aunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught
him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free
man too.[182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell
his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid
down the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by a
voluntary compact between man and woman."[183] This is true of a small
number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive
usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the
rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in
the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own
consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did
not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated
all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not
naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and
it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic
of the historic records then accessible.[184]

It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately
put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,
and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by
abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of
the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but
insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the
state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,
morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that we
must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the
best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is
destined."[185] In another place he calls attention to manners,
customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which
the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the
arching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in
rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.[186] This was
excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,
which men may hold in their m