hard, even when all abatements have been made, to overestimate the debt which the world owes to Christianity. And the longer the time that passes, the more completely the spirit is liberated from the dead hand of the letter, the greater assuredly does that debt. become. During the first ten centuries, no doubt, much evil blended with the good which these new influences brought. The young nations were turbulent and plunged in endless wars among themselves and with their neighbours. The first effect of Christianity was to bring not peace, but a sword, to set up an irreconcilable feud between the spiritual and the civil power, between the Church and the State. Both results were inevitable; for neither of them was any remedy possible except from experience and the healing work of time. And, not unnaturally, this was a longer process with the issue of principle than with the purely natural, and therefore largely accidental, hostility of tribe to tribe or of nation to nation. Hence it was that the whole political thought of the middle ages turned round the controversy between Church and State. And, once it was admitted that the Church alone stood for the spiritual power, that controversy could end in no other way than in the logical, if not the material, triumph of the Church. Dante no doubt, with a few others, had the vision to recognise that the State also-or rather, the ideal State as represented by the Empire-is entitled to rank as a spiritual power. But even they were forced to admit that such a claim was to be put forward only with safeguards and reservations: that there was 'a certain sense' in which the supreme spiritual power-and, with it, the ultimate sovereignty— rested solely with the Church.1 Far more important than this controversy-which, at any rate in its extreme form, was only temporary, and which by the end of the fourteenth century had in fact burned itself to ashes-is the inward change which Christianity wrought upon men's minds: the overwhelming value, a value hitherto not even dreamed of, which it gave to the individual soul. Morally speaking, this is the greatest of all the services which it has conferred upon the world. But no mistake could be graver than to suppose that such a change either was, or could be, confined to the sphere of personal conduct. It has, in fact, transformed our view of life on almost every side. And there is no side where its influence has been stronger or deeper than in that of politics: than in our whole conception of the relation between the individual and the State. 1 Quae quidem veritas [Monarchae auctoritatem a Deo dependere immediate] non sic stricte recipienda est ut Romanus Princeps in aliquo Romano Pontifici non subjaceat, cum mortalis ista felicitas quodam modo ad immortalem felicitatem ordinatur' (De Monarchia, iii.). It was only with the Reformation, with the claim to the right of private judgement triumphantly asserted by the Reformation, that the spirit of Christianity, on this side, was definitely set free. Hence it is that the Reformation opens a new page in the political life of Europe. It does so in practical affairs; it does so also, though this was a later development, in the field of theory. To bring about a political revolution was the last thing the Reformers desired. It was, however, among the first results of their teaching. They had thrown a gospel of liberty before an oppressed multitude, and how could they hope to limit its action to the world of the unseen and the divine? Might they not have foreseen that it would at once be applied to the world of human relations? above all, to a political and social order which treated the common herd of men as little better than the beasts, which seemed to have been framed expressly to inflict injustice and suffering upon them? The one remedy the Reformers could suggest was to transfer to the civil magistrate, as the Lord's anointed, as much as might be of the mysterious sanctity which they had roughly torn from the Vicar of Christ. And this, though it opens a curious chapter in what may be called by courtesy political theory, was in no way calculated to calm men who were smarting under the sense of intolerable wrong. The Peasants' War and the fleeting reign of the Anabaptists at Münster are among the saddest episodes of history. None the less so, because the latter at any rate was marred by wild extravagances of fanaticism and wrong-doing. These were perhaps no more than passing symptoms of the change which had come over the temper of men's minds. But before sixty years were out, they were followed in our own country by events which have left a lasting mark upon the political destinies of Europe. No sooner had Elizabeth, the last great figure of the old order, passed away than the Commons, themselves borne forward on a fresh wave of the Protestant revolution, began to demand a part in the government of the country which they had never claimed before. And within forty years they had swept all rival claimants, once the sole rulers of the nation, from the board. They seemed, no doubt, to have lost all for which they had striven when, twenty years later, the old order was summarily restored; and this was the judgement even of so wise an observer as Spinoza.1 But appearances were a mockery. And from the moment of the Restoration, still more from that of the Revolution, the Commons began to take back piecemeal all that they had, for the instant, been forced to surrender to the Crown. And in this matter England set the model which sooner or later all Europe, with more or less 1 Tractatus Theologico-politicus, xviii. 33-34 (1670). of consistency, was to follow. Had that not been the case, the events referred to would have had no claim to be mentioned in this place. As it is, they are of typical significance. The spiritual revolution which wrought these practical changes could not be expected to leave the field of political theory entirely untouched. And even before the end of the sixteenth century it was clear that, in this field also, a new era was about to open. The Contr'un of La Boëtie, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos of Languetin a more general sense, the works of Rabelais and Montaigne-are all so many proofs that the individualist leaven, the natural outcome of the Reformation, was beginning to work. It is perhaps yet more significant that the doctrine, which was to be the battle-horse of the individualists, was already beginning to take challengeable shape. All the instincts of Hooker lay in the opposite direction: he was an Aristotelian, or he was nothing. Yet, in the midst of his subtle defence of Law as interpreted