82 HARVARD LAW REVIEW.

with that common signal which, in other cases, we despaired of find- ing. 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 command- ing 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 ex- pedient, — alike conducive to the happiness of the people, is an- other question."

It is worth while to notice here a difficulty which Austin en- counters 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 auto- crator 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-