Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

e 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 unconstitutional 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 assistance of the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV. It ensured

n 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 ma

nwardness 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

; 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

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 classics 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

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 outloo

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 Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis the mathematic

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 constitutional scheme for Carolina which is noteworthy for its emphasis, thus early, upon the importance of religious toleration

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

he convincing argument of Mr. Fox-Bourne

of Sir Isaac Newton. He published some short discussions on economic matters, and in 1695 gave valuable assistance in the destruction of the censorship 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

t. Letter from Lady Ma

I

bes, has no manner of doubt; but his method of proof is to derive the title 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 institutions, 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;

a régime. 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 antithesis 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 th

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

e seem to him proof that the theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say, bind their successors? If legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent? And what of a child born into the community? Locke is at least logical in his consent. The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive members of a St

attitude of Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where government is derived from a secondary contract dependent upon the original institution of civil society. The distinction is made in the light of what is to follow. For Locke was above all anxious to leave

as of registering irrevocable decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as a whole. Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards

States, both as regards its individual members, and as a collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its relationships, Locke termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed, has no special value; and its author's own defence of it is far from clear. More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis of the distinction between legislature and executive. The making of laws is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do its work and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate the two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may exempt themselv

mmon the legislature. Here, clearly enough, Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his surrender here of consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook. For at the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it with single-m

invasion of powers? The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he was following the events of 1688. The substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of Parliament-all these are a perversion of the trust imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract. The state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with one more fitted to observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny the central position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued, must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke retorts that an absolute government is no gove

fe of Locke,

tists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island, Pennsylv

ical allegiance in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of he

. He himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact

years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among Catholics, the author of the Vindici? and Francis Hotman among the Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the conce

twright was as careful to exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism; not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible. But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is attemptin

critical period of history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of the St

uld permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]-a content which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand-is essential if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and centre of Lo

Modern State, p. 64., and

ance-it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau-is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had

blem of Sovere

e pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake judicial functions. The American history of the separation of

' remarks in Jensen v. Sou

ity in the Modern

eligion could win no assent from even a moderate Anglican; and, once the visible church is admitted, Locke's facile distinction between Church and State falls to the ground. Nor can it be doubted that he underestimated the power of coercion to produce assent; the policy of Louis XIV to the Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must be unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his generation

ge's apt remark. Tab

therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human rationalism. No one can read the Second Treatise without perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the cardinal points a true

But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's Franco-Gallia should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without conversin

rks (ed. of 1

Hoadly, in his Original and Institution of Civil Government, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal the care with which the Second Treatise had also been pillaged. Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the field he considered his own to call him, in that Divine Legation which he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor of

eing cast into the new form required by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war";

earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian view. And anyone who

sseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for its detection; and h

mpt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers