Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of Fraternity.  If the whole structure of society rests on an act of partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be, if the members of the union had only entered it to place their liberties at the feet of some superior power.  Society in the one case is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social brotherhood.  This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic.  The same idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.  Rousseau’s conception went no further than political association, as distinct from subjection.  Socialism, which came by and by to the front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond.  Men had entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour in all its aspects.  This naturally included the most important of all, material production.  They were not associated merely as equal participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by united action.  Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere of industrial force.

It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term belongs to the same source.  All the associates of this act of union, becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was Rousseau’s sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of sacramental stamp.  It came naturally to him, because it was the name of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were eligible to the chief magistracies.

3.  We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes of sovereignty.  It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.

These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by Austin.  When Hobbes says that “to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,”