e general kind
as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval
and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish
movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the
untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of
institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been
slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that
have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous
and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has
continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the
Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the
feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree
continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and
unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And
since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of
the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of
dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such
free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the
framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence,"
is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the
service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated
"liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long
as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is
expedient for his purposes.

The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of
which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically
to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine,
servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their
captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled
and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to
new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains. Out of it
all in the course of time came a feudal regime, under which personal
allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal
accredited bond of solidarity. As the outcome of further unremitting
intrigue and contention among feudal chiefs, of high and low degree, the
populace fell into larger parcels, under