THE SACRIFICE.

Ihr fuehrt ins Leben uns hinein;
Ihr laesst den armen schuldig werden;
Dann uebergiebt Ihr ihm der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld raecht sich auf Erden.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European
civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal
barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as
is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians
appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political,
social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men
whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general
views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of
being modern. They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling,
they had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking, they had
trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle Ages; no
symbolical mists made them see things vague, strange, and distorted;
their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our own, and, if they saw
less than we do, what they did see appeared to them in its true shape
and proportions. Almost for the first time since the ruin of antique
civilization, they could show well-organized, well-defined States;
artistically disciplined armies; rationally devised laws; scientifically
conducted agriculture; and widely extended, intelligently undertaken
commerce. For the first time, also, they showed regularly built,
healthy, and commodious towns; well-drained fields; and, more important
than all, hundreds of miles of country owned not by feudal lords, but by
citizens; cultivated not by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the
rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and
crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague
half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly
through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive,
and sceptical: modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern
politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end
of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic,
literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal,
and military inheritance of Rome, increased threefold by her own strong,
original, essentially modern activities.

Yet, at that very time, and almost in proportion as all t