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MODERN CAPITALISM. 7


which resemble capitalist industry are the equipment of land and sea expeditions for conquest and plunder. The early funds not only of monarchs but of the Italian cities in the Middle Ages were chiefly designed and used for war.

So long as the surplus-product of labour passed, in forms of tax, toll, and rent, into the hands of kings and nobles, the Church, the orders, and city funds, whether to be con- sumed in luxury or to be accumulated as treasure, it could not give rise to capitalism.

5. It was essential that masses of this surplus wealth should pass into the hands of ‘‘ business men,” who should seek to make it a basis of “profitable” use. Now, records seem to point to two chief origins of such a class.

The rise of the great mercantile power of the Italian cities clearly indicates one origin—the entrance of members of the landed aristocracy into city life and burgher occupations. With the growth of more settled order in the country, and of a softer, more luxurious habit of life, some of the landed nobility came to settle in the cities, bringing with them their rent-rolls and buying more city lands. Especially the younger branches of the nobility, no longer wholly occupied with war, came into town life. This merging of the landed nobility with city life was earlier and freer in the Italian and Flemish states than in France or Germany, and the larger quantity of money thus brought into the cities by the “ monetisation ” of the rents of their estates contributed not a little to the earlier development of large commercial undertakings by Italian and Flemish merchant-houses. In England also from the thirteenth century the lower nobles began to mix more easily with burgher life, and “the younger sons of the country knight sought wife, occupation, and estate in the towns.”! ‘A large proportion of the London apprentices were drawn from the houses of rural gentry”? in the time of Elizabeth, the cleavage between the landed and the moneyed interests not having yet begun to display itself. So, too, in Germany the early commercial prosperity of such towns as Augsburg, Niirnberg, Basel, and Koln was fed from a similar source. Unfortunately, the history of Germany in the later Middle Ages tended more

1 Stubbs, 197. ; 2 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, vol. i. p. 126 (8vo,

1903).

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