namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the
body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself,
or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a
great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of
the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to
Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality
there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a
metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification
of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by
differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of
circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such
circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought
are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It
is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits
of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally
altering the point of view.

In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to
be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by
the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a
prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from
harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The
subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but
the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is
obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular
principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to
justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need
for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still
emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be
from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But
it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of
Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the
extreme