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52. It may perhaps be censured an impertinent criticism
in a discourse of this nature to find fault with words and names
that have obtained in the world. And yet possibly it may not be
amiss to offer new ones when the old are apt to lead men into mistakes,
as this of paternal power probably has done, which seems so to place
the power of parents over their children wholly in the father, as
if the mother had no share in it; whereas if we consult reason or
revelation, we shall find she has an equal title, which may give
one reason to ask whether this might not be more properly called
parental power? For whatever obligation Nature and the right of
generation lays on children, it must certainly bind them equal to
both the concurrent causes of it. And accordingly we see the positive
law of God everywhere joins them together without distinction, when
it commands the obedience of children: "Honour thy father and
thy mother" (Exod. 20. 12); "Whosoever curseth his father
or his mother" (Lev. 20. 9); "Ye shall fear every man
his mother and his father" (Lev. 19. 3); "Children, obey
your parents" (Eph. 6. 1), etc., is the style of the Old and
New Testament.
53. Had but this one thing been well considered without looking
any deeper into the matter, it might perhaps have kept men from
running into those gross mistakes they have made about this power
of parents, which however it might without any great harshness bear
the name of absolute dominion and regal authority, when under the
title of "paternal" power, it seemed appropriated to the
father; would yet have sounded but oddly, and in the very name shown
the absurdity, if this supposed absolute power over children had
been called parental, and thereby discovered that it belonged to
the mother too. For it will but very ill serve the turn of those
men who contend so much for the absolute power and authority of
the fatherhood, as they call it, that the mother should have any
share in it. And it would have but ill supported the monarchy they
contend for, when by the very name it appeared that that fundamental
authority from whence they would derive their government of a single
person only was not placed in one, but two persons jointly. But
to let this of names pass.
54. Though I have said above (2) "That all men by nature are
equal," I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of "equality."
Age or virtue may give men a just precedency. Excellency of parts
and merit may place others above the common level. Birth may subject
some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those
to whom Nature, gratitude, or other respects, may have made it due;
and yet all this consists with the equality which all men are in
respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another, which was
the equality I there spoke of as proper to the business in hand,
being that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom,
without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.
55. Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality,
though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and
jurisdiction over them when they come into the world, and for some
time after, but it is but a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection
are like the swaddling clothes they are wrapt up in and supported
by in the weakness of their infancy. Age and reason as they grow
up loosen them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a
man at his own free disposal.
56. Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession
of their strength and reason, and so was capable from the first
instance of his being to provide for his own support and preservation,
and govern his actions according to the dictates of the law of reason
God had implanted in him. From him the world is peopled with his
descendants, who are all born infants, weak and helpless, without
knowledge or understanding. But to supply the defects of this imperfect
state till the improvement of growth and age had removed them, Adam
and Eve, and after them all parents were, by the law of Nature,
under an obligation to preserve, nourish and educate the children
they had begotten, not as their own workmanship, but the workmanship
of their own Maker, the Almighty, to whom they were to be accountable
for them.
57. The law that was to govern Adam was the same that was to govern
all his posterity, the law of reason. But his offspring having another
way of entrance into the world, different from him, by a natural
birth, that produced them ignorant, and without the use of reason,
they were not presently under that law. For nobody can be under
a law that is not promulgated to him; and this law being promulgated
or made known by reason only, he that is not come to the use of
his reason cannot be said to be under this law; and Adam's children
being not presently as soon as born under this law of reason, were
not presently free. For law, in its true notion, is not so much
the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent
to his proper interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the
general good of those under that law. Could they be happier without
it, the law, as a useless thing, would of itself vanish; and that
ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from
bogs and precipices. So that however it may be mistaken, the end
of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge
freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws,
where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be
free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where
there is no law; and is not, as we are told, "a liberty for
every man to do what he lists." For who could be free, when
every other man's humour might domineer over him? But a liberty
to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions,
and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under
which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will
of another, but freely follow his own.
