through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and learned _Histories_ of M'Crie, works which might have saved many vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is discussed at some length in _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 92-97, 143-47, 203, 204. Cp. _The Dynamics of Religion_, 1897, pt. i; _Letters on Reasoning_, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; and _A Short History of Freethought_, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi. The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said, however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in France it meant long periods of furious strife; that in Germany, where it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these. The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between medieval Italian development and that of other countries--say our own--there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty," but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts of the past process with some particularity. § 2