How can we be free and yet subject to the laws? The laws are the register of our own will. (_Ib_.) Laws, in short, are properly those general 'conditions of civil association' which the associates impose on themselves. Where either of the specified conditions is lacking, where either it is not the universal will from which an ordinance proceeds or it is not the whole people to which it relates, it is not a law but a decree, not an act of sovereignty but of magistracy. (_Ib_.) 71. This leads to a consideration of the nature and institution of magistracy or government. (III, i.) The government is never the same as the sovereign. The two are distinguished by their functions, that of the one being legislative, that of the other executive. Even where the people itself governs, its acts of government must be distinguished from its acts of sovereignty, the former having a particular, the latter a general, reference. Government is the exercise according to law of the executive power, and the 'prince' or 'magistrate' is the man or body of men charged with this administration; 'a body intermediary between the subjects and the sovereign, charged with the execution of the laws, and with the maintenance of civil and political freedom' (_Ib_.) Where all or most of the citizens are magistrates, or charged with the supreme functions of government, we have a democracy; where a few, an aristocracy; where one is so charged, a monarchy. (III, iii.) The differences depend, not as Hobbes and others had supposed, on the quarter where the sovereignty resides--for it must always reside in the whole body of people--but on that in which government resides. The idea of government is that the dominant will of the prince should be the general will or law, that it should be simply the public force by which that general will is brought to bear on individuals or against other states, serving the same purpose in the state as the union of soul and body in the individual (III, i.); and this idea is most likely to be satisfied under a democracy. There, the general will (if there _is_ a general will, which the democracy is no guarantee for there being, according to Rousseau's distinction between the 'volonté générale' and 'volonté de tous,' of which more hereafter) cannot fail to coincide with the dominant will of the government. The prevalence of particular interests may prevent there being a will at all of the kind which Rousseau would count general or truly sovereign, but they cannot be more prevalent in the magistracy, constituted by the whole people, than in the same people acting in the way of legislation. In a democracy, therefore, the will of the sovereign, so far as there is a sovereign in the proper sense, necessarily finds expression in the will of the magistracy. On the other hand, though under either of the other forms of government there is danger of collision between sovereign and government, yet the force of the government is greater than in a democracy. It is