We need not analyze the genesis of the force that has kept men under government. There are almost as many theories as there are inquirers. It has been said to be compulsion, physical force by one school of writers; by another school, agreement, a contractual relation. For many generations a popular theory was that authority is given to rulers by God, or the eternal reason; this theory cost King Charles I his head. Another school contends that it rests upon some psychological principle inherent in human character. There may be a vast practical difference in results, if some of these theories are pushed to the limit; but that there must be sovereignty in the state, however derived, and obedience to such sovereignty by the citizen, is plain, if anarchy is to be escaped. If we may use the phrase which Herbert Spencer coined and popularized, men naturally follow "the line of the least resistance;" and to obey, except where obedience is counter to self-interest, or where, in the more highly specialized civilizations, it would violate rights, honor, duty, is generally the easy course. The Castle of Indolence seldom has any vacant rooms. The exceptionally strong will, the "monarch mind," is rare. The principle of obedience to authority is strongly developed in the race, especially among nations where the supreme power is supposed to rest upon some religious sanction, as was the case with European governments until recent years, and as is the case with most Oriental nations to-day. We live in an age of intense specialization. A few generations ago we heard of men of universal knowledge. Not so now. The volume of knowledge has become so vast that no man, even the wisest, can do more than to touch its skirts. In no department of study is the trend of specialization more active than in the interpretation of history. In the hunt after the subtle causes that have lurked in the bosom of society and have flamed into consuming fire, from time to time, the patient historian, the student of sociology, has grouped tendencies, impulses, transitional waves of popular feeling, into generalizations. Especially is this statement true of German scholars, with whom specialization has often been reduced to infinitesimal analysis. Thus one school of writers dwells upon the economic interpretation of history. In their view, most popular upheavals have been synchronous with the poverty of the masses. It is when the people have been ground into hunger by excessive taxation and public extravagance that they have risen, like the blind giant pulling down the temple of Gaza, and swept away dynasties and royal pageantry. Such, it is said, was the mainspring of the French Revolution--one of the most dramatic events in history. Undoubtedly the economic problem has always been, and always will be, a powerful agent in the genesis of history.