The juristic and social amalgamation of the degraded freemen and the uplifted plebs henceforth inevitably tends toward ethnic interpenetration. While at first the subject peoples were not allowed either to intermarry or to have social intercourse with the freemen, now no such obstacles can be maintained; in any single village the social class is no longer determined by descent from the ruling race, but rather by wealth. And the case may frequently arise where the pure-blooded descendant of the warrior herdsman must earn his living as a field hand in the hire of the equally pure-blooded descendant of the former serfs. The social group of the subjects is now composed of a part of the former ethnic master group and a part of the former subject group. We say from a part only, because the other part has by this time been amalgamated with the other part of the old ethnic master group into a unital social class. In other words, a part of the plebs has not only attained the position to which the mass of the common freemen have sunk, but has climbed far beyond it, in that it has been completely received into the dominating group, which in the meantime, has not only risen enormously, but has been as greatly diminished in numbers. And that, too, is a universal process found in all history; because everywhere it follows with equally compelling force from the very premises of feudal dominion. The _primus inter pares_, whether the holder of the central power or some local potentate, taking the rank of a prince, requires more supple tools for his dominion than are to be found among his “peers.” The latter represent a class whom he must put down if he wants to rise--and that is and must be the aim of every one, since in this stage aiming for power is identical with the aim of self-preservation. In this effort he is opposed by his obnoxious and stiff-necked cousins and by his petty nobles--and for this reason, we find at every court, from that of the sovereign king of a mighty feudal empire down to the lord of what is hardly more than a big estate, men of insignificant descent as confidential officials alongside representatives of the master group, who in many cases under the mask of officials of the prince, as a matter of fact, are “ephors,” sharers of the power of the prince as the plenipotentiaries of their group. Let us but recall the Induna at the court of the Bantu kings. There is no wonder, then, that the prince rather places confidence in his own men than in these annoying and pretentious advisers, in men whose position is indissolubly bound up with his own, and who would be ruined by his fall.[S]