POLITICAL RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 645 



body, too, where its powers do not disappear by absorption in 

 those of the supreme head, tends to complicate; as in our 

 own case by the differentiation of a privy council from the 

 original consultative body, and again by the differentiation of 

 a cabinet from the privy council : accompanied, in the other 

 direction, by division of the consultative body into elective and 

 non-elective parts. While these metamorphoses are going on, 

 the separation of the three organizations, legislative, judicial, 

 and executive, progresses. Moreover, with progress in these 

 major political changes goes that progress in minor political 

 changes which, out of family-governments and clan-govern 

 ments, evolves such governments as those of the tything, the 

 gild, and the municipality. Thus in all directions from 

 primitive simplicity there is produced ultimate complexity, 

 through modifications upon modifications. 



With this advance from small incoherent social aggre 

 gates to great coherent ones, which, while becoming integrated 

 pass from uniformity to multiformity, there goes an advance 

 from indefiniteness of political organization to definiteness 

 of political organization. Save inherited ideas and usages, 

 nothing is fixed in the primitive horde. But the dif 

 ferentiations above described, severally beginning vaguely, 

 grow in their turns gradually more marked. Class-divisions, 

 absent at first and afterwards undecided, eventually acquire 

 great distinctness : slaves, serfs, freemen, nobles, king, become 

 separated, often by impassable barriers, and their positions 

 shown by mutilations, badges, dresses, &c. Powers and obli 

 gations which were once diffused are parted off and rigorously 

 maintained. The various parts of the political machinery come 

 to be severally more and more restricted in their ranges of 

 duties ; and usage, age by age accumulating precedents, brings 

 every kind of official action within prescribed bounds. This 

 increase of definiteness is everywhere well shown by the 

 development of laws. Beginning as inherited sacred injunc 

 tions briefly expressed, these have to be applied after some 

 prescribed method, and their meanings in relation to par- 



