thority ends. If A, B, C and D were so impressed with their responsibilities that there was no risk of infringement of one another's liberties, there would be no need for effective authority.

Effective authority, or government, is therefore an evil, but it is a necessary evil, and it is productive of good.

Effective authority and Sovereignty must not be confused. Effective authority is a delegation of power for the sake of preserving order in society and protecting from encroachment the rights of every man.

But this is not what is meant by Sovereignty.

Sovereignty is superiority to law or the right to do wrong with impunity.

It must repose on a religious idea or on force; that is, it must be moral, or it must be effective. It cannot be moral, for if moral it must repose on divine authority, and God's action on man being moral, not compulsory, it cannot derive from God.

It cannot be effective in its proper sense, for effective authority is delegated only for the sake of preserving right; therefore Sovereignty, or the right to do wrong with impunity, can only be an usurpation.

An attempt has been made to fuse moral and effective authorities, but such an attempt is immoral, and the accomplishment of the fusion is impossible.

If force be employed by the representatives of moral authority, that authority resolves itself into effective authority, and its power over consciences disappears. Obedience is of constraint, not of duty.

Sovereignty cannot derive from a contract. For none can give what they have not got. No individual or collection of individuals has the sovereignty, ie., the right to do wrong with impunity, in itself, and therefore cannot com

municate it. A political contract, real or obligatory, would only bind those who had subscribed to it; for the solidarity of generations cannot be a rational principle, though it may be a dogma.

Sovereignty must derive its prerogatives from God, and become thereby a power acting with divine authority which it personifies, or from which it depends, or it must abdicate every pretence to command on any other title than that of brute force. But it cannot derive from God, as has been shewn; therefore human sovereignty is nothing but pure despotism and usurpation.

The idea of sovereignty must not be confounded with the power of doing justice, i.e., with effective authority. Sovereignty is a power, if it be defined to be the faculty of enforcing submission to laws. But then the faculty of enforcing submission to bad laws must be included. If the idea of right renders such a power morally impossible, sovereignty disappears. To know if a power be sovereign, one must know whether it is able to violate right with impunity. That is not sovereignty which can only act aright.

The principle of certainty to each man being his own judgment, as has been already pointed out, it belongs to each man to declare what is duty, as his own law, and what is right, as the law of society; precisely as each man has to declare for himself that the exterior world exists, and that the whole is greater than its part.

The consequence of this principle is of the highest importance. To declare right is to exercise legislative power; if then the verity of right be known by the individual judgment, it follows that, in society, the legislative power belongs to each man individually, and not to any one man privately.

The ideas of sovereignty and right exclude one another.

Sovereignty may make concessions, but it cannot acknowledge rights, or it ceases to be sovereignty. Right being a purely personal faculty, is nothing, if there be a power which can prevent its exercise.

But if by sovereignty be understood merely the faculty of declaring right, it means nothing but effective authority. Sovereignty subordinated to right is no more sovereignty.

The idea of right has for corollary the idea of individual independence. The criterium of duty being the conscience, that must also be the criterium of right, for the two ideas are aspects of the same truth.

If, then, there be any other sovereignty than that of right it can only be the authority of the individual over himself, for it is only over himself that man can exercise authority, and for that he is responsible to God.

From this it follows that the whole Mediaeval govermental system was irrational.

When force is called in to assist moral authority, a theocracy is the result.

Plato laid down that sovereignty, to be rational and legitimate, must repose on the superiority of the sovereign to those ruled; and that this superiority must be due either to a communication of Divine power, or to a superior force a doctrine which Caligula pushed to an absurdity when he insisted on being a god. "Because," said he, " as a shepherd is different in kind from the sheep, so must a king differ from his subjects, or his government is inconsequent." According to the Medieval system the state was a pure theocracy. The body of Canon law contains a complete constitution, resting on the principle of authority derived from God. Separating the priest from the magistrate, it subordinated the latter to the former. In order that the

Crown might derive its sovereignty logically from God, it received its power through the Church by consecration.

According to the Mediaval doctrine, the authority of the State to curtail the liberties of the people, and to interfere with their prescriptive rights, was drawn from a Divine. commission conferred sacramentally through the Church, the incorporation of Divine power. The monarch was thus invested with a fictitious infallibility, or the privilege of irresponsibility to those governed.

This system is completely false, it rests on a confusion of moral with effective authority. God cannot communicate sovereignty without contradicting His moral government. If man is a moral being, he is responsible to God; if responsible to God, he must have liberty-that is the faculty of exercising his right. If God has conferred sovereignty, then He has commissioned some men to curtail the liberty of men in general, to impede them in the exercise of their duty;-He has impressed a duty on man and interfered with its accomplishment, which is impossible.

From this it follows that effective authority is legitimate and quasi-moral when it guarantees the rights of man, and that it is illegitimate and immoral when it becomes sovereign, that is when it assumes the power to violate those rights.

This is a conclusion at which modern political economists have, I believe, pretty generally arrived. But this conclusion entirely depends on the recognition of God as the basis of right, and of authority, which is its prolongation.

Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism. Effective authority disappears in violence, which is not the exercise, but the abuse, of effective authority. Right is without guarantee, for right is not acknowledged.

When the National Assembly drew up its famous Declaration of the Rights of Man, in 1789, " Write the name of God at the head of the declaration," said the Abbé Grégoire, "or you leave them without foundation, and you make right the equivalent of force, you declare not the rights of man, but the right of the strongest, you inaugurate the reign of violence." The Assembly refused. Grégoire was correct in his judgment, and the Reign of Terror proved that rights unbased in God produce an authority which is brute force.

Acknowledge God, and what is the result?

His action on man is purely moral; therefore a theocracy, or a despotism, carried on under His sanction, is impossible morally.

Effective authority is based on necessity for the protection of man's rights, which are themselves dogmatic.

Therefore effective authority is limited in its action to the declaration of the relations between man and man, and to their preservation.

In its own sphere effective authority is legitimate and justifiable. It must be recognized by the conscience as having Divine sanction, because social life has divine sanction; and that sanction extends to it in the same degree as force has been delegated to it, ie. to the same degree as it is useful.

The liberty in which we have been created," says Cardinal Bellarmine, "is not in opposition with political submission, but it is in opposition with despotic subjugation, that is, with true and proper servitude. The citizen therefore is governed for his own advantage, not for the advantage of him who governs him."1

1 Bellarmine: De Laicis, lib. ii. c. 7.