58. The power, then, that parents have over their children arises
from that duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their
offspring during the imperfect state of childhood. To inform the
mind, and govern the actions of their yet ignorant nonage, till
reason shall take its place and ease them of that trouble, is what
the children want, and the parents are bound to. For God having
given man an understanding to direct his actions, has allowed him
a freedom of will and liberty of acting, as properly belonging thereunto
within the bounds of that law he is under. But whilst he is in an
estate wherein he has no understanding of his own to direct his
will, he is not to have any will of his own to follow. He that understands
for him must will for him too; he must prescribe to his will, and
regulate his actions, but when he comes to the estate that made
his father a free man, the son is a free man too.
59. This holds in all the laws a man is under, whether natural
or civil. Is a man under the law of Nature? What made him free of
that law? what gave him a free disposing of his property, according
to his own will, within the compass of that law? I answer, an estate
wherein he might be supposed capable to know that law, that so he
might keep his actions within the bounds of it. When he has acquired
that state, he is presumed to know how far that law is to be his
guide, and how far he may make use of his freedom, and so comes
to have it; till then, somebody else must guide him, who is presumed
to know how far the law allows a liberty. If such a state of reason,
such an age of discretion made him free, the same shall make his
son free too. Is a man under the law of England? what made him free
of that law- that is, to have the liberty to dispose of his actions
and possessions, according to his own will, within the permission
of that law? a capacity of knowing that law. Which is supposed,
by that law, at the age of twenty-one, and in some cases sooner.
If this made the father free, it shall make the son free too. Till
then, we see the law allows the son to have no will, but he is to
be guided by the will of his father or guardian, who is to understand
for him. And if the father die and fail to substitute a deputy in
this trust, if he hath not provided a tutor to govern his son during
his minority, during his want of understanding, the law takes care
to do it: some other must govern him and be a will to him till he
hath attained to a state of freedom, and his understanding be fit
to take the government of his will. But after that the father and
son are equally free, as much as tutor and pupil, after nonage,
equally subjects of the same law together, without any dominion
left in the father over the life, liberty, or estate of his son,
whether they be only in the state and under the law of Nature, or
under the positive laws of an established government.
60. But if through defects that may happen out of the ordinary
course of Nature, any one comes not to such a degree of reason wherein
he might be supposed capable of knowing the law, and so living within
the rules of it, he is never capable of being a free man, he is
never let loose to the disposure of his own will; because he knows
no bounds to it, has not understanding, its proper guide, but is
continued under the tuition and government of others all the time
his own understanding is incapable of that charge. And so lunatics
and idiots are never set free from the government of their parents:
"Children who are not as yet come unto those years whereat
they may have, and innocents, which are excluded by a natural defect
from ever having." Thirdly: "Madmen, which, for the present,
cannot possibly have the use of right reason to guide themselves,
have, for their guide, the reason that guideth other men which are
tutors over them, to seek and procure their good for them,"
says Hooker (Eccl. Pol., lib. i., s. 7). All which seems no more
than that duty which God and Nature has laid on man, as well as
other creatures, to preserve their offspring till they can be able
to shift for themselves, and will scarce amount to an instance or
proof of parents' regal authority.
61. Thus we are born free as we are born rational; not that we
have actually the exercise of either: age that brings one, brings
with it the other too. And thus we see how natural freedom and subjection
to parents may consist together, and are both founded on the same
principle. A child is free by his father's title, by his father's
understanding, which is to govern him till he hath it of his own.
