docks of the preceding centuries, Dante's sonorous language to the barbarous Latin of the tenth century. A new world has opened up between the two!
Never, with the exception of that other glorious period of ancient Greece (free cities again) had humanity made such a stride forward. Never, in two or three centuries, had man undergone so profound a change or so extended his power over the forces of nature.
You may perhaps think of the progress of civilization in our own century, which is ceaselessly boasted of. But in each of its manifestations it is but the child of the civilization which grew up in the midst of free communes. All the great discoveries which have made modern science,—the compass, the clock, the watch, printing, the maritime discoveries, gunpowder, the law of gravitation, the law of atmospheric pressure of which the steam-engine is but a development, the rudiments of chemistry, the scientific method already pointed out by Roger Bacon and practised in Italian universities,—where do all these come from, if not from the free cities which developed under the shelter of communal liberties? {{dhr}{} But you may say, perhaps, that I forget the conflicts, the internal struggles, of which the history of these communes is full,—the street tumults, the ferocious battles sustained against the landlords, the insurrections of "young arts" against the "ancient arts," the blood that was shed and the reprisals which took place in these struggles.
I forget nothing. But, like Leo and Botta, the two historians of mediæval Italy, like Sismondi, like Ferrari, Gino Capponi, and so many others, I see that these struggles were the guarantee itself of free life in a free city. I perceive a renewal of and a new flight towards progress after each one of these struggles. After describing these struggles and conflicts in detail, and after measuring the immensity of progress realized while these struggles stained the streets with blood,—the well-being assured to all the inhabitants, and the renovation of civilization,—Leo and Botta conclude with this thought, so true, which often comes to my mind:
