Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 2.djvu/100

82 with that common signal which, in other cases, we despaired of finding. A certain act is in the instrument of convention specified, with respect to which the government is therein precluded from issuing a law to a certain effect: whether to the effect of commanding the act, of permitting it, or of forbidding it. A law is issued to that effect notwithstanding. The issuing, then, of such a law (the sense of it, and likewise the sense of that part of the convention which provides against it being supposed clear) is a fact notorious and visible to all: in the issuing, then, of such a law, we have a fact which is capable of being taken for that common signal we have been speaking of. These bounds the supreme body in question has marked out to its authority: of such a demarcation, then, what is the effect? Either none at all, or this: that the disposition to obedience confines itself within these bounds. Beyond them the disposition is stopped from extending: beyond them the subject is no more prepared to obey the governing body of his own state than that of any other. What difficulty, I say, there should be in conceiving a state of things to subsist in which the supreme authority is thus limited,-what greater difficulty in conceiving it with this limitation, than without any, I cannot see. The two states are, I must confess, to me alike conceivable: whether alike expedient, — alike conducive to the happiness of the people, is another question."

It is worth while to notice here a difficulty which Austin encounters when he tries to explain the position of a person who is, at the same time, sovereign in one independent political society and subject in another. "Supposing, for example," he says (Lect, VI., p. 216, 2d ed.), " that our own king were monarch and autocrator in Hanover, how would his subjection to the sovereign body of king, lords, and commons, consist with his sovereignty in his German kingdom? A limb or member of a sovereign body would seem to be shorn, by its habitual obedience to the body, of the habitual independence which must needs belong to it as sovereign in a foreign community. To explain the difficulty, we must assume that the characters of sovereign, and member of the sovereign body, are practically distinct: that, as monarch (for instance) of the foreign community, a member of the sovereign body neither habitually obeys it, nor is habitually obeyed by it." Now, a sovereign possessed of strictly unlimited power can issue to his subject any commands he may please, and inflict punish