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