all individuals, as man is above
men. But the theory substitutes a simple agency for government, and
makes each individual its principal. It is an abuse of language to
call this agency a government. It has no one feature or element of
government. It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity; its
authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a public
authority, representing a public will, a public right, or a public
interest. In no country could government be adopted and sustained if
men were left to the wisdom or justness of their theories, or in the
general affairs of life, acted on them. Society, and government as
representing society, has a real existence, life, faculties, and organs
of its own, not derived or derivable from individuals. As well might
it be maintained that the human body consists in and derives all its
life from the particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and
which are constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its
life, or government its powers, from individuals. No mechanical
aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is no
living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation of
individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths, can make
society where there is no informing social principle that aggregates
and assimilates them to a living body, or produce that mystic existence
called a state or commonwealth.

The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the nation to
be a purely personal affair. It gives the government no territorial
status, and clothes it with no territorial rights or jurisdiction. The
government that could so originate would be, if any thing, a barbaric,
not a republican government. It has only the rights conferred on it,
surrendered or delegated to it by individuals, and therefore, at best,
only individual rights. Individuals can confer only such rights as they
have in the supposed state of nature. In that state there is neither
private nor public domain. The earth in that state is not property,
and is open to the first occupant, and the occupant can lay no claim to
any more than he actually occupies. Whence, then, does government
derive its territorial jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain
claimed by all national governments? Whence its title to vacant or
unoccupied lands? How does any particular government fix its
territorial boundaries, and obtain the right to presc