Book I

Foreword

This little treatise is taken from a larger work, undertaken long ago without consulting my strength, and since abandoned. Of the various pieces that could be drawn from what had been done, this is the most considerable, and seemed to me the least unworthy of being offered to the public. The rest no longer exists.

Book I

I wish to inquire whether, in the civil order, there can be any legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are and laws as they can be. In this inquiry I shall always try to unite what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be divided.

I enter upon my subject without proving its importance. I shall be asked whether I am a prince or a legislator, that I write on politics. I answer that I am not, and that this is why I write on politics. If I were a prince or a legislator, I would not waste my time saying what ought to be done; I would do it, or keep silent.

Born a citizen of a free state, and a member of the sovereign, however feeble the influence my voice may have in public affairs, the right to vote on them is enough to impose on me the duty of informing myself about them. Happy am I, every time I reflect on governments, always to find in my inquiries new reasons for loving that of my own country!

Chapter I. Subject of This First Book

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who thinks himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question.

If I considered only force and the effect derived from it, I would say: as long as a people is compelled to obey and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does better still; for, recovering its liberty by the same right by which it was taken away, either it is entitled to take it back, or there was no title to take it from it. But the social order is a sacred right which serves as the basis of all the others. Yet this right does not come from nature; it is therefore founded on conventions. The question is to know what these conventions are. Before coming to that, I must establish what I have just put forward.

Chapter II. Of the First Societies

The most ancient of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family. Yet the children remain bound to the father only as long as they need him to preserve themselves. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed the father, and the father, released from the care he owed the children, all return equally to independence. If they continue to remain united, it is no longer naturally but voluntarily, and the family itself is maintained only by convention.

This common liberty is a consequence of the nature of man. His first law is to attend to his own preservation, his first cares are those he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, being sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, he thereby becomes his own master.

The family, then, is if you will the first model of political societies: the ruler is the image of the father, the people the image of the children; and all, being born equal and free, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that in the family the father's love for his children repays him for the care he gives them, whereas in the state the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love the ruler does not have for his peoples.

Grotius denies that all human power is established in favour of those who are governed, and cites slavery as an example. His most constant way of reasoning is always to establish right by fact.¹ A more consistent method could be employed, but not one more favourable to tyrants.

It is doubtful, then, according to Grotius, whether the human race belongs to a hundred or so men, or whether these hundred men belong to the human race; and throughout his book he seems to lean towards the former view. This is also the opinion of Hobbes. So here is the human species divided into herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps it in order to devour it.

As a herdsman is of a nature superior to that of his herd, so the shepherds of men, who are their rulers, are of a nature superior to that of their peoples. So reasoned, according to Philo, the emperor Caligula, concluding quite well from this analogy that kings were gods, or that peoples were beasts.

The reasoning of this Caligula comes to the same thing as that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before all of them, had also said that men are not naturally equal, but that some are born for slavery and others for domination.

Aristotle was right, but he took the effect for the cause. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery; nothing is more certain. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape from them; they love their servitude as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutish condition.² If there are slaves by nature, then, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves; their cowardice perpetuated them.

I have said nothing of King Adam, or of the Emperor Noah, father of three great monarchs who divided the universe among them, as did the children of Saturn, whom some have thought to recognize in them. I hope I shall be thanked for this moderation; for, descending directly from one of these princes, and perhaps from the eldest branch, who knows whether, on verification of titles, I might not find myself the legitimate king of the human race? However that may be, it cannot be denied that Adam was sovereign of the world, as Robinson was of his island, as long as he was its only inhabitant; and what was convenient about this empire was that the monarch, secure on his throne, had neither rebellion, nor wars, nor conspirators to fear.

Chapter III. Of the Right of the Strongest

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he transforms his force into right and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest — a right taken ironically in appearance and really established in principle. But will no one ever explain this word to us? Force is a physical power; I do not see what morality can result from its effects. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Let us suppose for a moment this so-called right. I say that nothing results from it but an inexplicable muddle. For as soon as it is force that makes right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that overcomes the first succeeds to its right. As soon as one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately; and since the strongest is always right, the only thing that matters is to make sure one is the strongest. But what is a right that perishes when force ceases? If one must obey by force, there is no need to obey by duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey, one is no longer obliged to. Clearly, then, this word "right" adds nothing to force; it means nothing at all here.

