Within the city walls there are still various ranks and grades of political status. At first the old settlers, the men of rank equal with the nobles of the surrounding country, the ancient freemen of the burgh, refuse to the newcomers, usually poor artisans or hucksters, the right of sharing in the government. But, as we saw in the case of the maritime cities, such gradations of rank can not be maintained within a business community. The majority, intelligent, skeptical, closely organized and compact, forces the concession of equal rights. The only difference is that the contest is longer in a developed feudal state, because now the fight concerns not only the parties at interest. The great territorial magnates of the neighborhood and the princes hinder the full development of the forces by their interference. In the maritime states of the ancient world, there was no _tertius gaudens_ who could derive any profit from the contests within the city, since outside the cities there existed no system of powerful feudal lords.
These then, are the political arms of the cities in their contest with the feudal state: alliances with the crown, direct attack, and the enticing away of the serfs of the feudal lords into the enfranchising air of the city. Its economic weapons are no less effective, the change from payments in kind to the system of _money as a means of exchange_ is inseparably connected with civic methods, is the means whereby the method of payment in kind is utterly destroyed, and with it the feudal state.
The sociological process set into motion by the system of money economy is so well known and its mechanics are so generally recognized, that a few suggestions will suffice.
Here, as in the case of the maritime states, the consequence of the invading money system is that the _central government becomes almost omnipotent, while the local powers are reduced to complete impotence_.
Dominion is not an end in itself, but merely the means of the rulers to their essential object, the enjoyment without labor of articles of consumption as many and as valuable as possible. During the prevalence of the system of natural economy there is no other way of obtaining them save by dominion; the wardens of the marches and the territorial princes obtain their wealth by their political power. The more peasants who are owned, the greater is the military power and the larger the scope of the territory subjected, and thus the greater are the revenues. As soon, however, as the products of agriculture are exchangeable for enticing wares, it becomes more rational for every one primarily a private man, i. e., for every feudal lord not a territorial prince--and this now includes the knights--to decrease as far as possible the number of peasants, and to leave only such small numbers as can with the utmost labor turn out the greatest product from the land, and to leave these as little as possible. The net product of the real estate, thus tremendously increased, is now taken to the markets and sold for goods, and is no longer used to keep a fencible body of guards. Having dissolved this following, the knight becomes simply the manager of a knight’s fee.[U] With this event, as with one blow, the central power, that of king or territorial prince, is without a rival for the dominion, and has become politically omnipotent. The unruly vassals, who formerly made the weak kings tremble, after a short attempt at joint rule during the time of the government of the feudal estates, have changed into the supple courtiers, begging favors at the hands of some absolute monarch, like Louis XIV. And he furthermore has become their last resort, since the military power, now solely exercised by him as the paymaster of the forces, alone can protect them from the ever-immanent revolt of their tenants, ground to the bone. While in the time of natural economy the crown was in nearly every instance allied with peasants and cities against nobility, we now have the union of the absolute kings, born from the feudal state, with their nobility, against the representatives of the economic means.