Note 3 — A LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE ABBE RAYNAL (continued 2)

COMMON SENSE. ABBE RAYNAL.

"Some writers have so confounded society With government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. "Care must be taken not to confound together society with government. That they may be known distinctly, their origin should be considered.

"Society is produced by our wants, and governments by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively, by uniting our affections; the latter negatively, by restraining our vices." "Society originates in the wants of men, government in their vices. Society tends always to good; government ought always to tend to the repressing of evil."

In the following paragraphs there is less likeness in the language, but the ideas in the one are evidently copied from the other.

"In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons, meeting in some frequented part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the peopling of any country or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be our first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto. The strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance of another, who, in his turn, requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness; but one man might labour out the common period of life, without accomplishing any thing; when he has felled his timber, he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger, in the mean time would, urge him from his work, and every different want call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death; for though neither might be immediately mortal, yet either of them would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.—Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal benefits of which would supersede and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary, while they remained perfectly just to each other. But as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other, and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of moral virtue." "Man, thrown, as it were by chance upon the globe, surrounded by all the evils of nature, obliged continually to defend and protect his life against the storms and tempests of the air, against the inundations of water, against the fire of volcanoes, against the intemperance of frigid and torrid zones, against the sterility of the earth which, refuses him aliment, or its baneful fecundity, which makes poison spring up beneath his feet; in short against the claws and teeth of savage beasts, who dispute with him his habitation and his prey, and attacking his person, seem resolved to render themselves rulers of this globe, of which he thinks himself to be the master. Man, in this state, alone and abandoned to himself, could do nothing for his preservation. It was necessary, therefore, that he should unite himself, and associate with his like, in order to bring together their strength and intelligence in common stock. It is by this union that he has triumphed over so many evils, that he has fashioned this globe to his use, restrained the rivers, subjugated the seas, insured his subsistence, conquered apart of the animals in obliging them to serve him, and driven others far from his empire, to the depths of deserts or of woods, where their number diminishes from age to age. What a man alone would not have been able to effect, men have executed in concert; and altogether they preserve their work.—Such is the origin, such the advantages, and the end of society.—Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing the injuries which the associated individuals had to fear from one another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common labourers be not disturbed."