1. Between 1000 and 1200 the independent and enterprising spirit—the individualism—that we have seen at the base of European character, and which first produced the Feudal System, began to move among the masses in various ways and laid the foundation for that influence of the People that was afterward to become the most powerful element in political life. It first presented itself in the development of industrial arts and commerce in cities which obtained, as corporations, the rights, or a part of the rights, of the feudal proprietor, which they proceeded to exercise under the form of Free Cities in Germany, privileged Communes in France and commercial Republics in Italy.
2. A second development, highly favorable some centuries later to the reaction of popular freedom against centralizing despotism in the government, was the religious protest against the claims of the church over freedom of thought. This spirit grew up in Germany, and its first remote beginnings are to be found in the imperial title conferred by the pope on Charlemagne. In the course of time (a. d. 963) that title was inherited by the German rulers who, for a long time, struggled for the control of Italy and a feudal superiority over the popes. This was carried on for two centuries with much acrimony, in which the terms Guelph, the general name of those who supported the side of the popes, and Ghibellines, of those who rallied to the emperor, came to be the watchwords of Germany and Italy. The popes triumphed in this contest, which prevented the establishment of a vast and powerful political despotism,[138] and gave the church a temporal kingdom in a part of Italy, with an immense spiritual empire highly embarrassing to free mental growth. The reaction against this spiritual control produced the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, in which was wrapped up the germ of modern Republicanism.
3. The Crusades loosened the bonds of Feudalism, taught nations and rulers to act together to gain a common object, enlarged the experiences of men immensely, and cultivated and organized the spirit of personal adventure which afterwards expended itself on commerce.
It was at about the crisis of this period (1215, a. d.) that the Magna Charta—the foundation of English constitutional liberty—was produced; that the Hanseatic League and Free Cities began to flourish in Germany; the commercial republics of Venice, Genoa and Florence rose in Italy; and the communal corporations in France sprang up. They were all more or less stimulated by influences growing out of the Crusades, and brought forward the people and their distinct and separate interests and activities into political importance. This was the beginning of an entirely new order of things, which required a new continent for its full development.
4. A first circumstance, above all favorable to the liberties of the people, was the Invention of Printing, producing rapid diffusion of information, the coincident revival of learning and the foundation of modern science. All these, working together with various other agencies, gradually swept away feudalism, checked the towering spiritual tyranny of the church and corrected a crowd of minor evils that embarrassed society, enterprise, and progress in the science of government.
The intermediate stage in this progress appeared like a return to old principles. The dissolution of feudalism left the governments of Europe centralized. The lords inheriting feudal rights had become intolerable despots. For a certain period the authority of the king was the bulwark behind which the people sheltered themselves from the oppressions of their[139] feudal superiors, and they united with him to reduce the feudal nobility to the comparatively harmless condition of the modern aristocracy, whose greatest distinction is social pre-eminence. It left them, indeed, a high, but not overwhelming, position in the body politic, which the growing education and wealth of the middle and lower classes constantly tended to reduce. This change was commencing when America was discovered. The feudal chiefs labored to extend and strengthen their power at the expense of each other, of the king and the people. The increasing activity and importance of commerce, trade and industry required the support of a broad legislation that could not be obtained while nations were broken up into petty lordships, p............