From centralization and from the use of money, which are the necessary properties of the maritime or the city State, as we shall hereafter call it, its fate follows of necessity.
The psychology of the townsman, and especially of the dweller in the maritime commercial city, is radically different from that of the countryman. His point of view is freer and more inclusive, even though it be more superficial; he is livelier, because more impressions strike him in a day than a peasant in a year. He becomes used to constant changes and news, and thus is always novarum rerum cupidus. He is more remote from nature and less dependent on it than is the peasant, and therefore he has less fear of “ghosts.” One consequence of this is that an underling in a city State is less apt to regard the “taboo” regulations imposed on him by the first and second estates of rulers. And as he is compelled to live in compact masses with his fellow subjects, he early finds his strength in numbers, so that he becomes more unruly and seditious than the serf who lives in such isolation that he never becomes conscious of the mass to which he belongs and ever remains under the impression that his overlord with his followers would have the upper hand in every fight.
This in itself brings about an ever progressive dissolution of the rigid system of subordinated groups first created by the feudal state. In Greece the territorial states alone were able to keep their subjects for a long time in a state of subjection: Sparta its Helots, Thessaly its Penestæ. In all the city States, on the other hand, we early find an uprising of the proletariat against which the master class was unable to oppose an effective resistance.
The economic situation tends toward the same result as the conditions of settlement. Movable wealth had far less stability than landed property: the sea is tricky, and the fortunes of maritime war and piracy not less so. The rich man of to-day may lose all by a turn of Fortune’s wheel; while the poorest man may, by the same swing, land on top. But in a commonwealth based entirely on possessions, loss of fortune brings with it loss of rank and of “class,” just as the converse takes place. The rich Plebeian becomes the leader of the mass of the people in their constitutional fight for equal rights and places all his fortune at risk in that struggle. The position of the patricians becomes untenable; when coerced they have ever conceded the claims of the lower class. As soon as the first rich Plebeian has been taken into their ranks, the right of rule by birth, defended as a holy institution, has forever become impossible. Henceforth it follows that what is fair for one is fair for the other; and the aristocratic rule is followed first by the plutocratic, then by the democratic, finally by the ochlocratic régime, until either foreign conquest or the “tyranny” of some “Savior of the Sword” rescues the community from chaos.
This end affects not only the State, but in most cases its inhabitants so profoundly that one may speak of a literal death of the peoples, caused by the capitalistic exploitation of slave labor. This latter is a social institution inevitably bound to exist in every state founded on piracy and maritime ventures and thus coming to use money as a means of exchange. In the primitive stages of feudalism, whence it was derived, slavery was harmless, as is true in all economic systems based on exchange and use in kind, only to become an ulcerating cancer, utterly destructive of the entire life of the State as soon as it is exploited by the “capitalist” method, i. e., as soon as slave labor is applied, not to be used in a system of a feudal payment in kind, but to supply a market paying in money.
Numberless slaves are brought into the country by piracy, privateering, or by the commercial wars. The wealth of their owners permits them to work the ground more intensively, and the owners of realty within the confines of the city limits draw ever increasing revenues from their possessions, and become more and more greedy of land. The small freeholder in the country, overburdened by the taxes and military service of wars waged in the interests of this great merchant class, sinks into debt, becomes a slave for debt, or migrates into the city as a pauper. But even so there is no hope for him, since the removal of the peasants has damaged the craftsmen and small traders, for the peasants were wont to purchase in the city, while the great estates, constantly increasing by the removal of the peasantry, supply their own needs by their own slave products. The evil attacks other parts of the body politic. The remaining trades are gradually usurped by masters exploiting slave labor, which is cheaper than free labor. The middle class thus goes to pieces; and a pauper, good-for-nothing mob, a genuine “bob-tail proletariat” comes into being, which, by reason of the democratic constitution achieved in the interim, is the sovereign of the commonwealth. The full course, political as well as military, is then a mere question of time. It may take place without a foreign invasion; which, however, usually sets in, when by reason of the physical breakdown caused by the immense depopulation, by the consumption of the people in its literal sense, the final stage is attained. This is the end of all these states. Within the scope of this treatise we can not dilate on this phase.
Only one city State was able to maintain itself throughout the centuries, because it was the ultimate conqueror of all the others, and because it was enabled to counteract the consumption of population by the only method of sanitation possible; by extensive recreations of middle class populations, both in cities and in country districts, as well as by vast colonizations of peasants on lands taken from the vanquished.
The Roman Empire was that state. But even this gigantic organism finally succumbed to the consumption of population, caused by capitalistic slave exploitation. In the interval, however, it had created the first imperium, i. e., the first tensely centralized state on a large scale, and had overcome and amalgamated all territorial states of both the Mediterranean shores and its neighboring countries, and had thereby for all time set before the world the model of such an organized dominion. In addition to this it had developed the organization of cities and of the system of money economy to such an extent that they never were utterly destroyed, even in the turmoil of the barbarian migration. In consequence of this, the feudal territorial states that occupied the territory of the former Roman Empire either directly or indirectly received those new impulses which were to carry them beyond the condition of the normal primitive feudal State.