that the watch shall go and keep time. A watch that will not keep time
is an unlawful article for him to depend upon, being tantamount to no
watch, whereas he is bound to have a watch. Otherwise, be his watch
large or small, gold, silver, or pinchbeck, all this is indifferent,
so long as it be a reliable timekeeper. In like manner, we must have a
State, we must have a government, and we must have a government that
can govern. Monarchy, aristocracy, parliaments, wide or narrow
franchise, centralisation, decentralisation, any one of these and
countless other forms--apart from the means whereby it is set up--is a
lawful government, where it is a workable one; unlawful, and forbidden
by God and nature, where it cannot work. A form of government that
from its own intrinsic defects could nowhere work, would be everywhere
and always unlawful.

3. You cannot argue from the accomplished fact the lawfulness of the
means whereby it was accomplished. Nor do we say that every form of
government, which succeeds in governing, was originally set up in
justice; nor again that the success of its rule is necessarily due to
the use of just means. The Committee of Public Safety in Paris in 1794
did manage to govern, but it was erected in blood, and it governed by
an unscrupulous disregard of everybody's rights. All that we say is,
that no distribution of civil power as a distribution, or no polity as
a polity (s. iii., n. 5, p. 312), is unlawful, if by it the government
can be carried on. And the reason is plain. For all that nature
requires is that there should be an efficient civil authority, not
that this man should have it, or that one man or other should have it
all, or that a certain class in council assembled should engross it,
or that all the inhabitants of the country should participate in it.
Any one of these arrangements that will work, satisfies the exigency
of nature for civil rule, and is therefore in itself a lawful polity.