Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident.

It promotes the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may have its play.

Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled his labor with some object.

This labor theory of ownership lived, it may be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of modern socialism.
The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character.

There may be war or violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is integral to their character.