In
this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A
thousand motives will excite them thereto, the strength of one man is
so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual
solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of
another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would
be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness,
but ONE man might labour out the common period of life without
accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not
remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time
would urge him from his work, and every different want call him a
different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for
though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from
living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to
perish than to die.
This necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly
arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessing of which,
would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government
unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as
nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably
happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of
emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will
begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this
remissness, will point out the necessity, of establishing some form
of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.
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