of these "social contracts." What a striking lesson for Romanists and Hegelists who know no other means to obtain a similarity of institutions than servitude before the law!
From the Atlantic to the middle course of the Volga, and from Norway to Italy, Europe was covered with similar communes—some becoming populous cities like Florence, Venice, Nuremberg, or Novgorod, others remaining boroughs of a hundred or even twenty families, but nevertheless treated as equals by their more or less prosperous sisters.
Organisms full of vigor, the communes evidently grew dissimilar in their evolution. Geographical position, the character of external commerce, the obstacles to be vanquished outside, gave every commune its own history. But for all, the principle was the same. Pskov in Russia and Brugge in Flanders, a Scotch borough of three hundred inhabitants and rich Venice with its islands, a borough in the North of France or in Poland and Florence the Beautiful represent the same amitas,—the same fellowship of village communes and of associated guilds, the same constitution in its general outline.
Generally, the town, whose enclosure grows in length and breadth with the population and surrounds itself with higher and higher towers, each tower erected by such and such a parish or such a guild and having its own individual character,—generally, I say, the town is divided into four, five, or six districts or sections, which radiate from the citadel to the ramparts. In preference each of these districts is inhabited by one "art" or craft, whereas new trades—the "young arts"—occupy the suburbs, which will soon be enclosed in a new fortified circle.
The street, or parish, represents a territorial unit, corresponding to the ancient village community. Each street or parish has its popular assembly, its forum, its popular tribunal, its elected priest, militia, banner, and often its seal as a symbol of sovereignty. It is federated with other streets, but it nevertheless keeps its independence.
The professional unit, which often corresponds, or nearly
