natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes’ gloomy picture, so does Locke’s social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of hard necessity.  It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains them—­life and liberty and property—­will be preserved.  The contract is thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.  Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group.  On the contrary, it is a contract with the community as a whole which thus becomes that common political superior—­the State—­which is to enforce the law of nature and punish infractions of it.  Nor is Locke’s state a sovereign State:  the very word “sovereignty” does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the treatise.  The State has power only for the protection of natural law.  Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.

Such a contract, in Locke’s view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of majority-rule.  Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had before the institution of political society.  And it is further to be assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.  Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it is no easy matter to determine.  That no evidence of its early existence can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow demonstrable by facts.  More important than origins, he seems to deem its implications.  He has placed consent in the foreground of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its continuance.  Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say, bind their successors?  If legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent?  And what of a child born into the community?  Locke is at least logical in his consent.  The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously insisted, it is not a contract.  Yet Locke urged that the primitive members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any satisfactory sense, would be impossible.  With children the case is different.  They are born subjects of no government or country; and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State has been accepted.  But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his fellows.  Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.