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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its Constitution,
+Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
+
+Author: A. O. Brownson
+
+Posting Date: January 29, 2009 [EBook #2053]
+Release Date: January, 2000
+[Last updated: January 8, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+
+ITS
+
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+
+
+BY
+
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+
+P. O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET.
+
+1866.
+
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865, By P. O'SHEA,
+
+In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for
+the Southern District of New York.
+
+
+
+
+  TO THE
+  HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,
+  THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT
+  Historian of the United States,
+
+  THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF
+  GOVERNMENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF
+  THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
+  IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A
+  SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,
+  PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,
+  AND PUBLIC SERVICE,
+  BY THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT                                                     15
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT                                           26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Continued                                 43
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Continued                                71
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Concluded                               106
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT                                    136
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT--Concluded                         166
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE UNITED STATES                                             192
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES                             218
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--Continued                                   244
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION                                                     277
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION                                                309
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES                                          348
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY--POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS                              392
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the
+public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, my
+whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity, extent,
+authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government, and the
+unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny of the
+American Republic.  Many of the points treated have been from time to
+time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views have been
+presented, in my previous writings; but this work is newly and
+independently written from beginning to end, and is as complete on the
+topics treated as I have been able to make it.
+
+I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have used
+their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they came within
+the scope of my present work.  I have not felt myself bound to adhere
+to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther than they coincide
+with my present convictions, and I have written as freely and as
+independently as if I had never written or published any thing before.
+I have never been the slave of my own past, and truth has always been
+dearer to me than my own opinions.  This work is not only my latest,
+but will be my last on politics or government, and must be taken as the
+authentic, and the only authentic statement of my political views and
+convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts with
+the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as retracted,
+and rejected.
+
+The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is an
+essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured critics
+will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of articles
+designed for a review, rather than a book.  It is hard to overcome the
+habits of a lifetime.  I have taken some pains to exchange the reviewer
+for the author, but am fully conscious that I have not succeeded.  My
+work can lay claim to very little artistic merit.  It is full of
+repetitions; the same thought is frequently recurring,--the result, to
+some extent, no doubt, of carelessness and the want of artistic skill;
+but to a greater extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought."  In
+composing my work I have followed, rather than directed, the course of
+my thought, and, having very little confidence in the memory or
+industry of readers, I have preferred, when the completeness of the
+argument required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with
+perpetual references to what has gone before.
+
+That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting to
+its publication; but how much or how little of it is really mine, I am
+quite unable to say.  I have, from my youth up, been reading,
+observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost said writing, at
+least by fits and starts, on political subjects, especially in their
+connection with philosophy, theology, history, and social progress, and
+have assimilated to my own mind what it would assimilate, without
+keeping any notes of the sources whence the materials assimilated were
+derived.  I have written freely from my own mind as I find it now
+formed; but how it has been so formed, or whence I have borrowed, my
+readers know as well as I. All that is valuable in the thoughts set
+forth, it is safe to assume has been appropriated from others.  Where I
+have been distinctly conscious of borrowing what has not become common
+property, I have given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's
+name, with three important exceptions which I wish to note more
+formally.
+
+I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality and
+the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions furnished
+by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of Freedom and
+Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning and profound
+philosophic views.  I could not have written my work without the aid
+derived from its suggestions, any more than I could without Plato,
+Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the
+Abbate Gioberti.  To these two last-named authors, one a humanitarian
+sophist, the other a Catholic priest, and certainly one of the
+profoundest philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted,
+though I have followed the political system of neither.  I have taken
+from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity of
+the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation to the
+creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the Credo and the
+first verse of Genesis.
+
+In treating the several questions which the preparation of this volume
+has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of first
+principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one important
+point, the views I had expressed in my previous writings, especially on
+the distinction between civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis
+of civilization itself, and the value to the world of the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.  I have ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism,
+rejected every species of political aristocracy, and represented the
+English constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not
+as its type.  I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and
+defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial
+democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on the one
+hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the other.
+
+I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and defended
+from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the sovereignty of the
+American Republic vests in the States, though in the States
+collectively, or united, not severally, and thus escape alike
+consolidation and disintegration.  I find, with Mr. Madison, our most
+philosophic statesman, the originality of the American system in the
+division of powers between a General government having sole charge of
+the foreign and general, and particular or State governments having,
+within their respective territories, sole charge of the particular
+relations and interests of the American people; but I do not accept his
+concession that this division is of conventional origin, and maintain
+that it enters into the original Providential constitution of the
+American state, as I have done in my Review for October, 1863, and
+January and October, 1864.
+
+I maintain, after Mr.  Senator Sumner, one of the most philosophic and
+accomplished living American statesmen, that "State secession is State
+suicide," but modify the opinion I too hastily expressed that the
+political death of a State dissolves civil society within its territory
+and abrogates all rights held under it, and accept the doctrine that
+the laws in force at the time of secession remain in force till
+superseded or abrogated by competent authority, and also that, till the
+State is revived and restored as a State in the Union, the only
+authority, under the American system, competent to supersede or
+abrogate them is the United States, not Congress, far less the
+Executive.  The error of the Government is not in recognizing the
+territorial laws as surviving secession but in counting a State that
+has seceded as still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted
+as one of the United States in amending the Constitution.  Such State
+goes out of the Union, but comes under it.
+
+I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political views; to
+their general principles, and to show that the general principles
+asserted have their origin and ground in the great, universal, and
+unchanging principles of the universe itself. Hence, I have labored to
+show the scientific relations of political to theological principles,
+the real principles of all science, as of all reality.  An atheist, I
+have said, may be a politician; but if there were no God, there could
+be no politics. This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must
+follow science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
+mistake their darkness for light.
+
+I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as a
+Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real principles
+are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either in nature or
+revelation.  I am a Catholic by God's grace and great goodness, and
+must write as I am.  I could not write otherwise if I would, and would
+not if I could.  I have not obtruded my religion, and have referred to
+it only where my argument demanded it; but I have had neither the
+weakness nor the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it.  I could
+never have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
+of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with the
+great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of all that
+is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with Catholics or
+non-Catholics.
+
+Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction of sect
+or party, I have had more especially in view the people of my own
+religious communion.  It is no discredit to a man in the United States
+at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and devout Catholic.  The old
+sectarian prejudice may remain with a few, "whose eyes," as Emerson
+says, "are in their hind-head, not in their fore-head;" but the
+American people are not at heart sectarian, and the nothingarianism so
+prevalent among them only marks their state of transition from
+sectarian opinions to positive Catholic faith.  At any rate, it can no
+longer be denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing
+element in the American population, quite too numerous, too wealthy,
+and too influential to be ignored.  They have played too conspicuous a
+part in the late troubles of the country, and poured out too freely and
+too much of their richest and noblest blood in defence of the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, for that.  Catholics
+henceforth must be treated as standing, in all respects, on a footing
+of equality with any other class of American citizens, and their views
+of political science, or of any other science, be counted of equal
+importance, and listened to with equal attention.
+
+I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly by a
+Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house.  They who are
+not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the current of
+American literature, if it is one they must read in order to be up with
+the living and growing thought of the age. If it is not a book of that
+sort, it is not worth reading by any one.
+
+Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to exert an
+influence on the future of my country, for which I have made, or,
+rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which I tenderly
+love.  Now, I believe that he who can exert the most influence on our
+Catholic population, especially in giving tone and direction to our
+Catholic youth, will exert the most influence in forming the character
+and shaping the future destiny of the American Republic.  Ambition and
+patriotism alike, as well as my own Catholic faith and sympathies,
+induce me to address myself primarily to Catholics.  I quarrel with
+none of the sects; I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth
+wherever I find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long
+life, or a permanent possession.  I engage in no controversy with any
+one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth is
+brought out and placed in a clear light before the public, whatever is
+sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the morning mists
+before the rising sun.
+
+I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of my book
+from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics; but I speak to
+my countrymen at large.  I could not personally serve my country in the
+field: my habits as well as my infirmities prevented, to say nothing of
+my age; but I have endeavored in this humble work to add my
+contribution, small though it may be, to political science, and to
+discharge, as far as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism.  I
+would the book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a
+more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have
+written it.  All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a sincere
+book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects treated.  If well
+received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I shall endeavor to
+practise resignation, as I have so often done.
+
+
+O. A. BROWNSON.
+
+ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, Know
+Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more important as
+there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge of himself, whence
+he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he is for, what he can do,
+what he ought to do, and what are his means of doing it.
+
+Nations are only individuals on a larger scale.  They have a life, an
+individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of their own, and
+have the same general laws of development and growth, and, perhaps, of
+decay, as the individual man.  Equally important, and no less difficult
+than for the individual, is it for a nation to know itself, understand
+its own existence, its own powers and faculties, rights and duties,
+constitution, instincts, tendencies, and destiny.  A nation has a
+spiritual as well as a material, a moral as well as a physical
+existence, and is subjected to internal as well as external conditions
+of health and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some
+measure understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in
+its growth, and end in premature decay and death.
+
+Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than
+the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.  It has hardly had
+a distinct consciousness of its own national existence, and has lived
+the irreflective life of the child, with no severe trial, till the
+recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and compel it to reflect
+on its own constitution, its own separate existence, individuality,
+tendencies, and end.  The defection of the slaveholding States, and the
+fearful struggle that has followed for national unity and integrity,
+have brought it at once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced
+it to pass from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence
+to grave and reflecting manhood.  The nation has been suddenly
+compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from reflection,
+understanding, science, statesmanship, not from instinct, impulse,
+passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and wherefore it does
+it.  The change which four years of civil war have wrought in the
+nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity,
+the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.
+
+Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
+existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
+understanding of its own national constitution.  Its vision is still
+obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and its judgment
+rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild theories and fancies of
+its childhood.  The national mind has been quickened, the national
+heart has been opened, the national disposition prepared, but there
+remains the important work of dissipating the mists that still linger,
+of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to
+form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
+appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny; or, in
+other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the
+means of its actualization in space and time.
+
+Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and
+whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny.  Every
+nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the
+chosen people of God, through whom the primitive traditions were to be
+preserved in their purity and integrity, and the Messiah was to come.
+The Greeks were the chosen people of God, for the development and
+realization of the beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the
+true in science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
+the state, law, and jurisprudence.  The great despotic nations of Asia
+were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a mission,
+they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the progressive
+development of the human race.  History has not recorded their mission,
+and as far as they are known they have contributed only to the abnormal
+development or corruption of religion and civilization.  Despotism is
+barbaric and abnormal.
+
+The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
+chosen of God for the realization of a great idea.  It has been chosen
+not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to
+accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either.  In art, it will
+prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science
+and philosophy, if it do not surpass it.  In the state, in law, in
+jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome.  Its idea is liberty,
+indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty.  Yet its mission is
+not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true
+idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public
+and the freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people
+without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.  In
+other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic
+union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those
+of society.  The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the
+detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same,
+or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state.  The
+American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the
+freedom of each with advantage to the other.
+
+The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a
+political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of
+the constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and
+secures advantages which none of them did or could possess.  The
+American constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution.  The
+American form of government can be classed throughout with none of the
+forms of government described by Aristotle, or even by later
+authorities.  Aristotle knew only four forms of government: Monarchy,
+Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed Governments.  The American form is
+none of these, nor any combination of them.  It is original, a new
+contribution to political science, and seeks to attain the end of all
+wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
+and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
+political writers themselves.  The originality of the American
+constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own
+statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the
+constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its
+own principles.  They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely,
+if ever, appreciated its distinctive and peculiar merits.
+
+As the United States have vindicated their national unity and
+integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history, nothing is
+more important than that they should take that new start with a clear
+and definite view of their national constitution, and with a distinct
+understanding of their political mission in the future of the world.
+The citizen who can help his countrymen to do this will render them an
+important service and deserve well of his country, though he may have
+been unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.
+The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more difficult
+and more delicate than that which has been accomplished by our brave
+armies.  As yet the people are hardly better prepared for the political
+work to be done than they were at the outbreak of the civil war for the
+military work they have so nobly achieved.  But, with time, patience,
+and good-will, the difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past
+corrected, and the Government placed on the right track for the future.
+
+It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the United
+States is very defective or it has been very grossly misinterpreted by
+all parties.  If the slave States had not held that the States are
+severally sovereign, and the Constitution of the United States a simple
+agreement or compact, they would never have seceded; and if the Free
+States had not confounded the Union with the General government, and
+shown a tendency to make it the entire national government, no occasion
+or pretext for secession would have been given.  The great problem of
+our statesmen has been from the first, How to assert union without
+consolidation, and State rights without disintegration?  Have they, as
+yet, solved that problem?  The war has silenced the State sovereignty
+doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State rights?
+Has it done it without asserting the General government as the supreme,
+central, or national government?  Has it done it without striking a
+dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution?  In
+suppressing by armed force the doctrine that the States are severally
+sovereign, what barrier is left against consolidation?  Has not one
+danger been removed only to give place to another?
+
+But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the
+problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through
+misunderstanding of the constitution.  Our statesmen have recognized no
+constitution of the American people themselves; they have confined
+their views to the written constitution, as if that constituted the
+American people a state or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a
+law ordained by the nation already existing and constituted.  Perhaps,
+if they had recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that
+drawn up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in
+the republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the problem,
+and asserts national unity without consolidation, and the rights of the
+several States without danger of disintegration. The whole controversy,
+possibly, has originated in a misunderstanding of the real constitution
+of the United States, and that misunderstanding itself in the
+misunderstanding of the origin and constitution of government in
+general.  The constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay
+is not defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either
+danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and return
+and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and always has
+been.
+
+There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do with the
+rebellion, but it was not its sole cause.  The real cause must be
+sought in the program that had been made, especially in the States
+themselves, in forming and administering their respective governments,
+as well as the General government, in accordance with political
+theories borrowed from European speculators on government, the
+so-called Liberals and Revolutionists, which have and can have no
+legitimate application in the United States.  The tendency of American
+politics, for the last thirty or forty years, has been, within the
+several States themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy,
+as if the American people had for their mission only the reproduction
+of ancient Athens.  The American system is not that of any of the
+simple forms of government, nor any combination of them.  The attempt
+to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government
+recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in
+the cast-off garments of the past.  The American system, wherever
+practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better
+than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these
+several forms, because it accords more nearly with the principles of
+things, the real order of the universe.
+
+But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states
+more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the
+American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its
+place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or
+corruption.  Under the influence of this false development, the people
+were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people
+are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the
+territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were
+beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to
+govern.  All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves
+have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of
+the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This
+tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking
+secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the
+Northern, Central, and Western States.
+
+The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, in
+spite of the short-sightedness and blundering of the Administration,
+have proved the vitality and strength of the national constitution, and
+the greatness of the American people. They say nothing for or against
+the democratic theory of our demagogues, but every thing in favor of
+the American system or constitution of government, which has found a
+firmer support in American instincts than in American statesmanship.
+In spite of all that had been done by theorists, radicals, and
+revolutionists, no-government men, non-resistants, humanitarians, and
+sickly sentimentalists to corrupt the American people in mind, heart,
+and body, the native vigor of their national constitution has enabled
+them to come forth triumphant from the trial.  Every American patriot
+has reason to be proud of his country-men, and every American lover of
+freedom to be satisfied with the institutions of his country.  But
+there is danger that the politicians and demagogues will ascribe the
+merit, not to the real and living national constitution, but to their
+miserable theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the
+several evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has
+cost so much to suppress.  What is now wanted is, that the people,
+whose instincts are right, should understand the American constitution
+as it is, and so understand it as to render it impossible for political
+theorists, no matter of what school or party, to deceive them again as
+to its real import, or induce them to depart from it in their political
+action.
+
+A work written with temper, without passion or sectional prejudice, in
+a philosophical spirit, explaining to the American people their own
+national constitution, and the mutual relations of the General
+government and the State governments, cannot, at this important crisis
+in our affairs, be inopportune, and, if properly executed, can hardly
+fail to be of real service.  Such a work is now attempted--would it
+were by another and abler hand--which, imperfect as it is, may at least
+offer some useful suggestions, give a right direction to political
+thought, although it should fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.
+
+This much the author may say, in favor of his own work, that it sets
+forth no theory of government in general, or of the United States in
+particular.  The author is not a monarchist, an aristocrat, a democrat,
+a feudalist, nor an advocate of what are called mixed governments like
+the English, at least for his own country; but is simply an American,
+devoted to the real, living, and energizing constitution of the
+American republic as it is, not as some may fancy it might be, or are
+striving to make it. It is, in his judgment, what it ought to be, and
+he has no other ambition than to present it as it is to the
+understanding and love of his countrymen.
+
+Perhaps simple artistic unity and propriety would require the author to
+commence his essay directly with the United States; but while the
+constitution of the United States is original and peculiar, the
+government of the United States has necessarily something in common
+with all legitimate governments, and he has thought it best to precede
+his discussion of the American republic, its constitution, tendencies,
+and destiny, by some considerations on government in general.  He does
+this because he believes, whether rightly or not, that while the
+American people have received from Providence a most truly profound and
+admirable system of government, they are more or less infected with the
+false theories of government which have been broached during the last
+two centuries.  In attempting to realize these theories, they have
+already provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion which has
+seriously threatened the national existence, and come very near putting
+an end to the American order of civilization itself.  These theories
+have received already a shock in the minds of all serious and thinking
+men; but the men who think are in every nation a small minority, and it
+is necessary to give these theories a public refutation, and bring back
+those who do not think, as well as those who do, from the world of
+dreams to the world of reality.  It is hoped, therefore, that any
+apparent want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay will be
+pardoned for the sake of the end the author has had in view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself.
+He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God.
+He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence only by communion with
+God, through which he participates of the divine being and life.  He
+communes with God through the divine creative act and the Incarnation
+of the Word, through his kind, and through the material world.
+Communion with God through Creation and Incarnation is religion,
+distinctively taken, which binds man to God as his first cause, and
+carries him onward to God as his final cause; communion through the
+material world is expressed by the word property; and communion with
+God through humanity is society.  Religion, society, property, are the
+three terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the
+essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and
+his perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the attainment of
+the end for which he is created.
+
+Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through his
+kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, to actualize
+the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to his beatitude, since
+humanity is neither God nor the material universe, it is yet a
+necessary and essential condition of his life, his progress, and the
+completion of his existence.  He is born and lives in society, and can
+be born and live nowhere else. It is one of the necessities of his
+nature.  "God saw that it was not good for man to be alone."  Hence,
+wherever man is found he is found in society, living in more or less
+strict intercourse with his kind.
+
+But society never does and never can exist without government of some
+sort.  As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is government a
+necessity of society.  The simplest form of society is the family--Adam
+and Eve.  But though Adam and Eve are in many respects equal, and have
+equally important though different parts assigned them, one or the
+other must be head and governor, or they cannot form the society called
+family.  They would be simply two individuals of different sexes, and
+the family would fail for the want of unity.
+
+Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some degree of
+family government, of some authority to direct, control, restrain, or
+prescribe.  Hence the authority of the husband and father is recognized
+by the common consent of mankind.  Still more apparent is the necessity
+of government the moment the family develops and grows into the tribe,
+and the tribe into the nation.  Hence no nation exists without
+government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or degraded,
+that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the elders, or in the
+tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint reminiscences of some sort
+of government, with authority to demand obedience and to punish the
+refractory.  Hence, as man is nowhere found out of society, so nowhere
+is society found without government.
+
+Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that its
+necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the fact that the
+human race by sin has fallen from its primitive integrity, or original
+righteousness.  The fall asserted by Christian theology, though often
+misinterpreted, and its effects underrated or exaggerated, is a fact
+too sadly confirmed by individual experience and universal history; but
+it is not the cause why government is necessary, though it may be an
+additional reason for demanding it.  Government would have been
+necessary if man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well
+as for the bad.  The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man
+retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his nature.  It
+exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven in its perfection.
+Its office is not purely repressive, to restrain violence, to redress
+wrongs, and to punish the transgressor.  It has something more to do
+than to restrict our natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain
+justice between man and man.  Its office is positive as well as
+negative.  It is needed to render effective the solidarity of the
+individuals of a nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a
+mere organization--to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen
+all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all--to
+develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and
+direct it to the promotion of the common weal--to be a social
+providence, imitating in its order and degree the action of the divine
+providence itself, and, while it provides for the common good of all,
+to protect each, the lowest and meanest, with the whole force and
+majesty of society. It is the minister of wrath to wrong-doers, indeed,
+but its nature is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the
+right of property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can
+exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science and
+art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful means to the
+fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his existence.  Next after
+religion, it is man's greatest good; and even religion without it can
+do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call it a
+necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted,
+hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved,
+respected, obeyed, and if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly
+goods, and even of life itself.
+
+The nature or essence of government is to govern.  A government that
+does not govern, is simply no government at all.  If it has not the
+ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument
+in the bands of individuals for advancing their private interests, but
+it is not government.  To be government it must govern both individuals
+and the community.  If it is a mere machine for making prevail the will
+of one man, of a certain number of men, or even of the community, it
+may be very effective sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest
+for evil, but government in the proper sense of the word it is not.  To
+govern is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and
+directs his ship.  It necessarily implies two terms, governor and
+governed, and a real distinction between them.  The denial of all real
+distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics
+analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real
+distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which
+all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism--the supreme
+sophism.  If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface
+both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that
+governs is identically the will that is governed.  To make the
+controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all
+control.  There must, then, if there is government at all, be a power,
+force, or will that governs, distinct from that which is governed.  In
+those governments in which it is held that the people govern, the
+people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the people
+governed, or there is no real government.
+
+Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right
+or authority to govern.  Power without right is not government.
+Governments have the right to use force at need, but might does not
+make right, and not every power wielding the physical force of a nation
+is to be regarded as its rightful government.  Whatever resort to
+physical force it may be obliged to make, either in defence of its
+authority or of the rights of the nation, the government itself lies in
+the moral order, and politics is simply a branch of ethics--that branch
+which treats of the rights and duties of men in their public relations,
+as distinguished from their rights and duties in their private
+relations.
+
+Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the
+right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere
+physical necessity.  The right to govern and the duty to obey are
+correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived without the
+other.  Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable sentiment but a duty, a
+moral virtue.  Treason is not merely a difference in political opinion
+with the governing authority, but a crime against the sovereign, and a
+moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, the Founder of the moral Law.
+Treason, if committed in other Countries, unhappily, has been more
+frequently termed by our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor
+than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human
+governments have authority to punish.  The American people have been
+chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the
+correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law,
+and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority,
+however constituted or wherever lodged.  It is as necessary, as much a
+duty, as much a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler
+examples of the most devoted loyalty are not found in the world's
+history than were exhibited in the ancient Greek and Roman republics,
+or than have been exhibited by both men and women in the young republic
+of the United States. Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most
+generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime
+love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment
+of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice,
+and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike.
