ir interests were
adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of
certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]

Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was
the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and
division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of
property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not
connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men
were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the
strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
consideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And
with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy
primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.

On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just
medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest
and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we
find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the
best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so
long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin
with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and
shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and
beautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they only
applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to
have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was
introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into
smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in
which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up a