owner to exact a heriot on the death of his tenant, were looked upon as private property. Under these circumstances it is not strange that an innovation in the law was thought to require the consent of those whose property was to be affected by it, whether it were the grant of a "free aid," or a change in the established custom of the realm, and this idea found its most complete expression in the famous saying of Edward I.: "That which toucheth all shall be allowed of all." The conceptions of the Middle Ages upon this subject, therefore, were not of a character to excite political speculation, because the rightfulness of all property was assumed without question, and of course there could be no doubt of the right of every man to dispose of his own. But when the Renaissance gave a new impulse to thought, and men began to distinguish more accurately between public authority and private right, it was unavoidable that they should investigate the rightfulness of that authority, and inquire into the origin of property. The question, then, presented itself: Whence has a government a right to compel a man to act against his will, and what gives the binding force to law? There was one obvious way to answer the question, and that was to ascribe a divine origin to government; but this view of the matter, for

reasons which I have already explained, became monopolized by one school of political thinkers, and consequently discredited among those who did not agree with their tenets. One other solution of the difficulty suggested itself, and that was the consent of the person interested; for clearly a man cannot be wronged by an act to which he has freely consented, and what easier than to suppose a universal compact, made at some remote period, by which every one consented to the institution of a government, and agreed to be bound by the laws enacted by it? Such a compact appeared to many men the only way of accounting for the rightfulness of government, and its existence was assumed without hesitation; for, anarchists being few in those times, every one was constrained to allow the lawfulness of some government or other, and when belief is indispensable it is easy to believe.

In this way the theory of the social compact met with a very general acceptance, and yet it contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, because, if the theory were logically carried out, each man, when he came of age, ought to have a right, as Locke maintained, to sever his connection with the body politic and declare his freedom from its laws; but such a doctrine, greatly impairing, as it must, the

effect of the theory, and giving a constant encouragement to lawlessness, could not be admitted for a moment. The theory, moreover, rested on the assumption that a contract is intrinsically binding in a state of nature when other rights do not exist; but such an assumption, although plausible, is clearly seen to be false by any one who will take pains to think about it. Spinoza and Leibnitz pointed this out in the earlier days of the discussion, but the tide was too strong to be stemmed at that time. As a matter of history, indeed, it is well known to students of the early forms of law that the right to compel the performance of a contract is not developed until long after the right to property is well established. But undoubtedly the chief causes of the decline of the theory were the change in the general tone of thought from speculative to positive, and the complete absurdity of such a compact from an historical point of view, an absurdity which became more evident as a knowledge of semibarbarous races became more extensive. It may well be doubted whether any one ever believed that an actual compact of this kind was made by people in a state of nature. Imagine a crowd of half-naked savages grouped around an ancient oak, while an old chief under its boughs explains to them that they have

reached the point when it is advisable to form a civil body politic, and that it is proposed to agree, among other things, that when they become sufficiently civilized to understand the meaning of king, lords, and commons, and to appreciate the benefits of taxation, then the king shall not have power to levy any tax without the consent of the faithful commons. Im. agine the savages clashing their spears and shields in token of universal approval, and breaking up with a further understanding that the sacredness of the social compact shall instantly be made an article of the state religion.

V.

THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGNTY.

No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.

It is the only supreme power in our system of government. — Mr. JUSTICE MILLER, in United States v. Lee, 106 U. S. 196.

AMONG the theories of jurists there is, perhaps, none which has been a battle-ground for so long a time as that which relates to the limits of sovereign power. For two centuries and a half the writers who maintained that sovereignty is in its nature unlimited, and those who contended that man is endowed with certain natural rights which the state cannot legally invade, waged against each other a continual war; the former, in England, being found among the partisans of monarchy, the latter in the ranks of those who favored the

popular cause. But now, just at the moment when democracy is carrying everything before it, and the advocates of the natural rights of man appear to have triumphed, there has come