102. (1) As to cases where the legal authority of the supposed command is doubtful. In modern states the definition of sovereignty,--the determination of the person or persons with whom the supreme power of making and enforcing law legally resides,--has only been arrived at by a slow process. The European monarchies have mostly arisen out of the gradual conversion of feudal superiority into sovereignty in the strict sense. Great states, such as Germany and Italy, have been formed by the combination of independent or semi-dependent states. In England the unity of the state goes back much further than anywhere else, but in England it was but gradually that the residence of sovereignty jointly in king, lords, and commons came to be practically established, and it is still founded merely on a customary law. In the United States, with a written constitution, it required all Austin's subtlety to detect where sovereignty lay, and he places it where probably no ordinary citizen of the United States had ever thought of it as residing, viz. 'in the states' governments as forming one aggregate body: meaning by a state's government, not its ordinary legislature, but the body of citizens which appoints its ordinary legislature, and which, the union apart, is properly sovereign therein.' He bases this view on the provision in the constitution, according to which amendments to it are only valid 'when ratified by the legislature in three-fourths of the several states, or by convention in three-fourths thereof.' (I, p. 268.) But no ordinary citizen of the United States probably ever thought of sovereignty except as residing either in the government of his state or in the federal government consisting of congress and president, or sometimes in one way, sometimes in the other. In other countries, e.g. France, where since Louis XIV the quarter in which sovereignty resides has at any given time been easily assignable, there have since the revolution been such frequent changes in the ostensible sovereign that there might almost at any time have been a case for doubting whether the ostensible sovereign had such command over the habitual obedience of the people as to be a sovereign in that sense in which there is a social duty to obey the sovereign, as the representative of the common interest in social order; whether some prior sovereignty was not really still in force. For these various reasons there have been occasions in the history of all modern states at which men, or bodies of men, without the conscious assertion of any right not founded upon law, might naturally deem themselves entitled to resist an authority which on its part claimed a right--a legally established power--to enforce obedience, and turned out actually to possess the power of doing so.