and civilisations which, while so much more fortunate in their political conditions, are still so far from the moral liberation of their labouring masses—these are not entitled to plume themselves on their comparative success. "The petty done" is still dwarfed by "the undone vast."

What they and we may truly claim is that in the modern State, freed from the primal curse of fratricidal strife between cities and provinces, the totality of "good life," no less than of industrial and commercial life, is far greater than of old, even if signal genius be less common. To contrast the Genoa of to-day with the old City-Stateis to realise how peace can liberate human effort. The city of Petrarch, Columbus, and Mazzini has no recent citizen of European fame; but since a wealthy son bequeathed to her his huge fortune (1875), she has become the chief port of Italy, passing some forty per cent. of the total trade of the country. The fact that half her imports, in weight, consist of coal, tells of the main economic disadvantage of modern Italy as compared with the chief northern countries; but the modern development of industry is all the more notable. Under a system of general free trade, it might go much further.

The fact remains that modern Italy is no such intellectual beacon-light among the nations as she was in the "old, unhappy, far-off times"; and upon this the historical sentimentalist is prone to moralise. But there is no perceptible reason why the new life, well managed, should not yield new intellectual glories; and the latterday intellectual Renaissance of Italy may one day take its place in the historic retrospect as no less notable than that of the days of strife.

FOOTNOTES:[598]Burckhardt (as cited, p. 94) agrees with Ranke that, if Italy had escaped subjugation by the Spaniards, she would have fallen into the hands of the Turks.[599]Burckhardt, p. 82. Freeman, from whom one looks for details (History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, ed. 1893, pp. 558, 615), gives none.[600]Purgatorio, canto vi, 91-93.[601]Machiavelli, however, had special schemes of constitutional compromise (see Burckhardt, p. 85, and Roscoe,Life of Leo X, ed. 1846, ii, 204, 205); and there were many framers of paper constitutions for Florence (Burckhardt, p. 83).[602]See Gibbon, ch. 70. Bohn ed. vii, 398, 404.[603]Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 6, 7.[604]Lea,Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 145-47, 212-20, 224-36, 242-43.[605]Sismondi,Short History, p. 20.[606]Trollope notes (History of the Commonwealth of Florence, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal passions of men in an expanding society. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.[607]Which, however, was probably already being weakened by the silting up of the Pisan harbour. This seems to have begun through the action of the Genoese in blocking it with huge masses of stone in 1290. Bent,Genoa, pp. 86-87. Sismondi notes that, after the great defeat of 1284, "all the fishermen of the coast quitted the Pisan galleys for those of Genoa."Short History, p. 111. As to the Pisan harbour, whose very site is now uncertain, see Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 258,note.[608]After destroying Ugolino, the Pisans chose as leader Guido de Montefeltro, who made their militia a formidable power.[609]Pignotti, as cited, iii, 283-84.[610]Heeren, as cited, pp. 69, 120, etc.[611]Cp. Trollope,History of Florence, i, 105; Villari,Two First Centuries, pp. 95, 100.[612]Cp. Sismondi,Short History, pp. 88-90.[613]Podestà, as we have seen, was an old imperialist title. In Florence it became communal, and in 1200 it was first held by a foreigner, chosen, it would seem, as likely to be more impartial than a native. Cp., however, the comments of Villari,First Two Centuries, p. 157, and Trollope, i, 84, 94; and the mention by Plutarch,De amore prolis, § 1, as to the same development among the Greeks. In the memoirs of Fra Salimbene (1221-90) there is mention that in 1233 the Parmesans "made a friar theirpodestà, who put an end to all feuds" (trans. by T.K. L. Oliphant, inThe Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 90). The Florentine institution of thepriori delle arti, mentioned below, is traced back as far as 1204 (Cantù, as cited, viii, 465,note). Theanziani, during their term of office, slept at the public palace, and could not go out save together.[614]Thus Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici belonged to the craft of apothecaries.[615]See Trollope, ii, 179, as to the endless Florentine devices to check special power and to vary the balance of the constitution.[616]Two years before a feebler attempt had been made to set up a military tool, named Gabrielli.[617]Machiavelli,Istorie, end of 1. ii and beginning of 1. iii.[618]According to Giovanni Villani, in the fourteenth century there were schools only for 8,000 children, and only 1,200 were taught arithmetic.[619]Details in Perrens'Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. viii, pp. 268, 284-88, 291, 307, 310.[620]Cp. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 276-80.[621]M. Perrens indeed pronounces the two Councils set up by Savonarola's party to be much superior to the former bodies (La civilisation florentine, p. 61); but he admits that "at bottom and from the start the system was vitiated by the theocracy which presided over it."[622]Cp. Armstrong, inCambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 171.[623]The constancy of Pisa in resisting the yoke of Florence, and the repeated self-expatriation of masses of the inhabitants, is hardly intelligible in view of the submission of so many other cities to worse tyrannies. It would seem that the sting lay in the idea that the rule of the rival city was more galling to pride than any one-man tyranny, foreign or other.[624]Sismondi,Républiques, xvi, 71-76, 158, 159, 170, 217;Short History, p. 336.[625]As to the misery of Florence after the siege, see Napier,Florentine History, iv, 533, 534.[626]Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii. citing Sandi.[627]Review of Mitford,Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1868, p. 74.[628]Macaulay doubtless proceeded on the history of Daru, now known to be seriously erroneous. Compare that of W.C. Hazlitt, above cited, pref.[629]Cp. Brown, inCambridge Modern History, 1902, vol. i,The Renaissance, p. 285.[630]Cp. Armstrong, inCambridge History, i, 150-51.

