Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/265

249 SOVEREIGNTY- IN ENGLISH LAW. 249 ing to vote the supplies necessary for putting the statute in execu- tion (a thing which has been known to happen), but it cannot alter one letter of the text. This is not what we understand by- sovereignty in the legal sense. It has been said by one or two modern writers that the electors who return members to the House of Commons are sovereign. This involves a still greater confusion of thought than attributing sovereignty to the House of Commons when elected. The persons chosen by the voters at a general election will certainly form that part of the legislature in which the controlling political power resides. But that, as we have seen, does not make them sov- ereign, much less does it make the electors sovereign. In fact the electors are not legislators or anything like legislators. They have not the power of issuing any legal commands at all. An identical resolution passed by the electors of every constituency in England, or a large majority of the constituencies, at the time of a general election or at any other time, might be a very notable political event. But it would certainly have no legal force what- ever. It would create no kind of legal authority, justification or excuse, and no court of justice would be entitled (much less bound) to pay any attention to it. As Cornewall Lewis long ago rightly said, "The right of voting for the election of one who is to possess a share of the sovereignty is itself no more a share of the sover- eignty than the right of publishing a political treatise or a political newspaper." ^ Although the whole theory of sovereignty is modern, and in fact could not have been definitely held or expressed before the prin- cipal states of modern Europe had acquired a strong and consoli- dated government, writers on the philosophy of law and politics have readily fallen into the way of assuming that civilized govern- ment cannot exist, or can exist only in an imperfect manner, unless there is some definite body in the state to which sovereignty can be attributed. Thus Blackstone^ says: — " However they [existing forms of government] began, or by what right soever they subsist, there is and must be in all of them a supreme, irre- sistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summa imperii or the rights of sovereignty reside." 1 Remarks on the Use and Abuse of some Political Terms, London, 1832, p. 43.
 * Comm. i. 49.