The Craftsman Volume 1-2 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ...and surrounded by others bitterly competing with it for success. Unaided by international law and equity,--for these principles were unknown in the Middle Ages,--it makes an inveterate fight for existence and for credit, until, at last, it is forced to succumb to claims pressing from without and within. Neither nations nor individuals can divorce themselves from the spirit of the times in which falls their active period of existence. Mediaevalism--that is: isolation, exaggerated individualism, selfishness--was as yet too strong to permit that permanent success and prosperity should remain on the side of the gilds. Two bitterly opposed systems were at war with each other in every Italian commune--most of all in Florence. The City as an abstract idea was the primitive atom, the germ-cell, as it may be called, of Roman society. The idea became a cult, a religion, and Rome-with all that it implied of majesty, received the name of Eternal. It was the idea of law uniting men in socialism, if the primitive meaning of that word: companionship, be taken at its value. The Italians received the idea as a rightful heritage, and were always more or less subject to it. Hence their sectional patriotism: "lo spirito di Campanile,' owing to which each city-republic struggled to annihilate its neighbors and rivals, and to build up anew at least the semblance of the old glory. But the traces of the barbarians were everywhere apparent over the length and breadth of Italy. The early Teutons had known nothing of citizen life. They were nomadic by principle, and passing from place to place, they willingly burned their embryo towns. Each count ruled over his district, according to his personal ideas of justice, oftentimes with primitive violence. Wide...