look to the moral philosophers for authority as to the law of nature, or to the commentators as to the civil laws.

The interpretation of the laws of nature in a commonwealth dependeth not on the books of moral philosophy. The authority of writers without the authority of the commonwealth maketh not their opinions law, be they never so true. That which I have written in this treatise concerning the moral virtues, . . . though it be evident truth, is not, therefore, presently law. . . . For though it be naturally reasonable, yet it is by the sovereign power that it is law.1

And again:

When question is of the meaning of written laws, he is not the interpreter of them that writeth a commentary upon them. For commentaries are commonly more subject to cavil than the text, and therefore need other commentaries; and so there will be no end of such interpretations.2

Thus the footing which the factions have found in various interpretations of the moral and the civil law is swept away, and the sovereign stands triumphant. But there remains one. other hope for the adversaries of absolutism. What if they could oppose to the sovereign a directly revealed command of God? Such a command, Hobbes readily admits, must supersede all human authority. But could the knowledge of such a command be independent of human judgment? If all men, in the presence of one another, received an identical manifestation of God's will, that would be conclusive. But when some one man or body of men comes forward claiming to have received privately a revelation from God, how shall other men be satisfied of its authenticity? Hobbes can find no adequate answer to this question, and his solution of the whole problem is reached on the same lines that have been followed in connection with the law of nature and the civil law.

In all things not contrary to the moral law, that is to say, to the law of nature, all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law which is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth.

And the reason of this is simple.

If men were at liberty to take for God's commandments their own dreams and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men, scarce two men would agree upon what is God's commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth.1

With logic like this there is no possibility of such confusion. as we have seen in Bodin over the relation of the sovereign to the leges divinae, naturae et gentium.2 Hobbes does indeed declare in various passages that the sovereign is bound by the law of nature; but his precise analysis of the source and character of this law leaves no room for the delusion that the sovereign's obligation is at all of the same type as that of the subject. The latter is bound under the terms of the original contract; but this contract is most carefully framed by Hobbes so as to exclude the sovereign from any share in it.3 Thus, while the keeping of contracts is a precept of the law of nature that affects the subjects, it has no application, so far as they are concerned, to the sovereign. Again, Hobbes scoffs at the classification of forms of state according to the relation of the sovereign to the laws of nature. Three forms, and three only, are logical. The others are merely the expressions of individual feeling.

They that are discontented under monarchy call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy call it oligarchy; so also they which find themselves grieved under a democracy call it anarchy, which signifies want of government. And yet I think no man believes that want of government is any new kind of government; nor by the same reason ought they to believe that the government is of one kind when they like it, and another when they dislike it, or are oppressed by the governers.5

There is obviously no room in Hobbes's thought for any conception like Bodin's leges imperii. Nor has the Englishman any such respect for private property as is displayed by

1 Leviathan, p. 133.

2 The law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing." Leviathan, p. 161. 5 Leviathan, p. 90. 6 Ante, p. 96.

3 Leviathan, p. 85.

4 Ante, p. 95.

103 the French writer. To sovereignty pertains "the whole power of prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may enjoy. . . without being molested by any of his fellow subjects; and this is it men call 'propriety.'" 1 It is a doctrine that tends to the dissolution of a commonwealth, "that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods, such as excludeth the sovereign." What property a man holds, he has only from the sovereign.2 On the other hand Hobbes agrees substantially with Bodin in respect to the relation of custom to law, and in the distinction between the sovereign and the administrative system, or government.

ས.

From the standpoint of pure speculation, it is impossible to deny that Hobbes's doctrine is more complete and perfect than that of Bodin. Where the latter, with the caution of the philosophic statesman, hesitated, the former, with the indifference of the exact mathematician, followed the path of his reasoning to the end. The student of history and law is not apt to be as confident as the devotee of the physical sciences, in regard to the availability of abstract formulas for solving political problems. The hostility aroused by the ethical and

1 Leviathan, p. 87.

4

2 "Where there is no commonwealth there is . . a perpetual war of every man against his neighbor; and therefore everything is his that getteth it and keepeth it by force; which is neither propriety nor community, but uncertainty." Leviathan, p. 116.

