CHAPTER I - Introduction

Summary

To discover to what end State institutions should be directed, and what limits should be set to their activity, is the design of the following pages. The importance of this question is self-evident, and if we compare the most noteworthy political constitutions with each other, and with the opinions of the most eminent philosophers and politicians, we shall, with reason, be surprised to find it so insufficiently discussed and vaguely answered.

Those who have either themselves remodelled the framework of State constitutions, or proposed schemes of political reform, seem mostly to have concerned themselves with specifying the respective shares which the nation or any of its parts should have in the administration and with assigning the proper function of each in the plan of government, so that none shall infringe the rights of the others. But in every attempt to frame or reorganize a political constitution, there are two main objects, it seems to me, to be distinctly kept in view, neither of which can be overlooked or made subordinate without serious injury to the general purposes; these are—first, to determine, for the nation in question, who shall govern, who shall be governed, and to arrange the actual working of the administration; and secondly, to prescribe the exact sphere to which the government, once constructed, should extend or confine its operations.