man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains there." They
held the same, and maintained that every one born into society
contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law,
every one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, and owes certain duties to society for the
protection and assistance it affords him.

But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed
from the theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine
which they would have been the last to accept. These theorists
or political speculators have imagined a state of nature
antecedently to civil society, in which men lived without
government, law, or manners, out of which they finally came by
entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of their number
to be king and to govern them, or with one another to submit to
the rule of the majority. Hobbes, the English materialist, is
among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of
this theory. He held that men lived, prior to the creation of
civil society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and
every one had an equal right to every thing, and to take any
thing on which he could lay his hands and was strong enough to
hold. There was no law but the will of the strongest. Hence,
the state of nature was a state of continual war. At length,
wearied and disgusted, men sighed for peace, and, with one
accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest among them: Come,
be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and govern us; we
surrender our natural rights and our natural independence to you,
with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or