Cosimo De' Medici (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Cosimo De' Medici

Florence, too, was a commercial state; the possession of land was merely an accident in the possession of power, - a part, but the least important part, of wealth; we find all the commercial problems of a later date already alive - the uneasy relations between capital and labour, the employment of foreign politics as a means to commercial extension, the manipulation of a state debt, with shares whose value fluctuated as the prosperity of the Government.

Here, too...