on direct union between citizens. It must abolish all union in the city, abolish the city itself, abolish all direct union between cities. For the federative principle it must substitute the principle of submission and discipline. Submission is its substance. Without this principle it leaves off being the State; it becomes a federation.
And the sixteenth century—century of carnage and wars—is entirely summed up in this war waged by the growing States against the cities and the federations. The towns are besieged, taken by assault, pillaged; their inhabitants are decimated or transported. The State is victorious all along the line.
And the consequences are these.
In the fifteenth century Europe was covered by rich cities, whose artisans, masons, weavers, and carvers produced marvels of art, whose universities laid the foundation of science, whose caravans travelled over continents, and whose vessels ploughed rivers and seas.
What was left of them two centuries later? Towns that had numbered fifty or a hundred thousand inhabitants and that had possessed (it was so in Florence) more schools and, in the communal hospitals, more beds per inhabitant than are possessed to-day by the towns best endowed in this respect, had become rotten boroughs. Their inhabitants having been massacred or transported, the State and Church were seizing their riches. Industry was fading under the minute tutelage of State officials. Commerce was dead. The very roads that formerly united the cities had become absolutely impracticable in the seventeenth century.
The State spelt warfare, and wars were devastating Europe and completing the ruin of those towns which the State had not yet ruined direct. But had not the villages, at least, gained by State centralisation? Certainly not! Read what historians tell us about the style of living in the rural districts of Scotland, Tuscany, and Germany in the fourteenth century, and compare their descriptions of that time with the misery of England at the beginning of 1648, in France under the "sun-king" Louis XIV, in Germany, in Italy,
