The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny Part 5

Indeed, the Roman const.i.tution, laws, and civilization not only gain the mastery in the nations seated within the limits of the old Roman Empire, but extend their power through out the whole civilized world.

The Graeco-Roman civilization is, in fact, the only civilization now recognized, and nations are accounted civilized only in proportion as they are Romanized and Christianized. The Roman law, as found in the Inst.i.tutes, Pandects, and Novellae of Justinian, or the Corpus Legis Civilis, is the basis of the law and jurisprudence of all Christendom.

The Graeco-Roman civilization, called not improperly Christian civilization, is the only progressive civilization. The old feudal system remains in England little more than an empty name. The king is only the first magistrate of the kingdom, and the House of Lords is only an hereditary senate. Austria is hard at work in the Roman direction, and finds her chief obstacle to success in Hungary, with the Magyars whose feudalism retains almost the full vigor of the Middle Ages. Russia is moving in the same direction; and Prussia and the smaller Germanic states obey the same impulse. Indeed, Rome has survived the conquest--has conquered her conquerors, and now invades every region from which they came. The Roman Empire may be said to be acknowledged and obeyed in lands lying far beyond the farthest limits reached by the Roman eagles, and to be more truly the mistress of the world than under Augustus, Trajan, or the Antonines. Nothing can stand before the Christian and Romanized nations, and all pagandom and Mohammedom combined are too weak to resist their onward march.

All modern European revolutions result only in reviving the Roman Empire, whatever the motives, interests, pa.s.sions, or theories that initiate them. The French Revolution of the last century and that of the present prove it. France, let people say what they will, stands at the head of the European civilized world, and displays en grand all its good and all its bad tendencies. When she moves, Europe moves; when she has a vertigo, all European nations are dizzy; when she recovers her health, her equilibrium, and good sense, others become sedate, steady, and reasonable. She is the head, nay, rather, the heart of Christendom--the head is at Rome--through which circulates the pure and impure blood of the nations. It is in vain Great Britain, Germany, or Russia disputes with her the hegemony of European civilization. They are forced to yield to her at last, to be content to revolve around her as the centre of the political system that masters them. The reason is, France is more completely and sincerely Roman than any other nation. The revolutions that have shaken the world have resulted in eliminating the barbaric elements she had retained, and clearing away all obstacles to the complete triumph of Imperial Rome. Napoleon III.

is for France what Augustus was for Rome. The revolutions in Spain and Italy have only swept away the relics of the barbaric const.i.tution, and aided the revival of Roman imperialism. In no country do the revolutionists succeed in establis.h.i.+ng their own theories; Caesar remains master of the field. Even in the United States, a revolution undertaken in favor of the barbaric system has resulted in the destruction of what remained of that system--in sweeping away the last relics of disintegrating feudalism, and in the complete establishment of the Graeco-Roman system, with important improvements, in the New World.

The Roman system is republican, in the broad sense of the term, because under it power is never an estate, never the private for the public good. As it existed under the Caesars, and is revived in modern times, whether under the imperial or the democratic form, it, no doubt, tends to centralism, to the concentration of all the powers and forces of the state in one central government, from which all local authorities and inst.i.tutions emanate. Wise men oppose it as affording no guaranties to individual liberty against the abuses of power. This it may not do, but the remedy is not in feudalism. The feudal lord holds his authority as an estate, and has over the people under him all the power of Caesar and all the rights of the proprietor. He, indeed, has a guaranty against his liege-lord, sometimes a more effective guaranty than his liege-lord has against him; but against his centralized power his va.s.sals and serfs have only the guaranty that a slave has against his owner.

Feudalism is alike hostile to the freedom of public authority and of the people. It is essentially a disintegrating element in the nation.

It breaks the unity and individuality of the state, embarra.s.ses the sovereign, and guards against the abuse of public authority by overpowering and suppressing it. Every feudal lord is a more thorough despot in his own domain than Caesar ever was or could be in the empire; and the monarch, even if strong enough, is yet not competent to intervene between him and his people, any more than the General government in the United States was to intervene between the negro slave and his master. The great va.s.sals of the crown singly, or, if not singly, in combination--and they could always combine in the interest of their order--were too strong for the king, or to be brought under any public authority, and could issue from their fortified castles and rob and plunder to their hearts' content, with none to call them to an account. Under the most thoroughly centralized government there is far more liberty for the people, and a far greater security for person and property, except in the case of the feudal n.o.bles themselves, than was even dreamed of while the feudal regime was in full vigor. n.o.bles were themselves free, it is conceded, but not the people. The king was too weak, too restricted in his action by the feudal const.i.tution to reach them, and the higher clergy were ex officio sovereigns, princes, barons, or feudal lords, and were led by their private interests to act with the feudal n.o.bility, save when that n.o.bility threatened the temporalities of the church. The only reliance, under G.o.d, left in feudal times to the poor people was in the lower ranks of the clergy, especially of the regular clergy. All the great German emperors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who saw the evils of feudalism, and attempted to break it up and revive imperial Rome, became involved in quarrels with the chiefs of the religious society, and failed, because the interest of the Popes, as feudal sovereigns and Italian princes, and the interests of the dignified clergy, were for the time bound up with the feudal society, though their Roman culture and civilization made them at heart hostile to it.

