men whom he could hold by debt between his thumb and finger.  His command of the public moneys enabled him to wink at peculation in State offices; it was part of his system to bind magistrates and secretaries to his interest by their consciousness of guilt condoned but not forgotten.  Not a few, moreover, owed their living to the appointments he procured for them.  While he thus controlled the wheel-work of the commonwealth by means of organised corruption, he borrowed the arts of his old enemies to oppress dissentient citizens.  If a man took an independent line in voting, and refused allegiance to the Medicean party, he was marked out for persecution.  No violence was used; but he found himself hampered in his commerce—­money, plentiful for others, became scarce for him; his competitors in trade were subsidised to undersell him.  And while the avenues of industry were closed, his fortune was taxed above its value, until he had to sell at a loss in order to discharge his public obligations.  In the first twenty years of the Medicean rule, seventy families had to pay 4,875,000 golden florins of extraordinary imposts, fixed by arbitrary assessment.

The more patriotic members of his party looked with dread and loathing on this system of corruption and exclusion.  To their remonstrances Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings:  ’Better the State spoiled than the State not ours.’  ’Governments cannot be carried on with paternosters.’  ‘An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.’  ’I aim at finite ends.’  These maxims represent the whole man,—­first, in his egotism, eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin; secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends; thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine clothes suffice for a citizen; fourthly, in his worldly ambition bent on positive success.  It was, in fact, his policy to reduce Florence to the condition of a rotten borough:  nor did this policy fail.  One notable sign of the influence he exercised was the change which now came over the foreign relations of the republic.  Up to the date of his dictatorship Florence had uniformly fought the battle of freedom in Italy.  It was the chief merit of the Albizzi oligarchy that they continued the traditions of the mediaeval State, and by their vigorous action checked the growth of the Visconti.  Though they engrossed the government they never forgot that they were first of all things Florentines, and only in the second place men who owed their power and influence to office.  In a word, they acted like patriotic Tories, like republican patricians.  Therefore they would not ally themselves with tyrants or countenance the enslavement of free cities by armed despots.  Their subjugation of the Tuscan burghs to Florence was itself part of a grand republican policy.  Cosimo changed all this.  When the Visconti dynasty ended by the death of Filippo Maria in 1447, there was a chance of restoring the independence of Lombardy.  Milan in effect declared