human society is gradually led to its highest improvements under the guardianship of those laws which secure property and regulate marriage. Et leges sanctas docuit, et chara jugavit These two great institutions convert the selfish as well as the social passions of our nature into the firmest bands of a peaceable and orderly intercourse; they change the sources of discord into principles of quiet; they discipline the most ungovernable, they refine the grossest, and they exalt the most sordid propensities; so that they become the perpetual fountain of all that strengthens, and preserves, and adorns society; they sustain the individual, and they perpetuate the race. Around these institutions all our social duties will be found at various distances to range themşelves; some more near, obviously essential to the good order of human life, others more remote, and of which the necessity is not at first view so apparent; and some so distant, that their importance has been sometimes doubted, though upon more mature consideration they will be found to be outposts and advanced guards of these fundamental principles; that man should securely enjoy the fruits of his labour, and that the society of the sexes should be so wisely ordered as to make it a school of the kind affections, and a fit nursery for the commonwealth. The subject of property is of great extent. It will be necessary to establish the foundation of the rights of acquisition, alienation, and transmission, not in imaginary contracts or a pretended state of nature, but in their subserviency to the subsistence and well-being of mankind. It will not only be curious, but useful, to trace the history of property from the first loose and transient occupancy of the savage, through all the modifications which it has at different times received, to that comprehensive, subtle, and anxiously minute code of property which is the last result of the most refined civilization. I shall observe the same order in considering the society of the sexes as it is regu lated by the institution of marriage.* I shall endeavour to lay open those unalterable principles of general interest on which that institution rests and if I entertain a hope that on this subject I may be able to add something to what our masters in morality have taught us, I trust, that the reader will bear in mind, as an excuse for my presumption, that they were not likely to employ much argument where they did not foresee the possibility of doubt. I shall also consider the history of marriage, and trace it through See on this subject an incomparable fragment of the first book of Cicero's Economics, which is too long for insertion here, but which, if it be closely examined, may perhaps dispel the illusion of those gentlemen, who have so strangely taken it for granted, that Cicero was incapable of exact reasoning. This progress is traced with great accuracy in some beautiful lines of Lucretius: Mulier conjuncta viro concessit in unum, Castaque privatæ Veneris connubia læta Cognita sunt, prolemque ex se vidêre coortam : TUM GENUS HUMANUM PRIMUM MOLLESCERE CPIT. all the forms which it has assumed, to that decent and happy permanency of union, which has, perhaps above all other causes, contributed to the quiet of society, and the refinement of manners in modern times. Among many other inquiries which this subject will suggest, I shall be led more particularly to examine the natural station and duties of the female sex, their condition among different nations, its improvement in Europe, and the bounds which Nature herself has prescribed to the progress of that improvement; beyond which, every pretended advance will be a real degradation. III. Having established the principles of private duty, I shall proceed to consider man puerisque parentum Blanditiis facile ingenium fregere superbum. OMNIUM. Lucret. lib. v. 1. 1010-22. under the important relation of subject and sovereign, or, in other words, of citizen and magistrate. The duties which arise from this relation I shall endeavour to establish, not upon supposed compacts, which are altogether chimerical, which must be admitted to be false in fact, which if they are to be considered as fictions, will be found to serve no purpose of just reasoning, and to be equally the foundation of a system of universal despotism in Hobbes, and of universal anarchy in Rousseau; but on the solid basis of general convenience. Men cannot subsist without society and mutual aid; they can neither maintain social intercourse nor receive aid from each other without the protection of government; and they cannot enjoy that protection without submitting to the restraints which a just government imposes. This plain argument establishes the duty of obedience on the part of citizens, and the duty of protection on that of magistrates, on the same foundation with that of every other moral duty; and it shews, with sufficient evidence, that these duties are reciprocal; the only rational end for which the |