enomena. The constitution of the state was based
in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince,
its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable
of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never
got beyond this cantonal constitution. Among the Greeks and Romans
the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis
of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together
within the same walls, they amalgamated into one commonwealth;
where a body of burgesses assigned to a portion of their fellow-
burgesses a new ring-wall, there regularly arose in this way a new
state connected with the mother community only by ties of piety
and, at most, of clientship. Among the Celts on the other hand
the "burgess-body" continued at all times to be the clan; prince
and council presided over the canton and not over any town,
and the general diet of the canton formed the authority of last resort
in the state. The town had, as in the east, merely mercantile
and strategic, not political importance; for which reason the Gallic
townships, even when walled and very considerable such as Vienna
and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing
but villages. In the time of Caesar the original clan-constitution
still subsisted substantially unaltered among the insular Celts
and in the northern cantons of the mainland; the general assembly held
the supreme authority; the prince was in essential questions bound
by its decrees; the common council was numerous--it numbered
in certain clans six hundred members--but does not appear
to have had more importance than the senate under the Roman kings.
In the more stirring southern portion of the land, again,
one or two generations before Caesar--the children of the last kings
were still living in his time--there had occurred, at least
among the larger clans, the Arverni, Haedui, Sequani, Helvetii,
a revolution which set aside the royal dominion and gave the power
into the hands of the nobility.

Development of Knighthood
Breaking Up of the Old Cantonal Constitution

It is simply the reverse side of the total want of urban
commonwealths among the Celts just noticed, that the opposite pole
of political development, knighthood, so thoroughly preponderates
in the Celtic clan-constitution. The Celtic aristocracy was to all
appearance a high nobility, for the most part perhaps the members
of the royal or formerly royal