naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of its activity.  The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its root not in contract but in force,—­the force of the sovereign to punish disobedience.  A man does not consent to be put to death if he shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no consent in the transaction.  Some person or persons, possessed of sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command valid.

Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?  Rousseau’s answer is this:—­When the law is proposed, the question put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether it is conformable to the general will:  the general will appears from the votes:  if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical sophistry than this.  The proper answer evidently is, that either experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority of votes to decide the law.  In other words, the inconvenience to the minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a separate community.  The minority submit to obey laws which were made against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.  The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more.  In both these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives.  It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct.  Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its possible value.  The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial ground of propositions about