proof that, before the nineteenth century, his political treatises were known even by name to those engaged in working the same field. The truth probably is that his Politics were completely thrown into the shade by his Ethics. And it may well be that the taint of reprobation' attaching to his memory, in virtue of his supposed atheism, may have deterred the few who read and admired him from acknowledging their debts. Whatever the cause, the result is beyond doubt. He lived before his time; and when, after two long generations, the world was at last ready to receive what he had taught, his name, except as a beacon of warning, had almost been forgotten; so that his successors were either compelled to rediscover the principles for which he had battled, or were tempted to suppress the fact that they were guided by his light. As metaphysician and moralist, his greatness has long been recognised. As political philosopher, he has even now barely come by his own.

because in the original edition (1677) T.P. follows immediately upon the Ethics. It is hard to see why the latter should have been read-and abused by all the world, while the former passed entirely unnoticed. It is also curious that Locke, who spent some crucial years in Holland (1684-9), should be entirely silent as to Spinoza, who had died less than ten years before.

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VOL. I

CHAPTER IV

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: LOCKE

SPINOZA was before his time; at least two generations were to pass before the vein of thought which he opened was to be effectively explored. With Locke we return to the beaten road of seventeenth-century speculation. And the Treatise of Government, whatever its flaws as a piece of speculative reasoning, has a historical importance to which few theoretical writings can lay claim. It provided the theory for the 'glorious Revolution' which had been safely accomplished a year before its publication (1690). And it remained the gospel of freedom, both in France and England, for at least two generations after its appearance. In this country, indeed, it was still a power to reckon with for considerably longer; and its influence, though no longer consciously recognised, is even now not entirely dead.

Locke's Treatise is a gun with two barrels: the one directed against Filmer and Divine Right, the other against Hobbes. The champion of Divine Right is treated with light-hearted disrespect; he was indeed hardly worth powder and shot. And it is a thousand pities that it should never have been Locke's fortune to measure himself with Bossuet, whose Avertissements aux Protestants were appearing just at the same time and who, if he cannot be counted a great thinker, was at any rate a great master of controversy, a great writer and a very great man: on every ground, a foe worthy, as the pedantic and rather fatuous Filmer certainly was not, of the philosopher's steel.1 The truth is that the doctrine itself does not deserve to be taken seriously: still less, its knightly exponent.

1 It must be remembered that his Politique, though originally written between 1670 and 1680, was not published until after his death (1709); and then, in a revised form. The only political writing of his that could have been known to Locke when Civil Government was published, is therefore the Avertissements; and, as the bulk of Civil Government was clearly written in or before 1688, all question of Bossuet in this connection must, in fact, be dismissed. Filmer's Patriarcha was posthumously published in 1680, the author having died in 1653.

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With Locke's refutation, and Bossuet's contemporary reassertion of it (or something not remotely resembling it) against Jurieu, the theory of Divine Right practically vanishes from history.1 Always an impossible theory, it was hopelessly at variance with the prevalent thought of an age which gave birth to the Royal Society and Bayle's Dictionary and which was beginning to lose stomach for theological discussions. Even the genius of Bossuet was unable to give it more than a momentary respite from death. Even the talent of de Maistre was unable, a century later, to galvanise it into more than a semblance of fresh life. The kings themselves, in the interval, had been hard at work to kill and bury it.

The second part of the Treatise, the Essay of Civil Government, is made of very different stuff. Here Locke puts forth all his powers: he is no longer concerned to destroy, but to build up. Like Spinoza, he writes throughout with his eye on Hobbes; and, like Spinoza, he never once allows the name of the terrible enemy to escape his lips. Here, however, the resemblance ends. Their methods of dealing with the problem are entirely different.

There are two possible ways of meeting the argument of Hobbes: the one, direct and simple, to judge it by its consequences; the other, less direct and more subtle, to assail its speculative assumptions. The latter is the method adopted by Spinoza: especially in that denial of natural Right-or rather, of Right in

1 It is just to point out that Bossuet is not, strictly speaking, an advocate of the divine right of kings. In his one complete work on political theory, Politique tirée de l'Écriture Sainte, he explicitly admits the legitimacy of other forms of Government (Il n'y a aucune forme de Gouvernement, ni aucun établissement humain, qui n'ait ses inconvénients: de sorte qu'il faut demeurer dans l'état auquel un long temps a accoutum le peuple. C'est pourquoi Dieu prend en sa protection tous les Gouvernements légitimes, en quelque forme qu'ils soient établis. Qui entreprend de les renverser n'est pas seulement ennemi public, mais encore ennemi de Dieu:' Pol. 11. 1, 12); pleading only that monarchy is the commonest, the oldest, the most durable and the most natural': in other words, basing his plea not upon Right, but upon expediency and fact. And in the Avertissements (v. § 48) he takes this ground still more definitely and unequivocally. Yet throughout the bulk of the former treatise, he seems, most illogically, to assume a superior sanctity in Monarchy, to argue as though the person of a king were more sacred than that of any other magistrate ('Il paraît de tout cela que la personne des rois est sacrée et qu'attenter sur eux, c'est un sacrilège:' Pol. 111. ii. 2). It might be urged in his defence that, writing as he did for a future king, the Dauphin, it was natural that he should lay a marked stress upon the privileges and duties of kings. But this is hardly convincing. Certainly, the general effect of his argument is to surround the Monarch with a halo of divine majesty.

