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