[598]Burckhardt (as cited, p. 94) agrees with Ranke that, if Italy had escaped subjugation by the Spaniards, she would have fallen into the hands of the Turks.

[599]Burckhardt, p. 82. Freeman, from whom one looks for details (History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, ed. 1893, pp. 558, 615), gives none.

[600]Purgatorio, canto vi, 91-93.

[601]Machiavelli, however, had special schemes of constitutional compromise (see Burckhardt, p. 85, and Roscoe,Life of Leo X, ed. 1846, ii, 204, 205); and there were many framers of paper constitutions for Florence (Burckhardt, p. 83).

[602]See Gibbon, ch. 70. Bohn ed. vii, 398, 404.

[603]Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 6, 7.

[604]Lea,Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 2nd ed. pp. 145-47, 212-20, 224-36, 242-43.

[605]Sismondi,Short History, p. 20.

[606]Trollope notes (History of the Commonwealth of Florence, i, 31) how Dante and Villani caught at the theory of an intermixture of alien blood as an explanation of the strifes which in Florence, as elsewhere, grew out of the primordial and universal passions of men in an expanding society. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 73) endorses the old theory without asking how civil strifes came about in the cities of early Greece and in those of the Netherlands.

[607]Which, however, was probably already being weakened by the silting up of the Pisan harbour. This seems to have begun through the action of the Genoese in blocking it with huge masses of stone in 1290. Bent,Genoa, pp. 86-87. Sismondi notes that, after the great defeat of 1284, "all the fishermen of the coast quitted the Pisan galleys for those of Genoa."Short History, p. 111. As to the Pisan harbour, whose very site is now uncertain, see Pignotti,Hist. of Tuscany, Eng. tr. iii, 258,note.

[608]After destroying Ugolino, the Pisans chose as leader Guido de Montefeltro, who made their militia a formidable power.

[609]Pignotti, as cited, iii, 283-84.

[610]Heeren, as cited, pp. 69, 120, etc.

[611]Cp. Trollope,History of Florence, i, 105; Villari,Two First Centuries, pp. 95, 100.

[612]Cp. Sismondi,Short History, pp. 88-90.

[613]Podestà, as we have seen, was an old imperialist title. In Florence it became communal, and in 1200 it was first held by a foreigner, chosen, it would seem, as likely to be more impartial than a native. Cp., however, the comments of Villari,First Two Centuries, p. 157, and Trollope, i, 84, 94; and the mention by Plutarch,De amore prolis, § 1, as to the same development among the Greeks. In the memoirs of Fra Salimbene (1221-90) there is mention that in 1233 the Parmesans "made a friar theirpodestà, who put an end to all feuds" (trans. by T.K. L. Oliphant, inThe Duke and the Scholar, 1875, p. 90). The Florentine institution of thepriori delle arti, mentioned below, is traced back as far as 1204 (Cantù, as cited, viii, 465,note). Theanziani, during their term of office, slept at the public palace, and could not go out save together.

[614]Thus Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici belonged to the craft of apothecaries.

[615]See Trollope, ii, 179, as to the endless Florentine devices to check special power and to vary the balance of the constitution.

[616]Two years before a feebler attempt had been made to set up a military tool, named Gabrielli.

[617]Machiavelli,Istorie, end of 1. ii and beginning of 1. iii.

[618]According to Giovanni Villani, in the fourteenth century there were schools only for 8,000 children, and only 1,200 were taught arithmetic.

