And therefore, though perhaps
at first, as shall be showed more at large hereafter, in the following
part of this discourse, some one good and excellent man having got a
pre-eminency amongst the rest, had this deference paid to his goodness
and virtue, as to a kind of natural authority, that the chief rule,
with arbitration of their differences, by a tacit consent devolved
into his hands, without any other caution but the assurance they had
of his uprightness and wisdom; yet when time giving authority, and, as
some men would persuade us, sacredness to customs, which the negligent
and unforeseeing innocence of the first ages began, had brought in
successors of another stamp, the people finding their properties not
secure under the government as then it was* (whereas government has no
other end but the preservation of property), could never be safe,
nor at rest, nor think themselves in civil society, till the
legislative was so placed in collective bodies of men, call them
senate, parliament, or what you please, by which means every single
person became subject equally with other the meanest men, to those
laws, which he himself, as part of the legislative, had established;
nor could any one, by his own authority, avoid the force of the law,
when once made, nor by any pretence of superiority plead exemption,
thereby to license his own, or the miscarriages of any of his
dependants.
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