1900-2 TRANSACTIONS. 75 



llie political entity which was then its ruler in France, 

 namely, a despotic King-. In short, he confounded 

 absolute sovereignty and delegated sovereignty. And this 

 lack of political insight was characteristic not only of 

 French kings but also of the French people down to a 

 comparatively recent period in history. In 1852 when the 

 people were asked if they would be governed by Louis 

 Napoleon, or by an Assembly, thev answered : " We will be 

 governed b\' the one man we can imagine, not by the many 

 people we cannot imagine!" (:). Thanks to the Puritan 

 politicial philosophers the English were earlier and better 

 taught the difference between positive and representative 

 sovereignty ; although we have to confess that so late as the 

 time of Blackstone we find apologists for the divine riirht of 

 kings among English jurists. However, by that time so 

 diluted with mere sentiment has the argument for the theory 

 become that its toxic properties require no antidotes to be 

 administered by the doctors of the law. But this is mere 

 digression. 



Karl von Savigny, the celebrated German jurist, truly 

 says that a People is a natural unit as contrasted with a State 

 which is an artificial unit (2); but when he proceeds to declare 

 that the natural unit never exists in history without its bodily 

 form the State, he forgets the distinction drawn in this behalf 

 by Aristotle (3) who instances the Arcadians as constituting an 

 ethnos nwlW they founded a City, and so became 2. polis^ a com- 

 munity in the law (4). So far from a given People and the 

 State being co-extensive we know that some European States 

 — Austria and Russia for instance — embrace several Peoples, 

 the former including Germanic, Slavic, and Magyar races, and 



(1) See Bagehot: Eng. Con. p. 31. 



(2) Savigny : System, i. p. 22^ 



(3) Pol. ii, 2, 3. 



(4) Strange to say the conception of a State in the mind of the average statesman 

 of ancient Hellas never got beyond the limitations of a Citj'. Plato, however, de- 

 clares in the Republic that the State may grow to the extent of its possibilities for 

 unity. 



