aristocracy and oligarchy, etc.), offers a purely logical schema which corresponds but partially with facts. True, it not infrequently happens that the rule of all--that is, democracy--gives way to the evil form of individual rulership--namely, tyranny. An aristocracy, however, or even a monarchy, may likewise develop into a tyranny. What the change is to be, depends upon historical conditions. Nor are monarchy, aristocracy, or the rule of the middle class forms of government that are ever actually to be found in the purity which logical schematization demands. Even in the Homeric State there was a council of elders and an assembly of freemen--an agora--in addition to the king. Indeed, if we go back still farther and inquire concerning those more primitive peoples of nature who are merely on the point of passing from tribal organization to a political Constitution, it might perhaps be nearer the truth to assert that democracy, and not monarchy, was the form of the early State. The fact is that the organization characteristic of the State as a whole is the product of historical factors of an exceedingly variable nature, and that it never adequately fits into any logical system that is based on merely a few political features. Even less may a logical schema of this sort be regarded as representing a universal law of development. Thus, the State is indeed the ultimate source of all the various branches of the legal system. So far as the fundamental elements of its own Constitution are concerned, however, it is really itself a product of _custom_, if we take this term in its broadest sense, as signifying an historically developed order of social life which has not yet come under the control of political authority. The course of development is the very opposite of that which rationalistic theories have taught, ever since the time of the Sophists, concerning the origin of the State. These theories maintain that the legal system originated in connection with the State, and that it then acquired an application to the separate departments of life. The reverse is true. It is with the determination of the rights of individuals and with the settlement of the controversies arising from these rights that the legal power of the State takes its rise. It is strengthened and extended when the custom of personal retribution comes to be superseded by penal law. Last of all comes the systematic formulation of the political Constitution itself. The latter, however, is never more than a _development_; it is not a creation in the proper sense of the word. Even such States as the United States of North America and the new German Empire were not created by lawgivers, but were only organized by them in respect to details. The State as such is always a product of history, and so it must ever remain. Every legal system presupposes the power of a State. Hence the latter can never itself originate in an act of legislation,