a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic
tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the
_Craftsman_, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is
irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still
remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's
separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The
most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline
of a social contract more daring even than his own. 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. "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