unit of the constitutional machinery, the simplest form of social organization, is the township, the villata or vicus."* The political unit of every nation was, originally, a little nation usually possessing all political powers, legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial, in a confused mixture; and in expanding into the great state, or becoming fused with other similar units, there has not ordinarily been a surrender of all power by the smaller unit. Actually, much of the old local authority has been retained in these smaller units which afterwards become the subordinate departments, counties, communes, or municipalities of the larger state. The sovereign ruling over this congeries of units which has become the nation has power to interpose his superior will to change the oldtime constitution of the original political unit, but more frequently he does not; he retains its form, and perhaps enlarges and more clearly defines its powers. Sometimes this unit is in the nature of a root from which a system of districts, county, city, and state, or department governments grow; a series of expanding branches. Through such processes the institutions of a country grow up. What are these? They are the instrumentalities through which the general will expresses itself, and the general force acts.

It is always to be remembered that, "what the sovereign permits, he commands," because the act of permission implies its antithesis, the power to prohibit. Hence, if a township has now certain political powers, and the county certain others, and the city still different ones, and these are exclusive within their several spheres, it by no means follows that these are subtractions from the central national will, and reduce it pro tanto. The central will permits them, therefore it wills them. These town

* "Constitutional History of England," i., 82.

ships and political subdivisions are not sovereign powers; they are strictly subordinate, because there is a power at some other point of the political fabric which can change and modify them. The difficulty of clearly perceiving the unity of the sovereign nation is largely because we see that all political action takes place in groups or circles, generally of no great magnitude. The nation at large, the national will and force, are more or less vague abstractions. The political movement which we see about us, is in wards of cities, or in election precincts, or townships, or counties, or, in the United States, in the state. Every subdivision has a certain jurisdiction.

The will and power of the nation distribute themselves through these, by means of political institutions. The growth of these is to be studied in the history of the expansion or the aggregation of the original units to the nation.

The political institutions of a country constitute the framework of the nation. They are the bones, heart and lungs of the commonwealth, but they are not the lifeblood which momently courses through the arteries and veins.

Institutions always tend to become permanent in form, though, among progressive people, the spirit which. animates them may change every half century. They may be divided into two classes, local and national. In the states which are the product of long growth, as those of Europe, the various circles or districts of administration, as a rule, represent the different points where sovereignty has resided before a further growth or fusion. The towns, counties, or departments, as the case may be, retain the substance of the original administrative powers, though, of course, modified, or more or less supervised by the superior power from time to time. When several of these smaller sovereignties are united, then the

The peculiarity

necessity for national institutions arises. of Asiatic political growth is that of arrested development. In the Orient, small communities have petrified, and are held together by a central despotism, without, however, arteries throughout the whole system for the free circulation of power. In Western Europe, the local institutions have been more flexible, and have expanded by degrees into those of the nation. We thus see that even in the perfectly developed nation the national will is single only in the sense that there is, and must be, the ability in some person or persons within the organism to form and express it in the last resort, and to use the national force to effectuate its mandates. It is through all the institutions of the state, both national and local, that this sovereign will expresses itself, and is thus apparently shared by many departments, but it will be found in every state that every district or department of administration traces its title through a superior power, and that they really all exist because of the permission of this higher power-the sovereign.

CHAPTER VII.

INSTINCT AS A FACTOR OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION.

An error in much political writing is the overestimation of intelligence and the underestimation of instinct. This appears with prominence in the writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in those of Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Puffendorf, Locke, Rousseau, in all, in fact, where the origin of government is explained by the hypothesis of a social contract; for this hypothesis involves the idea of intelligent beings, in the earliest stages of history, consciously and deliberately setting about the construction of a government. The influence of this contract theory on political thought lingers even to this day, though in a constantly diminishing degree. At present it may be considered as having generally given place to the view first advanced by Aristotle, which is, in brief, that man is by nature a political being, and that government is a result of social growth, and is, moreover, a necessary condition of human existence. Accepting this position, we have to consider the method and forces of this growth. Among the purely human forces we find intelligence and instinct. It is with the latter that we have here mainly to do, and especially to point out the nature and extent of its operation in the field of politics.

Instinct has been defined in a general way as a generic term, comprising all those faculties of mind which lead to the conscious performance of actions that are adaptive in character, but pursued without necessary knowledge of

the relation between the means employed and the ends attained." It may, therefore, be well illustrated by contrasting it with intelligence. "Intelligence," says Prof. Joseph Le Conte, in substance, "works by experience, and is wholly dependent on individual experience for the wisdom of its actions; while instinct, on the other hand, is wholly independent of individual experience. If we regard instinct in the light of intelligence, then it is not individual intelligence but cosmic intelligence, or the laws of nature working through inherited brain structure to produce wise results. Intelligence belongs to the individual, and is therefore variable, that is, different in different individuals, and also improvable in the life of the individual by experience. Instinct belongs to the species, and is therefore the same in all individuals, and unimprovable with age and experience. Whatever difference in the skill of individuals or improvement with age is observed, must be accredited to the intelligence of the individual, not to the inherited element. In a word, intelligent conduct is self-determined and becomes wise by individual experience. Instinctive conduct is predetermined in wisdom by brain structure. The former is free; the latter is, to a large extent, automatic." *

As to the origin of instinct, it can hardly be said that any theory has as yet gained universal assent, but no hypothesis appears more worthy of acceptance than that which regards it as habit grown to be hereditary. An act frequently performed in the consciousness of a specific purpose may continue to be performed, through the determinative force of structure, after the consciousness of the purpose of the act has been lost. When this peculiarity of structure, or the mental bias caused by the frequent and continued exercise of the mind in a given * Popular Science Monthly for October, 1875.