most valuable as appearing to condemn arbitrary and violent changes. It gave a vague but useful sanction to the existing order, whatever that order might happen to be. Thus it might at times be convenient to thinkers who admitted that political theories were to be tested solely by experience. In the absence of any satisfactory conception of political development, that test was necessarily applied in the crudest fashion. Politics, it may be said, was regarded from the statical, instead of the dynamical, point of view. In other words, the forces by which a government was maintained were not held to express the relations between the different parts of a growing organism, but the conditions of equilibrium of a cunningly balanced machine. It had been suddenly called into existence by some mythical legislator, who had pieced it together and determined its character. The ancient generalisation had divided all governments into monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical. Each form had its vices and virtues, its principle of life and of decay, upon which Aristotle was the great authority, and was to be considered absolutely without reference to conditions of time, place, and development. Permanence and not progress was the highest possible merit of a government. As a human machine it was liable to decay, and indeed, at some time or other, decay was inevitable. To arrange the machine so that, when once set going, it might continue to work smoothly as long as possible, was the great problem of legislators. Venice seems to have been the favourite model of such reasoners; but they had an abundant supply of classical instances to illustrate their arguments. 6. Each of these theories thus recognised an important truth. The metaphysical theory of absolute rights recognised the truth that a political system should ultimately rest on some surer foundation than the fancy of the day, or the contrivance of politicians. The theory of the three elementary forms of government recognised the necessity of appealing to experience and history, though history was still too little organised to enable the appeal to be made effectually. The two theories are, of course, strangely combined and distorted by partisans of conflicting opinions; and even when any coherent theory was accepted, it was frequently obscured by the personal prejudices of the day. I must endeavour to show how, beneath the shifting sands of party dispute, some deeper foundation was to be found, and how, to some extent, the ultimate logic of the dispute governed the immediate manifestations of personal animosities. II. THE PRINCIPLES OF 1688. 7. Locke expounded the principles of the revolution of 1688, and his writings became the political bible of the following century. They may be taken as the formal apology of Whiggism. He gave the source from which later writers drew their arguments, and the authority to which they appealed in fault of arguments. That authority vanished when the French Revolution brought deeper questions for solution and new methods became necessary in politics as in all other speculation. But during the eighteenth century Locke's theories gave his countrymen such philosophical varnish as was necessary for the embellishment of political pamphlets and parliamentary rhetoric. Their success was partly due to the fact that, like the revolution which they justified, they are a compromise between inconsistent theories. The characteristic quality of Locke's mind is shown in the tenacity with which he adheres to certain principles which seem to work in practice, though they fit rather awkwardly into any logical framework. His doctrine is explained in the Treatises on Government' (1690), and in the letters on Toleration' (1689). The Treatises on Government' are an answer to poor Sir R. Filmer. In the first treatise he disposes, at rather wearisome length, of his opponent's ingeniously absurd doctrine that kings derive their power by direct inheritance from Adam's personal authority over his immediate descendants. As a specimen of the way in which a powerful mind can tear a flimsy fallacy to pieces, the argument may have its interest. But we tire of secing a strong man deliberately picking to pieces the minutest reticulations of a web of sophistry long since gone to utter decay, instead of summarily brushing it aside. Merciful critics have seen in Filmer's arguments a distortion of the historical theory of the patriarchal origin of government. The form which the theory took in his hands was, at all events, so absurd that one wonders at Locke's condescending to a serious refutation. A still more elaborate reply is given in Algernon Sidney's Discourses on Government-a book which shows wide reading and some power of style, but of which we must charitably hope that its incessant repetitions and voluminous insistence upon particular points would have been expunged had the author published it in his lifetime. I need not linger upon an argument which, without the assaults of Locke and Sidney, would have died a natural death at the revolution. It is enough to note that an incidental remark in this part of Locke's1 treatise implies that, to his mind, it was an exhaustive division of all theories of government, to say that power must be founded either on a divine grant, on paternal authority, or on compact. As, in Filmer's version of the doctrine, the first two theories are identical, we are reduced to the alternative of regarding government as a matter of positive divine appointment, and regarding it as a matter of compact. Locke, like Sidney, unhesitatingly accepts the compact theory, which, stamped by his authority, became the orthodox Whig doctrine. 