Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/281

Rh (i. e., in the patriarchate, in which organization rests on consanguinity traced in the male line), the elder-man becomes vicar or priest, and hence law-giver and judge as well as both administrative and executive—as when a patriarch communes with his deity over sacrificing a son or daughter, or a kalif commands of his own impeccability, sits in judgment, awards and rewards, imposes and deposes, and (like a later emperor) personifies the state; yet his primary power is imputed mainly or solely to that supernatural source of which he is deemed but the agent. With the growth of cities and those civic usages in which the organization arises in proprietary right (especially in lands), rulers long remain vicars of mystical or spiritual powers manifested in symbols and ceremonies though often exercised through arms and armies; and until within recent centuries each monarchy was virtually a hierarchy whose king or emperor stood—panoplied in the "divinity which doth hedge about a king"—as the source and exponent of both temporal and spiritual power, performing so much as he would of all governmental functions, his rule ranging from hierarchic to autocratic according to the faith and custom of the time. Gradually (the rate being vastly accelerated by the American Revolution) the monarchs surrendered legislative functions, delegated judicative powers, divided administrative and executive duties with the agents of parliaments and courts, sometimes shared their vicarial powers with ecclesiastic potentates, and began yielding to the inevitable growth of petition into suffrage; yet no monarch was ever quite independent of putative supernatural powers residing within or conveyed through his own personally, or of the symbolism or ceremonial tending to perpetuate the imputation.

In brief, during each stage of governmental growth from the simplicity of primal clan to the pomp and circumstance of gilded empire, the primary functions remain much the same despite sweeping changes in structure. In logical order the functions are (I.) initiatory, and (II.) directive, the former connoting the source and the latter the aim or control of institutional power. In genetic sequence, or in that order of successive manifestation illustrated, e. g., in the natural family of which the clan, gens, city and nation are outgrowths, they are (1) administrative, or concerned with the current regulation of every-day affairs; (2) legislative, or concerned with the establisbment of rules of conduct (always finally adopted only through common consent); (3) judicative, or concerned with the peaceful settlement of disputes in accordance with custom and established rules; (4) executive, or concerned chiefly with the carrying out of rules and judicative decisions; and as the natural source of power gradually comes into ratiocinative view in the light of the general good, (5) determinative, or concerned with the primary expression of common judgment and desire.

Now when the founders of the American nation undertook to frame