of towns properly so-called was relatively small. Only those places that
were favored by a privileged geographical situation attracted the
merchants in sufficient number to enable them to maintain a commercial
movement of real importance. After that the attraction which these
centres of business exerted upon their environs was much greater than is
ordinarily imagined. All the secondary localities were subject to their
influence. The merchants dwelling in these last, too few to act by
themselves, affiliated themselves to the hanse or gild of the principal
town. The Flemish hanse, which we have already instanced, proves this
fully, by showing us the merchants of Dixmude, Damme, Oudenbourg,
Ardenbourg, etc., seeking admission into the hanse of Bruges.

In the second place, at the period we have now reached the towns devoted
themselves far more to commerce than to industry. Few could be cited
that appear thus early as manufacturing centres. The concentration of
artisans within their walls is still incomplete. If their merchants
export, along with the products of the soil, such as wine and grain, a
quantity of manufactured products, such, for example, as cloth, it is
more than probable that these were for the most part made in the
country.

Admit these two statements, and the nature of early commerce is
explained without difficulty. They account in fact both for the freedom
of the merchants and for that character of wholesale exporters which
they exhibit so clearly and which prevents our placing them in the
category in which the theory of urban economy claims to confine them.
Contrary to the general belief, it appears then that before the
thirteenth century we find a period of free capitalistic expansion. No
doubt the capitalism of that time is a collective capitalism: groups,
not isolated individuals, are its instruments. No doubt too it contents
itself with very simple operations. The commercial expeditions upon
which its activity especially centres itself demand, for their
successful conduct, an endurance, a physical strength, which the more
advanced stages of economic evolution will not require. But they demand
nothing more. Without the ability to plan and combine they would remain
sterile. And so we can see that, from the beginning, what we find at the
basis of capitalism is intelligence, that same intelligence which Georg
Hansen has so well shown, long ago, to be the efficient cause of the
emergence of the bourgeoisi