imposthumes of a desperate disease. That solid basis of national
morality which grounds the monarch firm upon the sympathies and
interests of the people whom he seems to lead, but whom he in reality
expresses, failed them. Therefore each individual despot trembled for
his throne, while Italy, as in the ominous picture drawn by her
historian, felt that all the elements were combining to devour her with
a coming storm. The land of earthquakes divined a cataclysm, to cope
with which she was unable. An apparently insignificant event determined
the catastrophe. The Sforza appealed to France, and after the disastrous
descent of Charles VIII. the whole tide of events turned. Instead of
internal self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a
succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.

The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent
nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the
history of the Communes and the development of despotism. We have
already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a
narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in
its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain.
Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil
life to the condition of serfdom. The voices of the inhabitants were no
longer heard debating questions that affected their interests. They
submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the
ascendant commonwealth. Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his
'Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,' the subjection of
Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of
numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from
the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted
Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by
such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become