of
connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain
fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is
impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for
instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the
principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency
found the first essential of all social order in conformity of
positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and
their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and
not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,
of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than
Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human
nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,
to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau
once wrote, in a letter about Riviere's book, that the great problem
in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle
in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law
above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult
for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the
authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to
control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau
ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who
believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to
suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his
speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal
authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
founded the social union.

2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each
citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation
to individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a member
of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first
point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body
politic are one and the same thing.[230]

Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already
been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or
what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as
a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It
breaks up the feudal conce