§. 101. To the first there is this to answer: That it is not at all to be
wondered that history gives us but a very little account of men that lived
together in the state of Nature. The inconveniencies of that condition, and the
love and want of society, no sooner brought any number of them together, but
they presently united and in corporated if they designed to continue together.
And if we may not suppose men ever to have been in the state of Nature, because
we hear not much of them in such a state, we may as well suppose the armies of
Salmanasser or Xerxes were never children, because we hear little of them till
they were men and embodied in armies. Government is everywhere antecedent to
records, and letters seldom come in amongst a people till a long continuation
of civil society has, by other more necessary arts, provided for their safety,
ease, and plenty. And then they begin to look after the history of their
founders, and search into their original when they have outlived the memory of
it. For it is with commonwealths as with particular persons, they are commonly
ignorant of their own births and infancies; and if they know anything of it,
they are beholding for it to the accidental records that others have kept of
it. And those that we have of the beginning of any polities in the world,
excepting that of the Jews, where God Himself immediately interposed, and which
favours not at all paternal dominion, are all either plain instances of such a
beginning as I have mentioned, or at least have manifest footsteps of it.
