KROPOTKIN and their federations. The towns are besieged, taken by assaultr pillaged; their inhabitants are decimated or transported. The State is victorious all along the line. The consequences are these. In the fifteenth century, Europe was covered by rich cities,, whose artisans, masons, weavers and carvers, produced marvels of artr whose universities laid the foundations of science, whose caravans. travelled over continents, and whose vessels ploughed rivers and seas. What was left of them two centuries later? Towns that had· numbered fifty and a hundred thousand inhabitants and had possessed (as in Florence) more schools, and, in the communal hospitals, more beds per inhabitant, than are possessed to-day by the towns best endowed in this respect, had become rotten boroughs. Their inhabitants having been massacred or transported, the State and Church seized their riches. Industry was fading under the minute tutelage of State officials. Commerce was dead. The very roads that formerly united the cities had become impracticable in the seventeenth century. The State spelt warfare, and wars were devastating Europe and completing the ruin of those towns which the State had not yet ruined direct. But had not the villages, at least, gained by State centralisation? Certainly not! Read what historians tell us about the style of living in the rural districts of Scotland, Tuscany, and Germany in the fourteenth century, and compare their descriptions of that time with the misery in England at the beginning of 1648, in France under the "sun-king" Louis XIV, in Germany, in Italy, everywhere, after a hundred years of State domination. Misery everywhere. Wherever serfdom had been abolished, it was reconstituted in a hundred different forms; wherever it had not yet been destrcyed, it was shaped, under State protection, into a ferocious institution, bearing all the characteristics of antique slavery, or even worse. Yet could anything else evolve out of this State-produced misery, when the State's chief anxiety was to annihilate the village con-,munity after the town, to destroy all bonds between peasants, to give their lands to be pillaged by the rich, and to subject them individually to the functionary, the priest and the lord? VIII. To annihilate the independence of cities, to plunder merchants' and artisans' rich guilds, to centralise the foreign trade of cities into its own hands and ruin it, to seize the internal administratfon of guilds, and subject home trade, as well as all manufactures, even in the· slightest detail, to a swarm of functionaries, and by these means kill both industry and arts, to seize local ,militias and all municipal administration, to crush the weak by taxation for the benefit of the strong and to ruin countries by war, such was the nascent Statc"s &ehavfour Bibhoteca G:no Bianco
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