Moreover, so long as family government sufficed, there was nothing but the family. The state would have existed only in germ (_vide infra_, p. 341), and would have remained thus inchoate even during that subsequent period when families were affiliated in tribal connection, though not yet coalesced into tribal union. It is my impression, that the period during which family government sufficed, continued much longer than is generally supposed; for, until the world became peopled and crowded, everything led to dispersion and the continuance of the pastoral state of life. From the necessities of pastoral life, mankind in early times could not have been gregarious--herds would have become intermixed, keep would have become short, the broad plains were spread out before them;[23] _e.g._ Gen. chap. xiii.-- "But Lot also, who was with Abraham, had flocks of sheep, and herds and tents. 6. Neither was the land able to bear them, that they might dwell together. 7. Whereupon there arose a strife between the herdsmen of Abraham and Lot; and at that time the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt in that country. 8. Abraham therefore said, Let there be no quarrel. 9. Behold the whole land is before thee."[24] [23] I indicated this view in a pamphlet, "Inviolability of Property by the State, by an English Landlord." 1866. [24] Again Esau and Jacob separated, after the death of the patriarch Isaac, because their stock in herds and flocks had so increased that, according to the scriptural phrase, "it was more than they might dwell together," and further, "the land would not bear them because of their cattle."--Gen. chap, xxxvi.; _Vide_ "Pinkerton, Voy." i. 528. Writing with reference to the Hamitic dynasty, founded at Babylon by Nimrod (_vide_ Rawlinson, Anc. Mon.), and the conquests of Kudur-Lagamer, identified by Rawlinson as Chedor-Laomer, Mr Brace adds ("Ethnology," p. 28):--"This at a period, as Professor Rawlinson remarks, when the kings of Egypt had never ventured beyond their borders, and when no monarch in Asia held dominion over more than a few petty tribes and a few hundred miles of territory."--_Vide_ ch. xiii. "A Golden Age."