ature has yet made for us
unmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in each
generation. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word in
precisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in
his laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, may
indeed disappear and may require hundreds of years to restore. Aristotle
defined the word 'polity' to mean a state where 'the citizens as a body
govern in accordance with the general good.'[16] As he wrote,
self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea was
already withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were no
such States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's
conception, the name which he defined is borne by the 'police' of
Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes 'Justices'
Justice' a paradox. From the time that the Roman jurisconsults resumed
the work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answer
built up the conception of 'natural justice, it, like all other
political conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand,
since the original effort of abstraction was in its completeness
incommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its
use. On the other hand, the actions and institutions of mankind, from
which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even
although the manuscripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and
Roman institutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinian
were used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was the
meaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words could
have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power of
the bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ages
were able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition of
reverence still attached itself to the sound of 'Rome.' For hundreds of
years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than
his neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor,' and was called
by the name of Caesar.

[16] _Politics_, ch. vii., [Greek: hotan to plethos pros to koinon
politeue tai sympheron.]

The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence the
history of a political entity when once formed confront the statesman
who is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck,
Cavour, or Metterni