great armies--flowers of chivalry--can ride away before them fast enough
at battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget insolence,
tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the
streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of
the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as
at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in the end,
unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural
as they are. And so, struggling along their appointed path, making
cloth, making money, making treaties with great kingdoms, making war by
land and sea, ringing great bells, waving great banners, they, too--these
insolent, boisterous burghers--accomplish their work. Thus, the mighty
power of the purse develops itself and municipal liberty becomes a
substantial fact. A fact, not a principle; for the old theorem of
sovereignty remains undisputed as ever. Neither the nation, in mass,
nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to human rights. All upper
attributes--legislative, judicial, administrative--remain in the land-
master's breast alone. It is an absurdity, therefore, to argue with
Grotius concerning the unknown antiquity of the Batavian republic.
The republic never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and was
only born after long years of agony. The democratic instincts of the
ancient German savages were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated
descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican polity had never
existed. The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right
to make the laws or to share in the government. As a matter of fact,
they did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions
of sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially. Sometimes by
bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard
blows they extorted their charters. Their codes, statutes, joyful
entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and
sworn to by the monarch. They were concessions from above; privileges