Where the claims of local life were so exacting and so overpowering we can scarcely wonder if the burgher took little thought for matters that lay beyond his “parish.” But within the narrow limits of the town dominions his experience was rich and varied. While townsmen were forced at every turn to discover and justify the limits of their privileges, or while controversies raged among them as to how the government of the community should be carried on, there was no lack of political teaching; and all questions “touching the great commonalty of the city” for whose liberties they had fought and whose constitution they had shaped, stirred loyal citizens to a genuine patriotism. Traders too, intent on the developement of their business, were deeply concerned in all the questions that affected commerce, the securing of communications, or the opening of new roads for trade, or the organization of labour. In such matters activity could never sleep; for the towns anticipated modern nations in the faith that the advantage of one community must be the detriment of another, and competition and commercial jealousy ran high.[303] Never perhaps in English history was local feeling so strong. Public virtue was summed up in an ardent municipal zeal, as lively among the “Imperial Co-citizens” of New Sarum[304] as among the “Great Clothing” of bigger boroughs. In those days indeed busy provincials but dimly conscious of national policy found in the confusion of court politics and the distraction of its intrigues, or in the feuds of a divided and bewildered administration, no true call to national service and no popular leader to quicken their sympathies. Civil wars which swept over the country at the bidding of a factious group of nobles or of a vain and unscrupulous Kingmaker left, and justly left, the towns supremely indifferent to any question save that of how to make the best terms for themselves from the winning side, or to use the disasters of warring lords so as to extend their own privileges.[305] Meanwhile in the intense effort called out by the new industrial and commercial conditions and the reorganization of social life which they demanded, it was inevitable that there should grow up in the boroughs the temper of men absorbed in a critical struggle for ends which however important were still personal, local, limited, purely material—a temper inspired by private interest and with its essential narrowness untouched by the finer conceptions through which a great patriotism is nourished. Such a temper, if it brought at first great rewards, brought its own penalties at last, when the towns, self-dependent, unused to confederation for public purposes, destitute of the generous spirit of national regard, and by their ignorance and narrow outlook left helpless in presence of the revolutions that were to usher in the modern world, saw the government of their trade and the ordering of their constitutions taken from them, and their councils degraded by the later royal despotism into the instruments and support of tyranny.