“On rebels,” he said, “vengeance is lawfully extended, not only to the fathers, but also to the third and fourth generations not yet in being, and consequently innocent of the fact for which they are afflicted.”

We may take Hobbes as the philosopher of the extreme idea of the State and the consequent iniquity of rebellion.  His is the ideal of the Hive, in which the virgin workers devote their whole lives without complaint to the service of the Queen and her State-supported grubs, while the drones are mercilessly slaughtered as soon as one of them has fulfilled his rapturous but suicidal functions for the future swarm.  This ideal found its highest human example in the Spartan State, which trained its men to have no private existence at all, and even to visit their own wives by stealth.  But we find the ideal present in some degree among Central Africans when they bury valuable slaves and women alive with their chief; and among the Japanese when mothers kill themselves if their sons are prevented from dying for their country; and among the Germans when the drill-sergeant shouts his word of command.

In fact, all races and countries are disciples of Hobbes when they address the Head of the State as “Your Majesty” or “Your Excellence,” when they decorate him with fur and feathers, and put a gold hat on his head and a gold walking-stick in his hand, and gird him with a sword that he never uses, and play him the same tune wherever he goes, and spread his platform with crimson though it is clean, and bow before him though he is dishonourable, and call him gracious though he is nasty-tempered, and august though he may be a fool.  In the first instance, we go through all this make-believe because the Leviathan of the State is necessary for peace and self-defence, and without it our life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.  But we further endow the State with a personality we can almost see and handle, and we regard it as something that is able not only to protect our peace but to shed a reflected splendour on ourselves, giving us an importance not our own—­just as schoolboys glory in their school, or Churchmen in their Church, or cricketers in their county, or fox-hunters in their pack of hounds.

It is this conception that makes rebellion so rare and so dangerous.  In hives it seems never to occur.  In rookeries, the rebels are pecked to death and their homes torn in pieces.  In human communities we have seen how they are treated.  Rebellion is the one crime for which there is no forgiveness—­the one crime for which hanging is too good.