8 While Bodin, as stated above, looks upon custom as lacking the character of law until the sovereign signifies positively his will in respect to it, Hobbes regards the silence of the sovereign as expressing his will. "When long use obtaineth the authority of a law, it is not the length of time that maketh the authority, but the will of the sovereign signified by his silence." Leviathan, p. 124.

It must be pointed out, however, that in one important instance criticism of Hobbes is generally unfair. He is censured greatly for holding that no law, i.e., expression of the will of the sovereign, can be unjust. He does, no doubt, say precisely that. But he has so defined justice as to include under the term only part of the idea usually connoted thereby. Justice, he says, is only the keeping of promises; and the original contract involved a promise of submission to the sovereign. Disobedience, therefore, is unjust. But this sense of justice involves only what is

religious doctrines of Hobbes obscured for a century the value of much that he wrote. Bodin, on the other hand, had great vogue for a time, though his rational and juristic absolutism was ill adapted to the appetite of the age which feasted on the emotional and divine-right doctrine of Bossuet. It was Montesquieu's great work that brought French thought back into the methods of Bodin, while Rousseau introduced the method of Hobbes. But the divergence of the later pair of writers was much greater than that of the earlier. The whole effect of Montesquieu's work was to emphasize those elements in social and political life which are most independent of human volition, and hence to minimize the significance, if not to exclude the conception, of absolute sovereignty. Rousseau, on the contrary, intensified, if possible, the absoluteness of the sovereign human will as conceived by Hobbes, and made it the sole basis of his democracy.

Wм. A. DUNNING.

known as commutative justice. Distributive justice is defined by Hobbes under another name, equity. And the whole criticism falls when Hobbes admits that the sovereign, while he cannot commit injustice, can commit iniquity. Leviathan, p. 86.

GRAUNT OR PETTY?

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE OBSERVATIONS UPON THE BILLS

THIS

OF MORTALITY.

HIS article proceeds upon the assumption that the Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills of Mortality, which were published at London in 1662 over the name of John Graunt,1 occupy by merit and priority 2 a place in the history of statistics which justifies careful examination of the available evidence bearing on the question whether they were in fact composed by Graunt, or, as is sometimes said, by his friend, Sir William Petty. The question has, indeed, already received the attention of Dr. John Campbell, of McCulloch, of Roscher,5 of De Morgan, of John and of Cunningham; and all of them have agreed that the Observations were written, as they purport to be, by Graunt, and not by Petty. In spite, therefore, of Macaulay's dictum and of Mr. W. B. Hodge's strong argument for Petty,10 the weight of authority might seem to have settled the dispute in Graunt's favor. But Dr. Bevan, in his recent monograph on Petty,11

1 The full title runs as follows: Natural and Political Observations mentioned in a following Index and made upon the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt, Citizen of London; with reference to the Government, Religion, Trade, Growth, Ayre, Diseases and the several Changes of the said City.

2 Süssmilch's Die göttliche Ordnung in den Veränderungen des menschlichen Geschlechts appeared in 1741.

3 Biographia Britannica (1757), IV, 2262–2263, note.

4 Literature of Political Economy (1845), 271.

5 Zur Geschichte der englischen Volkswirthschaftslehre im 16. und 17. Jahrh.

Abh. d. k. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss., Bd. iii (1857), s. 73, note.

6 Assurance Magazine, VIII (1859), 166, 167; Budget of Paradoxes (1872),

68, 69.

7 Geschichte der Statistik (1884), 170.

8 Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times (1892), 247,

note.

9 History of England (1868), I, 219, note.

10 Assurance Magazine, VIII, 94, 234–237.

11 Bevan, Sir William Petty, Publications of the Amer. Econ. Assoc., vol. ix (1894), no. 4.