under the control of the clergy,
and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political writers have sought
to render government purely human, and maintain that its origin is
conventional, and that it is founded in compact or agreement. Their
theory originated in the seventeenth century, and was predominant in
the last century and the first third of the present. It has been, and
perhaps is yet, generally accepted by American politicians and
statesmen, at least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the
question at all, which it must be confessed is not far.

The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of government
as a social pact or compact, and explained the reciprocal rights and
obligations of subjects and rulers by the general law of contracts; but
they have never held that government originates in a voluntary
agreement between the people and their rulers, or between the several
individuals composing the community. They have never held that
government has only a conventional origin or authority. They have
simply meant, by the social compact, the mutual relations and
reciprocal rights and duties of princes and their subjects, as implied
in the very existence and nature of civil society. Where there are
rights and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an
agreement voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in determining
whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire whether either has
broken the terms of the social compact. They were engaged, not with
the question whence does government derive its authority, but with its
nature, and the reciprocal rights and duties of governors and the
governed. The compact itself they held was not voluntarily formed by
the people themselves, either individually or collectively, but was
imposed by God, either immediately, or mediately, through the law of
nature. "Every man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains
there." They held the same, and maintained that every one born into
society contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law, every
one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
and owes certain duties to society for the protection and assistance it
affords him.

But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed from the
theologians, and made it co