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allegiance from the people: that is to say, bond or covenant to obey them in execution of those laws which they, the people, had themselves made or assented to. And this ofttimes with express warning that, if the king or magistrate proved unfaithful to his trust, the people would be disengaged.'

It is clear that the form of Contract which both writers had in view the former with, and the latter without, qualificationis, in all essentials, the form subsequently expounded by Locke. That, indeed, is what was to be expected. The idea of Contract once given, the only natural application of it is that which turns it to purposes of democracy. To make it the charter of despotism was a freak which called for the sardonic ingenuity of Hobbes: nothing less would have served the purpose. And it is obvious that the democratic form of the theory must have been in the air before Hobbes could have thought of his sophistical distortion. Locke may have come after him in time; but the Essay on Civil Government is presupposed on every page of De Cive and Leviathan. All that Hobbes did was to turn the guns, which the enemy had painfully trained into position, against the enemy's own ranks.

The testimony of two such men as Milton and Drydenneither of them a professed theorist, both of them keenly alive to the main currents of educated thought-is conclusive as to the prevalence, we may almost say the unquestioning acceptance, of the Contract theory, in one or other of its many forms, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century.2 And if further testimony 1 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).

2 A curious illustration of this statement is to be found in Bossuet's Avertissements aux Protestants (1689-91): 'Venons donc aux vrais auteurs du crime [le meurtre de Charles Ir]. C'est Cromwell et les Fanatiques. Je l'avoue. Mais de quelles maximes se servirent-ils pour faire entrer les peuples dans leurs sentiments? Quelles maximes voit-on encore dans leurs apologies? Dans celle de Midleton (sic) et dans cent autres libelles dont les Cromwellistes inondaient toute l'Europe. De quoi sont pleins tous ces livres et tous les actes publics et particuliers qu'on faisait alors que de la souveraineté absolue des peuples? de ces contrats primordiaux entre les peuples et les rois et toutes les autres maximes que M. Jurieu soutient encore après Bucanan (sic), que la Convention [de 1688] a suivies et où l'Eglise Anglicane se laisse entraîner malgré ses anciens décrets?' (Avert. v. § 62). The manner in which Bossuet mishandles the names of his British opponents does not say much for the thoroughness with which he had studied their writings. Who would recognise the author of Paradise Lost in Midleton'? It was an ill chance that led the Bishop to stumble over the name of a man still greater and still more famous than himself. His testimony to the point in question, however, is unimpeachable. The reference is to Milton's Defensio pro populo Anglicano, chaps. v., vi., vii.

-testimony drawn from a slightly different source-be wanted, it is supplied by the Act which dismissed James and cleared the ground for the choice of William and Mary in his stead. At that critical moment the Convention Parliament, casting about for grounds to justify its revolutionary action, was constrained to plead that, James having by his acts broken the original contract between king and people,' the throne was thereby rendered vacant. Other grounds are, no doubt, suggested: misgovernment, hostility to the national religion, and the rest. But the stronger those other grounds may be and no one doubts that they were the grounds which actually determined the Revolution-the more impossible is it that 'breach of contract' should have been thrown into the same scale with them, unless Contract had been generally recognized as the foundation of all government and the breach of it by the sovereign as a crime worthy to be put side by side with the arbitrary suspension of laws and the infamies of the Bloody Assizes.

That the same acceptance of Contract, as the origin of all civil power, should be proclaimed two generations later in a book as little favourable to the popular cause as Blackstone's Commentaries, is only one more proof that the doctrine had now become an article of the faith.1 And the less we think of the legal mind as a guide to speculative truth, the stronger that argument becomes. With Blackstone, we are within sight of the French Revolution; and the period with which we are immediately concerned is at an end.

