read so far, will no doubt remark that the legal profession is not a charitable institution, and that men practice law to get money and support themselves, and not from philanthropic motives. To this I answer that no profession can be great unless the money-making aims of the individual are leavened by a sense of the importance of his vocation, and of the dignity of the body that pursues it. A man who is unconscious of the strength of the esprit de corps of a great profession, of its power to inspire its members with a high and noble ambition, and to make itself an end and not a mere means of making money, a man who has never felt this has failed to appreciate one of the most valuable of human qualities. He has only to turn his eyes to the doctors to see its force, and no careful search is required to find it among lawyers. This is the quality which we need to foster, because its influence upon the moral and intellectual condition of the legal profession is great, and because it is upon that profession that we must chiefly rely for the preservation of constitutional principles in this country.

IV.

THE THEORY OF THE SOCIAL COMPACT.

A SKETCH OF ITS HISTORY.

L'homme est né libre, et par-tout il est dans les fers. Tel se croit le maitre des autres, qui ne laisse pas d'être plus esclave qu'eux. Comment ce changement s'est-il fait? je l'ignore. Qu'est-ce qui peut le rendre légitime? je crois pouvoir résoudre cette question. - ROUSSEAU, Contrat Social, livre i. chap. i.

THE political capacity of the English people is due in large measure to their great ingenuity in inventing political theories, and their obstinate skepticism in refusing to believe in them. Perhaps no better illustration of these qualities can be found than in the history of that extraordinary theory which, under the name of the "social compact," influenced deeply the political thought of Europe and America for two centuries. And it is not the least singular fact about a doctrine which proved so destructive to the existing order of things in Europe that it should have originated with a clergyman of the Church of England, and should have been invented by him for the purpose of defending the Established Church against the attacks of

its enemies. But in fact the position of the Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth, and for a good while afterwards, was extremely difficult; for it was assailed on one side by the Catholics, who claimed the authority of a divinely inspired church, and on the other by the Puritans, who referred their system of organization to the express teaching of the Bible. Under these circumstances, the "judicious Hooker," as he was afterwards called, instead of meeting his opponents on their own ground by claiming a divine origin for the English ecclesiastical system, parried their attacks by denying that any religious body is under direct divine guidance in all matters, and asserting that laws for the government of the church may be made by men, and that, if according to reason and not repugnant to Scripture, they are authorized by God.

Hooker begins his "Ecclesiastical Polity "1 with a discussion of laws in general. He treats of the condition of men before the existence of civil society, showing how force might then be resisted by force, and no one had a right to constitute himself a judge in his own case. To escape from this state of things "there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves,

1 Published in 1594.

by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereto." A father, he says, has by nature a supreme power within his own family, but rulers "not having the natural superiority of fathers, their power must needs be either usurped, and then unlawful; or, if lawful, then either granted or consented unto by them over whom they exercise the same, or else given extraordinarily from God, unto whom all the world is subject." Disregarding the last alternative, Hooker bases government upon the consent of the governed. Not that these need give a special assent to each separate law, for it is enough if they agree, once for all, that their rulers shall have authority to make laws for them. "And to be commanded we do consent," he says, "when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent."

Such was the origin of the theory of the social compact; for although the idea that the authority of the ruler is conferred upon him by the people was not new, I am not aware that any one before Hooker deduced the universal lawfulness of laws from the voluntary association of individuals to form a civil society.1

It would not be safe, however, to make too positive a statement in regard to Hooker's claim as first inventor, and it is by no means impossible that the theory may have been originated by several persons independently during the last part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. The course of thought had for many years been such as to prepare men's minds to produce and accept a theory of this kind; and, indeed, the doctrine that the authority of the king is derived from the consent of his people had recently become very prominent, and had developed until it assumed a form only a little less complete than that of the theory enun

1 Fortescue, writing about the end of the Wars of the Roses, divides monarchs into two classes: those whose power is founded on conquest, and whose authority is absolute; and those whose power is derived from a compact made by the community in forming a body politic, and whose authority is limited. (De Laudibus Legum Angliæ, ch. 11-13; The Governance of England, ch. 1, 2). He places the king of France in the former class, and the king of England in the latter. This partial theory of a social compact may have been drawn by him from earlier sources.