y_ or "brotherhood", for it was known
long ago that in ancient Greece clans were grouped into brotherhoods
and brotherhoods into tribes. Among uncivilized people all over the
world we find this kind of grouping. For example, a tribe of North
American Indians is regularly made up of phratries, and the phratries
are made up of clans; and, strange as it might at first seem, a good
many half-understood features of early Greek and Roman society have
had much light thrown upon them from the study of the usages of
Cherokees and Mohawks.

Wherever men have been placed, the problem of forming civil society
has been in its main outlines the same; and in its earlier stages it
has been approached in pretty much the same way by all.

[Sidenote: The hundred court.]
The ancient Romans had the brotherhood, and called it a _curia_.
The Roman people were organized in clans, curies, and tribes. But for
military purposes the curia was called a _century_, because
it furnished a quota of one hundred men to the army. The word
_century_ originally meant a company of a hundred men, and it was
only by a figure of speech that it afterward came to mean a period
of a hundred years. Now among all Germanic peoples, including the
English, the brotherhood seems to have been called the hundred.
Our English forefathers seem to have been organized, like other
barbarians, in clans, brotherhoods, and tribes; and the brotherhood
was in some way connected with the furnishing a hundred warriors to
the host. In the tenth century we find England covered with small
districts known as hundreds. Several townships together made a
hundred, and several hundreds together made a shire. The hundred
was chiefly notable as the smallest area for the administration of
justice. The hundred court was a representative body, composed of the
lords of lands or their stewards, with the reeve and four selected men
and the parish priest from each township. There was a chief magistrate
for the hundred, known originally as the hundredman, but after the
Norman conquest as the high constable.

[Sidenote: Decay of the hundred.]
[Sidenote: Hundred meetings in Maryland]
By the thirteenth century the importance of the hundred had much
diminished. The need for any such body, intermediate between township
and county, ceased to be felt, and the functions of the hundred were
gradually absorbed by the county. Almost everywhere in England, by the
reign of Elizabeth, the hundred had fallen int