The freedom of the individual soul, for all purposes and with no limitations, was asserted by Christianity. But the very vastness of the idea forbade that it should be conceived-much more, realised-otherwise than by stages and in fragments. The medieval Church did little more than drive it home, and that with countless restrictions and distortions, in the sphere of personal conduct. The Reformation, again most imperfectly and inconsistently, applied it to the field of doctrine and of worship. To work it out, again with many misconceptions and many extravagances, in the region of political practice and political theory was the task reserved for the French Revolution and the two centuries which preceded it. To correct those misconceptions and extravagances, to reconcile the claims of the 'individual' with those of the corporate' self, to show that the one cannot live without the other, that the full development of man's faculties is possible only in and through organised fellowship with other men: this was

1 The first volume of the Commentaries, containing the passage in question, was published in 1765.

the mission of the two thinkers, Rousseau and Burke, who prepared or witnessed the Revolution. In a still fuller and wider sense, it was the mission not only of the thinkers, but of every civilised nation, whether in the old world or the new, throughout the century that followed And the end is not yet.

CHAPTER II

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: HOBBES

THE Reformation was, in the first instance, a religious movement. But experience has shown-with a grain of speculative imagination, it might surely have been foreseen-that various political consequences, both speculative and practical, inevitably followed in its train. The main work of the Reformers-they themselves would have admitted it and gloried in it—was to lay a stress upon the individual responsibility of the Christian such as had never been laid before. The rebel leaders, Calvin excepted, may have thought of little beyond Church doctrine and Church government. But, once the principle was granted, no power on earth could limit its scope and application. And from the government of the Church, in particular, it was a short step to the government of the State. Two results-the one general, the other of a more special character -call for a few words of explanation.

The general result was to give a value to the individual citizen such as no other age had known. Hence, on the one hand, that sudden assertion of the Commons' claim to a determining voice in the government which has been already noticed; and on the other hand, the first appearance of individualism, as a reasoned theory of government, in the history of thought. Without the assumptions imposed by the Protestant revolution, the whole history of political theory from Hobbes to Godwin, indeed the whole history of philosophy from Des Cartes to Fichte, would have been inexplicable. We may go further and say, it would have been impossible.

The more special consequence is not so simple; but that does not make it the less real. So long as the medieval Church held sway over men's minds, it was possible, and even natural, that the State should leave the control of conduct for the most part in her hands. And the fact that the whole law not only of marriage, but even of testamentary disposition, was among the things so left is, of itself, enough to show how far the State was prepared to go in this direction. But the moment the ancient Church was either swept away or transformed out of all recognition, the question was bound

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to present itself: How are we to fill the gap which is left by the removal of the disciplinary powers of the Church? Is the State to step into the breach? or is this whole region-a region of vital importance both to the community and its several members-to be left purely to the individual conscience, restrained only by the terrors of the Law?

In the countries which remained faithful to the old religion, it is manifest that this question could not arise. In the Protestant countries, on the other hand, the difficulty was serious enough. On the whole, it may be said that those countries in which the Protestant feeling was strongest-Geneva and Scotland are the two typical examples-State and Church, more closely interwoven than they have ever been before or since in the history of Christendom, joined hands to tighten the discipline which in the old days had been wielded by the Church; and that the State, in this matter, acted mainly, though by no means solely, through the agency of the Church. Those countries on the contrary, which, like England, sought rather to transform the old system than to abolish it, after a half-hearted attempt to retain the Catholic discipline, were led by degrees to abandon all efforts at public control over the conduct of their members and to leave everything to the conscience of the individual, subject only to the forcible penalties of the Law.

And if this came to be more and more the practice of our own nation and of the organised institutions in which its life was constitutionally embodied, we must never forget that it came also to be more and more the theory of those smaller religious communities which, though cut off from the constitutional life of the nation, yet played a part altogether out of proportion to their size, or the social standing of their members, in moulding the national policy and building up the national conscience and ideals. As regards their own members, their discipline was commonly far stricter than that of the national Church. But it was enforced purely by moral suasion: by total or partial exclusion from communion with the rest of the body. And as time went on, even this weapon tended to fall more and more out of use. The Independents indeed, who did more than any other body to form opinion in this matter, were from the first shy of all outward interference with the liberty of their members and therefore more disposed than any other body to trust solely to the workings of the individual conscience. It is true that Milton, in his assault upon all State interference in such matters, is careful to reserve a right of excommunication to the Church. But it is clear that he is far more interested in the negative side of his argument than in the positive. It is equally clear that Erastus, in his assault upon the disciplinary powers of the Church, was far more concerned to overthrow the judgement-seat of the

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