Such influences may come also from without, from foreign states which, thanks to a more advanced economic development, possess a more tensely centralized power, a better military organization, and a greater forward thrust. We have touched on some of these phases. The independent development of the Mediterranean feudal states was abruptly stopped by their collision with those maritime states, which were on a much higher plane of economic growth and wealth, and more centralized, such as Carthage, and more especially Rome. The destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great may be instanced in this connection, since Macedonia had at that time appropriated the economic advances of the Hellenic maritime states. The best example within modern times is the foreign influence in the case of Japan, whose development was shortened in an almost incredible manner by the military and peaceful impulses of Western European civilization. In the space of barely one generation it covered the road from a fully matured feudal state to the completely developed modern constitutional state. It seems to me that we have only to deal with an abbreviation of the process of development. As far as we can see--though henceforth historical evidence becomes meager, and there are scarcely any examples from ethnography--the rule may be stated that forces from within, even without strong foreign influences, lead the matured feudal state, with strict logical consistency, on the same path to the identical conclusion. The creators of the economic means controlling this advance are the cities and their system of money economy, which gradually supersedes the system of natural economy, and thereby dislocates the axis about which the whole life of the state swings; in place of landed property, mobile capital gradually becomes preponderant. (a) THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTRY All this follows as a natural consequence of the basic premise of the feudal state. The more the great private landlords become a landed nobility, the more in the same measure must the feudal system of natural economy break to pieces. The more great landed property rights become vested in and nurtured by the princes of territorial states, the more is the feudal system based on payments in kind bound to disintegrate; one may say that the two keep step in this development.