shewed more at large hereafter in the following part of this discourse)
some one good and excellent man having got a pre-eminency amongst the
rest, had this deference paid to his goodness and virtue, as to a kind of
natural authority, that the chief rule, with arbitration of their
differences, by a tacit consent devolved into his hands, without any
other caution, but the assurance they had of his uprightness and wisdom;
yet when time, giving authority, and (as some men would persuade us)
sacredness of customs, which the negligent, and unforeseeing innocence of
the first ages began, had brought in successors of another stamp, the
people finding their properties not secure under the government, as then
it was, (whereas government has no other end but the preservation of *
property) could never be safe nor at rest, nor think themselves in civil
society, till the legislature was placed in collective bodies of men,
call them senate, parliament, or what you please. By which means every
single person became subject, equally with other the meanest men, to
those laws, which he himself, as part of the legislative, had
established; nor could any one, by his own authority; avoid the force of
the law, when once made; nor by any pretence of superiority plead
exemption, thereby to license his own, or the miscarriages of any of his
dependents.** No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of
it: for if any man may do what he thinks fit, and there be no appeal on
earth, for redress or security against any harm he shall do; I ask,
whether he be not perfectly still in the state of nature, and so can be
no part or member of that civil society; unless any one will say, the
state of nature and civil society are one and the same thing, which I
have never yet found any one so great a patron of anarchy as to affirm.
(*At the first, when some certain kind of regiment was once
appointed, it may be that nothing was then farther thought upon for the
manner of goveming, but all permitted unto their wisdom and discretion,
which were to rule, till by experience they found this for all parts very