tance? Every individual has his personal
relation to the state, and privileges of citizenship are important.
Who shall determine the right to vote and to hold office, or the duty
to pay taxes or serve in the army or navy? In these various ways the
state is no less functioning politically for the benefit of the people
than when coercing recalcitrant citizens, warning or fighting other
nations, or legislating in its congressional halls. Its opportunity to
regulate the social interests of its citizens is almost illimitable,
for while a written constitution may prescribe what a state may and
may not do, those who made the constitution have the power to revise
it or to override its provisions.

331. =Theories of the State.=--Archaeological and historical evidence
point to the family as the nursery of the state. There was a time when
the contract theory was popular. It was believed that the state became
possible when individuals agreed to give up some of their own
individual rights for the sake of living in peace with their neighbors
and enjoying mutual protection. There is no doubt that such a mutual
arrangement was made in the troublous feudal period of mediaeval
European history, just as the original thirteen American colonies gave
up some of their individual powers to make possible a real American
state, but the social-contract theory is no longer accepted as a
satisfactory explanation of the origin of government. There was no
_Mayflower_ compact with the bushmen when Englishmen decided to live
with the natives in Australia.

There is another theory that eminently wise men, with or without
divine assistance, formulated law and government for cities and
tribes, and that their codes were definitely accepted by the people,
but the work of these men, as far as it is historical at all, seems to
have been a work of codifying laws which had grown out of custom
rather than of making new laws. Still another theory that was once
held strenuously by a few was that of the divine right of kings, as if
God had given to one dynasty or one class the right to rule
irresponsibly over their fellows. Individual political philosophers,
like the Greek Aristotle and the German Bluntschli have published
their theories, and have influenced schools of publicists, but the
political science of the present day, basing its theories on observed
facts, is content to trace the gradual changes that have taken place
in the unconscious development of the