The freedom of a man at years of discretion, and the subjection
of a child to his parents, whilst yet short of it, are so consistent
and so distinguishable that the most blinded contenders for monarchy,
"by right of fatherhood," cannot miss of it; the most
obstinate cannot but allow of it. For were their doctrine all true,
were the right heir of Adam now known, and, by that title, settled
a monarch in his throne, invested with all the absolute unlimited
power Sir Robert Filmer talks of, if he should die as soon as his
heir were born, must not the child, notwithstanding he were never
so free, never so much sovereign, be in subjection to his mother
and nurse, to tutors and governors, till age and education brought
him reason and ability to govern himself and others? The necessities
of his life, the health of his body, and the information of his
mind would require him to be directed by the will of others and
not his own; and yet will any one think that this restraint and
subjection were inconsistent with, or spoiled him of, that liberty
or sovereignty he had a right to, or gave away his empire to those
who had the government of his nonage? This government over him only
prepared him the better and sooner for it. If anybody should ask
me when my son is of age to be free, I shall answer, just when his
monarch is of age to govern. "But at what time," says
the judicious Hooker (Eccl. Pol., lib. i., s. 6), "a man may
be said to have attained so far forth the use of reason as sufficeth
to make him capable of those laws whereby he is then bound to guide
his actions; this is a great deal more easy for sense to discern
than for any one, by skill and learning, to determine."
62. Commonwealths themselves take notice of, and allow that there
is a time when men are to begin to act like free men, and therefore,
till that time, require not oaths of fealty or allegiance, or other
public owning of, or submission to, the government of their countries.
63. The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to
his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to
instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him
know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will. To turn
him loose to an unrestrained liberty, before he has reason to guide
him, is not the allowing him the privilege of his nature to be free,
but to thrust him out amongst brutes, and abandon him to a state
as wretched and as much beneath that of a man as theirs. This is
that which puts the authority into the parents' hands to govern
the minority of their children. God hath made it their business
to employ this care on their offspring, and hath placed in them
suitable inclinations of tenderness and concern to temper this power,
to apply it as His wisdom designed it, to the children's good as
long as they should need to be under it.
64. But what reason can hence advance this care of the parents
due to their offspring into an absolute, arbitrary dominion of the
father, whose power reaches no farther than by such a discipline
as he finds most effectual to give such strength and health to their
bodies, such vigour and rectitude to their minds, as may best fit
his children to be most useful to themselves and others, and, if
it be necessary to his condition, to make them work when they are
able for their own subsistence; but in this power the mother, too,
has her share with the father.
65. Nay, this power so little belongs to the father by any peculiar
right of Nature, but only as he is guardian of his children, that
when he quits his care of them he loses his power over them, which
goes along with their nourishment and education, to which it is
inseparably annexed, and belongs as much to the foster-father of
an exposed child as to the natural father of another. So little
power does the bare act of begetting give a man over his issue,
if all his care ends there, and this be all the title he hath to
the name and authority of a father. And what will become of this
paternal power in that part of the world where one woman hath more
than one husband at a time? or in those parts of America where,
when the husband and wife part, which happens frequently, the children
are all left to the mother, follow her, and are wholly under her
care and provision? And if the father die whilst the children are
young, do they not naturally everywhere owe the same obedience to
their mother, during their minority, as to their father, were he
alive? And will any one say that the mother hath a legislative power
over her children that she can make standing rules which shall be
of perpetual obligation, by which they ought to regulate all the
concerns of their property, and bound their liberty all the course
of their lives, and enforce the observation of them with capital
punishments? For this is the proper power of the magistrate, of
which the father hath not so much as the shadow. His command over
his children is but temporary, and reaches not their life or property.
It is but a help to the weakness and imperfection of their nonage,
a discipline necessary to their education. And though a father may
dispose of his own possessions as he pleases when his children are
out of danger of perishing for want, yet his power extends not to
the lives or goods which either their own industry, or another's
bounty, has made theirs, nor to their liberty neither when they
are once arrived to the enfranchisement of the years of discretion.
The father's empire then ceases, and he can from thenceforward no
more dispose of the liberty of his son than that of any other man.
And it must be far from an absolute or perpetual jurisdiction from
which a man may withdraw himself, having licence from Divine authority
to "leave father and mother and cleave to his wife."
