source of the power of municipal corporations in England. They had from the beginning the right, as Stubbs expresses it, “of perpetuating its existence by filling up vacancies as they occur.” The ancient privileges were given expressly only to the burghers and their heirs. As matter of fact, they were exercised as a right to add new members, so that, whatever fate befell the members and their physical descendants, the corporation, as such, was held intact. This had to be paid for, to be sure, by the disappearance of the individual importance of the units behind their role as vehicles of the maintenance of the group, for the group security must suffer the closer it is bound up with the perishable individuality of the units. On the other hand, the more anonymous and unpersonal the unit is, the more fit is he to step into the place of another, and so to insure to the group uninterrupted self-maintenance. This was the enormous advantage through which during the Wars of the Roses the commons repulsed the previously superior power of the upper house. A battle that destroyed half the nobility of the country took also from the house of lords one-half its force, because this is attached to the personalities. The house of commons is in principle assured against such weakening. That estate at last got predominance which, through the equalizing of its members, demonstrated the most persistent power of group existence. This circumstance gives every group an advantage in competition with an individual. It has been remarked of the East India Company that it won its mastery over India by the same means which grand moguls had used before. Its advantage over other usurpers was simply that its life could not be destroyed.
On this account special arrangements are necessary so soon as the life of the group is intimately bound up with that of a leading, commanding individual. What dangers to the integrity of the group are concealed in this sociological form may be learned from the history of all interregnums—dangers which, of course, increase in the same ratio in which the ruler actually forms the central point of the functions through which the group preserves its unity, or, more correctly, at each moment creates its unity
