Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight. But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed and crime went on among the masters. Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years, there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic, interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise, resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the same general kind as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the untoward features of mediaevalism. The approach to a modern scheme of institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity. Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the feudal order. Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master. And since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence," is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the service of a master. Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated "liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long