their system of government was closely akin to ours, or that we have inherited many political institutions directly from them. It would, however, naturally mean that many of their political problems would be like ours, and that their method of approaching them would be similar to ours. In some cases they solved these problems with more or less success; in others, they failed. The legacy which they have handed down to us, then, is the practical demonstration in their political life of the merits of certain forms of government and of certain methods of dealing with political and social questions, and the weakness of others. The points of resemblance between the ancient and the modern, and the large extent of our direct and indirect inheritance will be defined later. The natural political entity in antiquity was the city, with a small outlying territory about it. This state of things the Romans clearly recognized in fixing the status of conquered territory in Italy and across the sea. Thus, after the conquest of Sicily, Rome made her arrangements for ruling the island, not with a government representing all Sicily, but with the sixty-eight individual cities and towns of the island, and the citizens of Syracuse or of Agrigentum derived such rights as they had, not from the fact that they were Sicilians, but from their residence in the one or the other of these two cities.[1] This political system, based on the independent life of a small community, is familiar enough to us in the history of such Italian cities as Venice, Florence, and Siena in the Middle Ages, and preëminently in the story of Geneva under Calvin. In fact the political institution of antiquity which has had the longest life and which has enjoyed an unbroken history up to our own day is that of the city-state. Hundreds of inscriptions from various parts of the world show us the form of government which these municipalities had in Roman times. The control of affairs rested in the hands of an executive, of a small assembly of chosen men, and of the whole body of citizens. The comparative strength of these three elements differed in different cities, and varied from period to period in the history of each city. This was the government which we find in the city of Rome in early days. Continuity was given to it by the senate, or assembly of elders of the resident clans, who, on the death of the king, appointed one of their number to choose the king’s successor, whose assumption of office was dependent on the approval of the senate and the people.