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.
102. He must show a strange inclination to deny evident matter of
fact, when it agrees not with his hypothesis, who will not allow
that the beginning of Rome and Venice were by the uniting together
of several men, free and independent one of another, amongst whom
there was no natural superiority or subjection.
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