public authority, representing a public will, a public right, or
a public interest. In no country could government be adopted and
sustained if men were left to the wisdom or justness of their
theories, or in the general affairs of life, acted on them.
Society, and government as representing society, has a real
existence, life, faculties, and organs of its own, not derived or
derivable from individuals. As well might it be maintained that
the human body consists in and derives all its life from the
particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and which are
constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its life,
or government its powers, from individuals. No mechanical
aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is
no living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation
of individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths,
can make society where there is no informing social principle
that aggregates and assimilates them to a living body, or produce
that mystic existence called a state or commonwealth.

The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the
nation to be a purely personal affair. It gives the government
no territorial status, and clothes it with no territorial rights
or jurisdiction. The government that could so originate would be,
if any thing, a barbaric, not a republican government. It has
only the rights conferred on it, surrendered or delegated to it
by individuals, and therefore, at best, only individual rights.
Individuals can confer only such rights as they have in the
supposed state of nature. In that state there is
neither private nor public domain. The earth in
that state is not property, and is open to the first occupant,
and the occupant can lay no claim to any more than he actually