The student of history, however strong his filial affection towards the visible head of the church, cannot help admiring the grandeur of the political views of Frederic the Second, the greatest and last of the Hohenstaufen, or refrain from dropping a tear over his sad failure. He had great faults as a man, but he had rare genius as a statesman; and it is some consolation to know that he died a Christian death, in charity with all men, after having received the last sacraments of his religion.

The Popes, under the circ.u.mstances, were no doubt justified in the policy they pursued, for the Swabian emperors failed to respect the acknowledged rights of the church, and to remember their own incompetency in spirituals; but evidently their political views and aims were liberal, far-reaching, and worthy of admiration. Their success, if it could have been effected without lesion to the church, would have set Europe forward some two or three hundred years, and probably saved it from the schisms of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. But it is easy to be wise after the event. The fact is, that during the period when feudalism was in full vigor, the king was merely a shadow; the people found their only consolation in religion, and their chief protectors in the monks, who mingled with them, saw their sufferings, and sympathized with them, consoled them, carried their cause to the castle before the feudal lord and lady, and did, thank G.o.d, do something to keep alive religious sentiments and convictions in the bosom of the feudal society itself. Whatever opinions may be formed of the monastic orders in relation to the present, this much is certain, that they were the chief civilizers of Europe, and the chief agents in delivering European society from feudal barbarism.

The aristocracy have been claimed as the natural allies of the throne, but history proves them to be its natural enemies, whenever it cannot be used in their service, and kings do not consent to be their ministers and to do their bidding. A political aristocracy has at heart only the interests of its order, and pursues no line of policy but the extension or preservation of its privileges. Having little to gain and much to lose, it opposes every political change that would either strengthen the crown or elevate the people. The n.o.bility in the French Revolution were the first to desert both the king and the kingdom, and kings have always found their readiest and firmest allies in the people. The people in Europe have no such bitter feelings towards royalty as they have towards the feudal n.o.bility--for kings have never so grievously oppressed them. In Rome the patrician order opposed alike the emperor and the people, except when they, as chivalric n.o.bles sometimes will do, turned courtiers or demagogues.

They were the people of Rome and the provinces that sustained the emperors, and they were the emperors who sustained the people, and gave to the provincials the privileges of Roman citizens.

Guaranties against excessive centralism are certainly needed, but the statesman will not seek them in the feudal organization of society--in a political aristocracy, whether founded on birth or private wealth, nor in a privileged cla.s.s of any sort. Better trust Caesar than Brutus, or even Cato. Nor will he seek them in the antagonism of interests intended to neutralize or balance each other, as in the English const.i.tution. This was the great error of Mr. Calhoun. No man saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun the utter worthlessness of simple paper const.i.tutions, on which Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit reliance, or that the real const.i.tution is in the state itself, in the manner in which the people themselves are organized; but his reliance was in const.i.tuting, as powers in the state, the several popular interests that exist, and pitting them against each other--the famous system of checks and balances of English states men. He was led to this, because he distrusted power, and was more intention guarding against its abuses than on providing for its free, vigorous, and healthy action, going on the principle that "that is the best government which governs least." But, if the opposing interests could be made to balance one another perfectly, the result would be an equilibrium, in which power would be brought to a stand-still; and if not, the stronger would succeed and swallow up all the rest. The theory of checks and balances is admirable if the object be to trammel power, and to have as little power in the government as possible; but it is a theory which is born from pa.s.sions engendered by the struggle against despotism or arbitrary power, not from a calm and philosophical appreciation of government itself. The English have not succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng their theory, for, after all, their const.i.tution does not work so well as they pretend. The landed interest controls at one time, and the mercantile and manufacturing interest at another. They do not perfectly balance one another, and it is not difficult to see that the mercantile and manufacturing interest, combined with the moneyed interest, is henceforth to predominate. The aim of the real statesman is to organize all the interests and forces of the state dialectically, so that they shall unite to add to its strength, and work together harmoniously for the common good.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONSt.i.tUTION OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.

