Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array,— Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Again I must enter into minute and detailed explanations. I hear my readers murmur, but I am prepared to meet their disapproval; I will not sacrifice the most important part of this book to your impatience. You may think me as long-winded as you please; I have my own opinion as to your complaints.

others, without further ceremony ascribing to the strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any notion of the things signified by the words authority and government. All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exit; though it plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man, immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to give to them, we must deny that, even before the deluge, such a state ever existed among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary event: a paradox very difficult to maintain, and altogether impossible to prove.

Grocio niega que todo poder humano se haya establecido en favor de los gobernados, y pone por ejemplo la esclavitud. La manera de discurrir, que más constantemente usa, consiste en establecer el derecho por el hecho.(1) Bien podría emplearse un método más consecuente, pero no se hallaría uno que fuese más favorable a los tiranos.