In the present
case this means that the men of the North brought the new ideas that
were to form modern history, and let their growth be directed and
assisted, while they were yet too young to stand alone, by some of the
framework which had been built up by the long experience of their
Southern neighbors.
To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study,
this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so
much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the
government of the Italian communes was purely Roman in its forms and
in its conception, or purely Teutonic. The supporters of neither
theory can be said to be in the right. You cannot say that the average
city government was entirely Roman or entirely Teutonic, either in the
laws which guided it, or in the channels by which these laws were
executed and expressed. I think much time and much learning have been
spent on a discussion both fruitless and unnecessary. We cannot err if
we subject the question to a consideration at once critical and
impartial.
The widely differing opinions eagerly supported by different writers
on this point, form a very good example of the deceiving influence of
national feeling on the judgment in matters of historical criticism.
For, on the one hand, we find many German writers ignoring entirely
the old framework of Roman organization, and recognizing only the new
Teutonic life which gave back to it the strength it had lost; on the
other, a host of lesser Italian writers who magnify certain old names
and forms, and mistake them for the substance, making all the new life
of Italy but the return of a past, which belonged to a greatness that
was dead.
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