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