Spencer speaks on this point, “... In the earliest stage of civilization, when the repulsive force is strong and the aggressive force weak, only small communities are possible; a modification of character causes these tribes, and satrapies, and _gentes_ and feudal lordships, and clans, to coalesce into nations.”[171] Friction and growing interests between families would in some cases draw them together into a tribe; the same process would draw tribes into a nation. The conception that holds these societies together is that of a common well-being. But the conception first arose in a natural group, the family, and was gradually extended through the tribe and up to the nation. Green points out that while force has been used in the formation of states, “it has only formed states as it has operated in and through a pre-existing medium of political, or tribal, or family rights.”[172] A people is a natural product of natural forces. It at least is not an artificial creation. Now a nation is formed when a people is organized under an institution, a state. What of the state? Is it an artificial creation? It is charged that states come to be ends in themselves, cut themselves off from the people, and cause wars over artificial values. Some philosophers, those who uphold the high sovereignty of the state, in capital letters, really identify the state with the nation. If this view be accepted the whole case of the critics of the state as artificial is, of course, at once disposed of. But the state is not identical with the nation. A state may embrace several nations. The British empire is such a super-national state. The state is an institutional organization. And yet there is good ground upon which to maintain that the state is not an artificial creation. As a people is a growth so also is the state. It is true, as is sometimes asserted, that states can be made in a day and that there can be artificial states, that is, states not resting upon a homogeneous people, but it is not true that _the_ state was made in a day. As a people, the raw material of a nation, grew out of the family and tribe units, so the state which is the institution of a people, grew out of the political institutions of the family and the tribe. The first institutions of men, as for instance that of the family, were probably the result of natural unreflective coöperation. They resulted almost as do the effects of a natural law. The actions which gave rise to them were in a way like the tropisms of primitive organisms. “Genuinely primitive association must have been blind, without forethought of advantage to those participating.”[173] Upon these unreflective associations states grew, also without forethought on the whole, although some reflection no doubt entered into the process. Spencer says, “Men did not deliberately establish political arrangements, but grew into them unconsciously--probably had no conception of an associated condition