commonwealth to become a city of a local kingdom; Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg, are still commonwealths, but commonwealths which are again members of an Empire. They are survivals, but survivals which modern Europe, Romeless Europe, the Europe of huge kingdoms and of countless armies--happy when kingdoms mean nations and when armies do not simply keep down unwilling subjects--cannot spare from the midst of her. The age of free cities is past; in some lands the mere high-handed robbery of the stranger has wiped them out, as where the fetters of the meanest of oppressors still clank over enslaved Ragusa. In other lands the loss of local freedom has perhaps been outweighed by admission into a wider national unity. In two lands again the commonwealths still abide, tempered only by the obligations of a federal tie. But a federal tie is one thing when it binds together a group of lands and cities none of which could now stand alone; it is another thing when the federation has an Imperial head, when three surviving cities are grouped with duchies and kingdoms which could at any moment overwhelm them, and when duchies and kingdoms are again grouped in fellowship with another kingdom greater than cities, duchies, and kingdoms joined in one. Yet to this day the free city, even if shorn of its old greatness, its old independence, is still an element in our modern Europe. Those three surviving cities of the great Hansa are precious fragments indeed, fragments in one sense of a world when the Roman power had put on its German garb, reminders in another sense of a world on which the Roman power had not yet risen. As we trust never to see the day when the bull of Uri and the bear of Bern shall cease to be badges of a freedom more than municipal, so we trust never to see the day when Imperial Germany shall cease, among the ensigns of its free confederate members, to reckon ensigns more worthy of honour than the banners of dukes and kings, the towers of Hamburg, the key of Bremen, and the eagle-shield of Lübeck. * * * * *