In order to understand the position assumed by Swift in the following pages, it is necessary to bear in mind the current theories as to the constitution of civil government. Sir Robert Filmer's posthumous work, entitled Patriarcha, had been first published in 1680, and maintained the divine right of kings by the inheritance which, he asserted, they derived from the authority vested in Adam. This fantastic theory had obtained considerable support, towards the close of the Stuart rule, by the views current amongst the Royalist party, and supported by the University of Oxford. The Revolution had overturned entirely the theory, and had proceeded upon the opposite notion, that society rested upon a supposed Original Contract, by which the constituent members had voluntarily surrendered something of their liberty, by a partition of authority amongst the various members of which the society was composed. This view of civil society had its counterpart in the theory of international relations, which held that peace was maintained by a balance of power amongst the various States of Europe. The Original Contract was formally maintained in the vote of the Convention, by which the Revolution was brought about: and its chief philosophical defender was Locke. It derived support from the theories advanced, in the previous generation, by Harrington in his Oceana, a book constantly present to Swift's mind in this treatise; and it set aside the theory of Hobbes, far more acute and far more philosophical than that of Filmer, which maintained that a mixed constitution was in reality impossible; that any symptoms of it were not, in their nature, 'absolute,' but only 'subordinate'; that the sovereign power must, in its essence, rest in one part of the constitution, and that any apparent mixture was only 'a mixture that imposeth' on our imaginations, and had no existence in Nature. Swift, writing as an adherent of the revolutionary Whig party, had adopted, for practical purposes, this theory of a 'balance of power' in civil society. His position obliged him to oppose Hobbes's views: and although his clearness of vision led him to distrust, as we shall notice, the theories of Harrington, yet for practical purposes he argues that this 'balance' must be maintained. But the fear which he shews of popular assemblies, and his hatred of popular encroachments, come strangely from an adherent of the Whig party, and prove, as the subsequent development of his political views proves still more conclusively, that in his mind the 'balance' was to be maintained quite as much as a defence against the danger of popular movements, as against those of monarchical prerogative.