HISTORICAL METHOD. 637 



a State. For example', no numerous society has ever been held together 

 without laws, or usages equivalent to them ; without tribunals, and an or- 

 ganized force of some sort to execute their decisions. There have always 

 been public authorities whom, with more or less strictness and in cases 

 more or less accurately defined, the rest of the community obeyed, or ac- 

 cording to general opinion were bound to obey. By following out this 

 course of inquiry we shall find a number of requisites, which have been 

 present in every society that has maintained a collective existence, and on 

 the cessation of which it has either merged in some other society, or re- 

 constructed itself on some new basis, in which the conditions wore con- 

 formed to. Although these results, obtained by comparing different forms 

 and states of society, amount in themselves only to empirical laws ; some 

 of them, when once suggested, are found to follow with so mucli proba- 

 bility from general laws of human natui'e, that the consilience of the two 

 processes raises the evidence to proof, and the generalizations to the rank 

 of scientific truths. 



This seems to be afiirmable (for instance) of the conclusions arrived at 

 in the following passage, extracted, with some alterations, from a criticism 

 on the negative philosophy of the eighteenth century,* and which I quote, 

 though (as in some former instances) from myself, because I have no bet- 

 ter way of illustrating the conception I have formed of the kind of theo- 

 rems of which sociological statics would consist. 



" The very first element of the social union, obedience to a government 

 of some sort, has not been found so easy a thing to establish in the Avorld. 

 Among a timid and spiritless race like the inhabitants of the vast plains of 

 tropical countries, passive obedience may be of natural growth ; though 

 even there we doubt whether it has ever been found among any people with 

 whom fatalism, or in other words, submission to the pressure of circum- 

 stances as a divine decree, did not prevail as a religious doctrine. But the 

 diflSculty of inducing a brave and warlike race to submit their individual 

 arbitrium to any common umpire, has always been felt to be so great, that 

 nothing short of supernatural power has been deemed adequate to over- 

 come it; and such tribes have always assigned to the first institution of 

 civil society a divine origin. So differently did those judge who knew 

 savage men by actual experience, from those who had no acquaintance 

 with them except in the civilized state. In modern Europe itself, after the 

 fall of the Roman empire, to subdue the feudal anarchy and bring the 

 whole people of any European nation into subjection to government 

 (though Christianity in the most concentrated form of its influence was 

 co-operating in the work) required thrice as many centuries as have elapsed 

 since that time. 



"Now if these philosophers had known human nature under any other 

 type than that of their own age, and of the particular classes of society 

 among whom they lived, it would have occurred to them, that wherever 

 this habitual submission to law and government has been firmly and du- 

 rably established, and yet the vigor and manliness of character which re- 

 sisted its establishment have been in any degree preserved, certain requi- 

 sites have existed, certain conditions have been fulfilled, of which the fol- 

 lowing may be regarded as the principal. 



"First: there has existed, for all who were accounted citizens — for 

 all who wei*e not slaves, kept down by brute force — a system of education, 



* Since reprinted entire in Dissertations and Discmsions, as the concluding paper of the first 

 volume. 



