At all times and under all systems there have been two sets of phenomena visible in government: the phenomena of command and the phenomena of obedience, the phenomena of governing and the phenomena of being governed. Obedience, moreover, is not always an automatic or unconscious thing. It is a submission of the will--an acquiescence which is either the product of choice, of necessity, or of habit. This has been observed from the first; was observed by Bodin, from whom we get our word sovereignty, and much of our conception of the thing, sovereignty. He perceived that the supremacy of the sovereign--even of the mediæval French sovereign before his eyes--was in fact limited, the frontiers of sovereignty being marked by certain antecedent rights, by divers established prerogatives of property and vested privilege--not a scientific, but a natural frontier, lying along the old mountains of habit, the well-known rivers of precedent. We know that the history of politics has been the history of liberty; a history of the enlargement of the sphere of independent individual action at the expense of the sphere of dictatorial authority. It has revealed a process of differentiation. Certain freedoms of opinion and utterance, of choice of occupation and of allegiance, of fair trial and equitable condemnation, have been blocked out as inviolable territories, lying quite beyond the jurisdiction of political sovereignty. Beginning with that singular and interesting order of the classical states of the ancient world, under which the individual was merged in the community and liberty became identical with a share in the exercise of the public power, we witness something like a gradual disintegration, a resolution of the State into its constituent elements, until at length those who govern and those who are governed are no longer one and the same, but stand face to face treating with one another, agreeing upon terms of command and obedience, as at Runnymede. Conditions of submission have been contested, and, as liberty has gained upon authority, have been jealously formulated. The procedure and the prerogatives of authority have been agreed upon; liberty has encroached upon sovereignty and set bounds to it. The process is old; only some of its results are new. What both political philosophers and political revolutionists have sought for time out of mind has been a final definition for that part of the Austinian conception which concerns the _habitual obedience_ of the community. These definitions, in their practical shape as institutions, we now call constitutions. At last peoples have become conscious of their relations to the highest powers of the State, and have sought to give permanence and certainty to those relations by setting the conditions of their subordination fast in stubborn practices or in the solemn covenants of written documents. A constitution government has always had; but not until this latest age these deliberate formulations of