between them and the promised land flowing with milk and honey,
fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back to Egypt,
and permit them to return to slavery.

In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it,
there is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil
society would not be a development, but a complete rupture with
the past, and an entire new creation. When it is with the
greatest difficulty that necessary reforms are introduced in old
and highly civilized nations and when it can seldom be done at
all without terrible political and social convulsions, how can we
suppose men without society, and knowing nothing of it, can
deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice aforethought," found
society? Without government, and destitute alike of habits of
obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
establish, and sustain government? To suppose it, would be to
suppose that men in a state of nature, without culture, without
science, without any of the arts, even the most simple and
necessary, are infinitely superior to the men formed under the
most advanced civilization. Was Rousseau right in asserting
civilization as a fall, as a deterioration of the race?

But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some
miracle or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the
origin of government as authority in compact is not yet
established. According to the theory, the rights of civil
society are derived from the rights of the individuals who form
or enter into the compact. But individuals cannot give what they
have not, and no individual has in himself the right to govern
another. By the law of nature all men have equal rights, are