+There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly
+loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal,
+criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.
+Such a people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind.  It
+mocks at duty, scorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no
+person, no thing, human or divine, sacred or inviolable.  The assertion
+of government as lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and
+reconciles it with authority.  Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever
+one pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.  Freedom to
+follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any civil
+restraint, is license, not liberty.  There is no lesion to liberty in
+repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of the
+authority that has the right to command.  Tyranny or oppression is not
+in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped
+authority--to a power that has no right to command, or that commands
+what exceeds its right or its authority.  To say that it is contrary to
+liberty to be forced to forego our own will or inclination in any case
+whatever, is simply denying the right of all government, and falling
+into no-governmentism.  Liberty is violated only when we are required
+to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to
+make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority
+has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a
+rightful command.  The requisition, if made by rightful authority,
+then, violates no right that we have or can have, and where there is no
+violation of our rights there is no violation of our liberty.  The
+moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of obedience,
+presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may meet in
+peace and operate to the same end.
+
+This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience,
+and that the resistance to power can never be lawful. The tyrant may be
+lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of the word itself, is a
+usurper, and without authority.  Abuses of power may be resisted even
+by force when they become too great to be endured, when there is no
+legal or regular way of redressing them, and when there is a reasonable
+prospect that resistance will prove effectual and substitute something
+better in their place.  But it is never lawful to resist the rightful
+sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
+sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be said
+to abuse it.  Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a
+power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no
+abuse or abuses to redress.  All turns, then, on the right of power, or
+its legitimacy.  Whence does government derive its right to govern?
+What is the origin and ground of sovereignty?  This question is
+fundamental and without a true answer to it politics cannot be a
+science, and there can be no scientific statesmanship.  Whence, then,
+comes the sovereign right to govern?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
+
+
+Government is both a fact and a right.  Its origin as a fact, is simply
+a question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is
+a question of ethics.  Whether a certain territory and its population
+are a sovereign state or nation, or not--whether the actual ruler of a
+country is its rightful ruler, or not--is to be determined by the
+historical facts in the case; but whence the government derives its
+right to govern, is a question that can be solved only by philosophy,
+or, philosophy failing, only by revelation.
+
+Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and
+the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of
+government, among which may be named--
+
+I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his child.
+
+II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
+
+III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are
+sovereign.
+
+IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
+
+V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of
+God;--
+
+VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual
+society;--
+
+VII. From God through the people;--
+
+VIII. From God through the natural law.
+
+I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin
+of government as a fact.  The patriarchal system is the earliest known
+system of government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly
+all known governments--in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the
+Irish septs and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman
+qentes, and the Russian and Hindoo villages.  The right of the father
+was held to be his right to govern his family or household, which, with
+his children, included his wife and servants.  From the family to the
+tribe the transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the
+nation.  The father is chief of the family; the chief of the eldest
+family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest tribe becomes
+chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch. The heads of
+families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, and the families
+themselves, represented by their delegates, or publicly assembling for
+public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three forms, with their
+several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and
+mixed governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and have
+generally been held to be all that are possible.
+
+Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from
+the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family.
+Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal,
+which seem to be founded on landed property, may be traced back to a
+patriarchal origin.  The patriarch is sole proprietor, and the
+possessions of the family are vested in him, and he governs as
+proprietor as well as father.  In the tribe, the chief is the
+proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and holds the
+domain.  Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the
+suzerain, holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or
+vacant.  All the great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold
+the domain and govern as proprietors; they have the authority of the
+father and the owner; and their subjects, though theoretically their
+children, are really their slaves.
+
+In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
+transformation.  The father retains all the power of the patriarch
+within his family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of
+it, is met and controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are
+united in the senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state.
+Yet, not all the heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the
+tenants of the sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed
+and marked by the god Terminus.  Hence the great plebeian houses, often
+richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all share in
+the government and the honors of the state, because they were not
+tenants of any portion of the sacred territory.  There is here the
+introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
+transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state,
+and founds the civil order, or what is now called civilization.  The
+city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, and
+territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.
+
+In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the
+land.  When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early
+times was to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took
+possession of him, received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only
+such persons as were taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the
+sacred territory or domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens
+with full political rights.  This, in modern language, means that the
+state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
+the state, not the state to the citizen.  Under the patriarchal, the
+tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly
+speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical
+rather than political.  Authority--even the nation itself--is personal,
+not territorial.  The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king,
+is the only proprietor.  Under the Graeco-Roman system all this is
+transformed.  The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the
+real proprietor is the city or state.  Under the Empire, no doubt, what
+lawyers call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as
+the representative and trustee of the city or state.
+
+When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
+history does not inform us.  The first-born of Adam, we are told, built
+a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence
+that it was constituted a municipality.  The earliest traces of the
+civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and
+its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as
+well as republican.  It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal
+system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion
+rather than by simple explication.  It has in it an element that, if it
+exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a
+different form, and the transformation marks the passage from the
+economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil
+constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
+
+The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from
+civitas--city or state.  The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and
+nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished
+from the state, barbarians.  The origin of the word barbarian,
+barbarus, or ........, is unknown, and its primary sense can be only
+conjectured.  Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild,
+fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks
+and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the
+term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of
+manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and
+sciences--the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.
+They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an
+aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in
+which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was
+personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right,
+not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
+tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.
+
+Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European sense, but
+to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedaemon had kings; yet
+it was no less republican than Athens; and Rome was called and was a
+republic under the emperors no less than under the consuls.  Republic,
+respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or,
+in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on
+personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory,
+or domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
+attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.  France, Spain,
+Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in substance
+though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the word,
+republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own
+private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of
+the state.  The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution
+of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal
+or private right. Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to
+barbarism, and all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian
+in Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern times to breeding
+or refinement of manners, simply because these are characteristics of a
+republican, or polished [from ....., city] people.  Every people that
+has a real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity, is a
+republican people; and hence the church and her great doctors when they
+speak of the state as distinguished from the church, call it the
+republic, as may be seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius
+IX., which some have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
+
+All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is
+developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded
+by all Christendom.  In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is
+transformed into that of the city or state, that is, of the republic;
+but in all barbarous nations it retains its Private and personal
+character.  The nation is only the family or tribe, and is called by
+the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical
+denomination.  Race has not been supplanted by country; they are a
+people, not a state. They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may
+find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never
+find among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
+distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern
+Christian nations.  They have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no
+patria, or country.  The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire,
+whether of the West or the East, were nations, or confederacies of
+nations, but not states.  The nation with them was personal, not
+territorial.  Their country was wherever they fed their flocks and
+herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night.  There were
+Germans, but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his
+"father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken.  The Polish,
+Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by
+German states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue,
+are excluded from the Germanic Confederation.  The Turks, or Osmanlis,
+are a race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
+the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
+
+Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or
+predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern
+Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no
+state, no country.  The nation defines the boundaries, not the
+boundaries the nation.  The nation does not belong to the territory,
+but the territory to the nation or its chief.  The Irish and
+Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
+territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
+indivisible, they still held it as private property.  The shah of
+Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the
+landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants.  They hold
+it from him, not from the Persian state.
+
+The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain
+of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.  There is in barbaric states
+no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being
+tempered by parental affection.  The chief is a despot, and rules with
+the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.
+He owns the land and his subjects.
+
+Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the
+Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
+Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
+constitution.  The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all,
+governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the
+commonwealth.  Under feudalism there are estates, but no state.  The
+king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate,
+and the commons are represented as an estate.  The whole theory of
+power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.
+It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized
+nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
+ages.
+
+It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
+constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats,
+especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and
+Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and
+anti-republican.  The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that
+power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that
+the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by
+virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
+fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism.  This says nothing in
+favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal
+suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
+theoretically or practically.  Property has of itself advantages
+enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights
+and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as
+the business classes.  The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage,
+or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
+government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis
+Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation
+to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter
+the revolution of 1848.  The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
+universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
+private or personal right.  It is not a private, but a political right,
+and, like all political rights, a public trust.  Extremes meet, and
+thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
+human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in
+principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their
+place with nations on whom the light of civilization has never yet
+dawned.  All is not gold that glisters.
+
+The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
+private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is,
+that it makes it a public trust.  Barbarism knows only persons;
+civilization asserts and maintains the state.  With barbarians the
+authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication;
+in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation.  Keeping
+in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of
+government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the
+patriarchal.  The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
+patriarchal that the human race has begun its career.  The family or
+household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
+historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as
+the initial or inchoate nation.  But its simple direct development
+gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which
+nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan
+and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order is
+republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
+It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or despotic
+nation, and must either find or create civilization, which has been
+developed from the patriarchal system by way of transformation.
+
+But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of government,
+and all governments have been developed or modified from it, the right
+of government to govern cannot be deduced from the right of the father
+to govern his children, for the parental right itself is not ultimate
+or complete.  All governments that assume it to be so, and rest on it
+as the foundation of their authority, are barbaric or despotic, and,
+therefore, without any legitimate authority.  The right to govern rests
+on ownership or dominion.  Where there is no proprietorship, there is
+no dominion; and where there is no dominion, there is no right to
+govern. Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
+
+Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation.  The maker has the
+right to the thing made.  He, so far as he is sole creator, is sole
+proprietor, and may do what he will with it.  God is sovereign lord and
+proprietor of the universe because He is its sole creator.  He hath the
+absolute dominion, because He is absolute maker.  He has made it, He
+owns it; and one may do what he will with his own.  His dominion is
+absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He rightly governs as
+absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises
+only His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
+justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
+conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be
+right, wise, just, and good.  The despot is a man attempting to be God
+upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power.  Despotism is based on,
+the parental right, and the parental right is assumed to be absolute.
+Hence, your despotic rulers claim to reign, and to be loved and
+worshipped as gods.  Even the Roman emperors, in the fourth and fifth
+centuries, were addressed as divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a
+Christian, was addressed as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras--so far
+did barbarism encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
+
+The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for he is
+the generator, not the creator of his child.  Generation is in the
+order of second causes, and is simply the development or explication of
+the race.  The early Roman law, founded on the confusion of generation
+with creation, gave the father absolute authority over the child--the
+right of life and death, as over his servants or slaves; but this was
+restricted under the Empire, and in all Christian nations the authority
+of the father is treated, like all power, as a trust.  The child, like
+the father himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father
+is answerable for the use he makes of his authority.  The law fixes the
+age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; and even
+during his nonage, takes him from the father and places him under
+guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly
+abuses his trust.  This is proper, because society contributes to the
+life of the child, and has a right as well as an interest in him.
+Society, again, must suffer if the child is allowed to grow up a
+worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a right to intervene, both in
+behalf of itself and of the child, in case his parents neglect to train
+him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or are training him
+up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the
+community.  How, then, base the right of society on the right of the
+father, since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to
+the right of the parent?
+
+But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
+authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the ground
+of the right of society to govern.  Assume the parental right to be
+perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, it is no right to
+govern where no such relation exists.  Nothing true, real, solid in
+government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a "sham."  The
+statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms to the
+realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts
+legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable.  The presumptions or
+assumptions of law or politics must have a real and solid basis, or
+they are inadmissible.  How, from the right of the father to govern his
+own child, born from his loins, conclude his right to govern one not
+his child?  Or how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the
+right of society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
+political authority over its members?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking from
+asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should favor
+theocracy, and place secular society under the control of the clergy,
+and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political writers have sought
+to render government purely human, and maintain that its origin is
+conventional, and that it is founded in compact or agreement.  Their
+theory originated in the seventeenth century, and was predominant in
+the last century and the first third of the present.  It has been, and
+perhaps is yet, generally accepted by American politicians and
+statesmen, at least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the
+question at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
+
+The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of government
+as a social pact or compact, and explained the reciprocal rights and
+obligations of subjects and rulers by the general law of contracts; but
+they have never held that government originates in a voluntary
+agreement between the people and their rulers, or between the several
+individuals composing the community.  They have never held that
+government has only a conventional origin or authority.  They have
+simply meant, by the social compact, the mutual relations and
+reciprocal rights and duties of princes and their subjects, as implied
+in the very existence and nature of civil society.  Where there are
+rights and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an
+agreement voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
+compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in determining
+whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire whether either has
+broken the terms of the social compact.  They were engaged, not with
+the question whence does government derive its authority, but with its
+nature, and the reciprocal rights and duties of governors and the
+governed.  The compact itself they held was not voluntarily formed by
+the people themselves, either individually or collectively, but was
+imposed by God, either immediately, or mediately, through the law of
+nature.  "Every man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains
+there."  They held the same, and maintained that every one born into
+society contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
+society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law, every
+one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+and owes certain duties to society for the protection and assistance it
+affords him.
+
+But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed from the
+theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine which they would
+have been the last to accept.  These theorists or political speculators
+have imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society, in which
+men lived without government, law, or manners, out of which they
+finally came by entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of
+their number to be king and to govern them, or with one another to
+submit to the rule of the majority.  Hobbes, the English materialist,
+is among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of this
+theory.  He held that men lived, prior to the creation of civil
+society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and every one
+had an equal right to every thing, and to take any thing on which he
+could lay his hands and was strong enough to hold.  There was no law
+but the will of the strongest.  Hence, the state of nature was a state
+of continual war.  At length, wearied and disgusted, men sighed for
+peace, and, with one accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest
+among them: Come, be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and
+govern us; we surrender our natural rights and our natural independence
+to you, with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
+among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or cutting
+each other's throats.
+
+Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, but
+asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had asserted it in
+the interests of power.  Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, followed in the
+next century with his Contrat Social, the text-book of the French
+revolutionists--almost their Bible--and put the finishing stroke to the
+theory.  Hitherto the compact or agreement had been assumed to be
+between the governor and the governed; Rousseau supposes it to be
+between the people themselves, or a compact to which the people are the
+only parties. He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men
+lived, antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
+without government or law.  All men in that state were equal, and each
+was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.  These equal,
+independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to have met, in
+convention, and entered into a compact with themselves, each with all,
+and all with each, that they would constitute government, and would
+each submit to the determination and authority of the whole,
+practically of the fluctuating and irresponsible majority.  Civil
+society, the state, the government, originates in this compact, and the
+government, as Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
+Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
+governed."
+
+This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that the
+individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to civil
+society, was generally adopted by the American people in the last
+century, and is still the more prevalent theory with those among them
+who happen to have any theory or opinion on the subject.  It is the
+political tradition of the country.  The state, as defined by the elder
+Adams, is held to be a voluntary association of individuals.
+Individuals create civil society, and may uncreate it whenever they
+judge it advisable.  Prior to the Southern Rebellion, nearly every
+American asserted with Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or
+revolution, and sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and
+revolutionists, wherever they made their appearance.  Loyalty was held
+to be the correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and
+traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent
+lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.  The fearful struggle
+of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its very existence
+may have changed this.
+
+That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory
+assumes, may be questioned.  Certainly nothing proves that it is, or
+ever was, a real state.  That there is a law of nature is undeniable.
+All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and jurisprudence
+assert it; the state assumes it as its own immediate basis, and the
+codes of all nations are founded on it; universal jurisprudence, the
+jus qentium of the Romans, embodies it, and the courts recognize and
+administer it.  It is the reason and conscience of civil society, and
+every state acknowledges its authority.  But the law of nature is as
+much in force in civil society as out of it.  Civil law does not
+abrogate or supersede natural law, but presupposes it, and supports
+itself on it as its own ground and reason.  As the natural law, which
+is only natural justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all
+men, persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its
+informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil state,
+natural society in civil society, which simply develops, applies, and
+protects it.  Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in
+it--is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and
+government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.
+The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state,
+an actual state, and never was; but an abstraction, in which is
+considered, apart from the concrete existence called society, what is
+derived immediately from the natural law.  But as abstractions have no
+existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature has no
+actual existence in the world of reality as a separate state.
+
+But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a real and
+separate state, in which men at first lived, there is great difficulty
+in understanding how they ever got out of it. Can a man divest himself
+of his nature, or lift himself above it? Man is in his nature, and
+inseparable from it.  If his primitive state was his natural state, and
+if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural,
+how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the
+latter?  The ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of
+creation, asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the
+earth, and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
+and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art,
+law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the
+Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of
+that state alone by his own unaided efforts.  They ascribed the
+invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil
+society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods.  It
+remained for the Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern
+successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first
+cause, believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
+care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own unassisted
+efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out of the primitive
+state, and institute what in modern times is called civilta, civility,
+or civilization.
+
+The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which men have
+emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of civil society,
+forget that if government is not the sole condition, it is one of the
+essential conditions of progress. The only progressive nations are
+civilized or republican nations. Savage and barbarous tribes are
+unprogressive.  Ages on ages roll over them without changing any thing
+in their state; and Niebuhr has well remarked with others, that history
+records no instance of a savage tribe or people having become civilized
+by its own spontaneous or indigenous efforts.  If savage tribes have
+ever become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
+aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
+missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
+commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age. Nothing
+in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of
+itself from the savage state to the civilized.  But the primitive man,
+as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke,
+Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage.  The lowest, most
+degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered
+has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social
+state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in
+superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion;
+but the people in the alleged state of nature have none.
+
+The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting into
+their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of
+the civilized man.  It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been
+civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the
+habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of
+society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away
+on some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all
+intercourse with the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and
+re-establish and maintain civil government.  They are civilized men,
+and bear civil society in their own life.  But these are no
+representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature.
+These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception
+even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they
+have thus far lived.  How then can they, since, on the theory, civil
+society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial creation,
+even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?
+
+These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
+abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel
+they could do in case civil society were broken up, what men may do and
+have done in a state of nature.  Men cannot divest themselves of
+themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it, they think, reason,
+and act as they are.
+
+Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.  The advocates
+of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete, should have
+presented their primitive man as below the lowest known savage,
+unprogressive, and in himself incapable of developing any progressive
+energy.  Unprogressive, and, without foreign assistance, incapable of
+progress, how is it possible for your primitive man to pass, by his own
+unassisted efforts, from the alleged state of nature to that of
+civilization, of which he has no conception, and towards which no
+innate desire, no instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
+
+But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
+supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some happy
+inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the state of
+nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil government, how
+could he carry his conception into execution? Conception is always
+easier than its realization, and between the design and its execution
+there is always a weary distance.  The poetry of all nations is a wail
+over unrealized ideals.  It is little that even the wisest and most
+potent statesman can realize of what he conceives to be necessary for
+the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly
+demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not
+seldom generations come and go without effecting them.  The republics
+of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities
+of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because
+intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are
+innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their
+realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life,
+which only their introduction and realization can supply.  So to be
+able to execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
+to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits,
+and characters in the public which are not possible without
+civilization itself.  Some philosophers suppose men have invented
+language, forgetting that it requires language to give the ability to
+invent language.
+
+Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it
+may be.  They are moved by their affections, passions, instincts, and
+habits.  Routine is more powerful with them than logic.  A few are
+greedy of novelties, and are always for trying experiments; but the
+great body of the people of all nations have an invincible repugnance
+to abandon what they know for what they know not.  They are, to a great
+extent, the slaves of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the
+necessary exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
+better.  Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
+prejudice, habits, and usages.  Never were philosophers more ignorant
+of human nature than they, so numerous in the last century, who
+imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of interest, and that
+enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien entendu, suffices to found
+and sustain the state.  No reform, no change in the constitution of
+government or of society, whatever the advantages it may promise, can
+be successful, if introduced, unless it has its root or germ in the
+past.  Man is never a creator; he can only develop and continue,
+because he is himself a creature, and only a second cause.  The
+children of Israel, when they encountered the privations of the
+wilderness that lay between them and the promised land flowing with
+milk and honey, fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back
+to Egypt, and permit them to return to slavery.
+
+In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, there
+is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil society would
+not be a development, but a complete rupture with the past, and an
+entire new creation.  When it is with the greatest difficulty that
+necessary reforms are introduced in old and highly civilized nations
+and when it can seldom be done at all without terrible political and
+social convulsions, how can we suppose men without society, and knowing
+nothing of it, can deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice
+aforethought," found society?  Without government, and destitute alike
+of habits of obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
+establish, and sustain government?  To suppose it, would be to suppose
+that men in a state of nature, without culture, without science,
+without any of the arts, even the most simple and necessary, are
+infinitely superior to the men formed under the most advanced
+civilization.  Was Rousseau right in asserting civilization as a fall,
+as a deterioration of the race?
+
+But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some miracle
+or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the origin of
+government as authority in compact is not yet established.  According
+to the theory, the rights of civil society are derived from the rights
+of the individuals who form or enter into the compact.  But individuals
+cannot give what they have not, and no individual has in himself the
+right to govern another.  By the law of nature all men have equal
+rights, are equals, and equals have no authority one over another.  Nor
+has an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right to
+dispose of himself as he pleases.  Man is not God, independent,
+self-existing and self-sufficing.  He is dependent, and dependent not
+only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on
+nature, or the material world.  That on which he depends in the measure
+in which be depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life,
+and to his well-being, and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right
+in him and to him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the
+proud spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation
+to another.  The right of that on which man depends, and by communion
+with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.
+
+Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his only
+medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him is neither
+absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it, lives in it, and
+cannot live without it.  It has, then, certain lights over him, and he
+cannot enter into any compact, league, or alliance that society does
+not authorize, or at least permit. These rights of society override his
+rights to himself, and he can neither surrender them nor delegate them.
+Other rights, as the rights of religion and property, which are held
+directly from God and nature, and which are independent of society, are
+included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these rights
+cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they are rights of
+man only before civil society, and therefore not his to cede, and
+because they are precisely the rights that government is bound to
+respect and protect.  The compact, then, cannot be formed as pretended,
+for the only rights individuals could delegate or surrender to society
+to constitute the sum of the rights of government are hers already, and
+those which are not hers are those which cannot be delegated or
+surrendered, and in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is the
+duty, the chief end of government to protect each and every individual.
+
+The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no
+authority without society, to meet in convention, and enter into the
+alleged compact, because they are not independent, sovereign
+individuals.  But pass over this: suppose the convention, suppose the
+compact, it must still be conceded that it binds and can bind only
+those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into it.  This is conceded
+by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of 1776, in the assertion
+that government derives its "just powers from the consent of the
+governed."  This consent, as the matter is one of life and death, must
+be free, deliberate, formal, explicit, not simply an assumed, implied,
+or constructive consent.  It must be given personally, and not by one
+for another without his express authority.
