rs to be an unavoidable inference that the ultimate executive
agency must become in some way or other elective. From such evidence as
existing society will afford us, it is to be inferred that the highest
State-office in whatever way filled will continue to decline in
importance. No speculations concerning ultimate political forms can,
however, be regarded as anything but tentative. There will probably be
considerable variety in the special forms of the political institutions
of industrial society; all of them bearing traces of past institutions
which have been brought into congruity with the representative
principle.

To turn to political functions, when corporate action is no longer
needed for preserving a society as a whole from destruction or injury by
other societies, the end which remains for it is that of preserving the
component members of society from injury by one another. With this
limitation of the state function it is probable that there will be
simultaneously carried further that trait which already characterises
the most industrially-organised society--the performance of
increasingly-numerous and increasingly-important functions by other
organisations than those which form departments of the government.
Already private enterprise, working through incorporated bodies of
citizens, achieves ends undreamed of as so achievable in primitive
societies; and in the future other ends undreamed of now as so
achievable will be achieved.

The conclusion of profoundest moment to which lines of argument converge
is that the possibility of a high social state political as well as
general, fundamentally depends on the cessation of war. Persistent
militancy, maintaining adapted institutions, must inevitably prevent, or
else neutralise, changes in the direction of more equitable institutions
and laws; while permanent peace will of necessity be followed by social
ameliorations of every kind.

_III.--Ecclesiastical Institutions_

Rightly to trace the evolution of ecclesiastical institutions, we must
know whence came the ideas and sentiments implied by them. Are these
innate or are they derived? They are derived. And here it may be
remarked that where among African savages there existed no belief in a
double which goes away during sleep, there was found to exist no belief
in a double which survived after death.

From the ordinary absence of the other self in sleep, and its
extraordinary absences in swoons, apoplexy, an