LIBERALISM AND THE MONARCHY
not a democratl—but he is a true champion of freedom in his
perpetually reiterated view that the sovereignty of the people,
which is the only defensible form of sovereignty, must be
limited by the anterior inalienable rights of the individual to
freedom of bodily action, of religion, of property,2 of opinion—
the last involving complete freedom of expression and therefore
of the Press.
Now such freedom, says Constant, can be realized only
under a system of parliamentary monarchy, the conditions of
which he saw with particular clearness. Leaving aside his
somewhat conventional views of the monarch as " standing
apart, above diversities of opinions, with no personal interests
to follow," his idea of leisure as an essential condition for the
satisfactory exercise of the franchise, his strenuous defence of
decentralization (based on the view that " municipal power
is not a branch of the executive but something entirely in-
dependent "), it is enough to say that he fastened on the two
points which other thinkers either neglected or took too much
for granted—ministerial responsibility and the party system.
He saw that only in a truly united Cabinet can you get true
ministerial responsibility, and that all guarantees of freedom
are illusory if ministers be not directly responsible to a majority
in Parliament; further, he realized that an essential condition
for this was the existence of a strongly organized opposition,
ready to take office at any moment. But an organized opposition
means organized parties, and we touch here on what is perhaps
the most original element in his political thought, his under-
standing of parties as organized, coherent, disciplined forces,
few in number, all agreed on certain fundamentals of govern-
ment so that a change of party does not involve a political
revolution.
Ruggiero, in his study of European Liberalism, attributes
1 " He fought the sophistries of wrong democratic theory," says Thureau-
Dangin in his Parti Ji&tral, p. 34,
2 But while believing in the social utility of private property he declared
it was only a social convention, that society had over it rights that it does
not possess over the liberty, the life, the opinions of its members. He
was, however, hostile to State interference in economic matters (Politique
constitutionnellc, i., p. 113).
4*