Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

By the instinct of aggregation, which belongs to an essentially social animal, families will club together into townships or villages, and townships will be centralised into states. Humanity without townships would degenerate into tigerhood, or whatever type of animal existence might express an essentially self-contained, solitary, and selfish creature; townships without that sort of headship which the word State implies, would make society cry halt at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates which would render common action for any high human purpose extremely difficult, and, in the general case, as human beings are, impossible. Hence the centralisation of the Attic townships at Athens in the legendary traditions of the Athenians attributed to Theseus;4 hence also the lax confederation of the earliest Latin states under the headship of Albalonga; and, after the humiliation of that old stronghold, the more closely cemented union of those states under the hegemony of Rome.5 Whatever may be the evils connected with the growth of large towns, especially when, as in modern times, they have been allowed to swell to enormous magnitude without regulation or control, it is one of the undoubted lessons of universal history that the social stimulus necessary for the creation of vigorous thought, no less than the centralised force indispensable to great achievement, is found only in the large towns. The Christians were called Christian first at Antioch; and, had there been no Rome to unify a little Latium, there would have been no great Roman Empire to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the North with the smooth civilisation of the South by the force of a common law and common language.6