ly local in their origin, they spontaneously resist the idea of more extended unity. Even much reflection upon advantages to be gained from wider association often fails to overcome them. The stranger long continues to be regarded as an enemy.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL STATUS

When, finally, the period of reflective consciousness is reached by a primitive community, it is evidently already subject to law; but it is a form of law imposed chiefly by natural necessity. Unconsciously, however, without purpose or definite intention, a status has been created, in which, if there are marked differences in the powers of individuals, there are corresponding differences in their positions in the community. The weak have unconsciously been made subject to the strong, and it is the will of the stronger that rules the group. If a neighboring tribe is conquered, it is reduced to slavery. Caste is thereby established, privilege is asserted and exercised, and there is one code of conduct for the ruler and another for the ruled. Self-preservation favors the progressive centralization of power in the hands of the ruling class. Thus is gradually built up a system of relations based on superior force. Ability to compel obedience to an order is soon recognized as rightful authority; and the power of command, accorded freely for the common good in time of war, becomes a permanent possession of the chiefs in time of peace. Rivalry between them eliminates the less powerful competitors for headship, or reduces most of them to a position of subordination, rendered effective and permanent by the domination of the supreme leader, who preserves his theoretical supremacy by conceding to these subordinates local authority so long as it is coupled with acknowledged subjection to himself.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE “STATE”

The status thus created is the beginning of the “State” in its accepted historic sense. Primarily, it is the product of contending forces, at first purely unconscious and instinctive, but finally becoming aware of the advantages afforded by the possession of . personal supremacy and its recognition by others, with a progressive acquisition of the means by which it may be more effectively sustained and extended.

In the first stages of the evolution of the State there is no evidence of any “contract, express or tacit; or of

any

convention of any kind. Nor is there any evidence of a conception of law as a consciously accepted rule of action. Law there is, but it is simply the mode of behavior, conditioned and determined by the operation of unconscious forces; and, therefore, closely analogous to natural law in its scientific sense, as the rule of se

quence in the realm of physical causation. The human mind, in the plenitude of its powers, has not yet been brought into action; and, in this period, the community has not attained complete self-conscious

ness.

The State, then, is older than philosophy, .older than art, older than a generally exercised reflective consciousness. Men did not consciously create it, they were born into it. It developed as they matured. The State is a primal reality, practically coeval with man as a social being

Such being its origin, its primal law is force. For a long period men acted as they must, rather than as they would. In the struggle for existence the first law was natural law. The long arm, the strong hand, the fleet foot, the heavier bulk—these were the titanic forces that laid the foundations of the State. War with wild beasts, the conflicts over the possession of their remains—these formed the first hard school in which the science of politics learned its A, B, C, and for long ages all its literature was spelled in the runic letters first traced by the primitive weapons of the Stone Age upon the field of battle.

THE PERSISTENCE OF PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS

Will it ever be possible to write the history of the State in other characters? Certainly, it cannot be disputed that for thousands of years it continued to be recorded almost entirely in these. During centuries upon centuries of time, who ever ruled except through the possession of superior force? Is it even now possible to dispense with physical categories in the exposition of political science? The "ruler” and the “ruled”—the impressive antithesis of strength and weakness-persist through all the sequence of rising and fallen kingdoms and empires. Here