Utterly antagonistic to the principles and the spirit of Burke, is the famous treatise of Rousseau, the Social Contract, which more than any other work was the text-book of the French Revolution. It is significant that the whole discussion is reared upon speculations relative to the origin of civil society. Rights and obligations must all be inferred. with mathematical exactitude from the fundamental theory. adopted at the start. This theory assumes that the existence of society is optional with men, and is due to their voluntary consent. Individuals are bound by the actual social bond only because, and as far as, they have agreed to be bound. This false dogma of a mutual contract is laid at the foundation of the edifice. It is further held that the individual in entering society surrenders all his rights to the community, and through this common act of all there instantly arises the body politic. To the community, thus formed, belongs sovereignty. The general will is now the supreme law. To this general will the entire frame-work of government is subject. The idea of "institutional" freedom, of freedom secured and assured to the individual by constitutional safeguards, against the haste or deliberate tyranny of majorities, is discarded. Representative government itself is derided as a product and sign of the decay of public spirit.' Of course the state must be restricted to narrow territorial limits. But what is this general will which is so omnipotent in the state? It turns out to be merely the majority of suffrages. When the vote of a citizen upon any measure is called for, the question really answered by him is, what in his opinion is the general will in reference to this measure. The result of the ballot decides the point, and thus if he finds himself in the minority, he is not really overruled, but simply mistaken in his judgment as to what the general will

1 Rousseau explicitly says that every law which is not expressly ratified by popular vote, is no law; and that the English, through their adherence to representative government, are slaves. "Toute loi que le peuple en personne n'a pas ratifiée est nulle; ce n'est point une loi. Le peuple Anglois pense être libre, il se trompe fort: il ne l'est que durant l'êlection des membres du parlement: sitôt qu'ils sont elus, il est esclave, il n'est rien." Livre III, ch. XV.

is.' It is impossible to imagine a more frightful despotism than Rousseau's sovereignty of the people, under which the individual has literally given up everything to the unchecked will of the majority. Equality, which more than liberty is the idol of the Frenchman, is the key-note of Rousseau's entire work. Views akin to those expressed in this ingenious but superficial essay have fascinated the French mind, and led to the sacrifice of both stable government and substantial freedom. On the warrant afforded by a popular vote (called for, according to the more approved practice, after the deed has been done), one government is overthrown and a new one set up, and the entire community, perhaps, brought under the uncontrolled sway of an imperial despot. This terrible price is paid for the sake of having a government which is (in theory) of their own making. The protection of natural rights, a prime object of society, is, in fact, given up, in consequence of the hot chase after political rights; and even these are not attained.'

'This curious, though puerile subterfuge for saving (theoretically) the freedom of the individual, when overborne by the vote of the majority, is found in Liv. IV, ch. ii (Des Suffrages.) "Quand donc l'avis contraire au mien l'importe, cela ne prouve autre chose sinon que je m'etois trompé, et que j'estimois être la volonté générale ne l'étoit pas."

Burke has left on record his opinion of the Social Contract and its author. In a letter to a French correspondent (in 1789), quoted in Prior's life of Burke, (Am. Ed. 1825, p. 313), he says: "I have read long since the Contrat Social. It has left very few traces upon my mind. I thought it a performance of little or no merit; and little did I conceive that it could ever make revolutions and give law to nations. But so it is." In Burke's "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," (1791), we find a dissection of Rousseau, whom he calls "the great founder and professor of the philosophy of vanity." Burke's satire upon the sentimental philanthropy which tramples under foot particular duties, is excellent. Rousseau is the father of the sentimental school of poets (not excepting Byron and Goethe) and novelists, who seek to make a criminal interesting by weaving around him a veil of sentiment-aiming to excite sympathy where reprobation is the proper feeling. There is a very curious fact concerning Rousseau, which Burke brings forward in the "Reflections." "Mr. Hume told me that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric observer, had perceived that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance which succeeded had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age; that now nothing was left to a writer but that

We are more apt to connect the theory of the Social Compact with the name of a true lover of liberty, John Locke, a man, in all that constitutes human excellence, at a high elevation above Rousseau. The negative part of Locke's treatise on government, wherein he demolishes the arguments of Filmer in favor of absolute monarchy as a legitimate inheritance from Adam and from the dominion of the patriarchs, is fully successful. His task was here comparaSo the second book of Locke's treatise is

tively easy. marked by signal merits. The sentiment of hostility to tyranny that inspires the work, is characteristic of the author. The natural rights of men, such as the rights of property, are declared to be not the creatures of civil society, but the end of society is properly defined to be the protection of them—though the error is committed of making the prime object of the commonwealth to be the security of property. The function of government, also, is limited to the end for which government is established. The state, however it may be constituted, must keep to its design. But Locke falls into the great error of supposing that the consent of the individual is necessary in order to his transference from an imaginary state of nature within the fold and under the obligations of civil society. Every man, says Locke, is naturally free, and nothing is "able to put him into subjection to any earthly power but only his own consent." Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. Compelled by his theory, Locke affirms that every one actually, though tacitly, gives his consent to the social compact when he comes of age, by the very act of inheriting property in a country! Every generation, by these separate acts of individuals, renews the compact,

species of the marvellous, which might still be produced, and with as great an effect as ever, though in another way; that this the marvellous in life, manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked for strokes in politics and morals."

1 Locke's Works (London, 1794), Vol. IV, p. 409.

2 Ib., p. 394.

otherwise society would be dissolved! Moreover, Locke assumes (for he fails to prove) that the assent to the social compact implies a promise to be governed by a majority. "When any number of men, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority."" Instead of founding society, with Burke, upon a divinely ordained, "predisposed order of things," with which the will of every rational being is assumed to agree, Locke makes the mistake of requiring, as a condition of the validity of government, an explicit act and the voluntary consent of every one who is born in a country. In taking this ground, he advanced beyond any statements of Hooker, whose authority he is able to bring in support of the principle that society owes its origin to an express or secret agreement, and that no human government is binding without the consent of the governed. Hooker, as we have said, avoids the necessity of getting the consent of every new generation to the existing form of society, by falling back upon the notion of the continued life of a corporation. The motive of Locke, we may add, was the honorable one of defending the rightfulness of the change of dynasty by which the Stuarts were expelled and the Prince of Orange raised to the throne. He desired to present a theory of society that would justify the change. It were better, however, to rest it upon the simple right of revolution.

The doctrine of the Social Compact is embodied in a general form in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence. Men are asserted to be by nature equal, governments are instituted to protect them in the exercise of their natural rights, and owe their powers to the consent of the governed. Jefferson states that he "turned to neither book nor pamphlet in writing it." It is clear, however, that phrases from the Virginia Declaration of Rights were in his thoughts. That document, as drawn up by George Mason, contains the following statements:

1 Works, Vol. IV, p. 395.

'Jefferson's Works (1853), Vol. VII, p. 305.

So Mr. Ford judges: Jefferson's Works, Vol. I, p. xxvi.

1. "That all men are created equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights * * * * * among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness.” * * * * *1

3. "That Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection and security of the people, nation or community." *****

In Jefferson's first draught of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote: "that all men are created equal and independent; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inherent and unalienable rights," etc. The terms "independent" and "inherent," which occur also in Mason's Paper, were erased from the draught by Jefferson's own hand. But the ultimate source of a number of thoughts and phrases in the theoretical part of the Declaration of Independence was, as Richard Henry Lee once alleged, Locke's treatise. Compare, also, the following passages, the first being from the Declaration: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." Locke writes (p. 472): "Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered that they should then.

1 Life and Correspondence of George Mason, Vol. I, p. 339.