e PATRIA
POTESTAS in some form so marked as to give family life distinctness and
precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline probable
and possible. While descent is traced only through the mother, and
while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high
polity is possible. Secondly, that polity would seem to have been
created very gradually; by the aggregation of families into clans or
GENTES, and of clans into nations, and then again by the widening of
nations, so as to include circumjacent outsiders, as well as the first
compact and sacred group--the number of parties to a discussion was at
first augmented very slowly. Thirdly, the number of 'open' subjects--as
we should say nowadays--that is, of subjects on which public opinion
was optional, and on which discussion was admitted, was at first very
small. Custom ruled everything originally, and the area of free
argument was enlarged but very slowly. If I am at all right, that area
could only be enlarged thus slowly, for Custom was in early days the
cement of society, and if you suddenly questioned such custom you would
destroy society. But though the existence, of these conditions may be
traced historically, and though the reason of them may be explained
philosophically, they do not completely solve the question why some
nations have the polity and some not; on the contrary, they plainly
leave a large 'residual phenomenon' unexplained and unknown.

II.

In this manner politics or discussion broke up the old bonds of custom
which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and
helped it. But this is only one of the many gifts which those polities
have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not
going to write an eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three
points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in
barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited
to civilised circumstances. A main and principal excellence in the
early times of the human races is the impulse to action. The problems
before men are then plain and simple. The man who works hardest, the
man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish--even
later on, the man who tends the largest herds, or the man who tills the
largest field--is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to
kill its enemies, or which kills most of its en