other case the extent of delegation actually made; and this difficulty nowise affects the truth that legal Sovereignty is capable of being divided between co-ordinate authorities, or of being from time to time interrupted, or rather overridden, by the action of a power not regularly at work. It will be understood that I am now dealing with Legal Sovereignty only, and not at this stage touching the question of whether, from the point of view of philosophic theory, Sovereignty is capable of division.

Finally, let it be noted that where Sovereignty is divided between two or more authorities, one of those (or possibly even more than one) may have executive functions only. Where there is but one Sovereign Person or Body, that Person or Body will evidently have both legislative and executive powers, i.e. will be entitled to issue special commands as well as to prescribe general rules. But a division of Sovereignty may assign legislative functions to one authority, executive to another. In the United States, for instance, the President is, by the Constitution, Sovereign for certain executive purposes (e.g. the command of the army), and the legislature cannot deprive him of that Sovereignty. If Congress were to pass an Act taking the command of the army from him, that Act would be void. So in England four centuries ago, although Parliament was already beginning to be recognized as sovereign for legislative purposes, the king had, in some departments, an executive sovereignty which the two Houses of Parliament did not dispute; and he laid claim in the time of the first two Stuarts to a sort of concurrent legislative sovereignty, which it required first a civil war and then a revolution finally to negative and extinguish.

So also it has been argued that Legal Sovereignty may be temporary, yet complete while it lasts, as was that of a Roman dictator. The phenomenon is so rare that we need not spend time on discussing it; but there seems to be in principle nothing to prevent absolute

legal control from being duly vested in a person or body of persons for a term which he, or they, cannot extend.

The kind of Sovereignty we have been considering is created by and concerned with law, and law only. It has nothing to do with the actual forces that exist in a State, nor with the question to whom obedience is in fact rendered by the citizens in the last resort. It represents merely the theory of the law, which may or may not coincide with the actual facts of the case, just as the validity of the demonstration of the fifth proposition in the first book of Euclid has nothing to do with the accuracy with which the lines of any actual figure of that proposition are drawn. The triangle in the figure which appears in a particular copy of the book may not have equal sides, nor the angles at the base be equal; this does not affect the soundness of the proof, which assumes the correctness of the figure. So law assumes, and must assume all through, that the machinery required for its enforcement is working in vacuo, steadily, equably, and in a manner capable of overcoming resistance. The actual receiving of obedience is therefore not (as some have argued) the characteristic mark of a Sovereign authority, but is a postulate of the law with regard to each and every of the authorities it recognizes. Penal laws no doubt contemplate transgression, but they assume the power of overcoming it. With the fact that obedience is in any given community rendered imperfectly or not rendered at all, Law as such has nothing to do. In other words, the question of where Legal Supremacy resides is a pure question of Right as defined by law. The Sovereign who exists as of right (de iure) has not necessarily anything to do with the Sovereign who prevails in fact (de facto), though, as we shall see presently, the two conceptions, however distinct scientifically, exercise a significant influence each on the other.

Further the question, Who is Legal Sovereign? stands quite apart from the questions, Why is he Sove

reign? and, Who made him Sovereign? The historical facts which have vested power in any given Sovereign, as well as the moral grounds on which he is entitled to obedience, lie outside the questions with which Law is concerned, and belong to history, or to political philosophy, or to ethics; and nothing but confusion is caused by intruding them into the purely legal questions of the determination of the Sovereign and the definition of his powers. Even the manner in which, or the determination of the persons by whom, the Legal Sovereign is chosen is a matter distinct from the nature and scope of his authority. He is not the less a Sovereign in the contemplation of law because he reigns not by his own. right but by the choice of others, as an elective monarch (like the Romano-Germanic emperor) did, or as an elective assembly does to-day. The appointing body, even if it can in a stated way and at a stated time recall its appointment, is not sovereign over him while his powers last. The fact that the House of Commons, a part of the Legal Sovereign of England, is chosen by the people, and that many members of the House of Lords, another part of the Legal Sovereign, have been appointed by the Crown, does not affect the Sovereignty of Parliament, because neither the people nor the Crown have the right of issuing directions, legally binding, to the persons they have selected.

