Thus the internal organisation of the boroughs was reduced to two simple elements--the general assembly of the inhabitants, and a government invested with a nearly arbitrary power, under the check of insurrection or risings. It was impossible, chiefly from the state of manners, to establish a regular government and veritable guarantees for order and stability. The greatest part of the borough population was in such a condition of ignorance, brutality, and ferociousness, as rendered it very difficult to govern. In a short time, there was almost as little security in the interior of a borough, as there existed formerly in the relations of the burghers with the superior lord. Still, a higher class of burghers was rather speedily formed, the cause of which may be easily divined. The state of ideas and of social relations produced the establishment and legal constitution of industrial professions into companies or corporations. The system of privilege or monopoly was thus introduced into the interior of the boroughs, and, as a consequence, great inequality. There was shortly in all of them a certain number of important and wealthy burghers, and a labouring population more or less numerous, which, in spite of its inferiority, had a considerable share of influence in the affairs of the borough. Therefore the boroughs were divided into two classes--the higher burghers, and a population prone to all the errors and vices of a mob. The superior burghers were trammelled by the enormous difficulty of governing this lower population on the one hand, and by the continual efforts of the old lord of the borough to re-usurp his power on the other. This was their situation not only in France, but in all Europe, up till the sixteenth century, and this was perhaps the principal cause which prevented the boroughs from obtaining all the political importance which they might otherwise have had in several countries of Europe, and especially in France. Two principles were in constant strife within them: among the inferior population, a blind, reckless, and ferocious democratic spirit; and thence among the superior population, a spirit of timidity and management, inducing an extreme facility to make accommodations either with the king or with the ancient lords, in order to re-establish order and docility in the interior of the community. These two tendencies, by their separate action, effectually prevented the boroughs from assuming an important station in the general state. All these consequences had not broken out in the twelfth century; yet we are enabled to anticipate them from the very character of the insurrection, from the manner in which it had commenced, and from the condition of the different component parts of the borough population. {138}