cutting each other's throats.

Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory,
but asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had
asserted it in the interests of power. Rousseau, a citizen of
Geneva, followed in the next century with his Contrat Social, the
text-book of the French revolutionists--almost their Bible--and
put the finishing stroke to the theory. Hitherto the compact or
agreement had been assumed to be between the governor and the
governed; Rousseau supposes it to be between the people
themselves, or a compact to which the people are the only parties.
He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men lived,
antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
without government or law. All men in that state were equal, and
each was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself. These
equal, independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to
have met, in convention, and entered into a compact with
themselves, each with all, and all with each, that they would
constitute government, and would each submit to the determination
and authority of the whole, practically of the fluctuating and
irresponsible majority. Civil society, the state, the
government, originates in this compact, and the government, as
Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
governed."

This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that
the individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to
civil society, was generally adopted by the American people in
the last century, and is still the more prevalent theory with