he union of shires that were previously
autonomous. In the primitive process of aggregation, the _shire_ or
_gau_, governed by its _witenagemote_ or "meeting of wise men," and by
its chief magistrate who was called _ealdorman_ in time of peace and
_heretoga_, "army-leader," _dux_, or _duke_, in time of war,--the
_shire_, I say, in this form, is the largest and most complex political
body we find previous to the formation of kingdoms and nations. But in
saying this, we have already passed beyond the point at which we can
include in the same general formula the process of political development
in Teutonic countries on the one hand and in Greece and Rome on the
other. Up as far as the formation of the tribe, territorially regarded,
the parallelism is preserved; but at this point there begins an
all-important divergence. In the looser and more diffused society of the
rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a shire, and the aggregation of
shires makes a kingdom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts
held together by similar bonds of relationship to the central governing
power. But in the society of the old Greeks and Italians, the
aggregation of tribes, crowded together on fortified hill-tops, makes
the _Ancient City_,--a very different thing, indeed, from the modern
city of later-Roman or Teutonic foundation. Let us consider, for a
moment, the difference.

Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan nearly all the great towns
and cities have arisen either from the simple expansion or from the
expansion and coalescence of primitive village-communities; and such as
have not arisen in this way, including some of the greatest of Indian
cities, have grown up about the intrenched camps of the Mogul
emperors.[10] The case has been just the same in modern Europe. Some
famous cities of England and Germany--such as Chester and Lincoln,
Strasburg and Maintz,--grew up about the camps of the Roman legions. But
in general the Teutonic city has been formed by the expansion and
coalescence of thickly-peopled townships and hundreds. In the United
States nearly all cities have come from the growth and expansion of
villages, with such occasional cases of coalescence as that of Boston
with Roxbury and Charlestown. Now and then a city has been laid out as a
city _ab initio_, with full consciousness of its purpose, as a man would
build a house; and this was the case not merely with Martin Chuzzlewit's
"Eden," but with the city of Washingto