The more we reflect on this subject, the greater appears the distance

between pure sensation and the most simple knowledge: it is impossible

indeed to conceive how a man, by his own powers alone, without the aid

of communication and the spur of necessity, could have bridged so great

a gap. How many ages may have elapsed before mankind were in a position

to behold any other Are than that of the heavens. What a multiplicity

of chances must have happened to teach them the commonest uses of that

element! How often must they have let it out before they acquired the

art of reproducing it? and how often may not such a secret have died

with him who had discovered it? What shall we say of agriculture, an

art which requires so much labour and foresight, which is so dependent

on others that it is plain it could only be practised in a society

which had at least begun, and which does not serve so much to draw

the means of subsistence from the earth--for these it would produce

of itself--but to compel it to produce what is most to our taste? But

let us suppose that men had so multiplied that the natural produce of

the earth was no longer sufficient for their support; a supposition,

by the way, which would prove such a life to be very advantageous for

the human race; let us suppose that, without forges or workshops, the

instruments of husbandry had dropped from the sky into the hands of

savages; that they had overcome their natural aversion to continual

labour; that they had learnt so much foresight for their needs; that

they had divined how to cultivate the earth, to sow grain and plant

trees; that they had discovered the arts of grinding corn, and of

setting the grape to ferment--all being things that must have been

taught them by the gods, since it is not to be conceived how they

could discover them for themselves--yet after all this, what man among

them would be so absurd as to take the trouble of cultivating a field,

which might be stripped of its crop by the first comer, man or beast,

that might take a liking to it; and how should each of them resolve to

pass his life in wearisome labour, when, the more necessary to him the

reward of his labour might be, the surer he would be of not getting

it? In a word, how could such a situation induce men to cultivate the

earth, till it was regularly parcelled out among them; that is to say,

till the state of nature had been abolished?

Were we to suppose savage man as trained in the art of thinking as

philosophers make him; were we, like them, to suppose him a very

philosopher capable of investigating the sublimest truths, and of

forming, by highly abstract chains of reasoning, maxims of reason and

justice, deduced from the love of order in general, or the known will

of his Creator; in a word, were we to suppose him as intelligent and

enlightened, as he must have been, and is in fact found to have been,

dull and stupid, what advantage Would accrue to the species, from all

such metaphysics, which could not be communicated by one to another,

but must end with him who made them? What progress could be made by

mankind, while dispersed in the woods among other animals? and how far

could men improve or mutually enlighten one another, when, having no

fixed habitation, and no need of one another's assistance, the same

persons hardly met twice in their lives, and perhaps then, without

knowing one another or speaking together?

Let it be considered how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how

far grammar exercises the understanding and facilitates its operations.

Let us reflect on the inconceivable pains and the infinite space of

time that the first invention of languages must have cost. To these

reflections add what preceded, and then judge how many thousand ages

must have elapsed in the successive development in the human mind of

those operations of which it is capable.

I shall here take the liberty for a moment, of considering the

difficulties of the origin of languages, on which subject I might

content myself with a simple repetition of the Abbé Condillac's

investigations, as they fully confirm my system, and perhaps even

first suggested it. But it is plain, from the manner in which this

philosopher solves the difficulties he himself raises, concerning the

origin of arbitrary signs, that he assumes what I question, viz. that

a kind of society, must already have existed among the first inventors

of language. While I refer, therefore, to his observations on this

head, I think it right to give my own, in order to exhibit the same

difficulties in a light adapted to my subject. The first which presents

itself is to conceive how language can have become necessary; for

as there was no communication among men and no need for any, we can

neither conceive the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility

of it, if it was not somehow indispensable. I might affirm, with many

others, that languages arose in the domestic intercourse between

parents and their children. But this expedient would not obviate the

difficulty, and would besides involve the blunder made by those who, in

reasoning on the state of nature, always import into it ideas gathered

in a state of society. Thus they constantly consider families as living

together under one roof, and the individuals of each as observing among

themselves a union as intimate and permanent as that which exists

among us, where so many common interests unite them: whereas, in this

primitive state, men had neither houses, nor huts, nor any kind of

property whatever; every one lived where he could, seldom for more

than a single night; the sexes united without design, as accident,

opportunity or inclination brought them together, nor had they any

great need of words to communicate their designs to each other; and

they parted with the same indifference. The mother gave suck to her

children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had

made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to

go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord;

and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another

than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite

incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.

It is farther to be observed that the child, having all his wants to

explain, and of course more to say to his mother than the mother could

have to say to him, must have borne the brunt of the task of invention,

and the language he used would be of his own device, so that the number

of languages would be equal to that of the individuals speaking them,

and the variety would be increased by the vagabond and roving life they

led, which would not give time for any idiom to become constant. For to

say that the mother dictated to her child the words he was to use in

asking her for one thing or another, is an explanation of how languages

already formed are taught, but by no means explains how languages were

originally formed.

We will suppose, however, that this first difficulty is obviated. Let

us for a moment then take ourselves as being on this side of the vast

space which must lie between a pure state of nature and that in which

languages had become necessary, and, admitting their necessity, let

us inquire how they could first be established. Here we have a new

and worse difficulty to grapple with; for if men need speech to learn

to think, they must have stood in much greater need of the art of

thinking, to be able to invent that of speaking. And though we might

conceive how the articulate sounds of the voice came to be taken as

the conventional interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain for

us to inquire what could have been the interpreters of this convention

for those ideas, which, answering to no sensible objects, could not be

indicated either by gesture or voice; so that we can hardly form any

tolerable conjectures about the origin of this art of communicating our

thoughts and establishing a correspondence between minds: an art so

sublime, that far distant as it is from its origin, philosophers still

behold it at such an immeasurable distance from perfection, that there

is none rash enough to affirm it will ever reach it, even though the

revolutions time necessarily produces were suspended in its favour,

though prejudice should be banished from our academies or condemned

to silence, and those learned societies should devote themselves

uninterruptedly for whole ages to this thorny question.

The first language of mankind, the most universal and vivid, in a

word the only language man needed, before he had occasion to exert

his eloquence to persuade assembled multitudes, was the simple cry of

nature. But as this was excited only by a sort of instinct on urgent

occasions, to implore assistance in case of danger, or relief in case

of suffering, it could be of little use in the ordinary course of life,

in which more moderate feelings prevail. When the ideas of men began to

expand and multiply, and closer communication took place among them,

they strove to invent more numerous signs and a more copious language.

They multiplied the inflections of the voice, and added gestures,

which are in their own nature more expressive, and depend less for

their meaning on a prior determination. Visible and movable objects

were therefore expressed by gestures, and audible ones by imitative

sounds: but, as hardly anything can be indicated by gestures, except

objects actually present or easily described, and visible actions; as

they are not universally useful--for darkness or the interposition

of a material object destroys their efficacy--and as besides they

rather request than secure our attention; men at length bethought

themselves of substituting for them the articulate sounds of the voice,

which, without bearing the same relation to any particular ideas, are

better calculated to express them all, as conventional signs. Such an

institution could only be made by common consent, and must have been

effected in a manner not very easy for men whose gross organs had not

been accustomed to any such exercise. It is also in itself still more

difficult to conceive, since such a common agreement must have had

motives, and speech seems to have been highly necessary to establish

the use of it.

It is reasonable to suppose that the words first made use of by mankind

had a much more extensive signification than those used in languages

already formed, and that ignorant as they were of the division of

discourse into its constituent parts, they at first gave every single

word the sense of a whole proposition. When they began to distinguish

subject and attribute, and noun and verb, which was itself no common

effort of genius, substantives were at first only so many proper

names; the present infinitive was the only tense of verbs; and the very

idea of adjectives must have been developed with great difficulty; for

every adjective is an abstract idea, and abstractions are painful and

unnatural operations.

Every object at first received a particular name without regard to

genus or species, which these primitive originators were not in a

position to distinguish; every individual presented itself to their

minds in isolation, as they are in the picture of nature. If one oak

was called A, another was called B; for the primitive idea of two

things is that they are not the same, and it often takes a long time

for what they have in common to be seen: so that, the narrower the

limits of their knowledge of things, the more copious their dictionary

must have been. The difficulty of using such a vocabulary could not

be easily removed; for, to arrange beings under common and generic

denominations, it became necessary to know their distinguishing

properties: the need arose for observation and definition, that is to

say, for natural history and metaphysics of a far more developed kind

than men can at that time have possessed.

Add to this, that general ideas cannot be introduced into the mind

without the assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize

them except by means of propositions. This is one of the reasons why

animals cannot form such ideas, or ever acquire that capacity for

self-improvement which depends on them. When a monkey goes from one nut

to another, are we to conceive that he entertains any general idea of

that kind of fruit, and compares its archetype with the two individual

nuts? Assuredly he does not; but the sight of one of these nuts recalls

to his memory the sensations which he received from the other, and his

eyes, being modified after a certain manner, give information to the

palate of the modification it is about to receive. Every general idea

is purely intellectual; if the imagination meddles with it ever so

little, the idea immediately becomes particular. If you endeavour to

trace in your mind the image of a tree in general, you never attain to

your end. In spite of all you can do, you will have to see it as great

or little, bare or leafy, light or dark, and were you capable of seeing

nothing in it but what is common to all trees, it would no longer be

like a tree at all. Purely abstract beings are perceivable in the same

manner, or are only conceivable by the help of language. The definition

of a triangle alone gives you a true idea of it: the moment you imagine

a triangle in your mind, it is some particular triangle and not

another, and you cannot avoid giving it sensible lines and a coloured

area. We must then make use of propositions and of language in order to

form general ideas. For no sooner does the imagination cease to operate

than the understanding proceeds only by the help of words. If then the

first inventors of speech could give names only to ideas they already

had, it follows that the first substantives could be nothing more than

proper names.

