NATURE OF GOVERNMENT. Government means authority, and in the last analysis all govern ment rests upon force, i.e. upon the power of con straining the action of any citizen or any number of citizens through the organized agencies of the State. This power may not be wisely or uni formly exercised; it may even, in the case of the modern industrial State, seldom or never he openly exerted; but no government can exist without it, and a government is partial and in complete, or perfect and complete, in proportion as it is able to command this power. The mere fact that the governing authorities of a State tolerate certain forms of injustice, or refuse or neglect to enforce certain laws, does not detract from the completeness of the government, so long as it has in reserve the power to compel obedience to its decrees. But a government may be one of limited powers, not because of any inherent lack of force, but because its authority is restricted by its constitution to a limited class of matters. Such limitation may be voluntary, as is the case in the United States and the self-governing colonies of Great Britain. where governmental power is distributed between the several States and the central government, or it may be im posed upon a State by the action of a paramount State, as is the case with Cuba under the recent convention with the United States. In much the same sense, we may speak of the government of minor political divisions of a State, as of cities, tcwns, and counties, as a government of limited powers. Within the sphere of their chartered authority, these may have ample governmental powers. but the scope of that authority and the field of its exercise are strictly limited by the grant or charter conferring it.
The two most striking facts in connection with political government are, first, its universality, and, second, the variety of forms in which it has manifested itself. It has existed in all stages of human society, and, in at least a rudimentary form, in every considerable group of men and -women united for a common purpose. This uni• versality of its occurrence testifies to its necessity, and probably to its permanence as an institu tion of human society. Of all human institu
tions, it has proved to be the most enduring, and, with the exception of the family, probably the most important and influential in shaping the destiny of mankind. Men have found it possible —as in China to-day—to live without an organ ization of religion, and, as in Sparta and among many barbarous tribes, without the institution of the family as we understand it; but wherever men and women live in society, some form of gov ernment arises to regulate their relations to one another and to other communities.
But, although government is the oldest, the n.ost persistent, and the most widespread of hu man institutions, there is no normal or absolute type of political organization. We may trace its origin to the institution of the patriarchal fam ily, but the patriarchal type of government is limited to society in its primitive stages, and in small aggregations. Men have sought for an ideal or absolute type in their conception of the divine government, and for centuries the glamor of the later Roman Empire east its spell over Europe, and successive generations of statesmen and political philosophers endeavored to recast the governments of Europe into a Holy Roman Empire; the seventeenth century brought to its culmination the mediaeval theory of the divine right of kings, and the eighteenth resolved all political authority into a social compact (contra social) among the members of the State. But no one type of government has emerged, either in fact or in theory, out of all this speculation. Governments are as diverse as ever, and we have come to recognize this diversity as a proof of their excellence and not as a defect. It is a part of the accepted philosophy of our time that a government should in its spirit and its form ex press the political consciousness and aims of the community, and that that government is best which most accurately reflects the character, the interests, and the purposes of the State. See SOCIETY ; SOCIOLOGY ; STATE.