It is plain, for example, that among a people who are capable only of loyalty to another human being the political system is bound to take the shape of a hierarchy, in which each man is loyal to his superior, and the man at the top is loyal to God alone. Such a society will be feudal, military, theocratic. If it is successfully organized it will be an ordered despotism, culminating, as the feudal system did, in God’s Vice-gerent on earth. If it is unsuccessfully organized, as for example, in the more backward countries of Central America to-day, the system of personal allegiances will produce little factions each with its chief, all of them contending for, without quite achieving, absolute power. This type of organization is so fundamentally [p264] human that it prevails even in communities which think they have outgrown it. Thus it appears in what Americans call a political machine, which is nothing but a hierarchy of professional politicians held together by profitable personal loyalties. The political boss is a demilitarized chieftain in the direct line of descent from his prototypes. The modern world has come to regard organization on the basis of human allegiances as alien and dangerous. Yet the political machine exists even in the most advanced communities. The reason for that is obvious. With the enfranchisement of virtually the whole adult population, political power has passed into the hands of a great mass of people most of whom are altogether incapable of loyalty to institutions, much less to ideas. They do not understand them. For these voters the only kind of political behavior is through allegiance to a human superior, and modern democracies are considered fortunate if the political leaders and bosses on whom these human allegiances converge are relatively loyal to the institutions of the country. This, for example, is the meaning of the dramatic speech in which President Calles on September 1, 1928, voluntarily renounced the continuation of his own dictatorship. “For the first time in Mexican history,” he said, “the Republic faces a situation (owing to the assassination of General Obregon) whose dominant note is the lack of a military leader, which is going to make it finally possible for us to direct the policy of the country into truly institutional channels, striving to pass once for all from our historical condition of one-man rule to the higher, more dignified, more useful, and more civilized condition of a nation of laws and institutions.” It is [p265] hardly to be supposed that President Calles thought that the Mexican people as a whole could pass once for all from their historical condition of one-man rule. What he meant was that the political chieftains to whom the people were loyal ought thereafter to arrange the succession and to exercise power not as seemed desirable to them, or as they might imagine that God had privately commanded them, but in accordance with objective rules of political conduct.