by tradition, he is unwary enough to slip in an argument which contains, if only in germ, the whole theory of Contract, and which a century later Locke, the starkest and most consistent of the champions of that theory, gleefully seized upon in support of his revolutionary plea: Laws human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.' may have forced, perhaps not quite fairly, the meaning of these words. But it remains true that, when pressed to their logical conclusion, they point straight to the democratic form of government which Hooker would certainly have fought shy of, and even to the contractual theory upon which, during the next two centuries, all popular rights were commonly supposed to rest. Locke Once launched, the idea of Contract fairly took the world by storm. It not only won a wider popular acceptance than any speculative idea before or since, but, unlike all other such ideas, it was actually framed and shaped, not by the philosophers, but by the people. It was current coin among the men of action long before it was refined and minted afresh by the men of theory. It was an idol of the market-place long before it became an idol also of the lecture-room. What, we ask, was the secret of this extraordinary success? The answer is that the metaphor of Contract, once suggested, seemed to explain a great deal more than it actually does. It is of the essence of the State to combine freedom with restriction, law with liberty. But how to reconcile these two opposites? That has always been the chief problem for the theorist, as, on a lower plane, it has always been the chief test of the wisdom of the statesman. Now, the conception of Contract contains exactly the same apparent contradiction: on the one hand, perfect freedom to make it, or not to make it, in the first instance; on the other hand, an absolute obligation, enforced by outward penalties, to fulfil it, when once made. And directly it occurred to any one to put the two things together, to compare the remote, the unfamiliar idea of the State with a thing so simple, of such everyday experience, as the lease of a farm or a public-house, all difficulties seemed to vanish; the fortune of the analogy was made; and from that moment the belief that the State is founded on a contract between its members became an article of the Faith. The way, no doubt, especially in this country, was further smoothed by the prevailing habit of referring everything to the Old Testament: by the undoubted fact that the origin of the Jewish State is there traced to a covenant, or contract, between the chosen people and God. And at a moment when the discontent of the nation with its government was daily deepening, the doctrine that all government was, in the first instance, the result of a contract between the governor and the governed, as well as the still more fundamental doctrine that every Society is founded upon a contract between all its members, was far too useful a weapon of rebellion to be lightly thrown aside. In this easy acceptance of a popular doctrine, one thing only was forgotten. This was that a contract is not possible, or indeed conceivable, except under the settled order of the State; that to assign the creation of the State itself to contract is therefore to assume the very thing which we are out to prove and to explain; that it is, in fact, a peculiarly flagrant instance of putting the cart before the horse. The strange thing is that a doctrine which was tacitly assumed by the whole world should have had to wait for a century before its inspired theorist appeared. It is perhaps yet stranger that the first writer to formulate it in any detail should have perverted it to ends the direct contrary of those for which it was manifestly devised; that he should have forced a democratic theory into the service of autocracy. This, it need hardly be said, was the amazing feat of Hobbes; and in the whole history of philosophy there is none more ingenious-none, it must be added, more disconcerting-than his. That, however, was no more than a momentary diversion of the current. And with Spinoza and Locke, both of whom wrote in conscious hostility to the author of Leviathan, the stream once more resumed its natural course. Some seventy years after the publication of the Essay on Civil Government it was again diverted-this time, in a wholly different sense-by the genius of Rousseau. And with the appearance of the Contrat social the history of the doctrine of Contract, by a strange paradox, comes abruptly to an end. The following chapters will offer a fuller discussion of these speculative matters. For the moment, the one thing needful is to fix our mind upon the unexampled readiness with which the doctrine of Contract was received. Whenever the dying creed of Divine Right was rejected, it would hardly be too much to say that the theory of Contract was at once accepted, as that which must inevitably take its place. To establish this, we must turn not so much to the jurists, from Grotius at one end of the period to Blackstone and the lawyers of the National Assembly at the other, as to those whose bent lay rather towards the beaten road of ordinary thought. As samples of these, we may take two men of great genius but little turn for abstract speculation: Dryden, that is, and Milton. In a remarkable passage of Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden, half adopting and half confuting the arguments of the Country Party as to the relation between the 'subject' and the Government, speaks as follows: What shall we think? Can People give away Then this resuming Covenant was declared And Milton, writing a generation earlier, is still more explicit. He applies the idea of Contract not only to the establishment of Government, but even-and this is far more important-to the very formation of Society. 'No man who knows aught can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free . . . and that they lived so till, from the root of Adam's transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, .. they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came cities, towns and commonwealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordain some authority that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common Right. .. When this would not serve, but that the law was either not executed or misapplied, they were constrained from that time, the only remedy left them, to put conditions and take oaths from all kings and magistrates, at their first instalment, to do impartial justice by law; who, upon those terms and no other, received 1 Absalom and Achitophel, i. 11. 759-768 (1681). |