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. Yet he need not fear the comparison with
the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of
the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy
ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of
which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's
view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil
character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept
Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a
kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but
Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other,
pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian
view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America
will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the
separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification.
Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes
makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids