their courts, gather idle or retrograde courtiers, men who call
themselves _noble_, but who have never been able to constitute
an aristocracy. An aristocracy is a compact independent body,
representing in itself an idea, and from one extremity of the
country to another, governed, more or less, by one and the same
inspiration: our nobles have lived upon the crumbs of royal
favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to
place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been
in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of
clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an
historical element: it has furnished some fortunate
_Condottieri_, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town;
it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have
passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being
nearly everywhere extinct, the races have become degenerated
amidst corruption and ignorance. The descendants of our noble
families at Genoa, at Naples, at Venice, and at Rome, are, for
the most part specimens of absolute intellectual nullity.
Almost every thing that has worked its difficult way in art, in
literature, or in political activity, is plebeian.

In Italy the initiative of progress has always belonged to the
people, to the democratic element. It is through her communes
that she has acquired all she has ever had of liberty: through
her workmen in wool or silk, through her merchants of Genoa,
Florence, Venice, and Pisa, that she has acquired her wealth;
through her artists, plebeian and republican, from Giotto to
Michael Angelo, that she has acquired her renown; through her
navigators,--plebeian,--that she has given a world to humanity;
through her Popes--sons of the people even they--that until the
twelfth century she aided in the emancipation of the weak, and
sent forth a word of unity to humanity. All her memories of
insurrection against the foreigner are memories of the people:
all that has made the greatness of our towns, dates almost
always from a republican epoch: the educational book, the only
book read by the inhabitant of the Alps or the Transteverin who
can read, is an abridgment of the history of the Ancient Roman
Republic. This is the reason why the same men who have so long
been