t in imaginary contracts or a pretended state of nature,
but in their subserviency to the subsistence and well-being of mankind.
It will not only be curious, but useful, to trace the history of
property from the first loose and transient occupancy of the savage,
through all the modifications which it has at different times received,
to that comprehensive, subtle, and anxiously minute code of property
which is the last result of the most refined civilization.

I shall observe the same order in considering the society of the sexes
as it is regulated by the institution of marriage.[19] I shall
endeavour to lay open those unalterable principles of general interest
on which that institution rests: and if I entertain a hope that on this
subject I may be able to add something to what our masters in morality
have taught us, I trust, that the reader will bear in mind, as an excuse
for my presumption, that _they_ were not likely to employ much argument
where they did not foresee the possibility of doubt. I shall also
consider the history[20] of marriage, and trace it through all the
forms which it has assumed, to that decent and happy permanency of
union, which has, perhaps above all other causes, contributed to the
quiet of society, and the refinement of manners in modern times. Among
many other inquiries which this subject will suggest, I shall be led
more particularly to examine the natural station and duties of the
female sex, their condition among different nations, its improvement in
Europe, and the bounds which Nature herself has prescribed to the
progress of that improvement; beyond which, every pretended advance will
be a real degradation.

III. Having established the principles of private duty, I shall proceed
to consider man under the important relation of subject and sovereign,
or, in other words, of citizen and magistrate. The duties which arise
from this relation I shall endeavour to establish, not upon supposed
compacts, which are altogether chimerical, which must be admitted to be
false in fact, which if they are to be considered as fictions, will be
found to serve no purpose of just reasoning, and to be equally the
foundation of a system of universal despotism in Hobbes, and of
universal anarchy in Rousseau; but on the solid basis of general
convenience. Men cannot subsist without society and mutual aid; they can
neither maintain social intercourse nor receive aid from each other
without the protection of gove