Sometime Professor of Ethics in the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome
"THE old order changeth, yielding place to new."{1} in the perennial struggle between freedom and force, between equal law and unequal privilege, we have come again to a turning point in history. Under the ancient practice of slave-hunting and of slavery by conquest, we arrived at a condition of four hundred thousand slaves in Athens, the most enlightened city in the world, with not more than twenty-one thousand free citizens.{2}
Aristotle drew the distinction between civil government and despotism. A State or civil society he declared to be a community of freemen, working together for the common happiness of life, under a government which is administered for the benefit of all: whereas a despotism is made up of slaves living under administrative control, not for their own common welfare, nor in any sense for their own benefit except by the merest accident, but for the profit of the ruler.{3} In his day the great bulk of mankind had no civil or political existence whatever, but were in a state of absolute slavery, exploited for the service and gain of their masters. Christianity, wherever Christianity prevailed, eventually conquered that, and gradually removed the blot of legal slavery from the face of the civilized earth. This was accomplished by practical and theoretical resistance on a principle, upon which in the last analysis all advance of democracy must be based, that every man is born to the image of his Maker, with essentially the same purpose of existence.
In a later age came the expansion of vast land-tenure into feudalism, and the western world went through the experience of servants of the soil, who passed with the land from owner to owner, had a title from their labor to a bare and squalid livelihood, and were bound to serve their masters with the of their labor, in time of peace; with their blood and life, in time of war. These men were practically agricultural slaves, and those were the days of serfdom, when government was by force of the strong arm. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages made an end of that, though a form of it renewed itself in Russia and lasted down to a very modern date.
A modified form of agricultural servitude has been kept up, here and there, through unjust oppression, by great landholders. The tenant-farmers or farm-servants of these landholders might as well be serfs, as practically they cannot get away from slavery to the soil, and live a man's full life, or any life, for that matter. Meanwhile came the absorption of the benefit of machinery by a limited number of moneyed men, the massing of capital and the development of extended credit, the centralization of production, and the exploitation of human labor therein; and behold, we have arrived at the condition of industrial servitude, before the remnant of agricultural oppression has been abolished.
Against the imminence of a servile State perpetuating this subjection the forces of freedom, both conservative and radical, were slowly marshaling, when, to the momentary relief of the oppressor, national ambitions and rivalry, territorial and commercial greed broke through the weak barrier of an artificial balance of power and let loose upon the world the late war of all the nations. In the swiftly changing phantasmagoria of national aims, motives, principles, and pretences, that have been set floating before the eyes of all, one outstanding fact has remained fixed on the screen. We must never again waste million human lives over the contentions for profit of a privileged few.
The solution of this problem has awakened a renewal of interest in constitutional readjustment of States, whose framework has been strained to the breaking point in the phenomenal trials of this war. We are again face to face with a discussion of the essential constitution of civil society, and with an examination of the character and place of sovereignty. Indiscreet friends{4} of the oppressed and foes of unjust privilege have flown in haste to Jean Jacques Rousseau, and invoke again the Contrat Social with its false establishment of political society by conventional compact, and its fantastic concept of sovereignty as an amalgam of all wills in one, in such fashion that government is only the organized doing of what ultimately we all want to do, whether right or wrong, good or bad. Meantime with an undying memory of the horrors of the French Revolution, conservative minds flee from the idea of civil society owing its civil existence to common consent: While the friends of unjust privilege thrash about for some weapon with which to exterminate the idea of popular sovereignty, and of governmental accountability on earth. Neither the lurid scenes of the "Terror" nor the discrowning of an ancient aristocracy makes false the doctrines that civil society emerges into juridical existence by consent and that sovereignty may be found in the people, no more than the fervid rhetoric and the brilliant style of Rousseau made them true. They must stand or fall by definition and proof.
I.
Rousseau's social contract gives judicial existence to the body politic as a distinct moral person by "the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights."{5} The doctrine of that contract is primarily false because no man can, even juridically, alienate himself, i.e., his personality, nor all his rights. For a man's person is the subjective term of imputability. If a man could alienate that, he would no longer be responsible for his individual actions, nor for his individual part in carrying out God's plan of creation. A man cannot thus throw on civil society all his personal responsibility to his Maker. No more can a man surrender all his rights. For some of them are an inalienable accompaniment of natural Divinely imposed duties which the individual cannot fulfil, if he be without the aforesaid rights. A surrender of these would be of a piece with a dishonest debtor's transfer of all his property to his wife. It is true that Rousseau further on in his work wishes to qualify that total and absolute surrender, so as to leave with the individual the rights for which the State has no use;{6} but the withdrawal will not stand, for he has already gone the whole way{7} and made the social contract the foundation of all right and duty, leaving no right or duty antecedent to it, and thus cutting the ground from under his own feet. For with all other prior duties of man he eliminates by neces that of keeping a contract; so that the present one loses all binding force.
Secondly, the contract as described by Rousseau is purely conventional,{8} i.e., arbitrary and artificial; it is not the result of any natural impulse nor under any precept of natural law; its content is not determined for it by the natural law. Yet civil society is as natural as the family; man's natural tendencies are equally strong towards it; it is equally necessary for God's full plan; it carries a like obligation upon mankind to establish it; its essential elements, juridical as well as others, are determined by the nature of the case, and hence are prescribed by the natural law, so that, if consent is to establish its existence, it cannot be the arbitrary and artificial consent of a conventional contract. Why, the thing would be revocable at will, and could give no stability at all to our political existence: whereas obviously civil society, if not as indissoluble as matrimony, must at least be fundamentally stable. Moreover, if the social bond were Rousseau's contract only, it could bind no one not a party to the contract, and would have to be renewed by each successive generation -- a consequence which does not escape Rousseau{9} himself. Yet, the essential continuity of society would thus perish utterly.