Though the const.i.tution of the people is congenital, like the const.i.tution of an individual, and cannot be radically changed without the destruction of the state, it must not be supposed that it is wholly withdrawn from the action of the reason and free-will of the nation, nor from that of individual statesmen. All created things are subject to the law of development, and may be developed either in a good sense or in a bad; that is, may be either completed or corrupted. All the possibilities of the national const.i.tution are given originally in the birth of the nation, as all the possibilities of mankind were given in the first man. The germ must be given in the original const.i.tution.

But in all const.i.tutions there is more than one element, and the several elements maybe developed pari pa.s.su, or unequally, one having the ascendency and suppressing the rest. In the original const.i.tution of Rome the patrician element was dominant, showing that the patriarchal organization of society still retained no little force.

The king was only the presiding officer of the senate and the leader of the army in war. His civil functions corresponded very nearly to those of a mayor of the city of New York, where all the effective power is in the aldermen, common council, and heads of departments. Except in name he was little else than a pageant. The kings, no doubt, labored to develop and extend the royal element of the const.i.tution. This was natural; and it was equally natural that they should be resisted by the patricians. Hence when the Tarquins, or Etruscan dynasty, undertook to be kings in fact as well as in name, and seemed likely to succeed, the patricians expelled them, and supplied their place by two consuls annually elected. Here was a modification, but no real change of the const.i.tution. The effective Power, as before, remained in the senate.

But there was from early times a plebeian element in the population of the city, though forming at first no part of the political people.

Their origin is not very certain, nor their original position in the city. Historians give different accounts of them. But that they should, as they increased in numbers, wealth, and importance, demand admission into the political society, religious or solemn marriage, a voice in the government, and the faculty of holding civil and military offices, was only in the order of regular development. At first the patricians fought them, and, failing to subdue them by force, effected a compromise, and bought up their leaders. The concession which followed of the tribunitial veto was only a further development. By that veto the plebeians gained no initiative, no positive power, indeed, but their tribunes, by interposing it, could stop the proceedings of the government. They could not propose the measures they liked, but they could prevent the legal adoption of measures they disliked--a faculty Mr. Calhoun a.s.serted for the several States of the American Union in his doctrine of nullification, or State veto, as he called it. It was simply an obstructive power.

But from a power to obstruct legislative action to the power to originate or propose it, and force the senate to adopt it through fear of the veto of measures the patricians had at heart, was only a still further development. This gained, the exclusively patrician const.i.tution had disappeared, and Marius, the head of a great plebeian house, could be elected consul and the plebeians in turn threaten to become predominant, which Sylla or Sulla, as dictator, seeing, tried in vain to prevent. The dictator was provided for in the original const.i.tution. Retain the dictators.h.i.+p for a time, strengthen the plebeian element by ruthless proscriptions of patricians and by recruits from the provinces, unite the tribunitial, pontifical, and military powers in the imperator designated by the army, all elements existing in the const.i.tution from an early day, and already developed in the Roman state, and you have the imperial const.i.tution, which retained to the last the senate and consuls, though with less and less practical power. These changes are very great, but are none of them radical, dating from the recognition of the plebs as pertaining to the Roman people. They are normal developments, not corruptions, and the transition from the consular republic to the imperial was unquestionably a real social and political progress. And yet the Roman people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the developments of their const.i.tution. There was Providence in the course of events, but no fatalism.

Sulla was a true patrician, a blind partisan of the past. He sought to arrest the plebeian development led by Marius, and to restore the exclusively patrician government. But it was too late. His proscriptions, confiscations, butcheries, unheard-of cruelties which antic.i.p.ated and surpa.s.sed those of the French Revolution of 1793, availed nothing. The Marian or plebeian movement, apparently checked for a moment, resumed its march with renewed vigor under Julius, and triumphed at Pharsalia. In vain Cicero, only accidentally a.s.sociated with the patrician party, which distrusted him--in vain Cicero declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and Ca.s.sius seize the a.s.sa.s.sin's dagger, and strike to the earth "the foremost man of all the world;" the plebeian cause moves on with resistless force, triumphs anew at Philippi, and young Octavius avenges the murder of his uncle, and proves to the world that the a.s.sa.s.sination of a ruler is a blunder as well as a crime. In vain does Mark Antony desert the movement, rally Egypt and the barbaric East, and seek to transfer the seat of empire from the Tiber to the banks of the Nile or the Orontes; plebeian and imperial Rome wins a final victory at Actium, and definitively secures the empire of the civilized world to the West.

