ntry:

Pectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis
Condere me jubeas, gravidoeque in viscera partu
Conjugis, in vita peragam tamen omnia dextra.

From the vast inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the great
variety of passions and of talents, of useless arts, of pernicious
arts, of frivolous sciences, would issue clouds of prejudices equally
contrary to reason, to happiness, to virtue. We should see the chiefs
foment everything that tends to weaken men formed into societies by
dividing them; everything that, while it gives society an air of
apparent harmony, sows in it the seeds of real division; everything
that can inspire the different orders with mutual distrust and hatred
by an opposition of their rights and interest, and of course
strengthen that power which contains them all.

'Tis from the bosom of this disorder and these revolutions, that
despotism gradually rearing up her hideous crest, and devouring in
every part of the state all that still remained sound and untainted,
would at last issue to trample upon the laws and the people, and
establish herself upon the ruins of the republic. The times
immediately preceding this last alteration would be times of calamity
and trouble: but at last everything would be swallowed up by the
monster; and the people would no longer have chiefs or laws, but only
tyrants. At this fatal period all regard to virtue and manners would
likewise disappear; for despotism, _cui ex honesto nulla est spes_,
tolerates no other master, wherever it reigns; the moment it speaks,
probity and duty lose all their influence, and the blindest obedience
is the only virtue the miserable slaves have left them to practise.

This is the last term of inequality, the extreme point which closes
the circle and meets that from which we set out. 'Tis here that all
private men return to their primitive equality, because they are no
longer of any account; and that, the subjects having no longer any law
but that of their master, nor the master any other law but his
passions, all notions of good and principles of justice again
disappear. 'Tis here that everything returns to the sole law of the
strongest, and of course to a new state of nature different from that
with which we began, in as much as the first was the state of nature
in its purity, and the last the consequence of excessive corruption.
There is, in other respects, so little difference between these two
states, and the contract of g