_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. Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan nearly all the great towns and cities have arisen either from the simple expansion or from the expansion and coalescence of primitive village-communities; and such as have not arisen in this way, including some of the greatest of Indian cities, have grown up about the intrenched camps of the Mogul emperors.[10] The case has been just the same in modern Europe. Some famous cities of England and Germany--such as Chester and Lincoln, Strasburg and Maintz,--grew up about the camps of the Roman legions. But in general the Teutonic city has been formed by the expansion and coalescence of thickly-peopled townships and hundreds. In the United States nearly all cities have come from the growth and expansion of villages, with such occasional cases of coalescence as that of Boston with Roxbury and Charlestown. Now and then a city has been laid out as a city _ab initio_, with full consciousness of its purpose, as a man would build a house; and this was the case not merely with Martin Chuzzlewit's "Eden," but with the city of Washington, the seat of our federal government. But, to go back to the early ages of England--the country which best exhibits the normal development of Teutonic institutions--the point which I wish especially to emphasize is this: _in no case does the city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a confederation of tribes_. In no case does citizenship, or burghership, appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it