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 Washington, the seat of our federal
government. But, to go back to the early ages of England--the country
which best exhibits the normal development of Teutonic institutions--the
point which I wish especially to emphasize is this: _in no case does the
city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a
confederation of tribes_. In no case does citizenship, or burghership,
appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent
from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we
have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it
a political unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or assumed;
but this was not the case with the city or borough. The city did not
correspond with the tribe, as the mark corresponded with the clan. The
aggregation of clans into tribes corresponded with the aggregation of
marks, not into _cities_ but into _shires_. The multitude of compound
political units, by the further compounding of which a nation was to be
formed, did not consist of cities but of shires. The city was simply a
point in the shire distinguished by greater density of population. The
relations sustained by the thinly-peopled rural townships and hundreds
to the general government of the shire were co-ordinate with the
relations sustained to the same government by those thickly-peopled
townships and hundreds which upon their coalescence were known as cities
or boroughs. Of course I am speaking now in a broad and general way, and
without reference to such special privileges or immunities as cities and
boroughs frequently obtained by royal charter in feudal times. Such