But when our new grammarians, by means of which I have no conception,

began to extend their ideas and generalise their terms, the ignorance

of the inventors must have confined this method within very narrow

limits; and, as they had at first gone too far in multiplying the names

of individuals, from ignorance of their genus and species, they made

afterwards too few of these, from not having considered beings in all

their specific differences. It would indeed have needed more knowledge

and experience than they could have, and more pains and inquiry than

they would have bestowed, to carry these distinctions to their proper

length. If, even to-day, we are continually discovering new species,

which have hitherto escaped observation, let us reflect how many of

them must have escaped men who judged things merely from their first

appearance! It is superfluous to add that the primitive classes and

the most general notions must necessarily have escaped their notice

also. How, for instance, could they have understood or thought of the

words matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion, when even our

philosophers, who have so long been making use of them, have themselves

the greatest difficulty in understanding them; and when, the ideas

attached to them being purely metaphysical, there are no models of them

to be found in nature?

But I stop at this point, and ask my judges to suspend their reading

a while, to consider, after the invention of physical substantives,

which is the easiest part of language to invent, that there is still a

great way to go, before the thoughts of men will have found perfect

expression and constant form, such as would answer the purposes of

public speaking, and produce their effect on society. I beg of them to

consider how much time must have been spent, and how much knowledge

needed, to find out numbers, abstract terms, aorists and all the tenses

of verbs, particles, syntax, the method of connecting propositions,

the forms of reasoning, and all the logic of speech. For myself, I am

so aghast at the increasing difficulties which present themselves,

and so well convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that

languages should owe their original institution to merely human means,

that I leave, to any one who will undertake it, the discussion of

the difficult problem, which was most necessary, the existence of

society to the invention of language, or the invention of language

to the establishment of society. But be the origin of language and

society what they may, it may be at least inferred, from the little

care which nature has taken to unite mankind by mutual wants, and to

facilitate the use of speech, that she has contributed little to make

them sociable, and has put little of her own into all they have done

to create such bonds of union. It is in fact impossible to conceive

why, in a state of nature, one man should stand more in need of the

assistance of another, than a monkey or a wolf of the assistance of

another of its kind: or, granting that he did, what motives could

induce that other to assist him; or, even then, by what means they

could agree about the conditions. I know it is incessantly repeated

that man would in such a state have been the most miserable of

creatures; and indeed, if it be true, as I think I have proved, that

he must have lived many ages, before he could have either desire or

an opportunity of emerging from it, this would only be an accusation

against nature, and not against the being which she had thus unhappily

constituted. But as I understand the word _miserable_, it either has

no meaning at all, or else signifies only a painful privation of

something, or a state of suffering either in body or soul. I should be

glad to have explained to me, what kind of misery a free being, whose

heart is at ease and whose body is in health, can possibly suffer. I

would ask also, whether a social or a natural life is most likely to

become insupportable to those who enjoy it. We see around us hardly a

creature in civil society, who does not lament his existence: we even

see many deprive themselves of as much of it as they can, and laws

human and divine together can hardly put a stop to the disorder. I

ask, if it was ever known that a savage took it into his head, when

at liberty, to complain of life or to make away with himself. Let us

therefore judge, with less vanity, on which side the real misery is

found. On the other hand, nothing could be more unhappy than savage

man, dazzled by science, tormented by his passions, and reasoning about

a state different from his own. It appears that Providence most wisely

determined that the faculties, which he potentially possessed, should

develop themselves only as occasion offered to exercise them, in order

that they might not be superfluous or perplexing to him, by appearing

before their time, nor slow and useless when the need for them arose.

In instinct alone, he had all he required for living in the state of

nature; and with a developed understanding he has only just enough to

support life in society.

It appears, at first view, that men in a state of nature, having no

moral relations or determinate obligations one with another, could

not be either good nor bad, virtuous or vicious; unless we take these

terms in a physical sense, and call, in an individual, those qualities

vices which may be injurious to his preservation, and those virtues

which contribute to it; in which case, he would have to be accounted

most virtuous, who put least check on the pure impulses of nature.

But without deviating from the ordinary sense of the words, it will

be proper to suspend the judgment we might be led to form on such a

state, and be on our guard against our prejudices, till we have weighed

the matter in the scales of impartiality, and seen whether virtues

or vices preponderate among civilised men; and whether their virtues

do them more good than their vices do harm; till we have discovered,

whether the progress of the sciences sufficiently indemnifies them for

the mischiefs they do one another, in proportion as they are better

informed of the good they ought to do; or whether they would not be,

on the whole, in a much happier condition if they had nothing to fear

or to hope from any one, than as they are, subjected to universal

dependence, and obliged to take everything from those who engage to

give them nothing in return.

Above all, let us not conclude, with Hobbes, that because man has no

idea of goodness, he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious

because he does not know virtue; that he always refuses to do his

fellow-creatures services which he does not think they have a

right to demand; or that by virtue of the right he truly claims to

everything he needs, he foolishly imagines himself the sole proprietor

of the whole universe. Hobbes had seen clearly the defects of all

the modern definitions of natural right: but the consequences which

he deduces from his own show that he understands it in an equally

false sense. In reasoning on the principles he lays down, he ought

to have said that the state of nature, being that in which the care

for our own preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others,

was consequently the best calculated to promote peace, and the most

suitable for mankind. He does say the exact opposite, in consequence

of having improperly admitted, as a part of savage man's care for

self-preservation, the gratification of a multitude of passions which

are the work of society, and have made laws necessary. A bad man, he

says, is a robust child. But it remains to be proved whether man in

a state of nature is this robust child: and, should we grant that he

is, what would he infer? Why truly, that if this man, when robust and

strong, were dependent on others as he is when feeble, there is no

extravagance he would not be guilty of; that he would beat his mother

when she was too slow in giving him her breast; that he would strangle

one of his younger brothers, if he should be troublesome to him, or

bite the arm of another, if he put him to any inconvenience. But that

man in the state of nature is both strong and dependent involves two

contrary suppositions. Man is weak when he is dependent, and is his

own master before he comes to be strong. Hobbes did not reflect that

the same cause, which prevents a savage from making use of his reason,

as our jurists hold, prevents him also from abusing his faculties, as

Hobbes himself allows: so that it may be justly said that savages are

not bad merely because they do not know what it is to be good: for it

is neither the development of the understanding nor the restraint

of law that hinders them from doing ill; but the peacefulness of

their passions, and their ignorance of vice: _tanto plus in illis

proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis_.[2] There

is another principle which has escaped Hobbes; which, having been

bestowed on mankind, to moderate, on certain occasions, the impetuosity

of egoism, or, before its birth, the desire of self-preservation,

tempers the ardour with which he pursues his own welfare, by an innate

repugnance at seeing a fellow-creature suffer.[3] I think I need not

fear contradiction in holding man to be possessed of the only natural

virtue, which could not be denied him by the most violent detractor

of human virtue. I am speaking of compassion which is a disposition

suitable to creatures so weak and subject to so many evils as we

certainly are: by so much the more universal and useful to mankind,

as it comes before any kind of reflection; and at the same time so

natural, that the very brutes themselves sometimes give evident proofs

of it. Not to mention the tenderness of mothers for their offspring and

the perils they encounter to save them from danger, it is well known

that horses show a reluctance to trample on living bodies. One animal

never passes by the dead body of another of its species: there are even

some which give their fellows a sort of burial; while the mournful

lowings of the cattle when they enter the slaughter-house show the

impressions made on them by the horrible spectacle which meets them.

We find, with pleasure, the author of the Fable of the Bees obliged to

own that man is a compassionate and sensible being, and laying aside

his cold subtlety of style, in the example he gives, to present us with

the pathetic description of a man who, from a place of confinement,

is compelled to behold a wild beast tear a child from the arms of its

mother, grinding its tender limbs with its murderous teeth, and tearing

its palpitating entrails with its claws. What horrid agitation must

not the eye-witness of such a scene experience, although he would not

be personally concerned! What anxiety would he not suffer at not being

able to give any assistance to the fainting mother and the dying infant!

Such is the pure emotion of nature, prior to all kinds of reflection!

Such is the force of natural compassion, which the greatest depravity

of morals has as yet hardly been able to destroy! for we daily find

at our theatres men affected, nay shedding tears at the sufferings of

a wretch who, were he in the tyrant's place, would probably even add

to the torments of his enemies; like the bloodthirsty Sulla, who was

so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or that Alexander of Pheros

who did not dare to go and see any tragedy acted, for fear of being

seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, though he could listen without

emotion to the cries of all the citizens who were daily strangled at

his command.

_Mollissima corda_

_Humano generi dare se natura fatetur,_

_Qua lacrimas dedit._

Juvenal, Satire xv, 151.[4]

Mandeville well knew that, in spite of all their morality, men would

have never been better than monsters, had not nature bestowed on them

a sense of compassion, to aid their reason: but he did not see that

from this quality alone flow all those social virtues, of which he

denied man the possession. But what is generosity, clemency or humanity

but compassion applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to mankind in

general? Even benevolence and friendship are, if we judge rightly, only

the effects of compassion, constantly set upon a particular object: for

how is it different to wish that another person may not suffer pain

and uneasiness and to wish him happy? Were it even true that pity is

no more than a feeling, which puts us in the place of the sufferer,

a feeling, obscure yet lively in a savage, developed yet feeble in

civilised man; this truth would have no other consequence than to

confirm my argument. Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the

more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with

the animal that suffers. Now, it is plain that such identification

must have been much more perfect in a state of nature than it is in

a state of reason. It is reason that engenders self-respect, and

reflection that confirms it: it is reason which turns man's mind back

upon itself, and divides him from everything that could disturb or

afflict him. It is philosophy that isolates him, and bids him say, at

sight of the misfortunes of others: "Perish if you will, I am secure."

