caution, but the assurance they had of his uprightness and
wisdom; yet when time, giving authority, and (as some men would persuade
us) sacredness of 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, (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 legislature was 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 dependents.** 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.

(*At the first, when some certain kind of regiment was once appointed,
it may be that nothing was then farther thought upon for the manner of
goveming, but all permitted unto their wisdom and discretion, which were
to rule, till by experience they found this for all parts very
inconvenient, so as the thing which they had devised for a remedy, did
indeed but increase the sore, which it should have cured. They saw, that
to live by one man's will, became the cause of all men's misery. This
constrained them to come unto laws, wherein all men might see their duty
beforehand, and know the penalties of transgressing them. Hooker's Eccl.
Pol. l. i. sect. 10.)

(**Civil law being the act of the whole body politic, cloth therefore
over-rule each several part of the same body. Hooker, ibid.)

CHAPTER. VIII.

OF THE BEGINNING OF POLITICAL SOCIETIES.

Sect. 95. MEN being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and
independent, no one can be put out of this estate,