n the administration,
in the judicature, and in the finances. From one end of the territory to
the other, he had sold innumerable offices, imposts, dignities,
honors, monopolies, exemptions, survivorships, expectancies--in brief,
privileges which, once conferred for a money consideration, became legal
property,[2316] often hereditary and transmissible by the individual or
the corporation which had paid for them. In this way the King alienated
a portion of his royalty for the benefit of the buyer. Now, in 1789, he
had alienated a great many of these portions; accordingly, his present
authority was everywhere restricted by the use he had previously made of
it.--Sovereignty, thus, in his hands had suffered from the double effect
of its historic origins and its historic exercise; the public power had
not become, or had ceased to be, omnipotence. On the one hand it had not
reached its plenitude, and on the other hand it had deprived itself of a
portion of its own completeness.

The philosophers wished to find a solution for this double weakness,
innate and acquired They had therefore transported sovereignty out of
history into the ideal and abstract world, with an imaginary city of
mankind reduced to the minimum of a human being Here men, infinitely
simplified, all alike, equal, separate from their surroundings and from
their past, veritable puppets, were all lifting their hands in common
rectangular motion to vote unanimously for the contrat social. In this
contract "all classes are reduced to one,[2317] the complete surrender
of each associate, with all his rights, to the community, each giving
himself up entirely, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces,
of which whatever he possesses forms a part," each becoming with respect
to himself and every act of his private life a delegate of the State, a
responsible clerk, in short, a functionary, a functionary of the people,
henceforth the unique, the absolute, and the universal sovereign. A
terrible principle, proclaimed and applied for ten years, below by
the mob and above by the government! Popular opinion had adopted
it; accordingly the passage from the sovereignty of the King to the
sovereignty of the people was easy, smooth,[2318] and to the novice in
reasoning, the old-fashioned taxable and workable subject, to whom the
principle conferred a portion of the sovereignty, the temptation was too
great.

At once, according to their custom, the jurists put themselve