In their systems, therefore, there has been room only for the administrative, and executive departments of government. These, of course, are secondary. With that which was first and highest, and regulative of the whole, man had nothing at all to do. Under such a state of things the administrative, and executive would naturally fall into the hands of those who were best acquainted with the law, that is, of those who were its constituted guardians, as priests, elders, doctors of the law, &c., and of those who in any way, by force or favour, could attain to power and office. Here is no place for republican, or democratic ideas. The whole ground in every man’s mind is pre-occupied with ideas that are antagonistic to them. If Orientals had had to make their own laws, Republicanism would have been as common in the East as in the West; perhaps more so. In the Mosaic polity, though it was in some respects very favourable to democracy, we see the absence of the legislative function leading necessarily in the end to a monarchy; the monarchy having been preceded by a rude exercise of administrative and executive functions, based in the main on such moral and intellectual qualifications as the system required. That the people in general assemblies, or through any other machinery, should take into their own hands the management of their own affairs was an idea that never at any time appears to have occurred to them. It was alien to their system to imagine that the will of the people was the source of power, or that law was the best reason of the community made binding on all.