Two treatises of government C.2

Property I have nowhere found more clearly explaincd, than in a
book entitled, Two Treatises of Government.' This remark was
made by John Locke in 17o3, not much more than a year before he
dicd. It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of
his own works as a guide to a young gentleman anxious to acquire
an insight into the constitution of the government, and real
interest of his country'. It must be even rarer for a man who was
prepared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle's
Politics and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, to write as if the work
were written by somebody else, somebody whom he did not know.
Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative.* What could
possibly be the point of concealing this thing, from a man who
probably knew it already?
Odd as it is, this statement of Locke anticipates the judgment of
posterity. It was not long before it was universally recognized
that Locke on Government did belong in the same class as Aristotle's
Politics, and we still think of it as a book about property, in recent
years especially. It has been printed perhaps a hundred times since
the 1st edition appeared with the date 1690 on the title-page. It
has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish,
Swedish, Norwegian and Hindi: probably into other languages
too.t It is an established classic of political and social theory,
perhaps not in the first fight of them all, but familiar to eight
generations of students of politics all over the world, and the
subject of a great body of critical literature.
The prime reason for the importance attached to this book of
Locke's is its enormous historical influence. We shall not be con-
cerned here with the part which it played in the growth to maturity
of English liberalism, or in the development of those movements
which had their issue in the American Revolution, the French
Revolution and their parallels in southern America, in Ireland