PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 601 
hungry and patient, until the whole society has had its fill. Locke proceeds 
accordingly: ' ‘ Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian’s who hath 
killed it. It is allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, 
though before it was the common right of everyone.’ 
His estimate of the agricultural skill of his ‘ Indians’ was a low one.? ‘ An 
acre of land that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in America, 
which with the same husbandry would do the like, are without doubt of the 
same natural intrinsic value. But yet the benefit mankind receives from one 
in a year is worth 5/., and the other possibly not worth a penny: if all the profit 
an Indian received from it were to be valued and sold here, at least, I may say 
truly, not one thousandth.’ Here again his experience does not extend yet to 
the agricultural communities of Carolina and Georgia ; it is the rude husbandry 
of the Iroquois and Algonquins that is typical, for him, of the natural state of 
man. More generally still, when he speaks of the function and use of money,° 
he asserts: ‘Thus in the beginning, all the world was America, and more so 
than that is now ; for no such thing as money was anywhere known.’ 
His views on the natural estate of matrimony are coloured again from the 
same source. ‘All the ends of marriage being to be obtained under politic 
government, as well as in the state of Nature, the civil magistrate doth not 
abridge the right or power of either [parent] naturally necessary to those ends’ ; 
a reflection once more of the many curious compromises between patriarchal 
and matriarchal government in American societies, and particularly among 
the peoples who had partially adopted agriculture—namely, the Southern 
Iroquois and the Eastern Sioux of Virginia. America, as we see from the extract 
on money, though it is still near the state of Nature, has in some parts advanced 
beyond it ; but it is still to America that he turns for examples of more purely 
natural conditions: * ‘If Josephus Acosta’s word may be taken, he tells us 
that in many parts of America there was no government at all.’ ‘There are 
great and apparent conjectures,’ says he, ‘ that these men [in Peru] for a long 
time had neither kings nor commonwealths, but lived in troops, as they do this 
day in Florida—the Cheriquanas, those of Brazil, and many other nations, 
which have no certain kings, but as occasion is offered in peace or war, they 
choose their captains as they please.’ * ‘I willnot deny,’ he goes on,’ ‘that if we 
look back, as far as history will direct us’—he might well have added, as far as 
ethnology is any guide—‘ towards the original of commonwealths, we shall 
generally find them under the government and administration of one man. 
. . . Conformable hereunto, we find the people of America, who (living out of 
the reach of the conquering swords and spreading domination of the two great 
empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoyed their own natural freedom [to elect a 
monarch], though ceteris paribus they commonly prefer the heir of their de- 
ceased king; yet, if they find him any way weak and incapable, they pass 
him by and set up the stoutest and bravest man for their ruler.» Once more 
America supplies the typical instance, and (once more) that part of America 
which best satisfies Locke’s description is among the hunting tribes of the 
Southern Algonquins, with their elective war-path chiefs, and regular deposition 
of the war-lord as soon as his physical force abates. Eventually the com- 
parative argument is pressed home, with a hypothesis of the graduation of 
culture from East to West, almost in the manner of Bodin or Thucydides: ‘Thus 
we see that the kings of the Indians, in America, which is still a pattern of the first 
ages in Asia and EKurope, whilst the inhabitants were too few for the country, 
and want of people and money gave no temptation to enlarge their possession 
of land, or contest for wider extent of ground, are little more than generals of 
their armies ; and though they command absolutely in war, yet at home, and 
in time of peace, they exercise very little dominion, and have but a very moderate 
sovereignty ; the resolutions of peace and war being ordinarily either in the 
people or in a council, though the war itself, which admits not of pluralities 
1 § 30. 2 § 43, 2 § 49. * § 102. 5 § 102. 
° Again he is quoting Acosta, National and Moral History of the East and West 
Indies, 1604, I. 25. 
7 § 108, 
