Locke was Rousseau’s most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke’s principles.  Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke’s politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics.  There was the important difference that Locke’s essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air.  The circumstances under which it was written gave to the propositions of Locke’s piece a reserve and moderation which savour of a practical origin and a special case.  They have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the corresponding propositions in Rousseau.  We find in Locke none of those concise phrases which make fanatics.  But the essential doctrine is there.  The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had any intention to carry them, when he said that “the legislature being only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218] It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have assented to the proposition that the people—­and did Locke mean by the people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?—­could by any expression of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown.  But Locke’s statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.

Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the foundation and first condition of the civil state.  From this naturally flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as given by the people to each new law.  We need not quote passages from Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and the author of the Social Contract.  They are found in every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution.  They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.