deal. Though the substance of ideals is the will,
their mould must be experience and a true discernment of opportunity; so
that while all ideals, regarded _in vacuo_, are equal in ideality, they
are, under given circumstances, very diverse in worth.

[Sidenote: Origin of free governments.]

When not founded on conquest, which is the usual source of despotism,
government is ordinarily based on traditional authority vested in elders
or patriarchal kings. This is the origin of the classic state, and of
all aristocracy and freedom. The economic and political unit is a great
household with its lord, his wife and children, clients and slaves. In
the interstices of these households there may be a certain floating
residuum--freedmen, artisans, merchants, strangers. These people, while
free, are without such rights as even slaves possess; they have no share
in the religion, education, and resources of any established family.
For purposes of defence and religion the heads of houses gather together
in assemblies, elect or recognise some chief, and agree upon laws,
usually little more than extant customs regulated and formally
sanctioned.

[Sidenote: Their democratic tendencies.]

Such a state tends to expand in two directions. In the first place, it
becomes more democratic; that is, it tends to recognise other influences
than that which heads of families--_patres conscripti_--possess. The
people without such fathers, those who are not patricians, also have
children and come to imitate on a smaller scale the patriarchal economy.
These plebeians are admitted to citizenship. But they have no such
religious dignity and power in their little families as the patricians
have in theirs; they are scarcely better than loose individuals,
representing nothing but their own sweet wills. This individualism and
levity is not, however, confined to the plebeians; it extends to the
patrician houses. Individualism is the second direction in which a
patriarchal society yields to innovation. As the state grows the family
weakens; and while in early Rome, for instance, only the _pater
familias_ was responsible to the city, and his children and slaves only
to him, in Greece we find from early times individuals called to account
before public judges. A federation of households thus became a republic.
The king, that chief who enjoyed a certain hereditary precedence in
sacrifices or in war, yields to elected generals and magistrates whose
power, while