[CHAPTER II.]
A CLASSIFICATION OF EUROPEAN POLITICAL BODIES.
The subject matter of the study of politics consists firstly of the groups or collections of men who have lived under governments, and secondly of the governments under which they have lived. In the present chapter I wish to speak of the groups, to describe in outline the various forms which they have taken, and to define the names by which their forms are severally known. I must premise that I shall call some of the groups political communities, meaning by a political community a number of persons living under one government and also having much else in common besides government: the rest I shall call political aggregates, meaning by a political aggregate a number of persons or bodies of persons living under one government and having nothing else or very little else in common. Having said this, I can proceed to notice the forms of individual communities or aggregates, with a view to classifying them according to their forms. In my survey the earliest forms will be taken first, and the others afterwards, as far as possible in chronological order[6].
The two European races into whose past we can grope our way farthest back are the Germans and the Greeks. Each of these races, when first we have any knowledge of them, had formed a large number of tribes or small primitive political communities. The German tribes in the times of Cæsar and of Tacitus and the Greek tribes in the time of Homer were alike in being of small size and in being primitive in their habits and government: but in a German tribe the whole population lived scattered over the open country and there was no walled city, while in a Greek tribe, though most of the people lived in the open country, there was a walled city as a centre for the community and a dwelling place for a few of the most important tribesmen. It is desirable to give the word tribe such a definition as will emphasize the distinction between a tribe and a city, and I shall therefore define it as meaning a small primitive political community, living in the open country without any walled city. From this definition it follows that I must regard the German tribes alone as being perfect specimens of the genus tribe or as being tribes pure and simple: the early Greek communities, though for brevity I shall speak of them as tribes, ought in strict accuracy to be regarded as tribes which were on the way to become cities and which had already acquired some small portion of the qualities by which cities are characterized.
In Greece tribes were succeeded by cities, that is to say small communities in which a walled city is everything, and the country districts are of little importance: and similar communities arose also in Italy. The cities of ancient Greece and Italy are often further designated as city-states, and the name is rightly applied to them: for they were not only cities in the sense which I have given to the word, but were also states because each of them was an independent community with a government of its own.
But the cities of ancient Greece and Italy were not all alike: the Greek cities were inexpansive: in Italy one city expanded itself by conquering a host of other cities and absorbing their populations into its own body politic. The contrast between the inexpansive cities of Greece and the expansive city of Rome is a matter of which I hope some time to speak at length: for the present it will suffice to notice that the Athenians, the largest political community known to Greek history in the age of the city states (that is to say before 338 B.C.), inhabited a territory of less area than an average English county: while in Italy before the beginning of the second Punic war (218 B.C.) towns or fortresses peopled by fully qualified citizens of the Roman Republic were to be found scattered over all the central region from Sena Gallica in Umbria to Sinuessa in Campania, and other towns or fortresses whose inhabitants possessed the private but not the public rights of Roman citizens existed in all parts of the peninsula[7]. It must however be observed that Rome did not by its expansion lose the distinguishing characteristics of a city state: it still continued after its expansion over all Italy to be a community in which a single city was of supreme importance and the population remote from the city was, politically at least, of little moment: but as it was incomparably larger than any ordinary city state, we must call it not simply a city state but an enlarged or expanded city state.
The small size of the Greek cities and their incapacity for acting in concert led to their subjugation by Macedonia in 338 B.C. About sixty or eighty years later many of them had recovered their independence, and some of them, in order to guard against a second conquest by Macedonia, joined together in a league or federation. The union of many communities in a federation was not a new thing in Greek history: during several centuries that preceded the year 338 B.C. some obscure tribes of mountaineers (the Achæans) had lived in such a union; their league had been broken up by the Macedonian conquerors, but they had been able, about 281 B.C., to reconstitute it: and the Greek cities, when they began, about 251 B.C., to see their need of mutual defence, had the Achæan League ready at hand, and were able to gain what they needed by enrolling themselves among its members. The Achæan League, enlarged by the admission of many important cities, was a federal state: that is to say, it was a community in which each city or canton had a government of its own for most purposes, but the federation or union of cities and cantons had also a common government for those matters which most nearly concerned the safety of them all. The League was perfectly successful till 221 B.C. in attaining the ends for which it had been established, and is remarkable as furnishing the first example in history of a well organized federal state[8].
The Romans employed the strength, which they had acquired through their conquest of Italy and their success in the second Punic war, in getting possession of many distant territories inhabited by alien races. Before 146 B.C. they were masters of Macedonia, part of Asia Minor, Spain and northern Africa, and the Roman dominions presented an example of a mere political aggregate, or heterogeneous empire or number of peoples having no natural attraction for one another and held together only by force. For the rule of a heterogeneous empire the institutions of a city and even of an expanded city proved utterly unsuitable: and it was necessary that both the conquering city and the dominions which it had conquered should submit to be ruled under a centralised and despotic system of government adapted to the needs of a heterogeneous empire. The right system was only gradually made, but it had been completed by the death of the Emperor Constantine the Great in 337 A.D.
But it is time to return to the Germans: for the Germans were the successors of the Romans as masters of Western Europe. The Germans in their primitive tribal condition possessed a great aptitude for forming large political communities by the union of many small communities:—an aptitude which is probably common to all peoples in a tribal condition:—and they inhabited a flat country which put no obstacles in the way of the amalgamation of their tribes. At any rate the German tribes between 150 A.D. and 400 A.D. were engaged in a process of amalgamation. About 150 A.D. Ptolemy enumerated more than fifty of them[9]: by the year 400 all or nearly all of these had gathered themselves into a few great hordes or associations of tribes, (which may themselves be called overgrown tribes,) bearing severally the names of the Saxons, the Salian Franks, the Ripuarian Franks, the Angli, the Alamanni, the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards. After 400 A.D. came the great migrations of the German peoples: some of them invaded the provinces of the Western Roman Empire, still full of wealth and of such civilisation as the Romans had planted there: others, in the second half of the fifth century, betook themselves to Britain, from whence the Romans had departed in the year 407.