§. 163. And therefore they have a very wrong notion of government who say that
the people have encroached upon the prerogative when they have got any part of
it to be defined by positive laws. For in so doing they have not pulled from
the prince anything that of right belonged to him, but only declared that that
power which they indefinitely left in his or his ancestors' hands, to be
exercised for their good, was not a thing they intended him, when he used it
otherwise. For the end of government being the good of the community,
whatsoever alterations are made in it tending to that end cannot be an
encroachment upon anybody; since nobody in government can have a right tending
to any other end; and those only are encroachments which prejudice or hinder
the public good. Those who say otherwise speak as if the prince had a distinct
and separate interest from the good of the community, and was not made for it;
the root and source from which spring almost all those evils and disorders
which happen in kingly governments. And indeed, if that be so, the people under
his government are not a society of rational creatures, entered into a
community for their mutual good, such as have set rulers over themselves, to
guard and promote that good; but are to be looked on as a herd of inferior
creatures under the dominion of a master, who keeps them and works them for his
own pleasure or profit. If men were so void of reason and brutish as to enter
into society upon such terms, prerogative might indeed be, what some men would
have it, an arbitrary power to do things hurtful to the people.
