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 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.
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