Have we not all learned at school that the State rendered great service in constituting national unions on the ruins of feudal society,—unions made impracticable in earlier times by the rivalry of cities? We have all learned it in school and we have all believed it in manhood.
And nevertheless to-day we learn that, in spite of all rivalries, mediæval cities had already worked during four centuries to constitute these unions by federation, freely consented to, and that they had fully succeeded in that work of consolidation.
The Lombard Union, for example, included the cities of upper Italy and had its federal treasury in safe keeping in Genoa and Venice. Other federations, such as the Tuscan Union, the Rhenan Union (comprising sixty towns), the federations of Westphalia, of Bohemia, of Servia, of Poland, and of Russian towns, covered Europe. At the same time, the commercial union of the Hansa included Scandinavian, German, Polish, and Russian towns throughout the basin of the Baltic.
All the elements, as well as the fact itself, of large human agglomerations, freely constituted, were there already.
Do you wish for a living proof of these groups? You have it in Switzerland. There the union asserted itself first between village communes (the old cantons), in the same way that it was constituted in France in the Laonnais. And as in Switzerland the separation between town and village was never so great as it was for towns carrying on an extensive and distant commerce, the Swiss towns lent a hand to the peasant insurrections of the sixteenth century, and the union encompassed both towns and villages and constituted a federation that still exists to-day.
But the State, by its very essence, cannot tolerate free federation; because the latter represents that nightmare of the legist, "the State within the State." The State does not recognize a freely adopted union working within itself. It only deals with subjects. The State alone, and its prop the Church, arrogate to themselves the right of being the connecting link between men.
Consequently the State must perforce annihilate cities based