Thus far the developments were normal, and advanced civilization. But Rome still retained the barbaric element of slavery in her bosom, and had conquered more barbaric nations than she had a.s.similated. These nations she at first governed as tributary states, with their own const.i.tutions and national chiefs; afterwards as Roman provinces, by her own proconsuls and prefects. When the emperors threw open the gates of the city to the provincials, and conceded them the rights and privileges of Roman citizens, they introduced not only a foreign element into the state, dest.i.tute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric and despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only partially a.s.similated. These elements became germs of anti-republican developments, rather of corruptions, and prepared the downfall of the empire. Doubtless these corruptions might have been arrested, and would have been, if Roman patriotism had survived the changes effected in the Roman population by the concession of Roman citizens.h.i.+p to provincials; but it did not, and they were favored as time went on by the emperors themselves, and more especially by Dioclesian, a real barbarian, who hated Rome, and by Constantine, surnamed the Great, a real despot, who converted the empire from a republican to a despotic empire. Rome fell from the force of barbarism developed from within, far more than from the force of the barbarians hovering on her frontiers and invading her provinces.

The law of all possible developments is in the providential or congenital const.i.tution; but these possible developments are many and various, and the reason and free-will of the nation as well as of individuals are operative in determining which of them shall be adopted. The nation, under the direction of wise and able statesmen who understood their age and country, who knew how to discern between normal developments and barbaric corruptions, placed at the head of affairs in season, might have saved Rome from her fate, eliminated the barbaric and a.s.similated the foreign elements, and preserved Rome as a Christian and republican empire to this day, and saved the civilized world from the ten centuries of barbarism which followed her conquest by the barbarians of the North. But it rarely happens that the real statesmen of a nation are placed at the head of affairs.

Rome did not fall in consequence of the strength of her external enemies, nor through the corruption of private morals and manners, which was never greater than under the first Triumvirate. She fell from the want of true statesmans.h.i.+p in her public men, and patriotism in her people. Private virtues and private vices are of the last consequence to individuals, both here and hereafter; but private virtues never saved, private vices never ruined a nation. Edward the Confessor was a saint, and yet be prepared the way for the Norman conquest of England; and France owes infinitely less to St. Louis than to Louis XI., Richelieu, and Napoleon, who, though no saints, were statesmen. What is specially needed in statesmen is public spirit, intelligence, foresight, broad views, manly feelings, wisdom, energy, resolution; and when statesmen with these qualities are placed at the head of affairs, the state, if not already lost, can, however far gone it may be, be recovered, restored, reinvigorated, advanced, and private vice and corruption disappear in the splendor of public virtue.

Providence is always present in the affairs of nations, but not to work miracles to counteract the natural effects of the ignorance, ineptness, short-sightedness, narrow views, public stupidity, and imbecility of rulers, because they are irreproachable and saintly in their private characters and relations, as was Henry VI. of England, or, in some respects, Louis XVI. of France. Providence is G.o.d intervening through the laws he by his creative act gives to creatures, not their suspension or abrogation. It was the corruption of the statesmen, in subst.i.tuting the barbaric element for the proper Roman, to which no one contributed more than Constantine, the first Christian emperor, that was the real cause of the downfall of Rome, and the centuries of barbarism that followed, relieved only by the superhuman zeal and charity of the church to save souls and restore civilization.

But in the const.i.tution of the government, as distinguished from the state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign. The const.i.tution of the state is that which gives to the people of a given territory political existence, unity, and individuality, and renders it capable of political action. It creates political or national solidarity, in imitation of the solidarity of the race, in which it has its root. It is the providential charter of national existence, and that which gives to each nation its peculiar character, and distinguishes it from every other nation. The const.i.tution of government is the const.i.tution by the sovereign authority of the nation of an agency or ministry for the management of its affairs, and the letter of instructions according to which the agent or minister is to act and conduct the matters intrusted to him. The distinction which the English make between the sovereign and the ministry is a.n.a.logous to that between the state and the government, only they understand by the sovereign the king or queen, and by the ministry the executive, excluding, or not decidedly including, the legislature and the judiciary. The sovereign is the people as the state or body politic, and as the king holds from G.o.d only through the people, he is not properly sovereign, and is to be ranked with the ministry or government. Yet when the state delegates the full or chief governing power to the king, and makes him its sole or princ.i.p.al representative, he may, with sufficient accuracy for ordinary purposes, be called sovereign. Then, understanding by the ministry or government the legislative and judicial, as well as the executive functions, whether united in one or separated into distinct and mutually independent departments, the English distinction will express accurately enough, except for strictly scientific purposes, the distinction between the state and the government.

