powell] SOCIOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF INSTITUTIONS 503
minor offices are filled in this manner. The persons who have the appointing power are persons who are elected to their offices and thus represent the people in their acts of appointment. Here different degrees of representation may be observed.
We wish to have a term which will signify the method by which the officers of the government are selected and the rules by which such selection is accomplished, and for that purpose I adopt the term constitutive government. I hold that this depart- ment of government is coordinate with the others to be explicated.
A representative government is one in which the officers of government represent the people. The manner by which they become representative must be in harmony with the third principle of justice, which is equality. All persons who constitute the body politic, and who acknowledge the government as authoritative and seek its protection from unjust encroachment, should have an equal voice, expressed by a vote, in the choice of the rep- resentatives of the people who perform the functions of the government.
In tribal government every person has a voice in the council, and the council is also the court. The chief of the council has but one vote like the other members, but he is also the leader of the people as they proceed to carry out the decisions of the council. Such a method of government is impossible in modern civilization, where the people are many and scattered over a large region of country. So representative government is devised in which few persons, compared with the whole number of the people, become the officers of the government, or, as it is some- times called, the government itself.
This is in harmony with that principle of evolution which is called specialization, in which the functions of society are par- celed among the people, so that one class of people may do one class of things for all. The experience of mankind in the evolu- tion of society has resulted in an ever increasing specialization of these functions.
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