who were summoned by Earl Simon to the famous parliament of 1265, as well as of the two knights from each shire whom the king had summoned eleven years before.  In these four discreet men sent to speak for their township in the old county assembly, we have the germ of institutions that have ripened into the House of Commons and into the legislatures of modern kingdoms and republics.  In the system of representation thus inaugurated lay the future possibility of such gigantic political aggregates as the United States of America.

In the ancient city, on the other hand, the extreme compactness of the political structure made representation unnecessary and prevented it from being thought of in circumstances where it might have proved of immense value.  In an aristocratic Greek city, like Sparta, all the members of the ruling class met together and voted in the assembly; in a democratic city, like Athens, all the free citizens met and voted; in each case the assembly was primary and not representative.  The only exception, in all Greek antiquity, is one which emphatically proves the rule.  The Amphiktyonic Council, an institution of prehistoric origin, concerned mainly with religious affairs pertaining to the worship of the Delphic Apollo, furnished a precedent for a representative, and indeed for a federal, assembly.  Delegates from various Greek tribes and cities attended it.  The fact that with such a suggestive precedent before their eyes the Greeks never once hit upon the device of representation, even in their attempts at framing federal unions, shows how thoroughly their whole political training had operated to exclude such a conception from their minds.

The second great consequence of the Graeco-Roman city-system was linked in many ways with this absence of the representative principle.  In Greece the formation of political aggregates higher and more extensive than the city was, until a late date, rendered impossible.  The good and bad sides of this peculiar phase of civilization have been often enough commented on by historians.  On the one hand the democratic assembly of such an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of political training superior to anything else that the world has ever seen.  It was something like what the New England town-meeting would be if it were continually required to adjust complicated questions of international polity, if it were carried on in the very centre or point of confluence of all contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in the habit every few days of listening to statesmen and orators like Hamilton or Webster, jurists like Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell, historians like Parkman.  Nothing in all history has approached the high-wrought intensity and brilliancy of the political life of Athens.