swept away in the blood and fire of the French Revolution. The burden

upon

faith had become too great to be borne. In the face of such preposterous contradictions and such brazen insincerity as the era of absolutism presented, it was impossible to respect the State, and equally impossible to accept a form of religious belief that shielded its vices and enormities. Every throne in Europe was shaken by the reaction. The State, as irresponsible power, could no longer be tolerated. If it could not be radically reformed-so profound was the revolt against it-it must disappear altogether; but with its disappearance was threatened for a time the destruction of the whole edifice of civilization,

It was necessary, therefore, to lay new foundations. “Sovereignty,” Rousseau had said, “is not an attribute of kings, but of the people.” Upon this new basis, then, the State was to be reconstructed.

sover

Unhappily, the conception of eignty remained substantially unmodified. For the “supreme power” of kings was to be substituted the “supreme power” of the people.

As a matter of fact, the people had become more powerful than their rulers. It was, therefore, their turn to rule; their turn to become the source of law; their turn to impose their absolute will; their turn to define treason, and to inflict death as a punishment.

THE TRANSFER OF POWER TO THE PEOPLE

The fact of this reversal of positions is not, however, so significant for the welfare of the community as it may at first appear. The substance of the State was not essentially altered by a mere change of masters. Supreme power, which had previously been exclusively in the hands of monarchs, aided by their counselors, was, indeed, transferred to the hands of the people, or of those who were supposed to represent them; but the change was far less a transformation of the State than a mere alteration in the control of its power to exact obedience.

Call the roll of the persons who, after the Revolution in France, became the chief depositories of power, and ask the question, “In what sense was its exercise ameliorated ?” and you are immediately impressed by the fact that authority, in any defensible sense, had made no substantial progress in defining its essential nature, as distinguished from mere power to compel obedience. The populace of Paris; Brissot, with his policy of a universal “war on kings”; Danton, and the massacres of the nobility by the Commune; Robespierre, and the “culte de la Raison"; the impersonal reign of War and Famine in the midst of universal terror; the Directory; the Consulate; Napoleon Bonaparte—liberator, emperor, and conqueror of Europe—were these less tyrannical than the King they had superseded?

In all this dreadful drama, there is not one act or scene that has not had its defenders; not one that did not seem to some enthusiast to have a justification for its enormity in still greater enormities which it was intended to suppress. And behind all this continued tragedy there was always one and the same philosophy: the theory that the State is power, “supreme power,” exercised in the name of some isolated virtue—the redress of wrong, the establishment of rightperpetual homage to the idea of justice; but justice ill conceived and violently administered!

Where, then, is the true theory of the State to be found? Evidently, it is not to be sought in the idea of power alone, no matter by whom it is possessed and exercised. Monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies, all and equally, have failed, and will always continue to fail, so long as they cling to the belief that power to command and to enforce obedience is the true essence of public authority. Nor can it be found in the idea of abstract justice as a merely personal conception. To give it stability and to evoke for it universal respect, a larger consensus and a more impersonal origin are demanded. To discover and to formulate the true nature of the State, appeal must be made to a more complete analysis of the constitution of man and of society than that which is embodied in the empirical art of imposing a dominant will. The true principle of authority is not to be found in any attribute of the ruler, whoever the ruler may be, but in the nature of the being who is to be ruled. The ultimate foundation of the law, as an expression of the power of the State, is to be sought in the virtue of the citizen.