Let us begin with an accepted definition of sovereignty. It is both decent and convenient to take that of Austin, that celebrated definition which he received through Bentham from Hobbes. Austin conceived a sovereign very concretely, as a person or body of persons existing in an independent political society and accorded the habitual obedience of the bulk of the members of that society, while itself subordinate to no political superior. Law he defined to be the explicit or implicit command of such a person or body of persons, addressed to the members of the community, its inferiors or subjects. He took it for granted that in every independent community supreme political authority did actually vest in some such determinate sovereign person or body of persons. By the very term used to describe it, moreover, this sovereignty is supremacy--is subject to no limitation. Every law is a command, not only, but the command of a supreme authority; and it would be a singular contradiction in terms to speak of this supreme power as limited by law. How can the supreme author of law within a state himself be subject to law: how can the creature bind the creator? How can one refrain from smiling at the logical incapacity of those who speak of limitations to sovereignty, or, more absurdly still, of divisions of sovereignty? Is there a hierarchy of supremacies: can there be a co-ordination of creators? Austin had studied in Bonn while it was the residence of such men as Niebuhr, Schlegel, Arndt, Welcher, Mackeldey, and Heffter, and at a period when controversy touching some of the fundamental questions concerning the province and method of jurisprudence was in its keen youth. His thought was mature, indeed, before he went abroad, and nature had very imperatively commanded of what sort that thought should be by giving him a mind framed for abstract conception and sharp logical processes; but contact with German thinking contributed many important elements to his mental equipment. Thibaut became scarcely less his master than Bentham. It was inevitable that it should be Thibaut rather than Savigny. Savigny believed that all law was rooted in old habit, and that legislation could modify law successfully and beneficially only by consenting to the secondary _rôle_ of supplementing, formulating, or at most guiding custom. He was at weapons drawn with the school of Thibaut, which proposed to lay legislative hands on the entire body of German law, make a code which should be common to all the German States, and so help to make Germany a national unit. To attempt thus to systematize law, where by natural development it was unsystematic, seemed to Savigny a deliberate effort to render it artificial. Law, he maintained, did not often grow into a logical system, but was the product of daily accretions of habit and sluggish formations of thought, which followed no system of philosophy. It was not the business of legal science to force it