maintain that its origin is conventional, and that it is founded
in compact or agreement. Their theory originated in the
seventeenth century, and was predominant in the last century and
the first third of the present. It has been, and perhaps is yet,
generally accepted by American politicians and statesmen, at
least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the question
at all, which it must be confessed is not far.

The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of
government as a social pact or compact, and explained the
reciprocal rights and obligations of subjects and rulers by the
general law of contracts; but they have never held that
government originates in a voluntary agreement between the people
and their rulers, or between the several individuals composing
the community. They have never held that government has only a
conventional origin or authority. They have simply meant, by the
social compact, the mutual relations and reciprocal rights and
duties of princes and their subjects, as implied in the very
existence and nature of civil society. Where there are rights
and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an agreement
voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in
determining whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire
whether either has broken the terms of the social compact. They
were engaged, not with the question whence does government derive
its authority, but with its nature, and the reciprocal rights and
duties of governors and the governed. The compact itself they
held was not voluntarily formed by the people themselves, either
individually or collectively, but was imposed by God, either
immediately, or mediately, through the law of nature. "Every