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.