It may serve to show that these characteristic and unimpeachable powers that invest all current governmental establishments are, after all, to be rated as the marks of a particular species of governments, and not characteristics of the genus of governmental establishments at large.

These powers answer to an acquired bias, not to an underlying trait of human nature; a matter of habit, not of heredity.
Such an historical instance is the so-called Republic, or Commonwealth, of Iceland--tenth to thirteenth centuries.

Its case is looked on by students of history as a spectacular anomaly, because it admitted none of these primary powers of government in its constituted authorities.
And yet, for contrast with these matter-of-course preconceptions of these students of history, it is well to note that in the deliberations of those ancients who installed the Republic for the management of their joint concerns, any inclusion of such powers in its competency appears never to have been contemplated, not even to the extent of its being rejected.

This singularity--as it would be rated by modern statesmen and students--was in no degree a new departure in state-making on the part of the founders of the Republic.

They had no knowledge of such powers, duties and accountabilities, except as unwholesome features of a novel and alien scheme of irresponsible oppression that was sought to be imposed on them by Harald Fairhair, and which they incontinently made it their chief and immediate business to evade.