REPRESENTATIVE BODIES. 587 



under such conditions, these can be neither that commercial prosperity 

 which produces large urban populations, nor cultivation of the associ- 

 ated 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 trans- 

 formation effected by the revolution of Kleisthenes at Athens took 

 the form of a redistribution of tribes and demes for purposes of taxa- 

 tion 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 under- 

 stand 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 obliga- 

 tion to fight coming first, and the right to vote coming second. And, 

 naturally, this duty of attendance survives when the primitive assem- 

 blage assumes other functions than those of a militant kind ; as wit- 

 ness the before-named fact that amono^ 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, 



