lt, society has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid
eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension
of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the
cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three dimensions.
Washington encountered a somewhat analogous problem when dealing with
the thirteen petty independent states, which had escaped from England;
but his problem was relatively rudimentary. Taking the theory of
sovereignty as it stood, he had only to apply it to communities. It was
mainly a question of concentrating a sufficient amount of energy to
enforce order in sovereign social units. The whole social detail
remained unchanged. Our conditions would seem to imply a very
considerable extension and specialization of the principle of
sovereignty, together with a commensurate increment of energy, but
unfortunately the twentieth-century American problem is still further
complicated by the character of the envelope in which this highly
volatilized society is theoretically contained. To attain his object,
Washington introduced a written organic law, which of all things is the
most inflexible. No other modern nation has to consider such an
impediment.

Moneyed capital I take to be stored human energy, as a coal measure is
stored solar energy; and moneyed capital, under the stress of modern
life, has developed at once extreme fluidity, and an equivalent
compressibility. Thus a small number of men can control it in enormous
masses, and so it comes to pass that, in a community like the United
States, a few men, or even, in certain emergencies, a single man, may
become clothed with various of the attributes of sovereignty. Sovereign
powers are powers so important that the community, in its corporate
capacity, has, as society has centralized, usually found it necessary to
monopolize them more or less absolutely, since their possession by
private persons causes revolt. These powers, when vested in some
official, as, for example, a king or emperor, have been held by him, in
all Western countries at least, as a trust to be used for the common
welfare. A breach of that trust has commonly been punished by
deposition or death. It was upon a charge of breach of trust that
Charles I, among other sovereigns, was tried and executed. In short, the
relation of sovereign and subject has been based either upon consent and
mutual obligation, or upon submission to a divine command; but