and landholder have fared far better than he. His condition is in many respects superior to that of the mediaval serf, but not absolutely so; for the latter, at least, had plenty to eat and a hut to protect him from the weather, whereas our outcasts often starve and have not where to lay their heads. There are more starving, homeless wretches in the great cities of England to-day than there ever were serfs in the whole island. They live in far more squalid and abject poverty than the meanest medieval bondman. Not until the masses enjoy more economic in additional to personal freedom may we vaunt our absolute social superiority over the middle ages. Oh, that we might add some of the prosperity of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the culture and progress of the nineteenth!* * For the economical development of England throughout the period see Thorold Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages. S. Mis. 104- -11 JEFFERSON AND THE SOCIAL COMPACT THEORY." By GEORGE P. FISHER. The theory of Social Compact founds the authority of government on the express or implied consent of the subjects to its creation or continuance. There are various types of the theory, but they agree in postulating, in some form, as the condition of rightful authority in the state, a pact between the governors and the governed. In the conservative form of the theory, this pact is merely a theoretic implication which serves to define the mutual obligations of ruler and subject. In the more radical form, the actual consent of the people, or of a major portion of them, is assumed to be requisite to the validity of a civil polity. The genesis of the Social Compact theory is a point of much historical interest. To investigate the rise and progress of this doctrine does not fall, however, within our present purpose. Many find the germ of the theory, which was developed by subsequent writers, in the sentence of Grotius: "Civilis juris mater est ipso ex consensu obligatio." Grotius in effect teaches that there is a tacit agreement on the part of the people of a monarchy or republic to obey the will of the sovereign or the majority. Before him, however, Hooker had presented the same doctrine; his view being that an original consent of a people to be subject to a sovereign binds posterity as parts of one corporation. We lived, he says, in our remote ancestors.‡ The idea was transformed, in the hands of Hobbes, into the distinct conception of an original contract—of a state of nature as preceding civil society-which, though acknowledged by him to be a fiction, as far as actual history is concerned, is, nevertheless, the basis of his reasoning in behalf of absolutism in government. Locke differs from Hobbes in placing the sovereignty, conceded by man on passing from the state of nature into society, in the community, instead of an absolute * Printed in The Yale Review, February, 1894. E. g., Leo, in his Universalgeschichte, B. III, S. 717. |