When it came to pointing out the body of persons with which sovereignty was lodged in particular states of complex constitutional structure, Austin was sometimes very unsatisfactory. Sovereignty is lodged in England, he says, in the king, the peers, and--_not_ the House of Commons, but--the electorate. For he holds the House of Commons to be merely a trustee of the electors, notwithstanding the fact that the electors exercise their right of franchise under laws which Parliament itself enacted and may change. In the United States he “believes” it to be lodged “in the States’ governments, as forming an aggregate body;” and he explains that by the government of a State he does not mean its “ordinary legislature, but the body of its citizens which appoints its ordinary legislature, and which, the Union apart, is properly sovereign therein.” Apparently he is led thus to go back of the House of Commons and the legislatures of our States to the electorates by which they are chosen, because of his conception of sovereignty as _unlimited_. If he stopped short of the electors, some part of his sovereign body would be subject to political superiors. If he were to go beyond the electors, to the larger body of the people--to the women and the children and the men who cannot vote--he would come upon, not a “determinate,” but an indeterminate body of persons. Our own writers, however, having made bold to embrace the dogma of popular sovereignty with a certain fervor of patriotism, have no hesitation about taking the additional step. They maintain, with Lieber, that “according to the views of free men,” sovereignty “can dwell with society, the nation, only.” Writers like the late Judge Jameson, of Chicago, declare that they have very definite ideas of what this means. They think that Mr. Bryce expounded the doctrine when he wrote his chapter on “Government by Public Opinion.” “When the true sovereign has spoken,” says Judge Jameson, “at public meetings, by the press, or by personal argument or solicitation, the electorate, when it acts, either registers the behests of the people or ceases betimes further to represent them.” “The pressure of public opinion consciously brought to bear upon the electorate,” he declares to be, even when “inarticulate” (whatever inarticulate pressure may be), “a clear and legitimate exercise of sovereign power;” and he thinks that Mr. Herbert Spencer meant the same thing when he declared that “that which, from hour to hour, in every country, governed despotically or otherwise, produces the obedience making political action possible, is the accumulated and organized sentiment felt towards inherited institutions made sacred by tradition,” inasmuch as Mr. Spencer proceeds to say with all plainness, “Hence it is undeniable that, taken in its widest acceptation, the feeling of the community is the sole source of political power; in those communities, at least, which are not under foreign domination.