Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/605

Rh under such conditions, these can be neither that commercial prosperity which produces large urban populations, nor cultivation of the associated mental nature. Whence it may be inferred that the growth of popular power accompanying industrial growth in England was largely due to the comparatively small amount of this warfare between the industrial groups and the feudal groups around them. The effects of the trading life were less interfered with, and the local governing centers, urban and rural, were not prevented from uniting to restrain the general center.

And now let us consider more specifically how the governmental influence of the people is acquired. By the histories of organizations of whatever kind, we are shown that the purpose originally subserved by some arrangement is not always the purpose eventually subserved. It is so here. Assent to obligations rather than assertion of rights has ordinarily initiated the increase of popular power. Even the transformation effected by the revolution of Kleisthenes at Athens took the form of a redistribution of tribes and demes for purposes of taxation and military service. In Rome, too, that enlargement of the oligarchy which occurred under Servius Tullius had for its ostensible motive the imposing on plebeians of obligations which up to that time had been borne exclusively by patricians. But we shall best understand this primitive relation between duty and power, in which the duty is original and the power derived, by going back once more to the beginning.

For when we remember that the primitive political assembly is essentially a war-council, formed of leaders who debate in presence of armed followers; and when we remember that in early stages all free adult males, being warriors, are called on to join in defensive or offensive actions—we see that, originally, the attendance of the armed freemen is in pursuance of the military service to which they are bound, and that such power as, when thus assembled, they exercise, is incidental. Later stages yield clear proofs that this is the normal order; for it recurs where, after a political dissolution, political organization begins de novo. Instance the Italian cities, in which, as we have seen, the original "parliaments," summoned for defense by the tocsin, included all the men capable of bearing arms: the obligation to fight coming first, and the right to vote coming second. And, naturally, this duty of attendance survives when the primitive assemblage assumes other functions than those of a militant kind; as witness the before-named fact that among the Scandinavians it was "disreputable for freemen not to attend" the annual assembly; and the further facts that in France the obligation to attend the hundred court in the Merovingian period rested upon all full freemen; that in the Carlovingian period, the "non-attendance is punished by fines and amercements"; that in England the lower freemen, as well as others,