Elders than to set up that of the civil magistrate. The argument of both writers, in fact, logically led to the abolition of all disciplinary power, ecclesiastical no less than civil.1 And this, the natural consequence of the individualist principle, was the view which, on all sides, ultimately prevailed.

What were the effects of all this upon the theory of the State? The first and most obvious was to provide a seed-plot for individualism such as the most rebellious spirit of the old world could never have foreseen: an atmosphere under which it may fairly be said. to have sprung unbidden from the soil. Under these conditions, the final triumph of the new theory was a mere question of time. And it is no accident that the first formal statement of it-embodied in Milton's republican pamphlets, embodied also, though under the most perverted form, in the opening arguments of De Cive and Leviathan-should have coincided with the throes of the Puritan Rebellion, or its final exposition with the fresh Protestant advance which followed on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

A theory, however, is no lifeless abstraction. If it be worth anything, it has consequences which stir the passions and give new power to the will. Individualism, in particular, was rich in practical results both for good and for evil. If on the one hand it deepened and widened the civic sense beyond all power of recognition, on the other hand it led to abuses and injustices which in the long run were bound to rouse the world to protest and revolt. A few words upon each side of the matter will suffice.

Until the sixteenth century, it may roughly be said that Europe, since the fall of the Roman Republic, had been content to be governed from above. And, so far as its rule was not intolerably oppressive, any government in possession was able fairly to count upon an indefinite continuance of its lease. But, with the Reformation, this comfortable reckoning was suddenly thrown out. Once cast himself athwart the religious convictions of any large class among his subjects, and the ruler, whether Catholic or Protestant, was henceforth liable to find himself face to face with armed resistance, with rebellion, or even with the prison and the scaffold. The history of England, France and Scotland, to say nothing of Geneva and the United Provinces, during the latter

1 See Milton, Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), and Erastus, Quaestio utrum Excommunicatio sit ex divino mandato an excogitata sit ab hominibus (1589). It may be observed that Erastus himself was no Erastian. His whole argument turns on the plea that it is an iniquity to rob a man of the aid of religion at the very moment when, ex hypothesi, he stands most in need of it. An English translation of his pamphlet was published in 1659. Milton describes himself as asserting the truth of Scripture against Érastus.'

half of the century is witness to the truth of this assertion. Still more so is the history of England during the whole of the century which followed. Nor can it be forgotten that the Thirty Years' War, one of the bloodiest upon record, had its rise in a rebellion which religious as well as racial differences and both are equally germane to our argument—had conspired to bring about.

But this is not all. Behind all such specific grievances there lay, consciously or unconsciously, a growing instinct that the government is made for the people, not the people for the government; and even, though this was a more lingering process, that the only way of giving practical reality to such a maxim is to secure to the people some voice at least in the management of what, after all, is their own immediate concern. Nor was it merely a matter of expediency. The more men thought over these things, the more they were driven to the conviction that it was also a question of Right; that the State could have no powers save those which were conferred upon it by its members; and consequently that every individual member had an inherent claim-no less, if also no more, than any other member—to a share in its control. This conviction was, no doubt, in part due to the extreme difficulty of conceiving the original foundation of society as the result of anything but universal consent: a difficulty which goes far to account for the ultimate triumph of the theory of Contract. But it was still more the direct result of that faith in the indefeasible worth of the individual soul, in the equality of all men before God, which lay at the root of Christianity and which had for the first time come to a full consciousness of itself with the Reformation.

But, whatever the cause of the conviction, the result of it was to make a complete revolution in the common conception of the State. No man who held such a conviction could be content with a State in which the Government alone was active and the rest of the community a mere passive instrument in its hands. He could be satisfied with nothing short of a State in which the Government, not only in name but in deed, was responsible to the com-/ munity; in which the community as a whole determined the course which the Government should take. In other words, the ideal was no longer, if indeed it had ever been, government from above; henceforth it was government, at least as to the broad outlines of policy, by the community at large. It was, in some measure at any rate, a return to the ideal of the Republics of antiquity: the ideal in the strength of which every citizen felt himself to be a living and active part of the being of the State. It was to replace passive obedience by active co-operation; to substitute a live organism for a cunningly devised machine. Doubtless, it was generations before such a conviction could work itself out to a

clear consciousness of all that lay within it. But the history of our own country, still more that of the Revolution in France, shows that this was the goal towards which it ultimately led.

All this was a good, if not unmixed, at least as nearly so as it is possible for human things to be. But there is another side to the picture which it is impossible to overlook. The very virtues of such a theory lent themselves but too readily to perversion. The rights of the individual were pampered, his duties left absolutely out of sight. On the other hand, the rights and powers, to say nothing of the duties, of the State were assiduously starved. And this led to two kinds of evil which, in the long run, made it clear that the whole theory must be revised.

On the one hand, as Rousseau was the first to point out, to give unlimited power to the individual is always to establish the mastery of the strong over the weak, of the rich over the poor. The State is there, if not to prevent these inequalities, at least to keep them within bounds. And if, so far from checking them, it gives them sanction and encouragement, then it is false to the trust which has been committed to its hands.

On the other hand, while enlarging the borders of the State, as it does by increasing the number of voters, the' individualist theory inevitably tends to limit and to beggar its scope. It is of the essence of that theory that the State has no powers beyond those explicitly entrusted to it from the beginning. And to restrict those powers within the narrowest possible limits has always, alike in theory and in practice, been the aim of those who start from individualist assumptions. The result is that, wherever those assumptions have prevailed, the State has been jealously stripped of all moral functions and left with no duty beyond that of preventing its members from picking each other's pockets and flying at each other's throats. From Locke to Beccaria, from Beccaria to Paine, from Paine to those who resisted the Income Tax, the Factory Laws, or the Old Age Pensions Act, this has been the invariable story. And if such be the only duty of the State, it is hard to see why either Poor Law or Education Expenses should appear upon the national budget; why the duty of national defence should be anything more than a mischievous and costly prejudice; why, in short, when he has once paid his taxes-and that on the smallest scale conceivable-the individual should ever trouble himself further with what are pompously called matters of national concern. The truth is that, upon these premisses, both national honour' and 'social justice' are the vainest of delusions; and anarchy plus a policeman' is, as Carlyle saw, the only possible definition of the political ideal.

With these considerations in view, let us now turn to watch

the theorists at work, and observe the different purposes which the twofold assumption of an original state of nature and of a Contract, as the only possible door of escape from it, was successively made

to serve.

The former of these two assumptions, under the familiar name of the golden age, is probably as old as the world. The latter, the social Contract, goes back at least as far as Plato, and possibly much farther. Plato, however, for the best of reasons, does little more than trifle with the notion. Epicurus has sometimes been credited with its adoption; but this would seem to put much more into his words than they can fairly be made to hold. And it was not until the Reformation and the strong bias towards individualism implanted by the Reformation that the hour of Contract can be said to have fully struck, that it can fairly be reckoned to have passed into the common currency of political thought. Even then, a century had to pass before it was formulated in any definite shape. It flits, as we have already seen, across the pages of Hooker. It reappears, but under the strangely different shape of a contract between already existing minor corporations, in the forgotten work of Althusius. And Grotius pays at least a passing tribute to it in the opening paragraphs of that learned medley, De Iure Belli et Pacis, which, however valuable as a first attempt to lay the foundations of International Law-and even here it is vitiated by a perpetual confusion between fact and Right-is, for all speculative purposes, a nest of sophistries and contradictions.2

By a strange irony, it was reserved for the deadliest enemy of individualism to give the first formal statement of the theory upon which, in the heyday of its power, individualism was universally held to rest. The whole work of Hobbes breathes the bitterest hatred not only of individualism as a theory, but even of those

1 The work of Althusius, Politica methodice digesta, was published in 1603; that of Grotius, prompted by the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, in 1625.

2 As, however, in the later part of the book, Grotius-it is sad to say that Locke follows him-accepts the right of conquest' and even the right of slavery' as valid foundations of civil power, it is clear that the idea of a free contract, as the foundation of all civil society, had taken no very deep hold upon his mind. See the unanswerable criticisms of Rousseau.

3 The political theory of Hobbes is to be found in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). The latter, the English version, is the fuller and, if only on account of its style, by far the more important. He returned to the charge towards the end of his life in Behemoth (1679), a violent assault upon the political theory and the political practice of the now vanquished Puritans.

elementary rights which none but the most backward nations now deny to the individual in practice. Yet this preposterous system is itself based, consciously or unconsciously, on assumptions représenting an extreme form of individualism: an individualism more uncompromising than that of Locke himself. And it rests upon the idea of Contract, as the only possible foundation of the civil state. Could anything prove more conclusively the extent to which the theory of Contract had taken hold upon men's minds? the enormous weight of resistance upon which any man who assailed the individualist scheme of politics must steel himself to reckon?

Hobbes was not wanting in courage for the task. Still less was he wanting in ingenuity. With uncanny skill he turns one part of the theory against the other, and avails himself of the premisses which all the world accepted to destroy the conclusion which eager spirits were coming more and more confidently to draw from them. Nothing could have been more baffling to his contemporaries, nothing more fascinating to readers of the present day. The latter have too often allowed the brilliance of his method to blind them to the inconsequence as well as the utter unsoundness of his argument. The former, so far as can be gathered from the evidence, fell into exactly the opposite mistake. In their bewilderment at the methods employed, they failed to recognise either the force of the blow which had been dealt by the audacious writer, or the genius of the man who dealt it. Locke, who thought it worth while to write a full-dress refutation of Filmer, never so much as mentions the name, and contents himself with two or three scornful allusions to the far more damaging assault, of Hobbes. And as for the champions of divine right, they preferred to lose their cause in the strength of Charles and Filmer, rather than gain it with the aid of artillery forged in the factory of the Devil.

The first thing to strike us in the argument of Leviathan is its preternatural ingenuity. The next is its amazing boldness and simplicity. After a long preface which, at first sight, may appear irrelevant, but which is soon seen to serve the useful purpose of pouring scorn on all the spiritual elements commonly attributed to man's being-we find ourselves suddenly face to face with a lurid picture of the natural condition of mankind': that is, of the state of nature. To most men, and not least to those of the seventeenth century, the state of nature is a state of innocence and, above all, a state of peace. To Hobbes, on the contrary, it is a

state of war: a war of all against all, a war in which each was as a ravening beast to his fellows: homo homini lupus. It was there1 Leviathan, chaps. i.-xii,