§. 162. It is easy to conceive that in the infancy of governments, when
commonwealths differed little from families in number of people, they differed
from them too but little in number of laws; and the governors being as the
fathers of them, watching over them for their good, the government was almost
all prerogative. A few established laws served the turn, and the discretion and
care of the ruler suppled the rest. But when mistake or flattery prevailed with
weak princes, to make use of this power for private ends of their own and not
for the public good, the people were fain, by express laws, to get prerogative
determined in those points wherein they found disadvantage from it, and
declared limitations of prerogative in those cases which they and their
ancestors had left in the utmost latitude to the wisdom of those princes who
made no other but a right use of it — that is, for the good of their
people.
