to be wondered, that history gives us but a very little account of men,
that lived together in the state of nature. The inconveniences of that
condition, and the love and want of society, no sooner brought any number
of them together, but they presently united and incorporated, if they
designed to continue together. And if we may not suppose men ever to
have been in the state of nature, because we hear not much of them in
such a state, we may as well suppose the armies of Salmanasser or Xerxes
were never children, because we hear little of them, till they were men,
and imbodied in armies. Government is every where antecedent to records,
and letters seldom come in amongst a people till a long continuation of
civil society has, by other more necessary arts, provided for their
safety, ease, and plenty: and then they begin to look after the history
of their founders, and search into their original, when they have
outlived the memory of it: for it is with commonwealths as with
particular persons, they are commonly ignorant of their own births and
infancies: and if they know any thing of their original, they are
beholden for it, to the accidental records that others have kept of it.
And those that we have, of the beginning of any polities in the world,
excepting that of the Jews, where God himself immediately interposed, and
which favours not at all paternal dominion, are all either plain
instances of such a beginning as I have mentioned, or at least have
manifest footsteps of it.
Sec. 102. He must shew a strange inclination to deny evident matter
of fact, when it agrees not with his hypothesis, who will not allow, that
shew a strange inclination to deny evident matter of fact, when it agrees
not with his hypothesis, who will not allow, that the beginning of Rome
and Venice were by the uniting together of several men free and
independent one of another, amongst whom there was no natural superiority
or subjection. And if Josephus Acosta's word may be taken, he tells us,
that in many parts of America there was no government at all. There are