The state - 1889 Author:Woodrow Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I THE PROBABLE ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT. 1. Nature of the Question. — The probable origin of government is a question of fact, to be settled, not by conjecture... more », but by history. Its answer is to be sought amidst such traces as remain to us of the history of primitive societies. Facts have come down to us from that early time in fragments, many of them having been revealed only by inference, and having been built together by the sagacious ingenuity of scholars much as complete skeletons have been reared by inspired naturalists in the light of the meagre suggestions of only a fossil joint or two. As those fragments of primitive animals have been kept for us sealed up in the earth's rocks, so fragments of primitive institutions have been preserved, embedded in the rocks of surviving law or custom, mixed up with the rubbish of accumulated tradition, crystallized in the organization of still savage tribes, or kept curiously in the museum of fact and rumor swept together by some ancient historian. Limited and perplexing as such means of reconstructing history may be, they repay patient comparison and analysis as richly as do the materials of the archaeologist and the philologian. The facts as to the origin and early history of government are at least as available as the facts concerning the growth and kinship of languages or the genesis and development of the arts and sciences. At any rate, such light as we can get from the knowledge of the infancy of society thus meagrely afforded us is better than that which might be derived from any a priorispeculations founded upon our acquaintance with our modern selves, or from any fancies, how learnedly soever constructed, that we could weave as to the way in which history might plausibly be read backwards. 2. Races to be studied: the Aryans....« less