Nothing but such general evils as threaten the whole community can

disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher, or tear him from his

bed. A murder may with impunity be committed under his window; he has

only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to

prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself

with the unfortunate sufferer. Uncivilised man has not this admirable

talent; and for want of reason and wisdom, is always foolishly ready to

obey the first promptings of humanity. It is the populace that flocks

together at riots and street-brawls, while the wise man prudently makes

off. It is the mob and the market-women, who part the combatants, and

hinder gentle-folks from cutting one another's throats.

It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling which, by

moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes

to the preservation of the whole species. It is this compassion that

hurries us without reflection to the relief of those who are in

distress: it is this which in a state of nature supplies the place of

laws, morals and virtues, with the advantage that none are tempted to

disobey its gentle voice: it is this which will always prevent a sturdy

savage from robbing a weak child or a feeble old man of the sustenance

they may have with pain and difficulty acquired, if he sees a

possibility of providing for himself by other means: it is this which,

instead of inculcating that sublime maxim of rational justice, _Do to

others as you would have them do unto you,_ inspires all men with that

other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect indeed, but perhaps

more useful; _Do good to yourself with as little evil as possible to

others._ In a word, it is rather in this natural feeling than in any

subtle arguments that we must look for the cause of that repugnance,

which every man would experience in doing evil, even independently of

the maxims of education. Although it might belong to Socrates and other

minds of the like craft to acquire virtue by reason, the human race

would long since have ceased to be, had its preservation depended only

on the reasonings of the individuals composing it.

With passions so little active, and so good a curb, men, being rather

wild than wicked, and more intent to guard themselves against the

mischief that might be done them, than to do mischief to others, were

by no means subject to very perilous dissensions. They maintained no

kind of intercourse with one another, and were consequently strangers

to vanity, deference, esteem and contempt; they had not the least

idea of _meum_ and _tuum_, and no true conception of justice; they

looked upon every violence to which they were subjected, rather as an

injury that might easily be repaired than as a crime that ought to be

punished; and they never thought of taking revenge, unless perhaps

mechanically and on the spot, as a dog will sometimes bite the stone

which is thrown at him. Their quarrels therefore would seldom have

very bloody consequences; for the subject of them would be merely the

question of subsistence. But I am aware of one greater danger, which

remains to be noticed.

Of the passions that stir the heart of man, there is one which

makes the sexes necessary to each other, and is extremely ardent

and impetuous; a terrible passion that braves danger, surmounts all

obstacles, and in its transports seems calculated to bring destruction

on the human race which it is really destined to preserve. What must

become of men who are left to this brutal and boundless rage, without

modesty, without shame, and daily upholding their amours at the price

of their blood?

It must, in the first place, be allowed that, the more violent the

passions are, the more are laws necessary to keep them under restraint.

But, setting aside the inadequacy of laws to effect this purpose, which

is evident from the crimes and disorders to which these passions daily

give rise among us, we should do well to inquire if these evils did not

spring up with the laws themselves; for in this case, even if the laws

were capable of repressing such evils, it is the least that could be

expected from them, that they should check a mischief which would not

have arisen without them.

Let us begin by distinguishing between the physical and moral

ingredients in the feeling of love. The physical part of love is that

general desire which urges the sexes to union with each other. The

moral part is that which determines and fixes this desire exclusively

upon one particular object; or at least gives it a greater degree of

energy toward the object thus preferred. It is easy to see that the

moral part of love is a factitious feeling, born of social usage, and

enhanced by the women with much care and cleverness, to establish their

empire, and put in power the sex which ought to obey. This feeling,

being founded on certain ideas of beauty and merit which a savage is

not in a position to acquire, and on comparisons which he is incapable

of making, must be for him almost non-existent; for, as his mind

cannot form abstract ideas of proportion and regularity, so his heart

is not susceptible of the feelings of love and admiration, which are

even insensibly produced by the application of these ideas. He follows

solely the character nature has implanted in him, and not tastes which

he could never have acquired; so that every woman equally answers his

purpose.

Men in a state of nature being confined merely to what is physical in

love, and fortunate enough to be ignorant of those excellences, which

whet the appetite while they increase the difficulty of gratifying

it, must be subject to fewer and less violent fits of passion,

and consequently fall into fewer and less violent disputes. The

imagination, which causes such ravages among us, never speaks to the

heart of savages, who quietly await the impulses of nature, yield to

them involuntarily, with more pleasure than ardour, and, their wants

once satisfied, lose the desire. It is therefore incontestable that

love, as well as all other passions, must have acquired in society

that glowing impetuosity, which makes it so often fatal to mankind.

And it is the more absurd to represent savages as continually cutting

one another's throats to indulge their brutality, because this opinion

is directly contrary to experience; the Caribeans, who have as yet

least of all deviated from the state of nature, being in fact the most

peaceable of people in their amours, and the least subject to jealousy,

though they live in a hot climate which seems always to inflame the

passions.

With regard to the inferences that might be drawn, in the case of

several species of animals, the males of which fill our poultry-yards

with blood and slaughter, or in spring make the forests resound with

their quarrels over their females; we must begin by excluding all those

species, in which nature has plainly established, in the comparative

power of the sexes, relations different from those which exist among

us: thus we can base no conclusion about men on the habits of fighting

cocks. In those species where the proportion is better observed, these

battles must be entirely due to the scarcity of females in comparison

with males; or, what amounts to the same thing, to the intervals during

which the female constantly refuses the advances of the male: for if

each female admits the male but during two months in the year, it

is the same as if the number of females were five-sixths less. Now,

neither of these two cases is applicable to the human species, in

which the number of females usually exceeds that of males, and among

whom it has never been observed, even among savages, that the females

have, like those of other animals, their stated times of passion and

indifference. Moreover, in several of these species, the individuals

all take fire at once, and there comes a fearful moment of universal

passion, tumult and disorder among them; a scene which is never beheld

in the human species, whose love is not thus seasonal. We must not

then conclude from the combats of such animals for the enjoyment of

the females, that the case would be the same with mankind in a state

of nature: and, even if we drew such a conclusion, we see that such

contests do not exterminate other kinds of animals, and we have no

reason to think they would be more fatal to ours. It is indeed clear

that they would do still less mischief than is the case in a state of

society; especially in those countries in which, morals being still

held in some repute, the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of

husbands are the daily cause of duels, murders, and even worse crimes;

where the obligation of eternal fidelity only occasions adultery, and

the very laws of honour and continence necessarily increase debauchery

and lead to the multiplication of abortions.

Let us conclude then that man in a state of nature, wandering up

and down the forests, without industry, without speech, and without

home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in

need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and

perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another; let us conclude

that, being self-sufficient and subject to so few passions, he could

have no feelings or knowledge but such as befitted his situation;

that he felt only his actual necessities, and disregarded everything

he did not think himself immediately concerned to notice, and that

his understanding made no greater progress than his vanity. If by

accident he made any discovery, he was the less able to communicate

it to others, as he did not know even his own children. Every art

would necessarily perish with its inventor, where there was no kind of

education among men, and generations succeeded generations without the

least advance; when, all setting out from the same point, centuries

must have elapsed in the barbarism of the first ages; when the race was

already old, and man remained a child.

If I have expatiated at such length on this supposed primitive state,

it is because I had so many ancient errors and inveterate prejudices

to eradicate, and therefore thought it incumbent on me to dig down to

their very root, and show, by means of a true picture of the state

of nature, how far even the natural inequalities of mankind are from

having that reality and influence which modern writers suppose.

It is in fact easy to see that many of the differences which

distinguish men are merely the effect of habit and the different

methods of life men adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate

constitution, and the strength or weakness attaching to it, are more

frequently the effects of a hardy or effeminate method of education

than of the original endowment of the body. It is the same with the

powers of the mind; for education not only makes a difference between

such as are cultured and such as are not, but even increases the

differences which exist among the former, in proportion to their

respective degrees of culture: as the distance between a giant and

a dwarf on the same road increases with every step they take. If we

compare the prodigious diversity, which obtains in the education and

manner of life of the various orders of men in the state of society,

with the uniformity and simplicity of animal and savage life, in

which every one lives on the same kind of food and in exactly the

same manner, and does exactly the same things, it is easy to conceive

how much less the difference between man and man must be in a state

of nature than in a state of society, and how greatly the natural

inequality of mankind must be increased by the inequalities of social

institutions.

But even if nature really affected, in the distribution of her gifts,

that partiality which is imputed to her, what advantage would the

greatest of her favourites derive from it, to the detriment of others,

in a state that admits of hardly any kind of relation between them?

Where there is no love, of what advantage is beauty? Of what use is wit

to those who do not converse, or cunning to those who have no business

with others? I hear it constantly repeated that, in such a state, the

strong would oppress the weak; but what is here meant by oppression?

Some, it is said, would violently domineer over others, who would

groan under a servile submission to their caprices. This indeed is

exactly what I observe to be the case among us; but I do not see how

it can be inferred of men in a state of nature, who could not easily

be brought to conceive what we mean by dominion and servitude. One

man, it is true, might seize the fruits which another had gathered,

the game he had killed, or the cave he had chosen for shelter; but how

would he ever be able to exact obedience, and what ties of dependence

could there be among men without possessions? If, for instance, I am

driven from one tree, I can go to the next; if I am disturbed in one

place, what hinders me from going to another? Again, should I happen to

meet with a man so much stronger than myself, and at the same time so

depraved, so indolent, and so barbarous, as to compel me to provide for

his sustenance while he himself remains idle; he must take care not to

have his eyes off me for a single moment; he must bind me fast before

he goes to sleep, or I shall certainly either knock him on the head

or make my escape. That is to say, he must in such a case voluntarily

expose himself to much greater trouble than he seeks to avoid, or can

give me. After all this, let him be off his guard ever so little;

let him but turn his head aside at any sudden noise, and I shall be

instantly twenty paces off, lost in the forest, and, my fetters burst

asunder, he would never see me again.

