political association known to have existed is that of the _clan_, or
group of families held together by ties of descent from a common
ancestor. We saw how the change from a nomadic to a stationary mode of
life, attendant upon the adoption of agricultural pursuits, converted
the clan into a _mark_ or village-community, something like those which
exist to-day in Russia. The political progress of primitive society
seems to have consisted largely in the coalescence of these small groups
into larger groups. The first series of compound groups resulting from
the coalescence of adjacent marks is that which was known in nearly all
Teutonic lands as the _hundred_, in Athens as the [Greek: _phratria_] or
_brotherhood_, in Rome as the _curia_. Yet alongside of the Roman group
called the _curia_ there is a group whose name, the _century_, exactly
translates the name of the Teutonic group; and, as Mr. Freeman says, it
is difficult to believe that the Roman _century_ did not at the outset
in some way correspond to the Teutonic _hundred_ as a stage in political
organization. But both these terms, as we know them in history, are
survivals from some prehistoric state of things; and whether they were
originally applied to a hundred of houses, or of families, or of
warriors, we do not know.[8] M. Geffroy, in his interesting essay on the
Germania of Tacitus, suggests that the term _canton_ may have a similar
origin.[9] The outlines of these primitive groups are, however, more
obscure than those of the more primitive mark, because in most cases
they have been either crossed and effaced or at any rate diminished in
importance by the more highly compounded groups which came next in order
of formation. Next above the _hundred_, in order of composition, comes
the group known in ancient Italy as the_pagus_, in Attika perhaps as the
_deme_, in Germany and at first in England as the _gau_ or _ga_, at a
later date in England as the _shire_. Whatever its name, this group
answers to the _tribe_ regarded as settled upon a certain determinate
territory. Just as in the earlier nomadic life the aggregation of clans
makes ultimately the tribe, so in the more advanced agricultural life of
our Aryan ancestors the aggregation of marks or village-communities
makes ultimately the _gau_ or _shire_. Properly speaking, the name
_shire_ is descriptive of division and not of aggregation; but this term
came into use in England after the historic order of formation had been
forgotten, and when the _shire_ was looked upon as a _piece_ of some
larger whole, such as the kingdom of Mercia or Wessex. Historically,
however, the _shire_ was not made, like the _departments_ of modern
France, by the division of the kingdom for administrative purposes, but
the kingdom was made by the union of shires that were previously
autonomous. In the primitive process of aggregation, the _shire_ or
_gau_, governed by its _witenagemote_ or "meeting of wise men," and by
its chief magistrate who was called _ealdorman_ in time of peace and
_heretoga_, "army-leader," _dux_, or _duke_, in time of war,--the
_shire_, I say, in this form, is the largest and most complex political
body we find previous to the formation of kingdoms and nations. But in
saying this, we have already passed beyond the point at which we can
include in the same general formula the process of political development
in Teutonic countries on the one hand and in Greece and Rome on the
other. Up as far as the formation of the tribe, territorially regarded,
the parallelism is preserved; but at this point there begins an
all-important divergence. In the looser and more diffused society of the
rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a shire, and the aggregation of
shires makes a kingdom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts
held together by similar bonds of relationship to the central governing
power. But in the society of the old Greeks and Italians, the
aggregation of tribes, crowded together on fortified hill-tops, makes
the _Ancient City_,--a very different thing, indeed, from the modern
city of later-Roman or Teutonic foundation. Let us consider, for a
moment, the difference.
Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan nearly all the great towns
and cities have arisen either from the simple expansion or from the
expansion and coalescence of primitive village-communities; and such as
have not arisen in this way, including some of the greatest of Indian
cities, have grown up about the intrenched camps of the Mogul
emperors.[10] The case has been just the same in modern Europe. Some
famous cities of England and Germany--such as Chester and Lincoln,
Strasburg and Maintz,--grew up about the camps of the Roman legions. But
in general the Teutonic city has been formed by the expansion and
coalescence of thickly-peopled townships and hundreds. In the United
States nearly all cities have come from the growth and expansion of
villages, with such occasional cases of coalescence as that of Boston
with Roxbury and Charlestown. Now and then a city has been laid out as a
city _ab initio_, with full consciousness of its purpose, as a man would
build a house; and this was the case not merely with Martin Chuzzlewit's
"Eden," but with the city of Washington, 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 the aggregation of clans into tribes
and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as we have seen, in the
City. There burghership, with its political and social rights and
duties, had its theoretical basis in descent from a common ancestor, or
from a small group of closely-related common ancestors. The group of
fellow-citizens was associated through its related groups of ancestral
household-deities, and through religious rites performed in common to
which it would have been sacrilege to have admitted a stranger. Thus the
Ancient City was a religious as well as a political body, and in either
character it was complete in itself and it was sovereign. Thus in
ancient Greece and Italy the primitive clan-assembly or township-meeting
did not grow by aggregation into the assembly of the shire, but it
developed into the _comitia_ or _ecclesia_ of the city. The chief
magistrate was not the _ealdorman_ of early English history, but the
_rex_ or _basileus_ who combined in himself the functions of king,
general, and priest. Thus, too, there was a severance, politically,
between city and country such as the Teutonic world has never known. The
rural districts surrounding a city might be subject to it, but could
neither share its franchise nor claim a co-ordinate franchise with it.
