what is in hand be made, enjoyment of the contingent expected
recompense will be received. Of course I am not saying that we shall
find in early society any authority of which these shall be the
motives. We must have travelled ages (unless all our evidence be
wrong) from the first men before there was a comprehension of such
motives. I only mean that the first thing in early society was an
authority of whose action this shall be the result, little as it
knew what it was doing, little as it would have cared if it had
known. The conscious end of early societies was not at all, or
scarcely at all, the protection of life and property, as it was
assumed to be by the eighteenth-century theory of government. Even
in early historical ages--in the youth of the human race, not its
childhood--such is not the nature of early states. Sir Henry Maine
has taught us that the earliest subject of jurisprudence is not the
separate property of the individual, but the common property of the
family group; what we should call private property hardly then
existed; or if it did, was so small as to be of no importance: it
was like the things little children are now allowed to CALL their
own, which they feel it very hard to have taken from them, but which
they have no real right to hold and keep. Such is our earliest
property-law, and our earliest life--law is that the lives of all
members of the family group were at the mercy of the head of the
group. As far as the individual goes, neither his goods nor his
existence were protected at all. And this may teach us that
something else was lacked in early societies besides what in our
societies we now think of.

I do not think I put this too high when I say that a most important
if not the most important object of early legislation was the
enforcement of LUCKY rites. I do not like to say religious rites,