In its primitive form political power is the feeling of the community
acting through an agency which it has either informally or formally
established; and this public feeling, while it is to some extent the
feeling spontaneously formed by those concerned, it is to a much larger
extent the accumulated and organised sentiment of the past. Everywhere
we are shown that the ruler's function as regulator is mainly that of
enforcing the inherited rules of conduct which embody ancestral
sentiments and ideas.