Slavery is wrong, according to Rousseau.[XI-11] It is a contract or agreement, at the expense of the slave and for the profit of the slaveholder, in which the slaveholder asserts: I’ll observe the agreement and you will observe it--as long as it pleases me. Strength does not make right. Strength and moral force are not necessarily the same. Strength may often be ironically accepted in appearance and established in principle. By a social contract man loses his natural liberty and gains civil and moral liberty.[XI-12] In this connection Rousseau was simply the spokesman of a point of view which found frequent expression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, in 1635, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts colony, made a clear-cut distinction between natural liberties, and civil and moral liberties. Natural liberty is liberty to do what one lists, to do evil as well as good. Civil, or moral, liberty is liberty under the covenant between God and man, under the political covenants between men and men, and under the moral law. It is a liberty to do only that which is good, just, and honest.[XI-13] It was Rousseau who contended that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are man’s inalienable rights. It was this doctrine which profoundly influenced Thomas Jefferson, as evidenced in the Declaration of Independence. Sovereignty rests not in a ruler or monarch but in the community of people--this was perhaps Rousseau’s main contribution to social thought. Before Rousseau, however, wrote the _Contrat social_, the social contract theory had been overthrown. The writings of Montesquieu (1689–1755) offer an elaborate analysis of social and political processes. These analyses are similar, in some ways, to Aristotle’s analyses of 158 constitutions. Montesquieu discussed the doctrine of natural rights, but did not believe that the natural state of mankind was one of conflict, in which social organization was forced as a means of meeting the needs of individual protection. He asserted that there was a natural, innate tendency in man toward association. In the support of this belief, Montesquieu drew facts from the lives of the individual members of the primitive tribes which were extant in his day. The influence of Montesquieu was clearly inimical to the social contract doctrine. In the _Esprit des lois_, Montesquieu dissected the laws of many nations and tried to show the relations between these laws and social and political conditions. The general implication is that laws are a natural outgrowth of life conditions rather than of formal contractual agreements. Hence, society is a natural evolution rather than a contract.