Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/359

alike in feudal Europe and in nearly feudalised India, be another illustration of the working of the law of evolution that underlies all these progressive changes? All of them start from rudimentary ideas of law, not yet distinguished from custom, which themselves imply a certain social advance. All of them, therefore, imply a still earlier state of things. Before we get to territorial sovereignty, there is tribal chieftainship, there is the mere leadership of robber bands. If there is something earlier than territorial sovereignty, that does not exclude the operation of the usual laws of progress when sovereignty of that kind has once been established. In Europe territorial sovereignty was the outcome of feudalism. The two distinct conceptions of sovereignty, running through international law and jurisprudence respectively, are due in Europe the one to the Publicists, the other to the Analytical Jurists. It is largely to both of them that we owe the severance of ideas of sovereignty from other ideas with which it was blended at the outset of our modern life. In India, though the process of disentanglement has been, under British rule or supremacy, more rapid than in Europe, the working of the law of evolution may be discerned in our measures no less than in the political theories of the West. In a country where feudal tendencies have been arrested by our supremacy, in an Empire which at this day comprises six hundred and twenty-nine feudatory states, we have long been in the course of discriminating ideas of property from ideas of sovereignty; and our legislative and political action is taken under influences largely derived from European international law and English jurisprudence.

---