Furthermore, the contract as explaining the origin of sovereignty destroys the very idea of sovereignty itself. Rousseau states that sovereignty is an absolute power in the body politic, i.e., in the moral person of the State as constituted by the civic compact, over all its members, when directed by the general will; that an act of sovereignty is an authentic act of the general will, an agreement of the body with each of its members, in a word a general convention.{10} He had already laid down that there is no lawful authority among men except what is based on conventions.{11} Now, with this concept of sovereignty as a blend of all the wills of the community, its binding force or obligation would come by way of each individual's consent to the original compact. This compact virtually enduring, every man, by his original consent, either antecedently bound himself by each law of sovereignty, or else bound himself, then, to consent anew to each law, in due course. But the human will properly never binds itself. It may consent to obligation, as it does in making a contract; but the obligation comes from the will of one higher up, from authority, from prior law. So just as the consent to the original contract does not itself properly bind, neither does it found an obligation, except in the supposition of prior existing law, right and duty. Moreover, if, in order to save obligation, we presume (as Rousseau does not) the existence of the natural law and the authority of God binding us through the natural law to keep our just contracts, we still (in Rousseau's concept) eliminate all idea of authority (i.e., all superior right to bind the will even of the reluctant) resident in civil society itself. This is precisely what Rousseau wishes to do; but despite that, this higher power has been insisted upon in the past, and is insisted upon in the present by the common sense and practice of mankind.
Nor is this all. Reason shows us the truth of the lesson of St. Paul that "there is no power but from God."{12} Power over the free will of man is nugatory without obligation, and ultimately only the Maker of man, who gave him his freedom, can, of original right, limit its exercise. In point of fact He must limit the exercise of human freedom according to the exigencies of purpose for which man was made. All obligation is ultimately from God; all right to impose obligation (i.e., all power) is consequently from Him. No man can sanely deny the Creator absolute right of both property and jurisdiction over His creature. None other can rule that creature except with power derived from on high. Of course Rousseau might have said that the power which men have over their own wills comes from God, and that when these wills are merged, the merger is still from God. As a matter of fact he did not say it. Though doubtless he conceded man to be God's creature, he had no concept of God conceding, by law, to man his rights over his own will. However, even that modification in his concept would not save the entirety of philosophic truth in the question: for civil authority is something more than a complex of individual rights over individual wills, and, as we shall see later, must come from God to civil society immediately.{13} For the moment we must call attention to the fact that this combination of citizens' wills would have no power of life and death in the community, for no one puts into the merger what he has not got, the right namely of direct disposal of his own life, much less of that of his fellow. Rousseau realizes this difficulty and labors in vain both to make a man's prior consent to his own possible execution the only indirect disposal of his own life, and to turn a criminal into an enemy at war, in the hope of finding a right to kill him as an unjust aggressor inevitably to be killed to save one's own life as well the lives of our fellow-citizens.{14} Rousseau proves quite well that civil society should have the right of life and death; but he does not prove what he should prove and what he set out to prove, viz: That individuals had that right and transferred it to the community.
The same difficulty arises with regard to all punishment for crime, as distinguished from reparation for damage. No individual can prove his right to punish his neighbor; and though Locke, to save the situation, insisted that in the state of man prior to civil society the right of necessary punishment was in every man's hands, he never proved the assertion.{15} It is a right of God, which we cannot claim to share without showing clear and evident title, and there is none forthcoming to the individual, though there is for the State. To be accuser, witness, judge, and executioner, all in one, against one's fellow-citizen is more than we can expect the wisdom and justice of God to have conceded to every poor, selfish, passionate man, even before civil society arose. Now if the individual never had the right, no number of them can confer it upon the State.
Finally, distinguishing between sovereignty, which is power, and administration, which is but the execution of sovereignty's laws, Rousseau's sovereignty of permanently amalgamated wills leaves no civil power possible except in the moral person of the community. That reduces all just forms of government to one, that of absolute democracy; makes the authority of all officers of the State merely illusory, reducing them to mere agents of the popular will with no power to bind or to loose in any act whatever. Now though an absolute form of democracy is one of the just forms of government and in a small community may be prudent and practical, the rejection of all serious entrusting of authority to any one distinct from the moral person of the whole community is an exaggeration, which would make political philosophy ridiculous, as it would make political government on any extended scale merely nugatory. Even the subjection of princes and officers of State to the arbitrary recall of their commission and Power, while more than the safety of the people from oppression requires, at the same time nullifies the possibility of stably preserving peace and promoting prosperity the very purpose for which God ordains and man institutes civil society.
Summarily our indictment comes to this, that the social contract of Rousseau as a juridical foundation of civil society is a judicial contradiction in terms, and that his concept of sovereignty contradicts common sense and common need, perverts political philosophy, ignores the supreme rights of God, while aiming to safeguard the rights of man, and makes insecure in civil society the very justice, peace, and prosperity, which Rousseau was on fire to restore.
II.
Rousseau has been truly said to have been the first to popularize with the masses the emancipating theory of civil society by consent, and of sovereignty ultimately in the people, which in substance and more consistent coherence had long been a possession of the schools of political philosophy.{16} Janet did not hesitate to write that "It would not be altogether inexact to say that in the Middle Ages it was in the cloisters that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people was born."{17} The two ideas, however, that of the Schoolmen in the monastic schools and that of Rousseau in the Paris forum have essential divergences, such in fact that though Rousseau might have brought himself to accept the Scholastic idea, the Scholastics could never have accepted Rousseau's variant.
