each other, but the just 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