Without my expatiating thus uselessly on these details, every one

must see that as the bonds of servitude are formed merely by the

mutual dependence of men on one another and the reciprocal needs that

unite them, it is impossible to make any man a slave, unless he be

first reduced to a situation in which he cannot do without the help

of others: and, since such a situation does not exist in a state of

nature, every one is there his own master, and the law of the strongest

is of no effect.

Having proved that the inequality of mankind is hardly felt, and that

its influence is next to nothing in a state of nature, I must next

show its origin and trace its progress in the successive developments

of the human mind. Having shown that human _perfectibility_, the

social virtues, and the other faculties which natural man potentially

possessed, could never develop of themselves, but must require the

fortuitous concurrence of many foreign causes that might never arise,

and without which he would have remained for ever in his primitive

condition, I must now collect and consider the different accidents

which may have improved the human understanding while depraving the

species, and made man wicked while making him sociable; so as to bring

him and the world from that distant period to the point at which we now

behold them.

I confess that, as the events I am going to describe might have

happened in various ways, I have nothing to determine my choice but

conjectures: but such conjectures become reasons, when they are the

most probable that can be drawn from the nature of things, and the only

means of discovering the truth. The consequences, however, which I mean

to deduce will not be barely conjectural; as, on the principles just

laid down, it would be impossible to form any other theory that would

not furnish the same results, and from which I could not draw the same

conclusions.

This will be a sufficient apology for my not dwelling on the manner in

which the lapse of time compensates for the little probability in the

events; on the surprising power of trivial causes, when their action is

constant; on the impossibility, on the one hand, of destroying certain

hypotheses, though on the other we cannot give them the certainty of

known matters of fact; on its being within the province of history,

when two facts are given as real, and have to be connected by a series

of intermediate facts, which are unknown or supposed to be so, to

supply such facts as may connect them; and on its being in the province

of philosophy when history is silent, to determine similar facts to

serve the same end; and lastly, on the influence of similarity, which,

in the case of events, reduces the facts to a much smaller number of

different classes than is commonly imagined. It is enough for me to

offer these hints to the consideration of my judges, and to have so

arranged that the general reader has no need to consider them at all.

[1] See Appendix.

[2] Justin. Hist, ii, 2. So much more does the ignorance of vice profit

the one sort than the knowledge of virtue the other.

[3] Egoism must not be confused with self-respect: for they differ both

in themselves and in their effects. Self-respect is a natural feeling

which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which,

guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity

and virtue. Egoism is a purely relative and factitious feeling, which

arises in the state of society, leads each individual to make more of

himself than of any other, causes all the mutual damage men inflict one

on another, and is the real source of the "sense of honour." This being

understood, I maintain that, in our primitive condition, in the true

state of nature, egoism did not exist; for as each man regarded himself

as the only observer of his actions, the only being in the universe who

took any interest in him, and the sole judge of his deserts, no feeling

arising from comparisons he could not be led to make could take root

in his soul; and for the same reason, he could know neither hatred nor

the desire for revenge, since these passions can spring only from a

sense of injury: and as it is the contempt or the intention to hurt,

and not the harm done, which constitutes the injury, men who neither

valued nor compared themselves could do one another much violence, when

it suited them, without feeling any sense of injury. In a word, each

man, regarding his fellows almost as he regarded animals of different

species, might seize the prey of a weaker or yield up his own to a

stronger, and yet consider these acts of violence as mere natural

occurrences, without the slightest emotion of insolence or despite, or

any other feeling than the joy or grief of success or failure.

[4] Nature avows she gave the human race the softest hearts, who gave <

them tears.

THE SECOND PART

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself

of saying _This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe

him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars

and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one

have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch,

and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you

are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth, belong to

us all, and the earth itself to nobody." But there is great probability

that things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no

longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many

prior ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have

been formed all at once in the human mind.

Mankind must have made very considerable progress, and acquired

considerable knowledge and industry which they must also have

transmitted and increased from age to age, before they arrived at this

last point of the state of nature. Let us then go farther back and

endeavour to unify under a single point of view that slow succession of

events and discoveries in the most natural order.

Man's first feeling was that of his own existence, and his first care

that of self-preservation. The produce of the earth furnished him

with all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it. Hunger and

other appetites made him at various times experience various modes of

existence; and among these was one which urged him to propagate his

species--a blind propensity that, having nothing to do with the heart,

produced a merely animal act. The want once gratified, the two sexes

knew each other no more; and even the offspring was nothing to its

mother, as soon as it could do without her.

Such was the condition of infant man; the life of an animal limited

at first to mere sensations, and hardly profiting by the gifts nature

bestowed on him, much less capable of entertaining a thought of forcing

anything from her. But difficulties soon presented themselves, and

it became necessary to learn how to surmount them: the height of the

trees, which prevented him from gathering their fruits, the competition

of other animals desirous of the same fruits, and the ferocity of those

who needed them for their own preservation, all obliged him to apply

himself to bodily exercises. He had to be active, swift of foot, and

vigorous in light. Natural weapons, stones and sticks, were easily

found: he learnt to surmount the obstacles of nature, to contend in

case of necessity with other animals, and to dispute for the means of

subsistence even with other men, or to indemnify himself for what he

was forced to give up to a stronger.

In proportion as the human race grew more numerous, men's cares

increased. The difference of soils, climates and seasons, must have

introduced some differences into their manner of living. Barren years,

long and sharp winters, scorching summers which parched the fruits of

the earth, must have demanded a new industry. On the sea-shore and the

banks of rivers, they invented the hook and line, and became fishermen

and eaters of fish. In the forests they made bows and arrows, and

became huntsmen and warriors. In cold countries they clothed themselves

with the skins of the beasts they had slain. The lightning, a volcano,

or some lucky chance acquainted them with fire, a new resource against

the rigours of winter: they next learned how to preserve this element,

then how to reproduce it, and finally how to prepare with it the flesh

of animals which before they had eaten raw.

This repeated relevance of various beings to himself, and one to

another, would naturally give rise in the human mind to the perceptions

of certain relations between them. Thus the relations which we denote

by the terms, great, small, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold,

and the like, almost insensibly compared at need, must have at length

produced in him a kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence,

which would indicate to him the precautions most necessary to his

security.

The new intelligence which resulted from this development increased his

superiority over other animals, by making him sensible of it. He would

now endeavour, therefore, to ensnare them, would play them a thousand

tricks, and though many of them might surpass him in swiftness or in

strength, would in time become the master of some and the scourge of

others. Thus, the first time he looked into himself, he felt the first

emotion of pride; and, at a time when he scarce knew how to distinguish

the different orders of beings, by looking upon his species as of the

highest order, he prepared the way for assuming pre-eminence as an

individual.

Other men, it is true, were not then to him what they now are to us,

and he had no greater intercourse with them than with other animals;

yet they were not neglected in his observations. The conformities,

which he would in time discover between them, and between himself and

his female, led him to judge of others which were not then perceptible;

and finding that they all behaved as he himself would have done in like

circumstances, he naturally inferred that their manner of thinking

and acting was altogether in conformity with his own. This important

truth, once deeply impressed on his mind, must have induced him, from

an intuitive feeling more certain and much more rapid than any kind of

reasoning, to pursue the rules of conduct, which he had best observe

towards them, for his own security and advantage.

Taught by experience that the love of well-being is the sole motive of

human actions, he found himself in a position to distinguish the few

cases, in which mutual interest might justify him in relying upon the

assistance of his fellows; and also the still fewer cases in which a

conflict of interests might give cause to suspect them. In the former

case, he joined in the same herd with them, or at most in some kind of

loose association, that laid no restraint on its members, and lasted no

longer than the transitory occasion that formed it. In the latter case,

every one sought his own private advantage, either by open force, if he

thought himself strong enough, or by address and cunning, if he felt

himself the weaker.

In this manner, men may have insensibly acquired some gross ideas of

mutual undertakings, and of the advantages of fulfilling them: that

is, just so far as their present and apparent interest was concerned:

for they were perfect strangers to foresight, and were so far from

troubling themselves about the distant future, that they hardly thought

of the morrow. If a deer was to be taken, every one saw that, in

order to succeed, he must abide faithfully by his post: but if a hare

happened to come within the reach of any one of them, it is not to be

doubted that he pursued it without scruple, and, having seized his

prey, cared very little, if by so doing he caused his companions to

miss theirs.

It is easy to understand that such intercourse would not require a

language much more refined than that of rooks or monkeys, who associate

together for much the same, purpose. Inarticulate cries, plenty of

gestures and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long time the

universal language; and by the addition, in every country, of some

conventional articulate sounds (of which, as I have already intimated,

the first institution is not too easy to explain) particular languages

were produced; but these were rude and imperfect, and nearly such as

now to be found among some savage nations.

Hurried on by the rapidity of time, by the abundance of things I have

to say, and by the almost insensible progress of things in their

beginnings, I pass over in an instant a multitude of ages; for the

slower the events were in their succession, the more rapidly may they

be described.

These first advances enabled men to make others with greater rapidity.

In proportion as they grew enlightened, they grew industrious. They

ceased to fall asleep under the first tree, or in the first cave that

afforded them shelter; they invented several kinds of implements of

hard and sharp stones, which they used to dig up the earth, and to

cut wood; they then made huts out of branches, and afterwards learnt

to plaster them over with mud and clay. This was the epoch of a

first revolution, which established and distinguished families, and

introduced a kind of property, in itself the source of a thousand

quarrels and conflicts. As, however, the strongest were probably the

first to build themselves huts which they felt themselves able to

defend, it may be concluded that the weak found it much easier and

safer to imitate, than to attempt to dislodge them: and of those

who were once provided with huts, none could have any inducement to

appropriate that of his neighbour; not indeed so much because it did

not belong to him, as because it could be of no use, and he could not

make himself master of it without exposing himself to a desperate

battle with the family which occupied it.

