The union of a greater or less number of free heads of houses upon a district sufficient for their support, in a mutual guarantee of equal civil rights, is the state itself: for man is evidently formed by God to live in a regulated community, by which mode of life alone he can develope the highest qualities of the nature which God has implanted in him; and the first community is the union of free men for purposes of friendly intercourse and mutual aid, each enjoying at the hands of every other the same rights as he is willing to grant to every other, each yielding something of his natural freedom in order that the idea of state, that is of orderly government, may be realized. For the state is necessary, not accidental. Man not living in a state, not having developed and in some degree realized the idea of state, is, in so far, not man but beast. He has no past and no future: he lives for the day, and does not even accumulate for the days to come: he lives, thinks, feels and dies like a brute. For man is free through the existence, not the absence, of law; through his voluntary and self-conscious relinquishment of the power to do wrong, and the adoption of means to counteract and diminish his own tendency to evil. The amount of personal liberty to be given up is the only question of practical importance, but from the idea of Freedom itself results the law, that this amount must be in all cases a minimum. The ideas of freedom and equality are not, however, inseparable: a nation of slaves may exist in sorrowful equality under the capricious will of a native or foreign tyrant: a nation of free men may cheerfully, wisely and happily obey the judge or the captain they have elected in the exigencies of peace and war. Hence the voluntary union of free men does not exclude the possibility of such union being either originally based upon terms of inequality, or becoming sooner or later settled upon such a basis. But, as the general term is the freedom, I take this as the unity which involves the difference; the noble is one of the freemen, and is made noble by the act of the free: the free are not made so by the noble. By these principles the divisions of this chapter are regulated.