Weber uses the notion of the ideal type to help him with the problem of transitional phases and intermediate societies. An ideal type is a set of correlated characteristics - such as a capitalist economy, an elected government, a secular society - which will be approached rather than fully realized in any actual society. Modern society and traditional society are thus divided by a continuum, not a dichotomy. Contemporary England and Wales, for example, has a capitalist economy, an elected government, a secular majority, but retains a traditional monarchy, vestiges of religious authority and vestiges of substantive law. Other societies, such as the USA, may be further along the continuum towards modernity on some charac¬teristics (for example, not having a monarchy), and Weber certainly viewed the English system of justice, especially in its reliance on precedent rather than the codes of continental Europe, and its reliance on a lay magistracy, as not having gone so far along the continuum towards formal legal rationality. He is consequently much challenged by England's success as a capitalist, imperial nation in the nineteenth century, and concludes that 'England achieved capitalist supremacy among the nations not because but rather in spite of its judicial system' (Weber 1978: 814).