ix GOVERNMENT 407 



To listen to Locke, one would imagine that a 

 general meeting of men living in the state of 

 nature having been called to consider the " defects " 

 of their condition, and somebody being voted to 

 the tree (in the presumable absence of chairs), this 

 earliest example of a constituent assembly resolved 

 to form a governmental company, with strictly 

 limited liability, for the purpose of defending 

 liberty and property; and that they elected a 

 director or body of directors, to be known as the 

 Sovereign, for the purpose of carrying on that 

 business and no other whatsoever. Thus we are a 

 long way from the absolute Sovereign of Hobbes. 

 Here is the point, in fact, at which Locke diverged 

 from the older philosopher ; and at which Rousseau 

 and Mably, after profiting as much as they could 

 by Locke's "Essay," left him and laid the theoretical 

 foundations of regimental socialism. 



The physiocrats of the eighteenth century, 

 struggling against the effects of that " fureur de 

 gouverner," which one of their leaders, the elder 

 Mirabeau, called the worst malady of modern 

 states, and which had nearly succeeded in strang- 



laws with penalties of death, and consequently of all less 

 penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of 

 employing the force of the community in the execution of Midi 

 laws and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign 

 injury ; and all this only for the public good," ( 3). " Govern- 

 ment has no other end than the preservation of property " (94). 

 "The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into 

 commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the 

 preservation of their property " ( 124). 





