The burghers, backed by the recently liberated peasantry, formed the strength of the Commune, and upheld the memories of Roman municipal organisation against the prevalently Germanic nobility. The Government of the Communes consisted of a college of Rectors with an Assembly of Elders, very much like the Senate of old, with various dependent _clientele_ that recall the _gentes_; the heads of the various Guilds were called Consuls and took command of their men in any emergency. Their defence of civic liberties was essentially the defence of freedom to attend to their trades and occupations. Here again they anticipated Mussolini. What matters to the Commonweal is not the individual but the interest he represents. They considered that this freedom of work was incompatible with the dependence of the Commune on any superior temporal authority. This was so deeply felt that the city was placed under the protection of a Patron Saint, who, according to Ercole Reggio, was not unlike the eponymous Hero of an ancient city. In attempting to justify these forms of political and professional life the citizens of the Commune came still more to consider themselves the lawful descendants of the Romans. Studies of Roman Law were pursued with as much zeal and vigour as any other form of practical or religious life. As long as Pisa, Milan, Cremona, Pavia, preserved their municipal liberties their whole life was imbued with a strong sense of classicism which expressed itself both in the intensified study of Roman Law, as Professor Solmi has clearly pointed out, and in the art of Niccolò Pisano. Such Roman and classical qualities were to disappear when the towns lost their municipal autonomy, only to reappear at the present day in the idealism of Gentile, whose _Filosofia del Diritto_ is as much impressed by the seal of their realism as it is influenced by the thought of Hegel. They reappear in the Reform of the Italian Constitution, tending to substitute actual interest as the dynamic basis of the State in the place of the static and naturalistic foundation it has had up till now. They reappear above all in Mussolini, who told the author he did not wish that a theoretical legislation should regulate or rather paralyse the development of the new corporations, but that, following the example of the Romans, he wished the legislation to grow out of the minutes of every single case submitted to the Corporation Court. Before they disappeared they had pervaded all Italian life to such a degree that scholars could say _we_ in talking of the ancient Romans, and consider Latin as their own language. Ricordano Malespini says that Frederick II spoke “_la nostra lingua latina e il nostro volgare_.” They had two national languages, Latin and the vernacular, the latter itself a degenerate offspring of Latin, known as the “_romano rustico_,” to which could be traced all the various dialects in spite of their local corruptions. The Communes