Locke contended is not without its justification.  Locke’s theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge.  Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder.  At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke’s side.  He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.

With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke.  No element integral to the Two Treatises is absent from the Social Contract.  Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor.  The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim.  He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism.  It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon which Rousseau’s fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance upon Locke.  The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust.  Rousseau’s general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious.  But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple numerical test.  Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke’s state has more real room for individuality than Rousseau’s.  The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state.  Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke—­what limits shall we place upon the power of government?  Rousseau has only emphasized the urgency of the debate.

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke’s teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions.  Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion.  We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset.  Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did.  In the largest sense, his questions are still our own.  In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers.  The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little resemblance to our own.  The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom.  The problem, now as then, was its translation into institutional terms.  It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his generation.