ments. They would reform and perfect the
function of reproduction without discarding it; they would maintain the
family unless they could devise some institution that combined intrinsic
and representative values better than does that natural artifice, and
they would recast either the instincts or the laws concerned, or both
simultaneously, until the family ceased to clash seriously with any of
these three things: natural affection, rational nurture, and moral
freedom.

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

[Sidenote: Patriarchal economy.]

We have seen that the family, an association useful in rearing the
young, may become a means of further maintenance and defence. It is the
first economic and the first military group. Children become servants,
and servants, being adopted and brought up in the family, become like
other children and supply the family's growing wants. It was no small
part of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal man
that children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-long
subjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age.
The daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, and
prepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmented
further by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle. This numerous household,
bound together by personal authority and by common fortunes, was
sufficient to carry on many rude industries. It wandered from pasture to
pasture, practised hospitality, watched the stars, and seems (at least
in poetic retrospect) to have been not unhappy. A Roman adage has
declared that to know the world one household suffices; and one
patriarchal family, in its simplicity and grandeur, seems to have given
scope enough for almost all human virtues. And those early men, as Vico
says, were sublime poets.

[Sidenote: Origin of the state.]

Nevertheless, such a condition can only subsist in deserts where those
who try to till the soil cannot grow strong enough to maintain
themselves against marauding herdsmen. Whenever agriculture yields
better returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support a
protector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of land
turns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of such
a passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population and
in requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon its
neighbours; this encroachment means war; and w