66. But though there be a time when a child comes to be as free
from subjection to the will and command of his father as he himself
is free from subjection to the will of anybody else, and they are
both under no other restraint but that which is common to them both,
whether it be the law of Nature or municipal law of their country,
yet this freedom exempts not a son from that honour which he ought,
by the law of God and Nature, to pay his parents, God having made
the parents instruments in His great design of continuing the race
of mankind and the occasions of life to their children. As He hath
laid on them an obligation to nourish, preserve, and bring up their
offspring, so He has laid on the children a perpetual obligation
of honouring their parents, which, containing in it an inward esteem
and reverence to be shown by all outward expressions, ties up the
child from anything that may ever injure or affront, disturb or
endanger the happiness or life of those from whom he received his,
and engages him in all actions of defence, relief, assistance, and
comfort of those by whose means he entered into being and has been
made capable of any enjoyments of life. From this obligation no
state, no freedom, can absolve children. But this is very far from
giving parents a power of command over their children, or an authority
to make laws and dispose as they please of their lives or liberties.
It is one thing to owe honour, respect, gratitude, and assistance;
another to require an absolute obedience and submission. The honour
due to parents a monarch on his throne owes his mother, and yet
this lessens not his authority nor subjects him to her government.
67. The subjection of a minor places in the father a temporary
government which terminates with the minority of the child; and
the honour due from a child places in the parents a perpetual right
to respect, reverence, support, and compliance, to more or less,
as the father's care, cost, and kindness in his education has been
more or less, and this ends not with minority, but holds in all
parts and conditions of a man's life. The want of distinguishing
these two powers which the father hath, in the right of tuition,
during minority, and the right of honour all his life, may perhaps
have caused a great part of the mistakes about this matter. For,
to speak properly of them, the first of these is rather the privilege
of children and duty of parents than any prerogative of paternal
power. The nourishment and education of their children is a charge
so incumbent on parents for their children's good, that nothing
can absolve them from taking care of it. And though the power of
commanding and chastising them go along with it, yet God hath woven
into the principles of human nature such a tenderness for their
offspring, that there is little fear that parents should use their
power with too much rigour; the excess is seldom on the severe side,
the strong bias of nature drawing the other way. And therefore God
Almighty, when He would express His gentle dealing with the Israelites,
He tells them that though He chastened them, "He chastened
them as a man chastens his son" (Deut. 8. 5)- i.e., with tenderness
and affection, and kept them under no severer discipline than what
was absolutely best for them, and had been less kindness, to have
slackened. This is that power to which children are commanded obedience,
that the pains and care of their parents may not be increased or
ill-rewarded.
68. On the other side, honour and support all that which gratitude
requires to return; for the benefits received by and from them is
the indispensable duty of the child and the proper privilege of
the parents. This is intended for the parents' advantage, as the
other is for the child's; though education, the parents' duty, seems
to have most power, because the ignorance and infirmities of childhood
stand in need of restraint and correction, which is a visible exercise
of rule and a kind of dominion. And that duty which is comprehended
in the word "honour" requires less obedience, though the
obligation be stronger on grown than younger children. For who can
think the command, "Children, obey your parents," requires
in a man that has children of his own the same submission to his
father as it does in his yet young children to him, and that by
this precept he were bound to obey all his father's commands, if,
out of a conceit of authority, he should have the indiscretion to
treat him still as a boy?
69. The first part, then, of paternal power, or rather duty, which
is education, belongs so to the father that it terminates at a certain
season. When the business of education is over it ceases of itself,
and is also alienable before. For a man may put the tuition of his
son in other hands; and he that has made his son an apprentice to
another has discharged him, during that time, of a great part of
his obedience, both to himself and to his mother. But all the duty
of honour, the other part, remains nevertheless entire to them;
nothing can cancel that. It is so inseparable from them both, that
the father's authority cannot dispossess the mother of this right,
nor can any man discharge his son from honouring her that bore him.
But both these are very far from a power to make laws, and enforcing
them with penalties that may reach estate, liberty, limbs, and life.
The power of commanding ends with nonage, and though after that
honour and respect, support and defence, and whatsoever gratitude
can oblige a man to, for the highest benefits he is naturally capable
of be always due from a son to his parents, yet all this puts no
sceptre into the father's hand, no sovereign power of commanding.
He has no dominion over his son's property or actions, nor any right
that his will should prescribe to his son's in all things; however,
it may become his son in many things, not very inconvenient to him
and his family, to pay a deference to it.
70. A man may owe honour and respect to an ancient or wise man,
defence to his child or friend, relief and support to the distressed,
and gratitude to a benefactor, to such a degree that all he has,
all he can do, cannot sufficiently pay it. But all these give no
authority, no right of making laws to any one over him from whom
they are owing. And it is plain all this is due, not to the bare
title of father, not only because as has been said, it is owing
to the mother too, but because these obligations to parents, and
the degrees of what is required of children, may be varied by the
different care and kindness trouble and expense, is often employed
upon one child more than another.
71. This shows the reason how it comes to pass that parents in
societies, where they themselves are subjects, retain a power over
their children and have as much right to their subjection as those
who are in the state of Nature, which could not possibly be if all
political power were only paternal, and that, in truth, they were
one and the same thing; for then, all paternal power being in the
prince, the subject could naturally have none of it. But these two
powers, political and paternal, are so perfectly distinct and separate,
and built upon so different foundations, and given to so different
ends, that every subject that is a father has as much a paternal
power over his children as the prince has over his. And every prince
that has parents owes them as much filial duty and obedience as
the meanest of his subjects do to theirs, and can therefore contain
not any part or degree of that kind of dominion which a prince or
magistrate has over his subject.
72. Though the obligation on the parents to bring up their children,
and the obligation on children to honour their parents, contain
all the power, on the one hand, and submission on the other, which
are proper to this relation, yet there is another power ordinarily
in the father, whereby he has a tie on the obedience of his children,
which, though it be common to him with other men, yet the occasions
of showing it, almost constantly happening to fathers in their private
families and in instances of it elsewhere being rare, and less taken
notice of, it passes in the world for a part of "paternal jurisdiction."
And this is the power men generally have to bestow their estates
on those who please them best. The possession of the father being
the expectation and inheritance of the children ordinarily, in certain
proportions, according to the law and custom of each country, yet
it is commonly in the father's power to bestow it with a more sparing
or liberal hand, according as the behaviour of this or that child
hath comported with his will and humour.
73. This is no small tie to the obedience of children; and there
being always annexed to the enjoyment of land a submission to the
government of the country of which that land is a part, it has been
commonly supposed that a father could oblige his posterity to that
government of which he himself was a subject, that his compact held
them; whereas, it being only a necessary condition annexed to the
land which is under that government, reaches only those who will
take it on that condition, and so is no natural tie or engagement,
but a voluntary submission; for every man's children being, by Nature,
as free as himself or any of his ancestors ever were, may, whilst
they are in that freedom, choose what society they will join themselves
to, what commonwealth they will put themselves under. But if they
will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it
on the same terms their ancestors had it, and submit to all the
conditions annexed to such a possession. By this power, indeed,
fathers oblige their children to obedience to themselves even when
they are past minority, and most commonly, too, subject them to
this or that political power. But neither of these by any peculiar
right of fatherhood, but by the reward they have in their hands
to enforce and recompense such a compliance, and is no more power
than what a Frenchman has over an Englishman, who, by the hopes
of an estate he will leave him, will certainly have a strong tie
on his obedience; and if when it is left him, he will enjoy it,
he must certainly take it upon the conditions annexed to the possession
of land in that country where it lies, whether it be France or England.
