The world is too well instructed in, and
too forward to allow of this way of dissolving of governments, to need
any more to be said of it; and there wants not much argument to
prove that where the society is dissolved, the government cannot
remain; that being as impossible as for the frame of a house to
subsist when the materials of it are scattered and displaced by a
whirlwind, or jumbled into a confused heap by an earthquake.
212. Besides this overturning from without, governments are
dissolved from within:
First. When the legislative is altered, civil society being a
state of peace amongst those who are of it, from whom the state of war
is excluded by the umpirage which they have provided in their
legislative for the ending all differences that may arise amongst
any of them; it is in their legislative that the members of a
commonwealth are united and combined together into one coherent living
body. This is the soul that gives form, life, and unity to the
commonwealth; from hence the several members have their mutual
influence, sympathy, and connection; and therefore when the
legislative is broken, or dissolved, dissolution and death follows.
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