The first expansions of the human heart were the effects of a novel

situation, which united husbands and wives, fathers and children, under

one roof. The habit of living together soon gave rise to the finest

feelings known to humanity, conjugal love and paternal affection. Every

family became a little society, the more united because liberty--and

reciprocal attachment were the only bonds of its union. The sexes,

whose manner of life had been hitherto the same, began now to adopt

different ways of living. The women became more sedentary, and

accustomed themselves to mind the hut and their children, while the

men went abroad in search of their common subsistence. From living a

softer life, both sexes also began to lose something of their strength

and ferocity: but, if individuals became to some extent less able to

encounter wild beasts separately, they found it, on the other hand,

easier to assemble and resist in common.

The simplicity and solitude of man's life in this new condition, the

paucity of his wants, and the implements he had invented to satisfy

them, left him a great deal of leisure, which he employed to furnish

himself with many conveniences unknown to his fathers: and this was the

first yoke he inadvertently imposed on himself, and the first source

of the evils he prepared for his descendants. For, besides continuing

thus to enervate both body and mind, these conveniences lost with use

almost all their power to please, and even degenerated into real needs,

till the want of them became far more disagreeable than the possession

of them had been pleasant. Men would have been unhappy at the loss of

them, though the possession did not make them happy.

We can here see a little better how the use of speech became

established, and insensibly improved in each family, and we may form

a conjecture also concerning the manner in which various causes may

have extended and accelerated the progress of language, by making it

more and more necessary. Floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited

districts with precipices or waters: revolutions of the globe tore off

portions from the continent, and made them islands. It is readily seen

that among men thus collected and compelled to live together, a common

idiom must have arisen much more easily than among those who still

wandered through the forests of the continent. Thus it is very possible

that after their first essays in navigation the islanders brought over

the use of speech to the continent: and it is at least very probable

that communities and languages were first established in islands, and

even came to perfection there before they were known on the mainland.

Everything now begins to change its aspect. Men, who have up to now

been roving in the woods, by taking to a more settled manner of life,

come gradually together, form separate bodies, and at length in every

country arises a distinct nation, united in character and manners,

not by regulations or laws, but by uniformity of life and food, and

the common influence of climate. Permanent neighbourhood could not

fail to produce, in time, some connection between different families.

Among young people of opposite sexes, living in neighbouring huts,

the transient commerce required by nature soon led, through mutual

intercourse, to another kind not less agreeable, and more permanent.

Men began now to take the difference between objects into account,

and to make comparisons; they acquired imperceptibly the ideas of

beauty and merit, which soon gave rise to feelings of preference. In

consequence of seeing each other often, they could not do without

seeing each other constantly. A tender and pleasant feeling insinuated

itself into their souls, and the least opposition turned it into an

impetuous fury: with love arose jealousy; discord triumphed, and human

blood was sacrificed to the gentlest of all passions.

As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and heart and head

were brought into play, men continued to lay aside their original

wildness; their private connections became every day more intimate

as their limits extended. They accustomed themselves to assemble

before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true

offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the

occupation, of men and women thus assembled together with nothing

else to do. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be

considered in turn; and thus a--value came to be attached to public

esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the

strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of

most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality,

and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions arose

on the one side vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy:

and the fermentation caused by these new leavens ended by producing

combinations fatal to innocence and happiness.

As soon as men began to value one another, and the idea of

consideration had got a footing in the mind, every one put in his claim

to it, and it became impossible to refuse it to any with impunity.

Hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages; and

every intended injury became an affront; because, besides the hurt

which might result from it, the party injured was certain to find in it

a contempt for his person, which was often more insupportable than the

hurt itself.

Thus, as every man punished the contempt shown him by others, in

proportion to his opinion of himself, revenge became terrible, and men

bloody and cruel. This is precisely the state reached by most of the

savage nations known to us: and it is for want of having made a proper

distinction in our ideas, and seen how very far they already are from

the state of nature, that so many writers have hastily concluded that

man is naturally cruel, and requires civil institutions to make him

more mild; whereas nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive

state, as he is placed by nature at an equal distance from the

stupidity of brutes, and the fatal ingenuity of civilised man. Equally

confined by instinct and reason to the sole care of guarding himself

against the mischiefs which threaten him, he is restrained by natural

compassion from doing any injury to others, and is not led to do such a

thing even in return for injuries received. For, according to the axiom

of the wise Locke, _There can be no injury, where there is no property_.

But it must be remarked that the society thus formed, and the relations

thus established among men, required of them qualities different from

those which they possessed from their primitive constitution. Morality

began to appear in human actions, and every one, before the institution

of law, was the only judge and avenger of the injuries done him, so

that the goodness which was suitable in the pure state of nature was

no longer proper in the new-born state of society. Punishments had

to be made more severe, as opportunities of offending became more

frequent, and the dread of vengeance had to take the place of the

rigour of the law. Thus, though men had become less patient, and their

natural compassion had already suffered some diminution, this period

of expansion of the human faculties, keeping a just mean between the

indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our

egoism, must have been the happiest and most stable of epochs. The

more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that this state was the

least subject to revolutions, and altogether the very best man could

experience; so that he can have departed from it only through some

fatal accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened.

The example of savages, most of whom have been found in this state,

seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it, that it is the

real youth of the world, and that all subsequent advances have been

apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual, but

in reality towards the decrepitude of the species.

So long as men remained content with their rustic huts, so long as

they were satisfied with clothes made of the skins of animals and sewn

together with thorns and fish-bones, adorned themselves only with

feathers and shells, and continued to paint their bodies different

colours, to improve and beautify their bows and arrows and to make

with sharp-edged stones fishing boats or clumsy musical instruments;

in a word, so long as they undertook only what a single person could

accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the

joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and

happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to

enjoy the pleasures of mutual and independent intercourse. But from

the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from

the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough

provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work

became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man

had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery

were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great

revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the

philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and

ruined humanity. Thus both were unknown to the savages of America, who

for that reason are still savage; the other nations also seem to have

continued in a state of barbarism while they practised only one of

these arts. One of the best reasons, perhaps, why Europe has been, if

not longer, at least more constantly and highly civilised than the rest

of the world, is that it is at once the most abundant in iron and the

most fertile in corn.

It is difficult to conjecture how men first came to know and use iron;

for it is impossible to suppose they would of themselves think of

digging the ore out of the mine, and preparing it for smelting, before

they knew what would be the result. On the other hand, we have the less

reason to suppose this discovery the effect of any accidental fire, as

mines are only formed in barren places, bare of trees and plants; so

that it looks as if nature had taken pains to keep the fatal secret

from us. There remains, therefore, only the extraordinary accident

of some volcano which, by ejecting metallic substances already in

fusion, suggested to the spectators the idea of imitating the natural

operation. And we must further conceive them as possessed of uncommon

courage and foresight, to undertake so laborious a work, with so

distant a prospect of drawing advantage from it; yet these qualities

are united only in minds more advanced than we can suppose those of

these first discoverers to have been.

With regard to agriculture, the principles of it were known long before

they were put in practice; and it is indeed hardly possible that men,

constantly employed in drawing their subsistence from plants and trees,

should not readily acquire a knowledge of the means made use of by

nature for the propagation of vegetables. It was in all probability

very fang, however, before their industry took that turn, either

because trees, which together with hunting and fishing afforded them

food, did not require their attention; or because they were ignorant of

the use of corn, or without instruments to cultivate it; or because

they lacked foresight to future needs; or lastly, because they were

without means of preventing others from robbing them of the fruit of

their labour.

When they grew more industrious, it is natural to believe that they

began, with the help of sharp stones and pointed sticks, to cultivate

a few vegetables or roots around their huts; though it was long before

they knew how to prepare corn, or were provided with the implements

necessary for raising it in any large quantity; not to mention how

essential it is, for husbandry, to consent to immediate loss, in order

to reap a future gain--a precaution very foreign to the turn of a

savage's mind; for, as I have said, he hardly foresees in the morning

what he will need at night.

The invention of the other arts must therefore have been necessary

to compel mankind to apply themselves to agriculture. No sooner were

artificers wanted to smelt and forge iron, than others were required

to maintain them; the more hands that were employed in manufactures,

the fewer were left to provide for the common subsistence, though

the number of mouths to be furnished with food remained the same:

and as some required commodities in exchange for their iron, the

rest at length discovered the method of making iron serve for the

multiplication of commodities. By this means the arts of husbandry and

agriculture were established on the one hand, and the art of working

metals and multiplying their uses on the other.

The cultivation of the earth necessarily brought about its

distribution; and property, once recognised, gave rise to the first

rules of justice; for, to secure each man his own, it had to be

possible for each to have something. Besides, as men began to look

forward to the future, and all had something to lose, every one

had reason to apprehend that reprisals would follow any injury he

might do to another. This origin is so much the more natural, as it

is impossible to conceive how property can come from anything but

manual labour: for what else can a man add to things which he does

not originally create, so as to make them his own property? It is the

husbandman's labour alone that, giving him a title to the produce of

the ground he has tilled, gives him a claim also to the land itself,

at least till harvest; and so, from year to year, a constant possession

which is easily transformed into property. When the ancients, says

Grotius, gave to Ceres the title of Legislatrix, and to a festival

celebrated in her honour the name of Thesmophoria, they meant by that

that the distribution of lands had produced a new kind of right: that

is to say, the right of property, which is different from the right

deducible from the law of nature.

