Rheims, Cologne—"the people were its masons" Victor Hugo has said so well—the treasures of beauty of Florence and Venice, the town halls of Bremen and Prague, the towers of Nuremberg and Pisa, and so on ad infinitum? All these great conquests of art were the product of that period.
Do you wish to measure the progress of that civilization at a glance? Compare the Dome of St. Marc in Venice to the rustic arch of the Normand's, Raphael's pictures to the naive embroideries and carpets of Bayeux, the mathematical and physical instruments and clocks of Nuremberg to the sand clocks of the preceding centuries, Dante's sonorous language to the barbarous Latin of the tenth century. A new world has opened up between the two!
Never, with the exception of that other glorious period of ancient Greece—free cities again—had humanity made such a stride forwards. Never in two or three centuries, had man undergone so profound a change nor so extended his power over the forces of nature.
You perhaps may think of the progress of civilisation in our own century which is ceaselessly boasted of? But in each of its manifestations it is but the child of the civilization which grew up in the midst of free communes! All the great discoveries which have made modern science,—the compass, the clock, the watch, printing, the maritime discoveries, gunpowder, the law of gravitation, the law of atmospheric pressure, of which the steam-engine is but a development, the rudiments of chemistry, the scientific method already pointed out by Roger Bacon, and practised in Italian universities,—where does that all come from, if not from the free cities which developed under the shelter of communal liberties?
But you may say perhaps, that I forget the conflicts, the internal struggles of which the history of these communes is full; the street tumults, the ferocious battles sustained against the landlords; the insurrections of "young arts" against the "ancient arts"; the blood that was shed and the reprisals which took place in these struggles.…
I forget nothing. But, like Leo and Botta, the two historians of medieval Italy, like Sismondi, like Ferrari, Gino Capponi, and so many others, I see that these struggles were the guarantee itself of free life in a free city. I perceive a renewal of and a new flight towards progress after each one of these struggles. After having described these struggles and conflicts in detail, and after having measured the immensity of progress realized while these struggles stained the streets with blood, viz: well-being assured to all the inhabitants, and a renovation of civilization, Leo and Botta concluded by this thought, so true, that so often comes to my mind:
