Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/572

Rh 528 NOBILITY same, only the way in which they came about is exactly opposite. The assembly of curia at Rome, originally the democratic assembly of the original people, first grew into an aristocratic assembly, and then died out alto gether as a new Roman people, with its own assembly, grew up by its side. It was a primitive institution which gradually changed its character by force of circumstances. It died out, supplanted by other and newer powers, when it became altogether unsuited to the times. The Great Council of Venice was anything but a primitive institu tion ; it was the artificial institution of a late age, which grew at the expense of earlier institutions, of the prince on the one side and of the people on the other. But the two different roads led to the same result. The Great Council of Venice, the curias of Rome, were each of them the assembly of a privileged class, an assembly in which every member of that class had a right to a place, an assembly which might be called popular as far as the privileged class was concerned, though rigidly oligarchic as regarded the excluded classes. But, close as the likeness is, it is 9 merely a superficial likeness, because it is the result of opposite causes working in opposite directions. It is like two men who are both for a moment in the same place, though their faces are turned in opposite ways. If the later nobilitas of Rome had established an assembly in which every one who had the jus imaginum had a vote and none other, that would have been a real parallel to the shutting of the Venetian Great Council ; for it would have. come about through the working of causes which are essentially the same. The The nobility which was thus formed at Venice is the Nobility very model of a civic nobility, a nobility which is also an n Ari 1C - G aristocracy. In a monarchy, despotic or constitutional, tocracy. there cannot in strictness be an aristocracy, because the whole political power cannot be vested in the noble class. But in the Venetian commonwealth the nobility was a real aristocracy. All political power was vested in the noble class ; the prince sank to a magistrate, keeping only some of the outward forms of sovereignty ; the mass of the people were shut out altogether. And, if no govern ment on earth ever fully carried out the literal meaning of aristocracy as the rule of the best, these civic nobilities come nearer to it than any other form of government. They do really seem to engender a kind of hereditary capa city in their members. Less favourable than either mon archy or democracy to the growth of occasional great men, they are more favourable than either to the constant supply of a succession of able men, qualified to carry on the work of government. Their weak point lies in their necessary conservatism ; they cannot advance and adapt themselves to changed circumstances, as either monarchy or democracy can. AVhen, therefore, their goodness is gone, their corruption becomes worse than the corruption of either of the other forms of government. Civic All this is signally shown in the history both of Venice aristo- an( j O f O ther aristocratic cities. But we are concerned with them now only as instances of one form of nobility. The civic aristocracies did not all arise in the same way. Venice is the best type of one way in which they rose ; but it is by no means the only way. In not a few of the Italian cities nobility had an origin and ran a course quite unlike the origin and the course which were its lot at Venice. The nobles of many cities were simply the nobles of the surrounding country changed, sometimes greatly against their will, into citizens. Such a nobility differed far more widely from either the Roman or the Venetian patriciate than they differed from one another. It wanted the element of legality, or at least of formality, which distinguished both these bodies. The privileges of the Roman patriciate, whatever we may call them, were not usurpations ; and, if we call the privileges of the Venetian nobility usurpations, they were stealthy and peaceful usurpations, founded on something other than mere violence. But in many Italian cities the position of the nobles, if it did not begin in violence, was main tained by violence, and was often overthrown by violence. They remained, in short, as unruly and isolated within the walls of the cities as they had ever been without. A nobility of this kind often gave way to a democracy which either proved as turbulent as itself, or else grew into an oligarchy ruling under democratic forms. Thus at Flor ence the old nobles became the opposite to a privileged class. The process which at Rome gradually gave the plebeian a political advantage over the patrician was carried at Florence to a far greater length at a single blow. The whole noble order was* disfranchised ; to be noble was equivalent to being shut out from public office. But something like a new nobility presently grew up among the commons themselves ; there were popolani grossi at Florence just as there were noble plebeians at Rome. Only the Roman commons, great and small, never shut out the patricians from office ; they were satisfied to share office with them. In short, the shutting out of the old no bility was, if not the formation of a new nobility, at least the formation of a new privileged class. For a certain class of citizens to be condemned, by virtue of their birth, to political disfranchisement is as flatly against every principle of democracy as for a certain class of citizens to enjoy exclusive rights by reason of birth. The Florentine demo cracy was, in truth, rather to be called an oligarchy, if we accept the best definition of democracy (see Thucydides, vi. 39), namely, that it is the rule of the whole, while oligarchy is the rule of a part only. It is in these aristocratic cities, of which Venice was the most fully developed model, that we can best see what nobility really is. It is in these only that we can see nobility in its purest form nobility to which no man can rise and from which no man can come down except by the will of the noble class itself. In a monarchy, where the king can ennoble, this ideal cannot be kept. Nor could it be kept in the later nobility of Rome. The new man had much to strive against, but he could sometimes thrust himself through, and when he did his descendants had their jus imaginum. But at Venice neither prince nor people could open the door of the Great Council ; only the Great Council itself could do that. That in the better times of the aristocracy nobility was not uncommonly granted to worthy persons, that in its worse times it was more commonly sold to unworthy persons, was the affair of the aristocratic body itself. That body, at all events, could not be degraded save by its own act. But these grants and sales led to distinctions within the ranks of the noble order, like those of which we get faint glimpses among the Roman patricians. The ducal dignity rarely passed out of a circle of specially old and distinguished families. But this has often been the case with the high magis tracies of commonwealths whose constitutions were purely democratic. From this purest type of nobility, as seen in the aristo- Rural cratic commonwealths, we may pass to nobility as seen in Nobility, states of greater extent that is, for the most part in mon archies. There are two marked differences between the two. They are differences which seem to be inherent in the difference between a republic and a monarchy, but which it would be truer to say are inherent in the differ ence between a body of men packed close together within the walls of a city and a body of men if we can call them a body scattered over a wide territory. The member of a civic nobility is more than a member of an order ; he is a member of a corporation ; he has no powers, he has hardly