In this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the

talents of individuals been equal, and had, for example, the use of

iron and the consumption of commodities always exactly balanced each

other; but, as there was nothing to preserve this balance, it was

soon disturbed; the strongest did most work; the most skilful turned

his labour to best account; the most ingenious devised methods of

diminishing his labour: the husbandman wanted more iron, or the smith

more corn, and, while both laboured equally, the one gained a great

deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself. Thus

natural inequality unfolds itself insensibly with that of combination,

and the difference between men, developed by their different

circumstances, becomes more sensible and permanent in its effects, and

begins to have an influence, in the same proportion, over the lot of

individuals.

Matters once at this pitch, it is easy to imagine the rest. I shall not

detain the reader with a description of the successive invention of

other arts, the development of language, the trial and utilisation of

talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use and abuse of riches, and

all the details connected with them which the reader can easily supply

for himself. I shall confine myself to a glance at mankind in this new

situation.

Behold then all human faculties developed, memory and imagination in

full play, egoism interested, reason active, and the mind almost at the

highest point of its perfection. Behold all the natural qualities in

action, the rank and condition of every man assigned him; not merely

his share of property and his power to serve or injure others, but

also his wit, beauty, strength or skill, merit or talents: and these

being the only qualities capable of commanding respect, it soon became

necessary to possess or to affect them.

It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were

not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from

this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all

the numerous vices that go in their train. On the other hand, free

and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence of

a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were,

to all nature, and particularly to one another; and each became in

some degree a slave even in becoming the master of other men: if

rich, they stood in need of the services of others; if poor, of their

assistance; and even a middle condition did not enable them to do

without one another. Man must now, therefore, have been perpetually

employed in getting others to interest themselves in his lot, and in

making them, apparently at least, if not really, find their advantage

in promoting his own. Thus he must have been sly and artful in his

behaviour to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a

kind of necessity to ill-use all the persons of whom he stood in need,

when he could not frighten them into compliance, and did not judge it

his interest to be useful to them. Insatiable ambition, the thirst of

raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from

the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity

to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more

dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point

with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition

on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with

a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All

these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable

attendants of growing inequality.

Before the invention of signs to represent riches, wealth could hardly

consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real possessions

men can have. But, when inheritances so increased in number and extent

as to occupy the whole of the land, and to border on one another, one

man could aggrandise himself only at the expense of another; at the

same time the supernumeraries, who had been too weak or too indolent to

make such acquisitions, and had grown poor without sustaining any loss,

because, while they saw everything change around them, they remained

still the same, were obliged to receive their subsistence, or steal

it, from the rich; and this soon bred, according to their different

characters, dominion and slavery, or violence and rapine. The wealthy,

on their part, had no sooner begun to taste the pleasure of command,

than they disdained all others, and, using their old slaves to acquire

new, thought of nothing but subduing and enslaving their neighbours;

like ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human flesh, despise

every other food and thenceforth seek only men to devour.

Thus, as the most powerful or the most miserable considered their might

or misery as a kind of right to the possessions of others, equivalent,

in their opinion, to that of property, the destruction of equality

was attended by the most terrible disorders. Usurpations by the rich,

robbery by the poor, and the unbridled passions of both, suppressed

the cries of natural compassion and the still feeble voice of justice,

and filled men with avarice, ambition and vice. Between the title of

the strongest and that of the first occupier, there arose perpetual

conflicts, which never ended but in battles and bloodshed. The new-born

state of society thus gave rise to a horrible state of war; men thus

harassed and depraved were no longer capable of retracing their steps

or renouncing the fatal acquisitions they had made, but, labouring by

the abuse of the faculties which do them honour, merely to their own

confusion, brought themselves to the brink of ruin.

_Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,_

_Effugere optat opes; et quæ modô voverat odit._[5]

It is impossible that men should not at length have reflected on so

wretched a situation, and on the calamities that overwhelmed them.

The rich, in particular, must have felt how much they suffered by a

constant state of war, of which they bore all the expense; and in

which, though all risked their lives, they alone risked their property.

Besides, however speciously they might disguise their usurpations,

they knew that they were founded on precarious and false titles; so

that, if others took from them by force what they themselves had

gained by force, they would have no reason to complain. Even those

who had been enriched by their own industry, could hardly base their

proprietorship on better claims. It was in vain to repeat, "I built

this well; I gained this spot by my industry." Who gave you your

standing, it might be answered, and what right have you to demand

payment of us for doing what we never asked you to do? Do you not

know that numbers of your fellow-creatures are starving, for want

of what you have too much of? You ought to have had the express and

universal consent of mankind, before appropriating more of the common

subsistence than you needed for your own maintenance. Destitute of

valid reasons to justify and sufficient strength to defend himself,

able to crush individuals with ease, but easily crushed himself by a

troop of bandits, one against all, and incapable, on account of mutual

jealousy, of joining with his equals against numerous enemies united

by the common hope of plunder, the rich man, thus urged by necessity,

conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of

man: this was to employ in his favour the forces of those who attacked

him, to make allies of his adversaries, to inspire them with different

maxims, and to give them other institutions as favourable to himself as

the law of nature was unfavourable.

With this view, after having represented to his neighbours the horror

of a situation which armed every man against the rest, and made their

possessions as burdensome to them as their wants, and in which no

safety could be expected either in riches or in poverty, he readily

devised plausible arguments to make them close with his design. "Let

us join," said he, "to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the

ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to

him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without

exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure

make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the

powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations.

Let us, in a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves,

collect them in a supreme power which may govern us by wise laws,

protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse their

common enemies, and maintain eternal harmony among us."

Far fewer words to this purpose would have been enough to impose on

men so barbarous and easily seduced; especially as they had too many

disputes among themselves to do without arbitrators, and too much

ambition and avarice to go long without masters. All ran headlong to

their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty; for they had just wit

enough to perceive the advantages of political institutions, without

experience enough to enable them to foresee the dangers. The most

capable of fore-seeing the dangers were the very persons who expected

to benefit by them; and even the most prudent judged it not inexpedient

to sacrifice one part of their freedom to ensure the rest; as a wounded

man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his body.

Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which

bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which

irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of

property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable

right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected

all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness. It is easy

to see how the establishment of one community made that of all the

rest necessary, and how, in order to make head against united forces,

the rest of mankind had to unite in turn. Societies soon multiplied

and spread over the face of the earth, till hardly a corner of the

world was left in which a man could escape the yoke, and withdraw

his head from beneath the sword which he saw perpetually hanging

over him by a thread. Civil right having thus become the common rule

among the members of each community, the law of nature maintained its

place only between different communities, where, under the name of

the right of nations, it was qualified by certain tacit conventions,

in order to make commerce practicable, and serve as a substitute for

natural compassion, which lost, when applied to societies, almost

all the influence it had over individuals, and survived no longer

except in some great cosmopolitan spirits, who, breaking down the

imaginary barriers that separate different peoples, follow the example

of our Sovereign Creator, and include the whole human race in their

benevolence.

But bodies politic, remaining thus in a state of nature among

themselves, presently experienced the inconveniences which had obliged

individuals to forsake it; for this state became still more fatal

to these great bodies than it had been to the individuals of whom

they were composed. Hence arose national wars, battles, murders, and

reprisals, which shock nature and outrage reason; together with all

those horrible prejudices which class among the virtues the honour

of shedding human blood. The most distinguished men hence learned to

consider cutting each other's throats a duty; at length men massacred

their fellow-creatures by thousands without so much as knowing why, and

committed more murders in a single day's fighting, and more violent

outrages in the sack of a single town, than were committed in the state

of nature during whole ages over the whole earth. Such were the first

effects which we can see to have followed the division of mankind into

different communities. But let us return to their institutions.

I know that some writers have given other explanations of the origin

of political societies, such as the conquest of the powerful, or the

association of the weak. It is, indeed, indifferent to my argument

which of these causes we choose. That which I have just laid down,

however, appears to me the most natural for the following reasons.

First: because, in the first case, the right of conquest, being no

right, in itself, could not serve as a foundation on which to build any

other; the victor and the vanquished people still remained with respect

to each other in the state of war, unless the vanquished, restored to

the full possession of their liberty, voluntarily made choice of the

victor for their chief. For till then, whatever capitulation may have

been made being founded on violence, and therefore _ipso facto_ void,

there could not have been on this hypothesis either a real society or

body politic, or any law other than that of the strongest. Secondly:

because the words _strong_ and _weak_ are, in the second case,

ambiguous; for during the interval between the establishment of a right

of property, or prior occupancy, and that of political government,

the meaning of these words is better expressed by the terms _rich_ and

_poor_: because, in fact, before the institution of laws, men had no

other way of reducing their equals to submission, than by attacking

their goods, or making some of their own over to them. Thirdly:

because, as the poor had nothing but their freedom to lose, it would

have been in the highest degree absurd for them to resign voluntarily

the only good they still enjoyed, without getting anything in exchange:

whereas the rich having feelings, if I may so express myself, in

every part of their possessions, it was much easier to harm them, and

therefore more necessary for them to take precautions against it; and,

in short, because it is more reasonable to suppose a thing to have been

invented by those to whom it would be of service, than by those whom it

must have harmed.

Government had, in its infancy, no regular and constant form. The want

of experience and philosophy prevented men from seeing any but present

inconveniences, and they thought of providing against others only as

they presented themselves. In spite of the endeavours of the wisest

legislators, the political state remained imperfect, because it was

little more than the work of chance; and, as it had begun ill, though

time revealed its defects and suggested remedies, the original faults

were never repaired. It was continually being patched up, when the

first task should have been to get the site cleared and all the old

materials removed, as was done by Lycurgus at Sparta, if a stable and

lasting edifice was to be erected. Society consisted at first merely of

a few general conventions, which every member bound himself to observe;

and for the performance of covenants the whole body went security to

each individual. Experience only could show the weakness of such a

constitution, and how easily it might be infringed with impunity, from

the difficulty of convicting men of faults, where the public alone

was to be witness and judge: the laws could not but be eluded in many

ways; disorders and inconveniences could not but multiply continually,

till it became necessary to commit the dangerous trust of public

authority to private persons, and the care of enforcing obedience to

the deliberations of the people to the magistrate. For to say that

chiefs were chosen before the confederacy was formed, and that the

administrators of the laws were there before the laws themselves, is

too absurd a supposition to consider seriously.

