KROPOTKIN .tury. A new world has opened between the two! Never, with the exception of that other glorious period of ancient Greece (free cities again) had humanity made such a stride forward. Never in two or three centuries ·had man undergone so profound a change or so extended his power over the forces of nature. You perhaps m~:; think of the boasted progress of civilisation in -0ur own century. But in each of its manifestations it is but the cltlld of the civilization which grew up in the free communes! All me great discoveries which have made modern science-the compass, the clock, the watch, printing, the maritime discoveries, gunpowder, the law of gravitatio:1, the law of atmospheric pressure (of which the steam-engine is but a development), the rudiments of chemistry, the scientific method already pointed out by Roger Bacon and practised in Italian universities, come from the free cities which developed under the shelter of communal liberties.* But you may say perhaps, that I forget the conflicts, the internal struggles of which the history of these communes is full; the street tumults, the ferocious battles sustained against the landlords; the insurrections of "young arts" against the "ancient arts"; the blood that was shed and the reprisals which took place in these struggles. I forget nothing. But, like Leo and Botta, the two historians of medieval Italy, like Sismondi, like Ferrari, Gino Capponi, and so many others, I see that these struggles were the guarantee of free life in a free city. I perceive a renewal of and a new flight towards progress after each one of these struggles. After having described these struggles and conflicts in detail, and after having measured the immensity of progress realized while these struggles stained the streets with blood-well-being assured to all the inhabitants and the renovation of civilization, Leo. and Botta concluded by this thought which often comes to my mind : "A commune only represents the picture of a moral whole, only appears universal in its behaviour, like the human mind itself, when it has admitted conflict and opposition in its midst." (Conflict, freely thrashed out, without an external power, the State, throwing its immense weight into the balance, in favour of one of the struggling forces). Like those two authors, I also think that "far more misery has -Oftenbeen caused by imposing peace, because in such cases contradictory things were forcibly allied in order to create a general politic •Of course some of the di~coveries such as the compass, printing, the principle of the stea,;n engine, etc., originated in China or Greece centuries before the free cities of the Middle Ages, but it was through the initiative of these free cities that they were actually developed and transmitted to modem society. It should also be remembered that the circumstances under which they first originated in the Greek and Chinese cities were similar in many respects to those which obtained in the media:val city societies.-ED. 24 Biblloteca G no Bianco
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