Anyone who is interested in the nature and derivation of governmental institutions and establishments in Europe, in any but the formal respect, should be able to satisfy his curiosity by looking over the shoulders of the professed students of Political Science. Quite properly and profitably that branch of scholarship is occupied with the authentic pedigree of these institutions, and with the documentary instruments in the case; since Political Science is, after all, a branch of theoretical jurisprudence and is concerned about a formally competent analysis of the recorded legal powers. The material circumstances from which these institutions once took their beginning, and the exigencies which have governed the rate and direction of their later growth and mutation, as well as the _de facto_ bearing of the institutional scheme on the material welfare or the cultural fortunes of the given community,--while all these matters of fact may be germane to the speculations of Political Theory, they are not intrinsic to its premises, to the logical sequence of its inquiry, or to its theoretical findings. The like is also true, of course, as regards that system of habits of thought, that current frame of mind, in which any given institutional scheme necessarily is grounded, and without the continued support of which any given scheme of governmental institutions or policy would become nugatory and so would pass into the province of legal fiction. All these are not idle matters in the purview of the student of Political Science, but they remain after all substantially extraneous to the structure of political theory; and in so far as matters of this class are to be brought into the case at all, the specialists in the field can not fairly be expected to contribute anything beyond an occasional _obiter dictum_. There can be no discourteous presumption, therefore, in accepting the general theorems of current political theory without prejudice, and looking past the received theoretical formulations for a view of the substantial grounds on which the governmental establishments have grown into shape, and the circumstances, material and spiritual, that surround their continued working and effect.