The Evolution of States

The Evolution of States: An Introduction to English Politics is by J. M. Robertson. The author says that, considered purely as a play of domestic political forces, the evolution is from first to last a simple conflict of class needs and interests. The text says that the State-organism is the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements.

The chronic readjustments, the text says, brought never a democratisation of the State, but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians and an admission of the richer to something like equal status with the optimates. Arab civilisation is described as arrested and anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated in exactly the same modes. The first great trouble, the text says, was the element of perpetual domestic strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system, since every succession was liable to dispute. The text says that Portugal and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic countries.