of the victorious faction.  But the Consiglio del Comune, with the Podesta, who has not ceased to exercise judicial functions, still subsists.  The Priors form the signory as of old.  The Credenza goes on working, and the Gran Consiglio represents the body of privileged burghers.  The party does but tyrannize over the city it has conquered, and manipulates the ancient constitution for its own advantage.  In this clash of Guelf with Ghibelline the beneficiaries were the lower classes of the people.  Excluded from the Popolo of episcopal and consular revolutions, the trades and industries of the great cities now assert their claims to be enfranchised.  The advent of the Arti is the chief social phenomenon of the crisis.[1] Thus the final issue of the conflict was a new Italy, deeply divided by factions that were little understood, because they were so vital, because they represented two adverse currents of national energy, incompatible, irreconcilable, eternal in antagonism as the poles.  But this discordant nation was more commercial and more democratic.  Families of merchants rose upon the ruins of the old nobility.  Roman cities of industry reduced their military rivals of earlier or later origin to insignificance.  The plain, the river, and the port asserted themselves against the mountain fastness and the barrackburgh.  The several classes of society, triturated, shaken together, leveled by warfare and equalized by industry, presented but few obstacles to the emergence of commanding personalities, however humble, from their ranks.  Not only had the hierarchy of feudalism disappeared; but the constitution of the city itself was confused, and the Popolo, whether ‘primo’ or ’secondo or even ‘terzo,’ was diluted with recently franchised Contadini and all kinds of ’novi homines.’[2] The Divine Comedy, written after the culmination of the Guelf and Ghibelline dissensions, yields the measure of their animosity.  Dante finds no place in Hell Heaven, or Purgatory for the souls who stood aloof from strife, the angels who were neither Guelf nor Ghibelline in Paradise.  His Vigliacchi, ‘wretches who never lived,’ because they never felt the pangs or ecstasies of partisanship, wander homeless on the skirts of Limbo, among the abortions and offscourings of creation.  Even so there was no standing-ground in Italy outside one or the other hostile camp.  Society was riven down to its foundation.  Rancors dating from the thirteenth century endured long after the great parties ceased to have a meaning.  They were perpetuated in customs, and expressed themselves in the most trivial details.  Banners, ensigns, and heraldic colors followed the divisions of the factions.  Ghibellines wore the feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs upon the other.  Ghibellines cut fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down.  In Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their host, who discovered from their way of slicing garlic that they sided with the hostile party.  Ghibellines