+
+It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms of the
+compact from the silence of the individual, and also from his continued
+residence in the country and submission to its government.  But
+residence is no evidence of consent, because it may be a matter of
+necessity.  The individual may be unable to emigrate, if he would; and
+by what right can individuals form an agreement to which I must consent
+or else migrate to some strange land?
+
+Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, be any thing
+but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and therefore
+invalid?  Nothing can be inferred from one's silence, for he may have
+many reasons for being silent besides approval of the government.  He
+may be silent because speech would avail nothing; because to protest
+might be dangerous--cost him his liberty, if not his life; because he
+sees and knows nothing better, and is ignorant that he has any choice
+in the case; or because, as very likely is the fact with the majority,
+he has never for moment thought of the matter, or ever had his
+attention called to it, and has no mind on the subject.
+
+But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from the
+compact or obligation to obey the government created by it all the
+women of a nation, all the children too young to be capable of giving
+their consent, and all who are too ignorant, too weak of mind to be
+able to understand the terms of the contract.  These several classes
+cannot be less than three-fourths of the population of any country.
+What is to be done with them? Leave them without government?  Extend
+the power of the government over them?  By what right?  Government
+derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that
+consent they have not given.  Whence does one-fourth of the population
+get its right to govern the other three-fourths?
+
+But what is to be done with the rights of minorities?  Is the rule of
+unanimity to be insisted on in the convention and in the government,
+when it goes into operation?  Unanimity is impracticable, for where
+there are many men there will be differences of opinion.  The rule of
+unanimity gives to each individual a veto on the whole proceeding,
+which was the grand defect of the Polish constitution.  Each member of
+the Polish Diet, which included the whole body of the nobility, had an
+absolute veto, and could, alone, arrest the whole action of the
+government.  Will you substitute the rule of the majority, and say the
+majority must govern?  By what right?  It is agreed to in the
+convention.  Unanimously, or only by a majority?  The right of the
+majority to have their will is, on the social compact theory, a
+conventional right, and therefore cannot come into play before the
+convention is completed, or the social compact is framed and accepted.
+How, in settling the terms of the compact, will you proceed?  By
+majorities?  But suppose a minority objects, and demands two-thirds,
+three-fourths, or four-fifths, and votes against the majority rule,
+which is carried only by a simple plurality of votes, will the
+proceedings of the convention bind the dissenting minority?  What gives
+to the majority the right to govern the minority who dissent from its
+action?
+
+On the supposition that society has rights not derived from
+individuals, and which are intrusted to the government, there is a good
+reason why the majority should prevail within the legitimate sphere of
+government, because the majority is the best representative practicable
+of society itself; and if the constitution secures to minorities and
+dissenting individuals their natural rights and their equal rights as
+citizens, they have no just cause of complaint, for the majority in
+such case has no power to tyrannize over them or to oppress them.  But
+the theory under examination denies that society has any rights except
+such as it derives from individuals who all have equal rights.
+According to it, society is itself conventional, and created by free,
+independent, equal, sovereign individuals. Society is a congress of
+sovereigns, in which no one has authority over another, and no one can
+be rightfully forced to submit to any decree against his will.  In such
+a congress the rule of the majority is manifestly improper,
+illegitimate, and invalid, unless adopted by unanimous consent.
+
+But this is not all.  The individual is always the equal of himself,
+and if the government derives its powers from the consent of the
+governed, he governs in the government, and parts with none of his
+original sovereignty.  The government is not his master, but his agent,
+as the principal only delegates, not surrenders, his rights and powers
+to the agent.  He is free at any time he pleases to recall the powers
+he has delegated, to give new instructions, or to dismiss him.  The
+sovereignty of the individual survives the compact, and persists
+through all the acts of his agent, the government.  He must, then, be
+free to withdraw from the compact whenever he judges it advisable.
+Secession is perfectly legitimate if government is simply a contract
+between equals.  The disaffected, the criminal, the thief the
+government would send to prison, or the murderer it would hang, would
+be very likely to revoke his consent, and to secede from the state.
+Any number of individuals large enough to count a majority among
+themselves, indisposed to pay the government taxes, or to perform the
+military service exacted, might hold a convention, adopt a secession
+ordinance, and declare themselves a free, independent, sovereign state,
+and bid defiance to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and
+that, too, without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.
+Would the government employ military force to coerce them back to their
+allegiance?  By what right?  Government is their agent, their creature,
+and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or creature.
+
+The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment be
+dissolved.  Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently maintained
+that one generation has no power to bind another; and, as if this was
+not enough, he asserted the right of revolution, and gave it as his
+opinion that in every nation a revolution once in every generation is
+desirable, that is, according to his reckoning, once every nineteen
+years.  The doctrine that one generation has no power to bind its
+successor is not only a logical conclusion from the theory that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
+since a generation cannot give its consent before it is born, but is
+very convenient for a nation that has contracted a large national debt;
+yet, perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new
+generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge the
+obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.  No man,
+certainly, can contract for any one but himself; and how then can the
+son be bound, without his own personal or individual consent, freely
+given, by the obligations entered into by his father?
+
+The social compact is necessarily limited to the individuals who form
+it, and as necessarily, unless renewed, expires with them. It thus
+creates no state, no political corporation, which survives in all its
+rights and powers, though individuals die. The state is on this theory
+a voluntary association, and in principle, except that it is not a
+secret society, in no respect differs from the Carbonari, or the
+Knights of the Golden Circle. When Orsini attempted to execute the
+sentence of death on the Emperor of the French, in obedience to the
+order of the Carbonari, of which the Emperor was a member, he was, if
+the theory of the origin of government in compact be true, no more an
+assassin than was the officer who executed on the gallows the rebel
+spies and incendiaries Beal and Kennedy.
+
+Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no social or
+civil element.  It does not and cannot create society.  It can give
+only an aggregation of individuals, and society is not an aggregation
+nor even an organization of individuals.  It is an organism, and
+individuals live in its life as well as it in theirs.  There is a real
+living solidarity, which makes individuals members of the social body,
+and members one of another. There is no society without individuals,
+and there are no individuals without society; but in society there is
+that which is not individual, and is more than all individuals.  The
+social compact is an attempt to substitute for this real living
+solidarity, which gives to society at once unity of life and diversity
+of members, an artificial solidarity, a fictitious unity for a real
+unity, and membership by contract for real living membership, a cork
+leg for that which nature herself gives. Real government has its ground
+in this real living solidarity, and represents the social element,
+which is not individual, but above all individuals, as man is above
+men.  But the theory substitutes a simple agency for government, and
+makes each individual its principal.  It is an abuse of language to
+call this agency a government.  It has no one feature or element of
+government.  It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity; its
+authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a public
+authority, representing a public will, a public right, or a public
+interest.  In no country could government be adopted and sustained if
+men were left to the wisdom or justness of their theories, or in the
+general affairs of life, acted on them. Society, and government as
+representing society, has a real existence, life, faculties, and organs
+of its own, not derived or derivable from individuals.  As well might
+it be maintained that the human body consists in and derives all its
+life from the particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and
+which are constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its
+life, or government its powers, from individuals.  No mechanical
+aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is no
+living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation of
+individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths, can make
+society where there is no informing social principle that aggregates
+and assimilates them to a living body, or produce that mystic existence
+called a state or commonwealth.
+
+The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the nation to
+be a purely personal affair.  It gives the government no territorial
+status, and clothes it with no territorial rights or jurisdiction.  The
+government that could so originate would be, if any thing, a barbaric,
+not a republican government.  It has only the rights conferred on it,
+surrendered or delegated to it by individuals, and therefore, at best,
+only individual rights. Individuals can confer only such rights as they
+have in the supposed state of nature.  In that state there is neither
+private nor public domain.  The earth in that state is not property,
+and is open to the first occupant, and the occupant can lay no claim to
+any more than he actually occupies.  Whence, then, does government
+derive its territorial jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain
+claimed by all national governments?  Whence its title to vacant or
+unoccupied lands?  How does any particular government fix its
+territorial boundaries, and obtain the right to prescribe who may
+occupy, and on what conditions the vacant lands within those
+boundaries? Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers,
+lakes, bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as
+appertaining to its domain?  Here are rights that it could not have
+derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed them in the
+so-called state of nature.  The concocters of the theory evidently
+overlooked these rights, or considered them of no importance.  They
+seem never to have contemplated the existence of territorial states, or
+the division of mankind into nations fixed to the soil.  They seem not
+to have supposed the earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of
+their followers pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of
+a nation are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy them, without
+leave asked of the national authority or granted.  The American people
+retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory habits
+of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they settled on the
+banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern Ocean, in Scania, or
+came in contact with the Graeco-Roman civilization.
+
+Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations are
+fixed to the soil.  The territory is defined, and is the domain of the
+state, from which all private proprietors hold their title-deeds.
+Individual proprietors hold under the state, and often hold more, than
+they occupy; but it retains in all private estates the eminent domain,
+and prohibits the alienation of land to one who is not a citizen.  It
+defends its domain, its public unoccupied lands, and the lands owned by
+private individuals, against all foreign powers.  Now whence, if
+government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it get
+this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even its
+unoccupied lands as trespassers?  In the state of nature the
+territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are restricted to
+the portion of land they occupy with their rude culture, and with their
+flocks and herds, and in civilized nations to what they hold from the
+state, and, therefore, the right as held and defended by all nations,
+and without which the nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is
+and can be no state, could never have been derived from individuals.
+The earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the sacred
+territory, to which the state and all political power are attached.
+Whence did Rome become a landholder, and the governing people a
+territorial people?  Whence does any nation become a territorial nation
+and lord of the domain?  Certainly never by the cession of individuals,
+and hence no civilized government ever did or could originate in the
+so-called social compact.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+III. The tendency of the last century was to individualism; that of the
+present is to socialism.  The theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and
+Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still held by many, has
+latterly been much modified, if not wholly transformed.  Sovereignty,
+it is now maintained, is inherent in the people; not individually,
+indeed, but collectively, or the people as society.  The constitution
+is held not to be simply a compact or agreement entered into by the
+people as individuals creating civil society and government, but a law
+ordained by the sovereign people, prescribing the constitution of the
+state and defining its rights and powers.
+
+This transformation, which is rather going on than completed, is, under
+one aspect at least, a progress, or rather a return to the sounder
+principles of antiquity.  Under it government ceases to be a mere
+agency, which must obtain the assassin's consent to be hung before it
+can rightfully hang him, and becomes authority, which is one and
+imperative.  The people taken collectively are society, and society is
+a living organism, not a mere aggregation of individuals.  It does not,
+of course, exist without individuals, but it is something more than
+individuals, and has rights not derived from them, and which are
+paramount to theirs. There is more truth, and truth of a higher order,
+in this than in the theory of the social compact.  Individuals, to a
+certain extent, derive their life from God through society, and so far
+they depend on her, and they are hers; she owns them, and has the right
+to do as she will with them.  On this theory the state emanates from
+society, and is supreme.  It coincides with the ancient Greek and Roman
+theory, as expressed by Cicero, already cited.  Man is born in society
+and remains there, and it may be regarded as the source of ancient
+Greek and Roman patriotism, which still commands the admiration of the
+civilized world.  The state with Greece and Rome was a living reality,
+and loyalty a religion.  The Romans held Rome to be a divinity, gave
+her statues and altars, and offered her divine worship.  This was
+superstition, no doubt, but it had in it an element of truth.  To every
+true philosopher there is something divine in the state, and truth in
+all theories.  Society stands nearer to God, and participates more
+immediately of the Divine essence, and the state is a more lively image
+of God than the individual.  It was man, the generic and reproductive
+man, not the isolated individual, that was created in the image and
+likeness of his Maker.  "And God created man in his own image; in the
+image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
+
+This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it enlists in
+its support the instincts, the intelligence, the living forces, and
+active tendencies of the age.  Kings, kaisers, and hierarchies are
+powerless before it, and war against it in vain.  The most they can do
+is to restrain its excesses, or to guard against its abuses.  Its
+advocates, in returning to it, sometimes revive in its name the old
+pagan superstition.  Not a few of the European democrats recognize in
+the earth, in heaven, or in hell, no power superior to the people, and
+say not only people-king but people-God.  They say absolutely, without
+any qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and
+make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in religion,
+philosophy, morals, science, and the arts.  The people not only found
+the state, but also the church.  They inspire or reveal the truth,
+ordain or prohibit worships, judge of doctrines, and decide cases of
+conscience.  Mazzini said, when at the head of the Roman Republic in
+1848, the question of religion must be remitted to the judgment of the
+people.  Yet this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in
+all civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.
+
+But this theory has its difficulties.  Who are the collective people
+that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign people?  The
+word people is vague, and in itself determines nothing.  It may include
+a larger or a smaller number; it may mean the political people, or it
+may mean simply population; it may mean peasants, artisans,
+shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as distinguished from the nobility;
+hired laborers or workmen as distinguished from their employer, or
+slaves as distinguished from their master or owner.  In which of these
+senses is the word to be taken when it is said, "The people are
+sovereign?"  The people are the population or inhabitants of one and
+the same country.  That is something.  But who or what determines the
+country?  Is the country the whole territory of the globe?  That will
+not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and their
+division into separate nations.  Is the territory indefinite or
+undefined?  Then indefinite or undefined are its inhabitants, or the
+people invested with the rights of society. Is it defined and its
+boundaries fixed?  Who has done it?  The people.  But who are the
+people?  We are as wise as we were at starting.  The logicians say that
+the definition of idem per idem, or the same by the same, is simply no
+definition at all.
+
+The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people the
+sovereign people.  But who are the people constituting the nation?  The
+sovereign people?  This is only to revolve in a vicious circle.  The
+nation is the tribe or the people living under the same regimen, and
+born of the same ancestor, or sprung from the same ancestor or
+progenitor.  But where find a nation in this the primitive sense of the
+word?  Migration, conquest, and intermarriage, have so broken up and
+intermingled the primitive races, that it is more than doubtful if a
+single nation, tribe, or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face
+of the earth. A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman,
+may have the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.
+The nation is the people inhabiting the same country, and united under
+one and the same government, it is further answered.  The nation, then,
+is not purely personal, but also territorial. Then, again, the question
+comes up, who or what determines the territory?  The government?  But
+not before it is constituted, and it cannot be constituted till its
+territorial limits are determined.  The tribe doubtless occupies
+territory, but is not fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it,
+and therefore is not territorial.  But a nation, in the modern or
+civilized sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its
+jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory is
+determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.
+
+The question is not an idle question.  It is one of great practical
+importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither determine who are
+the sovereign people, nor who are united under one and the same
+government.  Laws have no extra-territorial force, and the officer who
+should attempt to enforce the national laws beyond the national
+territory would be a trespasser.  If the limits are undetermined, the
+government is not territorial, and can claim as within its jurisdiction
+only those who choose to acknowledge its authority.  The importance of
+the question has been recently brought home to the American people by
+the secession of eleven or more States from the Union.  Were these
+States a part of the American nation, or were they not?  Was the war
+which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so much
+treasure, a civil war or a foreign war?  Were the secessionists
+traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were they patriots fighting
+for the liberty and independence of their country and the right of
+self-government?  All on both sides agreed that the nation is
+sovereign; the dispute was as to the existence of the nation itself,
+and the extent of its jurisdiction.  Doubtless, when a nation has a
+generally recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the
+difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be got
+over; but the question here concerns the institution of government, and
+determining who constitute society and have the right to meet in
+person, or by their delegates in convention, to institute it.  This
+question, so important, and at times so difficult, the theory of the
+origin of government in the people collectively, or the nation, does
+not solve, or furnish any means of solving.
+
+But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another, and a
+very grave one, to overcome.  The theory assumes that the people
+collectively, "in their own native right and might," are sovereign.
+According to it the people are ultimate, and free to do whatever they
+please.  This sacrifices individual freedom. The origin of government
+in a compact entered into by individuals, each with all and all with
+each, sacrificed the rights of society, and assumed each individual to
+be in himself an independent sovereignty.  If logically carried out,
+there could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and
+no public authority.  This new theory transfers to society the
+sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social
+despotism, or the absolutism of the state.  It asserts with sufficient
+energy public authority, or the right of the people to govern; but it
+leaves no space for individual rights, which society must recognize,
+respect, and protect.  This was the grand defect of the ancient
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The historian explores in vain the records
+of the old Greek and Roman republics for any recognition of the rights
+of individuals not held as privileges or concessions from the state.
+Society recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed
+over individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his household,
+the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over his subjects.
+The direct and indirect influence of the body of freemen admitted to a
+voice in public affairs, in determining the resolutions and action of
+the state, no doubt tempered in practice to some extent the authority
+of the state, and prevented acts of gross oppression; but in theory the
+state was absolute, and the people individually were placed at the
+mercy of the people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the
+collective people.
+
+Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and rights
+of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently of society,
+and not derived from God through the state.  The recognition of these
+rights by modern society is due to Christianity: some say to the
+barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire; but this last opinion is
+not well founded.  The barbarian chiefs and nobles had no doubt a
+lively sense of personal freedom and independence, but for themselves
+only.  They had no conception of personal freedom as a general or
+universal right, and men never obtain universal principles by
+generalizing particulars.  They may give a general truth a particular
+application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a particular
+truth--a general or universal application.  They are too good logicians
+for that.  The barbarian individual freedom and personal independence
+was never generalized into the doctrine of the rights of man, any more
+than the freedom of the master has been generalized into the right of
+his slaves to be free.  The doctrine of individual freedom before the
+state is due to the Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and
+worth of every human soul, the accountability to God of each man for
+himself, and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
+rather than men.  The church practically denied the absolutism of the
+state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the state, in
+converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of the state
+authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death the profession
+of the Christian faith.  In this she practically, as well as
+theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused into modern
+society the doctrine that every individual, even the lowest and
+meanest, has rights which the state neither confers nor can abrogate;
+and it will only be by extinguishing in modern society the Christian
+faith, and obliterating all traces of Christian civilization, that
+state absolutism can be revived with more than a partial and temporary
+success.
+
+The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so explained as
+to deny the rights of society, and to become pure individualism; but no
+political system that runs to the opposite extreme, and absorbs the
+individual in the state, stands the least chance of any general or
+permanent success till Christianity is extinguished.  Yet the assertion
+of principles which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely
+harmless, even in Christian countries.  Error is never harmless, and
+only truth can give a solid foundation on which to build. Individualism
+and socialism are each opposed to the other, and each has only a
+partial truth.  The state founded on either cannot stand, and society
+will only alternate between the two extremes.  To-day it is torn by a
+revolution in favor of socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another
+in favor of individualism, and without effecting any real progress by
+either revolution.  Real progress can be secured only by recognizing
+and building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our
+theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and independent of
+our opinions.
+
+Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth or
+reality.  Society has certain rights over individuals, for she is a
+medium of their communion with God, or through which they derive life
+from God, the primal source of all life; but she is not the only medium
+of man's life.  Man, as was said in the beginning, lives by communion
+with God, and he communes with God in the creative act and the
+Incarnation, through his kind, and, through nature.  This threefold
+communion gives rise to three institutions--religion or the church,
+society or the state, and property.  The life that man derives from God
+through religion and property, is not derived from him through society,
+and consequently so much of his life be holds independently of society;
+and this constitutes his rights as a man as distinguished from his
+rights as a citizen.  In relation to society, as not held from God
+through her, these are termed his natural rights, which, she must hold
+inviolable, and government protect for every one, whatever his
+complexion or his social position.  These rights--the rights of
+conscience and the rights of property, with all their necessary
+implications--are limitations of the rights of society, and the
+individual has the right to plead them against the state.  Society does
+not confer them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
+sacred and as fundamental as her own.
+
+But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all.  The people
+can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and act.  The
+people are not God, whatever some theorists may pretend--are not
+independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing. They are as dependent
+collectively as individually, and therefore can exist and act only as
+second cause, never as first cause. They can, then, even in the limited
+sphere of their sovereignty, be sovereign only in a secondary sense,
+never absolute sovereign in their own independent right.  They are
+sovereign only to the extent to which they impart life to the
+individual members of society, and only in the sense in which she
+imparts it, or is its cause.  She is not its first cause or creator,
+and is the medial cause or medium through which they derive it from
+God, not its efficient cause or primary source.  Society derives her
+own life from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him.  Then
+she is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God.  Her
+dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
+derivative.
+
+This third theory does not err in assuming that the people collectively
+are more than the people individually, or in denying society to be a
+mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and no rights but what it
+derives from them; nor even in asserting that the people in the sense
+of society are sovereign, but in asserting that they are sovereign in
+their own native or underived right and might.  Society has not in
+herself the absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
+dominion either of herself or her members.  God gave to man dominion
+over the irrational creation, for he made irrational creatures for man;
+but he never gave him either individually or collectively the dominion
+over the rational creation.  The theory that the people are absolutely
+sovereign in their own independent right and might, as some zealous
+democrats explain it, asserts the fundamental principle of despotism,
+and all despotism is false, for it identifies the creature with the
+Creator.  No creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and
+consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign. This third
+theory, therefore, is untenable.
+
+IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers they may
+be called, reject the origin of government in the people individually
+or collectively.  Satisfied that it has never been instituted by a
+voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and confounding government
+as a fact with government as authority, maintain that government is a
+spontaneous development of nature. Nature develops it as the liver
+secretes bile, as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his
+dam.  Nature, working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops
+society, and society develops government.  That is all the secret.
+Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond the
+simple positive fact, belong to the theological or metaphysical stage
+of the development of nature, but are left behind when the race has
+passed beyond that stage, and has reached the epoch of positive
+science, in which all, except the positive fact, is held to be unreal
+and non-existent. Government, like every thing else in the universe, is
+simply a positive development of nature.  Science explains the laws and
+conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin or
+ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world of space
+and time.
+
+These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they only
+oppose theory to theory.  The assertion that reality for the human mind
+is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible order, is purely
+theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact. Principles are as
+really objects of science as facts, and it is only in the light of
+principles that facts themselves are intelligible.  If the human mind
+had no science of reality that transcends the sensible order, or the
+positive fact, it could have no science at all.  As things exist only
+in their principles or causes, so can they be known only in their
+principles and causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as
+they really exist.  The science that pretends to deduce principles from
+particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of reasoning to an
+order that transcends facts, and in which facts have their origin, is
+undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that the positivists are
+unquestionably right.  But to maintain that man has no intelligence of
+any thing beyond the fact, no intuition or intellectual apprehension of
+its principle or cause, is equally chimerical.  The human mind cannot
+have all science, but it has real science as far as it goes, and real
+science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
+Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not
+exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond
+the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or
+transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it
+could never know the fact itself.  The error of modern philosophers, or
+philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred
+from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has direct and
+immediate intuition of it.
