Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/609

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 595

that is, of constitutional governments, and the development of an international life have been contemporaneous, and it is now conclusively evident that the bond of association has been the appeal to the equal or natural man, an appeal which has as once differentiated and organized the life of humanity. Usually we are told that the monarch is limited, because the sovereignty really belongs to his people, but this is not the whole truth. Always there are interests among the people that make them consciously subject to the life of humanity at large, so that a limited monarchy, a constitutional government, is never without positive foreign relations and responsibilities, and this is to say that consti- tutionalism really implies that all men feel themselves the subjects of one political union, as if a universal state an implication that is, of course, all-important to the organic theory. The equal, natural man is necessarily an international man, so that, as Hugo de Groot forcibly stated the case, even in times of war between nations there are certain interests, certain relations among men, with reference to which peace continues ; for example, the rela- tions of commerce. Similarly Locke, for whom peace and society were original and natural, found an illustration of his "state of nature" in the society of nations.

In the conception of the indivisibility of sovereignty, however, already mentioned as a conclusion from the doctrine of equality, and mentioned also as a bone of doubtful or ambiguous contention between Calhoun and his opponents, the idea of a universal or international state is presented in a still more striking way. To defend state rights by appeal to indivisibility was gross abuse of the idea, for with reference to political bodies as well as to lines or planes or things animate or inanimate it is not to be gainsaid that if a part is indivisible the whole must be indivisible also, or, conversely, that to isolate a part, to treat it as absolutely inde- pendent, as in secession, is at once to divide it, to destroy its own inner unity. To speak quite abstractly and symbolically, both A and not-A are divisible, that is, without unity, for both must be finite, each being limited by the other and so not self- sufficient. Only the self-sufficient is indivisible. Individuality, then, of state or of person or of thing, does in truth mean