thing of it. And I think it is plain, that it is far different from a
politic society.
Sec. 85. Master and servant are names as old as history, but given to
those of far different condition; for a freeman makes himself a servant
to another, by selling him, for a certain time, the service he undertakes
to do, in exchange for wages he is to receive: and though this commonly
puts him into the family of his master, and under the ordinary discipline
thereof; yet it gives the master but a temporary power over him, and no
greater than what is contained in the contract between them. But there
is another sort of servants, which by a peculiar name we call slaves, who
being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected
to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters. These men
having, as I say, forfeited their lives, and with it their liberties, and
lost their estates; and being in the state of slavery, not capable of any
property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil
society; the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.
Sec. 86. Let us therefore consider a master of a family with all
these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves,
united under the domestic rule of a family; which, what resemblance
soever it may have in its order, offices, and number too, with a little
common-wealth, yet is very far from it, both in its constitution, power
and end: or if it must be thought a monarchy, and the paterfamilias the
absolute monarch in it, absolute monarchy will have but a very shattered
and short power, when it is plain, by what has been said before, that the
master of the family has a very distinct and differently limited power,
both as to time and extent, over those several persons that are in it;
for excepting the slave (and the family is as much a family, and his
power as paterfamilias as great, whether there be any slaves in his
family or no) he has no legislative power of life and death over any of
them, and none too but what a mistress of a family may have as well as