er the
conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its
existence,--rights which are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the
first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental
rules, is, _that no man should be judge in his own cause_. By this each
person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of
uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own
cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in
a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first law of
Nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of
determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may
secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.

Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do
exist in total independence of it,--and exist in much greater clearness,
and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract
perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything
they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human _wants_. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in
the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This
can only be done _by a power out of themselves_, and not, in the
exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions
which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the
restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among
their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss
them upon that principle.

The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern
himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those
rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a
consideration of convenience. This it is w