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