es to account for the purposes that
so lie within the governmental discretion, as, e.g., the Common Defense.

These rights and powers still remain to the governmental establishment
even at the widest democratic departure from that ancient pattern of
masterful tutelage and usufruct that marked the old-fashioned
patrimonial State,--and that still marks the better preserved ones among
its modern derivatives. And so intrinsic to these governmental
establishments are these discretionary powers, and by so unfailing a
popular bias are they still accounted a matter of course and of
axiomatic necessity, that they have invariably been retained also among
the attributes of those democratic governments that trace their origin
to a revolutionary break with the old order.

To many, all this will seem a pedantic taking note of commonplaces,--as
if it were worth while remarking that the existing governments are
vested with the indispensable attributes of government. Yet history
records an instance at variance with this axiomatic rule, a rule which
is held to be an unavoidable deliverance of common sense. And it is by
no means an altogether unique instance. It may serve to show that these
characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current
governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of
a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the
genus of governmental establishments at large. These powers answer to an
acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of
habit, not of heredity.

Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth,
of Iceland--tenth to thirteenth centuries. Its case is looked on by
students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none
of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of
these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations
of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their
joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears
never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being
rejected. This singularity--as it would be rated by modern statesmen and
students--was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part
of the founders of the Republic. They had no knowledge of such powers,
duties and accountabilities, except as unwholeso