st and necessary expression of the relationship
of the Latin stock. The Latin league may not have at all times
included all Latin communities, but it never at any rate granted
the privilege of membership to any that were not Latin. Its
counterpart in Greece was not the Delphic Amphictyony, but the
Boeotian or Aetolian confederacy.

These very general outlines must suffice: any attempt to draw the
lines more sharply would only falsify the picture. The manifold play
of mutual attraction and repulsion among those earliest political
atoms, the cantons, passed away in Latium without witnesses competent
to tell the tale. We must now be content to realise the one great
abiding fact that they possessed a common centre, to which they
did not sacrifice their individual independence, but by means of
which they cherished and increased the feeling of their belonging
collectively to the same nation. By such a common possession the
way was prepared for their advance from that cantonal individuality,
with which the history of every people necessarily begins, to the
national union with which the history of every people ends or at
any rate ought to end.

Notes for Book I Chapter III

1. I. II. Italians

2. Like -latus- (side) and --platus-- (flat); it denotes therefore
the flat country in contrast to the Sabine mountain-land, just
as Campania, the "plain," forms the contrast to Samnium. Latus,
formerly -stlatus-, has no connection with Latium.

3. A French statist, Dureau de la Malle (-Econ. Pol. des Romains-,
ii. 226), compares with the Roman Campagna the district of Limagne
in Auvergne, which is likewise a wide, much intersected, and uneven
plain, with a superficial soil of decomposed lava and ashes--the
remains of extinct volcanoes. The population, at least 2500
to the square league, is one of the densest to be found in purely
agricultural districts: property is subdivided to an extraordinary
extent. Tillage is carried on almost entirely by manual labour,
with spade, hoe, or mattock; only in exceptional cases a light
plough is substituted drawn by two cows, the wife of the peasant
not unfrequently taking the place of one of them in the yoke. The
team serves at once to furnish milk and to till the land. They
have two harvests in the year, corn and vegetables; there is no
fallow. The average yearly rent for an arpent of arable land is
100 francs. If instead Of such an arrangement this same land were
to b