It follows from what has been said that the study of politicians who are chosen from a single institutional process makes a contribution to the general study of politicians in every institutional process, and that the conscious abstraction of categories until they are comprehensive opens a wider range of exact comparison. This may eventuate in an actual simplification of some fundamental conceptions. Of course, institutional processes differ in the scope which they give to certain human drives. Today the church offers less opportunity for the use of physical violence than it did in the sixteenth century, and very much less opportunity than the police force, the private detective agency, or the political gang. The advantages of comprehensiveness and possible simplification have been sacrificed by the political scientists of the schools because they have conceived their task in too narrow a spirit. They have been slow in studying the manifestations of human nature in politics because they have been saturated with sectarian pride in legal and philosophical distinctions; or they have checked their theories with their coats, and plunged into technical work. A body of theory which interacts fruitfully with philosophy, law, and technology is still very poorly developed. The formal sociological systems have been sacked for “premises” but neglected for hypotheses. (Witness the exploitation of the concept of “solidarity” in recent juridical theory.) The task of the hour is the development of a realistic analysis of the political in relation to the social process, and this depends upon the invention of abstract conceptions and upon the prosecution of empirical research. It is precisely this missing body of theory and practice which Graham Wallas undertook to supply in England and which Charles E. Merriam has been foremost in encouraging in the United States. It is the deficiency which led Catlin to propose to substitute what I would call the “functional” for the “institutional” definition of the field of political science.[14] This necessarily implies a new respect for the possibilities of using the ingenious suggestions to be found in the sociological systematists, a new curiosity about diverse ways of approaching events, and a new sympathy for parallels to institutional phenomena. Various obscurities can be removed if we generalize our terms from the narrowly institutional to the broadly functional plane. Terms like “statesman” and “despot” were minted of the metal of political experience in communities where the high road to power was governmental. It is true that in Athens it was difficult to draw very sharp lines between governmental and other forms of communal activity, on account of the intimate interlacing of all institutional processes. Nevertheless, terms like “statesman” and “despot” came to refer to forms of political activity in a narrowly institutional sense, and such is their connotation today.