85. Master and servant are names as old as history, but given to
those of far different condition; for a free man makes himself a
servant to another by selling him for a certain time the service he
undertakes to do in exchange for wages he is to receive; and though
this commonly puts him into the family of his master, and under the
ordinary discipline thereof, yet it gives the master but a temporary
power over him, and no greater than what is contained in the
contract between them. But there is another sort of servant which by a
peculiar name we call slaves, who being captives taken in a just war
are, by the right of Nature, subjected to the absolute dominion and
arbitrary power of their masters. These men having, as I say,
forfeited their lives and, with it, their liberties, and lost their
estates, and being in the state of slavery, not capable of any
property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil
society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.
86. Let us therefore consider a master of a family with all these
subordinate relations of wife, children, servants and slaves, united
under the domestic rule of a family, with what resemblance soever it
may have in its order, offices, and number too, with a little
commonwealth, yet is very far from it both in its constitution, power,
and end; or if it must be thought a monarchy, and the paterfamilias
the absolute monarch in it, absolute monarchy will have but a very
shattered and short power, when it is plain by what has been said
before, that the master of the family has a very distinct and
differently limited power both as to time and extent over those
several persons that are in it; for excepting the slave (and the
family is as much a family, and his power as paterfamilias as great,
whether there be any slaves in his family or no) he has no legislative
power of life and death over any of them, and none too but what a
mistress of a family may have as well as he.
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