Still, it is only in despotic states, which are not founded on right, but force, that the king can say, L'etat, c'est moi, I am the state; and Shakespeare's usage of calling the king of France simply France, and the king of England simply England, smacks of feudalism, under which monarchy is an estate, property, not a public trust. It corresponds to the Scottish usage of calling the proprietor by the name of his estate. It is never to be forgotten that in republican states the king has only a delegated sovereignty, that the people, as well as G.o.d, are above him. He holds his power, as the Emperor of the French professes to hold his, by the grace of G.o.d and the national will--the only t.i.tle by which a king or emperor can legitimately hold power.

The king or emperor not being the state, and the government, whatever its form or const.i.tution, being a creature of the state, he can be dethroned, and the whole government even virtually overthrown, without dissolving the state or the political society. Such an event may cause much evil, create much social confusion, and do grave injury to the nation, but the political society may survive it; the sovereign remains in the plenitude of his rights, as competent to restore government as he was originally to inst.i.tute it. When, in 1848, Louis Philippe was dethroned by the Parisian mob, and fled the kingdom, there was in France no legitimate government, for all commissions ran in the king's name; but the organic or territorial people of France, the body politic, remained, and in it remained the sovereign power to organize and appoint a new government. When, on the 2d of December, 1851, the president, by a coup d'etat, suppressed the legislative a.s.sembly and the const.i.tutional government, there was no legitimate government standing, and the power a.s.sumed by the president was unquestionably a usurpation; but the nation was competent to condone his usurpation and legalize his power, and by a plebiscitum actually did so. The wisdom or justice of the coup d'etat is another question, about which men may differ; but when the French nation, by its subsequent act, had condoned it, and formally conferred dictatorial powers on the prince-president, the princ.i.p.al had approved the act of his agent, and given him discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said. The imperial const.i.tution and the election of the president to be emperor, that followed on December 2d, 1852, were strictly legal, and, whatever men may think of Napoleon III., it must be conceded that there is no legal flaw in his t.i.tle, and that he holds his power by a t.i.tle as high and as perfect as there is for any prince or ruler.

But the plebiscitum cannot be legally appealed to or be valid when and where there is a legal government existing and in the full exercise of its const.i.tutional functions, as was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in a case growing out of what is known as the Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island. A suffrage committee, having no political authority, drew up and presented a new const.i.tution of government to the people, plead a plebiscitum in its favor, and claimed the officers elected under it as the legally elected officers of the state. The court refused to recognize the plebiscitum, and decided that it knew Rhode Island only as represented through the government, which had never ceased to exist. New States in Territories have been organized on the strength of a plebiscitum when the legal Territorial government was in force, and were admitted as States into the Union, which, though irregular and dangerous, could be done without revolution, because Congress, that admitted them, is the power to grant the permission to organize as States and apply for admission. Congress is competent to condone an offence against its own rights. The real danger of the practice is, that it tends to create a conviction that sovereignty inheres in the people individually, or as population, not as the body politic or organic people attached to a sovereign domain; and the people who organize under a plebiscitum are not, till organized and admitted into the Union, an organic or a political people at all. When Louis Napoleon made his appeal to a vote of the French people, he made an appeal to a people existing as a sovereign people, and a sovereign people without a legal government. In his case the plebiscitum was proper and sufficient, even if it be conceded that it was through his own fault that France at the moment was found without a legal government. When a thing is done, though wrongly done, you cannot act as if it were not done, but must accept it as a fact and act accordingly.

The plebiscitum, which is simply an appeal to the people outside of government, is not valid when the government has not lapsed, either by its usurpations or by its dissolution, nor is it valid either in the case of a province, or of a population that has no organic existence as an independent sovereign state. The plebiscitum in France was valid, but in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Modena, Parma, and Lucca, and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies it was not valid, for their legal governments had not lapsed; nor was it valid in the Aemilian provinces of the Papal States, because they were not a nation or a sovereign people, but only a portion of such nation or people. In the case of the states and provinces--except Lombardy, ceded to France by Austria, and sold to the Sardinian king--annexed to Piedmont to form the new kingdom of Italy, the plebiscitum was invalid, because implying the right of the people to rebel against the legal authority, and to break the unity and individuality of the state of which they form an integral part. The nation is a whole, and no part has the right to secede or separate, and set up a government for itself, or annex itself to another state, without the consent of the whole. The solidarity of the nation is both a fact and a law. The secessionists from the United States defended their action only on the ground that the States of the American Union are severally independent sovereign states, and they only obeyed the authority of their respective states.

