title can come to be under the “natural and absolute dominion” of two different men at once; or it be sense to say, that a man by birth is under the natural dominion of his father, only because he begat him, and a man by birth also is under the natural dominion of his eldest brother, though he did not beget him.
If then the private dominion of Adam, i.e. his property in the creatures, descended at his death all entirely to his eldest son, his heir (for, if it did not, there is presently an end of all Sir Robert’s monarchy); and his natural dominion, the dominion a father has over his children by begetting them, belonged, immediately upon Adam’s decease, equally to all his sons who had children, by the same title their father had it, the sovereignty founded upon property, and the sovereignty founded upon fatherhood, come to be divided; since Cain, as heir, had that of property alone; Seth, and the other sons, that of fatherhood equally with him. This is the best can be made of our author’s doctrine, and of the two titles of sovereignty he sets up in Adam: one of them will either signify nothing; or, if they both must stand, they can serve only to confound the rights of princes, and disorder government in his posterity: for by building upon two titles to dominion, which cannot descend together, and which he allows may be separated (for he yields that “Adam’s children had their distinct territories by right of private dominion,” O. 210, p. 40), he makes it perpetually a doubt upon his principles where the sovereignty is, or to whom we owe our obedience; since fatherhood and property are distinct titles, and began presently upon Adam’s death to be in distinct persons. And which then was to give way to the other?
Let us take the account of it, as he himself gives it us. He tells us out of Grotius, that “Adam’s children by donation, assignation, or some kind of cession before he was dead, had their distinct territories by right of private dominion; Abel had his flocks and pastures for them: Cain had his fields for corn, and the land of Nod, where he built him a city,” O. 210. Here it is obvious to demand, which of these two after Adam’s