We shall deal with the idea presently. Meanwhile several points claim our notice. 7. The hideous piece of cynicism whereby Rousseau (_Contrat Social_, iv. 2), after promising you that, if you join his commonwealth, you shall obey none but yourself, then goes on to tell you that you obey yourself in obeying the will of the majority, even when it puts you in irons or leads you to death--because as a citizen you have once for all renounced your own will, and can only wish what the majority wishes,--has its root in the position of Hobbes, that "every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth." (_Leviathan_, c. xxi.) 8. A real and important difference between the _Leviathan_ and the _Social Contract_, is that Hobbes (c. xix.) allows various distributions of sovereign power, but prefers monarchy: Rousseau (l. ii., c. i.) will have it that sovereignty is vested inalienably in the people: of which doctrine more to follow. 9. _Men are by nature equal_, say Rousseau and Hobbes and many more respectable authors. Yes, in their specific nature, that is, they are all equally men. Similarly you have it that all triangles are equal, if that is a proposition of any value. But men as individuals are not all equal. One is stronger in body, another more able in mind: one predisposed to virtue, another to vice: one born in affluence and honour, another in squalor. Not men in the abstract, but living men, start at different points of vantage, and the distance between them widens as they run the race of life. We may lay it down as an axiom, in diametric opposition to Rousseau, that inequalities are natural, equalities artificial. 10. _Man is born free_: so opens the first chapter of the _Contrat Social_. If free of all duties, then void of all rights (c. v., s. i., nn. 5, 7, pp. 246, 247): let him then be promptly knocked on the head as a sacrifice to Malthas; and with the misformed children born in Plato's _Republic_, "they will bury him in a secret and unseen spot, as is befitting."