This self-sufficient and perfect community, which
is not part of any higher community, is the State.
8. We may observe that the whole reason for the being of the State is
not mutual need, nor the repression of violence. Main reasons these
are, no doubt, but not the whole main reason. Even if men had no need
of one another for the supply of their animal wants, they would still
desire to converse for the satisfaction of their intellectual
curiosity and their social affections. And even if we had all remained
as void of guile, and as full of light and love, as our first parents
were at their creation, we should still have needed the erection of
States. In a State there are not only criminal but civil courts, where
it is not wicked men alone who come to be litigants. From sundry
passages of Scripture it would appear that even angels may disagree as
to what is best and proper: angelic men certainly may and do. It is a
mistake to look upon civil government, with its apparatus of laws and
judgments, simply as a necessary evil, and remedy of the perverseness
of mankind. On the contrary, were all men virtuous, States would still
be formed, towering in magnificence above the States known to history,
as the cedars of Lebanon above the scanty growths of a fell-side in
our north country.
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