required this disregard of wealth, and not
less so Christianity, which commanded men to despise the riches of this
world, and granted to the wealthy so little prospect of the Kingdom of
Heaven. Since the time of the Hohenstaufen, after the nobles were
constituted as a privileged order, the antagonism between the rich
money-makers of the city and the needy warriors of the country, was
more and more strongly developed. In the Hanse Towns of the north
undoubtedly the warlike merchant obtained dominion and respect by his
armed vessels, even in distant countries. But the rich and highly
cultivated gentlemen of Nueremberg and Augsburg, were scarcely less
distasteful to the people than to the princes and nobles who dwelt in
predatory habits on the frontiers of their domain; it was not the
Fuggers alone who were accused by the Reformers of usury and un-German
feeling. After the Thirty Years' War, this enmity bore new fruit, and
one can easily believe that the great merchants gave no little occasion
to keep alive such antipathy. No human occupation requires such free
competition and such unfettered intercourse as trade. But the whole
tendency of the olden time was to fence in from the outer world, and to
protect individuals by privileges; such a tendency of the time could
not fail to make the merchant hard and reckless; his endeavours to
obtain a monopoly, and to evade senseless laws with respect to the
interest of money, gave the people, frequently with justice, the
feeling that the gains of the merchant were produced by the pressure
they exercised on the consumer. This feeling became particularly
vigorous after the Thirty Years' War. Whilst in Holland and in England
the modern middle classes were pre-eminently strengthened by widely
extended commerce, German commerce--except in the larger sea-port
towns--was prevented from attaining a sound development by the
subdivision of territory, the arbitrary dues, the varying standard of
money, and, not least, by the poverty of the people; on the other hand,
there was constant temptation to every kind of usurious traffic. The
diversity of German coinage, and the unscrupulousness of the rulers,
favoured an endless _kipperei_: to buy up good coin at an advantage, to
clip gold of full weight, and to bring light money into circulation,
became the most profitable occupation. As now, multifarious
stockjobbing, so then, illegal traffic in coined metal, was to a great
extent the plague of commer