problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to "just" principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity, and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects[1] in political events not only in inner, but also (which is far more important) in external, history. Strength of leadership, which comes to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity — so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new party's making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nation's becoming the object of alien policy — and not seldom for ever.
For this reason, in every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living constitution, the "form" (to use again the sporting term), which has developed of itself out of the experience of Time, the situation, and, above all, the race-properties of the Nation. The more powerfully the natural form of the body politic has built itself up, the more surely it works in unforeseen situations; indeed, in the limit, it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever.[2] The leader's responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.
The fact, therefore, express and unequivocal, is that class-States — that is, States in which particular classes rule — are the only States. This must not be confused with the class-States to which the individual is merely attached in view of belonging to an estate, as in the case of the older Polis, the Norman States of England and Sicily, the France of the Constitution of 1791, and Soviet Russia to-day. The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience
