+The Theory of the State+.--Man is by nature a political animal, a being who can only develop his capacities by sharing in the life of a community. Hence Aristotle definitely rejects the view that the state or society is a mere creature of convention or agreement, an institution made by compact between individuals for certain special ends, not growing naturally out of the universal demands and aspirations of humanity. Mankind, he urges, have never existed at all as isolated individuals. Some rudimentary form of social organisation is to be found wherever men are to be found. The actual stages in the development of social organisation have been three--the family, the village community, the city state. In the very rudest forms of social life known to us, the patriarchal family, not the individual, is the social unit. Men lived at first in separate families under the control of the head of the family. Now a family is made up in its simplest form of at least three persons, a man, his wife, and a servant or slave to do the hard work, though very poor men often have to replace the servant by an ox as the drudge of all work. Children when they come swell the number, and thus we see the beginnings of complex social relations of subordination in the family itself. It involves three such distinct relations, that of husband and wife, that of parent and child, that of master and man. The family passes into the village community, partly by the tendency of several families of common descent to remain together under the direction of the oldest male member of the group, partly by the association of a number of distinct families for purposes of mutual help and protection against common dangers. Neither of these forms of association, however, makes adequate provision for the most permanent needs of human nature. Complete security for a permanent supply of material necessaries and adequate protection only come when a number of such scattered communities pool their resources, and surround themselves with a city wall. The city state, which has come into being in this way, proves adequate to provide from its own internal resources for all the spiritual as well as the material needs of its members. Hence the independent city state does not grow as civilisation advances into any higher form of organisation, as the family and village grew into it. It is the end, the last word of social progress. It is amazing to us that this piece of cheap conservatism should have been uttered at the very time when the system of independent city states had visibly broken down, and a former pupil of Aristotle himself was founding a gigantic empire to take their place as the vehicle of civilisation.