THE STATE Henceforth, the State's existence was secure. The lawyer, the priest and the soldier-lord, having constituted a solid alliance around the thrones, could carry on their work of annihilation. How many lies have been accumulated by State-paid historians, ,eoncerningthat period! Have we not all learned at school and believed in manhood that ·the State rendered great service in constituting national unions on the -ruins of feudal society;· unions made impracticable in earlier times 'by the rivalry of cities? Nevertheless, to-day we learn that in spite of all rivalries, -medieval cities had already worked during four centuries to constitute these unions by freely consented federation, and that they had fully succeededin the work of consolidation. The Lombard union, for example, included the cities of Upper Italy and had its federal treasury in safe keeping in Genoa and Venice. Other federations, such as the Tuscan Union, the Rhenan Union (comprising sixty towns), the federations of Westphalia, of :Bohemia,of Servia, of Poland, and of Russian towns covered Europe. At the same time, the commercial unions of the Hansa included Scandinavian, German, Polish, and Russian towns throughout the basin of the Baltic. All the elements were there already, as well as the fact itself -of large, freely constituted, human agglomerations. -Do you wish for a living proof of these groups? You have it in Switzerland. There the union asserted itself first between village ~ommunes (the old Cantons), in the same way as it was constituted in France in the Laonnais. And, as in Switzerland the separation between town and village was never so great as it was for towns carrying on an extensive and distant commerce, the Swiss towns lent a band to the peasant insurrections of the sixteenth century, and the union encompassed both towns and villages, and constituted a federation that exists to-day. But the State, by its very essence, cannot tolerate free federation because the latter represents that nightmare of the legist: "The State within the State." The State does no recognizea freely adopted union working within itself. It only deals with subjects. The State and its prop, the Church, arrogate to themselves alone the right of being the connecting link between men. - Consequently the State must perforce annihilate cities based on direct union between citizens. It must abolish all union within the ci_ty,abolish the city itself, abolish all direct union !,'Jet_weecnities. To the federative principle it must substitute the pnnc1p_Ieof su~- mission and discipline. Submiss{on is its substance. Without this principle it leaves off being the State; it becomes a federation. The sixteenth century-century of carnage and wars-is entirely summed up in this war waged by the growing States against the cities 31 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==