The approach to a modern scheme of institutions and modern conceptions of life and of human values has been slow, and hitherto incomplete, as compared with those communities that have, for good or ill, gone farthest along the ways of modernity.
Habituation to personal subjection and subservience under the rigorous and protracted discipline of standardised service and fealty has continued later, and with later and slighter mitigation, in the Fatherland; so as better to have conserved the spiritual attitude of the feudal order.

Law and order in the Fatherland has in a higher degree continued to mean unquestioning obedience to a personal master and unquestioning subservience to the personal ambitions of the master.

And since freedom, in the sense of discretionary initiative on the part of the common man, does not fit into the framework of such a system of dependence on personal authority and surveillance, any degree of such free initiative will be "licence" in the eyes of men bred into the framework of this system; whereas "liberty," as distinct from "licence," is not a matter of initiative and self-direction, but of latitude in the service of a master.

Hence no degree of curtailment in this delegated "liberty" will be resented or repudiated by popular indignation, so long as the master to whom service is due can give assurance that it is expedient for his purposes.
The age-long course of experience and institutional discipline out of which the current German situation has come may be drawn schematically to the following effect: In the beginning a turmoil of conquest, rapine, servitude, and contention between rival bands of marauders and their captains, gradually, indeed imperceptibly, fell into lines of settled and conventionalised exploitation; with repeated interruptions due to new incursions and new combinations of rapacious chieftains.

Out of it all in the course of time came a feudal regime, under which personal allegiance and service to petty chiefs was the sole and universal accredited bond of solidarity.