mere force wrest out of their hands, without leaving them the least
room to complain of such a proceeding. Even those, who owed all their
riches to their own industry, could scarce ground their acquisitions
upon a better title. It availed them nothing to say, 'Twas I built
this wall; I acquired this spot by my labour. Who traced it out for
you, another might object, and what right have you to expect payment
at our expense for doing that we did not oblige you to do? Don't you
know that numbers of your brethren perish, or suffer grievously for
want of what you possess more than suffices nature, and that you
should have had the express and unanimous consent of mankind to
appropriate to yourself of their common, more than was requisite for
your private subsistence? Destitute of solid reasons to justify, and
sufficient force to defend himself; crushing individuals with ease,
but with equal ease crushed by numbers; one against all, and unable,
on account of mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals against
banditti united by the common hopes of pillage; the rich man, thus
pressed by necessity, at last conceived the deepest project that ever
entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favour the very
forces that attacked him, to make allies of his enemies, to inspire
them with other maxims, and make them adopt other institutions as
favourable to his pretensions, as the law of nature was unfavourable
to them.

With this view, after laying before his neighbours all the horrors of
a situation, which armed them all one against another, which rendered
their possessions as burdensome as their wants were intolerable, and
in which no one could expect any safety either in poverty or riches,
he easily invented specious arguments to bring them over to his
purpose. "Let us unite," said he, "to secure the weak from
oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the