§. 94. But, whatever flatterers may talk to amuse people's understandings, it
never hinders men from feeling; and when they perceive that any man, in what
station soever, is out of the bounds of the civil society they are of, and that
they have no appeal, on earth, against any harm they may receive from him, they
are apt to think themselves in the state of Nature, in respect of him whom they
find to be so; and to take care, as soon as they can, to have that safety and
security, in civil society, for which it was first instituted, and for which
only they entered into it. And therefore, though perhaps at first, as shall be
showed more at large hereafter, in the following part of this discourse, some
one good and excellent man having got a pre-eminency amongst the rest, had this
deference paid to his goodness and virtue, as to a kind of natural authority,
that the chief rule, with arbitration of their differences, by a tacit consent
devolved into his hands, without any other caution but the assurance they had
of his uprightness and wisdom; yet when time giving authority, and, as some men
would persuade us, sacredness to customs, which the negligent and unforeseeing
innocence of the first ages began, had brought in successors of another stamp,
the people finding their properties not secure under the government as then it
was[3] (whereas government has no other end
but the preservation of property), could never be safe, nor at rest, nor think
themselves in civil society, till the legislative was so placed in collective
bodies of men, call them senate, parliament, or what you please, by which means
every single person became subject equally with other the meanest men, to those
laws, which he himself, as part of the legislative, had established; nor could
any one, by his own authority, avoid the force of the law, when once made, nor
by any pretence of superiority plead exemption, thereby to license his own, or
the miscarriages of any of his dependants. No man in civil society can be
exempted from the laws of it. For if any man may do what he thinks fit and
there be no appeal on earth for redress or security against any harm he shall
do, I ask whether he be not perfectly still in the state of Nature, and so can
be no part or member of that civil society, unless any one will say the state
of Nature and civil society are one and the same thing, which I have never yet
found any one so great a patron of anarchy as to affirm.[4]
