its history only by learning that of other institutions which included
and overshadowed it, then the practical life of the people within its
walls becomes of the greatest importance, even to the smallest detail
of civic law or city custom; and then, and not till then, begins what
could properly be called a study of municipal institutions.

During the three centuries that we have been investigating, the study
of the Italian municipalities has been, as we have seen, but the study
of other institutions of which the municipality formed only a part. No
attempt has been made to do more than prove the origin and trace the
earliest development of those principles, which in their maturity were
to gain for the municipal unit that position where the study of its
own structure would become an object of interest, entirely apart and
distinct from any of its surroundings. It has been shown that the city
did not inherit any such position from its immediate predecessor the
Roman _municipium_, which we have learnt to consider as overthrown,
from a constitutional standpoint as annihilated; but that the new
principle introduced into state life by the northern conquerors of
Italy, the principle of administration by county rather than by urban
divisions, relegated the city to an inferior place as part of a rural
holding, instead of leaving it the centre of a circle of rural
dependencies. Having demonstrated the absence of all constitutional
recognition of the municipal unit as such, I have attempted to show
how a condition of such legal insignificance became generally a
condition of actual importance; how from a position of such negative
interest, the advance of the city was commenced along a road which was
ultimately to restore it its old pre-eminence, even adding to this in
time the almost forgotten attribute of sovereignty. The motives for
this advance we have seen to be no higher ones than convenience and
expediency, which made the _urbs_ of every _civitas_ the natural