Of Fatherhood and Property Considered Together as Fountains of Sovereignty
In the foregoing chapters we have seen what Adam’s monarchy was, in our author’s opinion, and upon what titles he founded it. The foundations which he lays the chief stress on, as those from which he thinks he may best derive monarchical power to future princes, are two, viz. “fatherhood and property”: and therefore the way he proposes to “remove the absurdities and inconveniencies of the doctrine of natural freedom, is, to maintain the natural and private dominion of Adam,” O. 222. Conformable hereunto he tells us, the “grounds and principles of government necessarily depend upon the original of property, O. 108. The subjection of children to their parents is the fountain of all regal authority, p. 12. And all power on earth is either derived or usurped from the fatherly power, there being no other original to be found of any power whatsoever,” O. 158. I will not stand here to examine how it can be said without a contradiction, that the “first grounds and principles of government necessarily depend upon the original of property”; and yet, “that there is no other original of any power whatsoever but that of the father”: it being hard to understand how there can be “no other original but fatherhood,” and yet that the “grounds and principles of government depend upon the original of property”; property and fatherhood being as far different as lord of the manor and father of children. Nor do I see how they will either of them agree with what our author says, O. 244, of God’s sentence against Eve, Gen. 3:16, “that it is the original grant of government”: so that if that were the original, government had not its original, by our author’s own confession, either from property or fatherhood; and this text, which he brings as a proof of Adam’s power over Eve, necessarily contradicts what he says of the