“The office of the sovereign, be it monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was entrusted with the sovereign power, namely, the procuration of the safety of the people:  to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and to none but Him.  But by safety, here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.”

At first sight this may appear to be a statement of the police-theory of government, pure and simple; but it is not so.  For Hobbes goes on to say:—­

“And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries, when they shall complain; but by a general providence contained in public instruction both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases."[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Leviathan,” Molesworth’s ed. p. 322.]

To a witness of the civil war between Charles I. and the Parliament, it is not wonderful that the dissolution of the bonds of society which is involved in such strife should appear to be “the greatest evil that can happen in this life;” and all who have read the “Leviathan” know to what length Hobbes’s anxiety for the preservation of the authority of the representative of the sovereign power, whatever its shape, leads him.  But the justice of his conception of the duties of the sovereign power does not seem to me to be invalidated by his monstrous doctrines respecting the sacredness of that power.

To Hobbes, who lived during the break-up of the sovereign power by popular force, society appeared to be threatened by everything which weakened that power:  but, to John Locke, who witnessed the evils which flow from the attempt of the sovereign power to destroy the rights of the people by fraud and violence, the danger lay in the other direction.

The safety of the representative of the sovereign power itself is to Locke a matter of very small moment, and he contemplates its abolition when it ceases to do its duty, and its replacement by another, as a matter of course.  The great champion of the revolution of 1688 could do no less.  Nor is it otherwise than natural that he should seek to limit, rather than to enlarge, the powers of the State, though in substance he entirely agrees with Hobbes’s view of its duties:—­

“But though men,” says he, “when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be so far disposed of by the Legislature as the good of society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property (for no rational creature can be supposed to change