The foregoing criticism of democracy, defined as popular government, may have much practical importance; but there are objections to it on the score of logic.  It is not a criticism of a certain conception of democracy, so much as of democracy itself.  Ultimate responsibility for the government of a community must reside somewhere.  If the single monarch is practically dethroned, as he is by these liberal critics of democracy, some Sovereign power must be provided to take his place.  In England Parliament, by means of a steady encroachment on the royal prerogatives, has gradually become Sovereign; but other countries, such as France and the United States, which have wholly dispensed with royalty, cannot, even if they would, make a legislative body Sovereign by the simple process of allowing it to usurp power once enjoyed by the Crown.  France did, indeed, after it had finally dispensed with Legitimacy, make two attempts to found governments in which the theory of popular Sovereignty was evaded.  The Orleans monarchy, for instance, through the mouths of its friends, denied Sovereignty to the people, without being able to claim it for the King; and this insecurity of its legal framework was an indirect cause of a violent explosion of effective popular Sovereignty in 1848.  The apologists for the Second Empire admitted the theory of a Sovereign people, but claimed that the Sovereign power could be safely and efficiently used only in case it were delegated to one Napoleon III—­a view the correctness of which the results of the Imperial policy eventually tended to damage.  There is in point of fact no logical escape from a theory of popular Sovereignty—­once the theory of divinely appointed royal Sovereignty is rejected.  An escape can be made, of course, as in England, by means of a compromise and a legal fiction; and such an escape can be fully justified from the English national point of view; but countries which have rejected the royal and aristocratic tradition are forbidden this means of escape—­if escape it is.  They are obliged to admit the doctrine of popular Sovereignty.  They are obliged to proclaim a theory of unlimited popular powers.

To be sure, a democracy may impose rules of action upon itself—­as the American democracy did in accepting the Federal Constitution.  But in adopting the Federal Constitution the American people did not abandon either its responsibilities or rights as Sovereign.  Difficult as it may be to escape from the legal framework defined in the Constitution, that body of law in theory remains merely an instrument which was made for the people and which if necessary can and will be modified.  A people, to whom was denied the ultimate responsibility for its welfare, would not have obtained the prime condition of genuine liberty.  Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny; and I do not see how the existence of such an ultimate popular political