In the end, the military were brutalised, whilst the civilians became enervated. The former were made venal, the latter cowardly. The master-mind of Machiavelli, after the French invasions of 1492-9, saw these mischiefs, and would have remedied them by his plan for a civic militia; but it was too late, and the degeneracy engrafted upon the national character of Italy by the condottiere system still cankers it to the core. * * * * * Although the states which grew up under these varying circumstances are universally known as the Italian Republics, this phrase is scarcely correct in our idiom. The leading peculiarity of mediæval Italy was the separate sovereignty of its petty principalities, and towns of minor rank, in which democratic constitutions were but incidental and transient distinctions, progressively disappearing as the dark ages were succeeded by a cycle of golden radiance. The Italian Republics might, therefore, be more aptly named the Italian Communes or Commonwealths. This misnomer has also given rise to somewhat confused views regarding the amount of liberty enjoyed in these states, especially since their history has become known to us from the pen of one whose democratic prepossessions, though clothed in eloquence, are so tempered by benevolent philosophy as those of Sismondi. Liberty is a word of vague signification, both as to quality and degree. In a political sense, it has at least three meanings: personal freedom, self-government, national independence. Let us test the application of each of these qualities to the Italian commonwealths. Neither in them nor in any contemporary state, was freedom of person known in name or in fact. Individuals had no guarantee against oppression by their rulers, nor security from their powerful neighbours; no great charter constituted for them a claim of right to personal protection. In this respect there was little difference between the subjects of a petty autocrat and those of a democratic faction,--between the tyranny of one or of many: but in Venice, that most prosperous and permanent of all the commonwealths, which Roscoe, by a happy antithesis, has described as a "republic of nobles with a populace of slaves," and which especially arrogated _the_ republic as its title, individual safety was at the lowest grade.