nd mutation, as
well as the _de facto_ bearing of the institutional scheme on the
material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,--while
all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of
Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical
sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is
also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that
current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme
necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any
given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become
nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these
are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science,
but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of
political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be
brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not
fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional _obiter
dictum_. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in
accepting the general theorems of current political theory without
prejudice, and looking past the received theoretical formulations for a
view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments
have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual,
that surround their continued working and effect.

By lineal descent the governmental establishments and the powers with
which they are vested, in all the Christian nations, are derived from
the feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which, in turn, are of a
predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.[2] In nearly all
instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted
characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly
altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later
exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of
their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in
which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. Wherever the
unavoidable concessions have been shrewdly made with a view to
conserving the autonomy and irresponsibility of the governmental
establishment, or the "State," and where the state of national sentiment
has been led to favor this work of conservation, as, e.g., in the case
of Austria, Spain or Prussia, there