Louis’ decision, it appeared—­by their deliberate choice and the settlement of which he was the symbol would be maintained.  Parliament granted to William all that his foreign policy could have demanded.  His own death was only the prelude to the victories of Marlborough.  Those victories seemed to seal the solution of 1688.  A moment came when sentiment and intrigue combined to throw in jeopardy the Act of Settlement.  But Death held the stakes against the gambler’s throw of Bolingbroke; and the accession of George I assured the permanence of Revolution principles.

II

The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688.  He sought, as he said, “to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make good his title in the consent of the people.”  In the debate which followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason that it had the common sense of the generation on his side.  Yet Locke has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers.  Though his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather than read.  It is a profound and regrettable error.  Locke may not possess the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first of English political thinkers.  He yet stated more clearly than either the general problem of the modern State.  Hobbes, after all, worked with an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription against disorder.  Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman.  But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.

Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked.  He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible retort to the theory of Divine Right.  He so emphasized the principle of consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so made.  For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression.  Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State.  To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political problems.  But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic