Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/752

 736 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

2. An advanced state of commercial and industrial develop- ment offering opportunity for remunerative employment to large numbers.

3. A strongly centralized government guaranteeing freedom of migration from district to district, thus permitting the city to exercise its full powers of attraction upon the country popula- tion.

The absence of these conditions brings the social life, the economic activity, and the position of the mediaeval city in the loosely coordinated political system of the time into striking contrast with modern municipal institutions.

We have become so accustomed to regard the city as an administrative subdivision of the state, enjoying certain sub- ordinate powers of government, that we have great difficulty in picturing to ourselves the town life of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. The greatest differences relate to the activity rather than to the form of city government. The medi- aeval town was primarily an economic unit, the modern city is mainly a political and administrative division. A study of the town life of the Middle Ages leaves the impression that we have to do with great commercial corporations, exploiting special economic privileges. The monopoly of market rights, the power of regulating trades and industries, the complete control over every economic activity, all rights wrested from the temporal or ecclesiastical feudal lord, are the most important factors in the development of town institutions. Those who participated in the struggle for these privileges share equally in their enjoy- ment. When we stop to consider that all our modern ideas of political and civil rights, patriotism, and national allegiance were as yet undeveloped, it is not at all surprising that the early burghers looked upon the town as a complex of economic privi- leges, and that the town life of the period should receive its character from this principle. The exploitation of the tangible property and of the intangible rights of the town is the key to the institutions of the period.

The main problems with which the mediaeval towns had to deal were connected with the exploitation of these property