Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE TRUE ORIGIN OF THE STATE 1. The Historical or Evolutionary View of the State. — 2. The Patriarchal and Matriarchal Theories. — 3. Course of Development: the Aristotelian Cycle. — 4. Military and Economic Factors. — 5. Some General Features of Political Evolution. 1. The Historical or Evolutionary View of the State. The fallacious theories presented in the last chapter may be considered to prepare the way for a more correct estimate of the origin of the state. The view held by the best modern writers may be described as the historical or evolutionary theory of the state. By this is meant that the institution of the state is not to be referred back to any single point of time; it is not the outcome of any single movement or plan. The state is not an invention : it is a growth, an evolution, the result of a gradual process running throughout all the known history of man, and receding into the remote and unknown past. " The proposition that the State is a product of history," says Professor Burgess, " means that it is a gradual and continuous development of human society out of a grossly imperfect beginning through crude but improving forms of manifestation towards a perfect and universal organization of mankind." It is thus altogether erroneous to think of man as having in the course of his evolution attained to a full physical and mental development, and then looking about him to consider the advisability of inventing a government. We might as well imagine man, mentally and physically complete, deciding that the time had come for the invention of language, in order to satisfy his growing need of communicating with his fellows. Just as language has been evolved from the uncouth gibberings of animals, so has government had its origins in remote and rudimentary b...