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
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 the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an
enemy who never slumbered. Nor did England find the new régime
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 classes 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 constitution; 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 constitutional 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 petition 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 fashion 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 kingship. 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 assured 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 title 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 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 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 assumed 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 institutional necessity of his time--the provision of
channels of assent--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
classics. 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 Pocock, the Arabic scholar, and Wallis
the mathematician, who must at least have commanded his respect. In 1659
he accepted a Senior Studentship 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 friendship 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 ambassador opened up to him a
diplomatic career; but his sturdy 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 constitutional 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 passed 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 assist Lord
Shaftesbury in the passionate debates upon the Exclusion Bill. Locke
followed his patron into exile, remaining abroad from 1683 until the
Revolution. Deprived of his fellowship 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 passed 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 friendship 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 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
circumstances 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 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; 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 title 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 nobleman'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 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 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 transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled
his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership 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 passes beyond those boundaries.
Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of
majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of
superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had
before the institution of political society. And it is further to be
assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his
individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.
Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it
is no easy matter to determine. That no evidence of its early existence
can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and
the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice 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 State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless
the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any
satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case is
different. They are born subjects of no government or country; and their
consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment,
or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State
has been accepted. But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of
his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his
fellows. Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to
infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.
We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is not
yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did not
explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government. Indeed he
sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting, the 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 supreme power in a
community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could
not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself. Government there must
be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are
dependent upon popular institution.
Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing the types
of government into three. Where the power of making laws is in a single
hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have
alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The disposition of the
legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and
judiciary are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the
form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as
capable of making temporary 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 of an enduring good
rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates
controlled by popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the
abolition of kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian
system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon
it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so
long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon
popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of
kings.
We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free from
the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means for
securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that
means the force of men has been surrendered. The formulation of the
rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is
legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the
supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's view, two other functions
still remain. Law has not only to be declared. It must be enforced; and
the business of the executive is to secure obedience to the command of
law. But Locke here makes a third distinction. The State must live with
other 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
themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both
in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby
come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community,
contrary to the end of society and government." The legislator must
therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such
fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its
constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of
distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that
the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act. One hundred
and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was
translated into statute.
Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized
that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that
not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of
legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not
in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the
executive be forced to summon 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-minded reference to the
law of nature and their own natural rights. There is thus a standard of
right and wrong superior to all powers within the State. "A government,"
as he says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature
stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others."
The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.
Its corollary is the right of revolution. It is interesting that he
should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the
thought that not even the demands of conscience[3] can justify
rebellion. That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven
him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the
subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of
revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its
favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true remedy,"
he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to it." Let the
sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract
and resistance becomes a natural right. But how define such 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 government at all since it
proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a
state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character
of power. It lacks the essential element of consent without which the
binding force of law is absent. All government is a moral trust, and the
idea of limitation is therein implied. But a limitation without the
means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the
reserve power in society. The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke
suggests is that of number. Revolution should not, he urges, be the act
of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of
the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of
the covenant.
[Footnote 3: King, _Life of Locke_, pp. 62, 63.]
The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it
is difficult not to feel that the great _Letter on Toleration_ is the
noblest of all his utterances. It came as the climax to a long evolution
of opinion; and, in the light of William's own conviction, it may be
said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought. Already in the
sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the
persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists 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,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon
admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go
to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable.
And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had
not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn
a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a
remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.
Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the
problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was
consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element
of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is
concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal
with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of
the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its
appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the
latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English
situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics,
Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights
they would seek, and they find the centre of their political 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
heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe
not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of
the Church an institution radically different from the ruling
conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which
can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies,
but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is
alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the
limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it
there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him
modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a
vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.
IV
Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty
there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at
all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not
the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he
can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without
perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. 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 in
contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his
work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the
bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is
singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet
even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete
which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.
Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence
upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as
old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens.
The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the
contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great
medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also,
may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
than a hundred 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 _Vindiciæ_ and Francis Hotman among the
Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
Penn.
What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is
Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always
resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright 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
attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not
merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical
independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as
such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions
are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any
previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of
medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their
significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.
The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an
end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with
it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior
to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex
than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and
natural rights has received new meaning from each 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 State, in any sense save the mere
satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The
concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For
so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there
is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely
legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of
political philosophy.
No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort
to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection
can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose
remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full
capacity their trained initiative would 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 Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said
T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.
[Footnote 4: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, p. 64., and
the references there cited.]
The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first
place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To
Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of
gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at
such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like
Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the
interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of
right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in
substance--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 seen,
under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is
lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an
unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the
shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of
Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and
Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of
exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy
becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]
[Footnote 5: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chap. I.]
The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value.
Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their
power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the
temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this
doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It
tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the
material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the
root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the
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 powers
has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been
gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its
public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent
times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor
must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the
Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is
one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the
rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.[7]
[Footnote 6: Cf. Mr. Justice Holmes' remarks in _Jensen_ v.
_Southern Pacific_, 244 U.S. 221.]
[Footnote 7: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 70 f.]
Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the work of
Fitz James Stephen,[8] that has been levelled at Locke's theory of
toleration. For the larger part of the modern world, his argument is
acceptable enough; and its ingenious compromises have made it especially
representative of the English temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the
argument that some of his opponents, as Proast for example, had made.
His conception of the visible church as no part of the essence of
religion 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
were bound to hold, that the communication of his particular brand of
truth outweighed in value all other questions. "Every Church," he wrote,
"is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical"; but to any
earnest believer this would approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any
serious Christian accept the view that "under the gospel '...there is no
such thing as a Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians
this must have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.
[Footnote 8: Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. _Table Talk_, Jan. 3,
1834.]
Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism,
and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in
his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that
he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had
in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his
appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past
tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public
welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and 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 psychology of the State must seize. His very
contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It
resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives
imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the
vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All
this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by
Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance
of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.
V
Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not,
indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not
wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that
anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the
ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of
atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could
find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under
Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous
than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect.
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
conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we
learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has
already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate
influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew
naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of
Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as
Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were
almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused
counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the
defence.
[Footnote 9: Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.]
More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the _Spectator_, on six
separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a
national glory. Defoe in his _Original Power of the People of England_
made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his
acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift
softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose
doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in
the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. 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 the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory
is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this
self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English
Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps
a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.
Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the
_Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to
reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North
Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia
Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and
what was permanent in his work was being 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"; and in
his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he
declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was
based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of
Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the
levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the
contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined;
and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch
opened in the history of political ideas.
Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but,
once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past
was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to
compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for
after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have
understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which
made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the
grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
the 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 surveys the history of Church and State in America
will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the
separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes
makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids
them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where
Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every
point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the
future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less
splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that
he had a more splendid cause to defend.
With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his
teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element
integral to the _Two Treatises_ is absent from the _Social Contract_.
Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The
form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance
Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of
the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow
individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon
which Rousseau'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 he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple
numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has
more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much
show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in
the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the
confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern
problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke--what limits
shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only
emphasized the urgency of the debate.
Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching
and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility
that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has
new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would
condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the
attempt 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.
The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little
resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem
of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into
institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous
patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his
generation.