organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at
all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau
tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the
conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the
means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen,
under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is
lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an
unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the
shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of
Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and
Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of
exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy
becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]

[Footnote 5: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chap. I.]

The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value.
Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their
power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the
temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this
doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It
tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the
material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the
root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the
pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to
persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only
the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts
do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the
event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the
judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government