But for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction.

What his whole work amounts to in substance--it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau--is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole.

A common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence is wanting.

So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means of operation.

The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen, under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of Locke's attitude.