Obey the powers that be. If this means "yield to force", the precept is good but superfluous; I answer that it will never be violated. All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all disease. Does that mean it is forbidden to call the doctor? A robber surprises me at the edge of a wood: not only must I give up my purse by force, but, if I could keep it from him, am I in conscience obliged to give it? For after all, the pistol he holds is also a power.

Let us agree, then, that force does not make right, and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers. So my original question always returns.

Chapter IV. Of Slavery

Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow man, and since force produces no right, conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men.

If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people alienate its liberty and make itself subject to a king? There are many ambiguous words here that would need explanation, but let us confine ourselves to the word "alienate". To alienate is to give or to sell. Now a man who makes himself the slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at the very least for his subsistence. But for what does a people sell itself? Far from a king furnishing his subjects with their subsistence, he draws his own only from them, and according to Rabelais a king does not live on little. Do the subjects, then, give their persons on condition that their goods will be taken too? I do not see what they have left to keep.

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. So be it; but what do they gain by it, if the wars his ambition brings upon them, if his insatiable greed, if the vexations of his ministers desolate them more than their own dissensions would? What do they gain by it, if this very tranquillity is one of their miseries? One lives tranquilly in dungeons too; is that enough to make one feel well there? The Greeks shut up in the Cyclops' cave lived there tranquilly, waiting for their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself for nothing is to say something absurd and inconceivable; such an act is illegitimate and void, for the sole reason that the one who does it is not in his right mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness does not make right.

Even if each man could alienate himself, he cannot alienate his children; they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they reach the age of reason, the father can, in their name, stipulate conditions for their preservation and their well-being, but he cannot give them irrevocably and without condition; for such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature and exceeds the rights of paternity. For an arbitrary government to be legitimate, then, the people would have to be master, in each generation, of accepting or rejecting it; but then this government would no longer be arbitrary.

To renounce one's liberty is to renounce one's quality as a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties. There is no possible compensation for anyone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man; and to take away all liberty from one's will is to take away all morality from one's actions. Finally, it is a vain and contradictory convention to stipulate absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other. Is it not clear that one is bound to nothing towards a person from whom one has the right to demand everything? And does not this single condition, without equivalent, without exchange, entail the nullity of the act? For what right could my slave have against me, since everything he has belongs to me, and, his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a word without any meaning?

Grotius and the others derive from war another origin of the so-called right of slavery. The victor having, according to them, the right to kill the vanquished, the latter can buy back his life at the cost of his liberty — a convention all the more legitimate in that it turns to the profit of both.

But it is clear that this so-called right to kill the vanquished does not in any way result from the state of war. By the mere fact that men living in their primitive independence have no relationship among themselves constant enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war, they are not naturally enemies. It is the relationship between things and not between men that constitutes war; and since the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from relations of property, private war, or war of man against man, can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no settled property, nor in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws.

Individual combats, duels and encounters are acts that do not constitute a state; and as for the private wars authorized by the ordinances of Louis IX, king of France, and suspended by the Peace of God, they are abuses of feudal government, a system as absurd as ever there was, contrary to the principles of natural right and to all good polity.

War, then, is not a relation of man to man but a relation of state to state, in which individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, each state can have as enemies only other states and not men, inasmuch as no true relation can be established between things of different natures.

This principle even conforms to the maxims established in all ages and to the constant practice of all civilized peoples. Declarations of war are warnings not so much to the powers as to their subjects. The foreigner — be he king, individual or people — who robs, kills or detains subjects without declaring war on the prince is not an enemy but a brigand. Even in the midst of war a just prince indeed seizes, in enemy country, everything belonging to the public, but he respects the persons and goods of individuals; he respects rights on which his own are founded. The end of war being the destruction of the enemy state, one has the right to kill its defenders as long as they bear arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, they become simply men again, and one no longer has any right over their lives. Sometimes one can kill the state without killing a single one of its members. Now war gives no right that is not necessary to its end. These principles are not those of Grotius; they are not founded on the authority of poets, but they derive from the nature of things and are founded on reason.

