it lasts, is much greater; for no other comparable power
now subsists in the levelled state.

Modern Europe has seen an almost parallel development of democracy and
individualism, together with the establishment of great artificial
governments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based on
conquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful or
chivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes--the
burghers--grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened by
being divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king,
emperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs,
representatives of great states, and the people became, in a political
sense, a comparatively level multitude. Where parliamentary government
was established it became possible to subordinate or exclude the monarch
and his court; but the government remains an involuntary institution,
and the individual must adapt himself to its exigencies. The church
which once overshadowed the state has now lost its coercive authority
and the single man stands alone before an impersonal written law, a
constitutional government, and a widely diffused and contagious public
opinion, characterised by enormous inertia, incoherence, and blindness.
Contemporary national units are strongly marked and stimulate on
occasion a perfervid artificial patriotism; but they are strangely
unrepresentative of either personal or universal interests and may yield
in turn to new combinations, if the industrial and intellectual
solidarity of mankind, every day more obvious, ever finds a fit organ to
express and to defend it.

[Sidenote: Imperial peace.]

A despotic military government founded on alien force and aiming at its
own magnificence is often more efficient in defending its subjects than
is a government expressing only the people's energies, as the predatory
shepherd and his dog prove better guardians for a flock than its own
wethers. The robbers that at their first incursion brought terror to
merchant and peasant may become almost immediately representative organs
of society--an army and a judiciary. Disputes between subjects are
naturally submitted to the invader, under whose laws and good-will alone
a practical settlement can now be effected; and this alien tribunal,
being exempt from local prejudices and interested in peace that taxes
may be undiminished, may administer a comparatively impartial justice,
until corrupted