ason shows us that men are equal. From this equality are born
men's natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan
Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property. Obviously
enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is
the deepest of human impulses. By liberty Locke means the right of the
individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the
law of nature. Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the
realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will,
by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident. It promotes
the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement
obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may
have its play. Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which
becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled
his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may
be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the
parent of modern socialism.

The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes,
pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but
that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is
integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil
State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each
man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But
because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient
variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and
chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the
weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the
social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a
natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does
Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of
hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the
individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of
nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains
them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is
thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.
Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of
some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the
com