lisation which has returned to Roman
traditions is, therefore, necessarily municipal. A man's first country
in antiquity was his town; he died for his town; he left his wealth to
his town; the word "civilisation," like the word "citizen," and like a
hundred words connected with the superiority of mankind, are drawn
from the word for a town. To be political, to possess a police, to
recognise boundaries--all this was to be a townsman, and the various
districts of the Empire took their proper names, at least, from the
names of their chief cities, as do to-day the French and the Italian
countrysides.

Doubtless in Roman times the governing forces of Britain attempted a
similar system here. But it does not seem ever to have taken root in
the same way that it did beyond the Channel. The absence of a
municipal system in the fullest sense is one of the very few things
which differentiates the Roman Britain from the rest of the Empire,
others being a land frontier to the west, and the large survival of
aboriginal dialects.

The Roman towns were not small, indeed Roman London was very large;
they were not ill connected with highroads; they were certainly
wealthy and full of commerce; but they gave their names to no
districts, and their municipal institutions have left but very faint
traces upon posterity.

The barbarian invasions fell severely upon the Roman cities of
Britain, in some very rare cases they may have been actually
destroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may be
reasonably sure that municipal life continued without a break
throughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; and
when recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years,
with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, we
find thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the towns
living the life of villages.

The proportion that were walled was much smaller than was the case
upon the Continent, and even the most enduring emblem and the most
tenacious survival of the Roman Imperial system--namely, the Bishop
seated in the chief municipality of his district--was not universal to
English life.

It is characteristic of Gregory the Great that he intended, or is
believed to have intended, Britain, when he had recivilised it, to be
set out upon a clear Latin model, with a Primate in the chief city and
suffragans in every other. But if he had such a plan (and it would
have been a typic