dern world. The Italy of the
Renaissance was one of the many victims which inevitable moral sequence
dooms to be evil in order that others may learn to be good: it was a
sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring frightful
expiation on the part of the victim. For Italy was subjected, during
well-nigh two centuries, to a slow process of moral destruction; a
process whose various factors--political disorganization, religious
indifference, scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm for the
antique, breaking-up of mediaeval standards and excessive growth of
industry, commerce, and speculative thought at the expense of warlike
and religious habits--were at the same time factors in the great advent
of modern civilization, of which Italy was the pioneer and the victim; a
process whose result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce
to chaos the moral and political organization of the nation; at once
rendering men completely unable to discriminate between good and evil,
and enabling a certain proportion of them to sin with complete impunity:
creating on the one hand moral indifference, and on the other social
irresponsibility. Civilization had kept pace with demoralization; the
faculty of reasoning over cause and effect had developed at the expense
of the faculty of judging of actions. The Italians of the Renaissance,
little by little, could judge only of the adaptation of means to given
ends; whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate they soon
became unable to perceive and even unable to ask. Success was the
criterion of all action, and power was its limits. Active and furious
national wickedness there was not: there was mere moral inertia on the
part of the people. The Italians of the Renaissance neither resisted
evil nor rebelled against virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a
little pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the governed
classes, where the law was equal between men, and industry and commerce
kept up healthy activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans
and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals, listened to
edifying sermons, and were even moved (for a few moments) by men like
San Bernardino or Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right
lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence induced treachery and
violence, and irresponsibility produced excess, the pressure was towards
evil. The princelets and prelates and mercenery general