a certain amount of work.”  Quashie, seeing no better terms to be had, accepts the bargain, and goes to work accordingly.  A highwayman who garottes me, and then clears out my pockets, robs me by force in the strict sense of the words; but if he puts a pistol to my head and demands my money or my life, and I, preferring the latter, hand over my purse, we have virtually made a contract, and I perform one of the terms of that contract.  If, nevertheless, the highwayman subsequently shoots me, everybody will see that, in addition to the crimes of murder and theft, he has been guilty of a breach of contract.

A despotic Government, therefore, though often a mere combination of slaveholding and highway robbery, nevertheless implies a contract between governor and governed, with voluntary submission on the part of the latter; and a fortiori, all other forms of government are in like case.

Now a contract between any two men implies a restriction of the freedom of each in certain particulars.  The highwayman gives up his freedom to shoot me, on condition of my giving up my freedom to do as I like with my money:  I give up my freedom to kill Quashie, on condition of Quashie’s giving up his freedom to be idle.  And the essence and foundation of every social organization, whether simple or complex, is the fact that each member of the society voluntarily renounces his freedom in certain directions, in return for the advantages which he expects from association with the other members of that society.  Nor are constitutions, laws, or manners, in ultimate analysis, anything but so many expressed or implied contracts between the members of a society to do this, or abstain from that.

It appears to me that this feature constitutes the difference between the social and the physiological organism.  Among the higher physiological organisms, there is none which is developed by the conjunction of a number of primitively independent existences into a complex whole.  The process of social organization appears to be comparable, not so much to the process of organic development, as to the synthesis of the chemist, by which independent elements are gradually built up into complex aggregations—­in which each element retains an independent individuality, though held in subordination to the whole.  The atoms of carbon and hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, which enter into a complex molecule, do not lose the powers originally inherent in them, when they unite to form that molecule, the properties of which express those forces of the whole aggregation which are not neutralized and balanced by one another.  Each atom has given up something, in order that the atomic society, or molecule, may subsist.  And as soon as any one or more of the atoms thus associated resumes the freedom which it has renounced, and follows some external attraction, the molecule is broken up, and all the peculiar properties which depended upon its constitution vanish.