Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/194

 1'22 WORKMEN AND HEROES was about to create for written words. Printing and liberty were both to spring from the same soil and the same climate. Mainz, Strasburg, Worms, and other municipal towns on the Rhine, then gov- erned themselves, under the suzerainty of the empire, as small federal republics, like Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the other states of Italy. The nobility warlike, the burgesses increasing in importance, and the laboring population vacillating between these two classes, who alternately oppressed and courted it, from time to time, here as everywhere, fought for supremacy. Out- bursts of civil war, excited by vanity or in- terest, and in which the victory remained sometimes with the patricians, sometimes with the burgesses, and at others with the artisans, made them alternately victors, con- quered, and proscribed. This is the history of all cities, of all republics, and of all em- pires. Mainz was a miniature of Rome or Athens, only the proscribed party had not the sea to cross to escape from their country ; they went outside the walls, and crossed the Rhine ; those of Strasburg going to Mainz, and those of Mainz to Strasburg, to wait until their party recovered power, or until they were recalled toy their fellow-citizens. In these intestine struggles of Mainz, the young Gutenberg, himself a gen- tleman, and naturally fighting for the cause most holy in a son's eyes that of his father was defeated by the burgesses, and banished, with all the knights of his family, from the territory of Mainz. His mother and sisters alone remained there in possession of their property, as innocent victims on whom the faults of the nobility should not be visited. His first banishment was short, and peace was ratified by the return of the refugees. A vain quarrel about precedence in the public ceremonies on the occasion of the solemn entry of the Emperor Rob- ert, accompanied by the Archbishop Conrad, into Mainz, refreshed the animosity of the two classes in 1420, and young Gutenberg, at the age of nineteen, under went his second exile. The free city of Frankfort now offered itself as a mediator between the nobles and plebeians of Mainz, and procured their recall on condition of the governing magistracy being equally shared between the high classes and the burgesses. But Gutenberg, whether his valor in the civil war had rendered him more obnoxious and more hostile to the burgesses ; whether his pride, fostered by the traditions of his race, could not submit patiently to an equality with plebeians ; or whether, more probably, ten years of exile and study at Strasburg had already turned the bent of his thoughts to a nobler subject than the vain honors of a free city, re-