that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins. And, if we ignore, as exceptions proving the rule, revolutionary interregna and Cæarian conditions, in which individuals and fortuitous groupings maintain their power merely by material means (and often without any aptitude for ruling), it is always the minority within an Estate that rules by tradition. In by far the greater number of cases this minority is one within the nobility — for example, the "gentry" which governed the Parliamentary style of England, the nobiles at the helm of Roman politics in Punic War times, the merchant-aristocracy of Venice, the Jesuit-trained (nobles who conducted the diplomacy of the Papal Curia in the Baroque).[1] Similarly, we find the political aptitude in self-contained groups within the religious Estate — not only in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in Egypt and India and still more in Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. In the Third Estate — though this seldom produces it, not being in itself a life-unit — there are cases such as those of third-century Rome, where a stratum of the plebs contains men trained in commerce, and France since 1789, where an element of the bourgeoisie has been trained in law; in these cases, it is ensured by a closed circle of persons possessing homogeneous practical gifts, which constantly recruits itself and preserves in its midst the whole sum of unwritten political tradition and experience.
That is the organization of actual states in contradistinction to those conceived on paper and in the minds of pedants. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like "republic," "absolutism," "democracy," mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how "humanity" advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life "in form." Let us make the attempt on this basis.
- ↑ For in those centuries the high dignities of the Church were invariably given to the nobility of Europe, who put the political qualities of the blood at her service. From this school in turn emanated statesmen like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand, to name but a few.