The plebiscitum, or irregular appeal to what is called universal suffrage, since adopted by Louis Napoleon in France after the coup d'etat, is becoming not a little menacing to the stability of governments and the rights and integrity of states, and is not less dangerous to the peace and order of society than "the solidarity of peoples" a.s.serted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary, the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia has emanc.i.p.ated her serfs.

The nation, as sovereign, is free to const.i.tute government according to its own judgment, under any form it pleases--monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed--vest all power in an hereditary monarch, in a cla.s.s or hereditary n.o.bles, in a king and two houses of parliament, one hereditary, the other elective, or both elective; or it may establish a single, dual, or triple executive, make all officers of government hereditary or all elective, and if elective, elective for a longer or a shorter time, by universal suffrage or a select body of electors. Any of these forms and systems, and many others besides, are or may be legitimate, if established and maintained by the national will. There is nothing in the law of G.o.d or of nature, antecedently to the national will, that gives any one of them a right to the exclusion of any one of the others. The imperial system in France is as legitimate as the federative system in the United States. The only form or system that is necessarily illegal is the despotic. That can never be a truly civilized government, nor a legitimate government, for G.o.d has given to man no dominion over man. He gave men, as St. Augustine says, and Pope St. Gregory the Great repeats, dominion over the irrational creation, not over the rational, and hence the primitive rulers of men were called pastors or shepherds, not lords. It may be the duty of the people subjected to a despotic government to demean themselves quietly and peaceably towards it, as a matter of prudence, to avoid sedition, and the evils that would necessarily follow an attempted revolution, but not because, founded as it is on mere force, it has itself any right or legality.

All other forms of government are republican in their essential const.i.tution, founded on public right, and held under G.o.d from and for the commonwealth, and which of them is wisest and best for the commonwealth is, for the most part, an idle question. "Forms of government," somebody has said, "are like shoes--that is the best form which best fit the feet that are to wear them." Shoes are to be fitted to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and conformation. There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from the state, no antecedent right which binds the people, for antecedently to the existence of the government as a fact, the state is free to adopt any form that it finds practicable, or judges the wisest and best for itself. Ordinarily the form of the government practicable for a nation is determined by the peculiar providential const.i.tution of the territorial people, and a form of government that would be practicable and good in one country may be the reverse in another. The English government is no doubt the best practicable in Great Britain, at present at least, but it has proved a failure wherever else it has been attempted. The American system has proved itself, in spite of the recent formidable rebellion to overthrow it, the best and only practicable government for the United States, but it is impracticable everywhere else, and all attempts by any European or other American state to introduce it can end only in disaster. The imperial system apparently works well in France, but though all European states are tending to it, it would not work well at all on the American continent, certainly not until the republic of the United States has ceased to exist. While the United States remain the great American power, that system, or its kindred system, democratic centralism, can never become an American system, as Maximilian's experiment in Mexico is likely to prove.

Political propagandism, except on the Roman plan, that is, by annexation and incorporation, is as impracticable as it is wanting in the respect that one independent people owes to another. The old French Jacobins tried to propagate, even with fire and sword, their system throughout Europe, as the only system compatible with the rights of man. The English, since 1688, have been great political propagandists, and at one time it seemed not unlikely that every European state would try the experiment of a parliamentary government, composed of an hereditary crown, an hereditary house of lords, and an elective house of commons. The democratic Americans are also great political propagandists, and are ready to sympathize with any rebellion, insurrection, or movement in behalf of democracy in any part of the world, however mean or contemptible, fierce or b.l.o.o.d.y it may be; but all this is as unstatesmanlike as unjust; unstatesmanlike, for no form of government can bear transplanting, and because every independent nation is the sole judge of what best comports with its own interests, and its judgment is to be respected by the citizens as well as by the governments of other states. Religious propagandism is a right and a duty, because religion is catholic and of universal obligation; and so is the jus gentium of the Romans, which is only the application to individuals and nations of the great principles of natural justice; but no political propagandism is ever allowable, because no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.

Thoughtful Americans are opposed to political propagandism, and respect the right of every nation to choose its own form of government; but they hold that the American system is the best in itself, and that if other nations were as enlightened as the American, they would adopt it.

But though the American system, rightly understood, is the best, as they hold, it is not because other nations are less enlightened, which is by no means a fact, that they do not adopt, or cannot bear it, but solely because their providential const.i.tutions do not require or admit it, and an attempt to introduce it in any of them would prove a failure and a grave evil.

