Perhaps the quality which strikes us most in this dawn of our Modern World is its suddenness; Niccolo Pisano gets up, as it were, out of the ground, Giotto follows Cimabue, Dante is born while Guido Guinicelli is still a young man. We are amazed and bewildered, and it is not in the arts alone that the change is so startling. The political structure shifts with equal quickness, and while we are trying to connect and coordinate this outburst of art with the democratic triumph of the communes, the democratic communes disappear under our eyes. At first as we look we are a little puzzled, for the outward form of the commune remains unchanged; the _podesta_ is still there, the Great Council and the inner council are still there, the committees and the sub-committees superintending and directing the affairs of the commonwealth; but further observation discloses a lack of spontaneity. The motive power does not seem the resultant of the debate and argument of numerous discordant wills, but to proceed from some one definite inner source. More careful observation shows that these outward committees are but registering boards that record an inner will, that their members go to one particular palace to have their minds made up, at first privily, but soon openly, and at last confessedly and ostentatiously. This is the regular course. The commune is, as it were, a political chrysalis out of which a full-blown tyrant bursts. The tyrants were men of capacity, who gathered the various functions of the government into their own hands, and by a course of adroitness and fraud, or by a _coup d'etat_, reduced the city to obedience, and then, after having exercised sovereign rights during their lives, bequeathed the principality to their heirs. The reason of their success is plain. It was impossible for trade to flourish, for property to collect its income, for luxury to enjoy itself, under the political confusion that attended the democratic endeavours for self-government. The uncertainty in government, law, and trade, was too high a price to pay for liberty. Men of property, men of business, men of pleasure, preferred the comparative stability of a tyranny.