As for the right of conquest, it has no other foundation than the law of the strongest. If war does not give the victor the right to massacre the vanquished peoples, this right that he does not have cannot be the foundation of a right to enslave them. One has the right to kill the enemy only when one cannot make him a slave; the right to make him a slave does not, then, come from the right to kill him. It is therefore an iniquitous exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which one has no right. In founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death, is it not clear that one falls into a vicious circle?

Even supposing this terrible right to kill everyone, I say that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, is bound to nothing at all towards its master, except to obey him as far as it is forced to. In taking an equivalent for his life, the victor has not spared it: instead of killing him to no purpose, he has killed him usefully. Far, then, from having acquired over him any authority joined to force, the state of war subsists between them as before; their very relationship is its effect, and the exercise of the right of war presupposes no treaty of peace. They have made a convention, so be it; but this convention, far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuation.

Thus, from whatever angle one looks at things, the right of slavery is void, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and means nothing. These words, slavery and right, are contradictory; they exclude each other. Whether from man to man or from a man to a people, this speech will always be equally senseless: "I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my profit, which I shall observe as long as I please, and which you will observe as long as I please."

Chapter V. That We Must Always Go Back to a First Convention

Even if I granted everything I have refuted so far, the supporters of despotism would be no further forward. There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society. If scattered men, however many they may be, are successively enslaved to one man, I see in this only a master and slaves; I do not see a people and its ruler. It is, if you will, an aggregation, but not an association; there is neither public good nor body politic. Even if this man had enslaved half the world, he is still only an individual; his interest, separate from that of the others, is still only a private interest. If this same man happens to perish, his empire after him remains scattered and without bond, as an oak dissolves and falls into a heap of ashes after the fire has consumed it.

A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. According to Grotius, then, a people is a people before giving itself to a king. This gift itself is a civil act; it presupposes a public deliberation. Before examining the act by which a people elects a king, therefore, it would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people; for this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society.

Indeed, if there were no prior convention, where — unless the election were unanimous — would be the obligation for the minority to submit to the choice of the majority? And by what right do a hundred who want a master vote for ten who do not? The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity at least once.

Chapter VI. Of the Social Pact

I suppose men to have reached the point where the obstacles that hinder their preservation in the state of nature prevail, by their resistance, over the forces each individual can employ to maintain himself in that state. Then this primitive state can no longer subsist, and the human race would perish if it did not change its manner of being.

Now, as men cannot create new forces but only unite and direct those that exist, they have no other means of preserving themselves than to form by aggregation a sum of forces that can prevail over the resistance, to set them in motion by a single motive power, and to make them act in concert.

This sum of forces can arise only from the cooperation of many; but since each man's force and liberty are the chief instruments of his preservation, how is he to pledge them without harming himself and without neglecting the care he owes to himself? This difficulty, brought back to my subject, may be stated in these terms:

"To find a form of association that defends and protects with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and by which each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before." This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the solution.

The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and of no effect; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally stated, they are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized, until, the social pact being violated, each one then regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty, while losing the conventional liberty for which he renounced it.

These clauses, properly understood, all come down to one: the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community. For, in the first place, since each gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all; and the condition being equal for all, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.

Moreover, the alienation being made without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to claim. For if individuals retained some rights, since there would be no common superior who could decide between them and the public, each, being in some point his own judge, would soon claim to be so in all; the state of nature would subsist, and the association would necessarily become tyrannical or futile.

Finally, each, giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right one grants him over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all one loses, and more force to preserve what one has.

If, then, we set aside from the social pact whatever is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in our corporate capacity we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all the others, formerly took the name of city,³ and now takes that of republic or body politic, which is called by its members the state when it is passive, the sovereign when it is active, and a power when compared with others like it. As for the associates, they collectively take the name of people, and are individually called citizens as sharing in the sovereign authority, and subjects as subject to the laws of the state. But these terms are often confused and taken one for another; it is enough to know how to distinguish them when they are used with complete precision.

