act as without basis in history; yet
contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his
argument. The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then
because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral
limitations upon its exercise. He speaks continually of representation
without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys. The members
of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify
existent inequalities. "The natural foundations of sovereignty," he
writes, "are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and
power." Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been
taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual
exertion of authority. Nor has he clear notions of the way in which
property is to be founded. Communism, he writes in seventeenth century
fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the
earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the
soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions. This is
pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly
remote from the logical result of his own premises.

The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only
the most confused sort of notions. He had to preface his work with some
sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded
it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some
uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to
the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon
notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their
falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a
great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than
the fertility it contained. The merit of Blackstone is his learning,
which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand
some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is
right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying
the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
of his time to question its assumptions.

De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
perceive, his book has re