a
while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only
when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance
had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards;
a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national
institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized
the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form
independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the
characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in
short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and
Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. We must not hastily
accuse the volition of the Italians of the Renaissance; they may have
been egotistic and timid, but had they been (as some most certainly
were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, they could not
have averted the catastrophe. The nature of their civilization prevented
not only their averting the peril, but even their conceiving its
existence; the very nature of their political forms necessitated such a
dissolution of them. The commune grows from within; it is a little speck
which gradually extends its circumference, and the further this may be
from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. The modern
monarchy grows from external pressure, and towards the centre; it is a
huge mass consolidating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows
that the more the commonwealth developes, the weaker it grows, because
its tendency is to spread and fall to pieces; whereas the more the
monarchy developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up towards
the centre, and becomes more vigorously knit together. The city ceases
to be a city when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes
all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point.

The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth century was not
only inevitable, from the essential nature of the civilization of the
Renaissance, but it was also indispensable in order that this
civilization might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread so
long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished
nation can civilize its victors. The Greece of Pericles could not
Hellenize Rome, but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander
could; the Rome of Caesar did not Romanize the Teutonic races as did the
Rome of Theodosius; no