ocke. At present, I suppose, our own political life, as a nation, lies
in the supremacy of the law; and that again is resolvable into the
internal peace, and protection of life and property, and freedom of the
individual, which are its result; and these I call objects of sense.

For the very same reason, objects of this nature will not constitute the
life of a barbarian community; prudence, foresight, calculation of
consequences do not enter into its range of mental operations; it has no
talent for analysis; it cannot understand expediency; it is impressed
and affected by what is direct and absolute. Religion, superstition,
belief in persons and families, objects, not proveable, but vivid and
imposing, will be the bond which keeps its members together. I have
already alluded to the divinity which in the imagination of the Huns
encircled the hideous form of Attila. Zingis claimed for himself or his
ancestry a miraculous conception, and received from a prophet, who
ascended to heaven, the dominion of the earth. He called himself the son
of God; and when the missionary friars came to his immediate successor
from the Pope, that successor made answer to them, that it was the
Pope's duty to do him homage, as being earthly lord of all by divine
right. It was a similar pretension, I need hardly say, which was the
life of the Mahometan conquests, when the wild Saracen first issued from
the Arabian desert. So, too, in the other hemisphere, the Caziques of
aboriginal America were considered to be brothers of the Sun, and
received religious homage as his representatives. They spoke as the
oracles of the divinity, and claimed the power of regulating the seasons
and the weather at their will. This was especially the case in Peru;
"the whole system of policy," says Robertson, "was founded on religion.
The Incas appeared, not only as a legislator, but as the messenger of
heaven."[73] Elsewhere, the divine virtue has been considered to rest,
not on the monarch, but on the code of laws, which accordingly is the
social principle of the nation. The Celts ascribed their legislation to
Mercury;[74] as Lycurgus and Numa in Sparta and Rome appealed to a
divine sanction in behalf of their respective institutions.

This being the case, imperfect as is the condition of barbarous states,
still what is there to overthrow them? They have a principle of union
congenial to the state of their intellect, and they have not the
ratiocinative habit to scru