Filmer was answered by three writers of great distinction--Locke, Algernon Sidney, and the Rev. George Johnson, a memorable pamphleteer who scarcely vindicates a place for himself in literature. The merit of their polemic, and the obligation under which it has placed posterity, must of necessity be ill appreciated by an age which finds it difficult to believe that Filmer could ever be thought to require an answer. The propositions that the first man was invested by Heaven with monarchical privileges, and that these privileges had in some manner devolved on King Charles I., seem to us so palpably absurd that Locke himself appears chargeable with folly for having spent his time in refuting them. The steady intellectual upheaval which has been going on ever since the revival of letters has lifted us into a region where the conceptions of divine right and non-resistance cannot live; and we are inclined to attribute to the improvement of our understandings what really proceeds from the alteration of our environment. Ideas as baseless as Filmer's are now daily advanced, and daily combated by opponents whose services will one day be requited by the neglect that has overtaken Locke. Had Locke been a wit, he might indeed have immortalized himself and his antagonist together; but although he can and does make the latter ridiculous, he cannot make him amusing. There is more vitality in the second of his two _Tracts on Government_, for this in part deals with speculative questions regarding the origin of civil society as yet unsettled, and therefore not as yet commonplace. Locke deduces the mutual relations and obligations of rulers and ruled from a contract which he supposes to have been entered into in the infancy of society. The theory was highly salutary for the age, abolishing all superstitious notions of divine right, and providing sufficient justification for popular resistance to evil rulers. It must be owned, however, that it lacked the only safe basis of theory, the historical; the constitutions of uncivilized man were little known in Locke's day, and the better known they have become the less affinity they have seemed to present to the parliament which his imagination transported back from Westminster to Shinar. His essay nevertheless represents a necessary phase in the development of opinion, and exerted the most beneficial influence in generating the enlightened political sentiment of the eighteenth century. It is amusing to remark that, in spite of the Israelites, Locke stoutly refuses his imaginary society the right to contract itself out of its freedom by establishing an absolute monarchy, the only form of government which, according to his opponents, could be legitimate in any sense.