Terminus. Hence the great plebeian houses, often
richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all share in
the government and the honors of the state, because they were not
tenants of any portion of the sacred territory. There is here the
introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state,
and founds the civil order, or what is now called civilization. The
city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, and
territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.

In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the
land. When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early
times was to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took
possession of him, received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only
such persons as were taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the
sacred territory or domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens
with full political rights. This, in modern language, means that the
state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
the state, not the state to the citizen. Under the patriarchal, the
tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly
speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical
rather than political. Authority--even the nation itself--is personal,
not territorial. The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king,
is the only proprietor. Under the Graeco-Roman system all this is
transformed. The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the
real proprietor is the city or state. Under the Empire, no doubt, what
lawyers call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as
the representative and trustee of the city or state.

When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
history does not inform us. The first-born of Adam, we are told, built
a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence
that it was constituted a municipality. The earliest traces of the
civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and
its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as
well as republican. It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal
system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion
rather than by simple explication. It has in it an element that, if it
exists in the patriarch