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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