Hate! They detest and resolutely combat the elements of force in which men most delight, but which, as women believe, produce the worst ills; and these are, the power of money, the power of war. The egotism of wealth they regard as the very source of materialism, against which they cannot but struggle. On this point the women of the Renaissance bore the brunt of a long and skilfully fought battle, which we shall follow in all its phases. As for war, that is the arch-enemy against which their first blows are aimed. The little Italian wars of the Middle Ages did not resemble the vast hecatombs of to-day, but they bred a swarm of atrocities, tumults and feuds; war is less cruel, perhaps, when it is not a mere pastime. To storm a place at the opening of a campaign is regarded as a humane act and good tactics, since in the long run it shortens the struggle; but the horror of it! Naturally, women are the worst sufferers. In vain do they push their way through the flames to the feet of some cold stone angel or some Madonna with her eternal smile; you see poor girls flinging themselves into the water, and noble ladies going about serenely and deftly to save what can be saved—their husbands’ lives or their own fortunes. Many centuries had passed since St. Augustine had offered his tender consolations to the victims of the barbarians; they might appropriately have been offered when the French captured Padua or the Germans Rome, or even at that obscure assault of Rivolta in 1509, when an Italian captain devoured the heart of one of his political enemies, disembowelled the man’s wife, and made horse-troughs of their corpses. Even if we ignore gross infamies like these, war was not more humane. The historian of Bayard cannot find words to celebrate the magnanimity of his hero in so generously respecting two high-born maidens of Brescia who had received him into their house, tended him and healed his wounds with the devotion of sisters of mercy. And even in times of peace military habits were commonly so intolerable that quiet folk fervently prayed for a war to bring them relief. For centuries sages and philosophers had been expatiating on the evils of war; councils had attempted to intervene; but war continued to flourish. The idea of suppressing it seemed a mere Utopian dream. They might have tried at least to stem its flood by an appeal to the co-operation of moral forces; but, singularly enough, the more brilliant the fifteenth century in Italy became in art and intellect, the more its moral forces appeared to decline.