The civic aristocracies did not all arise in the same way.
Now many of these tendencies were carried into those Italian cities where the civic nobility was a half-tamed country nobility; but they have no place in the true civic aristocracies.
Here, in the 8th-6th centuries, all the Dorian states were in the hands of exclusive aristocracies, which presented a marked contrast to the subject populations.
The same conditions have produced similar spiritual aristocracies again and again in the East in more modern times, and even in antiquity more than one Oriental priesthood took a line of development similar to that which we have traced in Judaea.
And yet strangely enough the States of Holland themselves were not really representative of the people of that province, but only of the limited, self-coopting burgher aristocracies of Amster- certain towns, each of which with its rights and liberties the highest abilities and of soaring ambition.