who sings or dances best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most
dexterous, the most eloquent, comes to be the most respected: this was
the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.
From these first preferences there proceeded on one side vanity and
contempt, on the other envy and shame; and the fermentation raised by
these new leavens at length produced combinations fatal to happiness
and innocence.

Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what
esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for
any man to refuse it to another. Hence the first duties of civility
and politeness, even among savages; and hence every voluntary injury
became an affront, as besides the mischief, which resulted from it as
an injury, the party offended was sure to find in it a contempt for
his person more intolerable than the mischief itself. It was thus that
every man, punishing the contempt expressed for him by others in
proportion to the value he set upon himself, the effects of revenge
became terrible, and men learned to be sanguinary and cruel. Such
precisely was the degree attained by most of the savage nations with
whom we are acquainted. And it is for want of sufficiently
distinguishing ideas, and observing at how great a distance these
people were from the first state of nature, that so many authors have
hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and requires a regular
system of police to be reclaimed; whereas nothing can be more gentle
than he in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal
distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the pernicious good sense
of civilized man; and equally confined by instinct and reason to the
care of providing against the mischief which threatens him, he is
withheld by natural compassion from doing any injury to others, so far
from being ever so little prone even to return that which he has