No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort
to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection
can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose
remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full
capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard
certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What
Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]--a content
which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand--is essential
if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and
centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said
T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern
wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be
accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two
distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.

[Footnote 4: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, p. 64., and
the references there cited.]

The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first
place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To
Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of
gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at
such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like
Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the
interest of individual exertion. 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