Fit your shoes to your feet. The law of the governmental const.i.tution is in that of the nation. The const.i.tution of the government must grow out of the const.i.tution of the state, and accord with the genius, the character, the habits, customs, and wants of the people, or it will not work well, or tend to secure the legitimate ends of government. The const.i.tutions imagined by philosophers are for Utopia, not for any actual, living, breathing people. You must take the state as it is, and develop your governmental const.i.tution from it, and harmonize it with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two const.i.tutions, the government has no support in the state, in the organic people, or nation, and can sustain itself only by corruption or physical force. A government may be under the necessity of using force to suppress an insurrection or rebellion against the national authority, or the integrity of the national territory, but no government that can sustain itself, not the state, only by physical force or large standing armies, can be a good government, or suited to the nation. It must adopt the most stringent repressive measures, suppress liberty of speech and of conscience, outrage liberty in what it has the most intimate and sacred, and practise the most revolting violence and cruelty, for it can govern only by terror. Such a government is unsuited to the nation.

This is seen in all history: in the attempt of the dictator Sulla to preserve the old patrician government against the plebeian power that time and events had developed in the Roman state, and which was about to gain the supremacy, as we have seen, at Pharsalia, Philippi, and Actium; in the efforts to establish a Jacobinical government in France in 1793; in Rome in 1848, and the government of Victor Emmanuel in Naples in 1860 and 1861. These efforts, proscriptions, confiscations, military executions, a.s.sa.s.sinations, ma.s.sacres, are all made in the name of liberty, or in defence of a government supposed to guaranty the well-being of the state and the rights of the people. They are rendered inevitable by the mad attempt to force on a nation a const.i.tution of government foreign to the national const.i.tution, or repugnant to the national tastes, interests, habits, convictions, or whole interior life. The repressive policy, adopted to a certain extent by nearly all European governments, grows out of the madness of a portion of the people of the several states in seeking to force upon the nation an anti-national const.i.tution. The sovereigns may not be very wise, but they are wiser, more national, more patriotic than the mad theorists who seek to revolutionize the state and establish a government that has no hold in the national traditions, the national character, or the national life; and the statesman, the patriot, the true friend of liberty sympathizes with the national authorities, not with the mad theorists and revolutionists.

The right of a nation to change its form of government, and its magistrates or representatives, by whatever name called, is incontestable. Hence the French const.i.tution of 1789, which involved that of 1793, was not illegal, for though accompanied by some irregularities, it was adopted by the manifest will of the nation, and consented to by all orders in the state. Not its legality but its wisdom is to be questioned, together with the false and dangerous theories of government which dictated it. There is no compact or mutual stipulation between the state and the government. The state, under G.o.d, is sovereign, and ordains and establishes the government, instead of making a contract, a bargain, or covenant, with it. The common democratic doctrine on this point is right, if by people is understood the organic people attached to a sovereign domain, not the people as individuals or as a floating or nomadic mult.i.tude. By people in the political sense, Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, understood the people as the republic, organized in reference to the common or public good. With this understanding, the sovereignty persists in the people, and they retain the supreme authority over the government. The powers delegated are still the powers of the sovereign delegating them, and may be modified, altered, or revoked, as the sovereign judges proper.

The nation does not, and cannot abdicate or delegate away its own sovereignty, for sovereign it is, and cannot but be, so long as it remains a nation not subjected to another nation.

By the imperial const.i.tution of the French government, the imperial power is vested in Napoleon III., and made hereditary in his family, in the male line of his legitimate descendants. This is legal, but the nation has not parted with its sovereignty or bound itself by contract forever to a Napoleonic dynasty. Napoleon holds the imperial power "by the grace of G.o.d and the will of the nation," which means simply that he holds his authority from G.o.d, through the French people, and is bound to exercise it according to the law of G.o.d and the national will.

The nation is as competent to revoke this const.i.tution as the legislature is to repeal any law it is competent to enact, and in doing so breaks no contract, violates no right, for Napoleon and his descendants hold their right to the imperial throne subject to the national will from which it is derived. In case the nation should revoke the powers delegated, he or they would have no more valid claim to the throne than have the Bourbons, whom the nation has unmistakably dismissed from its service.