[619]Details in Perrens'Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. viii, pp. 268, 284-88, 291, 307, 310.

[620]Cp. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 276-80.

[621]M. Perrens indeed pronounces the two Councils set up by Savonarola's party to be much superior to the former bodies (La civilisation florentine, p. 61); but he admits that "at bottom and from the start the system was vitiated by the theocracy which presided over it."

[622]Cp. Armstrong, inCambridge Modern History, 1902, i, 171.

[623]The constancy of Pisa in resisting the yoke of Florence, and the repeated self-expatriation of masses of the inhabitants, is hardly intelligible in view of the submission of so many other cities to worse tyrannies. It would seem that the sting lay in the idea that the rule of the rival city was more galling to pride than any one-man tyranny, foreign or other.

[624]Sismondi,Républiques, xvi, 71-76, 158, 159, 170, 217;Short History, p. 336.

[625]As to the misery of Florence after the siege, see Napier,Florentine History, iv, 533, 534.

[626]Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii. citing Sandi.

[627]Review of Mitford,Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1868, p. 74.

[628]Macaulay doubtless proceeded on the history of Daru, now known to be seriously erroneous. Compare that of W.C. Hazlitt, above cited, pref.

[629]Cp. Brown, inCambridge Modern History, 1902, vol. i,The Renaissance, p. 285.

[630]Cp. Armstrong, inCambridge History, i, 150-51.

THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES

THE IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS

It lies on the face of the foregoing surveys that the principle which gives mass-form to all politics—to wit, the principle of nationality—makes at once for peace and war, co-operation and enmity. As against the tendency to atomism, the tribal principle supplies cohesion; as against tribalism, the principle of the State plays the same part; and as against oppression the instinct of race or nationality inspires and sustains resistance. But in every aggregate, the force of attraction tends to generate a correlative repulsion to other aggregates, and—save for the counterplay of class repulsions—the fundamental instinct of egoism takes new extensions in pride of family, pride of clan, pride of nation, pride of race. Until the successive extensions have all been rectified by the spirit of reciprocity, politics remains so far unmoralised and unrationalised.

The nullity of the conception of "race genius" has been forced on us at every meeting with it. No less clear, on a critical analysis, is the irrationality of the instinct of racial pride which underlies that conception, and which is involved in perhaps half of the strifes of tribes, States, and nations. Yet perhaps most of the reflections made by historical writers in the way of generalisations of the history of States and peoples are in terms of the fallacy and the irrationality in question. And the instinctive persistence of both reveals itself when we come to reflect on the fortunes of what we usually call the little nations—employing a term which at once sets up a whole series of partial hallucinations.

The main distinction between civilised nations being difference of language, there has spontaneously arisen the habit of identifying language with "race," and regarding a dwindling tongue as implying a dwindling people. In the British Islands, for instance, the decline in the numbers of the people speaking Celtic dialects—the Erse, the Welsh, and the Gaelic—leads many persons, including some of the speakers of those tongues, to regard the "Celtic stock" as in course of diminution; and statesmen speak quasi-scientifically of "the Celtic fringe" as representing certain political tendencies in particular. Yet as soon as we substitute the comparatively real test of name-forms for the non-test of language, we find that the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking stocks have enormously extended within the English-speaking population, so that "Welsh blood" is very much commoner in Britain than "Saxon," relatively to the proportions between the areas and populations of Wales and England, while "Highland blood" is relatively predominant in "Saxon"-speaking Scotland; and "Irish blood" is almost similarly abundant even in England, to say nothing of its immense multiplication in the United States.

Enthusiasm for one's nation as such thus begins on scrutiny to resolve itself into enthusiasm for one's speech; and as our English speech is a near variant of certain others held alien, as Dutch and Scandinavian and German, with a decisive control from French, enthusiasm for the speech-tie begins, on reflection, to assimilate to the enthusiasm of the district, the glen, the parish. Millions of us are at a given moment rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the ancestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible entity which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about history—the nation, considered as a continuous and personalised organism—is in large measure a metaphysical dream, and the emotion spent on it partakes much of the nature of superstition.

