One may read in learned and pretentious political works that the ultimate basis of a State is force--the army--which is the means by which the State's authority is maintained. But who compels the army to carry out the State's orders rather than its own will or the personal will of its commander? _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ The following passage from an address delivered by the present writer in America may perhaps help to make the point clear:-- 'When, after the counting of the votes, you ask Mr Wilson to step down from the President's chair, how do you know he will get down? I repeat, How do you know he will get down? You think that a foolish and fantastic question? But, in a great many interesting American republics, Mexico, Venezuela, or Hayti, he would not get down! You say, "Oh, the army would turn him out." I beg your pardon. It is Mr Wilson who commands the army; it is not the army that commands Mr Wilson. Again, in many American republics a President who can depend on his army, when asked to get out of the Presidency, would reply almost as a matter of course, "Why should I get down when I have an army that stands by me?" 'How do we know that Mr Wilson, able, we will assume, to count on his army, or, if you prefer, some President particularly popular with the army, will not do that? Is it physical force which prevents it? If so, whose? You may say: "If he did that, he knows that the country would raise an army of rebellion to turn him out." Well, suppose it did? You raise this army, as they would in Mexico, or Venezuela, and the army turns him out. And your man gets into the Presidential chair, and then, when you think he has stolen enough, you vote _him_ down. He would do precisely the same thing. He would say: "My dear people, as very great philosophers tell you, the State is Force, and as a great French monarch once said. 'I am the State.' _J'y suis, j'y reste._". And then you would have to get another army of rebellion to turn _him_ out--just as they do in Mexico, Venezuela, Hayti, or Honduras.' There, then, is the crux of the matter. Every constitution at times breaks down. But if that fact were a conclusive argument for the anarchical arming of each man against the other as preferable to a police enforcing law, there could be no human society. The object of constitutional machinery for change is to make civil war unnecessary.