common until later. Campanella, Fénélon, Harrington, Bacon, and others produced works of this species; and in most of them private property is found the social stumbling-block and the cause of social ills, and communism of some sort the only cure.

III.

IT was not difficult to devise Ideal Commonwealths, the example once set; but as it was found in time to be profitless, the practice became discredited, the writer was called a political projector, and Utopias ceased to be produced. It was more to the purpose to discover, if possible, how actual commonwealths and societies came into being, and their continued raison d'étre, and this was the problem to which philosophers next addressed themselves, a really philosophical and most important problem, but, for the solution of which unfortunately, as Sir Henry Maine remarks, the historical knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was quite insufficient, so that the philosophers were obliged to supplement their imperfect knowledge by ingenious guesses and to substitute hypothesis for history, drawing therefrom the most plausible deductions they could.

For a century and a half the human mind sat down obstinately in front of the problem of the origin of Civil Society and Government. Hobbes, Locke,

Filmer, Rousseau, all inquire into it, and the first two, as well as Rousseau, base the origin upon an original covenant or social contract. All three discuss likewise the best form of political Constitution,

D

which Hobbes finds to be an Absolute Monarchy, Locke a Constitutional Monarchy, and Rousseau a Democracy.

The first of these writers, Hobbes, very far from being what he has been called, "one of England's false prophets," was one of the most clear-seeing, original, and independent thinkers on morals and politics that ever lived. His great work, " Leviathan,” was epoch-making in both. Though weak in history, like all in his age, he was the first to perceive that the conduct of associated men must be governed by the nature—the appetites, desires, and affections—of individual men; that a sound psychology, therefore, is the one base of morals and politics; and accordingly he begins his famous book with an account of individual human nature, its passions, desires, and sentiments, in general with the principles that move man to action. He is in error, indeed, in supposing that man at all times is the same; that rude primitive men had as many or the same principles of action as civilized men. He did not allow for the fact of evolution; that the soul of the civilized man is as much expanded beyond that of the primitive man as that of the grown man is beyond that of the child; consequently his account of the motives that firsturged men into society, and regulated their early intercourse, requires qualification even on the score of psychology were there no historical objections to it.

Nevertheless there remains a certain truth in his theory and his reasonings.

What led men at all into civil society, according to Hobbes, was their terror of anarchy and its ex

perienced evils in the State of Nature, their original state;-in which state, while there is ceaseless strife, there are no arts, no learning, no inventions, no commerce, and the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Men weary of this state of misery are urged to get out of it by their fears, and, being rational, "reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace," which in brief were, that they should all forego mutual aggressions, and hand over their powers to a single person, "one man or one body," who should maintain peace and justice, and defend them against outside enemies. This one is Sovereign: his voice is Law-"the speech of him that of right commands." Property is the creature of law; there is no other origin for it. But the sovereign one should be guided by the law or laws of nature in issuing his laws. In the State of Nature every one had a right to everything that he had the power to get, but only so long as he was able to hold it. Hobbes believes that an absolute monarchy, the monarch governing according to the law of nature or natural morality, is the best form of government for the whole people, and especially for the masses. If the monarch is wise and good, so much the better; if not, still he should be obeyed, because the remedy, revolution, involving civil war and anarchy, would be worse than the evil. Better to bear the ills we have than fly to worse- to anarchy and its horrors, to get out of which was the original cause of the social contract and the transfer of power to the sovereign one.

Locke likewise bases Civil Society on a social contract. But with Locke there is a contract on both

sides, on the governed that they will obey provided the sovereign will govern according to certain fundamental principles. The obedience is not to be unlimited or passive; in other words, the sovereign's power should not be absolute. Locke founds the rights of property on labour, not on law. That thing is "mine" if, having got the raw material of it from the bounty of nature, I have "mixed my labour with it," and this, whether the original material be land in the primitive state of uncultivation, or any of its spontaneous products. If there is plenty of other land, I do no one harm by appropriating a part; but I must not take more than I can make use of, and my title to any part is only fully confirmed by its reclamation and cultivation. It is labour which gives the natural title to property: moreover, Locke adds, it is labour which is the cause of nearly all the values of things, whether value in use or value in exchange, an important conclusion, in which he anticipates in great measure Ricardo's theory, that exchange value depends on the quantity of labour necessary to produce commodities and place them in the market; a conclusion, too, that Karl Marx and the modern Socialists have seized upon and made the foundation of their argument and indictment against modern society.

One common conclusion of the two English philosophers was important from the consequences afterwards drawn from it by Rousseau. According to both, men in a State of Nature were "free and equal," a proposition that Locke limits and carefully qualifies; but which Hobbes holds in extreme form.

He maintains that not only were men originally equal, but that they are so still in the main: "for when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man should therefore claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. As to strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest by secret machination or confederacy with others"; and "as to the faculties of the mind," he adds, "I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. Leaving out of count the arts founded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general rules, because these are not native faculties," men are on a tolerable equality. That they do not generally think so is due to a vain conceit of their own wisdom; others they readily allow may be more witty, eloquent, or learned, but not more wise; "for they see their own wit at hand, others at a distance." But the best practical proof of equality is that each one is satisfied with himself, and would not exchange with another; "as there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything than that every man is contented with his own share."

The writings of both philosophers had much influence on the course of English politics, the friends of absolutism drawing their arguments from Hobbes, the Whigs from Locke: though neither had much effect on the material fortunes of the English people. The cause of absolute monarchy was fought and lost in England in the seventeenth century: the theory of Locke and limited sovereignty won. It