Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham Part 1

Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham.

by Harold J. Laski.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution of 1688; for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of abstract ideas, to be impressed by the large part Divine Right must have played in the politics of the succeeding century. Its very absoluteness made for keen partisans.h.i.+p on the one side and the other. It could produce at once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion, the wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of pa.s.sionate controversy was absent. The theory of a social contract never produced in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been secured there by other weapons. And this has perhaps given to the eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the n.o.ble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different subst.i.tutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.

Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an importance in English politics which the comparative absence of systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large const.i.tutional outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative detail had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.

Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.

It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative a.n.a.lysis which has, in Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.

Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved the way for the surprising novelties of G.o.dwin and the revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.

The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness. The deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted to provide it in social terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his _Human Understanding_ as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his _Principles of Morals_ the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abas.e.m.e.nt and poverty." Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man. For all of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a science distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations. The eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find its place in the political equation.

Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and, as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.

Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England required the absence of pa.s.sionate debate if they were in any fruitful fas.h.i.+on to be solved. Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be minimized. It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.

Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements of justification. The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her political system was compared with the governments of France and Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory party a new lease of power. There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good of the governing cla.s.s with the general welfare of the state. It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make prosperity the mask for political stagnation. He turned political debate from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the outcome of his cunning.

Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The const.i.tutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the a.s.surance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new rationalism on the other. What was needed also was the expansion of English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can be seen on every side. The st.u.r.dy morality of Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the _Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of democratic England.

The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of the past. Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government. He announced the advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to work, than of the foundations upon which it is based. Burke, for example, wrote what const.i.tutes the supreme a.n.a.lysis of the statesman's art. Adam Smith discussed in what fas.h.i.+on the prosperity of peoples could be best advanced. From Locke, that is to say, the subject of discussion is rather _politik_ than _staatslehre_. The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for parliamentary government. Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political arrangement in a fas.h.i.+on which presupposes the acceptance of a basis previously known. Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional substance of the State. But he met the new desires with hate instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic opinion underground. Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them substance, at least they gave them form for a later time.

Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content. The King was still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commons. The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution, when a new cla.s.s of men attained control of the nation's economic power. Only then was a realignment of political forces essential. Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new theory of the State.

The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government. Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the difference between n.o.bleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the pa.s.sage of Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconst.i.tutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret; and members.h.i.+p therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged cla.s.s. The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation. The England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The ma.s.ses were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prost.i.tution of her freedom.

Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and, indeed, it is most largely absent from its speculation. In its political ideas this is necessarily and especially the case. For the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the cla.s.s from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century's evolution. Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke magistrally demonstrated in terms of political philosophy. But the deeper problems of the state lay hidden until Bentham and the revolutionists came to insist upon their presence. That did not mean that the eighteenth century was a soulless failure. Rather did it mean that a period of transition had been successfully bridged. The stage was set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer represented the facts at issue.

It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general problems of the modern State. Other thinkers a.s.sumed his structure and dealt with the details he left undetermined. The main problems, the Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English throne and left the methods of government to those who were acquainted with them.

That most happy of all the happy accidents in English history made Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time. He used his opportunity to the full. Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister. The party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative government. Thenceforward, there are, on the whole, but three large questions with which the age concerned itself. Toleration had already been won by the persistent necessities of two generations, and the n.o.ble determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined.

Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party, combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King enabled Burke n.o.bly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of 1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an economic regime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the future lay on his side.

CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

I

The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An unconst.i.tutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it. To William the invitation was irresistible. It gave him the a.s.sistance of the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.

It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new regime unwelcome. Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James. If a large fraction of the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds, the commercial cla.s.ses gave it their warm support; and many who doubted in theory submitted in practice. All at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.

For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the English const.i.tution; and it had become important to define in set terms the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones of the modern const.i.tutional system.

What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential.

The right of pet.i.tion was re-affirmed; and the independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance. It is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fas.h.i.+on in which so striking a revolution was effected. Not, indeed, that the solution worked easily at the outset. William remained to the end a foreigner, who could not understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. The Cabinet, towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental administrative instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council, it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew better for the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and Tories had gambled against each other for their heads. He knew that no council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill. There is a certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning levee at Whitehall.

