337.  With regard to the means of enabling every man to enjoy this share, they have been different, in different countries, and, in the same countries, at different times.  Generally it has been, and in great communities it must be, by the choosing of a few to speak and act in behalf of the many:  and, as there will hardly ever be perfect unanimity amongst men assembled for any purpose whatever, where fact and argument are to decide the question, the decision is left to the majority, the compact being that the decision of the majority shall be that of the whole. Minors are excluded from this right, because the law considers them as infants, because it makes the parent answerable for civil damages committed by them, and because of their legal incapacity to make any compact. Women are excluded because husbands are answerable in law for their wives, as to their civil damages, and because the very nature of their sex makes the exercise of this right incompatible with the harmony and happiness of society.  Men stained with indelible crimes are excluded, because they have forfeited their right by violating the laws, to which their assent has been given. Insane persons are excluded, because they are dead in the eye of the law, because the law demands no duty at their hands, because they cannot violate the law, because the law cannot affect them; and, therefore, they ought to have no hand in making it.

338.  But, with these exceptions, where is the ground whereon to maintain that any man ought to be deprived of this right, which he derives directly from the law of Nature, and which springs, as I said before, out of the same source with civil society itself?  Am I told, that property ought to confer this right?  Property sprang from labour, and not labour from property; so that if there were to be a distinction here, it ought to give the preference to labour.  All men are equal by nature; nobody denies that they all ought to be equal in the eye of the law; but, how are they to be thus equal, if the law begin by suffering some to enjoy this right and refusing the enjoyment to others?  It is the duty of every man to defend his country against an enemy, a duty imposed by the law of Nature as well as by that of civil society, and without the recognition of this duty, there could exist no independent nation and no civil society.  Yet, how are you to maintain that this is the duty of every man, if you deny to some men the enjoyment of a share in making the laws?  Upon what principle are you to contend for equality here, while you deny its existence as to the right of sharing in the making of the laws?  The poor man has a body and a soul as well as the rich man; like the latter, he has parents, wife and children; a bullet or a sword is as deadly to him as to the rich man; there are hearts to ache and tears to flow for him as well as for the squire or the lord or the loan-monger: