Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of psychology.  It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same tender regard he has for himself.  So happy a condition does not exist; and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our situation.  A theologian might say that Hume derives government from original sin; to which he would have replied by denying the fall.  His whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to the whole field of political science.  He knows that opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the base of the thoughts which get accepted.  He does not, indeed, deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the thing judged.  We obey because otherwise “society could not subsist,” and society subsists for its utility.  “Men,” he says “could not live at all in society, at least in a civilized society, without laws and magistrates and judges, to prevent the encroachments of the strong upon the weak, of the violent upon the just and equitable.”

Utilitarianism is, of course, above all a method; and it is not unfair to say of Hume that he did not get very far beyond insistence on that point.  He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection.  So, too, it is the sense of public interest which determines men’s thoughts on government, on who should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical substance of these questions he leaves undetermined.  Politics, he thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still too young for general truths therein.  The maxims he suggests as of permanent value, “that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy, autocracy and democracy”; that “free governments ... are the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces”; that republics are more favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most thinkers at the present time.  And when he constructs an ideal constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the historical method had not yet come fully into being.