Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/222

210 "every little hamlet resting in an Alpine valley, or perched on mountain-crag, was an independent community, of which all the members were absolutely equal—entitled to vote in every assembly, and qualified for every public function.... Each hamlet had its own laws, jurisdiction, and privileges," the hamlets being federated into communes, the communes into districts, and the districts into a league.

Lastly, with the case of Switzerland may be associated that of San Marino—a little republic which, seated in the Apennines, and having its center on a cliff a thousand feet high, has retained its independence for fifteen centuries. Here eight thousand people are governed by a senate of sixty, and by captains elected every half year, assemblies of the whole people being called on important occasions. There is a standing army of eighteen, "taxation is reduced to a mere nothing," and officials are paid by the honor of serving.

One noteworthy difference between the compound heads arising under physical conditions of the kinds exemplified, must not be overlooked—the difference between the oligarchic form and the more or less popular form. As shown at the outset of this section, if each of the groups united by militant coöperation is despotically ruled—if the groups are severally framed on the patriarchal type, or are severally governed by men of supposed divine descent—then the compound head becomes one in which the people at large have no share. But if, as in these modern cases, patriarchal authority has decayed; or if belief in divine descent has been undermined by a creed at variance with it; or if peaceful habits have weakened that coercive authority which war ever strengthens—then the compound head is no longer an assembly of petty despots. With the progress of these changes it becomes more and more a head formed of those who exercise power not by right of position but by right of appointment.

There are other conditions which favor the rise of compound heads, temporary if not permanent: those, namely, which occur at the dissolutions of preceding organizations. Among people habituated through countless generations to personal rule, having sentiments appropriate to it, and no conception of anything else, the fall of one despot is at once followed by the rise of another; or, if a large personally-governed empire collapses, its parts severally generate governments for themselves of like kind. But, among less servile peoples, the breaking up of political systems having single heads is apt to be followed by the establishment of others having compound heads; especially where there is a simultaneous separation into parts which have not local governments of stable kinds. Under such circumstances there is a return to the primitive state. The preëxisting regulative system having fallen, the members of the community are left without any controlling power save the aggregate will; and, political organization having to commence afresh, the form first assumed is akin to that