merely be an inference as to his meaning. His actual procedure is to describe transactions, by which the sovereignty of the general will was established, and by which it in turn established a government, as if they had actually taken place. Nor is he content with supposing a tacit consent of the people as rendering subjection legitimate. The people whose submission to law is to be 'legitimate' must actually take part in sovereign legislative assemblies. It is very rarely that he uses language which implies the possibility of a sovereign power otherwise constituted. He does indeed speak [1] of the possibility of a prince (in the special meaning of the term, as representing the head of the executive) usurping sovereignty, and speaks of the sovereignty thus usurped as existing _de facto_, not _de jure_; but in no other connection (so far as I have observed) does he speak of anything short of the 'volonté générale' exercised through the vote of an assembled people as sovereign at all. And the whole drift of his doctrine is to show that no sovereign, otherwise constituted, had any claim on obedience. There was no state in Europe at his time in which his doctrine would not have justified rebellion, and even under existing representative systems the conditions are not fulfilled which according to him are necessary to give laws the claim on our obedience which arises from their being an expression of the general will. The only system under which these conditions could be fulfilled would be one of federated self-governing communes, small enough to allow each member an active share in the legislation of the commune. It is probably the influence of Rousseau that has made such a system the ideal of political enthusiasts in France. [1] 'If it happened that the prince had a private will more active than that of the sovereign, and that he made use of the public force placed in his hands as the instrument of this private will, there would result, so to speak, two sovereignties, one _de jure_, the other _de facto_; but from that moment the social union would disappear, and the body politic would be dissolved.' (III, i.) 'When the prince ceases to administer the state according to the laws, and usurps the sovereign power ... then the state in the larger sense is dissolved, and there is formed another within it, composed only of the members of the government ... the social pact is broken ... and all the ordinary citizens return as a matter of right to their state of natural liberty, and are merely forced, but not obliged, to obey.' (III, X.) F. _SOVEREIGNTY AND THE GENERAL WILL._ Rousseau and Austin.