Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/591

Rh saw Malta made the nucleus and the head-quarters of the most powerful and wealthy fraternity in Europe. Every land contributed its quota to the stream of wealth which from that day began to flow thither. The hamlet of the Bourg became a considerable town, and its suburbs extended themselves over the adjacent peninsula and the intervening mainland. Ere long a new city sprang up, exceeding in extent and magnificence anything which the wildest flight of imagination could have pictured in bygone years, adorned with auberges, churches, and other public buildings, by a brotherhood whose ample revenues enabled it thus to beautify its capital. Stores of grain accumulated in the public magazines; ramparts and forts sprang up to protect the island from the piratical descents of the Algerine corsairs, and Malta gradually rose from the insignificant position into which she had for so many years sunk, to be ranked as the most important fortress and the most flourishing community in the Mediterranean.

These were not slight benefits nor small privileges. The Order which had conferred such advantages on its subjects might well stand excused for some display of arrogance and despotism. After all, it was only with the highest class, the exclusive Maltese nobility, that the new government brought itself into anything approaching unpopularity, and even then it was not so much the despotism of the ruling power as the liberalism which had opened the way to office in favour of a lower grade than its own, which had engendered the dislike. Below it there was a rising class containing much of the talent and ambition of the island, and it was amongst these that the council sought for candidates to fill the posts hitherto invariably monopolized by the nobility. With them, therefore, the Order stood in high favour, and whilst, on the one hand, the old aristocracy held itself aloof, and, on the other, the lower class bowed in uncomplaining submission to the sway of a power sufficiently energetic to compel its obedience, this section, comprising all the energy and activity of the country, became faithful adherents to the system by which their own emancipation from the dictation of the aristocracy had been secured.

Into this portion of Maltese society the knights of St. John