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28 spirit of discipline, organisation, and pyramidal anthority. The rich and the poor alike asked for a savior.

And when the savior presented himself,—when the king, who had become enriched far from the forum's tumult, in some town of his creation, leaning on the wealthy Church, and followed by vanquished nobles and peasants,—when the king knocked at the city gates, promising the "lower orders" his mighty protection against the rich and the obedient rich his protection against the revolting poor, then the towns, which themselves were already undermined by the canker of authority, had no longer the strength to resist. They opened their gates to the king.

And then the Mongols had conquered and devastated eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, and an empire was springing up out there in Moscow, under the protection of the Tartar Khans and the Russian Christian Church. The Turks had come and settled in Europe, and pushed as far as Vienna in 1453, devastating everything on their path; and powerful States were being constituted in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and in the centre of Europe. While at the other extremity, the war of extermination against the Moors in Spain allowed of another powerful empire to constitute itself in Castille and Aragon, supported by the Roman Church and the Inquisition—the sword and the stake.

As the communes themselves were becoming little States, these little States were inevitably doomed to be swallowed up by the big ones.

VII

The victory of the State over the communes and the federalist institutions of the Middle Ages did not take place straightway. At one time the State was so threatened that its victory seemed doubtful.

A great popular movement, religious in form and expression, but eminently communistic in its aspirations and striving at equality, originated in the towns and rural parts of central Europe.