ute, and are
annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so
common. The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly
geographical: the population is mostly scattered; and where population
is sparse, discussion is difficult. But in a country very large as we
reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really
comfortable, would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the
New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an
education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the
numerical majority of no people equally numerous has ever possessed: in
a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a
sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create
that legislature. If the New England States possessed a cabinet
government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world
for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness.

WHY EARLY SOCIETIES COULD NOT BE FREE

From 'Physics and Politics'

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his
estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind: "Savages," he
says, "have the character of children with the passions and strength
of men."...

And this is precisely what we should expect. "An inherited drill,"
science says, "makes modern nations what they are; their born structure
bears the trace of the laws of their fathers:" but the ancient nations
came into no such inheritance,--they were the descendants of people who
did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored
habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of
every impulse and blown by every passion....

Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as
they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all
the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current
moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was
somehow and in some vague way intelligible to the ante-political man;
but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended
upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty
now exists in minds sensitive but untaught,--a still small voice of
uncertain meaning, an unknown something modifying everything else and
higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you
looked for it, it was gon