ern sociologists mean two different things and this is the reason for
so many misunderstandings. When he speaks of law, the modern sociologist
means the expression of the general will at such and such a date, 1910
for instance. The ancient sociologist would consider that the expression
of the general will in the second year of the 73rd Olympiad was not law
at all, but a decree. A law to him would be a paragraph of the
legislation of Solon, Lycurgus or Charondas. Whenever in a Greek or
Roman political treatise we meet the expression--"a State governed by
laws," the only way to translate it is--"a State governed by a very
ancient and immutable legislation." This gives the true meaning to the
famous personification of laws in the Phaedo, which would be quite
meaningless if the Greeks had understood what we do by the term. Are
laws the expression of the general will of the people? If so why should
Socrates have respected them, he who despised the people to the day he
was condemned? It would be absurd. These laws which Socrates respected
were not the decrees of the people contemporary with Socrates; they were
the ancient gods of the city, which had protected it from the earliest
days.

These laws may err in that they seemed to sanction the verdict that
condemned Socrates to death, but they were honourable, venerable and
inviolate, because they had been the guardians of the city for
centuries, and guardians of Socrates himself until the day when they
were misapplied against him.

A "constitution," therefore, to adopt Aristotle's terminology, is a
State which obeys laws, that is to say, laws framed by its ancestors.

It is, then, an aristocracy, for it is even more aristocratic to obey
our ancestors themselves by obeying the thoughts which they embedded in
legislation, five centuries ago, than to obey the inheritors of their
tradition, the aristocrats of to-day. For aristocrats of to-day belong
only partly to tradition, in that they live in the present. Whereas a
fifteenth century law belongs to the fifteenth century and to no other
period. To obey law as understood by the ancient sociologists, did not
mean obeying Scipio who has just passed us on the _Via Sacra_. It meant
to obey his grandfather's great grandfather! All this is
ultra-aristocratic.

Precisely! _Law is an aristocratic thing;_ only _the emergency law_, the
_decree_, is democratic. For this reason Montesquieu always speaks of a
monarchy as being limited, and,