sufficiently prominent political factors to have their deeds and their progress chronicled.  Besides, if we consider the modes by which the communes slowly rose to independence, it will easily be seen that to have every step of this slow and almost secret advance chronicled and given to the world, would have been entirely contrary to the policy of the cities.  These hoped to gain by the neglect of their rulers, and while clinging pertinaciously to every privilege ever legally granted, to claim new ones constantly, putting forth as their sole legal title that slippery claim of precedent and time-honored custom.  In that age, books of reference to prove such claims would have been found alike inconvenient and unnecessary.  All the city folks wished was to be forgotten and ignored by their superiors, as any notice vouchsafed them was sure to come only in the restraint of some assumed privilege or the curtailing of some coveted right.

Hence the principal cause of the poverty of record through all this period of slow if steady growth; and the disappointed investigator must in some measure console himself with such a reason.  It may be asked, what of the various local histories of different towns, whose authors seldom fail to give highflown accounts of their native cities, even in the remotest and darkest ages of their history?  To this question there is a double answer:  in the first place the uttermost caution must be enjoined in using such material; not only in separating fact from baseless tradition of a much later period, but in making large allowance for the heavy strain which a strong feeling of local patriotism, or civism, puts upon the conscience of the author.  In the second place it must be remembered that most of such histories, or at least of the monkish or other records from which they derive their source and most of their material, were written to the glory or under the auspices of some dominant noble family or ecclesiastical institution, to whose laudation in ages past and present the humble author devotes all the resources of his mind, and I am afraid far too often of his imagination.

Let us now cast a glance at the exhausted civilization of the towns of Northern Italy, where the formal shell of Roman organization still remained, after the vigor and life which had produced it had long been destroyed.  To describe the condition of the Roman municipia at the time of the Teutonic invasions is but to tell a part of the story of the fall of the Roman Empire.  The municipal system, which from the names and duties of its officers would seem to represent a surprising amount of local independence in matters of administration, even a collection of small almost free republics, had lost all its strength and all its vital power by the grinding exactions of a centralized despotism, which was compelled to support its declining power by strengthening the very forces which were working its destruction, at the expense of destroying those