With this one exception, where a mighty force executes the task, the power of circulating money seems in all cases to have dissolved the feudal state. The cost of the revolution fell on peasants and cities. When peace is made, the crown and the petty nobles mutually sacrifice the peasantry, dividing them, so to say, into two ideal halves; the crown grants to the nobility the major part of the peasants’ common lands, and the greatest part of their working powers that are not yet expropriated; the nobility concedes to the crown the right of recruiting and of taxing both peasantry and cities. The peasant, who had grown wealthy in freedom, sinks back into poverty and therefore into social inferiority. The former feudal powers now unite as allies to subjugate the cities, except where, as in Upper Italy, these become feudal central powers themselves. (And even in that case they for the most part all fall into the power of captains of mercenaries, condottieri.) The power of attack of the adversaries has become stronger, the power of the cities has diminished. For with the decay of the peasantry, their purchase power diminishes and with it the prosperity of the cities, based thereon. The small cities in the country stagnate and become poorer, and being now incapable of defense, fall a prey to the absolutist rule of the territorial princes; the larger cities, where the demand for the luxuries of the nobles has brought into being a strong trading element, split up into social groups and thus fritter away their political strength. The immigration now pouring into their walls is composed of discharged and broken mercenaries, dispossessed peasants, pauperized mechanics from the smaller towns; it is in other words a _proletarian_ immigration. For the first time there appears, in the terminology of Karl Marx, the “free laborer,” in masses, competing with his own class in the labor markets of the cities. And again, the “law of agglomeration” enters to form effective class and property distinctions, and thus to tear apart the civic population. Wild fights take place in the cities between the classes; through which the territorial prince, in nearly every instance, again succeeds in gaining control. The only cities that can permanently escape the deadly embrace of the prince’s power are the few genuine “maritime states,” or “city states.” As in the case of the maritime states, the pivot of the state’s life has again shifted over to another place. Instead of circling about wealth vested in landed estates, it now turns about capitalized wealth, because in the meantime property in real estate has itself become “capital.” _Why is it that the development does not, as in the case of the maritime states, open out into the capitalistic expropriation of slave labor?_