There is no unlimited power, except the sum of all powers. Our legal theorists have sought unlimited sovereignty by a process of summation; have made it consist in the combined forces of the community. Sovereignty, if it be a definite and separable thing at all, is not unlimited power; is not identical with the powers of the community. It is not the general vitality of the organism, but the specific originative power of certain organs. Sovereigns have always been subject in greater or less degree to the community; have always been organs of the State; have never been the State itself. But they have been sovereigns none the less; they, and not the community over which they presided. It is necessary, if there is to be any clear thinking at all upon this subject, to distinguish very sharply two radically different things; namely, the powers and processes of governing, on the one hand, from the relations of the people to those powers and processes, on the other. Those relations are relations of assent and obedience; and the degree of assent and obedience marks in every case the limits, that is, the sphere, of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the daily operative power of framing and giving efficacy to laws. It is the originative, directive, governing power. It lives; it plans; it executes. It is the organic origination by the State of its law and policy; and the sovereign power is the highest originative organ of the State. It is none the less sovereign because it must be observant of the preferences of those whom it governs. The obedience of the subject has always limited the power of the sovereign. “The Eastern politicians never do anything,” says Burke, “without the opinion of the astrologers on the fortunate moment.... Statesmen of a more judicious prescience look for the fortunate moment too; but they seek it, not in the conjunctions and oppositions of planets, but in the conjunctions and oppositions of men and things.” This is the covert admission of the Austinian definition itself: the sovereign power is that to which “the bulk of the community _is habitually obedient_.” When we discuss, with Mr. Sidgwick, the influences which tell upon the action of the originative organs of the State, we are not discussing sovereignty, but the natural and universal limitations of sovereignty, the structural checks and balances of the organism. There is no hope for theory if we neglect these obvious distinctions.