We have assigned two reasons for the failure of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to result in the triumph of personal liberty in France; namely, the undue emphasis put upon actual equality, and the identification of sovereignty with liberty. A third cause of this failure deserves attention. Though the Declaration contains a clause stating that every society in which a guarantee of rights and a separation of the powers of government is wanting, lacks a true constitution, yet the French people neglected to provide for such a guarantee as well as for the separation of the three departments of government. This separation is also lacking in the British constitution, and among any other people but the English, the omnipotence of Parliament might prove disastrous to personal freedom. But in England the force of custom and the respect of personal liberty are such, that they really act as restraints upon Parliament. In the American system of government it is by means of a territorial diffusion of sovereignty among the States and the national government; by means also of our system of "checks and balances"; and especially by the importance of our courts, that the sovereignty of the people is with us restrained and the individual protected in the enjoyment of his rights, not only against the infringement of these rights by other individuals, but also by the government.1 In France safeguards of this sort were, and are still, entirely lacking. Sovereignty there is concentrated; no system of courts exists to protect the individual from the government. In the administrative courts the government, not the individual, is favored. In the absence of a tribunal whose function it is to interpret

1 See the excellent essay of A. L. Lowell on "Democracy and Liberty" in his Essays on Government.

and apply the doctrines of the Declaration of Rights, that function must be exercised either by the administration itself, which would result in despotism, or else the people themselves would interpret the Declaration, in which case mob rule would be the consequence. Both of these eventualities have occurred in France, both have contributed toward rendering liberty nugatory. That which still further fostered the tendency toward direct government by the mob, was the pernicious view of popular sovereignty which Rousseau inculcated. the general will is but the sum of the individual wills; if this general will, strictly speaking, cannot be delegated, it follows that the people have a direct share in the government, that the legislators and magistrates are on the same level with the people, that the people have the right to see that their will is carried out; mob rule thus received a philosophical foundation. Hereby the respect for law and authority was still further undermined and the pernicious influence of the revolutionary spirit, which has worked such havoc in France, still further aggravated. Seeking liberty, the French people conferred sovereignty upon Napoleon, the Bourbons, Louis Philippe, Napoleon III., only to find that they had, in every case, been deluded.1 The French have yet to learn that it is not paper constitutions which form the basis of liberty, but that liberty must have its foundations in the customs of the people, and above all, in that reverence for law and order, without which liberty can never exist.

The Principles of 1789 are not yet dead in France. The influence of those ideas, which has been so wonder

1 See Laboulaye, Histoire des États-Unis, III., Intr. pp. vii., viii.; Laurent, Études sur l'histoire de l'humanité, La Révolution Française, I. p. 103 et seq.

ful in the past, is destined still to increase, not only in that country, but throughout the world. These principles are the basis of modern liberty. This liberty, the fruit of a struggle between people and their rulers which had been carried on for centuries, will not be forsaken. History shows, as Buckle points out, that there is "an intimate connexion between knowledge and liberty; between an increasing civilization and an advancing democracy."

Those who hold that public expediency determines the measure of individual rights, believe in a principle which no sound thinker will doubt. If the alternative were between the good of the whole State and the good of an individual, it would be foolish to deny that the good of the whole is of greater significance than that of an infinitesimally small part of the whole. But this alternative does not arise. There is at present a tendency, now that the organic conception of the State is universally accepted, to forget that the State consists of individuals and has no interest apart from theirs. Many persons who are continually speaking of public expediency forget that what we hold to be for the good of the whole may after all be only our own individual view of public expediency. It was in the interests of public expediency, falsely understood, that censorships, the inquisition, repressive measures of all sorts, were established. It was avowedly for the public good that Socrates was put to death; that the Puritans were driven from England; that the Huguenots were oppressed; that Robespierre and his consorts sent thousands to the guillotine; that the English government, during the French Revolution, adopted that wretched

1 Buckle, Hist. of Civilization in England, I. p. 438.

system of repression which brought the country to the verge of civil war. There can be no hostility between personal liberty and public expediency, rightly understood.

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