History of Politics,” how this stage originated in the adoption of agriculture.  We begin now to have the village community, bound by the tie of kinship, and submitting to the leadership of a lord; and are already on the threshold of modern political society, in which all these ancient barriers are broken down and the individual becomes the social unit.  The cause of this momentous change is development of the art of warfare.  But before we reach the modern State there is an intermediate stage, namely, feudalism.  The feudal chief is simply the successful warrior—­the leader of a band of adventurers who get control of a definite territory and exact military allegiance from its inhabitants.  Out of the consolidation of these bands, or by conquest, modern States were founded.  Leadership was now vested in an irresponsible despot—­the king; and the trouble was to render this new institution permanent, and to induce the people to submit to it.  The former result was attained by making the kingship hereditary, but the latter has always been a difficult task.  It is doubtful if it would ever have been accomplished but for a significant alliance—­that of Church and State.  The convenient fiction of the divine right of kings was invented, and religion was used to bolster up the institution and to provide a sanction for submission to absolutism.  In other words, irresponsible leadership was tolerated because responsibility was supposed to exist to a Higher Power.  So we find that all the great religious movements—­Christianity, Mohammedanism, and even Buddhism—­have been associated with the establishment of mighty kingdoms.  Moreover, the only two kingdoms in Europe in which absolutism still holds out are Russia and Turkey, in which the head of the State is also head of the Church.  But military despotism, which was based solely on the exploitation of weaker communities, of which ancient Rome was the culminating type, wanted the elements of permanent progress, and was bound to disappear before a new type which rested on the development of internal resources.  Militarism must therefore be looked on as a real stage of progress; for in contrast with patriarchal society it was competitive, and it broke down many ancient barriers, and prepared the way for industrial co-operation.  Thus we arrive at the conditions favourable to the rise of representative institutions.  For when the cost of wars had to be raised out of the national resources kings found it convenient to get the consent of the people to taxation.  Hence the great movement throughout Western Europe for the establishment of parliaments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Why is it that in England alone this movement was successful?  Partly no doubt because its isolated position was favourable to internal progress, but mainly because it was the only State in which the principles of organization and responsible leadership were continuously given effect to.  So it is that in England there was developed that wonderful machinery of representative