The diffusion given to the idea of society by consent, by the writings of Rousseau has obscured the fact of its hereditary descent. Rousseau frankly acknowledges his obligation to Locke, who preceded him by a century.{18} Locke in his "Second Treatise of Civil Government" had taught that civil society juridically established by a covenant of the people, which compact the law of nature obliges them to observe; but the law of nature on the other hand justified sovereignty in the government only as limited by popular contract. Locke made sovereignty consist in the rights, which every man has over his own actions, conceded by compact to the government, accord to the measure of exigency for the common welfare. Hobbes had anticipated him on the initial social existence by consent but Locke, though he avowedly builds on Hobbes, departs from him on the character of sovereignty, and adheres with frank avowal to the teachings of Richard Hooker.{19}
Hooker, a century still earlier, in his "Ecclesiastical Polity" had made men pass from subjection solely to the natural law into subjection to law politic by "an order expressly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together. The latter is that which we call the law of the common weal."{20} He adds that all public government of whatever kind arises from deliberate advice, consultation and composition between men, and that sovereignty resides ultimately with the people.{21} Now curiously enough, though Hooker may seem unaware of the chorus of Catholic theologians, who in his time were defending, against the Divine right of kings, the origin of society by consent, and the primary reception of sovereignty by the people (i.e., the whole community), his indebtedness to St. Thomas Aquinas is freely admitted.{22}
Of course that does not mean that Hooker found in St. Thomas a theory of political government worked out for him along the lines he followed; but he found there and borrowed thence the development of the natural law, and specific equality of men, their coalition by natural impulse into society, and the origin therein of political law. Moreover, he found sufficiently indicated the juridical causality of consent for the existence of civil society in the "Summa Theologica," where St. Thomas accepts with approval St. Augustine's definition that a political society (a people) is essentially "a multitude united by juridical consent (or by agreement in law, the words being juris consensu) and community of interest."{23} So too, St. Thomas insists that civil power in its actual existence is, in a sense, of human right and not of Divine.{24} In fact he adds that the reason why God chose her kings for Israel was precisely because Israel was under an exceptional regime, a theocratic constitution.{25}
Furthermore, St. Thomas places the essential note of sovereignty, namely, the legislative power, in the people or in the viceregent of the people, and assigns a reason for it, that legislation is the necessary direction of means to the end of civil society, and that, whereas the end of civil society belongs to people, the direction also of means to that end must lie with the people.{26} This position he enforces in his defense of custom prevailing as law. Distinguishing with Aristotle between a community free and independent and one that is dependent, he declares that in the former the custom of the people is the will of the people, and the people have the power to make law; whereas the prince, against whose law the custom may conflict, has the power to make law only as the vicegerent of the people.{27}
Moreover in his defense of the theocratic constitution of the people of Israel, prior to the question of what form of government may be best, he lays down the general principle that for all good governments it is requisite that the people have a share in sovereignty. He then adds that the best form of government is that wherein the people retain the right of electing its rulers from out of the people.{28}
From St. Thomas to Aristotle, though a great leap in point of time, is a short step in philosophic heredity. In fact in support of the last position we have cited from St. Thomas. The latter refers us to the "Politics" of Aristotle.{29} Janet insists that the principles of Aristotle are altogether favorable to sovereignty of the people.{30} Indeed, if one will run even cursorily through the "Politics," he cannot escape that impression. Aristotle lays down that a State (civitas), a body politic (politeia), is a society of freemen.{31} The government of a household is monarchical, while in civil government power belongs to all. "There is one rule," he says, "exercised over subjects who are by nature free, another over subjects who are by nature slaves; the rule of a household is a monarchy, for every house is under one head; whereas constitutional (i.e., political or civil) government is a government of freemen and equals."{32} All citizens have in a sense a claim to civil power.{33} Rulers and subjects are from time to time interchangeable, because all are equal (i.e., politically).{34} A citizen is one who shares in governing and being governed.{35} The government is everywhere sovereign in the State, and the constitution is in fact the government.{36} But a constitution is an organization of offices, which all the citizens distribute.{37} Forms of government are of several kinds according as the power is thus distributed.{38} Absolutely speaking, if an individual happens to be so eminent in virtue as to surpass all others, it is just enough that he should be king,{39} but always by the choice of the freemen who constitute the State.{40} In every form of government the majority (or, as St. Thomas translates it, the many) ultimately rule.{41} None of the principles on which individual men actually claim to rule, and to hold other men in subjection, are strictly right.{42} Sovereignty of the people is in principle susceptible of a satisfactory explanation, and, though not free from difficulty, seems to contain an element of truth.{43} Extreme democracy, as a form of government, must recognize law as supreme, and concede real authority to its magistrates.{44}
From all of this it would appear that the essential idea of civil society constituted by consent, and of fundamental sovereignty in the people, has come down to us from a respectable source, however tangled and untrue the exaggerated notions thereof may have become. The idea was indicated in Aristotle and outlined in St. Thomas; but it was only when there took place the great contention between the Empire and the Church, between the civil power of kings and the ecclesiastical power of the Papacy, that the controversy arose which led step by step to the fuller development in the Catholic schools of the juridical origin of civil power. From the middle of the sixteenth century both of the great palaestras of Scholastic theology, the Dominican and the Jesuit lecture halls, freely taught what in the seventeenth century Suarez so brilliantly defended, to wit, that civil sovereignty was through the natural law directly received from Almighty God by the people, and thence entrusted to the rulers of the State by constitutional consent.{45}
III.
In the origin of civil society in the concrete among men we must distinguish at the outset between the historic causes that variously brought men together in cities and States, that determined them to live submissively under patriarch, king, conquering general, or beneficent statesman, as their political head, and the juridical title or foundation, in view of whose exigency the natural law bound men together in concrete civil unity, into a moral and juridical civic entity, and ratified the establishment of power in the hands of a legitimate ruler. No one in reason doubts today that whatever was the historic cause that diversely in diverse cases brought man and woman together in a family relation, whether it was by purchase or forcible seizure, by paternal gift of the woman, by maternal wiles, by feminine witchery or by lover's ardent suit, the juridical title has been and is unchangeably the same, viz, mutual consent to the marriage bond. Similarly diverse instances of civil society may have had their historical origin under variously divergent circumstances, under the influence of distinctly diverse causes, of patriarchal expansion, for instance, or clan accretion, of conquest in war (just or unjust), of combination for defense or for trade, of colonial establishment or revolutionary reform; but in each and all cases we seek the juridical foundation to civic or political unity, the title to be recognized as a juridical State at all, and we declare it always to be popular consent to the civic bond.
For a State, a political unit, a civil society, is admitted to be a moral union of families and individuals for a naturally set human purpose. A union must have a bond, a moral union a moral bond. A moral bond must bind the free acts of men, the only acts which can be moral; and the only true binding force on our free actions comes from the obligation of law. The obligation, however, of no law touches man in the concrete without a foundation in fact. Hence for every moral bond we must find such fundament or title; and for the union which constitutes of men a civic body, we must find not merely the historic causes or the occasions of its existence, but the juridical foundation of the civic bond. This we maintain to be consent. In like fashion we are in search not of the history of how this or that ruler came to establish himself and exercise civil power; rather we are looking for his juridical title to the rights of sovereignty. We assert that this is the constitutional consent of the people, with whom lies original and fundamental sovereignty.