+
+Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or there
+could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we could never
+assert that development is development, or scientifically explain the
+laws and conditions of development. Development is explication, and
+supposes a germ which precedes it, and is not itself a development; and
+development, however far it may be carried, can never do more than
+realize the possibilities of the germ.  Development is not creation,
+and cannot supply its own germ.  That at least must be given by the
+Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.  If authority has
+not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
+spontaneously or otherwise.  All government has a governing will; and
+without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in
+her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality.
+Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only presents the end and
+the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain
+a law.  An imperative will, the will of a superior who has the right to
+command what reason dictates or approves, is essential to government;
+and that will is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in
+nature. So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
+government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development. Nature is
+no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual
+man.
+
+No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense of
+the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is placed
+by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be confounded with those
+laws of nature so-called, according to which she is productive as
+second cause, or produces her effects, which are not properly laws at
+all.  Fire burns, water flows, rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food
+nourishes, poisons kill, one substance has a chemical affinity for
+another, the needle points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said;
+that is, the effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural
+force. Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
+herself.  The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical law,
+is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on all moral
+creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason and free-will,
+and is called natural because promulgated in natural reason, or the
+reason common and essential to all moral creatures.  This is the moral
+law.  It is what the French call le droit naturell, natural right, and,
+as the theologians teach us, is the transcript of the eternal law, the
+eternal will or reason of God.  It is the foundation of all law, and
+all acts of a state that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains,
+violences rather than laws.  The moral law is no development of nature,
+for it is above nature, and is imposed on nature.  The only development
+there is about it is in our understanding of it.
+
+There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered as
+creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in successive
+developments.  Hence the origin of space and time. There would have
+been no space if there had been no external creation, and no time if
+the creation had been completed externally at once, as it was in
+relation to the Creator.  Ideal space is simply the ability of God to
+externize his creative act, and actual space is the relation of
+coexistence in the things created; ideal time is the ability of God to
+create existences with the capacity of being completed by successive
+developments, and actual time is the relation of these in the order of
+succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated
+development ceases, and time is no more.  In relation to himself the
+Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with him there
+is no time, for there is no succession.  But in relation to itself
+creation is incomplete, and there is room for development, which may be
+continued till the whole possibility of creation is actualized.  Here
+is the foundation of what is true in the modern doctrine of progress.
+Man is progressive, because the possibilities of his nature are
+successively unfolded and actualized.
+
+Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be
+scientifically ascertained and defined.  All generation is development,
+as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual. But everything is
+developed in its own order, and after its kind. The Darwinian theory of
+the development of species is not sustained by science. The development
+starts from the germ, and in the germ is given the law or principle of
+the development. From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or
+the linden.  Every kind generates its kind, never another.  But no
+development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result alone of
+the inherent energy or force of the germ developed. There is not only a
+solidarity of race, but in some sense of all races, or species; all
+created things are bound to their Creator, and to one another.  One and
+the same law or principle of life pervades all creation, binding the
+universe together in a unity that copies or imitates the unity of the
+Creator.  No creature is isolated from the rest, or absolutely
+independent of others.  All are parts of one stupendous whole, and each
+depends on the whole, and the whole on each, and each on each.  All
+creatures are members of one body, and members one of another.  The
+germ of the oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can
+never grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself
+in motion.  Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is absolutely
+deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will you watch for its
+germination.  Germinate it cannot without some external influence, or
+communion, so to speak, with the elements from which it derives its
+sustenance and support.
+
+There can be no absolutely spontaneous development.  All things are
+doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it is an
+active force of some sort; but only God himself alone suffices for his
+own activity.  All created things are dependent, have not their being
+in themselves, and are real only as they participate, through the
+creative act, of the Divine being.  The germ can no more be developed
+than it could exist without God, and no more develop itself than it
+could create itself.  What is called the law of development is in the
+germ; but that law or force can operate only in conjunction with
+another force or other forces.  All development, as all growth, is by
+accretion or assimilation.  The assimilating force is, if you will, in
+the germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
+Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
+supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and knows
+that to raise a crop of corn, he must plant the seed in a soil duly
+prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for its germination,
+growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening.  In all created things, in
+all things not complete in themselves, in all save God, in whom there
+is no development possible, for He is, as say the schoolmen, most pure
+act, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, the same law holds
+good.  Development is always the resultant of two factors, the one the
+thing itself, the other some external force co-operating with it,
+exciting it, and aiding it to act.
+
+Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient and
+adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can begin the
+Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural when the end is
+supernatural.  The principle of life in all orders is the same, and
+human activity no more suffices for itself in one order than in another.
+
+Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a civilized
+state without communion in some form with a people already civilized,
+and why there is no moral or intellectual development and progress
+without education and instruction, consequently without instructors and
+educators.  Hence the value of tradition; and hence, as the first man
+could not instruct himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper
+philosophy than is dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain
+that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a
+full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full
+activity.  Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain
+some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty
+them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe
+to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of
+every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to
+work in iron, to erect a shelter from the storm, and to build a fire to
+warm them and to cook their food.  The common sense, as well as the
+common traditions of mankind, refuses to accept the doctrine that men
+are developed without foreign aid, or progressive without divine
+assistance. Nature of herself can no more develop government than it
+can language.  There can be no language without society, and no society
+without language.  There can be no government without society, and no
+society without government of some sort.
+
+But even if nature could spontaneously develop herself, she could never
+develop an institution that has the right to govern, for she has not
+herself that right.  Nature is not God, has not created us, therefore
+has not the right of property in us.  She is not and cannot be our
+sovereign.  We belong not to her, nor does she belong to herself, for
+she is herself creature, and belongs to her Creator.  Not being in
+herself sovereign, she cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she
+develop government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for
+government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is distinct
+from that which is governed; but natural developments are nature, and
+indistinguishable from her.  The governor and the governed, the
+restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be identical.
+Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction in terms.  When an
+individual is said to govern himself, he is never understood to govern
+himself in the sense in which he is governed.  He by his reason and
+will governs or restrains his appetites and passions.  It is man as
+spirit governing man as flesh, the spiritual mind governing the carnal
+mind.
+
+Natural developments cannot in all cases be even allowed to take their
+own course without injury to nature herself.  "Follow nature" is an
+unsafe maxim, if it means, leave nature to develop herself as she will,
+and follow thy natural inclinations.  Nature is good, but inclinations
+are frequently bad.  All our appetites and passions are given us for
+good, for a purpose useful and necessary to individual and social life,
+but they become morbid and injurious if indulged without restraint.
+Each has its special object, and naturally seeks it exclusively, and
+thus generates discord and war in the individual, which immediately
+find expression in society, and also in the state, if the state be a
+simple natural development.  The Christian maxim, Deny thyself, is far
+better than the Epicurean maxim, Enjoy thyself, for there is no real
+enjoyment without self-denial.  There is deep philosophy in Christian
+asceticism, as the Positivists themselves are aware, and even insist.
+But Christian asceticism aims not to destroy nature, as voluptuaries
+pretend, but to regulate, direct, and restrain its abnormal
+developments for its own good.  It forces nature in her developments to
+submit to a law which is not in her, but above her.  The Positivists
+pretend that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that
+cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and restrains
+natural development.
+
+The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of nature, and
+at another the law of nature with nature herself, and take what is
+called the natural law to be a natural development. Here is their
+mistake, as it is the mistake of all who accept naturalistic theories.
+Society, no doubt, is authorized by the law of nature to institute and
+maintain government.  But the law of nature is not a natural
+development, nor is it in nature, or any part of nature.  It is not a
+natural force which operates in nature, and which is the developing
+principle of nature.  Do they say reason is natural, and the law of
+nature is only reason? This is not precisely the fact.  The natural law
+is law proper, and is reason only in the sense that reason includes
+both intellect and will, and nobody can pretend that nature in her
+spontaneous developments acts from intelligence and volition. Reason,
+as the faculty of knowing, is subjective and natural; but in the sense
+in which it is coincident with the natural law, it is neither
+subjective nor natural, but objective and divine, and is God affirming
+himself and promulgating his law to his creature, man.  It is, at
+least, an immediate participation of the divine by which He reveals
+himself and His will to the human understanding, and is not natural,
+but supernatural, in the sense that God himself is supernatural.  This
+is wherefore reason is law, and every man is bound to submit or conform
+to reason.
+
+That legitimate governments are instituted under the natural law is
+frankly conceded, but this is by no means the concession of government
+as a natural development.  The reason and will of which the natural law
+is the expression are the reason and will of God.  The natural law is
+the divine law as much as the revealed law itself, and equally
+obligatory.  It is not a natural force developing itself in nature,
+like the law of generation, for instance, and therefore proceeding from
+God as first cause, but it proceeds from God as final cause, and is,
+therefore, theological, and strictly a moral law, founding moral rights
+and duties.  Of course, all morality and all legitimate government rest
+on this law, or, if you will, originate in it.  But not therefore in
+nature, but in the Author of nature.  The authority is not the
+authority of nature, but of Him who holds nature in the hollow of His
+hand.
+
+V. In the seventeenth century a class of political writers who very
+well understood that no creature, no man, no number of men, not even,
+nature herself, can be inherently sovereign, defended the opinion that
+governments are founded, constituted, and clothed with their authority
+by the direct and express appointment of God himself.  They denied that
+rulers hold their power from the nation; that, however oppressive may
+be their rule, that they are justiciable by any human tribunal, or that
+power, except by the direct judgment of God, is amissible.  Their
+doctrine is known in history as the doctrine of "the divine right of
+kings, and passive obedience."  All power, says St. Paul, is from God,
+and the powers that be are ordained of God, and to resist them is to
+resist the ordination of God.  They must be obeyed for conscience' sake.
+
+It would, perhaps, be rash to say that this doctrine had never been
+broached before the seventeenth century, but it received in that
+century, and chiefly in England, its fullest and most systematic
+developments.  It was patronized by the Anglican divines, asserted by
+James I. of England, and lost the Stuarts the crown of three kingdoms.
+It crossed the Channel, into France, where it found a few hesitating
+and stammering defenders among Catholics, under Louis XIV., but it has
+never been very generally held, though it has had able and zealous
+supporters. In England it was opposed by all the Presbyterians,
+Puritans, Independents, and Republicans, and was forgotten or abandoned
+by the Anglican divines themselves in the Revolution of 1688, that
+expelled James II. and crowned William and Mary.  It was ably refuted
+by the Jesuit Suarez in his reply to a Remonstrance for the Divine
+Right of Kings by the James I.; and a Spanish monk who had asserted it
+in Madrid, under Philip II., was compelled by the Inquisition to
+retract it publicly in the place where he had asserted it.  All
+republicans reject it, and the Church has never sanctioned it.  The
+Sovereign Pontiffs have claimed and exercised the right to deprive
+princes of their principality, and to absolve their subjects from the
+oath of fidelity.  Whether the Popes rightly claimed and exercised that
+power is not now the question; but their having claimed and exercised
+it proves that the Church does not admit the inamissibility of power
+and passive obedience; for the action of the Pope was judicial, not
+legislative.  The Pope has never claimed the right to depose a prince
+till by his own act he has, under the moral law or the constitution of
+his state, forfeited his power, nor to absolve subjects from their
+allegiance till their oath, according to its true intent and meaning,
+has ceased to bind.  If the Church has always asserted with the Apostle
+there is no power but from God--non est potestas nisi a Deo--she has
+always through her doctors maintained that it is a trust to be
+exercised for the public good, and is forfeited when persistently
+exercised in a contrary sense.  St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Suarez
+all maintain that unjust laws are violences rather than laws, and do
+not oblige, except in charity or prudence, and that the republic may
+change its magistrates, and even its constitution, if it sees proper to
+do so.
+
+That God, as universal Creator, is Sovereign Lord and proprietor of all
+created things or existences, visible or invisible, is certain; for the
+maker has the absolute right to the thing made; it is his, and he may
+do with it as he will.  As he is sole creator, he alone hath dominion;
+and as he is absolute creator, he has absolute dominion over all the
+things which he has made. The guaranty against oppression is his own
+essential nature, is in the plenitude of his own being, which is the
+plenitude of wisdom and goodness.  He cannot contradict himself, be
+other than he is, or act otherwise than according to his own essential
+nature.  As he is, in his own eternal and immutable essence, supreme
+reason and supreme good, his dominion must always in its exercise be
+supremely good and supremely reasonable, therefore supremely just and
+equitable.  From him certainly is all power; he is unquestionably King
+of kings, and Lord of lords.  By him kings reign and magistrates decree
+just things.  He may, at his will, set up or pull down kings, rear or
+overwhelm empires, foster the infant colony, and make desolate the
+populous city. All this is unquestionably true, and a simple dictate of
+reason common to all men.  But in what sense is it true?  Is it true in
+a supernatural sense?  Or is it true only in the sense that it is true
+that by him we breathe, perform any or all of our natural functions,
+and in him live, and move, and have our being?
+
+Viewed in their first cause, all things are the immediate creation of
+God, and are supernatural, and from the point of view of the first
+cause the Scriptures usually speak, for the great purpose and paramount
+object of the sacred writers, as of religion itself, is to make
+prominent the fact that God is universal creator, and supreme governor,
+and therefore the first and final cause of all things.  But God creates
+second causes, or substantial existences, capable themselves of acting
+and producing effects in a secondary sense, and hence he is said to be
+causa causarum, cause of causes.  What is done by these second causes
+or creatures is done eminently by him, for they exist only by his
+creative act, and produce only by virtue of his active presence, or
+effective concurrence.  What he does through them or through their
+agency is done by him, not immediately, but mediately, and is said to
+be done naturally, as what he does immediately is said to be done
+supernaturally.  Natural is what God does through second causes, which
+he creates; supernatural is that which he does by himself alone,
+without their intervention or agency.  Sovereignty, or the right to
+govern, is in him, and he may at his will delegate it to men either
+mediately or immediately, by a direct and express appointment, or
+mediately through nature.  In the absence of all facts proving its
+delegation direct and express, it must be assumed to be mediate,
+through second causes.  The natural is always to be presumed, and the
+supernatural is to be admitted only on conclusive proof.
+
+The people of Israel had a supernatural vocation, and they received
+their law, embracing their religious and civil constitution and their
+ritual directly from God at the hand of Moses, and various individuals
+from time to time appear to have been specially called to be their
+judges, rulers, or kings.  Saul was so called, and so was David. David
+and his line appear, also, to have been called not only to supplant
+Saul and his line, but to have been supernaturally invested with the
+kingdom forever; but it does not appear that the royal power with which
+David and his line were invested was inamissible.  They lost it in the
+Babylonish captivity, and never afterwards recovered it.  The Asmonean
+princes were of another line, and when our Lord came the sceptre was in
+the hands of Herod, an Idumean Or Edomite.  The promise made, to David
+and his house is generally held by Christian commentators to have
+received its fulfilment in the everlasting spiritual royalty of the
+Messiah, sprung through Mary from David's line.
+
+The Christian Church is supernaturally constituted and supernaturally
+governed, but the persons selected to exercise powers supernaturally
+defined, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to the humblest parish priest
+are selected and inducted into office through human agency.  The
+Gentiles very generally claimed to have received their laws from the
+gods, but it does not appear, save in exceptional cases, that they
+claimed that their princes were designated and held their powers by the
+direct and express appointment of the god.  Save in the case of the
+Jews, and that of the Church, there is no evidence that any particular
+government exists or ever has existed by direct or express appointment,
+or otherwise than by the action of the Creator through second causes,
+or what is called his ordinary providence. Except David and his line,
+there is no evidence of the express grant by the Divine Sovereign to
+any individual or family, class or caste of the government of any
+nation or country.  Even those Christian princes who professed to reign
+"by the grace of God," never claimed that they received their
+principalities from God otherwise than through his ordinary providence,
+and meant by it little more than an acknowledgment of their dependence
+on him, their obligation to use their power according to his law and
+their accountability to him for the use they make of it.
+
+The doctrine is not favorable to human liberty, for it recognizes no
+rights of man in face of civil society.  It consecrates tyranny, and
+makes God the accomplice of the tyrant, if we suppose all governments
+have actually existed by his express appointment.  It puts the king in
+the place of God, and requires us to worship in him the immediate
+representative of the Divine Being.  Power is irresponsible and
+inamissible, and however it may be abused, or however corrupt and
+oppressive may be its exercise, there is no human redress.  Resistance
+to power is resistance to God.  There is nothing for the people but
+passive obedience and unreserved submission.  The doctrine, in fact,
+denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in the
+management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human activity.
+It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes power an hereditary
+and indefeasible right, not a trust which he who holds it may forfeit,
+and of which he may be deprived if he abuses it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the direct
+and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as to mean that
+civil authority is derived from God through the spiritual authority.
+The patriarch combined in his person both authorities, and was in his
+own household both priest and king, and so originally was in his own
+tribe the chief, and in his kingdom the king.  When the two offices
+became separated is not known.  In the time of Abraham they were still
+united. Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the
+earliest historical records of kings present them as offering
+sacrifices.  Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well as
+Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were held to be
+inseparable, but because they were both conferred on the same person by
+the republic.  In Egypt, in the time of Moses, the royal authority and
+the priestly were separated and held by different persons.  Moses, in
+his legislation for his nation, separated them, and instituted a
+sacerdotal order or caste.  The heads of tribes and the heads of
+families are, under his law, princes, but not priests, and the
+priesthood is conferred on and restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and
+more especially the family of his own brother Aaron.
+
+The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly, and in
+all primitive nations with a separate, organized priesthood, whether a
+true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is held to be above the king,
+elects or establishes the law by which is selected the temporal chief,
+and inducts him into his office, as if he received his authority from
+God through the priesthood. The Christian priesthood is not a caste,
+and is transmitted by the election of grace, not as with the Israelites
+and all sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation.  Like Him whose
+priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father or
+mother of the priestly line.  But in being priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, they are both priests and kings, as Melchisedech was, and
+as was our Lord himself, to whom was given by his Father all power in
+heaven and in earth.  The Pope, or Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our
+Lord on earth, his representative--the representative not only of him
+who is our invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and
+Lord of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power.
+Consequently, no one can have any mission to govern in the state any
+more than in the church, unless derived from God directly or indirectly
+through the Pope or Supreme Pontiff.  Many theologians and canonists in
+the Middle Ages so held, and a few perhaps hold so still.  The bulls
+and briefs of several Popes, as Gregory VII., Innocent Ill., Gregory
+IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII., have the appearance of favoring
+it.
+
+At one period the greater part of the medieval kingdoms and
+principalities were fiefs of the Holy See, and recognized the Holy
+Father as their suzerain.  The Pope revived the imperial dignity in the
+person of Charlemagne, and none could claim that dignity in the Western
+world unless elected and crowned by him, that is, unless elected
+directly by the Pope or by electors designated by him, and acting under
+his authority.  There can be no question that the spiritual is superior
+to the temporal, and that the temporal is bound in the very nature of
+things to conform to the spiritual, and any law enacted by the civil
+power in contravention of the law of God is null and void from the
+beginning.  This is what Mr. Seward meant by the higher law, a law
+higher even than the Constitution of the United States. Supposing this
+higher law, and supposing that kings and princes hold from God through
+the spiritual society, it is very evident that the chief of that
+society would have the right to deprive them, and to absolve their
+subjects, as on several occasions he actually has done.
+
+But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any great
+extent, except for a brief period, maintained by theologians or
+canonists.  The Pope conferred the imperial dignity on Charlemagne and
+his successors, but not the civil power, at least out of the Pope's own
+temporal dominions.  The emperor of Germany was at first elected by the
+Pope, and afterwards by hereditary electors designated or accepted by
+him, but the king of the Germans with the full royal authority could be
+elected and enthroned without the papal intervention or permission.
+The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples, Aragon, Muscovy,
+England, and other European states, was by virtue of feudal relations,
+not by virtue of the spiritual authority of the Holy See or the
+vicarship of the Holy Father.  The right to govern under feudalism was
+simply an estate, or property; and as the church could acquire and hold
+property, nothing prevented her holding fiefs, or her chief from being
+suzerain.  The expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in
+connection with the special relations existing between the Pope and
+emperor in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as
+their feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
+rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
+countenance to the theory in question.
+
+These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain temporal
+rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, as he has still
+in what is left him of the States of the Church; but they were
+exceptional or accidental relations, not the universal and essential
+relations between the church and the state.  The rights that grew out
+of these relations were real rights, sacred and inviolable, but only
+where and while the relations subsisted.  They, for the most part, grew
+out of the feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its
+barbarian conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order
+in which they originated.  Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
+rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or right
+to govern from God through her; but implied that their persons were
+sacred, and that violence to them would be sacrilege; that they held
+the Christian faith, and acknowledged themselves bound to protect it,
+and to govern their subjects justly, according to the law of God.
+
+The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of the two
+powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is chief of the
+spiritual society, his temporal principality, no theologian or canonist
+of the slightest respectability would argue that he derives his rights
+as temporal sovereign from his rights as pontiff.  His rights as
+pontiff depend on the express appointment of God; his rights as
+temporal prince are derived from the same source from which other
+princes derive their rights, and are held by the same tenure.  Hence
+canonists have maintained that the subjects of other states may even
+engage in war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity
+to him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
+
+The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but
+recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not derive
+from God through her.  St. Paul enjoins obedience to the Roman emperors
+for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that infidels and heretics
+may have legitimate government; and if she has ever denied the right of
+any infidel or heretical prince, it has been on the ground that the
+constitution and laws of his principality require him to profess and
+protect the Catholic faith.  She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic
+state no more than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has
+not condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our
+struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks
+against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the doctrine
+of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable doubt whether
+they were really rebels fighting against their legitimate sovereign or
+not.
+
+No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately from
+God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the state derives
+its authority only mediately from him, in a natural mode, she asserts
+the superiority of her authority, and that, in case of conflict between
+the two powers, the civil must yield. But this is only saying that
+supernatural is above natural. But--and this is the important
+point--she does not teach, nor permit the faithful to hold, that the
+supernatural abrogates the natural, or in any way supersedes it.
+Grace, say the theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.
+The church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it,
+elevates it, and is its firmest support.
+
+VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, Suarez,
+and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive their power
+from God through the people, or that the people, though not the source,
+are the medium of all political authority, and therefore rulers are
+accountable for the use they make of their power to both God and the
+people.
+
+This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting sovereignty
+in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a particular
+individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from it, as democracy
+is commonly explained, in understanding by the people, the people
+collectively, not individually--the organic people, or people fixed to
+a given territory, not the people as a mere population--the people in
+the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or
+despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is
+all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead
+of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people
+in their "own native right and might."  The people not being God, and
+being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
+sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.  It asserts the
+divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin. But
+as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as
+men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another;
+and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere
+belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in
+humanity alone can be a legitimate government.  Every such government
+is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great
+mistake--is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every
+error and every sin.