Chapter VII. Of the Sovereign

We see from this formula that the act of association involves a reciprocal engagement between the public and individuals, and that each individual, contracting, so to speak, with himself, is engaged in a double relation: namely, as a member of the sovereign towards individuals, and as a member of the state towards the sovereign. But the maxim of civil right that no one is bound by engagements made with himself cannot be applied here; for there is a great difference between being obliged to oneself and being obliged to a whole of which one forms part.

It must further be noted that the public deliberation, which can oblige all the subjects towards the sovereign because of the two different relations under which each of them is considered, cannot, for the opposite reason, oblige the sovereign towards itself; and that consequently it is contrary to the nature of the body politic for the sovereign to impose on itself a law it cannot break. Being able to consider itself only under one and the same relation, it is then in the position of an individual contracting with himself; from which it is clear that there is not, nor can there be, any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people, not even the social contract. This does not mean that this body cannot perfectly well engage itself to others in anything that does not derogate from this contract; for with regard to foreigners it becomes a simple being, an individual.

But the body politic or sovereign, deriving its being solely from the sanctity of the contract, can never oblige itself, even towards others, to anything that derogates from this original act, such as alienating some portion of itself or submitting to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it exists would be to annihilate itself, and what is nothing produces nothing.

As soon as this multitude is thus united in one body, one cannot offend one of its members without attacking the body, still less offend the body without the members feeling it. Thus duty and interest equally oblige the two contracting parties to help one another, and the same men must seek to combine, under this double relation, all the advantages that depend on it.

Now the sovereign, being formed only of the individuals who compose it, has not and cannot have any interest contrary to theirs; consequently the sovereign power has no need of a guarantee towards the subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to harm all its members, and we shall see later that it cannot harm any one in particular. The sovereign, by the mere fact that it is, is always all that it ought to be.

But this is not so of the subjects in relation to the sovereign, for whom, despite the common interest, nothing would answer for their engagements if it did not find means to assure itself of their fidelity.

Indeed, each individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or different from the general will he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him; and, regarding the moral person that constitutes the state as a creature of reason because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of the citizen without wishing to fulfil the duties of the subject — an injustice whose spread would cause the ruin of the body politic.

So that the social pact may not be an empty formula, therefore, it tacitly includes this engagement, which alone can give force to the others: that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, giving each citizen to the fatherland, guarantees him against all personal dependence — the condition that makes up the device and the working of the political machine, and that alone makes legitimate civil engagements, which without it would be absurd, tyrannical and subject to the most enormous abuses.

Chapter VIII. Of the Civil State

This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct and giving his actions the morality they had previously lacked. Only then, when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulse and right succeeds appetite, does man, who until then had looked only to himself, find himself forced to act on other principles and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although in this state he deprives himself of several advantages he has from nature, he gains such great ones in return, his faculties are so exercised and developed, his ideas so enlarged, his feelings so ennobled, his whole soul so elevated, that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the one he has left, he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment that wrenched him from it for ever and made of a stupid and limited animal an intelligent being and a man.

Let us reduce this whole balance to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can reach; what he gains is civil liberty and the ownership of all he possesses. In order not to be mistaken in these compensations, one must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is limited only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is only the effect of force or the right of the first occupant, from ownership, which can be founded only on a positive title.

To what has been said one could add to the acquisitions of the civil state moral liberty, which alone makes man truly master of himself; for the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty. But I have already said too much on this head, and the philosophical meaning of the word liberty is not my subject here.

Chapter IX. Of Real Property

Each member of the community gives himself to it at the moment it is formed, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, of which the goods he possesses form part. It is not that by this act possession changes its nature in changing hands and becomes property in the hands of the sovereign; but as the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession is also in fact stronger and more irrevocable, without being more legitimate, at least with regard to foreigners. For the state, with regard to its members, is master of all their goods by the social contract, which in the state serves as the basis of all rights; but with regard to other powers it is master only by the right of first occupancy, which it derives from individuals.

The right of first occupancy, although more real than that of the strongest, becomes a true right only after the right of property has been established. Every man has by nature a right to everything he needs; but the positive act that makes him owner of some good excludes him from all the rest. His share being made, he must confine himself to it, and has no further right to what is held in common. That is why the right of first occupancy, so weak in the state of nature, commands the respect of every civilized man. What one respects in this right is not so much what belongs to others as what does not belong to oneself.

