hed. For it is in the institutional life of a people, and in
the change and development it undergoes, that are to be found those
elements which form the basis for all future changes, whether simply
in the form of its government or in the structure of its social
system. If once a clear picture is gained of the structural parts
which form the institutional framework of any particular development,
and a truthful presentation of these forming principles is proved and
established, a detailed account of the material expression of them is
a matter of secondary importance.

I have not, in this paper, attempted to describe the actual condition
of any particular municipality, or even presented a picture which
could represent the material existence of the cities as a whole. Such
a picture would only be a necessary part of a study of institutions
when the city itself was the unit to be investigated, and not of one
whose chief object is to prove that the city as such had no
constitutional existence, but simply formed a part of another
institutional unit. When we reach a period in which the city stands
out as an object of study in itself, and when we do not have to trace
its history only by learning that of other institutions which included
and overshadowed it, then the practical life of the people within its
walls becomes of the greatest importance, even to the smallest detail
of civic law or city custom; and then, and not till then, begins what
could properly be called a study of municipal institutions.

During the three centuries that we have been investigating, the study
of the Italian municipalities has been, as we have seen, but the study
of other institutions of which the municipality formed only a part. No
attempt has been made to do more than prove the origin and trace the
earliest development of those principles, which in their maturity were
to gain for the municipal unit that position where the study of its
own structure would become an object of interest, entirely apart and
distinct from any of its surroundings. It has been shown that the city
did not inherit any such position from its immediate predecessor the
Roman _municipium_, which we have learnt to consider as overthrown,
from a constitutional standpoint as annihilated; but that the new
principle introduced into state life by the northern conquerors of
Italy, the principle of administration by county rather than by urban
divisions, relegated the city to an inferior