MUNICIPALITIES. Municipalities are as old as civilization itself. The story of the nations of antiquity that flourished in the val leys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates is in large part the narrative of what went on in the imposing cities of Thebes, Memphis, Baby lon and Nineveh. History gives us little ac curate knowledge of these populous centres of the ancient world and the student of municipal government gains little from a scrutiny of the autocratic systems by which they were ruled.
Real city life may be said to have been born in Greece. Largely due to geographi cal and topographical conditions which made community isolation inevitable, ancient Greece never became a unified nation. It was merely a geographical term applied to a group of inde pendent, usually self-governing cities with the areas of land adjacent to them. The Greek city-state was the sole unit of government. The city was the state and the state was the city. A man was a foreigner in any city but his own. There were no distinctions between the duties and functions which in modern times we call national or state and those which were municipal. It is therefore perfectly proper that we should derive our words "politics,"' upoliti cal,p and the similar terms by which we de scribe our public policies, institutions and con cerns from polls, the Greek word for city. The Greek cities differed widely in government. In Sparta the governing power remained consist ently autocratic or oligarchical, while in other Greek cities, notably Athens, the form of gov ernment fluctuated between autocracy and de mocracy.
Early Italian history, like that of Greece, is the record of the development and struggles of a large number of city-states. The history of Rome as a nation is the history of the conquest or establishment of numerous cities bound together into one gigantic, unified system by the dominating power of Rome. As in Greece, city life and national life tended to merge. The government of the city of Rome itself, beginning with monarchy, progressed through various stages of democracy and rep resentative government which were never com pletely lost even under the autocratic forms of the empire. There was little in the government of the cities outside of Rome, however, which could he called truly popular, and such demo cratic features as existed in the earlier period tended to diminish or disappear as the empire became more centralized. The political and
civil rights conferred by Rome upon these trib utary cities were usually made the basis for the imposition of heavy taxation. It is from the word municipium applied by the Romans to these dependent and partially self-governing cities that we derive our word municipality. In complexity of organization and in diversity of functions it may be safely said that municipal government and life at Rome at the height of its development rivaled that of the modern metropolis.
Mediaeval During the ages') municipalities seem to drop out of sight for the time being. The remnant of their powers and functions which was not lost in the general chaos was taken over largely by the Church. The development of the feudal system in Europe, beginning with the 10th century, was destined to exert an important influence upon the life and position of municipalities. Its im mediate result was a diminution of their already weakened power. The feudal lord who lived upon his estate in the country held the cities within his domain as vassals, exercising over them the same feudal prerogatives as over the individuals on his land. In spite of feudal oppression the mediaeval cities prospered as centers of trade and commerce. With pros perity came wealth and with wealth came the power to bargain or to fight with the feudal barons. Many of the larger cities of Italy, i.e., Florence, Venice, and Pisa, were able to pur chase something like independence, while the cities of northern Europe more frequently freed themselves by the sword. This was true of the powerful free cities of northern Germany, which during the 11th and 12th centuries ce mented their commercial interests in the for mation of the Hanseatic League. When the struggle for municipal rights was won either by barter or in battle tne cities secured the fruits thereof in a written treaty of peace or bill of rights called a charter. These charters, limited as they frequently were in the scope of the municipal freedom they guaranteed, may be said to have laid the foundations for modern constitutional government.