To come at this scientifically we must take a summary view of the natural problem of human life. God made man ultimately for an abiding union of knowledge and love of Him, in everlasting enjoyment of His truth, goodness and beauty; in which union we find God's eternal glory and man's eternal blessedness. God set man on earth for a period of existence until death, to fulfil His plan for the development of human life thereon. That development was to be a demonstration of Divine excellence latent in the powers of man and nature, and in human capacity to learn the control of the powers of nature. This demonstration, while it makes man "witness of the glory of God," as Euskin has called him,{46} likewise shows him growing in the knowledge and love of God through His creatures -- which constitutes the highest glory of God upon earth -- and its achievement, the temporal happiness of man. The connection between God's ultimate purpose and His earthly plan, between man's service on earth and his enjoyment after death is one of merit. Man is to merit beatitude by service on earth, development of life as planned by God. God has put in man and in nature the capacities for this development, has imprinted on them the necessary impulse towards it (in human reason by the natural law, in all things else by the laws of nature and has left man in manifold need of the very steps lead him on. Man, learning from his natural powers, his specific impulses and his cognate needs, the details of God's plan in his regard, in consequence recognizes therein the details of God's law bidding him carry out the details of the plan. In carrying these out as bidden man gives that final touch to his life development, which is imputed to him for merit of the happiness of the life that is to come.
Pursuant of his way towards the natural development of his life powers, man comes to recognize that the family relation has place in the fulness of the Divine plan of human life; and when he enters into that relation, he is normally conscious both of an obligation of the natural law binding him to all the necessary conditions of that relation as bearing on the purposes of human life, and is conscious at the same time of rights which the natural law gives him unto the fulfilment of that obligagation and the promotion of life's purposes. We know this definite, specific compound of obligations and rights as the marriage bond; its obligations give it the name; but its obligations on the one side involve rights on the other, and vice versa, and the two combined integrate the juridical connection. As a set of duties and rights, of obligations and moral powers, it has its source in God, whence it descends through the natural law. As incumbent on any man and wife in the concrete, no one denies today that it comes into existence by consent. As to the nature and force of its obligations and rights, it is of Divine right; as to concrete existence it is of human right. The principle of the bond is the natural law; but the foundation of its presence in this or that concrete couple is consent.
The next step in social consciousness is that men realize that in the mutual assistance of family life alone they cannot develop human life in its fulness; they cannot attain, as Aristotle says, "the good life," that is the perfection of life. They become acutely aware of the power, impulse, and need they have, bearing on what we call civil society, for the development of life's full faculties, physical, mental, and moral. They enter in due time upon this social relation, forming a unit from which they demand the protection of rights and the promotion of opportunities -- not merely economic, but in every sense human -- for a full life development, in the active achievement and enjoyment of which may normally be found man's temporal happiness. In this second natural and juridical social unit the elements are held together by a civic bond, embodying all the essential obligations of co-operation, and all the essential rights of social protection and opportunity. These essential obligations and rights are not the arbitrary choice of men. They are determined by the natural purposes and exigencies of such civic coalescence, The civic bond, like the marriage bond, is a definite, specific compound of obligations and rights.
The binding force of this bond also comes from God through the natural law. But what actuates it in this or that group of families, this or that multitude of men, in the concrete? Why not their consent? Consent is enough to actuate the conventional bond of a business partnership between man and man, of a commercial treaty between nation and nation, of a natural union between man and wife. There is no assignable reason why it should not suffice to determine the social union of citizens under the civic bond. In fact there is explicit reason why it should do so.
If we push on to see why ultimately neither the authority of parents, nor the weight of law, nor the obligation of conscience, can make man and woman husband and wife without their consent, we find that the marriage relation calls in its continuity for such a union of wills, in constancy of mutual love and common effort, as cannot be hoped for unless the bond is voluntarily accepted by an act of personal freedom. If we then consider the demand for union of wills, of co-operation, of sacrifice, of mutual civic altruism in peace and war, to be found in the continuity of the civil relation, it is easy to see that it is unreasonable to expect it, unless the constituent elements ultimately come to accept voluntarily the civic bond and its necessary consequences You may subject a people by force; you may subdue its spirit by oppression; you may maintain supremacy over it by the craft of subtle tyranny; but you can never have a civic unit working out by co-operation the happiness of all, unless the people come at one moment or another to accept the situation by consent.
When a multitude of people come to grasp, however dimly, the natural life-purposes incumbent upon them (purposes in themselves supremely desirable as well), come, morcover, to apprehend the obvious fact that only in civil union of a concrete society can these purposes be achieved; that this union implies a bond binding each of them, a bond bearing with it definite common civil duties and civil rights for all, they have certainly arrived at the threshold of a juridical union. In all other cases of juridical union contingent upon common action, in all other cases of natural and mutual obligations so contingent, as well as in the case of acquired natural rights over definite means to a natural end, the next step is a free act of the will, and the thing is done. In perfect parity, if the multitude there and then accept the bond in question, you there and then have in existence a new juridical entity, a juridical union, which men call civil society. They may have been entirely free to consent, or for one reason or other may have been morally bound to consent; they may have consented in written instrument or spoken word; in the cheerful enthusiasm of subordination and co-operation, with neither written or spoken pledge, or in the silent omission of all protest and repudiation, when such protest would be efficient or a matter of duty; they may have consented all together, or group after group yielding in course of time; they may have consented to the entirety of the bond at once or by degrees to the different duties of its content. It matters not. The one substantial thing in the establishment of a State as of a family, in joining a civic unit together with the civic bond as in joining a family unit with the marriage bond, is the voluntary and free consent of those who establish the union. The consent of the community then is the fact which of its nature spells an exigency that the natural law should supply the essential juridical ingredient there and then necessary for the natural function and juridical cohesion of civil society; and that is, after all, what we understand by a foundation, a juridically determinant cause of the existence of that juridical effect, which is found in a multitude, when, instead of remaining an incoherent assembly of discrete atoms, it is bound together into the social union which we know as a body politic or a State. It is indeed the only fact that accounts juridically for that union, just as consent is the only juridical cause that accounts for the juridical existence of a marital union. Vicinage does not do it, nor kindred blood. Common needs may be a motive of consent, and even, in a conceivable case, extreme enough to give rise to an obligation to yield the consent; but of themselves they do not place the consent, nor sufficiently substitute for it in placing the social bond. Such conditions will not suffice in the case of the matrimonial union. Why should they in the case of the more extensive and complicated unit? Patriarchal descent, occupancy of the territory of one and the same landed proprietor, subjection by conquest, none of these are claimed to be sufficient juridically to make a discrete multitude into a civil community, except in so far as the patriarch, landholder or conqueror has ipso facto sovereignty over those who fall under the respective categories correlative to each of them. But we shall proceed at once to show that sovereignty needs firmer ground, lies originally with the people, and is found derivatively elsewhere only by the people's consent.
IV.
