The conception of political sovereignty is one of those interesting portions of doctrine which belong in common to several distinct branches of study. No systematic discussion of any part of the science of politics can advance very far without it; and it is even more indispensable to the student of legal systems than to the student of politics. It is a question central to the life of states and to the validity of law. And it is rendered the more interesting by the fact that it is a critical question, used by all schools alike as a capital test of orthodoxy. No man who cares a whit about his standing among students of law or of politics can afford to approach it lightly. Whatever he says about it he must needs say with a profound sense of responsibility. He must undertake the discussion of it with the same sort of gravity, with the same deep sense of personal risk, that the political economist evinces when he ventures an opinion about Value or hazards a theory of Distribution. When once he has committed himself to an opinion concerning it, he may be sure that with a large and influential number of his fellow-students he can never thereafter pass for a man of undoubted scholarship or unclouded sense. If it is awkward, under such circumstances, that the conception should be so indispensable, it doubtless has the advantage of forcing boldness upon us. If for nothing else than for the sake of a _modus vivendi_, we must out with whatever notion it is that we have accepted or invented with reference to the nature and lodgement of sovereignty. It is, on the whole, safer to be explicit than to hedge. And yet it is not easy to be explicit; for there are no suitable terms to be explicit with. One no sooner begins to examine the field and the matter of controversy than he begins to suspect that it is all a question of terminology. After being hurried in bewilderment through one of Browning’s short poems without being permitted to be quite sure at any point of the full meaning, we are led in our disappointment to wonder, with Mr. Birrell, if it can be the punctuation. In what we read of sovereignty we are led to wonder if it can be the _words_ that confuse us. It must be evident to every one who has not been sophisticated by the terms themselves, or committed beyond retrieval by the controversial use of them, that when, for example, the people of the United States and the Czar of Russia are put together in the same class as sovereigns, language has been forced to a very artificial use, and one term made to cover radically different things. There is clearly a striking contrast between these two sovereigns, in character, in method, and in power. Doubtless an excellent way by which to enter our subject would be through an examination of this difference. But another way is more direct.