334.  In what manner civil societies proceeded in providing for the making of laws and for the enforcing of them; the various ways in which they took measures to protect the weak against the strong; how they have gone to work to secure wealth against the attacks of poverty; these are subjects that it would require volumes to detail; but these truths are written on the heart of man:  that all men are, by nature, equal; that civil society can never have arisen from any motive other than that of the benefit of the whole; that, whenever civil society makes the greater part of the people worse off than they were under the Law of Nature, the civil compact is, in conscience, dissolved, and all the rights of nature return; that, in civil society, the rights and the duties go hand in hand, and that, when the former are taken away, the latter cease to exist.

335.  Now, then, in order to act well our part, as citizens, or members of the community, we ought clearly to understand what our rights are; for, on our enjoyment of these depend our duties, rights going before duties, as value received goes before payment.  I know well, that just the contrary of this is taught in our political schools, where we are told, that our first duty is to obey the laws; and it is not many years ago, that HORSLEY, Bishop of Rochester, told us, that the people had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.  The truth is, however, that the citizen’s first duty is to maintain his rights, as it is the purchaser’s first duty to receive the thing for which he has contracted.

336.  Our rights in society are numerous; the right of enjoying life and property; the right of exerting our physical and mental powers in an innocent manner; but, the great right of all, and without which there is, in fact, no right, is, the right of taking a part in the making of the laws by which we are governed.  This right is founded in that law of Nature spoken of above; it springs out of the very principle of civil society; for what compact, what agreement, what common assent, can possibly be imagined by which men would give up all the rights of nature, all the free enjoyment of their bodies and their minds, in order to subject themselves to rules and laws, in the making of which they should have nothing to say, and which should be enforced upon them without their assent?  The great right, therefore, of every man, the right of rights, is the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit.