GOVERNMENT. Government in the ancient world presents three main types—the great despotic empires of Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Macedon; the city-states of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy; and the unique example in Rome of a city-state grad ually becoming the centre of an empire, and, in the process, changing its republican system into an autocracy, limited only by the survival of some republican institutions and traditions.
The early despotic empires have exerted no direct influence upon the development of forms of government and for information on them readers are referred to the separate articles in which they are described. The city-state Governments of the Mediterranean cannot be thus dismissed. It is true that, in a narrow sense, their direct influence upon the history of governmental institutions has been small. The disparity in size between the territory of the Athenian or Spartan State and any modern nation-state; the dif ference in social structure involved in the existence of slavery in the ancient world ; and the relation of the political structure to a social organization unrelated to modern conditions are sufficient in themselves, to say nothing of the long interval of time which elapsed between the downfall of the Roman empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, to account for this. Yet both Greece and Rome, through the effect of the political ideas of the one, and the legal system of the other, have exerted a profound influence upon the development of government.
The appearance of a number of small independent city-states in Greece and the Greek-speaking belt of Asia Minor, and later in the Greek colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy, led to the first great outburst of political speculation. The fundamental questions of political theory were discussed—the nature and end of the State, the meaning of justice, the ideal polity, its aims and structure— whilst speculation was combined with an inductive method by Aristotle and led to the classification of States into good and bad, according as the Government aimed at the good of the whole or at the satisfaction of its own interest and, from another point of view, into three types under each head—monarchy, aristocracy, polity, with their corresponding perversions tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—according as the governmental power was in the hands of one, a few, or the many in each State. To the political thought of the Greeks, and above all to that of Plato and Aristotle, modern political theorists have constantly returned; whilst to the Greek city-state, and especially to Athens, the modern world owes the idea of the self-governing community in which the rule of law is paramount, the citizen shares in political power and controls the destinies of the State, and the executive officers of the State are responsible to the citizen body for the exercise of the functions entrusted to them. (See PLATO, ARISTOTLE, ATHENS.) The influence of Rome has been of another kind. Though its legal writers and its legal system preserved some of the ideas of the Greeks—more especially the conception of a law of nature transcending the positive law of a given state—the strength of the Romans lay in legal construction rather than in political specula tion. The idea of the sovereignty of the State as in its nature final and unchallengeable to all its citizens, though implicit in the Greek view of the State, has indeed most clearly passed into modern political thought through Roman channels (see SOV EREIGNTY). Yet the direct influence of Rome is to be seen more in the influence exercised by the conception of a universal empire on the mediaeval mind, and what is still more important, in the influence of the great fabric of Roman law upon the legal systems of the modern world. The private law of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium and the Spanish American republics rests upon Roman foundations, and its only great rival, the English Common law, which was retained by the United States and has spread to some, though not all, of the Dominions and dependencies, itself owes not a little to the Roman law.
The Mediaeval Period.—The barbarian invasions of the West from the 5th to the loth centuries inaugurated a new and confused period in the history of Government from which the modern State has gradually emerged. On the one hand the new barbarian king doms were tribal and spread over a wide territory : their character was for long "rural" rather than "civic," and even when town life became important in the later middle age the towns were no longer, for the most part, independent centres of political life but were incorporated within large territorial areas of government. On the other hand the Roman theory of universal dominion lasted on throughout the Middle Ages and, through the titular supremacy of the Holy Roman empire, delayed the emergence of national ter ritorial states with a clear title to independence. This delay was assisted by the equally universal claim of the popes to human obedience, and by the effective organization of the Church's system of Government through the canon law, and the courts which administered it, throughout the Christian world. Further, within each territorial kingdom, the authority of the monarch was checked by the local authority of the feudal baron and the con tractual organization of feudal tenure. (See FEUDALISM.) But by the end of the 13th century the empire had begun to take on the character of a title appended to a German princedom, with out authority over or danger to the other princes of Europe : whilst in the first years of the 14th century the papacy itself fell a victim to the attack of a national king, Philip the Fair, and entered upon its "Babylonish captivity" at Avignon. At the same period the force of nationality began to make itself felt both in England and France, and the development in both countries in the later middle ages of a middle class, engaged in trade, gave the kings a new source of strength upon which to rely in their struggle with the feudal nobility. The great religious revolt of the i6th century carried the emergence of the national state yet a stage further. In the Protestant kingdoms—England, Sweden, Den mark for example—the universal claims of the pope were finally repudiated. And even in those States which adhered to Roman Catholicism the secular power gained greatly in authority.
The greatest contribution of the later middle age to the develop ment of modern government was the establishment of a repre sentative system in the countries of Europe. The conditions of the feudal contract always made it necessary for the king to obtain consent from his vassals for any military effort that would demand more from them in service than they were liable to perform. The summoning of the great tenants-in-chief to assemblies at which such consent was asked was natural enough. With the growth of the towns, many of which owed their charters to and held their immunities directly from the Crown the consent of these com munities—early regarded as "persons"—became advisable and necessary, more especially as military service became commuted into money contributions. The device of representation of the "estates" of the realm—nobility, clergy, commons—was adopted in the 13th century and spread rapidly over Europe. Its value as a means of solving the problem of consent in a State spread over a wide territorial area cannot be over-estimated, and though its early triumphs were not always permanent it remained the basis upon which a system of representative government could be built. The specifically feudal character implied in the term "estates" gradually gave way in England before the growing power of the Commons who, partly through the happy absence of any permanent barrier of nobility or privilege between the upper and lower classes, came to regard themselves as representative of the nation as a whole.
Modern Times.—If the modern nation-state clearly emerges in the i6th century the history of modern government falls equally clearly into two main periods since that date, the period before and the period since the French Revolution.
I. In its earlier form the nation-state was almost universally autocratic and dynastic. From 1600 down to 1789 the will of each State was the will of its monarch, or of advisers chosen by himself. In France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, as in most of the minor states of Europe, the will of the governed had hardly any means of constitutional expression and none of effective enforcement upon the governments. The estates were either no longer summoned-1614 was the last meeting of the French States General till I 789—or were deprived of all effective power. England and Holland stood almost alone in Europe as representative of a political system in which government was in constant and organ ized relationship with the will of the citizens as a whole, and even in these two countries the number of citizens legally entitled to express a political opinion was severely restricted.