necessity than from any idea of allegiance or of moral obligation. The prince is watchful and jealous, and must carefully guard against every beginning or appearance of insurrection. Time, by degrees, removes all these difficulties, and accustoms the nation to regard, as their lawful or native princes, that family whom at first they considered as usurpers or foreign conquerors. In order to found this opinion, they have no recourse to any notion of voluntary consent or promise, which, they know, never was in this case either expected or demanded. The original establishment was formed by violence, and submitted to from necessity. The subsequent administration is also supported by power, and acquiesced in by the people, not as a matter of choice, but of obligation. They imagine not that their consent gives their prince a title; but they willingly consent because they think that, from long possession, he has acquired a title independent of their choice or inclination.
Should it be said that by living under the dominion {p183} of a prince which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience, it may be answered that such implied consent can only take place where a man imagines that the matter depends on his choice. But where he thinks (as all mankind do who are born under established governments) that by his birth he owes allegiance to a certain prince or certain government, it would be absurd to infer a consent or choice, which he expressly, in this case, renounces and abjures.
Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his own country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day by the same small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master, though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her.