In other words their position as I understand it has considerable resemblances to that built up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. by the rich bankers and merchants who made themselves despots in so many of the city states of Italy. The most famous of these are the Medici, the family who gave a new power to the currency by their development of the banking business, and mainly as a result of this became tyrants of Florence. Santo Bentivoglio of Bologna passed from a wool factory to the throne. Another despot of Bologna was the rich usurer Roméo Pepoli. At Pisa the supreme power was grasped by the Gambacorti with an old merchant named Pietro at their head. At Lodi it was seized by the millionaire Giovanni Vignate. The above instances are taken from Symonds’ sixth class of despots of whom he says that “in most cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendancy[4].” [Sidenote: This view deserves examination in the light of the modern financial revolution,] Still closer analogies lie at our very door. It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of an industrial revolution. This modern movement was already beginning a century ago, when Byron pleaded the cause of the frameworkers before the House of Lords. There are of course obvious differences between the two revolutions. That of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. was mainly financial, that of the present time is mainly industrial. But the difference is not so great as it at first sight appears[5]. The invention of a metal coinage was accompanied by great industrial changes[6], and we can no more divide sharply the financial and industrial activities of the great houses of archaic Greece than we can separate the banking and the mercantile enterprises of the great families of the cities of Italy at the time of the renaissance, such as the wealthy Panciatighi of Florence, who lent money to the emperor Sigismund and exported cloths to London, Avignon and North Africa[7]. On the other hand the modern industrial movement, with its development of machinery and its organization of masters and men into trusts and trade unions, has been accompanied by a revolution in the nature of the currency. The modern financial revolution began at the same time as the industrial. [Sidenote: which has replaced metal coins by paper,] Its earliest phases are described and discussed in William Cobbett’s _Paper against Gold_[8]. Since Cobbett’s days the paper currency which so distressed him has developed enormously. Even before 1914 we were told that “Gold already acts in England only as change for notes[9].”