inconvenient, so as the thing which they had devised for a remedy, did
indeed but increase the sore, which it should have cured. They saw, that
to live by one man's will, became the cause of all men's misery. This
constrained them to come unto laws, wherein all men might see their duty
beforehand, and know the penalties of transgressing them. Hooker's Eccl.
Pol. l. i. sect. 10.)
(**Civil law being the act of the whole body politic, cloth therefore
over-rule each several part of the same body. Hooker, ibid.)


CHAP. VIII.

Of the Beginning of Political Societies.

Sec. 95. MEN being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and
independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the
political power of another, without his own consent. The only way
whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the
bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite
into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one
amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater
security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do,
because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they
were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have
so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby
presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority
have a right to act and conclude the rest.
Sec. 96. For when any number of men have, by the consent of every
individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one
body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and