The popular assembly
was enlarged, and public harmony was secured; but Athenian burghership
still remained a privilege which could not be acquired by the native of
any other city. Similar revolutions, with a similarly limited purpose
and result, occurred at Sparta, Elis, and other Greek cities. At Rome,
by a like revolution, the plebeians of the Capitoline and Aventine
acquired parallel rights of citizenship with the patricians of the
original city on the Palatine; but this revolution, as we shall
presently see, had different results, leading ultimately to the
overthrow of the city-system throughout the ancient world.
The deep-seated difference between the Teutonic political system based
on the shire and the Graeco-Roman system based on the city is now, I
think, sufficiently apparent. Now from this fundamental difference have
come two consequences of enormous importance,--consequences of which it
is hardly too much to say that, taken together, they furnish the key to
the whole history of European civilization as regarded purely from a
political point of view.
The first of these consequences had no doubt a very humble origin in the
mere difference between the shire and the city in territorial extent and
in density of population. When people live near together it is easy for
them to attend a town-meeting, and the assembly by which public business
is transacted is likely to remain a _primary assembly_, in the true
sense of the term.
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