People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it.

Men did not love Rome because she was great.

She was great because they had loved her.
The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right.

But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests.

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction.