456 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



the confederation in war, tins kinship becomes a matter of 

 course. For under such conditions the general government 

 is but a development of that which was previously one of 

 the local governments. We have a familiar illustration 

 furnished by old English times in the likeness between the 

 hundred-moot (a small local governing assembly), the 

 shire-moot (constituted in an analogous way, but having 

 military, judicial, and fiscal duties of a wider kind, and 

 headed by a chief originally elected), and the national 

 witanagemot (containing originally the same class-elements, 

 though in different proportions, headed by a king, also at first 

 elected, and discharging like functions on a larger scale). 

 This similarity recurs under another phase. Sir Henry Maine 

 says : 



&quot; It has often, indeed, been noticed that a Feudal Monarchy was an 

 exact counterpart of a Feudal Manor, but the reason of the correspon 

 dence is only now beginning to dawn upon us, which is, that both of 

 them were in their origin bodies of assumed kinsmen settled on land 

 and undergoing the same transmutation of ideas through the fact of 

 settlement.&quot; 



Of France in the early feudal period, Maury says, &quot;the 

 court of every great feudatory was the image, of course 

 slightly reduced, of that of the king ;&quot; and the facts he names 

 curiously show that locally, as generally, there was a develop 

 ment of servants into ministerial officers. Kindred evidence 

 comes from other parts of the world Japan, several African 

 States, sundry Polynesian islands, ancient Mexico, Mediaeval 

 India, &c. ; where forms of society essentially similar to those 

 of the feudal system exist or have existed. 



Where the local autonomy has been almost or quite 

 destroyed, as by a powerful invading race bringing with it 

 another type of organization, we still see the same thing; for 

 its tendency is to modify the institutions locally as it 

 modifies them generally, From early times eastern king 

 doms have shown us this ; as instance the provincial rulers, 

 or satraps, of the Persians. &quot; While . . . they remained in 

 office they were despotic they represented the Great 



