304 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



The Italian Republics of later days again show us, in nume 

 rous cases, this connexion between trading activities and a 

 freer form of rule. The towns were industrial centres. 



&quot;The merchants of Genoa, Pisa, Florence, and Venice supplied 

 E u-ooe with the products of the Mediterranean and of the East: the 

 brnikers 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 favoured lands.&quot; 



Tli en, on looking into their histories, we find that industrial 

 gilds 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 in 

 ternal feuds tended continually to revive narrower, or more 

 personal, forms of rule, rebellions of the industrial citizens 

 occasionally happening, tended to re-establish popular rule. 



When we join with these the like general connexions 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 



o O O O 



observe that the towns more than the country, and the great 

 industrial centres 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. 



489. In common with the results reached in preceding 

 chapters, the results above reached show that types of poli 

 tical 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 mediaeval Europe 

 (vol. iii. pp. 10 12), tacitly implies that conceptions of the 



