Political Futility of Force 195 



modem times, like Turkey, are of course the result 

 of conquest and banditism ; but nevertheless, it is 

 a profound error to believe, as Hobbes has argued, 

 that the essence of the nature of the State consists 

 in its being an enterprise for conquest and exploita- 

 tion. 



Although Spencer and other sociologists recog- 

 nize that the foundation of the State is co-opera- 

 tion and not violence, they maintain, as we have 

 seen in Chapter L, that without wars, banditism, 

 and conquest the State would never have been 

 produced. This arises also from a misconception 

 of the true nature of the State. Without bandit- 

 ism, the State would have been created by social 

 organization, by the voluntary action of the 

 citizens. This is the process which we see going 

 on under our eyes; and it is only the anthropo- 

 logical romances, and the failure to study the slow 

 and invisible causes of the evolution of society 

 which prevent us from realizing that the processes 

 we observe in the daily life about us have always 

 been the forces of social progress. We can observe 

 the process of the amalgamation of societies 

 proceeding through millions of relations, all 

 consisting of variations of the elementary facts of 

 the transportation of people, of products, and of 

 ideas. It is known that commercial relations 

 have been established since the highest antiquity, 

 between the most diverse regions; e, g., metal 

 instruments originating in Asia have been found 

 in the prehistoric remains in Europe, and it is 



