To understand the course of Florentine history, however, we must turn back for a moment to the informal internal organization of the two bodies thus opposed to each other. The struggle is between the military and territorial aristocracy on the one hand, and the mercantile democracy of the city on the other; and we have seen that the clan system and the Tower-clubs were the germ cells of the one order, and the Craft-guilds those of the other. Now the Craft-guilds were obviously capable of supporting a higher form of political development than could ever come out of the rival system. The officers of the Florentine Crafts were compelled to exercise all the higher functions of government. They preserved a strict discipline within their own jurisdiction--(and the aggregation of the trades in certain streets and districts made that jurisdiction roughly correspond to local divisions)--they had to coordinate their industries one with another, and regulate their complicated relations one with another, and they sent their representatives to all the great trading cities of the world, where they had to conduct such delicate and important negociations that they became the most skilful diplomatists in Italy. Indeed, the training of ambassadors may almost be considered as a Florentine industry! Add to this the vast financial concerns which they had to conduct, and it will readily be seen that as statesmen the merchants of Florence must eventually prove more than a match for their military rivals and opponents. The merchant people was the progressive and constructive element in Florentine society.