e; or if this be thought the delicate fiction
of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild
spasms of "wild justice," half punishment, half outrage: but anyhow,
being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for us
to imagine....

To sum up:--_Law_--rigid, definite, concise law--is the primary want of
early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is
requisite before they can gain anything else. But it is their greatest
difficulty as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their
reach as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it. In later
ages, many races have gained much of this discipline quickly though
painfully,--a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often
forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did
half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find
Romans or a conqueror? men conquer by the power of government, and it
was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of
civilization was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon
it, it seems almost nothing.

How the step from no polity to polity was made, distinct history does
not record.... But when once polities were begun, there is no difficulty
in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the
principle of "natural selection" in other departments, there is no doubt
of its predominance in early human history: the strongest killed out the
weakest as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of
polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning
even a slippery allegiance to a single head would be sure to have the
better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to any one, but
scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's
Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its
being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so
unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even
a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it
became valuable in poetry.

But though the origin of polity is dubious, we are upon the _terra
firma_ of actual records when we speak of the preservation of polities.
Perhaps every young Englishman who comes nowadays to Aristotle or Plato
is struck with their conservatism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of
the present ag