all conceivable shapes-that exclusion of all standards save those provided by expediency, which forms the corner - stone of his argument. The former course-straight, obvious and practicalis that followed by Locke. This gives his plea an actuality which, for the moment at any rate, was lacking to Spinoza's; but, for that very reason, robs it of the speculative interest which makes Spinoza's Treatise so notable a landmark in the history of political ideas.

There was, in truth, a very good reason why Locke should eschew the speculative line of attack. The elements of his system are almost identical with those of Leviathan. The relative stress laid upon each of them is, no doubt, extremely different; the practical upshot of his argument almost diametrically opposite. But the ideas themselves have the closest resemblance: they are drawn from the same source, from the common stock of seventeenthcentury speculation. The state of nature, the law of nature, the social contract-all these figure in Civil Government, as they had figured before it in Leviathan; and in the one treatise, as in the other, there is little else beside. Spinoza also, it may be said, makes play with two of these ideas: the state of nature and the Contract. But neither of them forms more than an ornament to his system. Both of them might have been dropped-the Contract, as we have seen, was in fact dropped in the Tractatus Politicusand the general course of his argument have remained practically untouched. Moreover, his explicit rejection of natural law changes the whole issue at a stroke. It is with him not a question of the rights secured, or the duties imposed, by the law of nature and the Contract; but of expediency, as determined by the permanent instincts and interests of men and by the circumstances in which, from time to time, they find themselves placed.

Under these conditions, it would have been an extremely intricate task for Locke to assail Hobbes on speculative grounds. He would have had to fight Leviathan chapter by chapter, almost page by page, in the effort to lay his finger upon the exact spot at which Hobbes had gone astray in applying each of these ideas, the precise grounds on which he himself was prepared to base his own very different application of them. He did well to decline a task so irksome to himself and to his readers: to avoid direct controversy and devote himself solely to build up his theory as it had shaped itself in his own mind. In practice, this was the method of Spinoza also. Only, starting as he did from a conception so fundamental and so simple as the identity between 'rights' and 'powers,' it was inevitable that, in stating his own principle, he should at the same time confute those of his opponent. Like Locke, however, he does so merely by implication; and except to

those who are in the secret, his two Tractates, no less than the Essay of Civil Government, are entirely constructive.

What, then, are the main lines of Locke's theory? What is the use he makes of the three strands—the state of nature, the law of nature, the social contract-out of which it is woven?

Briefly, it may be said that he interprets each of them in a sense the exact opposite of that which it bears to Hobbes. The ate of nature, so far from a state of war, the famous war of all against all,' is a state of 'good will, mutual assistance and preservation': in one word, a 'state of peace.'1 The law of nature, so far from a mere natural impulse upon which the idea of moral obligation is at a later stage illicitly grafted, is from the first a moral law which, though it lacks any outward and positive sanction, is yet recognised by all men, even by those who break it, as binding upon the conscience: a law to be observed by man, as man: a law, therefore, valid not only in the civil state, but also in the state of nature. Finally, the Contract by which men pass from the state of nature to the civil state is not an instrument of enslavement, but a charter of freedom, for the individual: who, so far from surrendering all his powers to a despot monarch, or a despot oligarchy, surrenders so much, and only so much, of them as shall provide a security, hitherto lacking in fact though not in right, for the free, untrammelled exercise of all the rest.

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The practical effect of this interpretation is to restore the theory of Contract to the purposes for which it was originally framed: to overthrow the portentous fabric so ingeniously conjured out of it by Hobbes; to sweep away the absolute sovereignty of the one man or one assembly of men'; and to set the sovereignty of the whole community-a sovereignty, however, strictly limited by the prior claims of the individual-in its place. And the limitation just mentioned is of the first importance. For a sovereignty that is not absolute, a sovereignty which can only claim second honours, is, in the strict sense, no sovereignty at all.2 Locke's argument has therefore a wider bearing than appears at first sight: even wider, it may be, than Locke himself was fully

1 C.G. (Civil Government), § 19.

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2 Locke's ideal of sovereignty appears from a casual reference in the course of the Essay: Thus we see that the kings of the Indians in America .. exercise very little dominion and have but a very moderate sovereignty' (ib. § 108). Compare: In commonwealths where the legislative is not always in being and the Executive is vested in a single person who has also a share in the Legislative, there that single person, in a very tolerable sense, may also (i.e. as well as the Legislative) be called supreme' (ib. § 151). The example he here has in view is, of course, England.