s us to remit this difficulty to a pre-existing
period in nature, where other instincts and powers than our present
ones may perhaps have come into play, and where our imagination can
hardly travel. At any rate, for the present I may assume these two
steps in human progress made, and these two conditions realized.

The rest of the way, if we grant these two conditions, is plainer. The
first thing is the erection of what--we may call a custom-making power,
that is, of an authority which can enforce a fixed rule of life, which,
by means of that fixed rule, can in some degree create a calculable
future, which can make it rational to postpone present violent but
momentary pleasure for future continual pleasure, because it ensures,
what else is not sure, that if the sacrifice of what is in hand be
made, enjoyment of the contingent expected recompense will be received.
Of course I am not saying that we shall find in early society any
authority of which these shall be the motives. We must have travelled
ages (unless all our evidence be wrong) from the first men before there
was a comprehension of such motives. I only mean that the first thing
in early society was an authority of whose action this shall be the
result, little as it knew what it was doing, little as it would have
cared if it had known. The conscious end of early societies was not at
all, or scarcely at all, the protection of life and property, as it was
assumed to be by the eighteenth-century theory of government. Even in
early historical ages--in the youth of the human race, not its
childhood--such is not the nature of early states. Sir Henry Maine has
taught us that the earliest subject of jurisprudence is not the
separate property of the individual, but the common property of the
family group; what we should call private property hardly then existed;
or if it did, was so small as to be of no importance: it was like the
things little children are now allowed to CALL their own, which they
feel it very hard to have taken from them, but which they have no real
right to hold and keep. Such is our earliest property-law, and our
earliest life--law is that the lives of all members of the family group
were at the mercy of the head of the group. As far as the individual
goes, neither his goods nor his existence were protected at all. And
this may teach us that something else was lacked in early societies
besides what in our societies we now think of.

I do not think I