This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible to the modern mind, so far removed are we from the political circumstances which made such a feeling possible.  Teutonic civilization, indeed, has never passed through a stage in which the foremost position has been held by civic communities.  Teutonic civilization passed directly from the stage of tribal into that of national organization, before any Teutonic city had acquired sufficient importance to have claimed autonomy for itself; and at the time when Teutonic nationalities were forming, moreover, all the cities in Europe had so long been accustomed to recognize a master outside of them in the person of the Roman emperor that the very tradition of civic autonomy, as it existed in ancient Greece, had become extinct.  This difference between the political basis of Teutonic and of Graeco-Roman civilization is one of which it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance; and when thoroughly understood it goes farther, perhaps, than anything else towards accounting for the successive failures of the Greek and Roman political systems, and towards inspiring us with confidence in the future stability of the political system which has been wrought out by the genius of the English race.

We saw, in the preceding lecture, how the most primitive form of 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