Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the treatise.

The State has power only for the protection of natural law.
Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.
Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of majority-rule.

Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had before the institution of political society.

And it is further to be assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law.
Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it is no easy matter to determine.

That no evidence of its early existence can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow demonstrable by facts.