But there
is another sort of servants, which by a peculiar name we call
slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right
of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power
of their masters. These men having, as I say, forfeited their
lives, and with it their liberties, and lost their estates; and
being in the state of slavery, not capable of any property,
cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society;
the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.
Sec. 86. Let us therefore consider a master of a family
with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants,
and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family; which,
what resemblance soever it may have in its order, offices, and
number too, with a little common-wealth, yet is very far from it,
both in its constitution, power and end: or if it must be thought
a monarchy, and the paterfamilias the absolute monarch in it,
absolute monarchy will have but a very shattered and short power,
when it is plain, by what has been said before, that the master
of the family has a very distinct and differently limited power,
both as to time and extent, over those several persons that are
in it; for excepting the slave (and the family is as much a
family, and his power as paterfamilias as great, whether there be
any slaves in his family or no) he has no legislative power of
life and death over any of them, and none too but what a mistress
of a family may have as well as he.
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