But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of 1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted; both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of the first Constitution of that Order. As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning. Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit. To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement. The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And this was true not only in regard to learning and representative government, but also with regard to the Inquisition. Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England. They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of defeat most provocative of pity.