self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a
succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.

The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent
nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the
history of the Communes and the development of despotism. We have
already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a
narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in
its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain.
Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil
life to the condition of serfdom. The voices of the inhabitants were no
longer heard debating questions that affected their interests. They
submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the
ascendant commonwealth. Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his
'Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,' the subjection of
Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of
numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from
the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted
Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by
such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become
sovereigns, administering the resources of the nation for their profit.
The dread of this catastrophe rendered Venice odious to her sister
commonwealths at the close of the fifteenth century, and justified,
according to Guicciardini's views of history, the action taken by Cosimo
de' Medici in 1450, when he rendered Milan strong by supporting her
despot, Francesco Sforza.[2] In a word republican freedom, as the term
is now understood, was unknown in Italy. Municipal autonomy, implying
the right of the municipality to rule its conquests for its own
particular profit, was the dominant idea. To have advanced from this
stage of thought to the highly developed conception of a national
republic, centralizing the forces of Italy and at the same time giving
free play to its local energies, would have been impossible. This kind
of republican unity implies a previous unification of the people in some
other form of government. It furthermore demands a system of
representation extended to all sections of the nation. Their very
nature, therefore, prevented the republican institutions won by the
Italians in the early Middle Ages from sufficing for their independence
i