e of
others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful,
and even that of exacting obedience from them.

It were absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing
the bare definition of natural inequality answers the question: it
would be more absurd still to enquire, if there might not be some
essential connection between the two species of inequality, as it
would be asking, in other words, if those who command are necessarily
better men than those who obey; and if strength of body or of mind,
wisdom or virtue are always to be found in individuals, in the same
proportion with power, or riches: a question, fit perhaps to be
discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but unbecoming
free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.

What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse? It is to
point out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, right taking
place of violence, nature became subject to law; to display that chain
of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to
serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the
expense of real happiness.

The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have,
every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a
state of nature, but not one of them has ever arrived there. Some of
them have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state the ideas of
justice and injustice, without troubling their heads to prove, that he
really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful
to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep
what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the
word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the
strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out
government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any
notion of the things signified by the words authority and government.
All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity,
oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature
ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they
described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much
as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exit; though it
plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man,
immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions
and precepts, ne