When men in the fulfilment of God's plan establish the juridical person of the body politic by their consent to this juridical union for the general welfare, the natural law necessarily concedes to that person in the very bond, which creates it, all the rights and powers necessary, and even those connaturally proportionate, to the purpose of the common weal. The powers essential to each and every State will be congenital rights of the body politic. If we conceive the thing as in a condition of juridical genesis, we ask ourselves, What are the first powers that body needs? The answer is the power to organize itself under a definite form of government of its choice; the power to choose the individuals in whom the governmental powers are stably to reside, to determine the stable limitation of these powers by reservation of power to the community itself, and the method of succession in their possession; the power to govern the community ad interim either directly or by the appointment of provisional governors; the power to reorganize the government, whenever its prior organization, whether from forces within or without, goes to pieces, or permanently fails to function for the general welfare, or in new times and circumstances fails to meet the exigencies of the common weal; the right, finally, to be the authentic judge of conditions requiring organization. I fancy we need not elaborate the point that substantially these powers are from the start requisite to the essential purpose of civil society; nor that by reason of God's ordering human society in His plan of human life, and by natural consequence of men putting one such into existence, this society has the above rights and powers. They are as obviously involved in the content of the civic bond as are all the rights and privileges necessary to the natural purpose of marital life involved in the marriage bond.
These powers may be and sometimes are called constituent powers, authority to enact a constitution or fundamental law, a law, namely, in which the organization of the government is provided for as above, and the reserved powers of the community declared. In point of fact that is what is meant by popular sovereignty, that is to say, the sum of supreme jurisdiction necessary to provide the organization and government of a State, as inherent in the community as a body politic, a moral person, from the first instant of its juridical existence; jurisdiction coming from God through the natural law in the civic bond which makes of a multitude a people, a community, a State. It is quite evident that such sovereign powers exist in some person or other within the range of the community, but the contention for popular sovereignty is that they are to be found in the moral person of the community itself.
It may appear that what is commonly known as sovereignty, the supreme powers, namely, in a sovereign, whether he be tsar, kaiser, or king, a class of nobles or a republican president, is not quite the same as the constituent and other powers above enumerated. That is true, though not in a sense as mutually exclusive as might be apprehended. Sovereign powers, as they exist in actual rulers, are the sum of jurisdiction necessary for actual normal government, stably set indeed in the rulers in order so to govern. They suppose then a determinate form of government, definite rulers and definite powers and a determined mode of succession; and finally they imply the possession by the rulers of the fulness of authority necessary for their function; whereas on the other hand the sovereignty attributed to the people seems rather made up of preliminary powers of organization, and not of powers to govern at all. That is a mistake. Popular sovereignty is both one and the other. As a matter of fact the community has in itself all the powers of governing provisionally in the interim of organization; may organize, if it so choose and the thing is expedient, a purely democratic form of government, and so retaining all its powers may stably govern the State. In one word original sovereignty as in the people includes the governing powers as well as the powers of organization. Outside of an absolute democracy the people entrust the governing powers to the rulers, retaining the organizing powers for the emergency of necessary reorganization.
The important question demanding a convincing reply is, Why should these powers appear first in the people, in the community itself? The metaphysician would answer: "Natura non deficit in necessariis," which the jurist translates, in terms of ethics, that God lays no natural duty or function upon any person, moral or physical, without naturally (i.e., through the natural law) communicating to that person all the powers necessary to the discharge of the said duty or function. Now it is quite evident from what we have said above{47} on the place of civil society in the Creator's plan, that on the person of the body politic, once existent, are naturally incumbent the duty and function of providing for the purpose of civil society, for the security of rights and for the promotion of civic opportunities, in a word, of directing civic co-operation to civil society's specific welfare. It is equally clear that such provision, such direction of co-operation, cannot be had without the possession all the moral powers indicated above as the content of sovereignty. Nor will it answer this, exigency to say that such powers must be somewhere within the limits of the community, but not necessarily be the powers of the people as such. For, St. Thomas insists, "in this matter, as in everything else, to him is given the power to order the means to the end, to whom that end properly belongs."{48} Now the end of civil society does not properly belong to any individual person, or individual group of persons in preference to others in the community, but to the community as such, to the people as a body politic, a moral person. It is the community's common weal or general welfare, which is the goal of civil society, an axiom recognized from Aristotle down.{49}
Natural rights are to be found in no person except in consequence of natural title, of natural exigency of those rights with a view to the natural purpose of life. Our congenital rights are the same 'in all of us, for their title in human nature, and that belongs alike to each of us. Rights other than congenital are acquired as we become possessed of contingent title or exigency thereto. The exigency for civil sovereignty does not naturally arise in any man, or any individual group of men, but only in a body politic; for it is a naturally necessary means only to an end proper only to a body politic. The natural exigency in any person whatsoever outside of the politic regards only a private and not a public purpose, springs from a relation of commutative justice between independent equals or domestic justice in the bosom of a family; whereas rights of civil sovereignty come into existence only for a public purpose, the common good or general welfare, and connote a relation of civic legal and distributive justice. A public purpose is naturally proper only to a public person, to the person of the State; and the proper juridical term of civic legal justice as well as the proper juridical subject of civic distributive justice is to be found only in the person of the commonwealth, or in that person's representative as such.
Naturally enough the position here taken has been controverted. I fancy that the landed aristocracies would wish to controvert today, and maintain that where one-half of one per cent of the inhabitants of a country own all its land,{50} and are thus in possession of the ultimate source of its wealth, it should govern the community, because it has most at stake in the community. This would be to argue that the title to power over the general and public welfare of society is to be found in the individuals who have the largest material interests of private ownership; and here the capitalist, the banker and the moneylender would contest the landlord claim. The only way one could twist a title out of that would be to say that he must necessarily have the care of the public good, to whose private gain that good is subordinated by nature, as a means to an end. Nature never yet subordinated one man's natural good as a means to another man's aims, let alone the natural welfare of a whole people to an individual's private profit. The thing savors of slavery.
