When afterwards societies began to be formed, the effect of bad habits,
communicated to laws and governments, corrupted their institutions and
objects, and established arbitrary and factitious rights, which depraved
the ideas of justice, and the morality of the people.

Thus one man being stronger than another, their inequality--an accident
of nature--was taken for her law;* and the strong being able to take
the life of the weak, and yet sparing him, arrogated over his person an
abusive right of property; and the slavery of individuals prepared the
way for the slavery of nations.


*Almost all the ancient philosophers and politicians have laid it down
as a principle that men are born unequal, that nature his created some
to be free, and others to be slaves. Expressions of this kind are to be
found in Aristotle, and even in Plato, called the divine, doubtless in
the same sense as the mythological reveries which he promulgated. With
all the people of antiquity, the Gauls, the Romans, the Athenians,
the right of the strongest was the right of nations; and from the same
principle are derived all the political disorders and public national
crimes that at present exist.


Because the head of a family could be absolute in his house, he made his
own affections and desires the rule of his conduct; he gave or resumed
his goods without equality, without justice; and paternal despotism laid
the foundation of despotism in government.*

* Upon this single expression it would be easy to write a
long and important chapter. We might prove in it, beyond