result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual
terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so
far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean
Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war
was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to
Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote,
"have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in
his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he
declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was
based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of
Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the
levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the
contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined;
and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch
opened in the history of political ideas.

Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but,
once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past
was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to
compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for
after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have
understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which
made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English
philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the
grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of
the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy
ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of
which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's
view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil
character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept
Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but
Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement