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But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such
thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind
another. The power of acting by a majority, which the gentlemen
theorists seem to assume so readily, after they have violated the
contract out of which it has arisen, (if at all it existed,) must be
grounded on two assumptions: first, that of an incorporation produced by
unanimity; and secondly, an unanimous agreement that the act of a mere
majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of
the whole.
We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider
this idea of the decision of a _majority_ as if it were a law of our
original nature. But such constructive whole, residing in a part only,
is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been
or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation. Out of
civil society Nature knows nothing of it; nor are men, even when
arranged according to civil order, otherwise than by very long training,
brought at all to submit to it.


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