he
takes to work. So it was with the towns. New wants were created;
commerce and industry arose to satisfy them; wealth and population
slowly returned.

But industry and commerce were absolutely without security; the townsmen
were exposed to merciless extortion and plundering at the hands of their
feudal overlords. Nothing irritates a man more than to be harassed in
his toil, thus deprived of its promised fruits. The only way in which
the towns could defend themselves from the violence of their masters was
by using violence themselves. So in the eleventh century we find town
after town rising in revolt against its despot, and winning from him a
charter of liberty.

Although the insurrection was in a sense general, it was in no way
concerted--it was not a rising of the combined citizens against the
combined feudal aristocracy. All the towns found themselves exposed to
much the same evils, and rescued themselves in much the same manner. But
each town acted for itself--did not go to the help of any other town.
Hence these detached communities had no ambitions, no aspirations to
national importance; their outlook was limited to themselves. But at the
same time the emancipation of the towns created a new class, a class of
citizens engaged in the same pursuits, with the same interests and the
same modes of life; a class that would in time unite and assert itself,
and prevent the domination of a single order of society that has been
the curse of Asia.

Although it may be broadly asserted that the emancipation did not alter
the relations of the citizens with the general government, that
assertion must be modified in one respect. A link was established
between the citizens and the king. Sometimes they appealed for his aid
against their lord, sometimes the lord invoked him as judge; in one way
or another a relation was established between the king and the towns,
and the citizens thus came into touch with the centre of the State.

_V.--The Crusades_

From the fifth to the twelfth century, society, as we have seen,
contained kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, citizens, peasantry, the
germs, in fact, of all that goes to make a nation and a government;
yet--no government, no nation. We have come across a multitude of
particular forces, of local institutions, but nothing general, nothing
public, nothing properly speaking political.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the contrary, all the
classes and the part