It would be as unreasonable to suppose that men at first threw

themselves irretrievably and unconditionally into the arms of an

absolute master, and that the first expedient which proud and

unsubdued men hit upon for their common security was to run headlong

into slavery. For what reason, in fact, did they take to themselves

superiors, if it was not in order that they might be defended from

oppression, and have protection for their lives, liberties and

properties, which are, so to speak, the constituent elements of their

being? Now, in the relations between man and man, the worst that can

happen is for one to find himself at the mercy of another, and it would

have been inconsistent with common-sense to begin by bestowing on a

chief the only things they wanted his help to preserve. What equivalent

could he offer them for so great a right? And if he had presumed to

exact it under pretext of defending them, would he not have received

the answer recorded in the fable: "What more can the enemy do to us?"

It is therefore beyond dispute, and indeed the fundamental maxim of

all political right, that people have set up chiefs to protect their

liberty, and not to enslave them. _If we have a prince_, said Pliny to

Trajan, _it is to save ourselves from having a master_.

Politicians indulge in the same sophistry about the love of liberty

as philosophers about the state of nature. They judge, by what they

see, of very different things, which they have not seen; and attribute

to man a natural propensity to servitude, because the slaves within

their observation are seen to bear the yoke with patience; they fail

to reflect that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue; the

value is known only to those who possess them, and the taste for them

is forfeited when they are forfeited themselves. "I know the charms of

your country," said Brasidas to a Satrap, who was comparing the life at

Sparta with that at Persepolis, "but you cannot know the pleasures of

mine."

An unbroken horse erects his mane, paws the ground and starts back

impetuously at the sight of the bridle; while one which is properly

trained suffers patiently even whip and spur: so savage man will not

bend his neck to the yoke to which civilised man submits without a

murmur, but prefers the most turbulent state of liberty to the most

peaceful slavery. We cannot therefore, from the servility of nations

already enslaved, judge of the natural disposition of mankind for

or against slavery; we should go by the prodigious efforts of every

free people to save itself from oppression. I know that the former

are for ever holding forth in praise of the tranquillity they enjoy

in their chains, and that they call a state of wretched servitude a

state of peace: _miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant_.[6] But when

I observe the latter sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power and

life itself to the preservation of that one treasure, which is so

disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals

dash their brains out against the bars of their cage, from an innate

impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages, that

despise European pleasures, braving hunger, fire, the sword and death,

to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for

slaves to argue about liberty.

With regard to paternal authority, from which some writers have derived

absolute government and all society, it is enough, without going back

to the contrary arguments of Locke and Sidney, to remark that nothing

on earth can be further from the ferocious spirit of despotism than the

mildness of that authority which looks more to the advantage of him who

obeys than to that of him who commands; that, by the law of nature, the

father is the child's master no longer than his help is necessary; that

from that time they are both equal, the son being perfectly independent

of the father, and owing him only respect and not obedience. For

gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but not a right to be

exacted: instead of saying that civil society is derived from paternal

authority, we ought to say rather that the latter derives its principal

force from the former. No individual was ever acknowledged as the

father of many, till his sons and daughters remained settled around

him. The goods of the father, of which he is really the master, are

the ties which keep his children in dependence, and he may bestow on

them, if he pleases, no share of his property, unless they merit it by

constant deference to his will. But the subjects of an arbitrary despot

are so far from having the like favour to expect from their chief,

that they themselves and everything they possess are his property, or

at least are considered by him as such; so that they are forced to

receive, as a favour, the little of their own he is pleased to leave

them. When he despoils them, he does but justice, and mercy in that he

permits them to live.

By proceeding thus to test fact by right, we should discover as little

reason as truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny. It would

also be no easy matter to prove the validity of a contract binding on

only one of the parties, where all the risk is on one side, and none on

the other; so that no one could suffer but he who bound himself. This

hateful system is indeed, even in modern times, very far from being

that of wise and good monarchs, and especially of the kings of France;

as may be seen from several passages in their edicts; particularly from

the following passage in a celebrated edict published in 1667 in the

name and by order of Louis XIV.

"Let it not, therefore, be said that the Sovereign is not subject

to the laws of his State; since the contrary is a true proposition

of the right of nations, which flattery has sometimes attacked but

good princes have always defended as the tutelary divinity of their

dominions. How much more legitimate is it to say with the wise Plato,

that the perfect felicity of a kingdom consists in the obedience of

subjects to their prince, and of the prince to the laws, and in the

laws being just and constantly directed to the public good!"[7]

I shall not stay here to inquire whether, as liberty is the noblest

faculty of man, it is not degrading our very nature, reducing ourselves

to the level of the brutes, which are mere slaves of instinct, and even

an affront to the Author of our being, to renounce without reserve

the most precious of all His gifts, and to bow to the necessity

of committing all the crimes He has forbidden, merely to gratify a

mad or a cruel master; or if this sublime craftsman ought not to be

less angered at seeing His workmanship entirely destroyed than thus

dishonoured. I will waive (if my opponents please) the authority of

Barbeyrac, who, following Locke, roundly declares that no man can so

far sell his liberty as to submit to an arbitrary power which may

use him as it likes. _For_, he adds, _this would be to sell his own

life, of which he is not master_. I shall ask only what right those

who were not afraid thus to debase themselves could have to subject

their posterity to the same ignominy, and to renounce for them those

blessings which they do not owe to the liberality of their progenitors,

and without which life itself must be a burden to all who are worthy of

it.

Puffendorf says that we may divest ourselves of our liberty in favour

of other men, just as we transfer our property from one to another by

contracts and agreements. But this seems a very weak argument. For in

the first place, the property I alienate becomes quite foreign to me,

nor can I suffer from the abuse of it; but it very nearly concerns me

that my liberty should not be abused, and I cannot without incurring

the guilt of the crimes I may be compelled to commit, expose myself

to become an instrument of crime. Besides, the right of property

being only a convention of human institution, men may dispose of

what they possess as they please: but this is not the case with the

essential gifts of nature, such as life and liberty, which every man is

permitted to enjoy, and of which it is at least doubtful whether any

have a right to divest themselves. By giving up the one, we degrade

our being; by giving up the other, we do our best to annul it; and,

as no temporal good can indemnify us for the loss of either, it would

be an offence against both reason and nature to renounce them at any

price whatsoever. But, even if we could transfer our liberty, as we

do our property, there would be a great difference with regard to the

children, who enjoy the father's substance only by the transmission of

his right; whereas, liberty being a gift which they hold from nature

as being men, their parents have no right whatever to deprive them of

it. As then, to establish slavery, it was necessary to do violence to

nature, so, in order to perpetuate such a right, nature would have to

be changed. Jurists, who have gravely determined that the child of a

slave comes into the world a slave, have decided, in other words, that

a man shall come into the world not a man.

I regard it then as certain, that government did not begin with

arbitrary power, but that this is the depravation, the extreme term,

of government, and brings it back, finally, to just the law of the

strongest, which it was originally designed to remedy. Supposing,

however, it had begun in this manner, such power, being in itself

illegitimate, could not have served as a basis for the laws of society,

nor, consequently, for the inequality they instituted.

Without entering at present upon the investigations which still remain

to be made into the nature of the fundamental compact underlying

all government, I content myself with adopting the common opinion

concerning it, and regard the establishment of the political body as

a real contract between the people and the chiefs chosen by them: a

contract by which both parties bind themselves to observe the laws

therein expressed, which form the ties of their union. The people

having in respect of their social relations concentrated all their

wills in one, the several articles, concerning which this will is

explained, become so many fundamental laws, obligatory on all the

members of the State without exception, and one of these articles

regulates the choice and power of the magistrates appointed to watch

over the execution of the rest. This power extends to everything which

may maintain the constitution, without going so far as to alter it.

It is accompanied by honours, in order to bring the laws and their

administrators into respect. The ministers are also distinguished by

personal prerogatives, in order to recompense them for the cares and

labour which good administration involves. The magistrate, on his side,

binds himself to use the power he is entrusted with only in conformity

with the intention of his constituents, to maintain them all in the

peaceable possession of what belongs to them, and to prefer on every

occasion the public interest to his own.

Before experience had shown, or knowledge of the human heart enabled

men to foresee, the unavoidable abuses of such a constitution, it must

have appeared so much the more excellent, as those who were charged

with the care of its preservation had themselves most interest in it;

for magistracy and the rights attaching to it being based solely on

the fundamental laws, the magistrates would cease to be legitimate as

soon as these ceased to exist; the people would no longer owe them

obedience; and as not the magistrates, but the laws, are essential to

the being of a State, the members of it would regain the right to their

natural liberty.

If we reflect with ever so little attention on this subject, we shall

find new arguments to confirm this truth, and be convinced from the

very nature of the contract that it cannot be irrevocable: for, if

there were no superior power capable of ensuring the fidelity of the

contracting parties, or compelling them to perform their reciprocal

engagements, the parties would be sole judges in their own cause, and

each would always have a right to renounce the contract, as soon as he

found that the other had violated its terms, or that they no longer

suited his convenience. It is upon this principle that the right of

abdication may possibly be founded. Now, if, as here, we consider

only what is human in this institution, it is certain that, if the

magistrate, who has all the power in his own hands, and appropriates

to himself all the advantages of the contract, has none the less a

right to renounce his authority, the people, who suffer for all the

faults of their chief, must have a much better right to renounce their

dependence. But the terrible and innumerable quarrels and disorders

that would necessarily arise from so dangerous a privilege, show,

more than anything else, how much human governments stood in need of

a more solid basis than mere reason, and how expedient it was for the

public tranquillity that the divine will should interpose to invest the

sovereign authority with a sacred and inviolable character, which might

deprive subjects of the fatal right of disposing of it. If the world

had received no other advantages from religion, this would be enough to

impose on men the duty of adopting and cultivating it, abuses and all,

since it has been the means of saving more blood than fanaticism has

ever spilt. But let us follow the thread of our hypothesis.