+
+The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian
+theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political
+writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Gentile philosophy had
+lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in
+so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to
+explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.
+
+Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the most
+faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the conception
+of creation, and never gets above that of generation and formation.
+Things are produced by the Divine Being impressing his own ideas,
+eternal in his own mind, on a pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.
+Aristotle teaches substantially the same doctrine.  Things eternally
+exist as matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
+unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, from
+materia informis to materia formata.  Even the Christian Platonists and
+Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation; they assert it,
+indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of revelation, not as a fact of
+science; and hence it is that their theology and their philosophy never
+thoroughly harmonize, or at least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
+
+Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists,
+and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God.
+They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in
+nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural
+laws.  If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a
+supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god.  They saw no
+divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by
+natural laws. Having no conception of the creative act, they could have
+none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
+Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
+themselves.  Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
+government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally
+founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its
+institution.  Their writings may be studied with advantage on the
+constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms
+of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs,
+but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its
+authority.
+
+The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that
+there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a
+religious duty.  Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil
+government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind
+it.  Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate
+sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no
+man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state.  No
+man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil
+duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from
+the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or
+her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
+not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a
+convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally
+important duty of taking care of themselves.  But by asserting the
+divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority,
+clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience,
+sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any
+sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the state.
+For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
+people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
+society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
+
+After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
+recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
+powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the divine
+origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church
+with most disastrous consequences.  While the Roman Empire of the West
+subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East
+asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of
+Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil
+matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to
+temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his
+possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by
+the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the
+Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor,
+and owed him no civil allegiance.  He became civilly independent of the
+Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it.  To the new
+powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged
+any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his
+civil as well as spiritual independence.
+
+This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to
+be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their
+empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed
+them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the
+Pope's superior.  If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the
+civil power is from God, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a
+Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the
+imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
+emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and
+as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope
+be subject to the emperor in temporals.  As at the time when the
+dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven
+with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted
+practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
+ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the
+state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope
+represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme
+over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty
+itself.  Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the
+emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor
+would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the
+spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.
+
+If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
+imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church,
+the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers
+would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy.  It would
+establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible
+governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most
+hostile to social progress.  Even the Jews could not, or would not,
+endure it, and prayed God to give them a king, that they might be like
+other nations.
+
+In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly
+perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and
+partly wrong.  The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of
+civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the
+supremacy of the moral order, or the law of God, without which
+governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being.  The
+real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine
+of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most
+approved theologians.  The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
+society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because
+he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is
+the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, and holds immediately
+from God; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from
+God only mediately, through second causes, or the people.  Yet, though
+derived from God only through the people, civil authority still holds
+from God, and derives its right from Him through another channel than
+the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
+sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and
+respect.  This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as
+we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she
+interprets and applies the law of God, both natural and revealed, she
+makes neither.
+
+Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false
+charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic
+or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the
+representative of the civil society on the same level with the
+representative of the spiritual, or to emancipate the state from the
+law of God while they conceded the divine origin or right of
+government, they sought to effect its independence by asserting for it
+only a natural or purely human origin.  For nearly two centuries the
+most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the
+divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the
+state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
+to derive authority from man alone.  They have not only separated the
+state from the church as an external corporation, but from God as its
+internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her
+sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at
+loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil authority, but
+what is called "the right of insurrection."  Under their teaching the
+age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and
+protect society, but with those who conspire against it--the
+insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction.  The
+established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate
+authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic,
+tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God,
+and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
+not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is
+hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself
+for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the
+party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.
+
+This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical
+or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical
+principles.  Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can
+sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right
+but might.  No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or
+what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order
+to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual
+or social progress.  The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but
+they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects
+it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be
+no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive.  In civil
+society two things are necessary--stability and movement. The human is
+the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only
+successively actualized.  But the element of stability can be found
+only in the divine, in God, in whom there is no unactualized
+possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal.  The
+doctrine that derives authority from God through the people, recognizes
+in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability
+and progress.
+
+This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of
+things.  It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real
+order.  It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which
+nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the
+Creator.  Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable
+without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act.
+That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first
+principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than
+in theology.  God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and
+creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
+inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being."
+All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as
+through that act they participate of his being. Through that act he is
+immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every
+creature.  The creature deriving from his creative act can no more
+continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it.  It is as
+bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that God created the universe,
+endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up,
+gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself.  It
+cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself.  It did not
+merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
+creative act.  Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no
+philosopher at all.  Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather,
+Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended
+or discontinued, or not passing over from the creature and returning to
+God.
+
+Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can continue
+to exist, act, or live only by participating through it of his divine
+being.  There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in
+every creature, and therefore it is that God is worshipped in his works
+without idolatry.  But he creates substantial existences capable of
+acting as second causes.  Hence, in all living things there is in their
+life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human
+life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the
+human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great
+Christian theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
+government.  Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence
+of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to
+build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God.  A
+government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in
+the air.  It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much
+as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they
+really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they
+accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God.
+What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason,
+without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real,
+living God himself. Hence government, like man himself, participates of
+the divine being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the
+same time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
+authority with freedom, and stability with progress.
+
+The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
+inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for
+it.  It is not their own.  If it were their own they might do with it
+as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an
+account; but holding it as a trust from God, they are under his law,
+and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes.  Civil rulers, holding
+their authority from God through the people, are accountable for it
+both to Him and to them.  If they abuse it they are justiciable by the
+people and punishable by God himself.
+
+Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad government, or
+what in modern times is called the responsibility of power.  At the
+same time the state is guarantied against sedition, insurrection,
+rebellion, revolution, by the elevation of the civic virtues to the
+rank of religious, virtues, and making loyalty a matter of conscience.
+Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign
+auxiliary, but as integral in the political order itself.  Religion
+sustains the state, not because it externally commands us to obey the
+higher powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because
+it trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
+resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but because it
+and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, though distinct,
+parts of one and the same whole.  The church and the state, as
+corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their
+spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state
+the church; but both are from God, and both work to the same end, and
+when each is rightly understood there is no antithesis or antagonism
+between them. Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in
+serving the church.  He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his
+country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith.  Civic
+virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without
+which there are no religious virtues, since no man who loves not his
+brother does or can love God.
+
+The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because it has
+not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and the via
+inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the nation, at its
+command.  The individual has, indeed, only moral guaranties against the
+abuse of power by the sovereign people, which may no doubt sometimes
+prove insufficient.  But moral guaranties are always better than none,
+and there are none where the people are held to be sovereign in their
+own native right and might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside
+of the constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
+since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
+criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
+infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
+against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what they
+please, they can do no wrong.  This would place the individual at the
+mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however
+oppressed or cruelly treated.  This would establish the absolute
+despotism of the state, and deny every thing like the natural rights of
+man, or individual and personal freedom, as has already been shown.
+Now as men do take part in government, and as men, either individually
+or collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never to
+be expected, under any possible constitution or form of government,
+that authority will always be wisely and justly exercised, that wrong
+will ever be done, and the rights of individuals never in any instance
+be infringed; but with the clear understanding that all power is of
+God, that the political sovereignty is vested in the people or the
+collective body, that the civil rulers hold from God through them and
+are responsible to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is
+all the guaranty against the abuse of power by the nation, the
+political or organic people, that the nature of the case admits.  The
+nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you get in
+the government all the available wisdom and virtue the nation has, and
+more is never, under any form or constitution of government,
+practicable or to be expected.
+
+It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king reigns, not
+governs."  The people, though sovereign under God, are not the
+government.  The government is in their name and by virtue of authority
+delegated from God through them, but they are not it, are not their own
+ministers.  It is only when the people forget this and undertake to be
+their own ministers and to manage their own affairs immediately by
+themselves instead of selecting agents to do it for them, and holding
+their agents to a strict account for their management, that they are
+likely to abuse their power or to sanction injustice.  The nation may
+be misled or deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular
+courtiers, but as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all
+natural rights.  The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak
+in their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.
+L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France, and while
+that was conceded the French nation could have in its government no
+more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at least no more than he
+could appreciate.  And under his government France was made responsible
+for many deeds that the nation would never have sanctioned, if it bad
+been recognized as the depositary of the national sovereignty, or as
+the French state, and answerable to God for the use it made of
+political power, or the conduct of its government.
+
+But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force in the
+nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong, for if the
+sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can rightly command or
+authorize the employment of force, and all commissions must run in its
+name.  Written constitutions alone will avail little, for they emanate
+from the people, who can disregard them, if they choose, and alter or
+revoke them at will. The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the
+state must after all be on moral guaranties.  In the very nature of the
+case there are and can be no other.  But these, placed in a clear
+light, with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found
+insufficient.  Hence the necessity for the protection, not of authority
+simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the liberty of religion
+and intelligence in the nation, of the general understanding that the
+nation holds its power to govern as a trust from God, and that to God
+through the people all civil rulers are strictly responsible.  Let the
+mass of the people in any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism
+of atheism, or lose themselves in that supreme sophism called
+pantheism, the grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism,
+and liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty, and
+perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among savages,
+would be lost and irrecoverable.
+
+But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of the
+case.  It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the divine
+origin of government in the sense that the origin of nature is divine;
+it derives it from God through the people, collectively, or as society,
+and therefore concedes it a natural, human, and social element, which
+distinguishes it from pure theocracy.  It, however, does not explain
+how authority comes from God to the people.  The ruler, king, prince,
+or emperor, holds from God through the people, but how do the people
+themselves hold from God?  Mediately or immediately?  If mediately,
+what is the medium?  Surely not the people themselves. The people can
+no more be the medium than the principle of their own sovereignty. If
+immediately, then God governs in them as he does in the church, and no
+man is free to think or act contrary to popular opinion, or in any case
+to question the wisdom or justice of any of the acts of the state,
+which is arriving at state absolutism by another process.  Besides,
+this would theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all
+human intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall
+into either pantheism or atheism.
+
+VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority, is
+derived by the collective people or society, from God through the law
+of nature.  Rulers hold from God through the people or nation, and the
+people or nation hold from God through the natural law.  How nations
+are founded or constituted, or a particular people becomes a sovereign
+political people, invested with the rights of society, will be
+considered in following chapters.  Here it suffices to say that
+supposing a political people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the
+community, not supernaturally, or by an external supernatural
+appointment, as the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural
+law, or law by which God governs the whole moral creation.
+
+They who assert the origin of government in nature are right, so far as
+they derive it from God through the law of nature, and are wrong only
+when they understand by the law of nature the physical force or forces
+of nature, which are not laws in the primary and proper sense of the
+term.  The law of nature is not the order or rule of the divine action
+in nature which is rightfully called providence, but is, as has been
+said, law in its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of
+nature, as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his
+creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is called
+natural, because promulgated through the reason common to all men.
+Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first man,
+supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and confirmed by
+Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian code itself.  Man
+needs even yet instruction in relation to matters lying within the
+range of natural reason, or else secular schools, colleges, and
+universities would be superfluous, and manifestly the instructor of the
+first man could have been only the Creator himself.
+
+The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam to us
+through two channels--reason, which is in every man, and in immediate
+relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the primitive
+instruction embodied in language and what the Romans call jus gentium,
+or law common to all civilized nations.  Under this law, whose
+prescriptions are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal
+jurisprudence, nations are providentially constituted, and invested
+with political sovereignty; and as they are constituted under this law
+and hold from God through it, it defines their respective rights and
+powers, their limitation and their extent.
+
+The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the
+people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or political
+society.  It is vested in the political community or nation, not in an
+individual, or family, or a class, because, under the natural law, all
+men are equal, as they are under the Christian law, and one man has, in
+his own right, no authority over another.  The family has in the father
+a natural chief, but political society has no natural chief or chiefs.
+The authority of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when
+his children have attained to majority, have married and become heads
+of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the paternal
+household.  The recognition of the authority of the father beyond the
+limits of his own household, is, if it ever occurs, by virtue of the
+ordinance, the consent, express or tacit, of the political society.
+There are no natural-born political chiefs, and wherever we find men
+claiming or acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the
+Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or
+constitution of the people or the nation.
+
+Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically developed
+from the authority of the patriarchs, and have unquestionably been
+sustained by an equally false development of the right of property,
+especially landed property.  The owner of the land, or he who claimed
+to own it, claimed as an incident of his ownership the right to govern
+it, and consequently to govern all who occupied it.  But however valid
+may be the landlord's title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can
+own any thing in land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the
+law of nature no political right.  Property, like all natural rights,
+is entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.
+Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a
+question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme
+political authority.  It was the basis, and almost exclusive basis, in
+the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in most states.
+France and the United States are the principal exceptions in
+Christendom.  Property alone, or coupled with birth, is made elsewhere
+in some form a basis of political power, and where made so by the
+sovereign authority, it is legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for
+it takes from the weak and gives to the strong.  The rich have in their
+riches advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the
+state any additional advantage.  An aristocracy, in the sense of
+families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services, wealth,
+cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable in every
+nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief support, but they
+need and should receive no political recognition.  They should form no
+privileged class in the state or political society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation,
+and the constitution of the government.  The constitution of the
+government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the
+constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its
+origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through
+historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the
+other in historical fact.  The nation must exist, and exist as a
+political community, before it can give itself a constitution; and no
+state, any more than an individual, can exist without a constitution of
+some sort.
+
+The distinction between the providential constitution of the people and
+the constitution of the government, is not always made.  The
+illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers
+who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in
+his work on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions,
+maintains that constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all
+human agency from their formation and growth.  Disgusted with French
+Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much,
+and deeply wedded to monarchy in both  church and state, he had the
+temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal families for the
+government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a
+good government without a king who has descended from one of those
+divinely created royal families.  It was with some such thought, most
+likely, that a French journalist, writing home from the United States,
+congratulated the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army,
+so that when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to
+do, they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
+emperor.  Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the
+descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the
+French, a decided parvenu.  Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a
+parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no
+peer among any of the descendants of the old royal families of Europe.
+
+There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that constitutions
+are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once.
+But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its constitution
+by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done
+so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse.  If the
+constitution once given is fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly
+divine, and contain no human element, and the people have and can have
+no hand in their own government--the fundamental objection to the
+theocratic constitution of society.  To assume it is to transfer to
+civil society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
+constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or supernatural
+providence, and to maintain that the divine sovereignty governs in
+civil society immediately and supernaturally, as in the spiritual
+society.  But such is not the fact.  God governs the nation by the
+nation itself, through its own reason and free-will.  De Maistre is
+right only as to the constitution the nation starts with, and as to the
+control which that constitution necessarily exerts over the
+constitutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.
+
+The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential
+constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a convention
+of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the only constitution,
+both of the people and the government.  Prior to its adoption there is
+no government, no state, no political community or authority.
+Antecedently to it the people are an inorganic mass, simply
+individuals, without any political or national solidarity.  These
+individuals, they suppose, come together in their own native right and
+might, organize themselves into a political community, give themselves
+a constitution, and draw up and vote rules for their government, as a
+number of individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve
+themselves into a temperance society or a debating club.  This might do
+very well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating
+club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join or not
+as they please, and which they are bound to obey no farther and no
+longer than suits their convenience.  But the state is a power, a
+sovereignty; speaks to all within its jurisdiction with an imperative
+voice; commands, and may use physical force to compel obedience, when
+not voluntarily yielded. Men are born its subjects, and no one can
+withdraw from it without its express or tacit permission, unless for
+causes that would justify resistance to its authority.  The right of
+subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a
+tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and
+warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the
+right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and
+authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to
+the state, and is bound to it.
+
+The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a
+territory or country under one political head is a truth; but "the
+solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or political
+authority of their respective countries, so eloquently preached a few
+years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only a falsehood, but a
+falsehood destructive of all government and of all political
+organization.  Kossuth's doctrine supposes the people, or the
+populations of all countries, are, irrespective of their governments,
+bound together in solido, each for all and all for each, and therefore
+not only free, but bound, wherever they find a population struggling
+nominally for liberty against its government, to rush with arms in
+their hands to its assistance--a doctrine clearly incompatible with any
+recognition of political authority or territorial rights.  Peoples or
+nations commune with each other only through the national authorities,
+and when the state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its
+subjects are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention
+on either side.  There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, more
+or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of the
+populations with and through their governments, not without them.
+Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals of one and
+the same nation.  These are all bound together, all for each and each
+for all.  The individual is born into society and under the government,
+and without the authority of the government, which represents all and
+each, he cannot release himself from his obligations.  The state is
+then by no means a voluntary association.  Every one born or adopted
+into it is bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from
+it, unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no
+protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for his
+rights of conscience.  This is Vattel's doctrine, and the dictate of
+common sense.
+
+The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation for
+itself is a law--the organic or fundamental law, if you will, but a
+law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power. That sovereign
+power must exist before it can act, and it cannot exist, if vested in
+the people or nation, without a constitution, or without some sort of
+political organization of the people or nation.  There must, then, be
+for every state or nation a constitution anterior to the constitution
+which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives itself
+derives all its vitality and legal force.
+
+Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, for
+creation and providence are simply the expression of the Supreme Logic,
+the Logos, by whom all things are made.  Nations have originated in
+various ways, but history records no instance of a nation existing as
+an inorganic mass organizing itself into a political community.  Every
+nation, at its first appearance above the horizon, is found to have an
+organization of some sort. This is evident from the only ways in which
+history shows us nations originating.  These ways are: 1. The union of
+families in the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The
+migration of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.
+4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial,
+religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt, separation,
+and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling of the conquerors
+and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a new people.  These are all
+the ways known to history, and in none of these ways does a people,
+absolutely destitute of all organization, constitute itself a state,
+and institute and carry on civil government.
+
+The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet incipient
+states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a
+centre of social life of their own.  The families and tribes that
+migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and
+tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time.  The Celtic tribes
+retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar
+Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and
+in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth.  It subsists still in
+the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or
+Kabyles of Africa.
+
+Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, at
+least under, the authority of the mother country, whose political
+constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry with them.  They
+receive from the parent state a political organization, which, though
+subordinate, yet constitutes them embryonic states, with a unity,
+individuality, and centre of public life in themselves, and which, when
+they are detached and recognized as independent, render them complete
+states.  War and conquest effect great national changes, but do not,
+strictly speaking, create new states.  They simply extend and
+consolidate the power of the conquering state.
+
+Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but only
+when they have previously existed as such, and have retained the
+tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when the
+administration has erected them into real though dependent political
+communities.  A portion of the people of a state not so erected or
+organized, that has in no sense had a distinct political existence of
+its own, has never separated from the national body and formed a new
+and independent nation.  It cannot revolt; it may rise up against the
+government, and either revolutionize and take possession of the state,
+or be put down by the government as an insurrection.  The amalgamation
+of the conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies
+the institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation or
+political community.  The English of to-day are very different from
+both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time of Richard
+Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or political
+community.  England is still England.
+
+The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been cut up
+into several separate and independent nations, but because its several
+provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman arms, been
+independent nations or tribes, and more especially because the
+conquerors themselves were divided into several distinct nations or
+confederacies.  If the barbarians had been united in a single nation or
+state, the Roman empire most likely would have changed masters, indeed,
+but have retained its unity and its constitution, for the Germanic
+nations that finally seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to
+destroy its name or nationality, for they were themselves more than
+half Romanized before conquering Rome.  But the new nations into which
+the empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without
+political or governmental organization, continued from the constitution
+of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or less by what was
+retained from the empire.
+
+It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be altered,
+or that every people starts with a constitution fully developed, as
+would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre.  The constitution of the
+family is rather economical than political, and the tribe is far from
+being a fully developed state. Strictly speaking, the state, the modern
+equivalent for the city of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed
+till men began to build and live in cities, and became fixed to a
+national territory.  But in the first place, the eldest born of the
+human race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find
+traces of the family and tribal organization long after their municipal
+existence--in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, and in Rome down
+to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the second place, the
+pastoral nations, though they have not precisely the city or state
+organization, yet have a national organization, and obey a national
+authority.  Strictly speaking, no pastoral nation has a civil or
+political constitution, but they have what in our modern tongues can be
+expressed by no other term.  The feudal regime, which was in full vigor
+even in Europe from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century,
+had nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper;
+yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, though
+a very imperfect one?
+
+The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the early
+ages.  For a long time the national organizations bore unmistakable
+traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from
+the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.
+Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same
+organization.  Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and
+diffused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural
+generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations,
+it was the same.  At first the father was both priest and king, and when
+the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
+hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have
+seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had
+the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and
+integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient
+nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms
+to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark,
+followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
+establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less
+a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than
+the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in
+faith and worship.  In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary
+descent, but every thing is by election of grace.  The Christian
+dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior
+to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural
+generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of
+Christendom.  No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and,
+indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to
+have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
+were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He
+came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive
+him.
+
+The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the nation
+is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and
+efficient constitution of the state.  It is the source of the vitality
+of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines
+its destiny.  The constitution which a nation is said to give itself,
+is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the
+state for the government instituted under it.  Thomas Paine would admit
+nothing to be the constitution but a written document which he could
+fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.  The Abbe
+Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was
+ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than
+that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.
+Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly
+as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with
+the constitution itself. No constitution can be written on paper or
+engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up,
+and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is
+extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best,
+legislative instead of constitutive.  The famous Magna Charta drawn up
+by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons
+at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date
+of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but
+a set of restrictions on power. The constitution is the intrinsic or
+inherent and actual constitution of the people or political community
+itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it
+from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one
+another.
+
+The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and
+established in accordance with any preconceived theory.  What is
+theoretic in a constitution is unreal.  The constitutions conceived by
+philosophers in their closets are constitutions only of Utopia or
+Dreamland.  This world is not governed by abstractions, for
+abstractions are nullities.  Only the concrete is real, and only the
+real or actual has vitality or force.  The French people adopted
+constitution after constitution of the most approved pattern, and amid
+bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and
+thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as
+enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had
+no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no
+element of its life. The English are great constitution-mongers--for
+other nations. They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own
+will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into
+trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it
+only an embarrassment or encumbrance.  The doctor might as well attempt
+to give an individual a new constitution, or the constitution of
+another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other constitution
+than that which it has, and with which it is born.
+
+The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves
+this thesis.  The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the
+nations founded on the site of the empire, a double constitution--the
+barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the
+Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East.  The key to all
+modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two constitutions
+and the interests respectively associated with them, which created two
+societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same
+national denomination.  The barbaric was the constitution of the
+conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and
+fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of
+barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to
+a very great extent into harmony with itself.  The Pope became a feudal
+sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.
+Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman
+constitution got the upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far
+as it could not be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.  The
+original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its
+constitution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any
+of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
+
+The same process is going on in the East, though it has not advanced so
+far, having begun there several centuries later, and the Graeco-Roman
+constitution was far feebler there than in the West at the epoch of the
+conquest.  The Germanic tribes that conquered the West had long had
+close relations with the empire, had served as its allies, and even in
+its armies, and were partially Romanized.  Most of their chiefs had
+received a Roman culture; and their early conversion to the Christian
+faith facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
+constitution.  In the East it was different.  The conquerors had no
+touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet, they were
+animated with an intense hatred, which, after the conquest, was changed
+into a superb contempt, of Christians and Romans.  They had their civil
+constitution in the Koran; and the Koran, in its principles, doctrines,
+and spirit, is exclusive and profoundly intolerant.  The Graeco-Roman
+constitution was always much weaker in the East, and had far greater
+obstacles to overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the
+shock of the conquest.  Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of
+the East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily receiving
+rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying outside of the
+boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able to sustain itself.
+The Greek or Christian populations of the empire are no longer in
+danger of being exterminated or absorbed by the Mohammedan state or
+population.  They are the only living and progressive people of the
+Ottoman Empire, and their complete success in absorbing or expelling
+the Turk is only a question of time.  They will, in all present
+probability, reestablish a Christian and Roman East in much less time
+from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the
+fall of Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric
+constitution founded by its Germanic invaders.
+
+Indeed, the Roman constitution, 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
+Institutes, 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, passions, 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 constitution, and
+aided the revival of Roman imperialism.  In no country do the
+revolutionists succeed in establishing 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
+institutions 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
+vassals 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, embarrasses 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 vassals 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 nobles
+themselves, than was even dreamed of while the feudal regime was in
+full vigor.  Nobles were themselves free, it is conceded, but not the
+people.  The king was too weak, too restricted in his action by the
+feudal constitution 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 nobility, save when that
+nobility threatened the temporalities of the church. The only reliance,
+under God, 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 circumstances, 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 God, 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 nobility 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 nobility--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 nobles 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 class 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 constitution.  This was the great error of Mr. Calhoun.  No man
+saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun the utter worthlessness of simple
+paper constitutions, on which Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit
+reliance, or that the real constitution is in the state itself, in the
+manner in which the people themselves are organized; but his reliance
+was in constituting, 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 passions 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
+establishing their theory, for, after all, their constitution 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.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the
+constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution.
+But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the
+several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one having
+the ascendency and suppressing the rest.  In the original constitution
+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 constitution.  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
+constitution.  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 asserted 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
+constitution 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
+constitution.  Retain the dictatorship 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 constitution from an early day, and already developed
+in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, 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 constitution.  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
+anticipated and surpassed 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 associated
+with the patrician party, which distrusted him--in vain Cicero
+declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and
+Cassius seize the assassin'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 assassination
+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 assimilated.  These
+nations she at first governed as tributary states, with their own
+constitutions 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, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric
+and despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only
+partially assimilated.  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 citizenship 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 constitution; 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 assimilated 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 statesmanship 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 he 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 God 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
+substituting 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 constitution of the government, as distinguished from the
+state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign.  The constitution
+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 constitution of government is the constitution 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 analogous 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 God
+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 principal 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
+God, are above him.  He holds his power, as the Emperor of the French
+professes to hold his, by the grace of God and the national will--the
+only title 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 constitution, 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 institute 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 assembly and
+the constitutional government, there was no legitimate government
+standing, and the power assumed 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 principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him
+discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said.  The imperial
+constitution 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 title, and that he holds his power by a title 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 constitutional 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 constitution 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" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary,
+the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia
+has emancipated her serfs.
+
+The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute 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
+class or hereditary nobles, 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 God 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 God 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
+constitution, founded on public right, and held under God 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 constitution 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 bloody 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 constitutions 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 constitution
+is in that of the nation.  The constitution of the government must grow
+out of the constitution 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
+constitutions 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 constitution from it, and harmonize it
+with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions,
+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, assassinations, massacres, 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
+constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, 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 constitution. 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 constitution 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
+God, 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 multitude.  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 constitution 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 God and the will of the nation," which means simply that
+he holds his authority from God, through the French people, and is
+bound to exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
+The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution 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
+title, 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 locum 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 title, 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 God 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 pronounced 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 constitution
+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 God, 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 principal.  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 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 constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution 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.
+
+But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any State,
+saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so, withdraw from the
+Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation to the Federal
+authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere to the Federal
+government.  Secession is, then, an incontestable right; not a right
+held under the constitution or derived from the convention but a right
+held prior to it, independently of it, inherent in the State
+sovereignty, and inseparable from it.  The State is bound by the
+constitution of the Union only while she is in it, and is one of the
+States united.  In ratifying the constitution she did not part with her
+sovereignty, or with any portion of it, any more than France has parted
+with her sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation,
+by vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate heirs
+male.  The principal parts not with his power to his agent, for the
+agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power of the
+principal.  Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French people, and
+governs only by the authority of the French nation, which is as
+competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on him, when it judges
+proper, as it was to confer them.  The Union exists and governs, if the
+States are sovereign, only by the will of the State, and she is as
+competent to revoke the powers she has delegated as she was to delegate
+them.  The Union, as far as she is concerned, is her creation, and what
+she is competent to make she is competent to unmake.
+
+In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very
+unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests of the
+other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she in doing so
+only exercises her unquestionable right.  The other members may regret
+her action, both for her sake and their own, but they cannot accuse her
+or her citizens of disloyalty in seceding, nor of rebellion, if in
+obedience to her authority they defend their independence by force of
+arms against the Union. Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever
+owed allegiance to the Union.  Allegiance is due from the citizen to
+the sovereign state, but never from a sovereign state or from its
+citizens to any other sovereign state.  While the State is in the Union
+the citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his
+State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it and
+all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her territory.
+The repeal by the State of the act of ratification releases the citizen
+from the obligation even of obedience, and renders it criminal for him
+to yield it without her permission.
+
+It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the States
+as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal to the
+language or provisions of the Federal constitution.  That constitutes
+the government, not the state or the sovereign.  It is ordained by the
+sovereign, and if the States were severally independent and sovereign
+states, that sovereign is the States severally, not the States united.
+The constitution is law for the citizens of a State only so long as the
+State remains one of the United States.  No matter, then, how clear and
+express the language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution,
+they bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.
+The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only while
+the compact is continued by the States, each for itself. The
+sovereignty of the United States as a single or political people must
+be established before any thing in the constitution can be adduced as
+denying the right of secession.
+
+That this doctrine would deprive the General government of all right to
+enforce the laws of the Union on a State that secedes, or the citizens
+thereof, is no doubt true; that it would weaken the central power and
+make the Union a simple voluntary association of states, no better than
+a rope of sand, is no less true; but what then?  It is simply saying
+that a confederation is inferior to a nation, and that a federal
+government lacks many of the advantages of a national government.
+Confederacies are always weak in the centre, always lack unity, and are
+liable to be dissolved by the influence of local passions, prejudices,
+and interests.  But if the United States are a confederation of states
+or nations, not a single nation or sovereign state, then there is no
+remedy.
+
+If the Anglo-American colonies, when their independence of Great
+Britain was achieved and acknowledged, were severally sovereign states,
+it has never since been in their power to unite and form a single
+sovereign state, or to form themselves into one indivisible sovereign
+nation.  They could unite only by mutual agreement, which gives only a
+confederation, in which each retains its own sovereignty, as two
+individuals, however closely united, retain each his own individuality.
+No sovereignty is of conventional origin, and none can emerge from the
+convention that did not enter it.  Either the states are one sovereign
+people or they are not.  If they are not, it is undoubtedly a great
+disadvantage; but a disadvantage that must be accepted, and submitted
+to without a murmur.
+
+Whether the United States are one sovereign people or only a
+confederation is a question of very grave importance.  If they are only
+a confederation of states--and if they ever were severally sovereign
+states, only a confederation they certainly are--state secession is an
+inalienable right, and the government has had no right to make war on
+the secessionists as rebels, or to treat them, when their military
+power is broken, as traitors, or disloyal persons.  The honor of the
+government, and of the people who have sustained it, is then deeply
+compromised.
+
+What then is the fact?  Are the United States politically one people,
+nation, state, or republic, or are they simply independent sovereign
+states united in close and intimate alliance, league, or federation, by
+a mutual pact or agreement? Were the people of the United States who
+ordained and established the written constitution one people, or were
+they not?  If they were not before ordaining and establishing the
+government, they are not now; for the adoption of the constitution did
+not and could not make them one.  Whether they are one or many is then
+simply a question of fact, to be decided by the facts in the case, not
+by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of jurists, or even
+by constitutional law itself.  The old Articles of Confederation and
+the later Constitution can serve here only as historical documents.
+Constitutions and laws presuppose the existence of a national sovereign
+from which they emanate, and that ordains them, for they are the formal
+expression of a sovereign will.  The nation must exist as an historical
+fact, prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign power, prior to
+the existence of written Constitutions and laws of any kind, and its
+existence must be established before they can be recognized as having
+any legal force or vitality.
+
+The existence of any nation, as an independent sovereign nation, is a
+purely historical fact, for its right to exist as such is in the simple
+fact that it does so exist.  A nation de facto is a nation de jure, and
+when we have ascertained the fact, we have ascertained the right.
+There is no right in the case separate from the fact--only the fact
+must be really a fact.  A people hitherto a part of another people, or
+subject to another sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they
+have declared themselves independent, and have organized a government,
+and are engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for
+independence.  The struggle must be practically over; the former
+sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce them to
+submission, or to bring them back under his authority, and if he
+continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the postulant must have
+proved his ability to maintain civil government, and to fulfil within
+and without the obligations which attach to every civilized nation,
+before it can be recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because
+before it is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.  The prior
+sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right, has
+lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for humanity
+demands not martyrs to lost causes.
+
+This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly
+philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
+nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, not a
+right antecedent to the fact.  The repugnance felt to this assertion
+arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in a strictly
+political sense, and sometimes in its original sense of tribe, and
+understanding by it not simply the body politic, but a certain relation
+of origin, family, kindred, blood, or race.  But God has made of one
+blood, or race, all the nations of men; and, besides, no political
+rights are founded by the law of nature on relations of blood, kindred,
+or family.  Under the patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some
+extent, under feudalism, these relations form the basis of government,
+but they are economical relations rather than civil or political, and,
+under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the
+household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or body
+politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse.  They are protected by
+the state, but do not found or constitute it.  The vicissitudes of
+time, the revolutions of states and empires, migration, conquest, and
+intermixture of families and races, have rendered it impracticable,
+even if it were desirable, to distribute people into nations according
+to their relations of blood or descent.
+
+There is no civilized nation now existing that has been, developed from
+a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most mixed are the most
+civilized.  The nearer a nation approaches to a primitive people of
+pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it is from civilization.  All
+civilized nations are political nations, and are founded in the fact,
+not on rights antecedent to the fact.  A hundred or more lost
+nationalities went to form the Roman empire, and who can tell us how
+many layers of crushed nationalities, superposed one upon another,
+serve for the foundation of the present French, English, Russian,
+Austrian, or Spanish nationalities?  What other title to independence
+and sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any European
+nation?  Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one can say how
+many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to be as it has, or
+can have.  Whether those nationalities have been justly extinguished or
+not, is no question for the statesman; it is the secret of Providence.
+Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of
+right.  The good is sometimes overborne, and the bad sometimes
+triumphs; but it is consoling, and even just, to believe that the good
+oftener triumphs than the bad.
+
+In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law. The
+nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the nation.
+Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize and apply both
+the law of nature and the law of nations, but only on the ground that
+they are included, or are presumed to be included, in the national law,
+or jurisprudence.  Doubtless, too, the nation holds from God, under the
+law of nature, but only by virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and
+when it is a nation dependent on no other, it holds from God all the
+rights and powers of any independent sovereign nation.  There is no
+right behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation
+that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights. In the
+case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part of another
+people, or subject to another people@ the right of the prior sovereign
+must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction of that right is
+necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise would be only an
+initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli. But that right ceases when
+its claimant, willingly or unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons
+it; and he does so when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows
+no ability or intention of soon renewing it with any reasonable
+prospect of success.
+
+The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to sovereignty,
+is founded in error.  Empty titles to states and kingdoms are of no
+validity.  The sovereignty is, under God, in the nation and the title
+and the possession are inseparable.  The title of the Palaeologi to the
+Roman Empire of the East, of the king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia,
+or the king of Spain--for they are all claimants--to the kingdom of
+Jerusalem founded by Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the
+thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the
+throne of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they
+are engrossed.  The contrary opinion, so generally entertained, belongs
+to barbarism, not to civilization.  It is in modern society a relic of
+feudalism, which places the state in the government, and makes the
+government a private estate--a private, and not a public right--a right
+to govern the public, not a right to govern held from or by the public.
+
+The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by violence,
+by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right, and another may
+usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact without acquiring any right
+or legal title to it.  The man who holds the legal title has the right
+to oust him and re-enter upon his estate whenever able to do so.  Here,
+in the economical order, the fact and the right are distinguishable,
+and the actual occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.
+Holding sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very
+properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments de
+jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a prince
+does not invalidate his title.  But sovereignty, it has been shown, is
+not in the government, but in the state, and the state is inseparable
+from the public domain.  The people organized and held by the domain or
+national territory, are under God the sovereign nation, and remain so
+as long as the nation subsists without subjection to another.  The
+government, as distinguished from the state or nation, has only a
+delegated authority, governs only by a commission from the nation.  The
+revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes its
+rights.  The nation is always sovereign, and every organic people fixed
+to the soil, and actually independent of every other, is a nation.
+There can then be no independent nation de facto that is not an
+independent nation de jure, nor de jure that is not de facto.  The
+moment a people cease to be an independent nation in fact, they cease
+to be sovereign, and the moment they become in fact an independent
+nation, they are so of right. Hence in the political order the fact and
+the right are born and expire together; and when it is proved that a
+people, are in fact an independent nation, there is no question to be
+asked as to their right to be such nation.
+
+In the case of the United States there is only the question of fact.
+If they are in fact one people they are so in right, whatever the
+opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the decisions of courts;
+for the courts hold from the national authority, and the theories and
+opinions of statesmen may be erroneous.  Certain it is that the States
+in the American Union have never existed and acted as severally
+sovereign states. Prior to independence, they were colonies under the
+sovereignty of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed
+and acted only as states united.  The colonists, before separation and
+independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the colonies
+had they held by charter or concession from the British crown.  The
+colonists never pretended to be other than British subjects, and the
+alleged ground of their complaint against the mother country was not
+that she had violated their natural rights as men, but their rights as
+British subjects--rights, as contended by the colonists, secured by the
+English constitution to all Englishmen or British subjects.  The denial
+to them of these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and
+they defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George
+III., on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and
+the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance.
+
+In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves independent
+states indeed, but not severally independent.  The declaration was not
+made by the states severally, but by the states jointly, as the United
+States.  They unitedly declared their independence; they carried on the
+war for independence, won it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers
+and by the mother country as the United States, not as severally
+independent sovereign states.  Severally they have never exercised the
+full powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag--symbol of
+sovereignty--recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign
+treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or
+interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or confederacies
+with foreign states or with one another, and in several respects have
+been more restricted in their powers in the Union than they were as
+British colonies.
+
+Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete states by
+declaring and winning their independence; and if the English colonies,
+now the United States, had separately declared and won their
+independence, they would unquestionably have become separately
+independent states, each invested by the law of nature with all the
+rights and powers of a sovereign nation.  But they did not do this.
+They declared and won their independence jointly, and have since
+existed and exercised sovereignty only as states united, or the United
+States, that is, states sovereign in their union, but not in their
+separation.  This is of itself decisive of the whole question.
+
+But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers of
+sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as one people,
+but they were, so far as a people at all, one people even before
+independence.  The colonies were all erected and endowed with their
+rights and powers by one and the same national authority, and the
+colonists were subjects of one and the same national sovereign.  Mr.
+Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our prominent statesmen maintains
+the unity of the colonial people, adds indeed to their subjection to
+the same sovereign authority, community of origin, of language,
+manners, customs, and law.  All these, except the last, or common law,
+may exist without national unity in the modern political sense of the
+term nation.  The English common law was recognized by the colonial
+courts, and in force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial
+legislation, but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in
+English jurisprudence.  The colonists were under the Common Law,
+because they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
+This proves that they were really one people with the English people,
+though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and not a separate
+people having nothing politically in common with them but in the
+accident of having the same royal person for their king.  The union
+with the mother country was national, not personal, as was the union
+existing between England and Hanover, or that still existing between
+the empire of Austria, formerly Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary;
+and hence the British parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right
+to tax the colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in
+all cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
+principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation laws.
+The people of the several colonies being really one people before
+independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, must be so
+still, unless they have since, by some valid act, divided themselves or
+been divided into separate and independent states.
+
+The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The king
+is dead!  Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never in
+abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed in
+another.  The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with
+independence, and the American took its place.  Did the sovereignty,
+which before independence was in Great Britain, pass from Great Britain
+to the States severally, or to the States united?  It might have passed
+to them severally, but did it? There is no question of law or
+antecedent right in the case, but a simple question of fact, and the
+fact is determined by determining who it was that assumed it, exercised
+it, and has continued to exercise it.  As to this there is no doubt.
+The sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the United
+States, the States united, and never by the States separately or
+severally.  Then as a fact the sovereignty that before independence was
+in Great Britain, passed, on independence to the States united, and
+reappears in all its vigor in the United States, the only successor to
+Great Britain known to or recognized by the civilized world.
+
+As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies,
+still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed
+into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign
+people, therefore a sovereign state or nation, and not a simple league
+or confederacy of nations.
+
+There is no doubt that all the powers exercised by the General
+Government, though embracing all foreign relations and all general
+interests and relations of all the States, might have been exercised by
+it under the authority of a mutual compact of the several States, and
+practically the difference between the compact theory and the national
+view would be very little, unless in cases like that of secession.  On
+the supposition that the American people are one political people, the
+government would have the right to treat secession, in the sense in
+which the seceders understand it, as rebellion, and to suppress it by
+employing all the physical force at its command; but on the compact
+theory it would have no such right.  But the question now under
+discussion turns simply on what has been and is the historical fact.
+Before the States could enter into the compact and delegate sovereign
+powers to the Union, they must have severally possessed them.  It is
+historically certain that they did not possess them before
+independence; they did not obtain them by independence, for they did
+not severally succeed to the British sovereignty, to which they
+succeeded only as States united.  When, then, and by what means did
+they or could they become severally sovereign States?  The United
+States having succeeded to the British sovereignty in the
+Anglo-American colonies, they came into possession of full national
+sovereignty, and have alone held and exercised it ever since
+independence became a fact.  The States severally succeeding only to
+the colonies, never held, and have never been competent to delegate
+sovereign powers.
+
+The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on the
+assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the several
+States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one nation, and,
+though divided into separate States, the people were regarded as one
+people.  The Legislature of New York, as early as 1782, calls for an
+essential change In the Articles of Confederation, as proved to be
+inadequate to secure the peace, security, and prosperity of "the
+nation."  All the proceedings that preceded and led to the call of the
+convention of 1781 were based on the assumption that the people of the
+United States were one people.  The States were called united, not
+confederated States, even in the very Articles of Confederation
+themselves, and officially the United States were called "the Union."
+That the united colonies by independence became united States, and
+formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the belief,
+the instinct of the great mass of the people.  They acted as they
+existed through State as they had previously acted through colonial
+organization, for in throwing off the British authority there was no
+other organization through which they could act.  The States, or people
+of the States, severally sent their delegates to the Congress of the
+United States, and these delegates adopted the rule of voting in
+Congress by States, a rule that might be revived without detriment to
+national unity. Nothing was more natural, then, than that Congress,
+composed of delegates elected or appointed by States, should draw up
+articles of confederation rather than articles of union, in order, if
+for no other reason, to conciliate the smaller States, and to prevent
+their jealousy of the larger States such as Virginia, Massachusetts,
+and Pennsylvania.
+
+Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted
+during the transition from colonial dependence to national
+independence.  Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not a fact
+till 1782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it was signed at
+Paris.  Till then the United States were not an independent nation;
+they were only a people struggling to become an independent nation.
+Prior to that preliminary treaty, neither the Union nor the States
+severally were sovereign.  The articles were agreed on in Congress in
+1777, but they were not ratified by all the States till May, 1781, and
+in 1782 the movement was commenced in the Legislature of New York for
+their amendment. Till the organization under the constitution ordained
+by the people of the United States in 1787, and which went into
+operation in 1789, the United States had in reality only a provisional
+government, and it was not till then that the national government was
+definitively organized, and the line of demarcation between the General
+Government and the particular State governments was fixed.
+
+The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected by the
+American people, precisely because it was not in harmony with the
+unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation; and it was not in
+harmony with that constitution precisely because it recognized the
+States as severally sovereign, and substituted confederation for union.
+The failure of confederation and the success of union are ample proofs
+of the unity of the American nation.  The instinct of unity rejected
+State sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861.  The first and the last
+attempt to establish State sovereignty have failed, and the failure
+vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States united, not
+in the States severally.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+
+The constitution of the United States is twofold, written and
+unwritten, the constitution of the people and the constitution of the
+government.
+
+The written constitution is simply a law ordained by the nation or
+people instituting and organizing the government; the unwritten
+constitution is the real or actual constitution of the people as a
+state or sovereign community, and constituting them such or such a
+state.  It is Providential, not made by the nation, but born with it.
+The written constitution is made and ordained by the sovereign power,
+and presupposes that power as already existing and constituted.
+
+The unwritten or Providential constitution of the United States is
+peculiar, and difficult to understand, because incapable of being fully
+explained by analogies borrowed from any other state historically
+known, or described by political philosophers.  It belongs to the
+Graeco-Roman family, and is republican as distinguished from despotic
+constitutions, but it comes under the head of neither monarchical nor
+aristocratic, neither democratic nor mixed constitutions, and creates a
+state which is neither a centralized state nor a confederacy.  The
+difficulty of understanding it is augmented by the peculiar use under
+it of the word state, which does not in the American system mean a
+sovereign community or political society complete in itself, like
+France, Spain, or Prussia, nor yet a political society subordinate to
+another political society and dependent on it. The American States are
+all sovereign States united, but, disunited, are no States at all.  The
+rights and powers of the States are not derived from the United States,
+nor the rights and powers of the United States derived from the States.
+
+The simple fact is, that the political or sovereign people of the
+United States exists as united States, and only as united States. The
+Union and the States are coeval, born together, and can exist only
+together.  Separation is dissolution--the death of both. The United
+States are a state, a single sovereign state; but this single sovereign
+state consists in the union and solidarity of States instead of
+individuals.  The Union is in each of the States, and each of the
+States is in the Union.