What secured the permanence of the settlement was less the policy of William than the blunder of the French monarch. Patience, foresight and generosity had not availed to win for William more than a grudging recognition of his kings.h.i.+p. He had received only a half-hearted support for his foreign policy. The army, despite his protests, had been reduced; and the enforced return of his own Dutch Guards to Holland was deliberately conceived to cause him pain. But at the very moment when his strength seemed weakest James II died; and Louis XIV, despite written obligation, sought to comfort the last moments of his tragic exile by the falsely chivalrous recognition of the Old Pretender as the rightful English king. It was a terrible mistake. It did for William what no action of his own could ever have achieved. It suggested that England must receive its ruler at the hands of a foreign sovereign. The national pride of the people rallied to the cause for which William stood. He was king--so, at least in contrast to Louis' decision, it appeared--by their deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was the symbol would be maintained. Parliament granted to William all that his foreign policy could have demanded. His own death was only the prelude to the victories of Marlborough. Those victories seemed to seal the solution of 1688. A moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined to throw in jeopardy the Act of Settlement. But Death held the stakes against the gambler's throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George I a.s.sured the permanence of Revolution principles.

II

The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make good his t.i.tle in the consent of the people." In the debate which followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason that it had the common sense of the generation on his side. Yet Locke has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the political cla.s.sics who are taken for granted rather than read. It is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly than either the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after all, worked with an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman. But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.

Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked.

He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so emphasized the principle of consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke a.s.sumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten upon the great inst.i.tutional necessity of his time--the provision of channels of a.s.sent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men again took up the study of foundations.

John Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset on the 29th of August, 1632.

His father was clerk to the county justices and acted as a captain in a cavalry regiment during the Civil War. Though he suffered heavy losses, he was able to give his son as good an education as the time afforded.

Westminster under Dr. Busby may not have been the gentlest of academies, but at least it provided Locke with an admirable training in the cla.s.sics. He himself, indeed, in the _Thoughts on Education_ doubted the value of such exercises; nor does he seem to have conceived any affection for Oxford whither he proceeded in 1652 as a junior student of Christ Church. The university was then under the Puritan control of Dr.

John Owen; but not even his effort to redeem the university from its reputation for intellectual laxity rescued it from the "wrangling and ostentation" of the peripatetic philosophy. Yet it was at Oxford that he encountered the work of Descartes which first attracted him to metaphysics. There, too, he met Poc.o.c.k, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659 he accepted a Senior Students.h.i.+p of his college, which he retained until he was deemed politically undesirable in 1684. After toying with his father's desire that he should enter the Church, he began the study of medicine. Scientific interest won for him the friends.h.i.+p of Boyle; and while he was administering physic to the patients of Dr. Thomas, he was making the observations recorded in Boyle's _History of the Air_ which Locke himself edited after the death of his friend.

Meanwhile accident had turned his life into far different paths. An appointment as secretary to a special amba.s.sador opened up to him a diplomatic career; but his st.u.r.dy commonsense showed him his unfitness for such labors. After his visit to Prussia he returned to Oxford, and there, in 1667, in the course of his medical work, he met Anthony Ashley, the later Lord Shaftesbury and the Ahitophel of Dryden's great satire. The two men were warmly attracted to each other, and Locke accepted an appointment as physician to Lord Ashley's household. But he was also much more than this. The tutor of Ashley's philosophic grandson, he became also his patron's confidential counsellor. In 1663 he became part author of a const.i.tutional scheme for Carolina which is noteworthy for its emphasis, thus early, upon the importance of religious toleration. In 1672, when Ashley became Lord Chancellor, he became Secretary of Presentations and, until 1675, Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations. Meanwhile he carried on his medical work and must have obtained some reputation in it; for he is honorably mentioned by Sydenham, in his _Method of Curing Fevers_ (1676), and had been elected to the Royal Society in 1668. But his real genius lay in other directions.

Locke himself has told us how a few friends began to meet at his chamber for the discussions of questions which soon pa.s.sed into metaphysical enquiry; and a page from a commonplace book of 1671 is the first beginning of his systematic work. Relieved of his administrative duties in 1675, he spent the next four years in France, mainly occupied with medical observation. He returned to England in 1679 to a.s.sist Lord Shaftesbury in the pa.s.sionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill. Locke followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683 until the Revolution. Deprived of his fellows.h.i.+p in 1684 through the malice of Charles II, he would have been without means of support had not Shaftesbury bequeathed him a pension. As it was, he had no easy time.

