had sooner brought things to a crisis in France, had not Colbert, with wonderful sagacity, persuaded Louis XIV. to establish an honest court of judicature for trying the offences of these financiers, and the king had the virtue to resist their splendid bribe. Whether Colbert took a lesson from Roman history I know not; but one cannot fail to be struck with his hitting the very point in which the Roman patricians failed: and though Colbert was no patrician, he happened to be a statesman desiring the honour and prosperity of his country. When the plutocrats came to be judges at Rome, they had won the day for their order; when Colbert carried the establishment of his courts in France, that species of plutocracy was checked for half a century, and never attained the absolute power possessed by the great capitalists of Rome.

But this same Colbert, finding the condition of society in his country ripe for large commercial and manufacturing enterprises, so framed his legislation as to encourage their growth. His manufactures flourished, and produced in France a second and more legitimate plutocracy, which ultimately sympathised by force of a natural harmony with the farmers-general of the revenue.

In northern Germany a plutocracy had been growing up by mortgaging the estates of the nobles in Holstein and South Sleswick. It often began by capitalists from Hamburg, Lubeck, Bremen, and other German towns, advancing money and putting in verpachters to superintend the farms which the old nobles were too proud or too indolent to cultivate with sufficient skill to make them profitable. These capitalists and their emissaries have come at last almost to oust the Holstein nobles out of the country, and the revenues they draw from these commercial speculations in the Duchies, have tended to the growth of a powerful plutocracy in Berlin and Vienna.*

* Laing's Denmark, pp. 55, 56. 148.

In fact, in all parts of Germany where there is not peasant proprietorship, the same change is now taking place as in ancient Rome. The land is ceasing to be regarded as the substratum for nobles, yeomen, and peasants to live upon, and is being repeopled with manufacturers, capitalists, and artisan cultivators; the former owing all their prestige to the towns, and the latter having very little of the character of the ancient, leisurely, simple-minded peasant about them.

CHAP. XVI.

THE FUSION OF ARISTOCRACY AND PLUTOCRACY.

FROM the summits of the Alps the mountain torrent rushes incessantly through the gorges of the pass. I trace its stream in summer-time far down through the rich pastures, rapid still, but smooth and with smiling surface; further on the busy haunts of men are built upon its banks, and life moves safely on its tamed waters.

Such were its normal condition, consisting of three stages which, though their boundaries be not easily traced by the senses, are capable of being kept clearly -distinct in the mind. The summer passes, and the snow of another year is heaped upon the snow of many winters. The torrent swells and rages past the pastures as fiercely as in its mountain homes; its impetuosity now lashes the masonry of the bridge, and overflows the gates of the dock. There is no more that intermediate stage between the torrent and the quiet river of civic life; they meet, the two extremes, and blend as best they may.

It is thus in many nations: as they float down the stream of progress they leave very gradually the old forms and feelings of aristocracy, and passing through fine and subtle shades of change, reach at last their plutocratic phase. The longer they are in the progress,

more numerous and defined in most instances are the distinguishable stages through which they pass from one extreme to the other, and so in my esteem the fuller and

more perfect is their development. But others have no intermediate stage, and pass with the abruptness of our stream in winter straight from aristocracy into plutocracy.

Of the slow and more elaborate development as it reaches down to plutocracy, some of the steps are traced elsewhere. I wish in this chapter to note three instances of abrupt passage, where one extreme blends at once into the other.

There is in history no instance of this predicament so striking and instructive as that afforded by the illustrious States of mediaval Italy. In most of them a feudal aristocracy had existed for uncertain duration, and with various fortunes, in castles and lordly domains, with retinues of vassals, devoted to the pursuits of war and the chase, and bearing in its every feature the traces of its Teutonic origin. A sudden change succeeds. In one moment the aristocracy has abandoned all its ancient character, its love of war, its scorn of trade, and its lawless rapacity. It takes up its abode in the cities, now contemned no more. Titles perhaps may be retained, but they are a badge of nothing but wealth, for every family as it gets rich may buy one and be equal with the proudest, when every taste of an old hardy warrior aristocracy is gone, and their estates and their farms are no more to be lived upon, but merely to produce them rents. And those to whom rents are insufficient open their banks, and spread their money-tables, without a thought of degradation. Refinement too comes speedily upon them. Costly and gorgeous palaces arise at the bidding of these merchant nobles, with statues, gems, and picture galleries resounding with the discussions of scholars and enlivened by the wit of accomplished women.

What is this but the sudden transformation of an aristocracy into a plutocracy? So it was in Sienna, and, with interposition of a few rapid half-developed phases of social change, in most of the little states of Italy. And thus,

amid a world of soldier-nobles and ignorant serfs, Italy became in the twelfth century the salt of the earth.

In Venice after the Huns retired the old noblesse of the continent then become city plutocrats, remained in their ocean dwellings, and sought not to rebuild the smoking ruins of the farm-castles on their ancestral estates. The cultivators of the soil and the small farmers returned and rendered their rents to the noblesse, who lived in the city; and it was perhaps at the time of the resumption of their ancient wealth, that they joined with the merchants who had grown rich by trade while Attila was still in Lombardy, in forming that solid and jealous oligarchy that, thanks to the Adriatic, endured till the close of the last century.*

All over Italy, wherever this change from the condition of a rural noblesse to a city life took place, the wealth of these new settlers in the cities consisted at first in the rent that was paid them from their estates, and this was often paid in kind and stored in their town palazzo, whose prodigious size, which now astonishes the traveller whether in Bologna, Padua, Venice, or Florence, is to be explained by the necessity of having a large warehouse underneath the palatial suite of apartments. Many of them sold their wine and corn in retail from their palaces, others thought it more becoming a merchant prince to put their stores all on board ship, and sell them in another part of the world.

The state of Sienna underwent the same social change as many of its prouder neighbours. Weavers of wool and silk, expelled from Lombardy, worked their way honestly with the native bourgeois to some little wealth and power. The nobles in their country castles kept

There seems some discrepancy of opinion as to the origin of the titled order of Venetians between M. de Sismondi (Rep. Ital. ch. v.) and M. Daru (Hist. de Venise, lib. xxxix.) But it ought not to be forgotten, that for the first two centuries and a half of its independent existence the Venetian constitution was a pure democracy.