Athens, indeed, at an early period, went so far as to incorporate with
itself Eleusis and Marathon and the other rural towns of Attika. In this
one respect Athens transgressed the bounds of ancient civic
organization, and no doubt it gained greatly in power thereby. But
generally in the Hellenic world the rural population in the
neighbourhood of a great city were mere [Greek: _perioikoi_], or
"dwellers in the vicinity"; the inhabitants of the city who had moved
thither from some other city, both they and their descendants, were mere
[Greek: metoikoi], or "dwellers in the place"; and neither the one class
nor the other could acquire the rights and privileges of citizenship. A
revolution, indeed, went on at Athens, from the time of Solon to the
time of Kleisthenes, which essentially modified the old tribal divisions
and admitted to the franchise all such families resident from time
immemorial as did not belong to the tribes of eupatrids by whom the city
was founded. But this change once accomplished, the civic exclusiveness
of Athens remained very much what it was before. The popular assembly
was enlarged, and public harmony was secured; but Athenian burghership
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 Græco-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 and four "discreet
men." I believe it has not been determined at what precise time this
step was taken, but it no doubt long antedates the Norman conquest. It
is mentioned by Professor Stubbs as being already, in the reign of Henry
III., a custom of immemorial antiquity.[12] It was one of the greatest
steps ever taken in the political history of mankind. In these four
discreet men we have the forerunners of the two burghers from each town
who were summoned by Earl Simon to the famous parliament of 1265, as
well as of the two knights from each shire whom the king had summoned
eleven years before. In these four discreet men sent to speak for their
township in the old county assembly, we have the germ of institutions
that have ripened into the House of Commons and into the legislatures of
modern kingdoms and republics. In the system of representation thus
inaugurated lay the future possibility of such gigantic political
aggregates as the United States of America.
In the ancient city, on the other hand, the extreme compactness of the
political structure made representation unnecessary and prevented it
from being thought of in circumstances where it might have proved of
immense value. In an aristocratic Greek city, like Sparta, all the
members of the ruling class met together and voted in the assembly; in a
democratic city, like Athens, all the free citizens met and voted; in
each case the assembly was primary and not representative. The only
exception, in all Greek antiquity, is one which emphatically proves the
rule. The Amphiktyonic Council, an institution of prehistoric origin,
concerned mainly with religious affairs pertaining to the worship of the
Delphic Apollo, furnished a precedent for a representative, and indeed
for a federal, assembly. Delegates from various Greek tribes and cities
attended it. The fact that with such a suggestive precedent before their
eyes the Greeks never once hit upon the device of representation, even
in their attempts at framing federal unions, shows how thoroughly their
whole political training had operated to exclude such a conception from
their minds.
The second great consequence of the Graeco-Roman city-system was linked
in many ways with this absence of the representative principle. In
Greece the formation of political aggregates higher and more extensive
than the city was, until a late date, rendered impossible. The good and
bad sides of this peculiar phase of civilization have been often enough
commented on by historians. On the one hand the democratic assembly of
such an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of political training
superior to anything else that the world has ever seen. It was something
like what the New England town-meeting would be if it were continually
required to adjust complicated questions of international polity, if it
were carried on in the very centre or point of confluence of all
contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in the habit every few
days of listening to statesmen and orators like Hamilton or Webster,
jurists like Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell,
historians like Parkman. Nothing in all history has approached the
high-wrought intensity and brilliancy of the political life of Athens.
On the other hand, the smallness of the independent city, as a political
aggregate, made it of little or no use in diminishing the liability to
perpetual warfare which is the curse of all primitive communities. In a
group of independent cities, such as made up the Hellenic world, the
tendency to warfare is almost as strong, and the occasions for warfare
are almost as frequent, as in a congeries of mutually hostile tribes of
barbarians. There is something almost lurid in the sharpness of contrast
with which the wonderful height of humanity attained by Hellas is set
off against the fierce barbarism which characterized the relations of
its cities to one another. It may be laid down as a general rule that in
an early state of society, where the political aggregations are small,
warfare is universal and cruel. From the intensity of the jealousies and
rivalries between adjacent self-governing groups of men, nothing short
of chronic warfare can result, until some principle of union is evolved
by which disputes can be settled in accordance with general principles
admitted by all. Among peoples that have never risen above the tribal
stage of aggregation, such as the American Indians, war is the normal
condition of things, and there is nothing fit to be called
_peace_,--there are only truces of brief and uncertain duration. Were it
not for this there would be somewhat less to be said in favour of great
states and kingdoms. As modern life grows more and more complicated and
interdependent, the Great State subserves innumerable useful purposes;
but in the history of civilization its first service, both in order of
time and in order of importance, consists in the diminution of the
quantity of warfare and in the narrowing of its sphere. For within the
territorial limits of any great and permanent state, the tendency is for
warfare to become the exception and peace the rule. In this direction
the political careers of the Greek cities assisted the progress of
civilization but little.
