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 so, with the district or section, is the guild—the trade union. This union also retains its saints, its assembly, its forum, its judges. It has its treasury, its landed property, its militia and banner. It also has its seal and it remains sovereign. In case of war, should it think right, its militia will march and join forces with those of other guilds, and it will plant its banner, side by side with the great banner, or carosse (cart) of the city.
And lastly the city is the union of districts, streets, parishes and guilds, and it has its plenary assembly of all inhabitants in the large forum, its great belfry, its elected judges, its banner for rallying the militia of the guilds and districts. It negotiates as a sovereign with other cities, federates with whom it likes, concludes national and foreign alliances. Thus the English "Cinque Ports" round Dover are federated with French and Netherland ports on the other side of the Channel; the Russian Novgorod is the ally of Scandinavian, Germanic Hansa, and so on. In its external relations, every city possesses all the prerogatives of the modern State, and from that time forth is constituted, by free contracts, that body of agreements which later on became known as International law, and was placed under the sanction of public opinion of all cities, while it was more often violated than respected by the States later on.
How often a city, not being able to decide a dispute in a complicated case, sends for "finding the sentence" to a neighbouring city! How often the ruling spirit of the time—arbitration, rather than the judge's authority—is manifested in the fact of two communes taking a third as arbitrator!
Trade unions behave in the same way. They carry on their commercial and trade affairs beyond the cities and make treaties, without taking their nationalities into account. And when, in our ignorance, we talk boastingly of our international workers' congresses, we forget that international trade congresses and even apprentice congresses were already held in the fifteenth century.
Lastly, the city either defends itself against aggressors and wages its own stubborn wars against neighbouring feudal lords, nominating each year one or rather two military commanders of its militias; or else it accepts a "military defender"—a prince or duke, who is chosen by the city for a year, and whom it can dismiss when it pleases. It usually
