Note 62 — PART I. SUPPLEMENTAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE Nature and Value of Civil Liberty and Free Government.

“In ages of darkness, and too often also in those of greater knowledge, by the perfidious arts of designing princes, and by the base servility of too many ecclesiastics, who managed the superstition of the populace, by the violent restraints put upon divulging any juster sentiments about the rights of mankind, the natural notions of polity were erased out of the minds of men; and they were filled with some confused imaginations of something adorable in monarchs, some representation of the Divinity; and that even in the worst of them; and of some certain Divine claims in certain families.—No wonder this! that millions thus look upon themselves as a piece of property to one of their fellows as silly and worthless as the meanest of them; when the like arts of superstition have made millions, nay the very artificers themselves, fall down before the block or stone they had set up; or adore monkies, cats, and crocodiles, as the sovereign disposers of their fortunes.” See Dr. Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy. Vol. ii. p. 280.