Under whatever point of view the institution may be regarded, when tested in comparison with sovereign right, it will be found to possess a great external resemblance, naturally calculated to strike the minds of men. Thus, whenever their reflection or their imagination has been turned towards the contemplation or study of the nature of the sovereignty of right and of its essential characteristics, they have inclined towards royalty. As, for instance, in those periods in which religious ideas had predominance, the habitual contemplation of the attributes of God has led mankind to the monarchical system. So, also, when jurisconsults have swayed society, the habit of studying, under the name of law, the nature of the supremacy of right, has been conducive to the dogma of its being personified in royalty. The attentive application of the human intellect to the investigation of the nature and the qualities of rightful sovereignty, when other causes have not interfered to destroy its operation, has invariably given strength and credit to royalty, as portraying its likeness. Furthermore, there are times peculiarly favourable to this personification, times in which individual forces range through the world with all their accidents and caprices, and in which selfishness rules paramountly over individuals from ignorance and brutality, or from corruption of manners. Then society, abandoned to the conflict of personal wills, and unable to constitute by their free concurrence a common and general will capable of rallying and controlling them, passionately longs for a superior to whom all individuals may be compelled to yield obedience; and as soon as any institution presents itself which bears some of the characteristics of rightful supremacy, and holds out to society its legitimate empire, all cling to it with eager haste as fugitives fly to a sanctuary. This is witnessed in the season of the disorganised youth of nations, in times such as we have surveyed. Royalty is admirably adapted for those eras of anarchy in which society longs for constitution and regularity, and cannot accomplish its aspiration by the free concord of individual inclinations. There are other times in which, from a totally different cause, it has the same good quality. How did the Roman world, on the verge of dissolution at the end of the republic, still subsist for nearly fifteen centuries under the name of that empire which, after all, was but a continual decay, a prolonged agony! Royalty alone could have produced such an effect, it alone could have repressed a society which corruption was perpetually tending to destroy. Thus the imperial power bore up for fifteen centuries against the ruin of the Roman world. {159}