TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT. IN THE FORMER THE FALSE PRINCIPLES AND FOUNDATION OF SIR ROBERT FILMER AND HIS FOLLOWERS ARE DETECTED AND OVERTHROWN. THE LATTER IS AN ESSAY CONCERNING THE TRUE ORIGINAL, EXTENT, AND END OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT. Two TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT. BOOK I. CHAPTER I. " I. SLAVERY is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an "Englishman," much less a "gentleman, should plead for it. And truly I should have taken this, as any other treatise which would persuade all men that they are slaves, and ought to be so, for such another exercise of wit as was his who writ the encomium of Nero, rather than for a serious discourse meant in earnest, had not the gravity of the title and epistle, the picture in the front of Sir Robert's book, and the applause that followed it, required me to believe that the author and publisher were both in earnest. I therefore took the "Patriarcha" of Sir R. Filmer into my hands with all the expectation, and read it through with all the attention, due to a treatise that made such a noise at its coming abroad, and cannot but confess myself mightily surprised that, in a book which was to provide chains for all mankind, I should find nothing but a rope of sand, useful, perhaps, to such whose skill and business it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people the better to mislead them, but is not of any force to draw those into bondage who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them. 2. If any one think I take too much liberty in speaking so freely of a man who is the great champion of absolute power, and the idol of those who worship it, I beseech him to make this small allowance for once to one who, even after the reading of Robert's book, cannot but think himself, as the laws allow him, a freeman, and I know no fault it is to do so, unless any one better skilled in the fate of it than I, should have it revealed to him that this treatise, which has lain dormant so long, was, when it appeared in the world, to carry by strengths of its arguments all liberty out of it, and that from thenceforth our author's short model was to be the pattern in the Mount and the perfect standard of politics for the future. His system lies in a little compass. It is no more but this: That all government is absolute monarchy; and the ground he builds on is this: That no man is born free. 3. Since there have been a generation of men sprung up in the world that would flatter princes with an opinion that they have a Divine right to absolute power, let the laws by which they are constituted and are to govern, and the conditions under which they enter upon their authority be what they will, and their engagements to observe them never so well ratified by solemn oaths and promises, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom, whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also so unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes (for they, too, by these men's doctrine, except only one, are all born slaves, and by Divine right are subjects to Adam's right heir), as if they had designed to make war upon all government and subvert the very foundations of human society. 4. However, we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us we are all born slaves; and there is no remedy for it, we must continue so. Life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other, though I do not find Scripture or reason anywhere say so, however these men would persuade us that Divine authority hath subjected us to the unlimited will of another: an admirable state of mankind, and that which they have not had wit enough to find out |