We look on her history and judge her by imaginary standards, which were never hers. We feel that at the end of the fourteenth century she entered upon a mistaken course in which she obstinately persevered to the end; we are sure that she should have been above any mere petty jealousy of her neighbours, and that she should have used all her strength in defence of her maritime trade and her colonies; we would have had her abide by the old law of 1274, which forbade a Venetian to own estates on the mainland of Italy; we consider that she was blinded to her true interests by all sorts of intrigues, and that she neglected her trade in order to put herself on the same war-footing as her adversaries, though she had not their natural aptitude for warfare; that she drained her treasury to pay grasping condottieri, and spent on futile campaigns the resources which had hitherto fed her commerce. All this we are to some extent justified in concluding, and upon those points we judge her, as we should strongly object to being judged. Nevertheless, all this is but the criticism of speculative moralists and philosophers, a class of well-meaning persons whose influence in the world has never been large. Unhappily for philosophy and morality, they are but too easily answered by the sledge-hammer argument of success. In plain fact, Venice survived, and grew great, and was a power during four hundred years after she adopted her ultimate formula of existence, and in the end she died, not by the hand of the enemies at home or abroad whom she had successfully baffled for centuries, but of sheer old age and marasmal decline after a life of eleven hundred years, during which she was never at any time subject to a foreign power, or a foreign prince, was never once occupied by a foreign army--and was never bankrupt! Unfortunately for sentiment, no European nation, not ancient Rome herself, can point to such a past, and the suggestion that Venice might have done much better by acting much more sentimentally is utterly futile. It is a good deal as if, when the ‘oldest inhabitant’ of a village has just died after utterly beating all other records of longevity, some well-meaning old woman should say: ‘Ah, but he would have lived much longer if he had taken my advice.’