CONSULTATIVE BODIES. 353 



mony with this implication are such facts as that, after a compara- 

 tively settled state has been reached, the power of the assembled peo- 

 ple is limited to accepting or rejecting the proposals made, and that 

 the members of the consultative body, summoned by the ruler, who 

 is also the general, give their opinions only when invited by him to 

 do so. 



Nor do we lack clews to the process by which the primitive war- 

 council grows, consolidates, and separates itself. Within the warrior- 

 class, which is also the land-owning class, war produces increasing dif- 

 ferences of wealth, as well as increasing differences of status ; so that, 

 along with the compounding and recompounding of groups which 

 war brings about, the military leaders come to be distinguished as 

 larsfe land-owners and local rulers. Hence, members of the consulta- 

 tive body become contrasted with the freemen at large, not only as 

 leading warriors are contrasted with their followers, but, still more, as 

 men of wealth and authority. 



This increasing contrast between the second and third elements of 

 the triune political body ends in separation when, in course of time, 

 war consolidates large territories. Armed freemen scattered over a 

 wide area are deterred from attending the periodic assemblies by cost 

 of travel, by cost of time, by danger, and also by the experience that 

 multitudes of men, unprepared and unorganized, are helpless in pres- 

 ence of an organized few, better armed and mounted, and with bands 

 of retainers. So that, passing through a time during which only the 

 armed freemen living near the place of meeting attend, there comes a 

 time when even these, not being summoned, are considered as having 

 no right to attend ; and thus the consultative body becomes completely 

 differentiated. 



Changes in the relative powers of the ruler and the consultative 

 body are determined by obvious causes. If the king retains or ac- 

 quires the repute of supernatural origin or authority, and the law of 

 hereditary succession is so settled as to exclude election, those who 

 might else have formed a consultative body having coordinate power 

 become simply appointed advisers. But, if the king has not the j^res- 

 tige of supposed sacred origin or commission, and continues to be elec- 

 tive, then the consultative body retains power, and is liable to become 

 an oligarchy. 



Of course, it is not alleged that all consultative bodies have arisen 

 in the way described, or are constituted in like manner. Societies, 

 broken up by wars or dissolved by revolutions, may preserve so little 

 of their primitive organizations that there remain no classes of the 

 kinds out of which such consultative bodies as those described arise. 

 Or, as we see in our own colonies, societies may have been formed in 

 ways which have not fostered classes of land-owning militant chiefs, 

 and therefore do not furnish the elements out of which the consulta- 

 tive body, in its primitive shape, is composed. Under conditions of 

 VOL. XIX. 23 