The different forms of government owe their origin to the differing

degrees of inequality which existed between individuals at the time

of their institution. If there happened to be any one man among them

pre-eminent in power, virtue, riches or personal influence, he became

sole magistrate, and the State assumed the form of monarchy. If

several, nearly equal in point of eminence, stood above the rest, they

were elected jointly, and formed an aristocracy. Again, among a people

who had deviated less from a state of nature, and between whose fortune

or talents there was less disproportion, the supreme administration was

retained in common, and a democracy was formed. It was discovered in

process of time which of these forms suited men the best. Some peoples

remained altogether subject to the laws; others soon came to obey their

magistrates. The citizens laboured to preserve their liberty; the

subjects, irritated at seeing others enjoying a blessing they had lost,

thought only of making slaves of their neighbours. In a word, on the

one side arose riches and conquests, and on the other happiness and I

virtue.

In these different governments, all the offices were at first elective;

and when the influence of wealth was out of the question, the

preference was given to merit, which gives a natural ascendancy, and

to age, which is experienced in business and deliberate in council.

The Elders of the Hebrews, the Gerontes at Sparta, the Senate at Rome,

and the very etymology of our word Seigneur, show how old age was once

held in veneration. But the more often the choice fell upon old men,

the more often elections had to be repeated, and the more they became

a nuisance; intrigues set in, factions were formed, party feeling

grew--bitter, civil wars broke out; the lives of individuals were

sacrificed to the pretended happiness of the State; and at length men

were on the point of relapsing into their primitive anarchy. Ambitious

chiefs profited by these circumstances to perpetuate their offices

in their own families: at the same time the people, already used to

dependence, ease, and the conveniences of life, and already incapable

of breaking its fetters, agreed to an increase of its slavery, in order

to secure its tranquillity. Thus magistrates, having become hereditary,

contracted the habit of considering their offices as a family estate,

and themselves as proprietors of the communities of which they were at

first only the officers, of regarding their fellow-citizens as their

slaves, and numbering them, like cattle, among their belongings, and of

calling themselves the equals of the gods and longs of kings.

If we follow the progress of inequality in these various revolutions,

we shall find that the establishment of laws and of the right of

property was its first term, the institution of magistracy the second,

and the conversion of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and

last; so that the condition of rich and poor was authorised by the

first period; that of powerful and weak by the second; and only by the

third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality,

and the term at which all the rest remain, when they have got so far,

till the government is either entirely dissolved by new revolutions, or

brought back again to legitimacy.

To understand this progress as necessary we must consider not so much

the motives for the establishment of the body politic, as the forms

it assumes in actuality, and the faults that necessarily attend it:

for the flaws which make social institutions necessary are the same

as make the abuse of them unavoidable. If we except Sparta, where

the laws were mainly concerned with the education of children, and

where Lycurgus established such morality as practically made laws

needless--for laws as a rule, being weaker than the passions, restrain

men without altering them--it would not be difficult to prove that

every government, which scrupulously complied with the ends for which

it was instituted, and guarded carefully against change and corruption,

was set up unnecessarily. For a country, in which no one either evaded

the laws or made a bad use of magisterial power, could require neither

laws nor magistrates.

Political distinctions necessarily produce civil distinctions. The

growing equality between the chiefs and the people is soon felt by

individuals, and modified in a thousand ways according to passions,

talents and circumstances. The magistrate could not usurp any

illegitimate power, without giving distinction to the creatures with

whom he must share it. Besides, individuals only allow themselves

to be oppressed so far as they are hurried on by blind ambition,

and, looking rather below than above them, come to love authority

more than independence, and submit to slavery, that they may in turn

enslave others. It is no easy matter to reduce to obedience a man

who has no ambition to command; nor would the most adroit politician

find it possible to enslave a people whose only desire was to be

independent. But inequality easily makes its way among cowardly and

ambitious minds, which are ever ready to run the risks of fortune, and

almost indifferent whether they command or obey, as it is favourable

or adverse. Thus, there must have been; a time, when the eyes of the

people were so fascinated, that their rulers had only to say to the

least of men, "Be great, you and all your posterity," to make him

immediately appear great in the eyes of every one as well as in his

own. His descendants took still more upon them, in proportion to their

distance from him; the more obscure; and uncertain the cause, the

greater the effect: the greater--the number of idlers one could count

in a family, the more illustrious it was held to be.

If this were the place to go into details, I could readily explain

how, even without the intervention of government, inequality of

credit and authority became unavoidable among private persons, as

soon as their union in a single society made them compare themselves

one with another, and take into account the differences which they

found out from the continual intercourse every man had to have with

his neighbours.[8] These differences are of several kinds; but

riches, nobility or rank, power and personal merit being the principal

distinctions by which men form an estimate of each other in society,

I could prove that the harmony or conflict of these different forces

is the surest indication of the good or bad constitution of a State.

I could show that among these four kinds of inequality, personal

qualities being the origin of all the others, wealth is the one to

which they are all reduced in the end; for, as riches tend most

immediately to the prosperity of individuals, and are easiest to

communicate, they are used to purchase every other distinction. By this

observation we are enabled to judge pretty exactly how far a people

has departed from its primitive constitution, and of its progress

towards the extreme term of corruption. I could explain how much

this universal desire for reputation, honours and advancement, which

inflames us all, exercises and holds up to comparison our faculties and

powers; how it excites and multiplies our passions, and, by creating

universal competition and rivalry, or rather enmity, among men,

occasions numberless failures, successes and disturbances of all kinds

by making so many aspirants run the same course. I could show that it

is to this desire of being talked about, and this unremitting rage of

distinguishing ourselves, that we owe the best and the worst things we

possess, both our virtues and our vices, our science and our errors,

our conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad

things, and a very few good ones. In a word, I could prove that, if

we have a few rich and powerful men on the pinnacle of fortune and

grandeur, while the crowd grovels in want and obscurity, it is because

the former prize what they enjoy only in so far as others are destitute

of it; and because, without changing their condition, they would cease

to be happy the moment the people ceased to be wretched.

These details alone, however, would furnish matter for a considerable

work, in which the advantages and disadvantages of every kind of

government might be weighed, as they are related to man in the state

of nature, and at the same time all the different aspects, under which

inequality has up to the present appeared, or may appear in ages yet

to come, according to the nature of the several governments, and the

alterations which time must unavoidably occasion in them, might be

demonstrated. We should then see the multitude oppressed from within,

in consequence of the very precautions it had taken to guard against

foreign tyranny. We should see oppression continually gain ground

without it being possible for the oppressed to know where it would

stop, or what legitimate means was left them of checking its progress.

We should see the rights of citizens, and the freedom of nations

slowly extinguished, and the complaints, protests and appeals of the

weak treated as seditious murmurings. We should see the honour of

defending the common cause confined by statecraft to a mercenary part

of the people. We should see taxes made necessary by such means, and

the disheartened husbandman deserting his fields even in the midst of

peace, and leaving the plough to gird on the sword. We should see fatal

and capricious codes of honour established; and the champions of their

country sooner or later becoming its enemies, and for ever holding

their daggers to the breasts of their fellow-citizens. The time would

come when they would be heard saying to the oppressor of their country--

_Pectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis_

_Condere me jubeas, gravidæque in viscera partu_

_Conjugis, invitâ peragam tamen omnia dextrâ._

Lucan. i, 376.

From great inequality of fortunes and conditions, from the vast variety

of passions and of talents, of useless and pernicious arts, of vain

sciences, would arise a multitude of prejudices equally contrary to

reason, happiness and virtue. We should see the magistrates fomenting

everything that might weaken men united in society, by promoting

dissension among them; everything that might sow in it the seeds of

actual division, while it gave society the air of harmony; everything

that might inspire the different ranks of people with mutual hatred and

distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of

another, and so strengthen the power which comprehended them all.

It is from the midst of this disorder and these revolutions, that

despotism, gradually raising up its hideous head and devouring

everything that remained sound and untainted in any part of the State,

would at length trample on both the laws and the people, and establish

itself on the ruins of the republic. The times which immediately

preceded this last change would be times of trouble and calamity; but

at length the monster would swallow up everything, and the people would

no longer have either chiefs or laws, but only tyrants. From this

moment there would be no question of virtue or morality; for despotism

_cui ex honesto nulla est spes_, wherever it prevails, admits no other

master; it no sooner speaks than probity and duty lose their weight and

blind obedience is the only virtue which slaves can still practise.

This is the last term of inequality, the extreme points that closes

the circle, and meets that from which we set out. Here all private

persons return to their first equality, because they are nothing; and,

subjects having no law but the will of their master, and their master

no restraint but his passions, all notions of good and all principles

of equity again vanish. There is here a complete return to the law of

the strongest, and so to a new state of nature, differing from that we

set out from; for the one was a state of nature in its first purity,

while this is the consequence of excessive corruption. There is so

little difference between the two states in other respects, and the

contract of government is so completely dissolved by despotism, that

the despot is master only so long as he remains the strongest; as soon

as he can be expelled, he has no right to complain of violence. The

popular insurrection that ends in the death or deposition of a Sultan

is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of

the lives and fortunes of his subjects. As he was maintained by force

alone, it is force alone that overthrows him. Thus everything takes

place according to the natural order; and, whatever may be the result

of such frequent and precipitate revolutions, no one man has reason to

complain of the injustice of another, but only of his own ill-fortune

or indiscretion.