HALVDAN KOHT. [N(). 3. 



To the objection that such principles are dangerous, Locke 

 answers (§ 223) that "people are not so easily got out of their 

 old forms as some are apt to suggest; they are hardly to be 

 prevailed with to amend the acknowledged faults in the frame 

 they have been accustomed to"; (§ 225) "great mistakes in the 

 ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the 

 slips of human frailty will be borne by the People without 

 mutiny or murmur". And, in the same spirit, the general pre- 

 amble of the Declaration states that all experience has shown 

 that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffe- 

 rable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which 

 they are accustomed. But, the Declaration continues, "when a 

 long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the 

 same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute 

 despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such 

 government and to provide new guards for their future security". 

 This stroke of rhetoric is almost verbatim tåken out of Locke's 

 treatise (§ 225): "if a long train of abuses, prevarications and 

 artifices, all tending the same vvay, make the design visible to 

 the People, and they cannot but feel vvhat they lie under, and 

 see whither ihey are going, 'tis not to be wondered that they 

 should then rouse themselves and endeavour to put the rule into 

 such hands which may secure to them the ends for which 

 Government was at first erected". 



The base of the political philosophy of Locke was the idea 

 that (II. § 87) "Man being born with a title to perfect freedom 

 and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges 

 of the Law of Nature equally with any other man or number 

 of men in the world, has by nature a power to preserve his 

 property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries 

 and attemps of other men". Likewise, the signers of the Decla- 

 ration held these truths to be self-evident, that all men are 

 created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with 

 certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and 

 the pursuit of happiness. Thus, the political principles of Eng- 