Originally, doubtless, civil government began under the headship of the patriarch of the clan; and paternal rights in the father were a prelude to civil powers in the first patriarch, which descended from him through eldest sons, so that at any given time claim to the possession of sovereignty was based on primogenitary descent from the first sovereign, who could be historically proved to have ruled over the nation.{51} To conclude from that historical fact that the original natural title to sovereignty is in extensive paternity is a far cry. It involves that by natural law civil sovereignty is absolute in the actual ruler, limited only by the demands of the common civic good; and that both in origin and transmission it is entirely independent of the consent of the people. But a father's right to govern his son cannot be proved out of any natural exigency -- such as that by which it is proved to exist at all -- to extend beyond the adult maturity of the son; and when the latter founds his own family, his parental rights are as strong and exclusive over his own family as his father's is over his, and so every head of a family. The general welfare, which is the reason of the existence of civil power, cannot be said to be, by the natural law, properly and peculiarly the patriarch's; nor his permanent care, unless you extend a man's responsibility (in the matter of life-purposes) for all his progeny to the nth generation; nor his purpose and profit, unless you make all his descendants his slaves. It is the common profit, the common benefit, and it is to be put before the profit, benefit and happiness of the ruler. Nor is the patriarch's case strengthened by the fact that he has the added title of landlord over the entire territory occupied clan, and can extend his right of property over wide lands to territorial sovereignty, and then to civil jurisdiction over the tenants and all inhabitants of the aforesaid territory. This weakens the case. For though a patriarch's feeling for his blood descendants might be a reason to expect him to set the general welfare above his own, yet the landed proprietor owns land for his own profit, and in the administration of it, and of any government of the occupants thereof, would naturally consider his own proprietary rights and gain first, and the welfare and rights of tenants in an entirely secondary place, and much as means to the former. History justifies our argument against him, for the landlord government has been a mockery of civil government as primarily for the benefit of the governed. How then, if we do not admit the patriarchal or proprietary title to civil sovereignty, are we to account for the obvious fact that historically this sovereignty obtained was exercised in many places and in many cases with a measure of beneficence? We answer, by consent or usurpation. Why men would naturally consent to patriarchal rule and find it beneficent, and how civil rule might be usurped and turned to oppression is well expressed in a passage of Aristotle, which, while a summary of the past before his time, savors of a prophecy of the centuries that were to come.
The first governments were kingships, probably for this reason because of old, when cities were small, men of eminent virtue were few. They were made kings because they were benefactors, and benefits can only be bestowed by good men. But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passed into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses, who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. Since cities have increased in size, no other form of government appears to be any longer possible.{52}
The contention that the patriarch and his primogenitary descendants are by nature and natural circumstances so evidently better fitted to govern than any other member of the community as to be thus indicated by nature (on a par with the father in the family) as the natural recipient of sovereign power is both in theory and in fact of so tenuous a texture that it needs but the breath of denial to disrupt it. The whole question in a nutshell comes to this: Whose rights and interests are paramount, the community's or those of the patriarch and his primogenitary descendants; and on whom has the natural law put the duty of the life-development of the community in the plan of God, on the community or on the patriarch? The life is the life of all in the community; its development is a duty of the community; its juridical purpose of existence is precisely that. This purpose is paramount to the development, profit, benefit, or interest of any individual, and the right to it supreme.
In the sixteenth century Bodin maintained that, though patriarchs were the first civil governors, the patriarchal State had been long since overturned by force of arms, and that the sovereigns of his day should find their original title in right of conquest. Assuredly not by unjust conquest, unless we wish to confound right with might. The victor in a just war may certainly exact the right or rights for which he justly went to war; but these belonged to him, conquest or no conquest. He may rightly claim indemnity also for necessary leases sustained in the prosecution of the war, as these are damages justly demanded to repair injury suffered; and one may also remark that the title to these in the court of conscience and the natural law does not suppose victory. Finally, he may demand reasonable security against repetition of the offense; but the foundation of this is the right which he has against threatened injury rather than the conquest by which he is enabled to enforce that right. Conquest in itself is but a robber's title, whether the prey be territory, booty, or men. Conditions may be conceived to be such that the conquered community cannot properly repair damage and give security except by accepting the sovereignty of the conqueror. It then may be bound to consent (at least temporarily) to such sovereignty, just as a man may be bound in conscience to marry a girl whom he has wronged under promise of marriage; but neither in one case or the other can the juridical bond be proved to arise without consent. Coersion may enforce subjection, as it may enforce cohabitation, but it does not create the natural bond without the natural title. You may make a plantation of slaves and call it a realm, but you cannot have a body politic to rule, nor authority to rule over one, except you have the foundation of consent. This of course is pushing the argument to an extreme. Suarez admitted that a conqueror could under the circumstances posited above annex territory and incorporate its inhabitants into his own pre-existing State. The territory raises no insuperable difficulty, and the inhabitants thereof may pass as alien residents under the sovereignty thus extended over the territory, but consistently with the original principle we have laid down they do not become citizen-subjects until they have consented to On transfer of allegiance. the eve of the English Revolution of 1688 Filmer in his "Patriarch" raised a weak cry in favor of existing absolute rule, resting the thrones of Europe on patriarchal descent. In the early nineteenth century De Haller reacting against the principles of the French Revolution{53} demolished the "Contrat Social" of Rousseau{54} and thought to find a justification in all nature for the principle that rule belongs to the strong, declaring that authority is to be found in him who has a superior excellence over those who have need of the benefit of that superiority, by a law of nature to which men necessarily conform.{55} He puts the sovereignty of a prince in his own particular independence, which is just in so far as it is his own private property, his subjects being those who have not achieved their own independence and owing to circumstances depend upon the superiority of the prince for their protection, help, and guidance.{56} He makes monarchy the initial form of civil government and places its sovereignty in independent superiority established chiefly by the titles of patriarch, territorial proprietorship, and military conquest.{57} Father Taparelli, S.J., with keener philosophical acumen and singular felicity of style presents De Haller's theory in the strongest shape in which an appeal could be made for it, narrowing the formal part of the title to sovereignty to a juridical superior excellence and fitness to govern to be found in the exclusive prior rights of patriarch, proprietary, or conqueror.{58} Both De Haller and Taparelli allow for an exceptional case in which independent equals may establish a form of government by consent, with the designation of the ruler by the community.{59} In its last form the theory has had the subsequent support of many conservative minds down to our own day. Yet its purpose is more admirable than its ground firm. Paternal authority, proprietary rights, and military conquest cannot transform themselves into a natural authority specifically distinct, whose purpose in God's plan is the general welfare of the community concerned, of which He laid the duty on the body politic itself.
