Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade;
The same his table, and the same his bed;
No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.”
[Essay on Man, III., 147 seq.]
In these lines of Pope’s the state of nature is identified with the golden age of the Greek and Latin poets; and “the reign of God” is an equivalent for Locke’s words, “has a law of nature to govern it.”
[4] Cf. Republic, II. 369. “A state,” says Socrates, “arises out of the needs of mankind: no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.”
[5] See Hume’s account of the origin of government (Treatise, III., Part II., Sect. VIII.). There are, he says, American tribes “where men live in concord and amity among themselves without any established government; and never pay submission to any of their fellows, except in time of war, when their captain enjoys a shadow of authority, which he loses after their return from the field, and the establishment of peace with the neighbouring tribes. This authority, however, instructs them in the advantages of government, and teaches them to have recourse to it, when either by the pillage of war, by commerce, or by any fortuitous inventions, their riches and possessions have become so considerable as to make them forget, on every emergence, the interest they have in the preservation of peace and justice.... Camps are the true mothers of cities; and as war cannot be administered, by reason of the suddenness of every exigency, without some authority in a single person, the same kind of authority naturally takes place in that civil government, which succeeds the military.”
Cf. Cowper: The Winter Morning Walk:—
“...........and ere long,
When man was multiplied and spread abroad