8. What, then, is Locke's version of the compact? What are its terms? How are they to be discovered, and why are they binding? Hobbes, to whom it is remarkable that Locke makes no explicit reference, interprets the compact as giving absolute power to the sovereign. Locke's special purpose is to prove that the sovereign's authority is limited by the terms of the compact. He, therefore, interprets it in such a fashion as to make it almost identical with the utilitarian formula. Since government exists for the good of the people, so his argument seems frequently to run, a law or a constitution must be judged simply by its conformity to that end. But Locke can never divest himself of the belief that the compact is somehow necessary to give a sound basis for his theories. Utility is doubtless, in some sense, the ultimate test; but utility must be embodied in a compact before the test can be applied. He is hampered by the reappearance of this imaginary compact, which occasionally clashes with the purpose for which it was designed. Yet, to defend a system simply as 1 Treatise of Government,' i. sec. 96. useful, seemed to relegate the whole political theory to the region of pure empiricism; and the compact, however useless in reality, could never be frankly cast aside. A curious complexity is thus introduced into his arguments, characteristic of the strange incapacity of so vigorous a mind to free itself from this relic of a metaphysical method. 1 3 9. Locke, like his predecessors, regards the compact as marking the transition from a 'state of nature,' but his state of nature differs materially from that of Hobbes. So far from being a state of anarchy, it has a 'law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone;' and that law is reason. According to Hobbes, promises are not binding in a state of nature; according to Locke, they are binding, 'for truth and keeping of faith belongs to men as men, and not as members of society.' Indeed, Locke's state of nature is almost the ideal state; he speaks of the 'golden age' in an apparently historical sense, and regards government as introduced by the 'ambition and luxury of future ages.' The difference is characteristic. With Hobbes or Spinoza, though in very dif ferent senses, God becomes an expression for the absolute; he is the equal source of all phenomena, and right is necessarily identified with might. The God of Locke, less severely abstract, is capable of taking a side in human affairs; desiring the happiness of men, he gives them a definite rule; the God-given reason teaches us that we should not harm the 'life, health, liberty, or possessions' of each other, for men are the creatures of an infinitely wise Maker, and the servants of a sovereign Master. Thus God is retained to supply the necessary sanction to the social compact. The terms of the compact are that we should do good to each other; the reason for obeying it that God orders us to cultivate happiness as much as possible. The divine sanction does not apply to any particular form of government; and the will of God is to be inferred, as in the doctrine of the utilitarian theologians, by observing what causes produce the greatest amount of happiness. The imagination is thus satisfied by a supposed absolute basis, though the decision in any given case is left to experience. 10. This doctrine may, of course, lapse into simple utilitarianism. Paternal authority, for example, is justified simply on the ground that the care of parents is necessary for helpless children. The obligations of marriage are defined by purely utilitarian considerations. It ought to be permanent in the human species because the infant does not, as in other species, become independent before another infant is born; and the bond regarded exclusively as a means of protecting the family is prolonged, at least, during the period of childbearing and the infancy of the children. The willingness to take the lower animals into account, and the strict limitation of the validity of marriage by considerations of immediate expediency, indicate the thoroughgoing utilitarian of the empirical school. In the sphere of pure politics, Locke naturally applies the same doctrine to the defence of the principles involved in the revolution. He insists in the strongest terms on the responsibility of all officials to the community; 2 he justifies the sacred right of insurrection in language which would be fully applicable to the American War of Independence or the French Revolution; and enunciates with vigour the duty of a people whose rulers desert their trust, to make an appeal to heaven.' 3 II. But vigorously as Locke can put the utilitarian argument, we become sensible that it somehow fails to give him complete satisfaction. He wants some binding element to supplement the mere shifting considerations of expediency. We constantly meet with rights of an indefeasible nature, which have somehow obtained an authority independent of the source from which they are derived. He is forced to alternate between simple utilitarianism and an odd system of legal fictions. A general, he says, may hang a soldier for deserting his post, but may not take from him a farthing of his estate; and he gives the simple and satisfactory reason that one power is necessary to, whilst the other has no connection with, the good of the community. But he cannot answer the question: What right has a state to punish an alien for crimes committed in its jurisdiction? without this unlucky compact. 1 Treatise ii. sec. 58. 2 Ib. sec. 152. Ib. sec. 168, and ch. xix. of the Dissolution of Government,' |