n suppose that men, by some miracle
or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the origin of
government as authority in compact is not yet established. According
to the theory, the rights of civil society are derived from the rights
of the individuals who form or enter into the compact. But individuals
cannot give what they have not, and no individual has in himself the
right to govern another. By the law of nature all men have equal
rights, are equals, and equals have no authority one over another. Nor
has an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right to
dispose of himself as he pleases. Man is not God, independent,
self-existing and self-sufficing. He is dependent, and dependent not
only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on
nature, or the material world. That on which he depends in the measure
in which be depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life,
and to his well-being, and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right
in him and to him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the
proud spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation
to another. The right of that on which man depends, and by communion
with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.

Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his only
medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him is neither
absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it, lives in it, and
cannot live without it. It has, then, certain lights over him, and he
cannot enter into any compact, league, or alliance that society does
not authorize, or at least permit. These rights of society override his
rights to himself, and he can neither surrender them nor delegate them.
Other rights, as the rights of religion and property, which are held
directly from God and nature, and which are independent of society, are
included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these rights
cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they are rights of
man only before civil society, and therefore not his to cede, and
because they are precisely the rights that government is bound to
respect and protect. The compact, then, cannot be formed as pretended,
for the only rights individuals could delegate or surrender to society
to constitute the sum of the rights of government are hers already, and
those which are not hers are those which cannot be delegated or