Appendix A: Excerpts from John Locke's The Second Treatise on Government Sec. 4, 6-8, 87-89, 95, 123, 131 (1690)

• Author: Arthur Rizer
• Profession: Director of Justice Policy and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute
• Pages: 193-198

193

APPENDIX A

Excerpts from John Locke’s

The Second Treatise on

Government Sec. 4, 6-8,

87-89, 95, 123, 131 (1690)

John Locke’s writings inspired or rst enunciated many of the themes that

Jeerson used across his works, including the notion of the “equality of men”

by nature. Below are portions of one of two treaties Locke wrote on civil

government and in which we see the same natural rights language we see

throughout Jeerson’s own most esteemed writings.

SECTIONS 4–6, AND 8

Sect. 4. TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original,

we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of

perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and

persons, as they think t, within the bounds of the law of nature, without

asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of

wherin all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than

another; there being nothing more evident, than that the creatures of the

same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of

nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst

another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of

them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another,