In England Locke's influence has been less dynamic than static; it has helped us to preserve a moderation in politics; to be content with piecemeal legislation, because to attempt too much might be to alienate the sympathies of the majority; to keep our political eye, so to speak, on the ebb and flow of public opinion--since it is public opinion that is the final court of appeal; to tolerate abuses until it is quite plain a great number of people are anxious to have the abuse removed; and above all to settle down in easy contentment under political defeat, and make the best of accomplished reforms, not because we like them, but because a Parliamentary majority has decreed them.
For England, in fact, the essence of Locke's teaching has helped to produce a deference almost servile to political majorities and to public opinion, a reluctance to make any reform until public opinion has pronounced loudly and often in favour of reform, and an emphatic assurance that every reform enacted by Parliament is the unmistakable expression of the will of the people.

Locke has discouraged us from hasty legislation and from political panics.
ROUSSEAU AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Locke's influence in France and in America has been altogether different.
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot were all students and admirers of Locke, and his political theories were at the base of Rousseau's "Social Contract." A return to nature, a harking back to an imaginary primitive happiness of mankind, the glorification of an ideal of simplicity and innocence,--supposed to have been the ideal of early politics--the restoration of a popular sovereignty built up on natural rights alleged to have been lost: these were the articles of faith Rousseau preached with passionate conviction in his "Discourses" and in the "Social Contract." Individual man was born naturally "free," and had become debased and enslaved by laws and civilisation.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," is the opening sentence of the "Social Contract." This liberty and equality of primitive man was acclaimed as a law of nature by eighteenth century writers in France, and to some extent in England too.
Pope could write, "The state of nature was the reign of God." Instead of a forward movement the business of man was to recover the lost happiness of the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and equality.

Locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning Rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted by their master.
It was all false, all a fiction, all mischievous and misleading, this doctrine of a return to an ideal happiness of the past, and it was the most worthless portion of Locke's work.

To-day it is easy for us to say this, when we have learnt something of the struggle for existence in nature, something of the habits and customs of primitive man, and something of man's upward growth.