His extradition was demanded by James II after the Monmouth rebellion; and though he was later pardoned he refused to return to England until William of Orange had procured his freedom. A year after his return he made his appearance as a writer. The _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ and the _Two Treatises of Government_ were both published in 1690. Five years earlier the _Letter Concerning Toleration_ was published in its Latin dress; and four years afterwards an English translation appeared. This last, however, perhaps on grounds of expediency, Locke never acknowledged until his will was published; for the time was not yet suited to such generous speculations. Locke was thus in his fifty-eighth year when his first admitted work appeared. But the rough attempts at the essay date from 1671, and hints towards the _Letter on Toleration_ can be found in fragments of various dates between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years of his life. Of the _Two Treatises_ the first seems to have been written between 1680 and 1685, the second in the last year of his Dutch exile.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the evidence for these dates see the convincing argument of Mr. Fox-Bourne in his _Life of Locke_, Vol. II, pp. 165-7.]

The remaining fourteen years of Locke's life were pa.s.sed in semi-retirement in East Anglia. Though he held public office, first as Commissioner of Appeals, and later of Trade, for twelve years, he could not stand the pressure of London writers, and his public work was only intermittent. His counsel, nevertheless, was highly valued; and he seems to have won no small confidence from William in diplomatic matters.

Somers and Charles Montagu held him in high respect, and he had the warm friends.h.i.+p of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable a.s.sistance in the destruction of the censors.h.i.+p of the press. Two years earlier he had published his _Thoughts on Education_, in which the observant reader may find the germ of most of Emile's ideas. He did not fail to revise the _Essay_ from time to time; and his _Reasonableness of Christianity_, which, through Toland, provoked a reply from Stillingfleet and showed Locke in retort a master of the controversial art, was in some sort the foundation of the deistic debate in the next epoch. But his chief work had already been done, and he spent his energies in rewarding the affection of his friends. Locke died on October 28, 1704, amid circ.u.mstances of singular majesty. He had lived a full life, and few have so completely realized the medieval ideal of specializing in omniscience. He left warm friends behind him; and Lady Masham has said of him that beyond which no man may dare to aspire.[2]

[Footnote 2: Fox-Bourne, _op. cit_. Letter from Lady Masham to Jean le Clerc.]

III

Locke's _Two Treatises of Government_ are different both in object and in value. The first is a detailed and tiresome response to the historic imagination of Sir Robert Filmer. In his _Patriarcha_, which first saw the light in 1680, though it had been written long before, the latter had sought to reach the ultimate conclusion of Hobbes without the element of contract upon which the great thinker depended. "I consent with him," said Filmer of Hobbes, "about the Rights of _exercising_ Government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it." That power must be absolute, Filmer, like Hobbes, has no manner of doubt; but his method of proof is to derive the t.i.tle of Charles I from Adam. Little difficulties like the origin of primogeniture, or whence, as Locke points out, the universal monarchy of Shem can be derived, the good Sir Robert does not satisfactorily determine. Locke takes him up point by point, and there is little enough left, save a sense that history is the root of inst.i.tutions, when he has done. What troubles us is rather why Locke should have wasted the resources of his intelligence upon so feeble an opponent. The book of Hobbes lay ready to his hand; yet he almost ostentatiously refused to grapple with it. The answer doubtless lies in Hobbes' unsavory fame. The man who made the Church a mere department of the State and justified not less the t.i.tle of Cromwell than of the Stuarts was not the opponent for one who had a very practical problem in hand. And Locke could answer that he was answering Hobbes implicitly in the second _Treatise_. And though Filmer might never have been known had not Locke thus honored him by retort, he doubtless symbolized what many a n.o.bleman's chaplain preached to his master's dependents at family prayers.

The _Second Treatise_ goes to the root of the matter. Why does political power, "a Right of making Laws and Penalties of Death and consequently all less Penalties," exist? It can only be for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience. Locke thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his _Leviathan_ though he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker. To Hobbes the state of nature which precedes political organization had been a state of war.

Neither peace nor reason could prevail where every man was his neighbor's enemy; and the establishment of absolute power, with the consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only means of escape from so brutal a regime. That the state of nature was so distinguished Locke at the outset denies. The state of nature is governed by the law of nature. The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had made it, the ant.i.thesis of real law, but rather its condition antecedent. It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all places, the conduct of men. Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural state, reason shows us that men are equal. From this equality are born men's natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property. Obviously enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is the deepest of human impulses. By liberty Locke means the right of the individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident. It promotes the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may have its play. Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which becomes trans.m.u.ted into individual owners.h.i.+p whenever a man has mingled his labor with some object. This labor theory of owners.h.i.+p lived, it may be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of modern socialism.

The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.

Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the community as a whole which thus becomes that common political superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish infractions of it. Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural law.

Its province ends when it pa.s.ses beyond those boundaries.