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 Graeco-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