suing the progress of inequality in these different revolutions,
we shall discover that the establishment of laws and of the right of
property was the first term of it; the institution of magistrates the
second; and the third and last the changing of legal into arbitrary
power; so that the different states of rich and poor were authorized
by the first epoch; those of powerful and weak by the second; and by
the third those of master and slave, which formed the last degree of
inequality, and the term in which all the rest at last end, till new
revolutions entirely dissolve the government, or bring it back nearer
to its legal constitution.

To conceive the necessity of this progress, we are not so much to
consider the motives for the establishment of political bodies, as the
forms these bodies assume in their administration; and the
inconveniences with which they are essentially attended; for those
vices, which render social institutions necessary, are the same which
render the abuse of such institutions unavoidable; and as (Sparta
alone excepted, whose laws chiefly regarded the education of children,
and where Lycurgus established such manners and customs, as in a great
measure made laws needless,) the laws, in general less strong than the
passions, restrain men without changing them; it would be no hard
matter to prove that every government, which carefully guarding
against all alteration and corruption should scrupulously comply with
the ends of its institution, was unnecessarily instituted; and that a
country, where no one either eluded the laws, or made an ill use of
magistracy, required neither laws nor magistrates.

Political distinctions are necessarily attended with civil
distinctions. The inequality between the people and the chiefs
increase so fast as to be soon felt by the private members, and
appears among them in a thousand shapes according to their passions,
their talents, and the circumstances of affairs. The magistrate can
not usurp any illegal power without making himself creatures, with
whom he must divide it. Besides, the citizens of a free state suffer
themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion as, hurried on by a
blind ambition, and looking rather below than above them, they come to
love authority more than independence. When they submit to fetters,
'tis only to be the better able to fetter others in their turn. It is
no easy matter to make him obey, who does not wish to command; and the
most r