"The execution of the law of nature is in that state [of nature] put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation: for the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world, be in vain, if there were nobody that in the state of nature had a power to execute that law." We observe that the punishment of offenders against the law of nature, as such, belongs to the Legislator, who is God alone. Certainly it is well, nay necessary, that there should be human law to bear out the law of nature: but human law is the creation of human society in its perfection, which is the State. Man is punished by man for breaking the laws of man, not--except remotely--for breaking the laws of God. Nor would it be any inconvenience, if the law of nature were in vain in a state wherein nature never intended men to live, wherein no multitude of men ever for any notable time have lived, a state which is neither actual fact nor ideal perfection, but a mere property of the philosophic stage, a broken article, an outworn speculation. Such is "the state of nature," as identified with the extra-civil state by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. SECTION III.--_Of the true state of Nature, which is the state of civil society; and consequently of the Divine origin of Power_. 1. The State is deemed by Aristotle (_Politics_, III., ix., 14): "the union of septs and villages in a complete and self-sufficient life." The first and most elementary community is the _family_, [Greek: oikia]. A knot of families associating together, claiming blood-relationship and descent, real or fictitious, from a common ancestor, whose name they bear, constitute a [Greek: genos], called in Ireland a _sept_, in Scotland a _clan_, nameless in England. When the sept come to cluster their habitations, or encampments, in one or more spots, and to admit strangers in blood to dwell among them, these hamlets, or camps, gradually reach the magnitude of a _village_. When a number of these _villages_, belonging to different _septs_, come to be contiguous to one another, this mere juxtaposition does not make of them a State. Nor does interchange of commodities, nor intermarriage, nor an offensive and defensive alliance: these are the mutual relations of a _confederacy_, [Greek: xymmaxia], but all these and more are needed for a State, [Greek: polis]. To be a State, it is requisite that these septs and villages should agree to regulate the conduct of their individual members by a _common standard of social virtue_, sufficient for their well-being as one community. This common standard is fixed by common consent, or by the decision of some power competent to act for all and to punish delinquents. The name of this common standard is _law_. (_Ethics_, c. vii., n. 1, p. 126.) The community thus formed leads a life _complete and self-sufficient_, not