[958] C. 14.
98. Conquest, in an unjust war, can give no right at all, unless robbers and pirates may acquire a right. Nor is anyone bound by promises which unjust force extorts from him. If we are not strong enough to resist, we have no remedy save patience; but our children may appeal to Heaven, and repeat their appeals till they recover their ancestral rights, which was to be governed by such a legislation as themselves approve. He that appeals to Heaven must be sure that he has right on his side, and right too that is worth the trouble and cost of his appeal, as he will answer at a tribunal that cannot be deceived. Even just conquest gives no further right than to reparation of injury; and the posterity of the vanquished, he seems to hold, can forfeit nothing by their parent’s offence, so that they have always a right to throw off the yoke. The title of prescription, which has commonly been admitted to silence the complaints, if not to heal the wounds, of the injured, finds no favour with Locke.[959] And hence, it seems that no state composed, as most have been, out of the spoils of conquest, can exercise a legitimate authority over the latest posterity of those it has incorporated. Wales, for instance, has an eternal right to shake off the yoke of England; for what Locke says of consent to laws by representatives, is of little weight when these must be out-numbered in the general legislature of both countries; and indeed the first question for the Cambro-Britons would be to determine whether they would form part of such a common legislation.
[959] C. 16.
99. Usurpation, which is a kind of domestic conquest, gives no more right to obedience than unjust war; it is necessary that the people should both be at liberty to consent, and have actually consented to allow and confirm a power which the constitution of their commonwealth does not recognise.[960] But tyranny may exist without usurpation, whenever the power reposed in anyone’s hands for the people’s benefit is abused to their impoverishment or slavery. Force may never be opposed but to unjust and unlawful force; in any other case, it is condemned before God and man. The king’s person is in some countries sacred by law; but this, as Locke thinks, does not extend to the case where, by putting himself in a state of war with his people, he dissolves the government.[961] A prince dissolves the government by ruling against law, by hindering the regular assembly of the legislature, by changing the form of election, or by rendering the people subject to a foreign power. He dissolves it also by neglecting or abandoning it, so that the laws cannot be put into execution. The government is also dissolved by breach of trust in either the legislature or the prince; by the former when it usurps an arbitrary power over the lives, liberties, and fortunes of the subject; by the latter, when he endeavours to corrupt the representatives or to influence the choice of the electors. If it be objected that no government will be able long to subsist, if the people may set up a new legislature whenever they take offence at the old one, he replies that mankind are too slow and averse to quit their old institutions for this danger to be apprehended. Much will be endured from rulers without mutiny or murmur. Nor is anything more likely to restrain governments than this doctrine of the right of resistance. It is as reasonable to tell men they should not defend themselves against robbers, because it may occasion disorder, as to use the same argument for passive obedience to illegal dominion. And he observes, after quoting some other writers, that Hooker alone might be enough to satisfy those who rely on him for their ecclesiastical polity.[962]
[960] C. 17.
[961] C. 18.
[962] C. 19.
Observations on this Treatise. 100. Such is, in substance, the celebrated treatise of Locke on civil government, which, with the favour of political circumstances, and the authority of his name, became the creed of a numerous party at home; while silently spreading the fibres from its root over Europe and America, it prepared the way for theories of political society, hardly bolder in their announcement, but expressed with more passionate ardour, from which the great revolutions of the last and present age have sprung. But as we do not launch our bark upon a stormy sea, we shall merely observe that neither the Revolution of 1688, nor the administration of William III., could have borne the test by which Locke has tried the legitimacy of government. There was certainly no appeal to the people in the former, nor would it have been convenient for the latter to have had the maxim established, that an attempt to corrupt the legislature entails a forfeiture of the entrusted power. Whether the opinion of Locke, that mankind are slow to political change, be conformable to an enlarged experience, must be judged by everyone according to his reading and observation; it is, at least, very different from that which Hooker, to whom he defers so greatly in most of his doctrine, has uttered in the very first sentence of his Ecclesiastical Polity. For my own part, I must confess, that in these latter chapters of Locke on Government I see, what sometimes appears in his other writings, that the influence of temporary circumstances on a mind a little too susceptible of passion and resentment, had prevented that calm and patient examination of all the bearings of this extensive subject which true philosophy requires.
101. But whatever may be our judgment of this work, it is equally true that it opened a new era of political opinion in Europe. The earlier writings on the side of popular sovereignty, whether those of Buchanan and Languet, of the Jesuits, or of the English republicans, had been either too closely dependent on temporary circumstances, or too much bound up with odious and unsuccessful factions, to sink very deep into the hearts of mankind. Their adversaries, with the countenance of every government on their side, kept possession of the field; and neither jurist, nor theologian, nor philosopher on the Continent, while they generally followed their predecessors in deriving the origin of civil society from compact, ventured to meet the delicate problem of resistance to tyranny, or of the right to reform a constitution, except in the most cautious and indefinite language. We have seen this already in Grotius and Puffendorf. But the success of the English Revolution; the necessity which the powers allied against France found of maintaining the title of William; the peculiar interest of Holland and Hanover, states at that time very strong in the literary world, in our new scheme of government, gave a weight and authority to principles which, without some such application, it might still have been thought seditious to propound. Locke too, long an exile in Holland, was intimate with Le Clerc, who exerted a considerable influence over the protestant part of Europe. Barbeyrac, some time afterwards, trod nearly in the same steps, and without going all the lengths of Locke, did not fail to take a very different tone from the two older writers, upon whom he has commented.
Avis aux Refugiéz, perhaps by Bayle. 102. It was very natural that the French protestants, among whom traditions of a turn of thinking not the most favourable to kings may have been preserved, should, in the hour of severe persecution, mutiny in words and writings against the despotism that oppressed them. Such, it appears, had been the language of those exiles, as it is of all exiles, when an anonymous tract, entitled Avis aux Refugiéz, was published with the date of Amsterdam in 1690. This, under pretext of giving advice, in the event of their being permitted to return home, that they should get rid of their spirit of satire, and of their republican theories, is a bitter and able attack on those who had taken refuge in Holland. It asserts the principle of passive obedience, extolling also the king of France and his government, and censuring the English Revolution. Public rumour ascribed this to Bayle; it has usually passed for his, and is even inserted in the collection of his miscellaneous works. Some, however, have ascribed it to Pelisson, and others to Larroque; one already, and the other soon after, proselytes to the church of Rome. Basnage thought it written by the latter, and published by Bayle, to whom he ascribed the preface. This is, apparently, in a totally opposite strain, but not without strong suspicion of irony or ill faith. The style and manner throughout appear to suggest Bayle; and though the supposition is very discreditable to his memory, the weight of presumption seems much to incline that way.