Against this practice and this principle comes the theory of the
Contrat-Social. It declares that the people are sovereign. Now, in
this divided Europe, where a conflict between rival States is always
imminent, sovereigns are military men; they are such by birth,
education, and profession, and by necessity; the title carries along
with it and involves the function. Consequently, the subject, in
assuming their rights, imposes upon himself their duties; in his quota
(of responsibility) he, in his turn, is sovereign; but, in his turn
and in his person, he is a soldier.[3261] Henceforth, if he is born an
elector, he is born a conscript; he has contracted an obligation of a
new species and of infinite reach; the State, which formerly had a claim
only on his possessions, now has one on his entire body; never does
a creditor let his claims rest and the State always finds reasons or
pretexts to enforce its claims. Under the threats or trials of invasion
the people, at first, had consented to pay this one; they regarded it
as accidental and temporary. After victory and when peace came, its
government continues to enforce the claim; it becomes settled and
permanent. After the treaties of Luneville and Amiens, Napoleon
maintains it in France; after the treaties of Paris and Vienna, the
Prussian government is to maintain it in Prussia. One war after another
and the institution becomes worse and worse; like a contagion, it has
spread from State to State. At the present time, it has overspread the
whole of continental Europe and here it reigns along with its natural
companion which always precedes or follows it, its twin-brother,
universal suffrage. Each more or less conspicuously "trotted out" and
dragging the other along, more or less incomplete and disguised, both
being the blind and formidable leaders or regulators of future history,
one thrusting a ballot into the hands of every adult, and the other
putting a soldier's knapsack on every adult's back:

* with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the twentieth
century,

* with what exasperation of international rancor and distrust,

* with what waste of human labor,

* through what perversion of productive discoveries,

* through what perfection of destructive appliances,

* through what a recoil to the lower and most unwholesome forms of old
militant societies,

* through what retrograde steps towards brutal and selfish instincts,

* towards the sentiments, h