from his
rights as a citizen. In relation to society, as not held from God
through her, these are termed his natural rights, which, she must hold
inviolable, and government protect for every one, whatever his
complexion or his social position. These rights--the rights of
conscience and the rights of property, with all their necessary
implications--are limitations of the rights of society, and the
individual has the right to plead them against the state. Society does
not confer them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
sacred and as fundamental as her own.

But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all. The people
can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and act. The
people are not God, whatever some theorists may pretend--are not
independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing. They are as dependent
collectively as individually, and therefore can exist and act only as
second cause, never as first cause. They can, then, even in the limited
sphere of their sovereignty, be sovereign only in a secondary sense,
never absolute sovereign in their own independent right. They are
sovereign only to the extent to which they impart life to the
individual members of society, and only in the sense in which she
imparts it, or is its cause. She is not its first cause or creator,
and is the medial cause or medium through which they derive it from
God, not its efficient cause or primary source. Society derives her
own life from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him. Then
she is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God. Her
dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
derivative.

This third theory does not err in assuming that the people collectively
are more than the people individually, or in denying society to be a
mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and no rights but what it
derives from them; nor even in asserting that the people in the sense
of society are sovereign, but in asserting that they are sovereign in
their own native or underived right and might. Society has not in
herself the absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
dominion either of herself or her members. God gave to man dominion
over the irrational creation, for he made irrational creatures for man;
but he never gave him either individually or collectively the dominion
over the rational creation. The theory that the people are absolutely
s