Originally, the chief is the father, the patriarch, the elder; in other words, the good and wise man, whose functions, consequently, are exclusively of a reflective and intellectual nature.

The human race--like all other races of sociable animals--has its instincts, its innate faculties, its general ideas, and its categories of sentiment and reason.

Its chiefs, legislators, or kings have devised nothing, supposed nothing, imagined nothing.

They have only guided society by their accumulated experience, always however in conformity with opinions and beliefs.
Those philosophers who (carrying into morals and into history their gloomy and factious whims) affirm that the human race had originally neither chiefs nor kings, know nothing of the nature of man.

Royalty, and absolute royalty, is--as truly and more truly than democracy--a primitive form of government.