A state is never a utilitarian institution pure and simple. It congeals on the surface of time like frost-flowers on a window-pane, and is as unpredictable, as ephemeral, and, in its pattern as rigidly causal to all appearances as they. An impulse of culture, spawned and pushed hither and thither by disparate forces of the most various provenance, finds embodiment in that aggregation of power we call ‘State’, which then seeks some reason for its existence, discovering it perhaps in the glory of a particular house or the excellence of a particular people