One of the widest spread peculiarities of former times, is the difference made between the old homebred citizens and those who have come from without. This difference has been almost every where done away with by the notions of the eighteenth century. In North America there is hardly any homebred population: with the exception of the eligibility for the presidentship, it matters not in the least how long one has lived in the country; there is no difference between him who is come from the first colonists, and the man who has just landed. Among the ancients, the admission to the rights of citizenship was every where difficult: the alien needed not to be of a foreign tongue, he might belong to the same nation as the citizen, and even to the same tribe of the nation. The lines of demarcation are drawn in the most varied manner. In the oldest constitution of which we have any authentic knowledge, that of the Jews, we already find such a distinction. The people consists of tribes with unequal rights, just as the tribes of the Romans; besides these, are the persons who had been received into the congregation of the Lord. With regard to the latter, the Pentateuch expressly makes this distinction, that some nations might be received, and others not. These aliens form a mass closely connected with the Jewish people, but out of the tribes. In after times, when the Jewish constitution is better known to us from books of more recent date, the population is divided into Jews and Proselytes; and the latter again into two classes,--the Proselytes of Righteousness, and the Proselytes of the Gate.[69] The former had political and civil rights, yet they were excluded from civic honours; they could buy land, make wills, marry Jewish women, &c. &c. The Proselytes of the Gate had to accommodate themselves to the Jewish customs; they could not do any thing which was against the ceremonial law for fear of giving offence; but they did not participate in civil rights with the inhabitants of the country. The same system presents itself, only less distinctly, in all the Greek constitutions,--a fact about which so much nonsense has been talked. Among the Greeks there existed from the very earliest times, besides the sovereign body of the citizens, a community of native freemen, who had civil rights, but by no means in every instance the privilege of intermarriage with the ruling tribe; they might sue and be sued, yet they had no share in the government. It was otherwise with the aliens or the freedmen, who were bereft of all the personal rights of citizens, and only protected against violence by taking a citizen for their patron. This twofold distinction, that one might be born in a country and exercise civil rights to a certain extent; and that those who were aliens had no civil rights whatever, was a very general notion.