So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to which individuals--even the highest--must bow. But here again the exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can, when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation will in the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses, finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand, see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very humble ground.