150 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



ward to a city. The English district corresponding to it, on the other hand, 

 became an autonomous community, with substantial and important, if not 

 original jDowers. 



The English town has therefore no counterpart in any other Germanic na- 

 tion; for in all the other Germanic nations the unit of the constitutional 

 machinery is the Hundred, a district too large to allow of this immediate 

 and detailed exercise of local self-government which we find ua the New 

 England towns, and, as has been made to appear, in those of England. Much 

 less has it any counterpart in the Celtic and Slavonic nations, which never 

 advanced unassisted to the territorial principle of government; nor in the 

 Romance nations, whose government, derived from that of the later Roman 

 empire, Tvas wholly summary and authoritative. On the other hand, the 

 ancient Greeks and Italians — the only branches of the Aryan race which 

 possessed an equally strong political sense with the Germanic — developed 

 a territorial system which has a strong analogy with the English. 



The City {civitas, Tto'Xii), is the political type of the Greeks and Italians, 

 as the Town is of the English: and while the two institutions diverged 

 greatly in their development, they were essentially identical in their origin 

 and structure. The Greeks, Itahans and Germans alike passed from 

 the social stage of institutions, based upon personal relations, to the polit- 

 ical, based upon territory, at a very early period. In all of these we find 

 the territory divided up into autonomous districts, small enough in extent 

 to permit the direct participation of all the citizens in the work of govern- 

 m.ent. The Greek City was thus identical with the German Hundred. But 

 the development of all the Germanic nations, except the English, -was ar- 

 rested by the creation of great centralized monarchies. Even in England 

 the more perfectly organized district, the Town, was shortly checked in its 

 development by the establishment of the manorial system ; and even where 

 a higher municipal type was develoi^ed, in the boroughs, it was sporadic 

 and thus incomplete. 



The Greeks and Italians, on the other hand, concentrated and intensified 

 their political life by what is known as Synoikismos, — the establishment in 

 the middle of the territory of each city, of an oppidum or urhs, a place of 

 collective residence, siirrounded by walls, in which were erected their pub- 

 lic buildings, and where they transacted all public and private business. 

 This higher organization ^vas applied to all cities, not merely to some here 

 and there, like the English boroughs. These nations became urban in their 

 life, while the English remained rural. But, in becoming urban, in build- 

 ing a city surrounded with walls for residence, trade, Avorship and social 

 life, they did not shift the basis of their political oi'ganization. The city 

 continued, as it had always done, to comprise the rural districts as well as 

 the walled town; citizenship indeed was based upon ownership of land 

 outside the walls equally with residence or property within the walls: the 

 distinction between rus and urhs was jpurely social, in no sense political. 

 Now the oppidum, inclosed within its walls, is very much the same thing as 



