government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and
the third of reason.

When a set of artful men pretended, through the medium of oracles, to
hold intercourse with the Deity, as familiarly as they now march up
the back-stairs in European courts, the world was completely under the
government of superstition. The oracles were consulted, and whatever
they were made to say became the law; and this sort of government lasted
as long as this sort of superstition lasted.

After these a race of conquerors arose, whose government, like that of
William the Conqueror, was founded in power, and the sword assumed the
name of a sceptre. Governments thus established last as long as the
power to support them lasts; but that they might avail themselves of
every engine in their favor, they united fraud to force, and set up
an idol which they called Divine Right, and which, in imitation of the
Pope, who affects to be spiritual and temporal, and in contradiction to
the Founder of the Christian religion, twisted itself afterwards into an
idol of another shape, called Church and State. The key of St. Peter
and the key of the Treasury became quartered on one another, and the
wondering cheated multitude worshipped the invention.

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature
has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and
happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern
mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and
can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.

We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in
contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.

It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the
principles of Freedom to say that Government is a compact between those
who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because
it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have
existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when
governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist
no governors to form such a compact with.

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his
own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other
to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments
have a right to arise, and the only principle on which