How hard it is for anyone trained in such emotion to transcend it is seen from the form taken by the sympathy which is bestowed by considerate members of a large community on members of a small one. "Gallant little Wales" is a phrase in English currency; and a contemporary poet, who had actually written pertinently and well in prose on the spurious conception of greatness attached to membership in a large population, has also written in verse a plea for "little peoples" in terms of the assumption of an entity consciousof relative smallness. Some of these more sympathetic pictures of the lesser States obscurely recall the anecdote of the little girl who, contemplating a picture of martyrs thrown to the lions, sorrowed for the "poor lion who hadn't any Christian." The late Sir John Seeley, on the other hand, wrote in the more normal Anglo-Saxon manner that "some countries, such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably (sic) regard their history as in a manner wound up; ... the only practical lesson of their history is a lesson of resignation."[631]The unit in a population of three millions is implicitly credited with the consciousness of a dwarf or a cripple facing a gigantic rival when he thinks of the existence of a community of thirty or sixty millions. Happily, the unit of the smaller community has no such consciousness;[632]and, inasmuch as his state is thus intellectually the more gracious, there appears to be some solid psychological basis for the paradox, lately broached by such a one, that "the future lies with the small nations." That is to say, it seems likely that a higher level of general rationality will be attained in the small than in the large populations, in virtue of their escaping one of the most childish and most fostered hallucinations current in the latter.

Certain patriots of the wilful sort are wont to flout reason in these matters, blustering of "false cosmopolitanism" and "salutary prejudice." To all such rhetoric the fitting answer is the characterisation of it as false passion. Those who indulge in it elect wilfully to enfranchise from the mass of detected and convicted animal passions one which specially chimes with their sentiment, as if every other might not be allowed loose with as good reason. Matters are truly bad enough without such perverse endorsement of vulgar ideals by those who can see their vulgarity. Ordinary observation makes us aware that the most commonplace and contracted minds are most prone to the passion of national and racial pride; whereas the men of antiquity who first seem to have transcended it are thereby marked out once for all as a higher breed. It is in fact the proof of incapacity for any large or deep view of human life to be habitually and zealously "patriotic" in the popular sense of the term. Yet, in the civilisations which to-day pass for being most advanced, the majority of the units habitually batten on that quality of feeling, millions of adults for ever living the political life of the schoolboy; and, as no polity canlong transcend the ideals of the great mass, national fortunes and institutions thus far tend to be determined by the habit of the lower minds.

It is pure paralogism to point to the case of a large backward population without a national-flag idea—for instance, the Chinese[633]—as showing that want of patriotic passion goes with backwardness in culture. There is an infinity of the raw material of patriotism among precisely the most primitive of the Chinese population, whose hatred of "foreign devils" is the very warp of "imperialism." The ideal of cosmopolitanism is at the other end of the psychological scale from that of the ignorance which has gone through no political evolution whatever; its very appearance implies past patriotism as a stepping-stone; and its ethic is to that of patriotism what civil law is to club law. If "salutary prejudice" is to be the shibboleth of future civilisation, the due upshot will be the attainment of it one day by the now semi-civilised races, and the drowning out of European patriotisms by Mongolian.

If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the "great nations" to realise the significance of the fortunes of the "little nations," in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical entities, but of actual human conditions—material, passional, and intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps as erudite, and certainly multitudes of educated people, seem capable of thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial entity, national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an "effete nation," of Belgium as "doomed to absorption," of the Scandinavian peoples as "having failed in the race," and of Switzerland as "impotent"; even as they call Spain "dying" and Turkey "decomposing."

Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, maycontinue to maintain, as they do, a rather higheraverageof decent life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634]though they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater masses of wealth and much greater masses of poverty, larger groups of idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that "bigness is not necessarily greatness"; adding, "if by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude."[635]But he had before used the term "greatness" without reserve as equivalent to "mere material magnitude"; and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the mass of mankind. Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that "the things that are most excellent" have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations—though it had to be a poet—who saw not hardship but happiness in the thought of "leaving great verse unto a little clan." And it was a Christian bishop, looking on the break-up of a great empire, who asked,An congruat bonis latius velle regnare?—Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their rule?—and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in peaceful neighbourhood.[636]

As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage and census and quantity of war material, it is hard to distinguish ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which all men save those who cherish it are agreed to pronounce odious. Even the snobs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their "poorer" neighbours, the members of the less numerouscommunities. Yet the note which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many days pass without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and æsthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares of "patriotism," with its false ideals and its vitiation of true fraternity.

To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged. Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope; and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States; while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large aggregates—to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain—that have suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their "prestige" by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter of historic fact that the "patriotic" consciousness in England had its withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637]No "little nation" could exhibit a more wincingsense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus visibly felt by multitudes of a great aggregate over military repulses at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter than that of the large; and thus in the last analysis the pride of the unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.

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