too well instructed in, and too forward to allow of, this way
of dissolving of governments, to need any more to be said of it; and
there wants not much argument to prove, that where the society is
dissolved, the government cannot remain; that being as impossible, as
for the frame of an house to subsist when the materials of it are
scattered and dissipated by a whirl-wind, or jumbled into a confused
heap by an earthquake.

Sect. 212. Besides this over-turning from without, governments are
dissolved from within.

First, When the legislative is altered. Civil society being a state of
peace, amongst those who are of it, from whom the state of war is
excluded by the umpirage, which they have provided in their legislative,
for the ending all differences that may arise amongst any of them, it is
in their legislative, that the members of a commonwealth are united, and
combined together into one coherent living body. This is the soul that
gives form, life, and unity, to the common-wealth: from hence the
several members have their mutual influence, sympathy, and connexion:
and therefore, when the legislative is broken, or dissolved, dissolution
and death follows: for the essence and union of the society consisting
in having one will, the legislative, when once established by the
majority, has the declaring, and as it were keeping of that will. The
constitution of the legislative is the first and fundamental act of
society, whereby provision is made for the continuation of their union,
under the direction of persons, and bonds of laws, made by persons
authorized thereunto, by the consent and appointment of the people,
without which no one man, or number of men, amongst them, can have
authority of making laws that shall be binding to the rest. When any
one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have
not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the
people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again
to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new
legislative, as they think best, being in full liberty to resist the
force of those, who without authority would impose any thing upon them.
Every one is at the disposure of his own will, when those who had, by
the delegation of the society, the declaring of the public will, are
excluded from it, and others usurp the place, who have no such authority
or delegation.

Sect. 213. This being usually brought about by