od, packing the Signory and
the Councils with men whom he could hold by debt between his thumb and
finger. His command of the public moneys enabled him to wink at
peculation in State offices; it was part of his system to bind
magistrates and secretaries to his interest by their consciousness of
guilt condoned but not forgotten. Not a few, moreover, owed their
living to the appointments he procured for them. While he thus
controlled the wheel-work of the commonwealth by means of organised
corruption, he borrowed the arts of his old enemies to oppress
dissentient citizens. If a man took an independent line in voting,
and refused allegiance to the Medicean party, he was marked out for
persecution. No violence was used; but he found himself hampered in
his commerce--money, plentiful for others, became scarce for him; his
competitors in trade were subsidised to undersell him. And while the
avenues of industry were closed, his fortune was taxed above its
value, until he had to sell at a loss in order to discharge his public
obligations. In the first twenty years of the Medicean rule, seventy
families had to pay 4,875,000 golden florins of extraordinary imposts,
fixed by arbitrary assessment.

The more patriotic members of his party looked with dread and loathing
on this system of corruption and exclusion. To their remonstrances
Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiled
than the State not ours.' 'Governments cannot be carried on with
paternosters.' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.' 'I aim at finite
ends.' These maxims represent the whole man,--first, in his egotism,
eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin;
secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends;
thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine
clothes suffice for a citizen; fourthly, in his worldly ambition bent
on positive success. It was, in fact, his policy to reduce Florence to
the condition of a rotten borough: nor did this policy fail. One
notable sign of the influence he exercised was the change which now
came over the foreign relations of the republic. Up to the date of his
dictatorship Florence had uniformly fought the battle of freedom in
Italy. It was the chief merit of the Albizzi oligarchy that they
continued the traditions of the mediaeval State, and by their vigorous
action checked the growth of the Visconti. Though they engrossed the
government they never forgot tha