The only point here to be observed is, that the change must be by the nation itself, in its sovereign capacity; not by a mob, nor by a part of the nation conspiring, intriguing, or rebelling, without any commission from the nation. The first Napoleon governed by a legal t.i.tle, but he was never legally dethroned, and the government of the Bourbons, whether of the elder branch or the younger, was never a legal government, for the Bourbons had lost their original rights by the election of the first Napoleon, and never afterwards had the national will in their favor. The republic of 1848 was legal, in the sense that the nation acquiesced in it as a temporary necessity; but hardly anybody believed in it or wanted it, and the nation accepted it as a sort of loc.u.m tenens, rather than willed or ordained it. Its overthrow by the coup d'etat may not be legally defensible, but the election of Napoleon III. condoned the illegality, if there was any, and gave the emperor a legal t.i.tle, that no republican, that none but a despot or a no-government man can dispute. As the will of the nation, in so far as it contravenes not the law of G.o.d or the law of nature, binds every individual of the nation, no individual or number of individuals has, or can have, any right to conspire against him, or to labor to oust him from his place, till his escheat has been p.r.o.nounced by the voice of the nation. The state, in its sovereign capacity, willing it, is the only power competent to revoke or to change the form and const.i.tution of the imperial government. The same must be said of every nation that has a lawful government; and this, while it preserves the national sovereignty, secures freedom of progress, condemns all sedition, conspiracy, rebellion, revolution, as does the Christian law itself.

CHAPTER IX.

THE UNITED STATES

Sovereignty, under G.o.d, inheres in the organic people, or the people as the republic; and every organic people fixed to the soil, and politically independent of every other people, is a sovereign people, and, in the modern sense, an independent sovereign nation.

Sovereign states may unite in an alliance, league, or confederation, and mutually agree to exercise their sovereign powers or a portion of them in common, through a common organ or agency; but in this agreement they part with none of their sovereignty, and each remains a sovereign state or nation as before. The common organ or agency created by the convention is no state, is no nation, has no inherent sovereignty, and derives all its vitality and force from the persisting sovereignty of the states severally that have united in creating it. The agreement no more affects the sovereignty of the several states entering into it, than does the appointment of an agent affect the rights and powers of the princ.i.p.al. The creature takes nothing from the Creator, exhausts not, lessens not his creative energy, and it is only by his retaining and continuously exerting his creative power that the creature continues to exist.

An independent state or nation may, with or without its consent, lose its sovereignty, but only by being merged in or subjected to another.

Independent sovereign states cannot by convention, or mutual agreement, form themselves into a single sovereign state, or nation. The compact, or agreement, is made by sovereign states, and binds by virtue of the sovereign power of each of the contracting parties. To destroy that sovereign power would be to annul the compact, and render void the agreement. The agreement can be valid and binding only on condition that each of the contracting parties retains the sovereignty that rendered it competent to enter into the compact, and states that retain severally their sovereignty do not form a single sovereign state or nation. The states in convention cannot become a new and single sovereign state, unless they lose their several sovereignty, and merge it in the new sovereignty; but this they cannot do by agreement, because the moment the parties to the agreement cease to be sovereign, the agreement, on which alone depends the new sovereign state, is vacated, in like manner as a contract is vacated by the death of the contracting parties.

That a nation may voluntarily cede its sovereignty is frankly admitted, but it can cede it only to something or somebody actually existing, for to cede to nothing and not to cede is one and the same thing. They can part with their own sovereignty by merging themselves in another national existence, but not by merging themselves in nothing; and, till they have parted with their own sovereignty, the new sovereign state does not exist. A prince can abdicate his power, because by abdicating he simply gives back to the people the trust he had received from them; but a nation cannot, save by merging itself in another. An independent state not merged in another, or that is not subject to another, cannot cease to be a sovereign nation, even if it would.

That no sovereign state can be formed by a agreement or compact has already been shown in the refutation of the theory of the origin of government in convention, or the so-called social compact. Sovereign states are as unable to form themselves into a single sovereign state by mutual compact as are the sovereign individuals imagined by Rousseau. The convention, either of sovereign states or of sovereign individuals, with the best will in the world, can form only a compact or agreement between sovereigns, and an agreement or compact, whatever its terms or conditions, is only an alliance, a league, or a confederation, which no one can pretend is a sovereign state, nation, or republic.

The question, then, whether the United States are a single sovereign state or nation, or a confederacy of independent sovereign states depends on the question whether the American people originally existed as one people or as several independent states. Mr. Jefferson maintains that before the convention of 1787 they existed as several independent sovereign states, but that since that convention, or the ratification of the const.i.tution it proposed, they exist as one political people in regard to foreign nations, and several sovereign states in regard to their internal and domestic relations. Mr. Webster concedes that originally the States existed as severally sovereign states, but contends that by ratifying the const.i.tution they have been made one sovereign political people, state, or nation, and that the General government is a supreme national government, though with a reservation in favor of State rights. But both are wrong. If the several States of the Union were severally sovereign states when they met in the convention, they are so now; and the const.i.tution is only an agreement or compact between sovereigns, and the United States are, as Mr. Calhoun maintained, only a confederation of sovereign states, and not a single state or one political community.