Nor can any of these prior rights be said to establish a natural title to civil power. For a natural title to civil power, title in the nature of the thing, should show special fitness, physical or moral or both, for the task of authoritatively guiding the people to the goal of the general welfare; should show it in reality and not in appearance only with something like evidence and not mere plausibility exclusively in the person claiming power, and per se, i.e., in the ordinary run of human events. These characteristics we demand in the title of a father to be head of the family, and it is only on the ground of the absence of one or the other of them that an argument can be raised to dispute the man's natural right in preference to the woman. Now in the ordinary run of human events physical fitness is not pratically exclusive; nor moral fitness either for that matter. Hence the argument has passed in the course of controversy to juridical fitness from the presence of some right having a special bearing on civil power, such as the amplified paternal right of the patriarch, the right of property in a territorial landlord, the right of conquest in a victor at war. But we have to note that such rights proceed by commutative justice or domestic jurisdiction, the former of which is primarily for benefit of the individual, the latter for the benefit of the individual family; and neither of them has particular bearing on legal justice nor do they necessarily manifest a tendency and obligation to send one's activity forth out of one's own personal circle to labor for the general welfare. The moral person of the community itself, however, is linked together by legal justice, and as such has both the natural tendency and obligation to work primarily for the common weal. We must not consider sovereignty as private property but as a public trust.
The rights of sovereignty lie where the duty falls, by the same law and precisely on that title. The duty of achieving that precise element of the Divine plan of human life, intended to be achieved in civil society, God laid on that natural moral person itself, not upon another; primarily and paramountly for its own benefit, the greater welfare, and not for the advantage of any individual. The sovereignty which is necessary to accomplish this achievement, to fulfil this duty, God through the natural law put upon the people, the State, the civil society itself. The natural law bestows the power only where and when the exigency arises; the natural exigency for sovereignty arises only in the people, and precisely at the moment when the multitude juridically coalesces into a State. Neither in theory nor in practice will anything stay a resolute people who have the strength, from readjusting their form of government, whether a republic or a monarchy, except the fact that the government is being properly and successfully conducted for the general welfare with the protection of the rights of all and the exclusion of none from a fair opportunity to develop human life along the lines indicated by the nature of man.
This may bring the reader to ask whether by repudiating Rousseau's Social Contract and establishing society by natural consent with sovereignty as a new and distinct power descending from God through the natural law we have not reverted to the Divine right of sovereignty? Yes and no: To the Divine right of kings or other individual rulers to their sovereignty, no; to the Divine right of the people to their sovereignty, yes. The phrase Divine right (jure divino) signifies literally by Divine law, and in a general sense all right is Divine, i.e., ultimately deriving its force from God's eternal law. "By Divine right" in a special and technical sense signifies from the law or will of God without the mediation of any human law or will, and in this sense a Divine right in a man means a right thus immediately received. Now Divine law is twofold, positive and natural; the former is over and above the exigencies of created nature and is found in the Revealed law; the latter follows the exigencies of created human nature and is formulated by human reason. The powers given to Moses in the Old Covenant and to St. Peter and his successors in the New are of Divine positive right. James I of England, the great champion of the Divine right of Kings, in as much as he claimed in his kingship the plenitude of spiritual power over Christ's Church in England, doubtless, so far forth at least, intended that his sovereignty was from the Revealed law and thus of Divine positive right, and moreover he sought to prove his theory of sovereignty from the law revealed in the Scriptures. Yet he could not well claim his sovereignty as a king from that source, unless -- as Suarez argued{60} -- he was prepared to show that God by special revelation or by some extraordinary sign had elected him or one of his progenitors King of England. The keener minds defending Divine right of kingship soon dropped the argument from Scripture with its insinuation of right from Revealed law, and fell back on the natural law. This left the issue of Divine right to be whether on the one hand the natural law bestowed sovereignty immediately upon the rulers either by original title, whether of patriarch, proprietary, conqueror, consent or prescription, or by derivative title from such original possessor of civil power, without in any way deriving said power from the people; or whether on the other hand the actual individual rulers were never original holders of sovereignty, but only subsequent possessors by derivative title from the sole original holder, the people. In the former case the power of kings, whether original or derived, would be by Divine right directly from the natural law; in the latter by human right (juro humano) of constitutional law or popular transference. Hence the doctrine of the Schoolmen was not the doctrine of Divine right for the sovereignty of actual rulers, but only for the sovereignty of the people.
Cardinal Zigliara not quite a half century ago originated the theory that while the consent of the people was the necessary title to civil sovereignty, it was not a derivative title, but an original one.{61} Hence the people was not the original holder of civil power, transmitting it to its rulers under an established form of government, but merely the sole legitimate designator of the person to possess sovereignty, who in consequence of such designation always received its power directly from God, though in virtue of popular consent. A more recent Roman authority, while conceding to the people constituent powers, defends the same view in regard to governing sovereignty, and maintains that as in virtue of the people's constituent powers governing sovereignty was by way of title at the free disposal of the people, and as it is present in actual rulers juridically by the free act of the popular will, it must be said to be invested in the said rulers by human right and not by Divine.{62}
The principal ground in reason for this position that the consent of the people is not a derivative title is the supposition that the community as such cannot be the original possessor of governing sovereignty before determining its form of government and its stable rulers, because the community as a whole is not per se fitted by nature to possess and exercise such governing powers. The ground does not seem conclusive, and that for two reasons. First, the unfitness for possession and exercise of governing powers appear only in case of too populous and ill-educated communities; for a community of moderate proportions and of a fair amount of civil education can evidently conduct (as has been done in the past) civil government under the form of an absolute democracy. Now the fact of large size and of lack of essentially necessary civil education is a mere accident and not a per se condition. Per se, civil communities normally begin in small compass, where the essentials of civil government are sufficiently known. Secondly, even if the contrary were true, it does not follow that the natural law would not concede sovereignty to the whole community as such, even though the exercise of it necessarily postulated the entrusting of its governing powers to definite individuals under a determinate form of government. For returning to our original argument, the community as such has the duty of effecting the normal purpose to be accomplished by civil society, and in consequence has all the rights that are the necessary means to that purpose, of which the first and most important is governing sovereignty, and must exercise those rights by itself or by others (to whom it entrusts them for exercise) according to the exigencies of the general welfare. Cardinal Bellarmine found no difficulty in maintaining both that governing sovereignty was first in the people and yet necessarily to be transferred to definite rulers under some legitimate form of government.{63} Sovereignty is held by no ruler except in trust for the general welfare, in trust for the accomplishment of the natural purpose of civil society; and certainly unless that trust were committed to the ruler by the community, the community itself would not have had original control over its own destiny, which natural law not only supposes it to have had as a right, but has imposed as a duty.
