But little by little, as the tribe grows in numbers, and in power and intelligence, as it comes to capture slaves in battle, and to unite with other tribes, there comes to be an hereditary chieftain and a group of his leading supporters, his courtiers and henchmen. When the society has evolved into the stage which we call barbarism, there is a permanent superior caste; there are hereditary priests, who have in their keeping the favor of the gods; and there is a subject population of slaves. The society moves on into the feudal stage, in which the various grades and classes are precisely marked off, each with its different functions, its different privileges and rights and duties. The feudal principalities and duchies war and struggle among themselves; they are united by marriage or by conquest, and presently some stronger ruler brings a great territory under his power, and we have what is called a kingdom; a society still larger, still more complex in its organization, and still more rigid in its class distinctions. Take France, under the ancient regime, and compare a courtier or noble gentleman with a serf; they are not only different before the law, they are different in the language they use, in the clothes they wear, in the ideas they hold; they are different even in their bodies, so that the gentleman regards the serf as an inferior species of creature. The kings warred among themselves and emperors arose. The ultimate ideal in Europe was a political society which should include the whole continent, and this ideal was several times almost attained. But it is the rule of history that wherever a large society is built upon the basis of privilege and enslavement, the ruling classes prove morally and intellectually unequal to the burden put upon them; they become corrupted, and their rule becomes intolerable. This happened in Europe, and there came political revolutions--first in England, which accomplished it by gradual stages, and then in the French monarchy, and quite recently in a dozen monarchies and empires, large and small. What precisely is this political revolution? Let us consider the case of France, where the change was sudden, and the issues precisely drawn. King Louis XIV had said, "I am the state." To a person of our time that might seem like boasting, but it was merely an assertion of the existing political fact. King Louis was the state by universal consent, and by divine authority, as all men believed. The army was his army, the navy was his navy, and wars, when he made them, were his wars. Everyone in the state was his subject, and all the property of the state was his personal, private property, to dispose of as he pleased. The government officials carried out his will, and members of the nobility held the land and ruled in his name.