rights; and that if it is other than this, if it is a representative and maintainer of rights, its existence presupposes rights, which remain to be accounted for. As previously shown, Hobbes, while professing to make all rights dependent on the sovereign power, presupposes rights in his account of the institution of this power. The validity of contracts 'begins not but with its institution,' yet its own right is derived from an irrevocable contract of all with all in which each devolves his 'persona,' the body of his rights, upon it. Without pressing his particular forms of expression unfairly against him, it is clear that he could not really succeed in thinking of rights as derived simply from supreme force; that he could not associate the idea of absolute right with the sovereign without supposing prior rights which it was made the business of the sovereign to enforce, and in particular such a recognised distinction between 'meum' and 'tuum' as is necessary to a covenant. Nor when we have dropped Hobbes' notion of government or law-making power, as having originated in a covenant of all with all, shall we succeed any better in deriving rights of property, any more than other rights, from law or a sovereign which makes law, unless we regard the law or sovereign as the organ or sustainer of a general social recognition of certain powers, as powers which should be exercised. [1] Grotius, _De Jure, etc_. Book II, chap. ii. Sect. 5. 'Simul discimus quomodo res in proprietatem iverint ... pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem: simul atque enim communio displicuit, nec instituta est divisio, censeri debet inter omnes convenisse ut, quod quisque occupasset, id proprium haberet.' But he supposes a previous process by which things had been appropriated (Sect. 4), owing to the necessity of spending labour on them in order to satisfy desire for a more refined kind of living than could be supplied by spontaneous products of the earth. 'Hinc discimus quae fuerit causa, ob quam a primaeva communione rerum primo mobilium, deinde et immobilium discessum est: nimirum quod non contenti homines vesci sponte natis, antra habitare ... vitae genus exquisitius delegissent, industria opus fuit, quam singuli rebus singulis adhiberent.' ... The 'communio rerum,' thus departed from when labour came to be expended on things, Grotius had previously described (Sect. 1) as a state of things in which everyone had a right to whatever he could lay hands on. 'Erant omnia communia et indivisa omnibus, veluti unum cunctis patrimonium esset. Hinc factum ut statim quisque hominum ad suos usus arripere posset quod vellet, et quae consumi poterant consumere, ac talis usus universalis juris erat tum vice proprietatis. Nam quod quisque sic arripuerat, id ei eripere alter nisi per injuriam non poterat.' Here then a virtual right of property, though not so called, seems to be supposed in