This second power over his material the student of politics can never possess.  He can never create an artificial uniformity in man.  He cannot, after twenty generations of education or breeding render even two human beings sufficiently like each other for him to prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will behave alike under like circumstances.

How far has he the first power?  How far can he abstract from the facts of man’s state qualities in respect of which men are sufficiently comparable to allow of valid political reasoning?

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the Bastille John Adams, then American Ambassador to England, and afterwards President of the United States, wrote to a friend describing the ’fermentation upon the subject of government’ throughout Europe.  ’Is Government a science or not?’ he describes men as asking.  ’Are there any principles on which it is founded?  What are its ends?  If indeed there is no rule, no standard, all must be accident and chance.  If there is a standard, what is it?’[25]

[25] Memoir of T. Brand Hollis, by J. Disney, p. 32.

Again and again in the history of political thought men have believed themselves to have found this ‘standard,’ this fact about man which should bear the same relation to politics which the fact that all things can be weighed bears to physics, and the fact that all things can be measured bears to geometry.

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked for it in the final causes of man’s existence.  Every man differed, it is true, from every other man, but these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect manhood which, though few men approached, and none attained it, all were capable of conceiving.  May not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern—­the ’idea’—­of man formed by God and laid up ’in a heavenly place’?  If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know that pattern.  Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable purposes of God.

Or the relation of man to God’s purpose was thought of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to which the law is applied.  We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the moral facts of the world, learn God’s law.  That law confers on us certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a valid political science can be deduced.  We know our rights with the same certainty that we know his law.

‘Men,’ wrote Locke, ’being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s, pleasure:  and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if we were made for one another’s uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.’[26]