No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose remains.  A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature.  What Stammler calls a “natural law with changing content"[4]—­a content which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand—­is essential if the state is to live the life of law.  For here was the head and centre of Locke’s enquiry.  “What he was really concerned about,” said T.H.  Green, “was to dispute ’the right divine of kings to govern wrong.’” The method, as he conceived, by which this could be accomplished was the limitation of power.  This he effected by two distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.

[Footnote 4:  Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, p. 64., and the references there cited.]

The external method has, at bottom, two sides.  It is, in the first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state.  To Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion.  But for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction.  What his whole work amounts to in substance—­it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau—­is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole.  A common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence is wanting.  So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke’s book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means of operation.  The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen, under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes’ proof that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of Locke’s attitude.  That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]

[Footnote 5:  Cf. my Problem of Sovereignty, Chap.  I.]