The natural tendency, however, of this state of isolation is to give way; population is an ever-active element of social well-being: and when once the surface of a country has become thickly studded with communities settled between the Marks, and daily finding the several clearings grow less and less sufficient for their support[88], the next step is the destruction of the Marks themselves, and the union of the settlers in larger bodies, and under altered circumstances. Take two villages, placed on such clearings in the bosom of the forest, each having an ill-defined boundary in the wood that separates them, each extending its circuit woodward as population increases and presses upon the land, and each attempting to drive its Mark further into the waste, as the arable gradually encroaches upon this. On the first meeting of the herdsmen, one of three courses appears unavoidable: the communities must enter into a federal union; one must attack and subjugate the other; or the two must coalesce into one on friendly and equal terms[89]. The last-named result is not improbable, if the gods of the one tribe are common to the other: then perhaps the temples only may shift their places a little. But in any case the intervening forest will cease to be Mark, because it will now lie in the centre, and not on the borders of the new community. It will be converted into common pasture, to be enjoyed by all on fixed conditions; or it may even be gradually rooted out, ploughed, planted and rendered subject to the ordinary accidents of arable land: it will become _folcland_, public land, applicable to the general uses of the enlarged state, nay even divisible into private estates, upon the established principles of public law. And this process will be repeated and continue until the family becomes a tribe, and the tribe a kingdom; when the intervening boundary lands, cleared, drained and divided, will have been clothed with golden harvests, or portioned out in meadows and common pastures, appurtenant to villages; and the only marks remaining will be the barren mountain and moor of the frontiers, the deep unforded rivers, and the great ocean that washes the shores of the continent. ----- Footnote 88: “Facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia praestant.” Tac. Germ. 26. But as the space diminishes, so also diminishes the stability of a form of society founded upon its existence. Footnote 89: History supplies numerous illustrations of this process. Rome grew out of the union of the Rhamnes and Luceres with the Sabines: and generally speaking in Greece, the origin of the πόλις lies in what may be called the compression of the κώμαι. The ἀγορὰ is on the space of neutral ground where all may meet on equal terms, as the Russians and Chinese trade at Kiachta: but then when the πόλις has grown up, the ἀγορὰ is in its centre, not in its suburbs. -----