ABSTRACT
Early republicans were obliged even in their own time to note that general conditions, such as are summed up under the name of culture, had a good deal to do with political institutions. For they held that oppressions of State and Church had exercised a corrupting influence upon human nature, so that the original impulse to liberty had either been lost or warped out of shape. Proof is decisive that economic factors are an intrinsic part of the culture that determines the actual turn taken by political measures and rules, no matter what verbal beliefs are held. Knowledge that the connection demanded a general distribution of property and the prevention of rise of the extremely poor and the extremely rich was however different from explicit recognition of a relation between culture and nature so intimate that the former may shape the patterns of thought and action.
