50. Thus the only logical development of that separation of right from social duty which is implied in the doctrine of 'social contract' is that of Spinoza. Happily the doctrine has not been logically developed by those whose way of thinking has been affected by it. The reduction of political right--the right of the state over its subjects--to superior power, has not been popularly accepted, though the general conception of _national_ right seems pretty much to identify it with power. Among the enlightened, indeed, there has of late appeared a tendency to adopt a theory very like that of Spinoza, without the higher elements which we noticed in Spinoza; to consider all right as a power attained in that 'struggle for existence' to which human 'progress' is reduced. But for one person, who, as a matter of speculation, considers the right of society over him to be a disguised might, there are thousands who, as a matter of practice, regard their own right as independent of that correlation to duty without which it is merely a might. The popular effect of the notion that the individual brings with him into society certain rights which he does not derive from society,--which are other than claims to fulfil freely (i.e. for their own sake) certain functions towards society,--is seen in the inveterate irreverence of the individual towards the state, in the assumption that he has rights against society irrespectively of his fulfilment of any duties to society, that all 'powers that be' are restraints upon his natural freedom which he may rightly defy as far as he safely can. D. _LOCKE._ 51. It was chiefly Rousseau who gave that cast to the doctrine of the origin of political obligation in contract, in which it best lends itself to the assertion of rights apart from duties on the part of individuals, in opposition to the counter-fallacy which claims rights for the state irrespectively of its fulfilment of its function as securing the rights of individuals. It is probably true that the _Contrat Social_ had great effect on the founders of American independence, an effect which appears in the terms of the Declaration of Independence and in preambles to the constitutions of some of the original American states. But the essential ideas of Rousseau are to be found in Locke's _Treatise of Civil Government_, which was probably well known in America for half a century before Rousseau was heard of. [1] Locke again constantly appeals to Hooker's first book on _Ecclesiastical Polity_,[2] and Grotius[3] argues in exactly the same strain.