Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country seething with discontent. The reign of "Thorough" was collapsing, and the forces pent up since 1629 were soon to rend the fabric of the state. By these events Hobbes was distracted from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. The Short Parliament, as he tells us at a later time (_E.W._ iv. 414), was not dissolved before he had ready "a little treatise in English," in which he sought to prove that the points of the royal prerogative which the members were determined to dispute before granting supplies "were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty which they did not then deny to be in the king." Now it can be proved that at this time he had written not only his _Human Nature_ but also his _De corpore politico_, the two treatises (though published separately ten years later) having been composed as parts of one work;[4] and there cannot be the least question that together they make "the little treatise" just mentioned. We are therefore to understand, first, that he wrote the earliest draft of his political theory some years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and, secondly, that this earliest draft was not written till, in accordance with his philosophical conception, he had established the grounds of polity in human nature. The first point is to be noted, because it has often been supposed that Hobbes's political doctrine took its peculiar complexion from his revulsion against the state of anarchy before his eyes, as he wrote during the progress of the Civil War. The second point must be maintained against his own implied, if not express, statement some years later, when publishing his _De cive_ (_L.W._ ii. 151), that he wrote this third part of his system before he had been able to set down any finished representation of the fundamental doctrines which it presupposed. In the beginning of 1640, therefore, he had written out his doctrine of Man at least, with almost as much elaboration as it ever received from him. In Paris.