The point is worth elaborating. To possess per se a right it is not necessary that the possessor be per se competent to exercise it by himself, but only that he be per se competent to exercise it either by himself or by others to whom he may entrust it for exercise. Thus the right to educate their children would still belong to the parents, even if parents were not per se fitted to exercise it by themselves, but were necessitated to seek competent substitutes, to whom they entrusted the right for execution. And the reason is that parents could not divest themselves of the duty and responsibility, even in the supposition that the duty was per se and of necessity to be fulfilled by others of their appointment. In like manner the community cannot escape the responsibility or divest itself of the duty of accomplishing the purpose for which governing sovereignty is given.
Just as the physical power of understanding belongs to the soul, though it cannot exercise it without an intellectual faculty, which derives its power from the soul; so too the moral power tilling the soil of an immense estate, which belongs to an individual owner, is his, even though he cannot exercise it by himself, but must needs invoke others to exercise it for his benefit. Even the civil law can grant a transitory right to an individual per se incompetent to exercise it, with the added obligation, of transferring it to others at his choice, that they may exercise it for his benefit and for its civil purpose.
In the contrary position taken against our general contention of original sovereignty in the people, it would follow that governing sovereignty did not actually exist in civil society prior (even by nature) to the determination of a specific form of government and the nomination of actual rulers, a proposition more easily assumed than proved. For just as a physical person immediately upon its coming into juridical existence has dominion over itself and its members, and has not to wait for such juridical dominion until the development of the faculties requisite for its exercise; so too a moral person immediately upon its juridical constitution has juridical dominion over itself and its members (and governing sovereignty in civil society is no more than this) even before the development of the organization requisite for its exercise. Nor can the force of this be evaded in the case of civil society by contending that the community, once juridically a civil unit, has the right only of acquiring the necessary governing dominion by determining a specific form of government and nominating definite rulers. For civil society, if at all a natural juridical person existing for the common welfare, must instantly have the right of exacting detailed co-operation from its members towards accomplishing the common good; and when all is said and done, such right and power in a civil community is essentially governing sovereignty.
To restate by way of conclusion the Scholastic doctrine which we have above set forth: The title for the juridical existence of an actual State is the consent of the people who constitute it. Immediately consequent upon this follows by Divine right of the natural law sovereignty in the people, now a juridical unit, a body politic, a moral person. Logically and juridically subsequent to this comes constitutional organization of a form of government and a determination of definite rulers, who constitute the government, the juridical and derivative title to whose sovereignty is the consent of the body politic, the people. In this sense lies the truth of the principle that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."{64}
{1} Tennyson, Morte d 'Arthur.
{2} Athenagoras, Book VI, quoted by Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, I, p. 23.
{3} Aristotle, Politics, I, 7:111; 7 and 9.
{4} Belloc, The French Revolution, London, 1911.
{5} Rousseau, Contrat Social, I, 6.
{6} Ibid. II, 4.
{7} Ibid., I, 8.
{8} "The earliest of all societies, and the only natural one is the family, . . . and the family itself is only kept together by convention." Contract Social, I, 2.
{9} Ibid., I, 4.
{10} Ibid., II, 4.
{11} Ibid., I, 4.
{12} Romans, xiii, 11.
{13} Infra, pp. 23 sqq.
{14} Rousseau, Contrat Social, II, 5.
{15} Tozer, Rousseau's Social Contract, Introd., p. 20.
{16} Tozer, Rousseau's Social Contract, Introd., p. 2.
{17} Janet, Histoire de la Philosophie Politique, II, II, p. 297.
{18} Tozer, ibid., quoting Rosseau's Letters from the Mountain.
{19} Tozer, ibid., pp. 20 and 24.
{20} Book I, quoted by Tozer, p. 13.
{21} Tozer, ibid., p. 13.
{22} Tozer, ibid, P. 13.
{23} Sum Theol., II, II, q. 42, a. 2.
{24} Ibid., q. 10, a. 10.
{25} Ibid. 1, II, q. 105, a. 1, ad 1.
{26} Ibid., I, II, q. 90, a. 3.
{27} Sum. Theol, I, II, q. 97, a. 3, ad 3.
{28} Ibid. q. 105, a. 1, in cor.
{29} Comment. S. Thom., in II Pol., lect. 1; III Pol., lect. 5.
{30} Janet, Histoire de la Politeque, I, II, 2, p. 297.
{31} Aristotle, Politics, III, 6.
{32} Ibid., I, 7.
{33} Ibid III, 13.
{34} Ibid III, 13.
{35} Arist Pol., I, 12 and II, 2.
{36} Ibid III, 6.
{37} Ibid IV, 3.
{38} Ibid III, 7.
{39} Ibid III, 17.
{40} Ibid IV, 3.
{41} Ibid IV, 4.
{42} Ibid III, 13.
{42} Ibid III, 11.
{44} Ibid., IV, 4.
{45} Arist., Pol., III, 11.
{46} Modern Painters, II, 3.
{47} Supra, p. 19.
{48} Sum. Theol., I, II, q. 90, a. 3, in corpore articuli; quoted above in note 25.
{49} Politics, VII, 9; III, 7 and III, 9.
{50} Cf. 3. Murphy, Dictionary for Social Students, p. 33.
{51} Aristotle, Politics, I, 2; Hallam, Literature of Europe, III, p. 160.
{52} Aristotle, Politics, III, 15 (Jowett's Translation, I, p. 100).
{53} Restauration de la Science Politique, Introd.
{54} Ibid., chap. 6.
{55} Ibid., chap 13.
{56} Ibid., Introd.
{57} Ibid., chap. 24.
{58} Saggio Teoretico di Diritto Naturale, Dissert. II, cap. 9.
{59} De Haller, Restauration de la Science Politique, chap. 18. Taparelli, Saggio Teoretico di Diritto Naturale, Dissert. II, cap. 9, nn. 519-523.
{60} Suarez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae, III, III, 7.
{61} Zigliara, Jus Naturae, Lib. II, Cap. 2, Art. 8, No. 12.
{62} Billot, De Ecclesia, tom. III, quest. 12, p. 21.
{63} Bellarmine, De Laicis, Lib. III, cap. 6, not. 3; quoted above in Note 42.
{64} American Declaration of Independence.