limits of that
authority to be determined?

One of the oldest and profoundest of English philosophers, Hobbes of
Malmesbury, writes thus:--

"The office of the sovereign, be it monarch or an assembly,
consisteth in the end for which he was entrusted with the
sovereign power, namely, the procuration of _the safety_ of
the people: to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and
to render an account thereof to God, the author of that law,
and to none but Him. But by safety, here, is not meant a bare
preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which
every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the
commonwealth, shall acquire to himself."

At first sight this may appear to be a statement of the police-theory
of government, pure and simple; but it is not so. For Hobbes goes on
to say:--

"And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to
individuals, further than their protection from injuries, when
they shall complain; but by a general providence contained in
public instruction both of doctrine and example; and in the
making and executing of good laws to which individual persons
may apply their own cases."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Leviathan," Molesworth's ed. p. 322.]

To a witness of the civil war between Charles I. and the Parliament,
it is not wonderful that the dissolution of the bonds of society which
is involved in such strife should appear to be "the greatest evil that
can happen in this life;" and all who have read the "Leviathan" know
to what length Hobbes's anxiety for the preservation of the authority
of the representative of the sovereign power, whatever its shape,
leads him. But the justice of his conception of the duties of the
sovereign power does not seem to me to be invalidated by his monstrous
doctrines respecting the sacredness of that power.

To Hobbes, who lived during the break-up of the sovereign power by
popular force, society appeared to be threatened by everything which
weakened that power: but, to John Locke, who witnessed the evils which
flow from the attempt of the sovereign power to destroy the rights
of the people by fraud and violence, the danger lay in the other
direction.

The safety of the representative of the sovereign power itself is to
Locke a matter of very small moment, and he contemplates its abolition
when it ceases to do its duty, and its replacement by another, as a
matter of course.