83. The great class of the merchants is more difficult to define; but
you may regard them generally as the examples of whatever modes of life
might be consistent with peace and justice, in the economy of transfer,
as opposed to the military license of pillage.

They represent the gradual ascendancy of foresight, prudence, and order
in society, and the first ideas of advantageous national intercourse.
Their body is therefore composed of the most intelligent and temperate
natures of the time,--uniting themselves, not directly for the purpose
of making money, but to obtain stability for equal institutions,
security of property, and pacific relations with neighbouring states.
Their guilds form the only representatives of true national council,
unaffected, as the landed proprietors were, by merely local
circumstances and accidents.

84. The strength of this order, when its own conduct was upright, and
its opposition to the military body was not in avaricious cowardice,
but in the resolve to compel justice and to secure peace, can only be
understood by you after an examination of the great changes in the
government of Florence during the thirteenth century, which, among
other minor achievements interesting to us, led to that destruction of
the Tower of the Death-watch, so ingeniously accomplished by Niccola
Pisano. This change, and its results, will be the subject of my next
lecture. I must to-day sum, and in some farther degree make clear, the
facts already laid before you.

85. We have seen that the inhabitants of every great Italian state may
be divided, and that very stringently, into the five classes of
knights, priests, merchants, artists, and peasants. No distinction