The authors of the _Declaration of Independence_ had still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr.Martin of North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention.

Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required by the time.

A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went behind the settlement of 1688.

Nor is the work of Dean Tucker without significance.

The failure of England in the American war was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to Locke as the author of their principles.