In this partnership all men have equal
rights, but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the
partnership has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred
pounds has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an
equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the
share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought
to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst
the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my
contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to
be settled by convention.
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention
must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the
descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort
of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They
can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man
claim under the conventions of civil society rights which do not so
much as suppose its existence- rights which are absolutely repugnant
to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes
one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his
own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the
first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for
himself and to assert his own cause.
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