History furnishes notable instances of what has been put here merely hypothetically. The earls of Flanders were honourably distinguished among all the European potentates by the liberal manner in which they treated their subjects. The appendix to this chapter contains some of the earliest charters which they granted to their towns, and these fully explain the wealth, power and happiness of Flanders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And notwithstanding what I have said in the text, and which is justified by the conduct of the bishops in some parts of Europe, it must be admitted that the clergy were generally just and merciful lords, as far as the material well-being of their dependents was concerned. The German proverb says: “’Tis good to live under the crozier.” ----- But unhappily there is another side to the picture: the lord may have ruled ill, and often did so rule, for class-prejudices and short-sighted selfish views of personal interest drove him to courses fatal to himself and his people. When this was the case, there was but one miserable alternative, revolt, and ruin either for the lord, the city, or both,—in the former case possibly, in the latter always and certainly a grievous loss to the republic. But before this final settlement of the question, how much irreparable mischief, how much of credit and confidence shaken, of raw material wasted and destroyed, of property plundered, of security unsettled, of internecine hostility engendered, class set against class, family against family, man against man! Verily, when we contemplate the misery which such contests caused from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, we could almost join in the cry of the Jacquerie, and wish, with the prædial and urban serfs of old, that the race of Seigneurs had been swept from the face of the earth; did we not know that gold must be tried in the fire, that liberty could grow to a giant’s stature only by passing through a giant’s struggles.