In what way, then, are the terms of this fundamental compact to be known? No one now maintains the old view that the transition from the ‘natural’ to the ‘political’ state actually took place by means of an “original contract,” which conferred indelible legitimacy on some particular form of social organisation. Shall we say, then, that a man by remaining a member of a community enters into a ‘tacit undertaking’ to obey the laws and other commands imposed by the authority generally recognised as lawful in that community? In this way however the Ideal lapses into the Customary: and the most unlimited despotism, if established and traditional, might claim to rest on free consent as well as any other form of government: so that the principle of abstract Freedom would lead to the justification of the most unqualified concrete tyranny and servitude; and thus our theory would end by riveting men’s chains under pretence of exalting their freedom. If to avoid this result, we suppose that certain ‘Natural Rights’ are inalienable--or tacitly reserved in the tacit compact--and that laws are not strictly legitimate which deprive a man of these, we are again met by the difficulty of deducing these inalienable rights from any clear and generally accepted principles. For instance, as we have seen, a widely accepted opinion is that all such rights may be summed up in the notion of Freedom; but we have also seen that this principle is ambiguous, and especially that the right of private property as commonly recognised cannot be clearly deduced from it; and if so it would certainly be most paradoxical to maintain that no government can legitimately claim obedience for any commands except such as carry out the principle of protecting from interference the Freedom of the individuals governed. It has been thought that we can avoid this difficulty by constituting the supreme organ of government so that any law laid down by it will always be a law to which every person called on to obey it will have consented personally or by his representatives: and that a government so constituted, in which--to adopt Rousseau’s phrase--every one “obeys himself alone,” will completely reconcile freedom and order. But how is this result to be attained? Rousseau held that it could be attained by pure direct democracy, each individual subordinating his private will to the “general will” of the sovereign people of which all are equally members. But this “general will” must be practically the will of the majority: and it is paradoxical to affirm that the freedom and natural rights of a dissentient minority are effectively protected by establishing the condition that the oppressors must exceed the oppressed in number. Again, if the principle be absolute it ought to apply to all human beings alike: and if to avoid this absurdity we exclude children, an arbitrary line has to be drawn: and the exclusion of women, which even those who regard the