Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as they must have been) of morals which then existed.  If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left.  The residuum was somehow and in some vague way intelligible to the ante-political man; but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended upon.  In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught,—­a still small voice of uncertain meaning, an unknown something modifying everything else and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild spasms of “wild justice,” half punishment, half outrage:  but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for us to imagine....

To sum up:—­Law—­rigid, definite, concise law—­is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else.  But it is their greatest difficulty as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it.  In later ages, many races have gained much of this discipline quickly though painfully,—­a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work for above half Europe.  But where could the first ages find Romans or a conqueror? men conquer by the power of government, and it was exactly government which then was not.  The first ascent of civilization was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.

How the step from no polity to polity was made, distinct history does not record....  But when once polities were begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted.  Whatever may be said against the principle of “natural selection” in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history:  the strongest killed out the weakest as they could.  And I need not pause to prove that any form of polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to any one, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood.  Homer’s Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became valuable in poetry.