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is both juster and more pressing.' It is one of those matters which can be settled only by equity, or an amicable compromise. The conqueror must abate something of his full claim; he must leave to the wife and children, if not to the man himself, enough for their subsistence.' 1

If this argument is to be pressed home, it is clear that we have here more than one sweeping limitation upon the rights of Property, as commonly understood: upon the right of a man to do what he will with his own. If a man's wife and children have a title to the goods he enjoys, and their share in the estate he possesses,' it follows that his right to dispose freely of his property is laid under considerable restrictions. If the extent of their 'title' and the amount of their shares are to be reckoned on a liberal scale, then the restrictions become severe. Again, it is impossible to limit the rights and title of the owner in chief, without also limiting the claims of his creditors; the two things stand and fall together. The only creditor considered by Locke is the foreign conqueror. Would he be willing to put the native creditor on the same footing? And if not, by what argument would he justify the distinction? Once more: if the claims of the creditor are to be limited on grounds of equity and humanity—and the principle is two-edged, seeing that, after all, the creditor too may have a wife and childrenhow can we refuse to judge the claims of the wage-earner-this time, it is a question, not of limitation, but of extension-by the same rule? Would Locke have been willing to adopt the principle of a 'living wage'?

To the modern reader such inferences from Locke's statements will seem both logically necessary and morally just. But it is more than doubtful whether Locke himself would have accepted them. If he would, it is strange that nothing is said of them in that detailed discussion of Property, its origin and justification, with which the Essay opens. If he would not, what are we to say of his consistency? In either case, what becomes of his assertion that the law of nature, to which he makes explicit reference in this very passage, is 'plain and intelligible to every rational creature? Some of the hottest disputes among economists have raged round these very points; and "high and reverend authorities lift their heads on both sides.' Sufficient proof, if proof were needed, that neither in this, nor in many of its other applications, is the law of nature so simple a matter as Locke would have us to believe.

Another, and still more trenchant, limitation on the rights of the conqueror-and consequently on the rights of Propertyremains behind. In estimating the amount of the damage done

1 C.G. § 183. Compare Treatise I. (Refutation of Filmer), §§ 87-90.

to his territory, it is solely that inflicted on his real property-his land, crops and houses-that he is entitled to reckon. His personal property-his money and such riches and treasures, being none of nature's goods '—must not be thrown in. They have but a fantastical, imaginary value; nature has put no such upon them. They are of no more account by her standard than the Wampompeke of the Americans to an European prince, or the silver money of Europe to an American.'1 The effect of this obviously is to reduce the conqueror's bill of indemnity to an indefinite extent. The conqueror will, no doubt, reply that such an argument cuts both ways that, if he is at no loss from the money and such treasures taken from him,' neither will the thief be at any loss, if he is forced to restore them. Locke, however, and with much prudence, takes no heed of this obvious retort. At this stage of his argument, it is the law of nature with him, or it is nothing.

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That indeed is the weapon with which he would doubtless have returned the blows of his critics in this matter. 'All commonwealths,' he tells us, ' are in a state of nature one with another '; and on that principle, it would seem, he may fairly claim to have his argument judged by the law of nature,' and by that alone. Such a plea has a great appearance of reason; and in the mouth of some writers-Hobbes, for instance-it would be conclusive. Locke, however, had expressly debarred himself from using it. For, in a passage to which reference has been made already, he had said in so many words that the revolution which gave this 'fantastical value' to gold and silver had been accomplished before men quitted the state of nature that out of the bounds of society and without compact'-that is, before the 'original compact which is the foundation of all civil society-they had already 'tacitly agreed in the use of money' and in the inequality of private possessions' which naturally, if not inevitably, follows.3 It is therefore impossible for him to turn round at a later moment and declare that the use of money is a thing purely 'fantastical': a thing which is not justified by the law, and has no existence in the state, of nature.

It may be said that this is no more than a momentary inadvertence on Locke's part, that in the fundamental principles of his theory there was nothing which made it necessary for him to treat the convention of money, with its resulting inequality of private possessions,' as having arisen in the state of nature and as forming an integral part of the law of nature. A moment's reflection will

show that this is not the case. The inequality of private possessions and, with it, the convention of money, are integral parts of the 'rights of property,' as they exist in practice. And to preserve 2 Ib. § 183. 3 lb. § 50.

1 C.G. § 184.

those rights, to prove that they are rights which man brought with him into civil society and which all civil societies are therefore bound to regard as sacred and inviolable, was one of the chief objects which Locke had in view as he thought out his whole theory of Civil Government.

The preservation of Property' is 'the end of Government.' 1 And though, as we have seen, he often includes under the term a great deal health, life and liberty '—which, according to strict usage, does not belong to it, yet, as we have also seen, Property, in its obvious sense of goods and chattels,' is always that which is primarily present to his mind. In fact, in the passage from which the above words are drawn, the context shows this to have been the only sense which he had in view, as he wrote it.

