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234 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTideology of "possessive individualism." And at the heart of that ideologywas a political theory of appropriation that was given its fullest elaborationin the second of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. In additionto the property of his own person, Locke argued, all men have aright to their own labor and to the fruits of that labor. When a person'sprivate labor is put to the task of gathering provisions from the commonrealm, the provisions thus gathered become the private property of the onewho labored to gather them, so long as there are more goods left in thecommon realm for others to gather with their labor. But beyond the rightto the goods of the land, Locke argued, was the right to "the Earth it self."It is, he says, "plain" that the same logic holds with the land itself as withthe products of the land: "As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves,Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by hisLabour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common." 110Only through the ability to exercise such individual acquisitiveness,thought Locke, does a man become fully and truly human. However, notesMacpherson, concealed within this celebration of grasping and exclusiveindividualism was the equally essential notion that "full individuality forsome was produced by consuming the individuality of others." Thus, "thegreatness of seventeenth-century liberalism was its assertion of the freerational individual as the criterion of the good society; its tragedy was thatthis very assertion was necessarily a denial of individualism to half thenation." 111 Indeed, more than a denial of individualism, Locke's proposalsfor how to treat the landless poor of his own country-whom he considereda morally depraved lot-were draconian: they were to be placedinto workhouses and forced to perform hard labor, as were all their childrenabove the age of three. As Edmund S. Morgan observes, this proposal"stopped a little short of enslavement, though it may require a certainrefinement of mind to discern the difference." 112Locke's work, of course, post-dates the era of early British colonizationin North America, but the kernels of at least these aspects of his thoughtwere present and articulated prior to the founding of the English coloniesin the work of Luther, Calvin, More, Melanchthon, and other British andContinental thinkers. 113 An obvious conclusion derivable from such anideology was that those without a Western sense of private property were,by definition, not putting their land to "good or profitable use," as Morephrased it, and that therefore they deserved to be dispossessed of it. Thus,in More's Utopia, first published in Latin in 1516 and in English in 1551,he envisions the founding of a colony "wherever the natives have muchunoccupied and uncultivated land"; should the natives object to this takingof their property or should they "refuse to live according to their [thesettlers'] laws," the settlers are justified in driving the natives "from theterritory which they carve out for themselves. If they resist, they wage waragainst them." 114 In practice this became known as the principle of vac-