In the third place, states have rights which cannot be deduced from rights surrendered by individuals. It does not follow because A. and B. make a contract that their special rights and obligations continue precisely the same as they would be, if the two remained entirely disconnected; or that they may not have new ones. Take the case of a couple uniting in marriage. They live together and have children. In this condition new relations, new rights and obligations, most natural, begin to exist in consequence of their connection. Society is not the sum of its members but is something more, and is so for all time. Hence it is not strange that it can do what they, considered as individually apart from society, could not do, or could not rightfully do. Thus society in the state form has a right to hold wild land, but it cannot be made to appear that an individual in a state of nature could own more than he cultivated.* Society in the state-form has a right over the lives of individuals, so far as, for instance, to punish wilful murder capitally. But the murdered man certainly did not give up his right to punish his murderer. He would have killed him if he could. Nor does it appear that men in general possess, or can give up, a right over their own lives. The right of punishment does not rest on such a flimsy foundation. The trouble that this case gives to Rousseau is instructive. Again the great right of administering justice is not drawn from the judicial prerogative of each wild son of nature, for it is clear that no man can be a judge in his own case. Two must agree if even an arbitrator is appointed. Society, in short, has more wisdom and might than the sum of its members, and much more than contending claimants in a given case. Its wisdom and might qualify it for judgment, and it brings these qualities to bear on all. The right comes not from renounced power but from the state's being, in the natural order of things, God's method of helping men towards a perfect life.

* Here it may be noticed that the contract theory requires that men come into the social compact with their lands and all other property. The fair conclusion for the followers of Rousseau is against community of goods as an original institution.

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Another way of accounting for the existence of the state Theory of the and of civil order is to refer it to the ordinance state's divine origin. of God. The state and the magistrate are of divine appointment. This in practice has more or less been used to defend the right of kings, and to justify hereditary right, especially if it has received some confirmation from the ministers of religion. In this there is truth mixed with falsehood; but the truth fails to account for that for which it has been used as a support. If every king were a David, believed to be set up by an express promise as the head of a hereditary line, that would be to the purpose; although the monarchy among the Jews at its introduction was rather endured than welcomed. But even by such a monarchy as that of the Jews in southern Palestine we could still deny that anything general and fundamental was taught us. David did not create the state, nor did his predecessor, but its foundations were laid long before. The will of God is revealed in history and the nature of man, which provide for the state, but do not provide for any particular form of state. state is thus of God, as all magistrates are. The powers that be are ordained of God so far forth as some powers must exist; and all are equally ordained from the highest to the lowest. A state is of God, but not a bad, unjust, unwise state, as a family is, but not a bad corrupt family. God is in the world working his counsels, but not founding a particular state in such a sense that the people may not have contributed to or altered or destroyed their constitution, nor bringing an illmated pair into the marriage union without unwise choice of their own. The fact that the state is of God, as a general institution is neither a bar to the inquiry how a state has a right to exist, nor to the interference of the people, when the magistrates are corrupt and traitors, any more than the fact that marriage is of God is a bar to the separation of a married pair, when one of the two is faithless to their covenant.

The

Nor, if there has been in the world a theocratic state strictly so called, that is, one in which God was the lawgiver and founder, and in a certain sense the king, would that fact prove that all states must have the same origin ascribed to them. For first, the theocracy might be instituted for a special purpose never to recur again, and then it might be not so much a polity, as a collection of precepts ceremonial and religious, together with an immediate divine presence suited to various kinds of polities.

isted. only one step

out of many.

And, in the same way, we may say that if anything like a Contract, if it ex- social contract has appeared in history, when men came together to form new instruments of government, the contract was only one form out of many, which have preceded some established constitution of things in the political sphere. Society never began by a contract between men or even families entirely independent, and separate. But in the later stages of society, the political action of the people may have taken a shape resembling contract, which, however, presupposed some existing organization and some political habits. Such transactions would be contracts of a people with a ruler, acceptance of the fact of conquest, union of confederates, colonies left to themselves by the mother country to build their own frame of government. In all such cases men were already under law. The preliminaries relating to what was renounced among the rights of a state of nature and what was retained were not so much as thought of.

It is further to be observed that contract is not necessary to make a government binding on the conscience, nor can the want of it justify revolution, as a matter of course. Dismissing the extended consideration of these topics until we speak professedly on the subject of revolutions, we add here two remarks. One is that the assent of the reason and conscience is necessary before any government can be said to have the highest right to exist, and the other that the right of opposing an existing polity and seeking to overthrow it is not justified simply by showing that it contains many bad features,

but other practical considerations also must be taken into

account.

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The state's real origin.

The historical.

How then does the state arise? If the question meant how in fact can organized society be accounted for, the answer is that the family supplies the foundation, that the wants of men, their needs of one another, their social nature, even their fears, keep them together, and that any society of men living together will organize itself by accepting principles of justice, rules of convenient intercourse, and methods of self-protection. These will appear in the form of custom and usage. The settlement of disputes between man and man, and protection of the community against enemies, will give rise to arbitrators or judges and to military leaders, both which offices might be committed in early society to one and the same person. If, however, the question refers to the rational grounds on which we can justify the existence of an organThe rational. ized society, the answer is found in the nature and destination of men, in their being so made as to seek society, for which they are prepared by the family state, and in the impossibility that society should exist, be permanent, and prosper, without law and organization. The individual could make nothing of himself or of his rights except in society; society unorganized could make no progress, could have no security, no recognized rights, no order, no settled industry, no motive for forethought, no hope for the future. The need of such an institution as the state, the physical provision for its existence, the fact that it has appeared everywhere in the world, unless in a few most degraded tribes, show that it is in a manner necessary, and if necessary, natural, and if natural, divine. It is as truly natural as rights are, and as society is, and is the bond of both. It is the means for all the highest ends of man and of society.

CHAPTER III.

LAND, SOVEREIGNTY, PEOPLE.

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THAT a state may accomplish these ends it must have adePowers or rights of quate powers or rights of action.

the state.

Relations to other states.

Its powers

may be called rights like those of the individual, and these rights imply corresponding obligations of others whether these others are within the state or are outside of it. If the state-making instinct is common to mankind, there will be a network of states over the world, which will have some of the same relations, many of the same obligations,-each to all the others,-that exist between individual men. But as individual men may have no intercourse, so it may be with states. And there is no obligation of states to hold intercourse, which is of such strictness that to live within themselves in entire isolation would be a ground for hostile proceedings. Yet mutual wants will, in the end, cause a society of nations, and usage or express contract will define its conditions. A universal society and the spread of all truth and improvement thus become possible. For this, as the parties are equal and under no common jurisdiction, rules embodying the sense of what is due between two or more nations, or conceding mutual privileges, will prepare the way, and thus we reach the possibility of a universal law of nations. But this law, which would define the rights of all nations, and what they owe to one another, although it is properly a part of the theory of the state, will be passed by in the present work, both because we confine ourselves to the nature and constitution of the single state, and because international law is to a great extent posi