which the commands of the sovereign conflict. But even according to this meaning of 'jus,' a sovereign in the strict Austinian sense, that is not so 'de jure,' is in the long run an impossibility. 'Habitual obedience' cannot be secured in the face of such claims. [1] [Above, sec. 80. RLN] 96. But whether or no in any qualified sense of 'sovereign' or 'jus,' a sovereign that is not so 'de jure' is possible, once understand by 'sovereign' the determinate person or persons with whom the ultimate law-imposing and law-enforcing power resides, and by 'jus' law, it is then obviously a contradiction to speak of a sovereign 'de jure' as distinguished from one 'de facto.' The power of the ultimate imponent of law cannot be derived from, or limited by, law. The sovereign may no doubt by a legislative act of its own lay down rules as to the mode in which its power shall be exercised, but if it is sovereign in the sense supposed, it must always be open to it to alter these rules. There can be no illegality in its doing so. In short, in whatever sense 'jus' is derived from the sovereign, in that sense no sovereign can hold his power 'de jure.' So Spinoza held that 'imperium' was 'de jure' indeed, but 'de jure naturali' ('jus naturale' = natural power), which is the same as 'de jure divino'; only powers exercised in subordination to 'imperium' are 'de jure civili.' So Hobbes said that there could be no 'unjust law.' A law was not a law unless enacted by a sovereign, and 'the just' being that to which the sovereign obliges, the sovereign could not enact the unjust, though it might enact the inequitable and the pernicious, the 'inequitable' presumably meaning that which conflicts with a law of nature, the 'pernicious' that which tends to weaken individuals or society. Rousseau retains the same notion of the impeccability of the sovereign, but on different grounds. Every act of the sovereign is according to him 'de jure,' not because all right is derived from a supreme coercive power and the sovereign is that power, but because the sovereign is the general will, which is necessarily a will for the good of all. The enactment of the sovereign could as little, on this view, be 'inequitable' or 'pernicious' as it could be 'unjust.' But this view necessitates a distinction between the sovereign, thus conceived, and the actually supreme power of making and enforcing law as it exists anywhere but in what Rousseau considered a perfect state. Rousseau indeed generally avoids calling this actually supreme power 'sovereign,' though he cannot, as we have seen, altogether avoid it; and since, whatever he liked to call it, the existence of such a power in forms which according to him prevented its equivalence to the general will was almost everywhere a fact, his readers would naturally come to think of the actually supreme power as sovereign 'de facto,' in distinction from something else which was sovereign 'de jure.' And further, under the influence of Rousseau's