=How Government Began.=—But admitting that government rests on the consent of the governed, how was this consent obtained, and how did the first government come into existence? Here, again, there are two theories as to what happened. The first is that the state and government originated in a “social contract”. Primitive men, living in a condition of political chaos, made a general covenant, by which they created a sovereign power to rule them. This idea is as old as the days of Plato, but it did not take strong hold on the minds of men until a few centuries ago. It was put forward by Thomas Hobbes in England to defend absolutism, his argument being that to dethrone a king was to break the contract upon which the state had been founded. On the other hand it was used by John Locke to prove that the people of England had a right to dethrone a monarch if the monarch failed to abide by the terms of the social contract, and those who compare certain passages in Locke’s book with the Declaration of Independence will see that the framers of that daring document were much influenced by his assertions. Even in America the contract theory took a strong hold. The Mayflower pilgrims, lying off the rock-bound shores of New England, drew up and signed a formal document wherein they solemnly covenanted and combined themselves into a “civil body politic”. The doctrine found frequent expression in the writings of Jefferson and Madison; but while it afforded an excellent basis for arguments in defence of revolutions against despotism the theory that the state had its origin in a social contract has long since been abandoned as unhistorical. It assumes that primitive men were free and equal individuals subject to no paternal authority, whereas, as a matter of history, freedom and equality among men arose only after states had been formed. [Sidenote: The theory of political evolution.] The true explanation of how government began is to be found by applying to the study of political science the methods of biology. We do not know exactly where or when the first government came into existence, but we do know that all political institutions are the result of a gradual evolution or development.