and Smith's national hymn, "My country,'tis of thee," know no _mother-land_. In the great _Century Dictionary_, the only illustration cited of the use of the word _mother-land_ is a very recent one, from the _Century Magazine_ (vol. xxix. p. 507). Shakespeare, however, comes very near it, when, in _King John_ (V. ii.), he makes the Bastard speak of "your dear Mother-England," --but this is not quite "mother-land." In German, though, through the sterner influences which surrounded the Empire in its birth and reorganization, _Vaterland_ is now the word, _Mutterland_ was used by Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Uhland, etc. Lippert suggests an ingenious explanation of the origin of the terms _Mutterland_, _Vaterland_, as well as for the predominance of the latter and younger word. If, in primitive times, man alone could hold property,--women even and children were his chattels,--yet the development of agriculture and horticulture at the hands of woman created, as it were, a new species of property, property in land, the result of woman's toil and labour; and this new property, in days when "mother-right" prevailed, came to be called _Mutterland_, as it was essentially "mothers' land." But when men began to go forth to war, and to conquer and acquire land that was not "mothers' land," a new species of landed property,--the "land of the conquering father,"--came into existence (and with it a new theory of succession, "father-right"), and from that time forward "Vaterland" has extended its signification, until it has attained the meaning which it possesses in the German speech of to-day (492. 33, 36). The inhabitants of the British colonies scattered all over the world speak of Britain as the "mother country," "Mother England"; and R. H. Stoddard, the American poet, calls her "our Mother's Mother." The French of Canada term France over-sea "la mère patrie" (mother fatherland). Even Livy, the Roman historian, wrote _terra quam matrem appellamus_,--"the land we call mother,"--and Virgil speaks of Apollo's native Delos as _Delum maternum_. But for all this, the proud Roman called his native land, not after his mother, but after his father, _patria_; so also in corresponding terms the Greek, [Greek: _patris_], etc. But the latter remembered his mother also, as the word _metropolis_, which we have inherited, shows. [Greek: _Maetropolis_] had the meanings: "mother-state" (whence daughter-colonies went forth); "a chief city, a capital, metropolis; one's mother-city, or mother-country." In English, _metropolis_ has been associated with "mother-church," for a _metropolis_ or a _metropolitan_ city, was long one which was the seat of a bishopric.