In general, to authorize the right of first occupancy over any piece of land, the following conditions are required. First, that the land should not yet be inhabited by anyone; second, that one should occupy only the amount one needs in order to subsist; third, that one should take possession of it, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of ownership which, in the absence of legal titles, ought to be respected by others.

Indeed, to grant the right of first occupancy to need and labour, is that not to extend it as far as it can go? Can this right be left without limits? Will it be enough to set foot on common land to claim at once to be its master? Will it be enough to have the strength to drive other men away from it for a moment to deprive them of the right ever to return? How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and deprive the whole human race of it except by a punishable usurpation, since it takes from the rest of mankind the dwelling place and the sustenance that nature gives them in common? When Núñez de Balboa, standing on the shore, took possession of the South Sea and of all South America in the name of the crown of Castile, was that enough to dispossess all its inhabitants and exclude all the princes of the world from it? On that footing such ceremonies were multiplied quite vainly, and the Catholic King had only to take possession of the whole universe at one stroke from his study, saving only the subsequent removal from his empire of what had previously been possessed by other princes.

One can understand how the lands of individuals, joined and adjacent, become the public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects to the land they occupy, becomes at once real and personal; which places the possessors in greater dependence and makes their very forces the guarantees of their fidelity. This advantage does not seem to have been well understood by the ancient monarchs, who, calling themselves only kings of the Persians, the Scythians or the Macedonians, seemed to regard themselves as rulers of men rather than as masters of the country. Those of today more cleverly call themselves kings of France, of Spain, of England and so on. By holding the land in this way, they are quite sure of holding its inhabitants.

What is singular in this alienation is that, far from despoiling individuals of their goods by accepting them, the community only assures them of their legitimate possession, changing usurpation into a true right and enjoyment into ownership. Then the possessors, being regarded as trustees of the public good, their rights being respected by all the members of the state and maintained with all its forces against the foreigner, have, by a cession advantageous to the public and still more so to themselves, acquired, so to speak, all that they have given — a paradox easily explained by the distinction between the rights that the sovereign and the owner have over the same property, as will be seen later.

It may also happen that men begin to unite before possessing anything, and that, afterwards seizing a piece of land sufficient for all, they enjoy it in common, or divide it among themselves, either equally or in proportions established by the sovereign. In whatever way this acquisition is made, the right each individual has over his own property is always subordinate to the right the community has over all; without this there would be neither solidity in the social bond nor real force in the exercise of sovereignty.

I shall end this chapter and this book with a remark that must serve as the basis of every social system: that, instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact on the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed among men, and that, though they may be unequal in strength or in genius, they all become equal by convention and by right.⁴

End of Book One.

1. "Learned researches into public right are often nothing but the history of ancient abuses, and one has been wrongly obstinate in taking the trouble to study them too much." Manuscript treatise on the interests of France in relation to her neighbours, by M. L. A. d'A. That is precisely what Grotius has done. ↩
2. See a short treatise of Plutarch entitled: That Beasts Use Reason. ↩
3. The true meaning of this word has almost entirely disappeared among the moderns; most take a town for a city and a townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make the town, but citizens make the city. This same error once cost the Carthaginians dear. I have not read that the title of cives was ever given to the subjects of any prince, not even in ancient times to the Macedonians, nor in our own day to the English, although they are nearer to liberty than all the others. Only the French use this name of citizens quite familiarly, because they have no true idea of it, as can be seen in their dictionaries; otherwise, in usurping it, they would fall into the crime of lèse-majesté: among them the name expresses a virtue and not a right. When Bodin tried to speak of our citizens and townsmen, he made a gross blunder in taking the one for the other. M. d'Alembert did not make this mistake, and in his article "Geneva" clearly distinguished the four orders of men (even five, counting mere foreigners) who are in our town, and of whom only two make up the republic. No other French author, to my knowledge, has understood the true meaning of the word citizen. ↩
4. Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to keep the poor man in his misery and the rich man in his usurpation. In fact laws are always useful to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as they all have something and none of them has too much. ↩