Page:Henry Osborn Taylor, A Treatise on the Law of Private Corporations (5th ed, 1905).djvu/461

 CHAP. Vni.] CORPORATION AND STATE. [§ 456. of a duty, or the waiver of constitutional right on his part, for the state would, in such case, already have power to do what- ever any citizen could agree that it should do. 1 But in truth, in no Anglo-Saxon community has there ever existed absolute sovereignty, 2 any power so supreme or absolute that it could do anything not in itself impossible. Although it may be hard to conceive any body politic wherein there is not some force supe- rior to all other forces, the fact, nevertheless, remains that there is no unqualified supreme power in any state. 3 And by this proposition no mere truism is meant, that there is no power in a state that can make two and two equal to five. The prop- osition means that there never exists unqualified political su- premacy. The sum total of the physical force of a nation exists in the people thereof. But this sum total of physical force is far from constituting any unqualified political suprem- acy, because it is incapable of unqualified organization ; in- capable through its humanity, of unconditional subjection to any will. And as no man ever absolutely subjects himself to the common will, there can be no unqualified common will. Accordingly, it is impossible for any state to do all that a single being could, who possessed in himself the entire physical force of the members of the state. Never did there exist any political sovereignty so absolute that it might not wreck itself in attempting what it could not do. There are certain things which men of any given race will not submit to, things which shock general notions of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, expediency and inexpedi- ency, however one may phrase it ; and the result of action by government in disregard of these notions is revolution ; 4 though 1 See Austin, Province of Juris- prudence. Lecture VI. 2 If the learned reader will appre- ciate the truth of this remark, let him peruse Stubb's Constitutional History of England, in which he will find the growth of English govern- ment traced by a master's hand. From that work may he learn how hardly a government acquires powers. Indeed the history of the English constitution, as well as the history of the development of our own system of government, exem- plifies the fact that the early factor in the development of political power is the necessity of becoming a com- munity, and that the later factor in the same development, is the neces- sity of becoming a nation. 3 The term "state" is not used here as meaning one of the United States. 4 Witness our own Revolution. 441