Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: his own people have been formed, which he would throw himself against in vain. The boundaries of his authority lie where he finds the limits of his subjects' willingness or ability to obey him. They cannot obey him if he seek to force upon them rules too strange to their habit; they will not know how, and their spirits will revolt. They will not obey him if he outrage them by too gross a violation of the understandings which they have come to regard as sacred and of the very essence of their life and happiness. The difference between a constitutional system and an unconstitutional is that in a constitutional system the requirements of opinion are clearly formulated and understood, while in an unconstitutional they are vague and conjectural. The unconstitutional ruler has to guess where his subjects will call a halt upon him, and experiment at the hazard of his throne and head; the constitutional ruler definitely knows the limits which he must not transgress and is safe in his authority so long as he does not overstep them. 3. THE MEANING OP SELF-GOVERNMENT. On the fourth day of July, 1776, the Continental Congress acting in behalf of the thirteen colonies then engaged in armed resistance to the authority of England, adopted the Declaration of Independence. From that day to this the United States has stood as the typical example of a self-governing community. The success of this experiment in government has been due to the fact that the people of the thirteen colonies were at the time the Declaration of Independence was made already endowed with the capacity essential for self-government. The nature of this capacity is very clearly and forcibly explained by Dr. Lyman Abbott: A great deal of current discussion assumes that the Declaration of Independence is a declaration in...