council of elders

• first governmental body

70:5.2With the grad­ual emer­gence of the fam­ily units the foun­da­tions of gov­ern­ment were es­tab­lished in the clan or­ga­ni­za­tion, the group­ing of con­san­guineous fam­i­lies. The first real gov­ern­men­tal body was the coun­cil of the el­ders. This reg­u­la­tive group was com­posed of old men who had dis­tin­guished them­selves in some ef­fi­cient man­ner. Wis­dom and ex­pe­ri­ence were early ap­pre­ci­ated even by bar­baric man, and there en­sued a long age of the dom­i­na­tion of the el­ders. This reign of the oli­garchy of age grad­u­ally grew into the pa­tri­ar­chal idea.

70:5.3In the early coun­cil of the el­ders there resided the po­ten­tial of all gov­ern­men­tal func­tions: ex­ec­u­tive, leg­isla­tive, and ju­di­cial. When the coun­cil in­ter­preted the cur­rent mores, it was a court; when es­tab­lish­ing new modes of so­cial us­age, it was a leg­is­la­ture; to the ex­tent that such de­crees and en­act­ments were en­forced, it was the ex­ec­u­tive. The chair­man of the coun­cil was one of the fore­run­ners of the later tribal chief.

• powers gradually concentrated in absolute monarch

70:12.2While prim­i­tive au­thor­ity was based on strength, phys­i­cal power, the ideal gov­ern­ment is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive sys­tem wherein lead­er­ship is based on abil­ity, but in the days of bar­barism there was en­tirely too much war to per­mit rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment to func­tion ef­fec­tively. In the long strug­gle be­tween di­vi­sion of au­thor­ity and unity of com­mand, the dic­ta­tor won. The early and dif­fuse pow­ers of the prim­i­tive coun­cil of el­ders were grad­u­ally con­cen­trated in the per­son of the ab­so­lute monarch. Af­ter the ar­rival of real kings the groups of el­ders per­sisted as quasi-leg­isla­tive-ju­di­cial ad­vi­sory bod­ies; later on, leg­is­la­tures of co-or­di­nate sta­tus made their ap­pear­ance, and even­tu­ally su­preme courts of ad­ju­di­ca­tion were es­tab­lished sep­a­rate from the leg­is­la­tures.