The state had to contend, however, with more subtle and serious attacks. This great Leviathan, as Hobbes called it, was not at first a popular institution; and it frightened many people. The American colonists, for instance, thought that its absolute sovereignty was too dangerous a thing to be left loose, and they put sovereignty under a triple lock and key, giving one to the judicature, one to the legislature, and a third to the executive. Only by the co-operation of these three keepers can the American people loose their sovereignty and use it to amend their constitution; and so jealously is sovereignty confined that anarchy often seems to reign in its stead. There was, indeed, some excuse for distrusting a sovereignty claimed by George III and the unreformed British parliament; and it was natural enough that people should deny its necessity and set up in its place Declarations of the Rights of Man. Sovereignty of Hobbes's type was a somewhat novel conception; men had not grasped its possibilities as an engine of popular will, because they were only familiar with its exploitation by kings and oligarchs; and so closely did they identify the thing with its abuses that they preferred to do without it altogether, or at least to confine it to the narrowest possible limits. Government and the people were antagonistic: the less government there was, the less harm would be done to the people, and so a general body of individualistic, _laissez-faire_ theory developed, which was expressed in various Declarations of the Rights of Man, and set up against the "paternal despotism" of the eighteenth century. These Rights of Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in possession prefer a policy of _laissez faire_; they are all for Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoever they like with what they are pleased to call their own. But those who have little to call their own, and much that they would like, prefer strong government if they can control it; and the strength of government has steadily grown with popular control. This is due to more than a predatory instinct; it is natural, and excusable enough, that people should be reluctant to maintain what is no affair of theirs; but even staunch Conservatives have been known to pay Radical taxes with comparative cheerfulness when their party has returned to power.