As Pollock has put it in his _Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics_: According to Rousseau “every man gives up himself and his individual rights as fully as in Hobbes’ covenant. But the surrender is to the whole society, not to a sovereign. The government is not the sovereign, but a mediator between the community in its corporate capacity and its individual members as subjects.” In his _History of the Theory of Sovereignty since Rousseau_, Merriam has traced the development of the doctrine into our own times. The conclusion at which he arrives for our own day is that “those who adhere to the sovereignty of the general will or of public opinion, sentiment, reason, do not mean that this sovereign is at any given moment organized to express the will of the State; they mean that it is to be obeyed, not immediately but ultimately.” Modern theory therefore has come back to the position of Cicero and the Roman jurists, although, as Bryce has said in his _Modern Democracies_, the acceptance and development of the doctrine of popular sovereignty by Rome, “was due to the pressure of actual grievances far more than to any theories regarding the nature of government and the claims of the people.” Before leaving the subject of popular sovereignty it is worth while noticing the limitations under which it is exercised even in a pure democracy and the transformation which a democracy inevitably undergoes. On the first point, if we recall the history of the Roman Republic which has been sketched in the preceding chapter, we shall feel that, although Bryce is speaking of modern democracies, no more accurate description can be given of the limitations which hemmed in the Roman democracy than is to be found in his statement that “popular powers are in practice more frequently negative or deterrent than positive. The people can more readily reject a course proposed to them than themselves suggest a better course.” Equally applicable to the history of the patriciate, the senatorial oligarchy, and the plutocracy under the Republic is his remark, drawn from a study of modern conditions, that “nature is always tending to throw power into the hands of the Few, and the Few always tend by a like natural process to solidify into a Class, as the vapours rising from the earth gather into clouds. Fortunately the Class, by a like process, is always tending to dissolve.... Thus Free Government cannot but be, and has in reality always been, an Oligarchy within a Democracy.”