My aim in this book is not just to establish that Locke held a position on human equality, and that that position was held on theological grounds; I also want to show that this commitment to basic equality is an important working premise of his whole political theory, and that its influence is pervasive in his arguments about property, family, slavery, government, politics, and toleration. It is not just a piece of religiously inspired egalitarian rhetoric wheeled out up front as a sort of edifying decoration; if it were, its religious cast would be much less troubling. Basic equality operates for Locke as a premise and as a constraint. It is a premise for everything he says about authority, and it is also a premise for everything he says about our relations to each other, our concern for each other, and the extent to which our awareness of others' interests should affect our sense of what is reasonable in the pursuit of our own. And equality operates also in Locke's political philosophy as an on-going theoretical constraint, patrolling our derivations from the premises of the theory, checking not only that they are grounded in equality but also that their implications are broadly consistent with the idea that corporeal rational creatures are basically one another's equals. Both of these functions are apparent in the theory of property, and that is the subject of the present chapter.