e clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics.
Let them be their amusement in the schools.

_Illa_ se jactet in aula
AEolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.

But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the
earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great
deep to overwhelm us!

Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from
withholding in practice, (if I were of power to give or to withhold,)
the _real_ rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do
not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended
rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage
of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is
an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting
by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to
justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic
function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of
their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful.
They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the
nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life
and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do,
without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and
he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its
combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this
partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that
has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as
he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion; but he has
not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock. And
as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual
ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be
amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have
in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to
be settled by convention.

If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be
its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of
constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative,
judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being
in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, und