The expedition which Charles VIII made to Naples in 1494 brought the French into Italy. They were soon followed by the Spaniards, until Italy became the cockpit of European rivalries. Political as well as moral degradation was reached when, by the League of Cambrai, 1508, Pope Julius II made alliance with Louis XII of France, the Emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand “The Catholic” of Spain for the partition of the Venetian territories. Humiliation ensued sixteen years later, when German and Spanish mercenaries, led by the renegade Constable Bourbon, sacked Rome. Italy, after having led the van in the emancipation of human intellect and will, had prostituted both. Even the Counter-Reformation, instituted by the Church to reform her own abuses as well as to resist the tide of Protestantism, could not save Italy to the Italians. Three hundred and fifty years had to elapse before they could recover their nationality and once more set themselves upon the road of progress. GERMAN RENAISSANCE The influence of the Italian Renaissance was firstly and most directly absorbed by France. But the consideration of this may conveniently be postponed until after a review of its operation in Germany and Spain. For in both these countries the Renaissance influence bred antagonisms: in Germany the Reformation and in Spain the Counter-Reformation. The Renaissance which the Italians had initiated as a thing of Beauty, began to operate in Germany as a thing of Power; the emancipation of the human intellect and will was supplemented by the emancipation of the human conscience. The Italian indifference to the latter was more than a source of decadence to themselves; for it cleft into two channels what should have been united in a single stream of human endeavour; it forged barriers between what should be component elements in human ideals. It started that antagonism between Beauty and Morality, between Æsthetics and Ethics by which even to this day civilisation is being retarded in its richest and most beneficent possibilities of progress.