The other system, that of free government, of a public power and force, was likewise out of the question; it never could have taken root in the midst of feudalism. This was owing to a very simple cause. When we speak at the present day of a public power, and of what we call the rights of sovereignty--namely, the rights of legislation, of taxation, and of punishment--we know and feel that they appertain not to any individual, and that no person has a prerogative, derived from himself alone, to punish others, or to impose upon them a burden or a law. These are privileges which are only vested in society as a mass, exercised in its name, and held not from itself, but imparted from a higher influence. So when an individual is arraigned before a power invested with these rights, he is irresistibly, and perhaps unwittingly, impressed with the feeling, that he is at the bar of a public and legitimate tribunal, which holds a mission to command over him, to which he yields a mental and immediate submission. Now, in the feudal system, on the contrary, the holder of a fief was invested with all the rights of sovereignty in his domain, and over the people inhabiting it; they were inherent to the domain, and matter of private property--so much so, that the prerogatives now recognised as public were then private, and the public powers were equally appropriated. {83} When the possessor of a fief, in the habit of exercising sovereignty, in his own name, and by right of property, over all the population amongst which he lived, attended an assembly or parliament held by his suzerain--a parliament generally scanty in numbers, and composed of his equals, or those who were nearly so--he carried neither to it nor from it the idea of a public power. Such an idea was in contradiction to his whole existence, and to all that he was accustomed to do in the interior of his domains. He saw in that assembly only men invested with the same rights as himself, in the same situation as he was, and acting, like him, by virtue of personal will. Nothing led or compelled him to acknowledge in the most elevated portion of the government, or in the institutions now known as public, that superior and general character inherent in the idea that we entertain of political powers. And if he were dissatisfied with the decision, he refused to concur in it, or appealed to force to resist it. In reality, force was the true and habitual guarantee of rights in the feudal system, if it be permitted to call force a guarantee. The only means of inducing acknowledgment and respect to rights was an incessant recurrence to force. No institution availed; and so perfectly was this felt, that institutions ceased to be invoked. If the seignorial courts and feudal parliaments had been conditioned to act, they would have been much more energetic and frequent than history represents them: their rarity proves their uselessness.