It is probable that if Mainz, his country, had not been a free city, this young gentleman would have been unable to conceive or to carry into execution his invention. Despotism and superstition equally insist upon silence; they would have stifled the universal and resistless echo which genius was about to create for written words. Printing and liberty were both to spring from the same soil and the same climate. [Illustration: Hans Gutenberg.] Mainz, Strasburg, Worms, and other municipal towns on the Rhine, then governed themselves, under the suzerainty of the empire, as small federal republics, like Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the other states of Italy. The nobility warlike, the burgesses increasing in importance, and the laboring population vacillating between these two classes, who alternately oppressed and courted it, from time to time, here as everywhere, fought for supremacy. Outbursts of civil war, excited by vanity or interest, and in which the victory remained sometimes with the patricians, sometimes with the burgesses, and at others with the artisans, made them alternately victors, conquered, and proscribed. This is the history of all cities, of all republics, and of all empires. Mainz, was a miniature of Rome or Athens, only the proscribed party had not the sea to cross to escape from their country; they went outside the walls, and crossed the Rhine; those of Strasburg going to Mainz, and those of Mainz to Strasburg, to wait until their party recovered power, or until they were recalled by their fellow-citizens. In these intestine struggles of Mainz, the young Gutenberg, himself a gentleman, and naturally fighting for the cause most holy in a son's eyes--that of his father--was defeated by the burgesses, and banished, with all the knights of his family, from the territory of Mainz. His mother and sisters alone remained there in possession of their property, as innocent victims on whom the faults of the nobility should not be visited. His first banishment was short, and peace was ratified by the return of the refugees. A vain quarrel about precedence in the public ceremonies on the occasion of the solemn entry of the Emperor Robert, accompanied by the Archbishop Conrad, into Mainz, refreshed the animosity of the two classes in 1420, and young Gutenberg, at the age of nineteen, under went his second exile.