Under the conditions of Graeco-Roman civic life there were but two
practicable methods of forming a great state and diminishing the
quantity of warfare. The one method was _conquest with incorporation_,
the other method was _federation_. Either one city might conquer all
the others and endow their citizens with its own franchise, or all the
cities might give up part of their sovereignty to a federal body which
should have power to keep the peace, and should represent the civilized
world of the time in its relations with outlying barbaric peoples. Of
these two methods, obviously the latter is much the more effective, but
it presupposes for its successful adoption a higher general state of
civilization than the former. Neither method was adopted by the Greeks
in their day of greatness. The Spartan method of extending its power was
conquest without incorporation: when Sparta conquered another Greek
city, she sent a _harmost_ to govern it like a tyrant; in other words
she virtually enslaved the subject city. The efforts of Athens tended
more in the direction of a peaceful federalism. In the great Delian
confederacy which developed into the maritime empire of Athens, the
Ægean cities were treated as allies rather than subjects. As regards
their local affairs they were in no way interfered with, and could they
have been represented in some kind of a federal council at Athens, the
course of Grecian history might have been wonderfully altered. As it
was, they were all deprived of one essential element of
sovereignty,--the power of controlling their own military forces. Some
of them, as Chios and Mitylene, furnished troops at the demand of
Athens; others maintained no troops, but paid a fixed tribute to Athens
in return for her protection. In either case they felt shorn of part of
their dignity, though otherwise they had nothing to complain of; and
during the Peloponnesian war Athens had to reckon with their tendency to
revolt as well as with her Dorian enemies. Such a confederation was
naturally doomed to speedy overthrow.
In the century following the death of Alexander, in the closing age of
Hellenic independence, the federal idea appears in a much more advanced
stage of elaboration, though in a part of Greece which had been held of
little account in the great days of Athens and Sparta. Between the
Achaian federation, framed in 274 B.C., and the United States of
America, there are some interesting points of resemblance which have
been elaborately discussed by Mr. Freeman, in his "History of Federal
Government." About the same time the Aetolian League came into
prominence in the north. Both these leagues were instances of true
federal government, and were not mere confederations; that is, the
central government acted directly upon all the citizens and not merely
upon the local governments. Each of these leagues had for its chief
executive officer a General elected for one year, with powers similar to
those of an American President. In each the supreme assembly was a
primary assembly at which every citizen from every city of the league
had a right to be present, to speak, and to vote; but as a natural
consequence these assemblies shrank into comparatively aristocratic
bodies. In Ætolia, which was a group of mountain cantons similar to
Switzerland, the federal union was more complete than in Achaia, which
was a group of cities. In Achaia cases occurred in which a single city
was allowed to deal separately with foreign powers. Here, as in earlier
Greek history, the instinct of autonomy was too powerful to admit of
complete federation. Yet the career of the Achaian League was not an
inglorious one. For nearly a century and a half it gave the Peloponnesos
a larger measure of orderly government than the country had ever known
before, without infringing upon local liberties. It defied successfully
the threats and assaults of Macedonia, and yielded at last only to the
all-conquering might of Rome.
Thus in so far as Greece contributed anything towards the formation of
great and pacific political aggregates, she did it through attempts at
_federation_. But in so low a state of political development as that
which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean world in pre-Christian
times, the more barbarous method of _conquest with incorporation_ was
more likely to be successful on a great scale. This was well illustrated
in the history of Rome,--a civic community of the same generic type with
Sparta and Athens, but presenting specific differences of the highest
importance. The beginnings of Rome, unfortunately, are prehistoric. I
have often thought that if some beneficent fairy could grant us the
power of somewhere raising the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the
earliest ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no place from which
the historian should be more glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the
centuries which saw the formation of the city, and which preceded the
expulsion of the kings. Even the legends, which were uncritically
accepted from the days of Livy to those of our grandfathers, are
provokingly silent upon the very points as to which we would fain get at
least a hint. This much is plain, however, that in the embryonic stage
of the Roman commonwealth some obscure processes of fusion or
commingling went on. The tribal population of Rome was more
heterogeneous than that of the great cities of Greece, and its earliest
municipal religion seems to have been an assemblage of various tribal
religions that had points of contact with other tribal religions
throughout large portions of the Græco-Italic world. As M. de Coulanges
observes,[13] Rome was almost the only city of antiquity which was not
kept apart from other cities by its religion. There was hardly a people
in Greece or Italy which it was restrained from admitting to
participation in its municipal rites.