Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/229

Rh cases, this connection between trading activities and a freer form of rule. The Italian towns were industrial centers. "The merchants of Genoa, Pisa, Florence, and Venice supplied Europe with the products of the Mediterranean and of the East; the bankers of Lombardy instructed the world in the mysteries of finance and foreign exchanges; Italian artificers taught the workmen of other countries the highest skill in the manufactures of steel, iron, bronze, silk, glass, porcelain, and jewelry. Italian shops, with their dazzling array of luxuries, excited the admiration and envy of foreigners from less favored lands." Then, on looking into their histories, we find that industrial guilds were the bases of their political organizations; that the upper mercantile classes became the rulers, in some cases excluding the nobles; and that, while external wars and internal feuds tended continually to revive narrower, or more personal, forms of rule, rebellions of the industrial citizens, from time to time occurring, tended to reëstablish popular rule.

When we join with these the like general connections that arose in the Netherlands and in the Hanse towns; when we remember the liberalization of our own political institutions which has gone along with growing industrialism; when we observe that the towns more than the country, and the great industrial centers more than the small ones, have given the impulses to these changes—it becomes unquestionable that, while by increase of militant activities compound headships are narrowed, they are widened in proportion as industrial activities become predominant.

In common with the results reached in preceding chapters, the results above reached show that types of political organization are not matters of deliberate choice. It is common to speak of a society as though it had, once upon a time, decided on the form of government which thereafter existed in it. Even Mr. Grote, in his comparison between the institutions of ancient Greece and those of mediæval Europe (vol. iii, pages 10-12) tacitly implies that conceptions of the advantages or disadvantages of this or that arrangement furnished motives for establishing or maintaining it. But, as gathered together in the foregoing sections, the facts show us that, as with the genesis of simple political headships, so with the genesis of compound political headships, conditions and not intentions determine.

Recognizing the fact that independence of character is a factor, but ascribing this independence of character to the continued existence of a race in a habitat which facilitates evasion of control, we saw that, with such a nature so conditioned, coöperation in war causes the union on equal terms of groups whose heads are joined to form a directive council. And according as the component groups are governed more or less autocratically, the directive council is more or less oligarchic. We have seen that in localities differing so widely as do