"The Americans," he wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in his _Treatise Concerning Civil Government_ and his _Four Letters_ he declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was based.

Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness.
Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England.
Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined; and once Bentham's _Fragment_ had begun to make its way, a new epoch opened in the history of political ideas.
Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned.
For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's own.

It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood.

Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English philosophy.

Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him.