The negro has not yet invented the door; his hut remains open. Against the nocturnal forays of wild beasts, he obstructs the entrance with thorns.
Nor does the bird know how to close his nest. What shall be its defence? A great and terrible question.
He makes the entry narrow and tortuous. If he selects a natural nest, as the wryneck does, in the hollow of a tree, he contracts the opening by skilful masonry. Many, like the pine-pine, build a double nest in two apartments: the mother sits in the alcove; in the vestibule watches the father, an attentive sentinel, to repulse invasion.
What enemies has he to fear! Serpents, men or apes, squirrels! And what do I say? The birds themselves! This people, too, has its robbers. His neighbours sometimes assist a feeble bird to recover his property, to expel by force the unjust usurper. Naturalists assure us that the rooks (a kind of crow) carry further the spirit of justice. They do not pardon a young couple who, to complete their establishment the sooner, rob the materials—"the movables"—of another nest. They assemble in a troop of eight or ten to rend in fragments the nest of the criminals, and completely destroy that house of theft. And punished thieves are driven afar, and forced to begin all over again.
Is there not here an idea of property, and of the sacred lights of labour?
Where shall they find securities, and how assure a commencement of public order? It is curious to know in what way the birds have resolved the question.
Two solutions presented themselves. The first was that of association—the organization of a government which should concentrate force, and by the reunion of the weak form a defensive power. The second (but miraculous? impossible? imaginative?) would have been the realization of the aerial city of Aristophanes,—the construction of a dwelling-place guarded by its lightness from the unwieldy brigands of the air, and inaccessible to the approaches of the brigands of the earth—the hunter, the serpent.