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Nevertheless her commercial importance had been great, and her ships used to trade in all parts of the world.
Although the administration was in the hands of some thirty-five families of nobles, their rule had always been just and enlightened.
To this day, the people of all classes are distinguished by their good looks, the excellence of their manners, and their graceful deportment.
Cosmopolitans by circumstance, they spoke many languages, and from earliest times the standard of education was high as schools were numerous and well organized.
The traveller Thomas Watkins who visited Ragusa just before the French Revolution wrote about them in the following terms: 'They have more learning and less ostentation that any people I know, more politeness to each other, and less envy: Their hospitality to strangers cannot be exceeded . . .'
Thanks to the prosperity of their trade, and the great fertility of the adjoining mainland, taxation was relatively low, and so the standard of living in Ragusa was high.
Travellers commented upon the decorum of the small community where most of the inhabitants could afford to let their wives dress as handsomely as those of the nobility in other countries, and to live in houses that would have been classed as palaced in Italy.
Although the patrician families owned estates to which the peasants were attached like serfs, harmony prevailed between members of all classes. There were no feuds within the city, presumably because only a few miles away lived the fierce Montenegrins who were in a state of perpetual warfare with the Ragusans, and the latter were forced by this circumstance to maintain a united front.
Since the fourteen century it had been the practice of rich citizens to send their sons abroad to be educated. Many went to the Universities of Italy, but later on, both Salamanca (Spain) and the Sorbonne (Paris) were patronized.
Since Ragusa had been a place of refuge for people of all nations, toleration of a sort had always existed, but the citizens were jealous of foreign merchants and would not allow them to settle in the city even though they were prepared to protect exiles at the risk of incurring the displeasure of one of the great powers.
Also the Catholics, who formed the great majority of the population, never permitted the construction of a Greek church within the confines of the State, but this restriction may have had some political cause, for the neighboring Montenegrins practised the Orthodox relgion and were under the direct influence of the Russians.
From earliest times there had existed what we now call social services organized by the religious bodies. In the Franciscan monastery there is the third oldest dispensary in Europe, dating from the year 1317.
Numerous hospitals existed for the care of the sick, and the huge lazaretto outside the south eastern gate of the city was used as a quarantine centre and to isolate infectious cases.
Plagues and epidemics were a constant danger and, on occasion, merchants or seamen who were believed to have brought contagion from abroad, were lynched by the indignant population.
In other way, however, there was great consideration for the rights of the individual which were safeguarded by a statute published in 1272. Torture was abolished in the fourteenth century, and the slave trade at some time in the same period.