+
+It is necessary to distinguish in the outset between the United States
+and the government of the United States, or the so-called Federal
+government, which the convention refused, contrary to its first
+intention to call the national government.  That government is not a
+supreme national government, representing all the powers of the United
+States, but a limited government, restricted by its constitution to
+certain specific relations and interests.  The United States are
+anterior to that government, and the first question to be settled
+relates to their internal and inherent Providential constitution as one
+political people or sovereign state.  The written constitution, in its
+preamble, professes to be ordained by "We, the people of the United
+States."  Who are this people?  How are they constituted, or what the
+mode and conditions of their political existence?  Are they the people
+of the States severally?  No; for they call themselves the people of
+the United States.  Are they a national people, really existing outside
+and independently of their organization into distinct and mutually
+independent States?  No; for they define themselves to be the people of
+the United States.  If they had considered themselves existing as
+States only, they would have said "We, the States," and if
+independently of State organization, they would have said "We, the
+people," do ordain, &c.
+
+The key to the mystery is precisely in this appellation United States,
+which is not the name of the country, for its distinctive name is
+America, but a name expressive of its political organization.  In it
+there are no sovereign people without States, and no States without
+union, or that are not united States.  The term united is not part of a
+proper name, but is simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its
+full and proper sense.  Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in
+the States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally,
+precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in the
+people collectively or as society, not in the people individually.  The
+life is in the body, not in the members, though the body could not
+exist if it had no members; so the sovereignty is in the Union, not in
+the States severally; but there could be no sovereign union without the
+States, for there is no union where there is nothing united.
+
+This is not a theory of the constitution, but the constitutional fact
+itself.  It is the simple historical fact that precedes the law and
+constitutes the law-making power.  The people of the United States are
+one people, as has already been proved: they were one people, as far as
+a people at all, prior to independence, because under the same Common
+Law and subject to the same sovereign, and have been so since, for as
+united States they gained their independence and took their place among
+sovereign nations, and as united States they have possessed and still
+possess the government.  As their existence before independence in
+distinct colonies did not prevent their unity, so their existence since
+in distinct States does not hinder them from being one people.  The
+States severally simply continue the colonial organizations, and united
+they hold the sovereignty that was originally in the mother country.
+But if one people, they are one people existing in distinct State
+organizations, as before independence they were one people existing in
+distinct colonial organizations.  This is the original, the unwritten,
+and Providential constitution of the people of the United States.
+
+This constitution is not conventional, for it existed before the people
+met or could meet in convention.  They have not, as an independent
+sovereign people, either established their union, or distributed
+themselves into distinct and mutually independent States.  The union
+and the distribution, the unity and the distinction, are both original
+in their constitution, and they were born United States, as much and as
+truly so as the son of a citizen is born a citizen, or as every one
+born at all is born a member of society, the family, the tribe, or the
+nation.  The Union and the States were born together, are inseparable
+in their constitution, have lived and grown up together; no serious
+attempt till the late secession movement has been made to separate
+them; and the secession movement, to all persons who knew not the real
+constitution of the United States, appeared sure to succeed, and in
+fact would have succeeded if, as the secessionists pretended, the Union
+had been only a confederacy, and the States had been held together only
+by a conventional compact, and not by a real and living bond of unity.
+The popular instinct of national unity, which seemed so weak, proved to
+be strong enough to defeat the secession forces, to trample out the
+confederacy, and maintain the unity of the nation and the integrity of
+its domain.
+
+The people can act only as they exist, as they are, not as they are
+not.  Existing originally only as distributed in distinct and mutually
+independent colonies, they could at first act only through their
+colonial organizations, and afterward only through their State
+organizations.  The colonial people met in convention, in the person of
+representatives chosen by colonies, and after independence in the
+person of representatives chosen by States.  Not existing outside of
+the colonial or State organizations, they could not act outside or
+independently of them.  They chose their representatives or delegates
+by colonies or States, and called at first their convention a Congress;
+but by an instinct surer than their deliberate wisdom, they called it
+not the Congress of the confederate, but of the United States,
+asserting constitutional unity as well as constitutional multiplicity.
+It is true, in their first attempt to organize a general government,
+they called the constitution they devised Articles of Confederation,
+but only because they had not attained to full consciousness of
+themselves; and that they really meant union, not confederation, is
+evident from their adopting, as the official style of the nation or new
+power, united, not confederate States.
+
+That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was represented
+in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the fact that the several
+States, when they wished to adopt State constitutions in place of
+colonial charters, felt not at liberty to do so without asking and
+obtaining the permission of Congress, as the elder Adams informs us in
+his Diary, kept at the time; that is, they asked and obtained the
+equivalent of what has since, in the case of organizing new States,
+been called an "enabling act."  This proves that the States did not
+regard themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as
+completely sovereign only in it.  And this again proves that the
+Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living
+constitution of the people.  Even then it was felt that the
+organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be
+regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no Territory
+can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a State, and adopt
+a State constitution, without an enabling act by Congress, or its
+equivalent.
+
+New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into the
+Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of Kansas, if
+nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular, illicit,
+invalid, and dangerous.  Congress, of course, can condone the wrong and
+validate the act, but it were better that the act should be validly
+done, and that there should be no wrong to condone.  Territories have
+organized as States, adopted State constitutions, and instituted State
+governments under what has been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such
+sovereignty has no existence, because sovereignty is attached to the
+domain; and the domain is in the United States.  It is the offspring of
+that false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people
+personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which makes
+sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to the soil, and
+is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of power.  In all
+civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from the state, and the
+state is inseparable from the domain.  The will of the people, unless
+they are a state, is no law, has no force, binds nobody, and justifies
+no act.
+
+The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains
+admirably the mutual relation of the Union and the several States.  The
+people of a Territory belonging to the United States or included in the
+public domain not yet erected into a State and admitted into the Union,
+are subjects of the United States, without any political rights
+whatever, and, though a part of the population, are no part of the
+sovereign people of the United States.  They become a part of that
+people, with political rights and franchises, only when they are
+erected into a State, and admitted into the Union as one of the United
+States.  They may meet in convention, draw up and adopt a constitution
+declaring or assuming them to be a State, elect State officers,
+senators, and representatives in the State legislature, and
+representatives and senators in Congress, but they are not yet a State,
+and are, as before, under the Territorial government established by the
+General Government.  It does not exist as a State till recognized by
+Congress and admitted into the Union.  The existence of the State, and
+the rights and powers of the people within the State, depend on their
+being a State in the Union, or a State united. Hence a State erected on
+the national domain, but itself outside of the Union, is not an
+independent foreign State, but simply no State at all, in any sense of
+the term.  As there is no union outside of the States, so is there no
+State outside of the Union; and to be a citizen either of a State or of
+the United States, it is necessary to be a citizen of a State, and of a
+State in the Union.  The inhabitants of Territories not yet erected
+into States are subjects, not citizens--that is, not citizens with
+political rights.  The sovereign people are not the people outside of
+State organization, nor the people of the States severally, but the
+distinct people of the several States united, and therefore most
+appropriately called the people of the United States.
+
+This is the peculiarity of the American constitution and is
+substantially the very peculiarity noted and dwelt upon by Mr. Madison
+in his masterly letter to Edward Everett, published in the "North
+American Review," October, 1830.
+
+"I In order to understand the true character of the constitution of the
+United States," says Mr. Madison, "the error, not uncommon, must be
+avoided of viewing it through the medium either of a consolidated
+government or of a confederated government, whilst it is neither the
+one nor the other, but a mixture of both.  And having, in no model, the
+similitudes and analogies applicable to other systems of government, it
+must, more than any other, be its own interpreter, according to its
+text and the facts in the case.
+
+"From these it will be seen that the characteristic peculiarities of
+the constitution are: 1. The mode of its formation. 2. The division of
+the supreme powers of government between the States in their united
+capacity and the States in their individual capacities.
+
+"1. It was formed not by the governments of the component States, as
+the Federal Government, for which it was substituted, was formed; nor
+was it formed by a majority of the people of the United States as a
+single community, in the manner of a consolidated government.  It was
+formed by the States; that is, by the people in each of the States,
+acting in their highest sovereign capacity, and formed consequently by
+the same authority which formed the State constitution.
+
+"Being thus derived from the same source as the constitutions of the
+States, it has within each State the same authority as the constitution
+of the State, and is as much a constitution in the strict sense of the
+term, within its prescribed sphere, as the constitutions of the States
+are within their respective spheres; but with this obvious and
+essential difference, that, being a compact among the States in their
+highest capacity, and constituting the people thereof one people for
+certain purposes, it cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the
+States individually, as the constitution of a State may be at its
+individual will.
+
+"2. And that it divides the supreme powers of government between the
+government of the United States and the governments of the individual
+States, is stamped on the face of the instrument; the powers of war and
+of taxation, of commerce and treaties, and other enumerated powers
+vested in the government of the United States, are of high and
+sovereign a character as any of the powers reserved to the State
+governments."
+
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Webster, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and nearly
+all the old Republicans, and even the old Federalists, on the question
+as to what is the actual constitution of the United States, took
+substantially the same view; but they all, as well as Mr. Madison
+himself, speak of the written constitution, which on their theory has
+and can have only a conventional value. Mr. Madison evidently
+recognizes no constitution of the people prior to the written
+constitution, from which the written constitution, or the constitution
+of the government, derives all its force and vitality.  The
+organization of the American people, which he knew well--no man
+better,--and which he so justly characterizes, he supposes to have been
+deliberately formed by the people themselves, through the
+convention--not given them by Providence as their original and inherent
+constitution.  But this was merely the effect of the general doctrine
+which he had adopted, in common with nearly all his contemporaries, of
+the origin of the state in compact, and may be eliminated from his view
+of what the constitution actually is, without affecting that view
+itself.
+
+Mr. Madison lays great stress on the fact that though the constitution
+of the Union was formed by the States, it was formed, not by the
+governments, but by the people of the several States; but this makes no
+essential difference, if the people are the people of the States, and
+sovereign in their severalty, and not in their union.  Had it been
+formed by the State governments with the acquiescence of the people, it
+would have rested on as high authority as if formed by the people of
+the State in convention assembled.  The only difference is, that if the
+State ratified it by the legislature, she could abrogate it by the
+legislature; if in convention, she could abrogate it only in
+convention.  Mr. Madison, following Mr. Jefferson, supposes the
+constitution makes the people of the several States one people for
+certain specific purposes, and leaves it to be supposed that in regard
+to all other matters, or in all other relations, they are sovereign;
+and hence he makes the government a mixture of a consolidated
+government and a confederated government, but neither the one nor the
+other exclusively.  Say the people of the United States were one people
+in all respects, and under a government which is neither a consolidated
+nor a confederated government, nor yet a mixture of the two, but a
+government in which the powers of government are divided between a
+general government and particular governments, each emanating from the
+same source, and you will have the simple fact, and precisely what Mr.
+Madison means, when is eliminated what is derived from his theory of
+the origin of government in compact.  It is this theory of the
+conventional origin of the constitution, and which excludes the
+Providential or real constitution of the people, that has misled him
+and so many other eminent statesmen and constitutional lawyers.
+
+The convention did not create the Union or unite the States, for it was
+assembled by the authority of the United States who were present in it.
+The United States or Union existed before the convention, as the
+convention itself affirms in declaring one of its purposes to be "to
+provide for a more perfect union."  If there had been no union, it
+could not and would not have spoken of providing for a more perfect
+union, but would have stated its purpose to be to create or form a
+union.  The convention did not form the Union, nor in fact provide for
+a more perfect union; it simply provided for the more perfect
+representation or expression in the General government of the Union
+already existing.  The convention, in common with the statesmen at the
+time, recognized no unwritten or Providential constitution of a people,
+and regarded the constitution of government as the constitution of the
+state, and consequently sometimes put the state for the government.  In
+interpreting its language, it is necessary to distinguish between its
+act and its theory.  Its act is law, its theory is not.  The convention
+met, among other things, to organize a government which should more
+perfectly represent the union of the States than did the government
+created by the Articles of Confederation.
+
+The convention, certainly, professes to grant or concede powers to the
+United States, and to prohibit powers to the States; but it simply puts
+the state for the government.  The powers of the United States are,
+indeed, grants or trusts, but from God through the law of nature, and
+are grants, trusts, or powers always conceded to every nation or
+sovereign people.  But none of them are grants from the convention.
+The powers the convention grants or concedes to the United States are
+powers granted or conceded by the United States to the General
+government it assembled to organize and establish, which, as it extends
+over the whole population and territory of the Union, and, as the
+interests it is charged with relate to all the States in common, or to
+the people as a whole, is with no great impropriety called the
+government of the United States, in contradistinction from the State
+governments, which have each only a local jurisdiction. But the more
+exact term is, for the one, the general government, and for the others,
+particular governments, as having charge only of the particular
+interests of the State; and the two together constitute the government
+of the United States, or the complete national government; for neither
+the General government nor the State government is complete in itself.
+The convention developed a general government, and prescribed its
+powers, and fixed their limits and extent, as well as the bounds of the
+powers of the State or particular governments; but they are the United
+States assembled in convention that do all this, and, therefore,
+strictly speaking, no powers are conceded to the United States that
+they did not previously possess.  The convention itself, in the
+constitution it ordained, defines very clearly from whom the General
+government holds its powers.  It holds them, as we I have seen, from
+"We, the people of the United States;" not we, the people of the States
+severally, but of the States united.  If it had meant the States
+severally, it would have said, We, the States; if it had recognized and
+meant the population of the country irrespective of its organization
+into particular States, it would have said simply, We, the people.  By
+saying "We, the people of the United States," it placed the sovereign
+power where it is, in the people of the States united.
+
+The convention ordains that the powers not conceded to the General
+government or prohibited to the particular governments, "are reserved
+to the States respectively, or to the people." But the powers reserved
+to the States severally are reserved by order of the United States, and
+the powers not so reserved are reserved to the people.  What people?
+The first thought is that they are the people of the States severally;
+for the constitution understands by people the state as distinguished
+from the state government; but if this had been its meaning in this
+place, it would have said, "are reserved to the States respectively, or
+to the people" thereof.  As it does not say so, and does not define the
+people it means, it is necessary to understand by them the people
+called in the preamble "the people of the United States." This is
+confirmed by the authority reserved to amend the constitution, which
+certainly is not reserved to the States severally, but necessarily to
+the power that ordains the constitution--"We, the people of the United
+States."  No power except that which ordains is or can be competent to
+amend a constitution of government.  The particular mode prescribed by
+the convention in which the constitution of the government may be
+amended has no bearing on the present argument, because it is
+prescribed by the States united, not severally, and the power to amend
+is evidently reserved, not indeed to the General government, but to the
+United States; for the ratification by any State or Territory not in
+the Union counts for nothing.  The States united, can, in the way
+prescribed, give more or less power to the General government, and
+reserve more or less power to the States individually.  The so-called
+reserved powers are really reserved to the people of the United States,
+who can make such disposition of them as seems to them good.
+
+The conclusion, then, that the General government holds from the States
+united, not from the States severally, is not invalidated by the fact
+that its constitution was completed only by the ratification of the
+States in their individual capacity.  The ratification was made
+necessary by the will of the people in convention assembled; but the
+convention was competent to complete it and put it in force without
+that ratification, had it so willed.  The general practice under the
+American system is for the convention to submit the constitution it has
+agreed on to the people, to be accepted or rejected by a plebiscitum;
+but such submission, though it may be wise and prudent, is not
+necessary. The convention is held to be the convention of the people,
+and to be clothed with the full authority of the sovereign people, and
+it is in this that it differs from the congress or the legislature.  It
+is not a congress of delegates or ministers who are obliged to act
+under instructions, to report their acts to their respective sovereigns
+for approval or rejection; it is itself sovereign, and may do whatever
+the people themselves can do.  There is no necessity for it to appeal
+to a plebiscitum to complete its acts.  That the convention, on the
+score of prudence, is wise in doing so, nobody questions; but the
+convention is always competent, if it chooses, to ordain the
+constitution without appeal.  The power competent to ordain the
+constitution is always competent to change, modify, or amend it. That
+amendments to the constitution of the government can be adopted only by
+being proposed by a convention of all the States in the Union, or by
+being proposed, by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and
+ratified by three-fourths of the States, is simply a conventional
+ordinance, which the convention can change at its pleasure.  It proves
+nothing as it stands but the will of the convention.
+
+The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in
+reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized on,
+since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the constitution
+emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty or compact between
+sovereign states, not an organic or fundamental law ordained by a
+single sovereign will; but this argument is inadmissible, because, as
+we have just seen, the convention is competent to ordain the
+constitution without submitting it for ratification, and because the
+convention uses sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.
+That the framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact,
+or agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held in
+regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as little
+doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly believed that they
+were constituting a real government. Mr. Madison's authority on this
+point is conclusive.  They unquestionably regarded the States, prior to
+the ratification of the constitution they proposed, as severally
+sovereign, as they were declared to be by the old Articles of
+Confederation, but they also believed that all individuals are
+sovereign prior to the formation of civil society.  Yet very few, if
+any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption
+of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
+conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal belief of
+the time among political philosophers,--the little account which they
+made of the historical facts that prove that the people of the United
+States were always one people, and that the States never existed as
+severally sovereign states.
+
+The political philosophers of the present day do not generally accept
+the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in these pages to
+be unsound and incompatible with the essential nature of government.
+The statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the state is
+derived from the people individually, and held that sovereignty is
+created by the people in convention. The rights and powers of the
+state, they held, were made up of the rights held by individuals under
+the law of nature, and which the individuals surrendered to civil
+society on its formation. So they supposed that independent sovereign
+states might meet in convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion
+of their rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real
+government, and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of
+their sovereignty.  This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings
+of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by Mr. Webster,
+in his great speech in the Senate against the State sovereignty
+doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won for him the
+honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and expound it he, no
+doubt, did in the sense of its framers.  He boldly concedes that prior
+to the adoption of the constitution, the people of the United States
+were severally sovereign states, but by the constitution they were made
+one sovereign political community or people, and that the States,
+though retaining certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty
+in the Union.
+
+The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can
+originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could not
+stand; that, if the States went into the convention sovereign States,
+they came out of it sovereign States; and that the constitution they
+formed could from the nature of the case be only a treaty, compact, or
+agreement between sovereigns.  It could create an agency, but not a
+government.  The sovereign States could only delegate the exercise of
+their sovereign powers, not the sovereign powers themselves.  The
+States could agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty
+only in common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on
+the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their
+sovereignty.  Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as before
+the convention, vested in the States severally.  Hence State
+sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that cannot come
+properly before the Supreme Court of the United States for decision,
+each State is free to decide for itself, on which he based the right of
+nullification, or the State veto of acts of Congress whose
+constitutionality the State denies. Mr. Calhoun was himself no
+secessionist, but he laid down the premises from which secession is the
+logical deduction; and large numbers of young men, among the most open,
+the most generous, and the most patriotic in the country, adopted his
+premises, without being aware of this fact any more than he himself
+was, and who have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and
+in their sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebellion.
+
+The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and which
+attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State sovereignty, has
+thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject, and led them to
+re-examine the historical facts in the case from a different point of
+view, to see if Mr. Calhoun's theory is not as unfounded as he had
+proved Mr. Webster's theory to be.  The facts in the case really
+sustain neither, and both failed to see it: Mr. Calhoun because he had
+purposes to accomplish which demanded State sovereignty, and Mr.
+Webster because he examined them in the distorting medium of the theory
+or understanding of the statesmen of the eighteenth century.  The civil
+war has vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the
+State sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as
+far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to
+consolidation or centralism.
+
+But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding of the
+framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the expression will
+be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on their merits.  What binds
+is the thing done, not the theory on which it was done, or on which the
+actors explained their work either to themselves or to others.  Their
+political philosophy, or their political theory, may sometimes affect
+the phraseology they adopt, but forms no rule for interpreting their
+work.  Their work was inspired by and accords with the historical facts
+in the case, and is authorized and explained by them.  The American
+people were not made one people by the written constitution, as Mr.
+Jefferson, Mr. Madison, Mr. Webster, and so many others supposed, but
+were made so by the unwritten constitution, born with and inherent in
+them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--CONTINUED.
+
+
+Providence, or God operating through historical facts, constituted the
+American people one political or sovereign people, existing and acting
+in particular communities, organizations, called states.  This one
+people organized as states, meet in convention, frame and ordain the
+constitution of government, or institute a general government in place
+of the Continental Congress; and the same people, in their respective
+State organizations, meet in convention in each State, and frame and
+ordain a particular government for the State individually, which, in
+union with the General government, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government within the States, as the General government, in union with
+all the particular governments, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government of the nation or whole country.  This is clearly the view
+taken by Mr. Madison in his letter to Mr. Everett, when freed from his
+theory of the origin of government in compact.
+
+The constitution of the people as one people, and the distinction at
+the same time of this one people into particular States, precedes the
+convention, and is the unwritten constitution, the Providential
+constitution, of the American people or civil society, as distinguished
+from the constitution of the government, which, whether general or
+particular, is the ordination of civil society itself.  The unwritten
+constitution is the creation or constitution of the sovereign, and the
+sovereign providentially constituted constitutes in turn the
+government, which is not sovereign, but is clothed with just so much
+and just so little authority as the sovereign wills or ordains.
+
+The sovereign in the republican order is the organic people, or State,
+and is with us the United States, for with us the organic people exist
+only as organized into States united, which in their union form one
+compact and indissoluble whole.  That is to say, the organic American
+people do not exist as a consolidated people or state; they exist only
+as organized into distinct but inseparable States.  Each State is a
+living member of the one body, and derives its life from its union with
+the body, so that the American state is one body with many members; and
+the members, instead of being simply individuals, are States, or
+individuals organized into States.  The body consists of many members,
+and is one body, because the members are all members of it, and members
+one of another.  It does not exist as separate or distinct from the
+members, but exists in their solidarity or membership one of another.
+There is no sovereign people or existence of the United States
+distinguishable from the people or existence of the particular States
+united.  The people of the United States, the state called the United
+States, are the people of the particular States united.  The solidarity
+of the members constitutes the unity of the body.  The difference
+between this view and Mr. Madison's is, that while his view supposes
+the solidarity to be conventional, originating and existing in compact,
+or agreement, this supposes it to be real, living, and prior to the
+convention, as much the work of Providence as the existence in the
+human body of the living solidarity of its members.  One law, one life,
+circulates through all the members, constituting them a living
+organism, binding them in living union, all to each and each to all.
+
+Such is the sovereign people, and so far the original unwritten
+constitution.  The sovereign, in order to live and act, must have an
+organ through which he expresses his will.  This organ under the
+American system, is primarily the Convention.  The convention is the
+supreme political body, the concrete sovereign authority, and exercises
+practically the whole sovereign power of the people.  The convention
+persists always, although not in permanent session.  It can at any time
+be convened by the ordinary authority of the government, or, in its
+failure, by a plebiscitum.
