4. The pastoral nomad's life is, like the hunter's, a singularly free one,--free both from restraint, and, comparatively, from toil. For watching and tending flocks is not a laborious occupation, and no authority can always reach or weigh very heavily on people who are here to-day and elsewhere to-morrow. Therefore, it is only with the third stage of human existence, the agricultural one, that civilization, which cannot subsist without permanent homes and authority, really commences. The farmer's homestead is the beginning of the State, as the hearth or fireplace was the beginning of the family. The different labors of the fields, the house, and the dairy require a great number of hands and a well-regulated distribution of the work, and so keep several generations of the settler's family together, on the same farm. Life in common makes it absolutely necessary to have a set of simple rules for home government, to prevent disputes, keep up order and harmony, and settle questions of mutual rights and duties. Who should set down and enforce these rules but the head of the family, the founder of the race--the patriarch? And when the family has become too numerous for the original homestead to hold it, and part of it has to leave it, to found a new home for itself, it does not, as in the primitive nomadic times, wander off at random and break all ties, but settles close by on a portion of the family land, or takes possession of a new piece of ground somewhat further off, but still within easy reach. In the first case the land which had been common property gets broken up into lots, which, though belonging more particularly to the members who separate from the old stock, are not for that withdrawn from the authority of the patriarch. There are several homesteads now, which form a village, and, later on, several villages; but the bond of kindred, of tradition and custom is religiously preserved, as well as subordination to the common head of the race, whose power keeps increasing as the community grows in numbers and extent of land, as the greater complications of relationships, property, inheritance, demand more laws and a stricter rule,--until he becomes not so much Father as King. Then naturally come collisions with neighboring similar settlements, friendly or hostile, which result in alliances or quarrels, trade or war, and herewith we have the State complete, with inner organization and foreign policy.