We may take Hobbes as the philosopher of the extreme idea of the State
and the consequent iniquity of rebellion. His is the ideal of the Hive,
in which the virgin workers devote their whole lives without complaint
to the service of the Queen and her State-supported grubs, while the
drones are mercilessly slaughtered as soon as one of them has fulfilled
his rapturous but suicidal functions for the future swarm. This ideal
found its highest human example in the Spartan State, which trained its
men to have no private existence at all, and even to visit their own
wives by stealth. But we find the ideal present in some degree among
Central Africans when they bury valuable slaves and women alive with
their chief; and among the Japanese when mothers kill themselves if
their sons are prevented from dying for their country; and among the
Germans when the drill-sergeant shouts his word of command.

In fact, all races and countries are disciples of Hobbes when they
address the Head of the State as "Your Majesty" or "Your Excellence,"
when they decorate him with fur and feathers, and put a gold hat on his
head and a gold walking-stick in his hand, and gird him with a sword
that he never uses, and play him the same tune wherever he goes, and
spread his platform with crimson though it is clean, and bow before him
though he is dishonourable, and call him gracious though he is
nasty-tempered, and august though he may be a fool. In the first
instance, we go through all this make-believe because the Leviathan of
the State is necessary for peace and self-defence, and without it our
life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But we further
endow the State with a personality we can almost see and handle, and we
regard it as something that is able not only to protect our peace but to
shed a reflected splendour on ourselves, giving us an importance not our
own--just as schoolboys glory in their school, or Churchmen in their
Church, or cricketers in their county, or fox-hunters in their pack of