His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke.  The English philosopher said, in his second treatise, “To understand political power aright and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in; and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man—­a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should by any manifest declaration of His will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.”  But a state of liberty is not a state of license.  We cannot exceed our own rights without assailing the rights of others.  There is no such subordination as authorizes us to destroy one another.  As every one is bound to preserve himself, so he is bound to preserve the rest of mankind, and except to do justice upon an offender we may not impair the life, liberty, health, or goods of another.  Here Locke deduces the power that one man may have over another; community could not exist if transgressors were not punished.  Every wrongdoer places himself in “a state of war.”  Here is the difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which men, says Locke, have confounded—­alluding probably to Hobbes’s notion of the lawlessness of human society in the original condition.

The portion of Locke’s treatise which was not accepted by the French theorists was that relating to property.  Property in lands or goods is due wholly and only to the labor man has put into it.  By labor he has removed it from the common state in which nature has placed it, and annexed something to it that excludes the common rights of other men.

Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this was not his only lack of originality.  His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century.  All the thinkers and philosophers and fine ladies and gentlemen assumed a certain state of nature, and built upon it, out of words and phrases, an airy and easy reconstruction of society, without a thought of investigating the past, or inquiring into the development of mankind.  Every one talked of “the state of nature” as if he knew all about it.  “The conditions of primitive man,” says Mr. Morley, “were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at convivial supper-parties, and settled with complete assurance.”  That was the age when solitary Frenchmen plunged into the wilderness of North America, confidently expecting to recover the golden age under the shelter of a wigwam and in the society of a squaw.