re yourselves your own, nor is that yours of
which you are possessed. Both your goods and you belong to your
families, as well those past as those to come; but, further, both your
family and goods much more appertain to the public. Wherefore, lest any
flatterer in your old age or in your sickness, or any passion of your
own, should unseasonably prevail with you to make an unjust will, I shall
take care to prevent that inconvenience; but, having respect both to the
universal interests of the city and that of your particular family, I
shall establish laws, and make it by good reasons appear, that private
convenience ought to give place to the common benefit. Go then
cheerfully where human necessity calls you. It is for me, who regard no
more the one thing than the other, and who, as much as in me lies, am
provident of the public interest, to have a care as to what you leave
behind you."

To return to my subject: it appears to me that women are very rarely
born, to whom the prerogative over men, the maternal and natural
excepted, is in any sort due, unless it be for the punishment of such,
as in some amorous fever have voluntarily submitted themselves to them:
but that in no way concerns the old ones, of whom we are now speaking.
This consideration it is which has made us so willingly to enact and give
force to that law, which was never yet seen by any one, by which women
are excluded the succession to our crown: and there is hardly a
government in the world where it is not pleaded, as it is here, by the
probability of reason that authorises it, though fortune has given it
more credit in some places than in others. 'Tis dangerous to leave the
disposal of our succession to their judgment, according to the choice
they shall make of children, which is often fantastic and unjust; for the
irregular appetites and depraved tastes they have during the time of
their being with child, they have at all other times in the mind. We
commonly see them fond of the most weak, ricketty, and deformed children;
or of those, if they have such, as are still hanging at the breast. For,
not having sufficient force of reason to choose and embrace that which is
most worthy, they the more willingly suffer themselves to be carried
away, where the impressions of nature are most alone; like animals that
know their young no longer than they give them suck. As to the rest, it
is easy by experience to be discerned that this natural affection to
wh