accept
tyranny for the sake of the protection it professed to extend to life
and property.

To these vicissitudes all the republics of Italy, with the exception of
Venice, were subject. In like manner, they shared in common the belief
that constitutions could be made at will, that the commonwealth was
something plastic, capable of taking the complexion and the form
impressed upon it by speculative politicians. So firmly rooted was this
conviction, and so highly self-conscious had the statesmen of Italy
become, partly by the experience of their shifting history, and partly
by their study of antiquity, that the idea of the State as something
possessed of organic vitality can scarcely be said to have existed among
them. The principle of gradual growth, which gives its value, for
example, to the English Constitution, was not recognized by the
Italians. Nor again had their past history taught them the necessity, so
well defined and recognized by the Greek statesmen, of maintaining a
fixed character at any cost in republics, which, in spite of their small
scale, aspired to permanence.[1] The most violent and arbitrary changes
which the speculative faculty of a theorist could contrive, or which the
prejudices of a party could impose, seemed to them not only possible but
natural.

[1] The value of the [Greek: _ethos_] was not wholly unrecognized by
political theorists. Giannotti (vol. i. p. 160, and vol. ii. p. 13),
for example translates it by the word 'temperamento.'

A very notable instance of this tendency to treat the State as a plastic
product of political ingenuity, is afforded by the annals of Genoa.
After suffering for centuries from the vicissitudes common to all
Italian free cities--discords between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions,
between the nobles and the people, between the enfranchised citizens and
the proletariat--after submitting to the rule of foreign masters,
especially of France and Milan, and after being torn in pieces by the
rival houses of Adorni and Fregosi, the Genoese at last received liberty
from the hands of Andrea Doria in 1528. They then proceeded to form a
new Constitution for the protection of their freedom; and in order to
destroy the memory of the old parties which had caused their ruin, they
obliterated all their family names with the exception of twenty, under
one or other of which the whole body of citizens were bound to enroll
themselves.[1] This was nothing less than an