s as old as history, but given to
those of far different condition; for a freeman makes himself a servant
to another, by selling him, for a certain time, the service he
undertakes to do, in exchange for wages he is to receive: and though
this commonly puts him into the family of his master, and under the
ordinary discipline thereof; yet it gives the master but a temporary
power over him, and no greater than what is contained in the contract
between them. But there is another sort of servants, which by a peculiar
name we call slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the
right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power
of their masters. These men having, as I say, forfeited their lives, and
with it their liberties, and lost their estates; and being in the state
of slavery, not capable of any property, cannot in that state be
considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof is the
preservation of property.

Sect. 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; which, what resemblance soever it
may have in its order, offices, and number too, with a little
common-wealth, 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.

Sect. 87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect
freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges
of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or