hip
still remained a privilege which could not be acquired by the native of
any other city. Similar revolutions, with a similarly limited purpose
and result, occurred at Sparta, Elis, and other Greek cities. At Rome,
by a like revolution, the plebeians of the Capitoline and Aventine
acquired parallel rights of citizenship with the patricians of the
original city on the Palatine; but this revolution, as we shall
presently see, had different results, leading ultimately to the
overthrow of the city-system throughout the ancient world.

The deep-seated difference between the Teutonic political system based
on the shire and the Graeco-Roman system based on the city is now, I
think, sufficiently apparent. Now from this fundamental difference have
come two consequences of enormous importance,--consequences of which it
is hardly too much to say that, taken together, they furnish the key to
the whole history of European civilization as regarded purely from a
political point of view.

The first of these consequences had no doubt a very humble origin in the
mere difference between the shire and the city in territorial extent and
in density of population. When people live near together it is easy for
them to attend a town-meeting, and the assembly by which public business
is transacted is likely to remain a _primary assembly_, in the true
sense of the term. But when people are dispersed over a wide tract of
country, the primary assembly inevitably shrinks up into an assembly of
such persons as can best afford the time and trouble of attending it, or
who have the strongest interest in going, or are most likely to be
listened to after they get there. Distance and difficulty, and in early
times danger too, keep many people away. And though a shire is not a
wide tract of country for most purposes, and according to modern ideas,
it was nevertheless quite wide enough in former times to bring about the
result I have mentioned. In the times before the Norman conquest, if not
before the completed union of England under Edgar, the shire-mote or
county assembly, though in theory still a folk-mote or primary assembly,
had shrunk into what was virtually a witenagemote or assembly of the
most important persons in the county. But the several townships, in
order to keep their fair share of control over county affairs, and not
wishing to leave the matter to chance, sent to the meetings each its
_representatives_ in the persons of the town-reeve an