Nature's Simple Plan Author:Chauncey Brewster Tinker 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: II A NEW NATION 'How end all our victories? In debts and a wretched peace.' —Horace Walpole. Since man, by nature, consorts with his kind, Nature's ... more »simple plan must be applicable to men in society; there must be, in other words, a 'state of nature' for peoples as well as for individuals. Throughout the century the characteristic marks of such a society were the subject of profound study and brilliant speculation. But where was the model to be found? Some, like Rousseau, despaired of discovering it anywhere in the modern world, could not be certain that such a group had ever existed in the past, and were obliged to admit that the state which was the subject of their inquiries might be merely ideal. Nevertheless it was an ideal possible of attainment and, indeed, as natural and of as much authority in governing the conduct and the political ventures of men as though its existence were actual. On one characteristic of such a society of men, all were agreed. It must be free. Of liberty and the natural rights of man the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote with an eloquence that has never been surpassed. It is not my intention to review their conclusions. For the purposes of this paper it is sufficient to say that one of their chief problems was to reconcile the existence of personal freedom with that quantum of authority which is necessary in order to hold any state together. Concession of some kind there must be, an equal concession from all the contracting parties. Equality in the sight of the law is prerequisite to any such conception of liberty. Moreover, any notion of equality contains within itself a theory of brotherhood; and thus the group becomes a family, self-governed, the members of which owe allegiance to an abstraction, a 'sta...« less