Note 311 — Chapter XI · - THE ROMAN GENS.

“A fixed local centre was quite as necessary in the case of such a canton as in that of a clanship; but as the members of the clan, or, in other words, the constituent elements of the canton, dwelt in villages, the centre of the canton cannot have been a town or place of joint settlement in the strict sense. It must, on the contrary, have been simply a place of common assembly, containing the seat of justice and the common sanctuary of the canton, where the members of the canton met every eighth day for purposes of intercourse and amusement, and where, in case of war, they obtained a safer shelter for themselves and their cattle than in the villages; in ordinary circumstances this place of meeting was not at all or but scantily inhabited.... These cantons accordingly, having their rendezvous in some stronghold, and including a certain number of clanships, form the primitive political unities with which Italian history begins.... All of these cantons were in primitive times politically sovereign, and each of them was governed by its prince with the co-operation of the council of elders and the assembly of warriors. Nevertheless the feeling of fellowship based on community of descent and of language not only pervaded the whole of them, but manifested itself in an important religious and political institution—the perpetual league of the collective Latin cantons.”—Hist. of Rome, i, 64-66. The statement that the canton or tribe was governed by its prince with the co-operation of the council, etc., is a reversal of the correct statement, and therefore misleading. We must suppose that the military commander held an elective office, and that he was deposable at the pleasure of the constituency who elected him. Further than this, there is no ground for assuming that he possessed any civil functions. It is a reasonable, if not a necessary conclusion, therefore, that the tribe was governed by a council composed of the chiefs of the gentes, and by an assembly of the warriors, with the co-operation of a general military commander, whose functions were exclusively military. It was a government of three powers, common in the Upper Status of barbarism, and identified with institutions essentially democratical.