But though the origin of polity is dubious, we are upon the terra firma of actual records when we speak of the preservation of polities.  Perhaps every young Englishman who comes nowadays to Aristotle or Plato is struck with their conservatism:  fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching.  They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike both, that man is “the hardest of all animals to govern.”  Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being “the Tories of speculation,” have commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according to that doctrine to have been a Liberal if any one ever was a Liberal.  In fact, both of these men lived when men “had not had time to forget” the difficulties of government:  we have forgotten them altogether.  We reckon as the basis of our culture upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture; we take without thought as a datum what they hunted as a quaesitum.

In early times the quantity of government is much more important than its quality.  What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling them what to expect of each other,—­fashioning them alike and keeping them so:  what this rule is, does not matter so much.  A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none; while, for reasons which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good.  But to gain that rule, what may be called the “impressive” elements of a polity are incomparably more important than its useful elements.  How to get the obedience of men, is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.

To gain that obedience, the primary condition is the identity—­not the union, but the sameness—­of what we now call “church” and “state."...  No division of power is then endurable without danger, probably without destruction:  the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest and prophet king,—­the two must say the same because they are the same.  The idea of difference between spiritual penalties and legal penalties must never be awakened,—­indeed, early Greek thought or early Roman thought would never have comprehended it; there was a kind of rough public opinion, and there were rough—­very rough—­hands which acted on it.  We now talk of “political penalties” and “ecclesiastical prohibition” and “the social censure”; but they were all one then.  Nothing is very like those old communities now, but perhaps a trades-union is as near as most things:  to work cheap is thought to be a “wicked” thing, and so some Broadhead puts it down.