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INTRODUCTION.

the sovereign to transfer or to relinquish his rights, because this would mean the dissolution of the commonwealth and a return to a state of nature, which is a state of war, which is the greatest evil possible to life. The sovereign must maintain his rights in their entirety. Again, it is contrary to his duty to allow the people to be in ignorance or wrongly informed in regard to the grounds of his rights, because through ignorance and wrong information men are seduced and influenced to resistance when the commonwealth calls for their use and exercise. The sovereign, then, is under obligation only to the law of nature – accountable only to God who is the author of this law.[1] The measure of his obligation is determined by the end for which sovereignty is established.

But with this absoluteness of the sovereign goes a certain "liberty" of the subject. Because, "whensoever a man transferreth his right, or renounceth it; it is either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself; or for some other good he hopeth for thereby. For it is a voluntary act and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself. And therefore there be some rights, which no man can be understood by any words, or other signs, to have abandoned, or transferred. As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to aim thereby, at any good to himself. The same may be said of wounds, and chains, and imprisonment."[2] Not, then, having renounced all rights by his submission to the sovereign, a certain amount of "liberty" is his while subject to the sovereign. That is to say, there are some things "which, though commanded by the sover-

  1. ↑ The right of nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his laws, is to be derived, not from his creating them, as if he required obedience as of gratitude for his benefits; but from his irresistible power. – Leviathan, Pt. II., chap. XXXI.
  2. ↑ Leviathan, Pt. I., chap. XIV.
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