o
be prevented at all cost. Now, this might be all very well but for
evolution. Mankind cannot rest quietly under the strongest and most stable
government in the world. It will insist on learning new tricks, on thinking
new thoughts, and if it is not allowed to teach itself fresh habits, it
will break out in revolt, and either the government will be broken or the
subjects will wither away under the rule of repression.

Hobbes may be quoted as a supporter of the rule of the Stuarts, and equally
of the rule of Cromwell. Every kind of strong tyranny may be defended by
his principles.

In the nineteenth century Carlyle was the finest exponent of "strong"
government, and generally the leaders of the Tory party have been its
advocates, particularly in the attitude to be taken towards subject races.

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)

Locke, setting out to vindicate the Whig Revolution of 1688, rejects
Hobbes' view of the savagery of primitive man, and invents "a state of
peace, goodwill, mutual assistance and preservation"--equally, as we know
to-day, far from the truth. Locke's primitive men have a natural right to
personal property--"as much land as a man tills, plants, improves,
cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property"--but they
are as worried and as fearful as Hobbes' savages. So they, too, renounce
their natural rights in favour of civil liberty, and are happy when they
have got "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society,
and made by the legislative power erected on it."

According to Hobbes, once having set up a government, there was no possible
justification for changing it--save national peril; and a bad government
was to be obeyed rather than the danger of civil war incurred.

But Locke never allows the government to be more than the trustee of the
people who placed it in power. It rules by consent of the community, and
may be removed or altered when it violates its trust. Hobbes saw in the
break-up of a particular government the dissolution of society. Locke made
a great advance on this, for he saw that a change of government could be
accomplished without any very serious disturbance in the order of society
or the peace of a nation. Hobbes did not believe that the people could be
trusted to effect a change of government, while Locke had to justify the
change which had just taken place in 1688.

Only when we have dropped all Locke's theories of primitive man's
happiness, and