violently if you will, upon it. We do not hear of Athens or of Rome,
of an Alexander or of a Caesar, of a city or of a man. It is an
"Italian nation." It is the individualism of the independent spirit of
the North, which "forms" a nation from the exhausted remains of the
development of centralization of the South. The new idea of distinct
nationality among races of kindred stock was already at work, even
though it did not reach a formal expression till the Treaty of Verdun,
more than two hundred and fifty years later.

I do not mean to imply that we must in any measure ignore the passive
force and influence of the old forms on the new. The old veins receive
the new blood; the new torrent, overrunning everything at first with
the strength of its new life, will find again, even if it deepen, the
channel of the old river: a vanquished civilization will always subdue
and at the same time raise its barbarous conquerors, if they come of a
stock capable of appreciating civilizing influences. In the present
case this means that the men of the North brought the new ideas that
were to form modern history, and let their growth be directed and
assisted, while they were yet too young to stand alone, by some of the
framework which had been built up by the long experience of their
Southern neighbors.

To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study,
this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so
much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the
government of the Italian communes was purely Roman in its forms and
in its conception, or purely Teutonic. The supporters of neither
theory can be said to be in the right. You cannot say that the average
city government was entirely Roman or entirely Teutonic, either in the
laws which guided it, or in the channels by which these laws were