74. To conclude, then, though the father's power of commanding
extends no farther than the minority of his children, and to a degree
only fit for the discipline and government of that age; and though
that honour and respect, and all that which the Latins called piety,
which they indispensably owe to their parents all their lifetime,
and in all estates, with all that support and defence, is due to
them, gives the father no power of governing- i.e., making laws
and exacting penalties on his children; though by this he has no
dominion over the property or actions of his son, yet it is obvious
to conceive how easy it was, in the first ages of the world, and
in places still where the thinness of people gives families leave
to separate into unpossessed quarters, and they have room to remove
and plant themselves in yet vacant habitations, for the father of
the family to become the prince of it;* he had been a ruler from
the beginning of the infancy of his children; and when they were
grown up, since without some government it would be hard for them
to live together, it was likeliest it should, by the express or
tacit consent of the children, be in the father, where it seemed,
without any change, barely to continue. And when, indeed, nothing
more was required to it than the permitting the father to exercise
alone in his family that executive power of the law of Nature which
every free man naturally hath, and by that permission resigning
up to him a monarchical power whilst they remained in it. But that
this was not by any paternal right, but only by the consent of his
children, is evident from hence, that nobody doubts but if a stranger,
whom chance or business had brought to his family, had there killed
any of his children, or committed any other act, he might condemn
and put him to death, or otherwise have punished him as well as
any of his children. which was impossible he should do by virtue
of any paternal authority over one who was not his child, but by
virtue of that executive power of the law of Nature which, as a
man, he had a right to; and he alone could punish him in his family
where the respect of his children had laid by the exercise of such
a power, to give way to the dignity and authority they were willing
should remain in him above the rest of his family.
* "It is no improbable opinion, therefore, which
the arch-philosopher was of, That the chief person in every household
was always, as it were, a king; so when numbers of households joined
themselves in civil societies together, kings were the first kind
of governors among them, which is also, as it seemeth, the reason
why the name of fathers continued still in them, who of fathers
were made rulers; as also the ancient custom of governors to do
as Melchizedec; and being kings, to exercise the office of priests,
which fathers did, at the first, grew, perhaps, by the same occasion.
Howbeit, this is not the only kind of regimen that has been received
in the world. The inconveniencies of one kind have caused sundry
others to be devised, so that, in a word, all public regimen, of
what kind soever, seemeth evidently to have risen from the deliberate
advice, consultation and composition between men, judging it convenient
and behoveful, there being no impossibility in Nature, considered
by itself, but that man might have lived without any public regimen."
Hooker, Eccl. Pol., i. 10.
75. Thus it was easy and almost natural for children, by a tacit
and almost natural consent, to make way for the father's authority
and government. They had been accustomed in their childhood to follow
his direction, and to refer their little differences to him; and
when they were men, who was fitter to rule them? Their little properties
and less covetousness seldom afforded greater controversies; and
when any should arise, where could they have a fitter umpire than
he, by whose care they had every one been sustained and brought
up. and who had a tenderness for them all? It is no wonder that
they made no distinction betwixt minority and full age, nor looked
after one-and-twenty, or any other age, that might make them the
free disposers of themselves and fortunes, when they could have
no desire to be out of their pupilage. The government they had been
under during it continued still to be more their protection than
restraint; and they could nowhere find a greater security to their
peace, liberties, and fortunes than in the rule of a father.
76. Thus the natural fathers of families, by an insensible change,
became the politic monarchs of them too; and as they chanced to
live long, and leave able and worthy heirs for several successions
or otherwise, so they laid the foundations of hereditary or elective
kingdoms under several constitutions and manors, according as chance,
contrivance, or occasions happened to mould them. But if princes
have their titles in the father's right, and it be a sufficient
proof of the natural right of fathers to political authority, because
they commonly were those in whose hands we find, de facto, the exercise
of government, I say, if this argument be good, it will as strongly
prove that all princes, nay, princes only, ought to be priests,
since it is as certain that in the beginning "the father of
the family was priest, as that he was ruler in his own household."
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