78. The first remark upon it which suggests itself is that, as Rousseau puts the matter, there may be an independent political society in which there is no sovereign power at all, or in which, at any rate, it is not exercised. The sovereign is the general will. But the general will can only be exercised through the assembly of a whole people. The necessary conditions of its exercise, then, in Rousseau's time, were only fulfilled in the Swiss cantons and (perhaps) in the United Provinces. In England they were fulfilled in a way during the time of a general election. But even where these conditions were fulfilled, it did not follow that the general will was put in force. It might be overpowered, as in the Roman comitia, by particular interests. Is it then to be understood that, according to Rousseau, either there can be independent states without any sovereignty in actual exercise, or that the European states of his time, and equally the great states of the present day (for in none of these is there any more exercise of the general will than in the England of his time), are not properly states at all? 79. We may try to answer this question by distinguishing sovereign _de facto_ from sovereign _de jure_, and saying that what Rousseau meant was that the general will, as defined by him and as exercised under the conditions which he prescribes, was the only sovereign _de jure_, but that he would have recognised in the ordinary states of his time a sovereign _de facto_; and that in the same way, when he describes the institution of government as arising out of a twofold act consequent on the original pact (an act in which the sovereign people first decides that there shall be a government, and then, not as a sovereign people, but as a democratic magistracy, decides in what hands the government shall be placed), he does not conceive himself to be describing what has actually taken place, but what is necessary to give a government a moral title to obedience. Whether Rousseau himself had this distinction in view is not always clear. At the outset he states his object thus: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in fetters. How has this change come about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? That is a question which I deem myself able to answer.' (I, i.) The answer is the account of the establishment of a sovereign by social pact. It might be inferred from this that he considered himself in the sequel to be delineating transactions to the actual occurrence of which he did not commit himself, but which, if they did occur, would constitute a duty as distinct from a physical necessity of submission on the part of subjects to a sovereign, and to which some equivalent must be supposed, in the shape of a tacit present convention on the part of the members of a state, if their submission is to be matter of duty as distinct from physical necessity, or is to be explained as a matter of right by the ostensible sovereign. This, however, would