n, the seat of our federal
government. But, to go back to the early ages of England--the country
which best exhibits the normal development of Teutonic institutions--the
point which I wish especially to emphasize is this: _in no case does the
city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a
confederation of tribes_. In no case does citizenship, or burghership,
appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent
from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we
have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it
a political unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or assumed;
but this was not the case with the city or borough. The city did not
correspond with the tribe, as the mark corresponded with the clan. The
aggregation of clans into tribes corresponded with the aggregation of
marks, not into _cities_ but into _shires_. The multitude of compound
political units, by the further compounding of which a nation was to be
formed, did not consist of cities but of shires. The city was simply a
point in the shire distinguished by greater density of population. The
relations sustained by the thinly-peopled rural townships and hundreds
to the general government of the shire were co-ordinate with the
relations sustained to the same government by those thickly-peopled
townships and hundreds which upon their coalescence were known as cities
or boroughs. Of course I am speaking now in a broad and general way, and
without reference to such special privileges or immunities as cities and
boroughs frequently obtained by royal charter in feudal times. Such
special privileges--as for instance the exemption of boroughs from the
ordinary sessions of the county court, under Henry I.[11]--were in their
nature grants from an external source, and were in nowise inherent in
the position or mode of origin of the Teutonic city. And they were,
moreover, posterior in date to that embryonic period of national growth
of which I am now speaking. They do not affect in any way the
correctness of my general statement, which is sufficiently illustrated
by the fact that the oldest shire-motes, or county-assemblies, were
attended by representatives from all the townships and hundreds in the
shire, whether such townships and hundreds formed parts of boroughs
or not.

Very different from this was the embryonic growth of political society
in ancient Greece and Italy. There t