Ten, and could do nothing more than designate the Monarch or the
Council. Under such a restriction the Cardinals elect the Pope. But
our electors can institute any polity they see fit. They are a
Constituent Assembly. They may fix upon a monarchy or a republic, two
or one legislative chambers, a wide or a narrow franchise, home rule
or centralization: or they may erect a Provisional Government for five
years with another appeal to the people at the end of that term. More
than that. They could impose a protective duty upon corn, or endow the
Roman Catholic religion, making such protection or endowment a
fundamental law (s. iv., n. 8, p. 323), and withholding from the
government, which they proceed to set up, the power of meddling with
that law. They are then not only a Constituent but likewise a
Legislative Assembly. But this power of making laws and moulding the
future constitution of the State, what else is it but sovereign power,
and indeed the very highest manifestation of sovereignty?

3. So far we follow Suarez in his controversy with James I. The
_natural_ order of evolution certainly is, that the State should be
conceived in pure democracy, and thence develop into other polities.
But in speaking as though the natural order had always been the
_actual_ order, Suarez seems to have been betrayed by the ardour of
controversy into the use of incorrect expressions. It is true in the
abstract, as he says, that "no natural reason can be alleged why
sovereignty should be fixed upon one person, or one set of persons,
rather than upon another, short of the whole community." This is true,
inasmuch as in the abstract we view men as men, in which specific
character they are all equal. But in the concrete and real life, the
primeval citizens who start a commonwealth are rarely alike and equal,
as the founders of the American Republic at the separation from Great
Britain pretty well were, but some men, or some order of men, will so