of government under leaders selected or elected
by popular acclaim or at least by popular consent, to more or less
permanent leadership enjoying many political privileges, including the
selection of its successors.

Under the pressure of social emergency, engendered within the social
group or imposed from outside the group by migration, intrusion or
invasion, leadership takes the measures which it considers necessary to
preserve and/or extend its authority. Each emergency offers leadership
an opportunity or an excuse to by-pass custom and/or law, overlook
whatever public opinion may exist and proceed to the measures needed to
meet the emergency. In each organized social group the exercise of
authority has provided the leadership with a near-monopoly of money and
weapons in the hands of a permanent military elite. The use of this
elite to deal with the emergency is accepted by civil authority as a
matter of course.

When social division of function has produced and armed a military
elite, leadership turns to this elite in any emergency arising from
natural disaster or social crisis. The outcome is a community directed
by a military arm seeking to perpetuate and enlarge its own role in the
determination and exercise of public authority, using any means which
seems likely to produce the desired results.

Politically, therefore, any expanding empire or civilization reaches a
point at which absolute monarchy, exercising unquestioned authority,
makes and enforces public policy by the use of the military or with its
help.

Many commentators write as though the essence of civilization was its
art galleries, concert halls, its universities and its libraries. Such
agencies are the trappings, decorations and fringes of a civilization.
There is no justification for such a selective approach. The strong
right-arm of every civilization has been its wealth (money) and its
martial equipment (its guns).

Success in politics has been described as the art of selecting the
possible and bringing it to fruition. Every community is more or less
fragmented by deviations, contradictions, confrontations and conflicts.
These fragmentations begin in the personality and extend through the
entire social structure--from the individual, through the family, such
voluntary associations as the sports club, the trade union, the
merchants' association, the educational system, the political party, the
municipal or the national government.

Unrestrai