rnment; and they cannot enjoy that
protection without submitting to the restraints which a just government
imposes. This plain argument establishes the duty of obedience on the
part of citizens, and the duty of protection on that of magistrates, on
the same foundation with that of every other moral duty; and it shews,
with sufficient evidence, that these duties are reciprocal; the only
rational end for which the fiction of a contract could have been
invented. I shall not encumber my reasoning by any speculations on the
origin of government; a question on which so much reason has been wasted
in modern times; but which the ancients[21] in a higher spirit of
philosophy have never once mooted. If our principles be just, the origin
of government must have been coeval with that of mankind; and as no
tribe has ever yet been discovered so brutish as to be without some
government, and yet so enlightened as to establish a government by
common consent, it is surely unnecessary to employ any serious argument
in the confutation of a doctrine that is inconsistent with reason, and
unsupported by experience. But though all inquiries into the origin of
government be chimerical, yet the history of its progress is curious and
useful. The various stages through which it passed from savage
independence, which implies every man's power of injuring his neighbour,
to legal liberty, which consists in every man's security against wrong;
the manner in which a family expands into a tribe, and tribes coalesce
into a nation; in which public justice is gradually engrafted on private
revenge, find temporary submission ripened into habitual obedience; form
a most important and extensive subject of inquiry, which comprehends all
the improvements of mankind in police, in judicature, and in
legislation.

I have already given the reader to understand that the description of
liberty which seems to me the most comprehensive, is that of _security
against wrong_. Liberty is therefore the object of all government. Men
are more free under every government, even the most imperfect, than they
would be if it were possible for them to exist without any government
at all: they are more secure from wrong, _more undisturbed in the
exercise of their natural powers, and therefore more free, even in the
most obvious and grossest sense of the word_, than if they were
altogether unprotected against injury from each other. But as general
security is enjoyed in very different