The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right to make the laws or to share in the government.

As a matter of fact, they did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions of sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially.

Sometimes by bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard blows they extorted their charters.

Their codes, statutes, joyful entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and sworn to by the monarch.

They were concessions from above; privileges private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had invaded, than to overturn the system.