Note 204-11 — Chapter VII

In medieval Italy, also, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed oligarchy and a proletariat. Popolo grasso and minuto (bourgeoisie—peuple) in Florence. The former were reproached especially with the breach of trust in the matter of the public moneys (Sismondi, Gesch. der Ital. Republiken, II, 323, seq.), which reminds one of the French cry, corruption in 1847. Machiavelli gives a masterly description of the class contrasts during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, in his Istoria Fiorent., III, a. 1378, 4. The poor, whose spokesmen recall the most desperate shibboleths of modern socialists, dwell principally on this, that there is only one important difference, that between rich and poor; that all men are by nature entirely equal; that people get rich only through deceit or violence; that the poor want revenge etc. It is significant how, in Florence, the largest banker finally became absolute despot, and that contemporaneously in Genoa, the Bank of St. George, in a measure, absorbed the state; the former supported by numerous loans made to influential persons like Crassus (Machiavelli, Ist. Fior., VII); the latter by the overstraining of the system of national debt.