62(5 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



strong for him, and without their cordial cooperation he would 

 soon cease to reign ;&quot; is what we recognize as having heen 

 true, and as &quot;being si ill true, in various better-known societies 

 where the supreme head is nominally absolute. From 

 the time when the Roman emperors were chosen by the 

 soldiers and slain when they did not please them, to the 

 present time when, as we are told of Russia, the desire of the 

 army often determines the will of the Czar, there have been 

 many illustrations of the truth that an autocrat is politically 

 strong or weak according as many or few of the influential 

 classes give him their support ; and that even the sentiments of 

 those who are politically prostrate occasionally affect political 

 action; as instance the influence of -Turkish fanaticism over 

 the decisions of the Sultan. 



A number of facts must be remembered if we are rightly 

 to estimate the power of the aggregate will in comparison 

 with the power of the autocrat s will. There is the fact that 

 the autocrat is obliged to respect and maintain the great mass 

 of institutions and laws produced by past bentiments and 

 ideas, which have acquired a religious sanction; so that, as in 

 ancient Egypt, dynasties of despots live and die leaving the 

 social order essentially unchanged. There is the fact that a 

 serious change of the social order, at variance with general 

 feeling, is likely afterwards to be reversed ; as when, in Egypt, 

 Amenhotep IV., spite of a rebellion, succeeded in establishing 

 a new religion, which was abolished in a succeeding reign ; and 

 there is the allied fact that laws much at variance with the 

 general will prove abortive, as, for instance, the sumptuary 

 laws made by mediaeval kings, which, continually re-enacted, 

 continually failed. There is the fact that, supreme as he may 

 be, and divine as the nature ascribed to him, the all-powerful 

 monarch is often shackled by usages which make his daily 

 life a slavery : the opinions of the living oblige him to fulfil 

 the dictates of the dead. There is the i act that if he does not 

 conform, or if he otherwise produces by his acts much 

 adverse feeling, his servants, civil and military, refuse to act, 



