more partial, or
therefore more tyrannical, than such as should give to society a general
power of dealing at its pleasure with its associates, and of arbitrarily
subjecting separate classes or individuals to exceptional treatment.
Even, therefore, if a law to such monstrous effect were enacted, it
could have no morally binding force. It would be no one's duty to
acquiesce in it.

I will not here stop to dispute, though I am not sure that I could
without some slight reservation admit, that the receipt of unasked-for
benefits places the recipient under precisely the same obligation to
benefit his benefactor, as if the good received by him had been
conferred on express condition of his availing himself of the first
opportunity to render equal good. I will not stop to dispute, for
instance, that a person saved from drowning at the risk of his own
rescuer's life, would be bound, on occasion arising, to risk his own
life in order to save his former rescuer's. For my immediate purpose, it
may suffice to remark that society has never been in the habit of
showing such parental solicitude for its component members as would
warrant its claiming filial devotion from them. In the matter of
philanthropy its practice has never been in advance of its very moderate
professions. It has invariably contented itself with rendering certain
specific services, never failing to exact in return fully equivalent
services of each species.

In candour, however, there must be admitted to be innumerable blessings
not yet adverted to, including indeed most of those by the possession of
which man is distinguished from brutes, for which he is in so far
indebted to society that, but for the instrumentality of society, they
would never have been his. Unless individuals had formed themselves into
communities, civilization could have made no sensible progress: there
could have been no considerable advances, material, intellectual, moral,
or aesthetic. Not only should we have been destitute of all the comforts
and luxuries that now surround us, we should have lacked also whatever
cerebral development we have attained, together with all its
concomitants and consequences; whatever of intelligence, or moral
perceptiveness, or artistic taste we have to boast of. Still, though
none of these faculties could have made much approach to maturity except
under the shelter of society, they are not gifts of society. Without the
help of a plough, land cannot be ploughe