iformity of coinage and of weights and measures was to be decreed,
together with the abolition of the Roman and Canon law. Legists,
priests, and princes were to be severely dealt with. But, curiously
enough, the middle and lower nobility, especially the knighthood, were
more tenderly handled, being treated as themselves victims of their
feudal superiors, lay and ecclesiastic, especially the latter. In this
connection the secularization of ecclesiastical fiefs was strongly
insisted on.

As men found, however, that neither the Emperor Sigismund, nor the
Emperor Friedrich III, nor the Emperor Maximilian, upon each of whom
successively their hopes had been cast as the possible realization of
the German Messiah of earlier dreams, fulfilled their expectations,
nay, as each in succession implicitly belied these hopes, showing no
disposition whatever to act up to the views promulgated in their
names, the tradition of the Imperial deliverer gradually lost its
force and popularity. By the opening of the Lutheran Reformation the
opinion had become general that a change would not come from above,
but that the initiative must rest with the people themselves--with the
classes specially oppressed by existing conditions, political,
economic, and ecclesiastical--to effect by their own exertions such a
transformation as was shadowed forth in the spurious constitutions.
These, and similar ideas, were now everywhere taken up and elaborated,
often in a still more radical sense than the original; and they
everywhere found hearers and adherents.

The "true inwardness" of the change, of which the Protestant
Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation
of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one
individualistic in its essential character. The whole polity of the
Middle Ages industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based
on the principle of the group or the community--ranging in
hierarchical order from the trade-guild to the town corporation; from
the town corporation through the feudal orders to the Imperial throne
itself; from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from
the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as
represented by the papal chair. The principle of this social
organization was now breaking down. The modern and bourgeois
conception of the autonomy of the individual in all spheres of life
was beginning to affirm itself.

The most definite e