rights being built solely on the
fundamental laws, as soon as these ceased to exist, the magistrates
would cease to be lawful, the people would no longer be bound to obey
them, and, as the essence of the state did not consist in the
magistrates but in the laws, the members of it would immediately
become entitled to their primitive and natural liberty.

A little reflection would afford us new arguments in confirmation of
this truth, and the nature of the contract might alone convince us
that it can not be irrevocable: for if there was no superior power
capable of guaranteeing the fidelity of the contracting parties and of
obliging them to fulfil their mutual engagements, they would remain
sole judges in their own cause, and each of them would always have a
right to renounce the contract, as soon as he discovered that the
other had broke the conditions of it, or that these conditions ceased
to suit his private convenience. Upon this principle, the right of
abdication may probably be founded. Now, to consider as we do nothing
but what is human in this institution, if the magistrate, who has all
the power in his own hands, and who appropriates to himself all the
advantages of the contract, has notwithstanding a right to divest
himself of his authority; how much a better right must the people, who
pay for all the faults of its chief, have to renounce their dependence
upon him. But the shocking dissensions and disorders without number,
which would be the necessary consequence of so dangerous a privilege,
show more than anything else how much human governments stood in need
of a more solid basis than that of mere reason, and how necessary it
was for the public tranquillity, that the will of the Almighty should
interpose to give to sovereign authority, a sacred and inviolable
character, which should deprive subjects of the mischievous right to
dispose of it to whom they pleased. If mankind had received no other
advantages from religion, this alone would be sufficient to make them
adopt and cherish it, since it is the means of saving more blood than
fanaticism has been the cause of spilling. But to resume the thread of
our hypothesis.

The various forms of government owe their origin to the various
degrees of inequality between the members, at the time they first
coalesced into a political body. Where a man happened to be eminent
for power, for virtue, for riches, or for credit, he became sole
magistrate, and the state assume