The same result is exhibited in the state of Germany. It was in the middle of the fifteenth century, in 1438, that the house of Austria returned to the empire, and with it the imperial power acquired a stability which it had never possessed before: the form of election became almost a mere consecration of hereditary right. At the end of the fifteenth century, Maximilian I. definitively fixed the preponderance of his house, and the regular exercise of the central power. Charles VII. had been the first in France to create a standing force for the maintenance of order, so also Maximilian in his hereditary states adopted the same means for the same object. Louis XI. had established the post-office in France, and Maximilian introduced it into Germany. In every quarter similar advancements in civilisation universally conduced to the advantage of the central power. The history of England in the fifteenth century consists of two great events--the war with France outwardly, and that of the Roses inwardly, a foreign and a civil war. These two wars, so different in appearance, tended to the same result. The contest with France was maintained by the English people with a zeal which turned almost exclusively to the profit of the royal power. This nation, even then more skilful and firm than any other in sparing its troops and its money, abandoned them to its kings at that epoch without foresight or calculation. In the reign of Henry V., a considerable revenue, the rights of customs, was granted to the king for life from his accession to the throne. The foreign war being finished, or nearly so, the civil war, which had been at first connected with it, continued alone, and the houses of York and Lancaster maintained their respective claims with the sword. {188} When a final term was put to their bloody contests, the high English aristocracy was ruined, thinned, and utterly unable to preserve the power which it had exercised in former times. A coalition of the great barons could no longer awe the crown. When the Tudors mounted the throne in the person of Henry VII., in 1485, the era of political centralisation and the triumph of royalty commenced. In Italy, royalty was not established, at least not under that name; but it is of little moment with regard to the result. The republics fell in the fifteenth century; or where the name still lingered, power was concentrated in the hands of one or a few families; the republican life was burnt to the socket In the north of Italy, almost all the Lombardian republics merged in the duchy of Milan. In 1434, Florence fell under the dominion of the Medicis. In 1464, Genoa became subject to the Milanese. The majority of the republics, great and small, gave place to sovereign houses. Shortly afterwards, the pretensions of foreign sovereigns to the north and south of Italy--to the Milanese on the one hand, and to the kingdom of Naples on the other--began to be advanced.