Excerpt from Cosimo De' Medici
Florence, too, was a commercial state; the possession of land was merely an accident in the possession of power, - a part, but the least important part, of wealth; we find all the commercial problems of a later date already alive - the uneasy relations between capital and labour, the employment of foreign politics as a means to commercial extension, the manipulation of a state debt, with shares whose value fluctuated as the prosperity of the Government.
Here, too, are found in almost every individual that very modern craving to obtain a share, however small, in the direction of the national policy; here, as in modern politics, the difficulty of establishing an executive powerful enough and sufficiently many-sided to embrace and com with the complicated and manifold conditions of modern administration; here efforts like those of a modern foreign minister to make his policy consistent and effective, and yet agreeable to the public whim Government must be maintained either by brute force or by clearly-expressed public Opinion, never by the inert acquiescence of the governed in any rule that had an appearance of hereditary right.
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