We have already seen that Legal Sovereignty may be limited or divided. But it is further to be noted that the totality of possible legal sovereignty may, in a given State, not be vested either in one sovereign or in all the sovereign bodies and persons taken together. In other words, there may be some things which by the constitution of the State no authority is competent to do, because those things have been placed altogether out of the reach of legislation. We have already remarked that all the American constitutions, for instance, both State and Federal, forbid the legislature to interfere with the socalled 'primordial rights' of the citizen. There is thus

in the United States no authority invested with legal power, in time of peace, to prohibit public meetings not threatening public order, or to suppress a newspaper. It is true that the people of each State (or of the Union) retain the power to alter their Constitution, but until or unless they do alter it the acting legal Sovereign remains debarred from an important part of the power of Sovereignty. And we may imagine a case in which a Constitution has been enacted with no provision for any legal method of amending it1. In fact, a somewhat similar condition of things exists in all Musulman countries. In Turkey, the Sultan, though Sovereign, is subject to the Sheriat or Sacred Law, which he cannot alter; and which no power exists capable of altering. A good deal may be done in the way of interpretation; and the desired Fetwa or solemnly rendered opinion of the Chief Mufti or Sheik-ul-Islam can generally be obtained by adequate extra-legal pressure on the Sultan's part. But no Sultan would venture to extort, and probably no Mufti to render, a fetwa in the teeth of some sentence of the Koran itself, which, with the Traditions, is the ultimate source of the Sacred Law, binding all Muslims always and everywhere.

III. PRACTICAL SOVEREIGNTY (De Facto).

We may now turn back to the more popular meaning in which the term Sovereignty is used by others than lawyers 2. Even to the ordinary layman it generally seems to convey some sort of notion of legal right, yet it may be, and sometimes has been, used to denote simply the strongest force in the State, whether that force has or has not any recognized legal supremacy.

1 This seems to be the case in Spain. Some of the republics of antiquity professed to have unchangeable laws, but few, if any, of these fully answered to the conception of a Rigid Constitution as we understand it. See Essay III, p. 124. a I pass by the sense in which it is applied to the person of a monarch, whether limited or absolute, as the king is in any country called the Sovereign, because that sense is not liable to be confused with the purely legal sense. A Nominal Sovereign need not be, and often is not, either a Legal or a Practical Sovereign.

This strongest force may be a king, or an assembly, or an oligarchic group controlling a king or an assembly, or an army, or the chief or chiefs of an army. It may be and ought to be the legal sovereign, or it may be quite distinct from the legal sovereign and possess no admitted status in the Constitution. The expression is perhaps most frequent in the phrase 'Sovereign Power,' which carries with it the idea of its being, whether legal or not, at any rate irresistible. We may define this dominant force, whom we may call the Practical Sovereign, as the person (or body of persons) who can make his (or their) will prevail whether with the law or against the law. He (or they) is the de facto ruler, the person to whom obedience is actually paid.

It is better not to say 'the person who compels obedience' or 'the person who commands physical force,' because it may not be under positive compulsion, but in virtue of other sources of power than the command of physical force, that obedience is in fact rendered. Religious influence or moral influence or habit may dispose men not only themselves to obey, but to place their service in making others obey at the disposal of the person to whom such influence belongs. A priest or a prophet may be stronger than the king.

The best instances of the Practical or Actual Sovereign are to be found in communities where legal sovereignty is in dispute or has disappeared. Cromwell when he dissolved the Long Parliament, Napoleon when he overthrew the Directory, the Convention when it offered the Crown of England to William and Mary, the Constituent Assembly in France in 1871 when it made peace with Germany before any regular republican constitution had been adopted for France, were actually Sovereign. Even where a Legal Sovereign exists, there are sometimes particular persons or groups who stand out as able to control the State. However, although Thucydides speaks of Pericles as exercising practical control in Athens, it would be going too far to apply to him or