e small component social aggregates, by
substituting other divisions, these original divisions are still more
broken down by growing industrialism. Generating a wealth that is not
connected with rank, this initiates a compelling power; and at the same
time, by establishing the equal positions of citizens before the law in
respect of trading transactions, it weakens those divisions which at the
outset expressed inequality of position before the law.

POLITICAL FORMS AND FORCES

In its primitive form political power is the feeling of the community
acting through an agency which it has either informally or formally
established; and this public feeling, while it is to some extent the
feeling spontaneously formed by those concerned, it is to a much larger
extent the accumulated and organised sentiment of the past. Everywhere
we are shown that the ruler's function as regulator is mainly that of
enforcing the inherited rules of conduct which embody ancestral
sentiments and ideas.

CHIEFS AND KINGS

At the outset the principle of efficiency was the sole principle of
organisation, but evidently supremacy which depends exclusively on
personal attributes is but transitory. Only when the chief's place is
forthwith filled by one whose claim is admitted does there begin a
differentiation which survives through successive generations. The
custom of reckoning descent through females, it may be noted, is less
favourable to the establishment of permanent political headship than is
the system of kinship through males, which conduces to a more coherent
family, to a greater culture of subordination and to a more probable
union of inherited position and inherited capacity. In sundry
semi-civilised societies distinguished by permanent political headships,
inheritance through males has been established in the ruling house while
inheritance through females survives in the society at large. Descent
through males also fosters ancestor-worship, and the consequent
reinforcing of natural authority by supernatural authority--a very
powerful factor. Development of the ghost theory, leading as it does to
special fear of the ghosts of powerful men, until, where many tribes
have been welded together by a conqueror, his ghost acquires in
tradition the pre-eminence of a god, produces two effects. In the first
place his descendant is supposed to partake of his divine nature; and in
the second place, by propitiatory sacrifices to him is supposed to