had not the courage to extend their ideas of equality, either to the neighboring rural districts or even to those citizens who had later on established themselves in their enclosures, refuges of liberty, there to create industrial arts. A distinction between the old families who had made the revolution of the twelfth century—or curtly, "the families"—and the others who established themselves later on in the city, is to be met with in all towns. The old "Merchant Guild" had no desire to receive the new-comers. It refused to incorporate the "young arts" for commerce. And from simple clerk of the city it became the go-between, the intermediary, who enriched itself by distant commerce, and who imported oriental ostentation. Later on the "Merchant Guild" allied itself to the lord and the priest, or it went and sought the support of the nascent king, to maintain its monopoly, its right to enrichment. Having thus become personal instead of communal, commerce killed the free city.
Besides, the guilds of ancient trades, of which the city and its government were composed at the outset, would not recognise the same rights to the young guilds, formed later on by the younger trades. These had to conquer their rights by a revolution. And that is what they did everywhere. But while that revolution became, in most large cities, the starting of a renewal of life and arts (this is well seen in Florence), in other cities it ended in the victory of the richer orders over the poorer ones—of the "fat people" (popolo grasso) over the "low people" (popolo basso)—in a despotic crushing of the masses, in numberless transportations and executions, especially when lords and priests took part in it.
And—need we say it?—it was "the defence of the poorer orders" that the king, who had received Macchiavelli's lessons, took later on as a pretext when he came to knock at the gates of the free cities!
And then the cities had to die, because the ideas themselves of men had changed. The teaching of canonical and Roman law had perverted them.
The European of the twelfth century was essentially a federalist;—a man of free initiative, of free agreement, of
