He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men lived, antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society, without government or law.All men in that state were equal, and each was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.These equal, independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to have met, in convention, and entered into a compact with themselves, each with all, and all with each, that they would constitute government, and would each submit to the determination and authority of the whole, practically of the fluctuating and irresponsible majority.Civil society, the state, the government, originates in this compact, and the government, as Mr.Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed."This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that the individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to civil society, was generally adopted by the American people in the last century, and is still the more prevalent theory with those among them who happen to have any theory or opinion on the subject.It is the political tradition of the country.The state, as defined by the elder Adams, is held to be a voluntary association of individuals.Individuals create civil society, and may uncreate it whenever they judge it advisable.Prior to the Southern Rebellion, nearly every American asserted with Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or revolution, and sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and revolutionists, wherever they made their appearance.Loyalty was held to be the correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.The fearful struggle of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its very existence may have changed this.
That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory assumes, may be questioned.Certainly nothing proves that it is, or ever was, a real state.That there is a law of nature is undeniable.All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and jurisprudence assert it; the state assumes it as its own immediate basis, and the codes of all nations are founded on it;universal jurisprudence, the jus qentium of the Romans, embodies it, and the courts recognize and administer it.It is the reason and conscience of civil society, and every state acknowledges its authority.But the law of nature is as much in force in civil society as out of it.Civil law does not abrogate or supersede natural law, but presupposes it, and supports itself on it as its own ground and reason.As the natural law, which is only natural justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all men, persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil state, natural society in civil society, which simply develops, applies, and protects it.Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in it--is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state, an actual state, and never was; but an abstraction, in which is considered, apart from the concrete existence called society, what is derived immediately from the natural law.But as abstractions have no existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature has no actual existence in the world of reality as a separate state.
But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a real and separate state, in which men at first lived, there is great difficulty in understanding how they ever got out of it.
Can a man divest himself of his nature, or lift himself above it?
Man is in his nature, and inseparable from it.If his primitive state was his natural state, and if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural, how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the latter? The ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of creation, asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the earth, and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees, and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art, law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of that state alone by his own unaided efforts.They ascribed the invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods.It remained for the Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first cause, believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own unassisted efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out of the primitive state, and institute what in modern times is called civilta, civility, or civilization.
The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which men have emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of civil society, forget that if government is not the sole condition, it is one of the essential conditions of progress.
The only progressive nations are
civilized or republican nations.
