166 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
some shape underlying even the most centralized and despotic 
forms of government. 
^an is by nature a social being. Aristotle calls him a “ politi¬ 
cal animal.” Society for the proper protection of each in his 
rights must become jural society or government. Hence every 
community, with hardly an exception, consciously or uncon¬ 
sciously, assumes the character of a state, and this state in its in¬ 
ception, or so far back as we can trace it, is democratic. The nat¬ 
ural sequence of development appears to have been this : 
1. There is a local self-government in which all w r ith consider¬ 
able freedom participate ; but this is a government unrestrained 
except by the merest rudiments of a common law and totally with¬ 
out a written constitution or statute law. This is what Professor 
Maine characterizes as “village communities,” and in his opinion 
originated in the community of goods and interests of families of 
the same blood. 
2. Next with advancement in civilization and intercourse, cen¬ 
tralization follows, whereby these roughly organized communities 
are aggregated and become one nation under the overpowering in¬ 
fluence of a superior individual or class, in which process, local 
liberties and privileges are apt to be trampled upon, but in which 
the personal safety of the citizens and public welfare are generally 
promoted. This was the work first of feudal lords and then of 
such personages as Alfred in England and Charlemange on the 
continent. 
■8. Then comes constitutional government, of which republican 
democracy is a form. Government, at first a shapeless mass of 
brute force, is gradually developed into an articulated series of 
powers, limitations and balances; in all forms of which there con¬ 
stantly reappears the tendency to revert to the original democratic 
type, and the dispersion of so much of the centralized power as is 
not needed to hold the state together. This is the condition of 
many of the more advanced nations to-day. 
It is a broad generalization, however, and not always, nor en¬ 
tirely true. The development may be arrested, as it seems to be 
in China, or imperfect, as in France. But China, Hindostan and 
Russia, three of the oldest and least changeable countries upon 
the globe, still show the remains of former local self-governments 
