Power is the combined wills of the masses, transferred by their expressed or tacit consent to the rulers chosen by the masses.
In the domain of the science of law, made up of arguments on how a state and power ought to be constructed, if it were possible to construct it, all this is very clear; but in its application to history this definition of power calls for elucidation.
The science of law regards the state and power, as the ancients regarded fire, as something positively existing. But for history the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for the physical science of to-day fire is not an element, but a phenomenon.
From this fundamental difference in the point of view of history and of the science of law, it comes to pass that the science of law can discuss in detail how in the scientific writer’s opinion power should be organised, and what is power, existing immovable outside the conditions of time; but to historical questions as to the significance of power, undergoing visible transformation in time, it can give no answer.
If power is the combined will of the masses transferred to their rulers, is Pugatchov a representative of the will of the masses? If he is not, how then is Napoleon i. such a representative? Why is it that Napoleon hi.,
when he was seized at Boulogne, was a criminal, and afterwards those who had been seized by him were criminals?
In palace revolutions—in which sometimes two or three persons only take part—is the will of the masses transferred to a new person? In international relations, is the will of the masses of the people transferred to their conqueror? In 1808 was the will of the Rhine Alliance league transferred to Napoleon? Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French made war upon Austria?
These questions may be answered in three ways: (1) By maintaining that the will of the masses is always unconditionally delegated over to that ruler or those rulers whom they have chosen, and that consequently every rising up of new power, every struggle against the power once delegated, must be regarded as a contravention of the real power.
Or (2) by maintaining that the will of the masses is delegated to the rulers, under certain definite conditions, and by showing that all restrictions on, conflicts with, and even abolition of power are due to non- observance of the rulers of those conditions upon which power was delegated to them.
Or (3) by maintaining that the will of the masses is delegated to the rulers conditionally, but that the conditions are uncertain and undefined, and that the rising up of several authorities, and their conflict and fall, are due only to the more or less complete fulfilment of the rulers of the uncertain conditions upon which the will of the masses is transferred from one set of persons to another.
In these three ways do historians explain the relation of the masses to their rulers.
Some historians—those most distinctively biographers and writers of memoirs, of whom we have spoken above—-failing in the simplicity of their hearts to understand the question as to the meaning of power, seem to believe that the combined will of the masses is delegated to historical leaders unconditionally, and therefore, describing any such authority, these historians assume that that authority is the one absolute and real one, and that every other force, opposing that real authoritjq is not authority, but a violation of authority, and unlawful violence.
Their theory fits in well with primitive and peaceful periods of history; but in its application to complicated and stormy periods in the life of nations, when several different authorities rise up simultaneously and struggle together, the inconvenience arises that the legitimist historian will assert that the National Assembly, the Directorate, and Bonaparte were only violations of real authority: while the Republican and the Bonapartist will maintain, one that the Republic, and the other that the Empire were the real authority, and that all the rest was a violation of authority. It is evident that the explanations given by these historians, being mutually contradictory, can satisfy none but children of the tenderest age.
Recognising the deceptiveness of this view of history, another class of
historians assert that authority rests on the conditional delegation of the combined will of the masses to their rulers, and that historical leaders possess power only on condition of carrying out the programme which the will of the people has by tacit consent dictated to them. But what this programme consists of, those historians do not tell us, or if they do, they continually contradict one another.
