106. Thus, though looking back as far as records give us any account
of peopling the world, and the history of nations, we commonly find
the government to be in one hand, yet it destroys not that which I
affirm- viz., that the beginning of politic society depends upon the
consent of the individuals to join into and make one society, who,
when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of
government they thought fit. But this having given occasion to men
to mistake and think that, by Nature, government was monarchical,
and belonged to the father, it may not be amiss here to consider why
people, in the beginning, generally pitched upon this form, which,
though perhaps the father's pre-eminency might, in the first
institution of some commonwealths, give a rise to and place in the
beginning the power in one hand, yet it is plain that the reason
that continued the form of government in a single person was not any
regard or respect to paternal authority, since all petty monarchies-
that is, almost all monarchies, near their original, have been
commonly, at least upon occasion, elective.
107. First, then, in the beginning of things, the father's
government of the childhood of those sprung from him having accustomed
them to the rule of one man, and taught them that where it was
exercised with care and skill, with affection and love to those
under it, it was sufficient to procure and preserve men (all the
political happiness they sought for in society), it was no wonder that
they should pitch upon and naturally run into that form of
government which, from their infancy, they had been all accustomed to,
and which, by experience, they had found both easy and safe.
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