COMPOUND POLITICAL HEADS. 217 



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 in- 

 structed 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, ex- 

 cited 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 reestablish 

 popular rule. 



When we join with these the like general connections that arose 

 in the IsTetherlands and in the Hanse towns ; when we remember the 

 Iiberali2>ation 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 unques- 

 tionable that, while by increase of militant activities compound head- 

 ships 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 govern- 

 ment which thereafter existed in it. Even Mr. Grote, in his compari- 

 son between the institutions of ancient Greece and those of mediaeval 

 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 mdependence of character is a factor, 

 but ascribing this independence of character to the continued exist- 

 ence of a race in a habitat which facilitates evasion of control, we saw 

 that, with such a nature so conditioned, cooperation in war causes the 

 union on equal terms of groups whose heads are joined to form a di- 

 rective council. And according as the component groups are governed 

 more or less autocratically, the directive council is more or less oli- 

 garchic. We have seen that in localities differing so widely as do moun- 



