sovereign the king or queen,
and by the ministry the executive, excluding, or not decidedly
including, the legislature and the judiciary. The sovereign is the
people as the state or body politic, and as the king holds from God
only through the people, he is not properly sovereign, and is to be
ranked with the ministry or government. Yet when the state delegates
the full or chief governing power to the king, and makes him its sole
or principal representative, he may, with sufficient accuracy for
ordinary purposes, be called sovereign. Then, understanding by the
ministry or government the legislative and judicial, as well as the
executive functions, whether united in one or separated into distinct
and mutually independent departments, the English distinction will
express accurately enough, except for strictly scientific purposes, the
distinction between the state and the government.

Still, it is only in despotic states, which are not founded on right,
but force, that the king can say, L'etat, c'est moi, I am the state;
and Shakespeare's usage of calling the king of France simply France,
and the king of England simply England, smacks of feudalism, under
which monarchy is an estate, property, not a public trust. It
corresponds to the Scottish usage of calling the proprietor by the name
of his estate. It is never to be forgotten that in republican states
the king has only a delegated sovereignty, that the people, as well as
God, are above him. He holds his power, as the Emperor of the French
professes to hold his, by the grace of God and the national will--the
only title by which a king or emperor can legitimately hold power.

The king or emperor not being the state, and the government, whatever
its form or constitution, being a creature of the state, he can be
dethroned, and the whole government even virtually overthrown, without
dissolving the state or the political society. Such an event may cause
much evil, create much social confusion, and do grave injury to the
nation, but the political society may survive it; the sovereign remains
in the plenitude of his rights, as competent to restore government as
he was originally to institute it. When, in 1848, Louis Philippe was
dethroned by the Parisian mob, and fled the kingdom, there was in
France no legitimate government, for all commissions ran in the king's
name; but the organic or territorial people of France, the body
politic, remained, and in it remained the so