of all private associations, etc.  Now all these characteristics arise from their utility for the purpose of war, a utility amounting to necessity if war is the State’s chief purpose.  For every purpose is best served when the whole available force co-operates toward it:  other things equal, the bigger the army the better; and to increase it, men must be taken from industry, until only just enough remain to feed and equip the soldiers.  As this arrangement is not to everybody’s taste, there must be despotic control; and this control is most effective through regimentation by grades of command.  Private associations, of course, cannot live openly in such a State, because they may have wills of their own and are convenient for conspiracy.  Thus the induction of characteristics is verified by a deduction of them from the nature of the case.

Sec. 6.  The greater indefiniteness of the Historical compared with the Physical Method, both in its inductions and in its deductions, makes it even more difficult to work with.  It wants much sagacity and more impartiality; for the demon of Party is too much with us.  Our first care should be to make the empirical law as nearly true as possible, collecting as many as we can of the facts which the law is supposed to generalise, and examining them according to the canons of Induction, with due allowance for the imperfect applicability of those canons to such complex, unwieldy, and indefinite instances.  In the examples of such laws given above, it is clear that in some cases no pains have been taken to examine the facts.  What is the inductive evidence that Democracies change into Despotisms; that revolutions always begin in hunger; or that civilisation is inimical to individuality?  Even Mill’s often quoted saying, “that the governments remarkable in history for sustained vigour and ability have generally been aristocracies,” is oddly over-stated.  For if you turn to the passage (Rep.  Gov. chap. vi.), the next sentence tells you that such governments have always been aristocracies of public functionaries; and the next sentence but one restricts, apparently, the list of such remarkable governments to two—­Rome and Venice.  Whence, then, comes the word “generally” into Mill’s law?

As to deducing our empirical law from a consideration of the nature of the case, it is obvious that we ought—­(a) to take account of all the important conditions; (b) to allow weight to them severally in proportion to their importance; and (c) not to include in our estimates any condition which we cannot show to be probably present and operative.  Thus the Great-Man-Theory of history must surely be admitted to assign a real condition of national success.  The great man organises, directs, inspires:  is that nothing?  On the other hand, to recognise no other condition of national success is the manifest frenzy of a mind in the mythopoeic age.  We must allow the great man his due weight, and then inquire into the general conditions that (a) bring him to birth in one nation rather than another, and (b) give him his opportunity.