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