not
weakened, when we come to examine and deal with an age yet older, and a
social bond far more rudimentary.

But when once polities were began, 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 politics 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 anyone, 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 now-a-days to Aristotle or
Plato is struck with their conservatism: fresh from the liberal
doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognised
teachers so much contrary teaching. They both--unlike as they are--hold
with Xenophon--so unlike both--that man is the 'hardest of all animals
to govern.' Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the
adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being 'the tories of
speculation,' have commonly been prone to conservatism in government;
but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought,
according to that doctrine, to have been a liberal, if anyone ever was
a liberal. In fact, both of these men lived when men had not 'had time
to forget' the difficulties of government. We have forgotten them
altogether. We reckon, as the basis of our culture, upon an amount of
order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these
philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture. We
take without thought as a datum, what they hunted as a quaesilum.

In early times the quantity of government is much more important than
its quality. What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men
together, making them do much the same things, telling the