and gilded Hanse of commercial republicanism coils itself around the decaying trunk of feudal despotism.  Cities leagued with cities throughout and beyond Christendom-empire within empire-bind themselves closer and closer in the electric chain of human sympathy and grow stronger and stronger by mutual support.  Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers and merchant princes.  Commerce plucks up half-drowned Holland by the locks and pours gold into her lap.  Gold wrests power from iron.  Needy Flemish weavers become mighty manufacturers.  Armies of workmen, fifty thousand strong, tramp through the swarming streets.  Silk-makers, clothiers, brewers become the gossips of kings, lend their royal gossips vast sums and burn the royal notes of hand in fires of cinnamon wood.  Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.  Learning to handle cross-bow and dagger, the burghers fear less the baronial sword, finding that their own will cut as well, seeing that 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