the command of law.  But Locke here makes a third distinction.  The State must live with other States, both as regards its individual members, and as a collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its relationships, Locke termed “federative.”  This last distinction, indeed, has no special value; and its author’s own defence of it is far from clear.  More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis of the distinction between legislature and executive.  The making of laws is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do its work and be gone.  But those who attend to their execution must be ceaseless in their vigilance.  It is better, therefore, to separate the two both as to powers and persons.  Otherwise legislators “may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community, contrary to the end of society and government.”  The legislator must therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its constituencies.  It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act.  One hundred and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was translated into statute.

Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger.  Nor can the executive be forced to summon the legislature.  Here, clearly enough, Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of compromise is implicit in his remarks.  Nor is his surrender here of consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook.  For at the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the law of nature and their own natural rights.  There is thus a standard of right and wrong superior to all powers within the State.  “A government,” as he says, “is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others.”  The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.