ments, moreover, were much less restrictive than they subsequently became. ^* Ashcraft points out that the main threat to property rights came not from a mass movement of disfranchised, impoverished proletarians but from the Stuart monarchy, with its attempt to impose taxes without parliamentary authority and to consolidate its claims to absolute power. Macpherson and other historians of "possessive individualism" tend to read the record of nineteenth-century class struggles back into the seventeenth century. They see Locke's defense of property rights as part of a larger strategy of "social control," designed to keep the laboring classes in their place. Locke valued religion, according to this interpretation, only because heavenly rewards and punishments would discourage the poor from demanding justice in this life. As Macpherson's critics point out, however, Locke's proposal that manual laborers be allowed to spend several hours a day in study (while the educated classes spent several hours in manual labor) does not sound like the opinion of a man who relied on ignorance and superstition to keep the lower orders quiet.

It is true that Locke recommended harsh treatment for the idle poor. But he also thought that the laws should make it a crime for any parish to deny relief to those in need of it. He defined the "common rule of charity" so broadly that it would have prevented anyone from enriching himself at another's expense or from exploiting another's "necessity" in order to "force him to become his vassal." James Tully goes so far as to construe these words as a prohibition of wage labor. Tully has been accused of exaggerating Locke's reluctance to endorse the alienability either of property rights or of labor power. But if Locke cannot be seen as a critic

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According to a recent study by Derek Hirst, 40 percent of adult males were eligible to vote in the middle of the seventeenth century. Ashcraft, citing this and another study, by Keith Thomas, notes that "not only did wage earners, copyholders, and male inhabitants vote in elections, there are a number of instances in which almsmen were assumed by contemporaries to be included within the common right of suffrage." The suffrage began to shrink only in the eighteenth century. If the Whigs in Locke's day failed to demand an extension of the suffrage, that was because it was "already exercised," according to Ashcraft, "by hundreds of thousands of artisans, tradesmen, shopkeepers, merchants, and small farmers.... The late seventeenth century was a highwater mark of democratic participation, not achieved again in England until the mid-nineteenth century."

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