ver a political doctrine which they would
have been the last to accept. These theorists or political speculators
have imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society, in which
men lived without government, law, or manners, out of which they
finally came by entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of
their number to be king and to govern them, or with one another to
submit to the rule of the majority. Hobbes, the English materialist,
is among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of this
theory. He held that men lived, prior to the creation of civil
society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and every one
had an equal right to every thing, and to take any thing on which he
could lay his hands and was strong enough to hold. There was no law
but the will of the strongest. Hence, the state of nature was a state
of continual war. At length, wearied and disgusted, men sighed for
peace, and, with one accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest
among them: Come, be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and
govern us; we surrender our natural rights and our natural independence
to you, with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or cutting
each other's throats.

Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, but
asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had asserted it in
the interests of power. Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, followed in the
next century with his Contrat Social, the text-book of the French
revolutionists--almost their Bible--and put the finishing stroke to the
theory. Hitherto the compact or agreement had been assumed to be
between the governor and the governed; Rousseau supposes it to be
between the people themselves, or a compact to which the people are the
only parties. He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men
lived, antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
without government or law. All men in that state were equal, and each
was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself. These equal,
independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to have met, in
convention, and entered into a compact with themselves, each with all,
and all with each, that they would constitute government, and would
each submit to the determination and authority of the whole,
practically of the fluctuating and irresponsible majority.