mons was to be made loyal to the king and the government, the loyalty was not to be quite disinterested.

No sooner was this apparent than Locke began to trouble himself less about parliamentary affairs. He was very anxious that as many of his friends and other honest men as possible should be elected to the new house of commons, and that their full strength should be shown in the opening proceedings; but when that strength proved unavailing, when on the first day of the session Sir John Trevor, Carmarthen's tool, was chosen speaker of the house, he seems to have felt that there was little to be hoped for. We have hardly any trace, at any rate, of his connection with parliamentary movements during the next four years, and therefore we need not here attempt to follow those movements.

He sought to help forward the work of the revolution, as he understood it, in other ways; and we must now follow him into one of those literary undertakings for which he complained that he had, in the first year after his return from Holland, so little leisure. This was, however, an undertaking by which he rendered to the cause of which William the Third was champion a service of certainly not less immediate importance, and as certainly of much more permanent value to the world, than anything he can have been able to do in giving advice concerning the current business of parliament or the best means of maintaining something like good government amid the embarrassments caused by selfish courtiers and greedy place-hunters, disloyal whigs and more disloyal tories, by Jacobite plotters in England, by disaffected Scotsmen and by Irish rebels.

CA

BODL

BLIOT

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Early in 1690 appeared 'Two Treatises of Government,' with this announcement on the title-page: "In the former the false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown: the latter is an Essay concerning the true Original, Extent and End of Civil Government." This work, afterwards acknowledged as his by Locke, was licensed for printing on the 23rd of August, 1689, and must accordingly have been written. before that date. "Thou hast here," Locke said in his prefatory address to the reader, "the beginning and end of a discourse concerning government. What fate has otherwise disposed of the papers that should have filled up the middle and were more than all the rest, it is not worth while to tell thee. These, which remain, I hope are sufficient to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present King William, to make good his title in the consent of the people, which, being the only one of all lawful governments, he has more fully and clearly than any prince in Christendom, and to justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved the nation when it was on the very brink of slavery and ruin. If these papers have that evidence I flatter myself is found in them, there will be no great miss of those which are lost, and my readers may be satisfied without them; for I imagine I shall have neither the time nor inclination to repeat my pains and fill up the wanting part of my answer by tracing Sir Robert again through all the windings and obscurities which are to be met with in the several branches of his wonderful system."

Locke was so busily employed in other ways during the six months that elapsed between his return to England and the licensing of this book, comprising less than half

of the whole work written by him, that it is very unlikely that he had opportunity, within those six months, for writing any large part of it, least of all its elaborate review of Sir Robert Filmer's "windings and obscurities." It is yet more unlikely that its middle portion, "more than all the rest," should have been lost so immediately after it was written, and, though what is now the second essay may possibly have been prepared in England in 1689, its tone and method seem to suggest that it was composed before, instead of after, William the Third's accession. On these grounds, supported by some minor considerations which hardly need be here set forth, it may fairly be assumed that the whole was substantially completed during the last year or so of Locke's residence in Holland, and that probably the earlier and larger portions, including that which was lost, were written before Locke went thither. Its place in the history of political and philosophical history, however, must be assigned to the first year after his return to England. It was evidently begun as a mere rejoinder to the Patriarcha' in which Sir Robert Filmer, a devoted subject of Charles the First, had boldly set himself to support his master's cause by claiming for kings more absolute dominion over their subjects than any but the maddest kings in their maddest moments ever ventured to claim for themselves. Besides this work, which was written about the year 1642, and thus was nearly contemporary with Hobbes's treatise De Cive,' Filmer published 'The Anarchy of a Limited and Mixed Monarchy' in 1646, The Freeholder's Grand Inquest' and 'The Power of Kings' in 1648, and 'Observations upon Mr. Hobbes's "Leviathan," Mr. Milton against Salmasius, and Grotius "De Jure Belli et Pacis," concerning the Original of Government' in

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1652. The 'Patriarcha' was not published till 1680, when, Filmer being apparently dead, it was issued by his son and welcomed by all the champions of divine right who were then rallying round Charles the Second. Locke's friend, James Tyrrell, answered it in 1681, in an essay styled, Patriarcha non Monarcha;" and a new edition was published in 1685, with a preface "in which this piece is vindicated from the cavils and misconstructions of the author of 'Patriarcha non Monarcha.'"

"I

The first of Locke's Two Treatises of Government' was probably written at some time between the appearance of Filmer's first and second editions. should not speak so plainly of a gentleman long since past answering," he said, “had not the pulpit of late years publicly owned his doctrine and made it the current divinity of the times. I should not have taken the pains to show his mistakes, inconsistencies and want of what he so much boasts of and pretends wholly to rely onScripture proofs-were there not men amongst us who, by crying up his books and espousing his doctrine, save me from the reproach of writing against a dead adversary.

11 3

It is difficult to understand why Locke should have thought those pains worth taking. "Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation," he said, "that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it. And truly I should have taken Sir Robert Filmer's 'Patriarcha as any other treatise which would persuade all men that they are slaves and ought to be so for another exercise of

1 I have not been able to meet with a copy of Tyrrell's work.

2 All his references are to the first edition.

3

Two Treatises of Government' (1690), Preface.

wit, as was his who writ the encomium of Nero, rather than for a serious discourse meant in earnest, had not the gravity of the title and epistle, the picture in front of the book, and the applause that followed it, required me to believe that the author and publisher were both in earnest. I therefore took it into my hands with all the expectation, and read it through with all the attention, due to a treatise that made such a noise at its coming abroad, and cannot but confess myself mightily surprised that in a book which was to provide chains for all mankind I should find nothing but a rope of sand, useful, perhaps, to such whose skill and business it is to raise a dust and blind the people the better to mislead them, but in truth not of any force to draw those into bondage who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them."1

Filmer had woven into his "rope of sand" a few texts from the book of Genesis, from which he argued that Adam was endowed with absolute mastery over the whole world, and also that "the succeeding patriarchs had, by right of fatherhood, royal authority over their children." "God created only Adam, and of a piece of him made the woman, and by generation from them two, as parts of them, all mankind was propagated. God gave to Adam not only the dominion over the woman and the children that should issue from them, but also over all the earth to subdue it, and over all the creatures on it; so that as long as Adam lived no man could claim or enjoy anything but by donation, assignation, or permission from him." "It was God's ordinance that the supremacy should be unlimited in Adam and as large as 1 Two Treatises of Government' (1690), b. i., § 1.