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.

The state of nature of Rousseau was a state in which inequality did not exist, and with a fervid rhetoric he tried to persuade his readers that it was the happier state.  He recognized inequality, it is true, as a word of two different meanings:  first, physical inequality, difference of age, strength, health, and of intelligence and character; second, moral and political inequality, difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment of others-such as riches, honor, power.  The first difference is established by nature, the second by man.  So long, however, as the state of nature endures, no disadvantages flow from the natural inequalities.

In Rousseau’s account of the means by which equality was lost, the incoming of the ideas of property is prominent.  From property arose civil society.  With property came in inequality.  His exposition of inequality is confused, and it is not possible always to tell whether he means inequality of possessions or of political rights.  His contemporary, Morelly, who published the Basileade in 1753, was troubled by