§. 86. Let us therefore consider a master of a family with all these
subordinate relations of wife, children, servants and slaves, united under the
domestic rule of a family, with what resemblance soever it may have in its
order, offices, and number too, with a little commonwealth, yet is very far
from it both in its constitution, power, and end; or if it must be thought a
monarchy, and the paterfamilias the absolute monarch in it, absolute monarchy
will have but a very shattered and short power, when it is plain by what has
been said before, that the master of the family has a very distinct and
differently limited power both as to time and extent over those several persons
that are in it; for excepting the slave (and the family is as much a family,
and his power as paterfamilias as great, whether there be any slaves in his
family or no) he has no legislative power of life and death over any of them,
and none too but what a mistress of a family may have as well as he. And he
certainly can have no absolute power over the whole family who has but a very
limited one over every individual in it. But how a family, or any other society
of men, differ from that which is properly political society, we shall best see
by considering wherein political society itself consists.