If then there is any inadvertence on the author's part, it is manifestly not to be found in his acceptance of the money convention, or the consequent inequality of private possessions,' but in the contradictory assertion that the value attributed to 'money and such treasures' is a thing purely arbitrary, 'fantastical,' and in no way justified by the law of nature. And the inadvertence must be set down to a motive in itself entirely honourable: to his manifest hatred of war and of the vicious usages summed up under the vile phrase, the rights of conquest': usages, it may be remembered, which had been revived on a vast scale in the very year before the publication of his Essay, by the devastation of the Palatinate at the orders of Louvois and of Louis XIV (1689). None the less, it is a logical blot upon his theory of Property and his exposition of those individualist ideas with which his theory of Property is inseparably bound up.

The inconsistency does not stop here: it has a further rebound upon his presentment of the law of nature. We are forced to the conclusion that there are, in fact, two distinct conceptions of the law of nature struggling for the mastery in his mind. The one, that which comes to the front in his discussion of Property, is nothing more nor less than a transcript of the usages which he found established in his own country, or in what claimed to be the civilised world of his own day. The other-it is that which prevails in his chapter one rights of conquest-is, at least in the main, governed by considerations of pure equity: though of equity determined, as it must always be, by the most humane standards of the author's own day and country. Both of them, no doubt, claim to be wholly independent of time, place and circumstance: to be 'plain and intelligible to every rational creature.' Neither of them is so, in truth. The former is an exact replica of the usages which prevailed throughout Europe at the time when Civil

1 C.G. § 138; compare § 222.

Government was written. The latter is little more than an echo of the ideal which the best minds of the seventeenth century had dimly formed upon certain points of social duty, and by which they strove to correct the injustices of established fact and historical tradition. The latter, therefore, has a fair claim to call itself the 'law of nature.' It is an ideal which represents the best thought of the time, and which might eventually become embodied in the outward institutions of one community or another. The former has no such pretensions. It is a mere copy of the positive law which Locke found in force around him. To call it natural law, even in the very modified sense which alone can properly be given to the term, is a pure confusion. And how Locke came to be entangled in it, it is difficult to say. That he should ever have confounded the one of his two 'laws' with the other is still more surprising.

There is one more inconsistency in Locke's theory of Property: an inconsistency so glaring that it cannot fail to strike any reader who is not wholly blinded by individualist preconceptions. 'Government exists for the preservation of Property'; and Property, as we have seen, is a right existing before the foundation of Society, a right brought straight by the individual from the natural into the civil state. Starting from these premisses, we should expect to find Property treated as the sacred right of the individual: as something which, without the express consent of each individual concerned, it is sacrilege for the State to question, touch, or tamper with in any way whatsoever. What we actually find is something strangely different. The property of the individual is taxable by the State under conditions to be specified directly. What is more, it is tenable only so long as, at least by the implied consent of residence, he remains a citizen of the State in whose territory it is placed.

As for the former provision, it must at once be admitted that the payment of a tax to the State, in return for protection rendered by the State, is, in itself, reasonable enough. And if the consent of the individual were declared to be a necessary condition of such taxation, there would be nothing more to say on the matter. This, however, is far from being the case. Some consent is indeed demanded by Locke. It is the consent, however, not of the individual, but of his representatives'; and that is a very different thing. It is true that, to save appearances, Locke does throw in the individual now reduced to a miserable fraction an alternative to his representatives: 'It must be with his own consent-i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them.' 1 But this is only

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1 C.G. § 140.

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to make matters worse. For he must have known that to be one of a minority which, by a direct vote, opposes the imposition of a tax and yet has to pay it when imposed, is at the opposite pole from paying a tax to which I have heartily assented; and that, when the vote is indirect, the chances of misrepresentation are indefinitely increased: so that, when my official representative has the effrontery to vote for a tax which I personally condemn, the height of absurdity is reached and the plea of my own consent' is reduced to a mere farce. Under such circumstances I shall not be consoled by the assurance that the Legislative which imposes the tax consists wholly, or in part, of Assemblies which are variable, whose members, upon the dissolution of the Assembly, are subjects under the common law of the country, equally with the rest.' 1 I shall still feel that I am suffering from an act of tyranny, a gross violation of my natural rights.' And on Locke's principles, who shall say that I am wrong?

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The truth is that, on individualist assumptions, taxation, as commonly understood, is in no way to be justified. The only legitimate form of it, when such assumptions are once granted, is that voluntary taxation' which was advocated by a fantastic, but logical, individualist in this country some forty years ago. And there is nothing risked by the prophecy that any State which adopted his system would be reduced to beggary within a fortnight. That, in the face of his pronouncements on the sacredness of Property and the inviolable rights of the individual, Locke should have found himself driven to fall back upon an inviolability violable at the convenience or caprice of other individuals, of a sacredness which is liable to be profaned at any moment by the sovereign will of the majority,' is one more proof of the impossibility of framing any individualist theory which does not contradict itself upon the very threshold. It is one more example of the way in which, after laying down principles that claim to be drawn from the unadulterated law of nature, Locke proceeds to fill up all the working details from the rough and ready practice of his own day and his own country: a practice which, if it is to be justified at all, is to be justified only on principles the very opposite of those he had chosen to assume in the first instance.

The same method, the same inconsequence, reappears in his handling of the second point above mentioned: the last point there is any need to consider in connection with his theory of Property.

The preservation of Property is the chief end of civil government.' How then does it happen that, in the very act of joining any civil society, the owner not only submits his property to any 1 C.G. § 138.

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