+
+Next follows the Government created and constituted by the convention.
+The government is constituted in such manner, and has such and only
+such powers, as the convention ordains.  The government has, in the
+strict sense, no political authority under the American system, which
+separates the government from the convention.  All political questions
+proper, such as the elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution
+of the several departments of government, as the legislative, the
+judicial, and the executive, changing, altering, or amending the
+constitution of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a
+word, all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take
+the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the government,
+but to the convention; and where the will of the sovereign is not
+sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a new appeal to the
+convention is necessary, and may always be had. The constitution of
+Great Britain makes no distinction between the convention and the
+government.  Theoretically the constitution of Great Britain is feudal,
+and there is, properly speaking, no British state; there are only the
+estates, king, lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute
+the Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the
+plenitude of political sovereignty.  The British Parliament, composed
+of the three estates, possesses in itself all the powers of the
+convention in the American constitution, and is at once the convention
+and the government.  The imperial constitution of France recognizes no
+convention, but clothes the senate with certain political functions,
+which, in some respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his
+creature. The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God
+and the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the
+sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the
+imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not
+of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the
+people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle
+disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief
+of the government.  The senate, the council of state, the legislative
+body, and the emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have
+properly no political functions, and to give them such functions is to
+place the sovereign under his own subjects!  The real aim of the
+imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the guise of
+republicanism.  It leaves and is intended to leave the nation no way of
+practically asserting its sovereignty but by either a revolution or a
+plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is permissible only where there is no
+regular government.
+
+The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes no
+restriction on the power of the government.  The French imperial
+constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as well as with the
+free action of the nation.  The American constitution has all the
+advantages of both, and the disadvantages of neither.  The convention
+is not the government like the British Parliament, nor a creature of
+the state like the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a
+practical form.  By means of the convention the government is
+restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in practice
+either too great or too small, can be enlarged or contracted in a
+regular, orderly way, without resorting to a revolution or to a
+plebiscitum.  Whatever political grievances there may be, there is
+always present the sovereign convention competent to redress them.  The
+efficiency of power is thus secured without danger to liberty, and
+freedom without danger to power.  The recognition of the convention,
+the real political sovereign of the country and its separation from and
+independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most striking
+features of the American constitution.
+
+The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the constitution
+by the convention of the government.  This constitution, as Mr. Madison
+well observes, divides the powers conceded by the convention to
+government between the General Government and the particular State
+governments.  Strictly speaking, the government is one, and its powers
+only are divided and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.
+This division of the powers of government could never have been
+established by the convention if the American people had not been
+providentially constituted one people, existing and acting through
+particular State organizations.  Here the unwritten constitution, or
+the constitution written in the people themselves, rendered practicable
+and dictated the written constitution, or constitution ordained by the
+convention and engrossed on parchment.  It only expresses in the
+government the fact which pre-existed in the national organization and
+life.
+
+This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the United
+States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal
+disintegration and Roman centralism.  Misled by their prejudices and
+peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United States,
+pleading in their justification the theory of State sovereignty,
+attempted disintegration, secession, and national independence separate
+from that of the United States, but the central force of the
+constitution was too strong for them to succeed.  The unity of the
+nation was too strong to be effectually broken.  No doubt the reaction
+against secession and disintegration will strengthen the tendency to
+centralism, but centralism can succeed no better than disintegration
+has succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no
+suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent of the
+States.  The particular governments are stronger, if there be any
+difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General
+government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after
+swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward
+the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the
+government move on in its constitutional path.
+
+Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism by the
+tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or obstructive
+power.  Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and wished to effect the
+same end here, where it is secured by other, more effective, and less
+objectionable means, by a State veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual
+executive, and by substituting concurrent for numerical majorities.
+Imperial Rome gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated
+all power in the hands of the emperor, became completely centralized,
+and fell.  The British constitution seeks the same end by substituting
+estates for the state, and establishing a mixed government, in which
+monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy temper, check, or balance each
+other; but practically the commons estate has become supreme, and the
+nobility govern not in the house of lords, and can really influence
+public affairs only through the house of commons.  The principle of the
+British constitution is not the division of the powers of government,
+but the antagonism of estates, or rather of interests, trusting to the
+obstructive influence of that antagonism to preserve the government
+from pure centralism.  Hence the study of the British statesman is to
+manage diverse and antagonistic parties and interests so as to gain the
+ability to act, which he can do only by intrigue, cajolery, bribery in
+one form or another, and corruption of every sort.  The British
+government cannot be carried on by fair, honest, and honorable means,
+any more than could the Roman under the antagonism created by the
+tribunitial veto.  The French tried the English system of organized
+antagonism in 1789, as a cure for the centralism introduced by
+Richelieu and Louis XIV., and again under the Restoration and Louis
+Philippe, and called it the system of constitutional guarantees; but
+they could never manage it, and they have taken refuge in unmitigated
+centralism under Napoleon III., who, however well disposed, finds no
+means in the constitution of the French nation of tempering it.  The
+English system, called the constitutional, and sometimes the
+parliamentary system, will not work in France, and indeed works really
+well nowhere.
+
+The American system, sometimes called the Federal system, is not
+founded on antagonism of classes, estates, or interests, and is in no
+sense a system of checks and balances.  It needs and tolerates no
+obstructive forces.  It does not pit section against section, the
+States severally against the General government, nor the General
+government against the State governments, and nothing is more hurtful
+than the attempt to explain it and work it on the principles of British
+constitutionalism.  The convention created no antagonistic powers; it
+simply divided the powers of government, and gave neither to the
+General government nor to the State governments all the powers of
+government, nor in any instance did it give to the two governments
+jurisdiction in the same matters. Hence each has its own sphere, in
+which it can move on without colliding with that of the other.  Each is
+independent and complete in relation to its own work, incomplete and
+dependent on the other for the complete work of government.
+
+The division of power is not between a NATIONAL government and State
+governments, but between a GENERAL government and particular
+governments.  The General government, inasmuch as it extends to matters
+common to all the States, is usually called the Government of the
+United States, and sometimes the Federal government, to distinguish it
+from the particular or State governments, but without strict propriety;
+for the government of the United States, or the Federal government,
+means, in strictness, both the General government and the particular
+Governments, since neither is in itself the complete government of the
+country.  The General government has authority within each of the
+States, and each of the State governments has authority in the Union.
+The line between the Union and the States severally, is not precisely
+the line between the General government and the particular governments.
+As, for instance, the General government lays direct taxes on the
+people of the States, and collects internal revenue within them; and
+the citizens of a particular State, and none others, are electors of
+President and Vice-President of the United States, and representatives
+in the lower house of Congress, while senators in Congress are elected
+by the State legislatures themselves.
+
+The line that distinguishes the two governments is that which
+distinguishes the general relations and interests from the particular
+relations and interests of the people of the United States.  These
+general relations and interests are placed under the General
+government, which, because its jurisdiction is coextensive with the
+Union, is called the Government of the United States; the particular
+relations and interests are placed under particular governments, which,
+because their jurisdiction is only coextensive, with the States
+respectively, are called State governments.  The General government
+governs supremely all the people of the United States and Territories
+belonging to the Union, in all their general relations and interests,
+or relations and interests common alike to them all; the particular or
+State government governs supremely the people of a particular State, as
+Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey, in all that pertains to their
+particular or private rights, relations, and interests.  The powers of
+each are equally sovereign, and neither are derived from the other.
+The State governments are not subordinate to the General government,
+nor the General government to the State governments.  They are
+co-ordinate governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving
+its powers from the same sovereign authority.  In their respective
+spheres neither yields to the other.  In relation to the matters within
+its jurisdiction, each government is independent and supreme in regard
+of the other, and subject only to the convention.
+
+The powers of the General government are the power--
+
+To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the
+debts and provide for the general welfare of the United States; to
+borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce
+with foreign nations, among the several States, and with the Indian
+tribes; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws
+on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin
+money and regulate the value thereof, and fix the standard of weights
+and measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the
+securities and current coin of the United States; to establish
+post-offices and post-roads; to promote the progress of science and of
+the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors
+the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to
+define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and
+offences against the law of nations; to declare war, grant letters of
+marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and
+water; to raise and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to
+make rules for the government of the land and naval forces; to provide
+for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union,
+suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; to provide for organizing,
+arming, and disciplining the militia, and of governing such part of
+them as may be employed in the service of the United States; to
+exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such
+district, not exceeding ten miles square, as may by cession of
+particular States and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of
+the government of the United States, and to exercise a like authority
+over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the
+State in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines,
+arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings; and to make all laws
+which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the
+foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in
+the government of the United States, or in any department or office
+thereof.
+
+In addition to these, the General government is clothed with the
+treaty-making power, and the whole charge of the foreign relations of
+the country; with power to admit new States into the Union; to dispose
+of and make all needful rules and regulations concerning the territory
+and all other property belonging to the United States; to declare, with
+certain restrictions, the punishment of treason, the constitution
+itself defining what is treason against the United States; and to
+propose, or to call, on the application of the legislatures of
+two-thirds of all the states, a convention for proposing amendments to
+this constitution; and is vested with supreme judicial power, original
+or appellate, in all cases of law and equity arising under this
+constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made or to be
+made under their authority, in all cases affecting ambassadors, other
+public ministers, and consuls, in all cases of admiralty and maritime
+jurisdiction, in all controversies to which the United States shall be
+a party, all controversies between two or more States, between a State
+and citizens of another State, between citizens of different States,
+between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of
+different States, and between a State or the citizens thereof and
+foreign states, citizens, or subjects.
+
+These, with what is incidental to them, and what is necessary and
+proper to carry them into effect, are all the positive powers with
+which the convention vests the General government, or government of the
+United States, as distinguished from the governments of the particular
+States; and these, with the exception of what relates to the district
+in which it has its seat, and places of forts, magazines, &c., are of a
+general nature, and restricted to the common relations and interests of
+the people, or at least to interests and relations which extend beyond
+the limits of a particular State.  They are all powers that regard
+matters which extend beyond not only the individual citizen, but the
+individual State, and affect alike the relations and interests of all
+the States, or matters which cannot be disposed of by a State
+government without the exercise of extra-territorial jurisdiction.
+They give the government no jurisdiction of questions which affect
+individuals or citizens only in their private and domestic relations
+which lie wholly within a particular State.  The General government
+does not legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or
+things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance, wills,
+the transferrence or transmission of property, real or personal; it can
+charter no private corporations, out of the District of Columbia, for
+business, literary, scientific, or eleemosynary purposes, establish no
+schools, found no colleges or universities, and promote science and the
+useful arts only by securing to authors and inventors for a time the
+exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.  The United States
+Bank was manifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present
+so-called national banks.  The United States Bank was a private or
+particular corporation, and the present national banks are only
+corporations of the same sort, though organized under a general law.
+The pretence that they are established to supply a national currency,
+does not save their constitutionality, for the convention has not given
+the General government the power nor imposed on it the duty of
+furnishing a national currency. To coin money, and regulate the value
+thereof, is something very different from authorizing private companies
+to issue bank notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private
+property, or even on what is called a specie basis.  To claim the power
+under the general welfare clause would be a simple mockery of good
+sense.  It is no more for the general welfare than any other successful
+private business.  The private welfare of each is, no doubt, for the
+welfare of all, but not therefore is it the "general welfare," for what
+is private, particular in its nature, is not and cannot be general.  To
+understand by general welfare that which is for the individual welfare
+of all or the greater number, would be to claim for the General
+government all the powers of government, and to deny that very division
+of powers which is the crowning merit of the American system.  The
+general welfare, by the very force of the words themselves, means the
+common as distinguished from the private or individual welfare.  The
+system of national banks may or may not be a good and desirable system,
+but it is difficult to understand the constitutional power of the
+General government to establish it.
+
+On the ground that its powers are general, not particular, the General
+government has no power to lay a protective tariff.  It can lay a
+tariff for revenue, not for protection of home manufactures or home
+industry; for the interests fostered, even though indirectly
+advantageous to the whole people, are in their nature private or
+particular, not general interests, and chiefly interests of private
+corporations and capitalists.  Their incidental or even consequential
+effects do not change their direct and essential nature.  So with
+domestic slavery.  Slavery comes under the head of private rights,
+whether regarded on the side of the master or on the side of the slave.
+The right of a citizen to hold a slave, if a right at all, is the
+private right of property, and the right of the slave to his freedom is
+a private and personal right, and neither is placed under the safeguard
+of the General government, which has nowhere, unless in the District of
+Columbia and the places over which it has exclusive legislative power
+in all cases whatsoever, either the right to establish it or to abolish
+it, except perhaps under the war power, as a military necessity, an
+indemnity for the past, or a security for the future.
+
+This applies to what are called Territories as well as to the States.
+The right of the government to govern the Territories in regard to
+private and particular rights and interests, is derived from no express
+grant of power, and is held only ex necessitate--the United States
+owning the domain, and there being no other authority competent to
+govern them.  But, as in the case of all powers held ex necessitate,
+the power is restricted to the absolute necessity in the case.  What
+are called Territorial governments, to distinguish them from the State
+governments, are only provisional governments, and can touch private
+rights and interests no further than is necessary to preserve order and
+prepare the way for the organization and installation of a regular
+State government.  Till then the law governing private rights is the
+law that was in force, if any such there was, when the territory became
+by purchase, by conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the
+United States.
+
+Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance of
+1787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of the
+Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery
+north of the parallel 36° 30'.  The Wilmot proviso was for the same
+reason unconstitutional.  The General government never had and has not
+any power to exclude slavery from the Territories, any more than to
+abolish it in the States. But slavery being a local institution,
+sustained neither by the law of nature nor the law of nations, no
+citizen migrating from a slave State could carry his slaves with him,
+and hold them as slaves in the Territory.  Rights enacted by local law
+are rights only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters
+into a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they are
+carried enacts to the contrary.  The only persons that could be held as
+slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves or the children of
+those who were slaves in the Territory when it passed to the United
+States.  The whole controversy on, slavery in the Territories, and
+which culminated in the civil war, was wholly unnecessary, and never
+could have occurred had the constitution been properly understood and
+adhered to by both sides.  True, Congress could not exclude slavery
+from the Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
+slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded, for the
+inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from the States after
+the cession to the United States, were too few to be counted.
+
+The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
+naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was very
+proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one State from
+gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage over another; but
+the General government has itself no power to naturalize a single
+foreigner, or in any case to say who shall or who shall not be
+citizens, either of a State or of the United States, or to declare who
+may or may not be electors even of its own officers.  The convention
+ordains that members of the house of representatives shall be chosen by
+electors who have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most
+numerous branch of the State legislature, but the State determines
+these qualifications, and who do or do not possess them; that the
+senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures, and that the
+electors of President and Vice-President shall be appointed in such
+manner as the respective State legislatures may direct.  The whole
+question of citizenship, what shall or shall not be the qualifications
+of electors, who shall or shall not be freemen, is reserved to the
+States, as coming under the head of personal or private rights and
+franchises.  In practice, the exact line of demarcation may not always
+have been strictly observed either by the General government or by the
+State governments; but a careful study of the constitution cannot fail
+to show that the division of powers is the division or distinction
+between the public and general relations and interests, rights and
+duties of the people, and their private and particular relations and
+interests, rights and duties.  As these two classes of relations and
+interests, rights and duties, though distinguishable, are really
+inseparable in nature, it follows that the two governments are
+essential to the existence of a complete government, or to the
+existence of a real government in its plenitude and integrity.  Left to
+either alone, the people would have only an incomplete, an initial, or
+inchoate government.  The General government is the complement of the
+State governments, and the State governments are the complement of the
+General government.
+
+The consideration of the powers denied by the convention to the General
+government and to the State governments respectively, will lead to the
+same conclusion.  To the General government is denied expressly or by
+necessary implication all jurisdiction in matters of private rights and
+interests, and to the State government is denied all jurisdiction in
+right, or interests which extend, as has been said, beyond the
+boundaries of the State.  "No State shall enter into any treaty,
+alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin
+money, emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a
+tender in the payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post
+facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any
+title of nobility.  No State shall, without the consent of Congress,
+lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be
+absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws and the net
+produce of all duties and imposts laid by any State on imports and
+exports shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States, and
+all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress.
+No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of
+tonnage, keep troops or ships-of-war in time of peace, enter into any
+agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign power, or
+engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as
+will not admit of delay."
+
+The powers denied to the States in some matters which are rather
+private and particular, such as bills of attainder, ex post facto laws,
+laws impairing the obligation of contracts, granting titles of
+nobility, are denied equally to the General government. There is
+evidently a profound logic in the constitution, and there is not a
+single provision in it that is arbitrary, or anomalous, or that does
+not harmonize dialectically with the whole, and with the real
+constitution of the American people.  At first sight the reservation to
+the State of the appointment of the officers of the militia might seem
+an anomaly; but as the whole subject of internal police belongs to the
+State, it should have some military force at its command.  The subject
+of bankruptcies, also, might seem to be more properly within the
+province of the State, and so it would be if commerce between the
+several States had not been placed under Congress, or if trade were
+confined to the citizens of the State and within its boundaries; but as
+such is not the case, it was necessary to place it under the General
+government, in order that laws on the subject might be uniform
+throughout the Union, and that the citizens of all the States, and
+foreigners trading with them, should be placed on an equal footing, and
+have the same remedies. The subject follows naturally in the train of
+commerce, for bankruptcies, as understood at the time, were confined to
+the mercantile class, bankers, and brokers; and since the regulation of
+commerce, foreign and inter-state, was to be placed under the sole
+charge of the General government, it was necessary that bankruptcy
+should be included.  The subject of patents is placed under the General
+government, though the patent is a private right, because it was the
+will of the convention that the patent should be good in all the
+States, as affording more encouragement to science and the useful arts
+than if good only within a single State, or if the power were left to
+each State to recognize or not patents granted by another.  The right
+created, though private in its nature, is Yet general or common to all
+the States in its enjoyment or exercise.
+
+The division of the powers of government between a General government
+and particular governments, rendered possible and practicable by the
+original constitution of the people themselves, as one people existing
+and acting through State organizations, is the American method of
+guarding against the undue centralism to which Roman imperialism
+inevitably tends; and it is far simpler and more effective than any of
+the European systems of mixed governments, which seek their end by
+organizing an antagonism of interests or classes.  The American method
+demands no such antagonism, no neutralizing of one social force by
+another, but avails itself of all the forces of society, organizes them
+dialectically, not antagonistically, and thus protects with, equal
+efficiency both public authority and private rights.  The General
+government can never oppress the people as individuals, or abridge
+their private rights or personal freedom and independence, because
+these are not within its jurisdiction, but are placed in charge, within
+each State, of the State government, which, within its sphere, governs
+as supremely as the General government: the State governments cannot
+weaken the public authority of the nation or oppress the people in
+their general rights and interests, for these are withdrawn from State
+jurisdiction, and placed under charge of a General government, which,
+in its sphere, governs as supremely as the State government.  There is
+no resort to a system of checks and balances; there is no restraint on
+power, and no systematic distrust of power, but simply a division of
+powers between two co-ordinate governments, distinct but inseparable,
+moving in distinct spheres, but in the same direction, or to a common
+end. The system is no invention of man, is no creation of the
+convention, but is given us by Providence in the living constitution of
+the American people.  The merit of the statesmen of 1787 is that they
+did not destroy or deface the work of Providence, but accepted it, and
+organized the government in harmony with the real orders the real
+elements given them.  They suffered themselves in all their positive
+substantial work to be governed by reality, not by theories and
+speculations.  In this they proved themselves statesmen, and their work
+survives; and the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present
+and future, the model republic--as much so as was Rome in her day; and
+it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit that
+pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and more advanced
+order of civilization; such is really the fact.
+
+The only apparently weak point in the system is in the particular
+States themselves.  Feudalism protected the feudal aristocracy
+effectively for a time against both the king and the people, but left
+the king and the people without protection against the aristocracy, and
+hence it fell.  It was not adequate to the wants of civil society, did
+not harmonize all social elements, and protect all social and
+individual rights and interests, and therefore could not but fail.  The
+General government takes care of public authority and rights; the State
+protects private rights and personal freedom as against the General
+government: but what protects the citizens in their private rights,
+their personal freedom and independence, against the particular State
+government?  Universal suffrage, answers the democrat.  Armed with the
+ballot, more powerful than the sword, each citizen is able to protect
+himself.  But this is theory, not reality.  If it were true, the
+division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate,
+governments would be of no practical importance.  Experience does not
+sustain the theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the
+individual may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.
+Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the
+freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly
+pretended.  The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing.
+The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he
+stands alone, as if he had it not.  To render it of any avail he must
+associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success
+of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up
+to it his own private convictions and free will.  In practice,
+individuals are nothing individually, and parties are every thing.
+Even the suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the
+Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the
+government found the leaders of the party opposed to the Republican
+party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount than the chiefs of
+the armies of the so-called Confederate States.
+
+Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one knows
+by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some private or
+personal purposes, for which they wish, through party to use the
+government.  Parties have no conscience, no responsibility, and their
+very reason of being is, the usurpation and concentration of power.
+The real practical tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic,
+instead of an imperial, centralism.  What is to guard against this
+centralism? Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it; and if
+the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the
+will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.  Is the remedy in
+written or paper constitutions?  Party can break through them, and by
+making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and re-eligible,
+can do so with impunity.  In several of the States, the dominant
+majority have gained the power to govern at will, without any let or
+hindrance.  Besides, constitutions can be altered, and have been
+altered, very nearly at the will of the majority.  No mere paper
+constitutions are any protection against the usurpations of party, for
+party will always grasp all the power it can.
+
+Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the States the
+principle of division of powers is carried into the bosom of the State
+itself; in some States further than in others, but in all it obtains to
+some extent.  In what are called the New England States, the best
+governed portion of the Union, each town is a corporation, having
+important powers and the charge of all purely local matters--chooses
+its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own
+poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own
+children.  Between these corporations and the State government are the
+counties, that take charge of another class of interests, more general
+than those under the charge of the town, but less general than those of
+the State.  In the great central and Northwestern States the same
+system obtains, though less completely carried out.  In the Southern
+and Southwestern States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the
+rights and interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less
+well protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.  But
+with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the influence of
+the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of peace and the
+revival of agricultural, industrial, and commercial prosperity, the New
+England system, in its main features, is pretty sure to be gradually
+introduced, or developed, and the division of powers in the State to be
+as effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between the
+General government and the particular or State governments. So, though
+universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not alone sufficient,
+the division of powers affords with it a not inadequate protection.
+
+No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or can be
+practically perfect--secure all good, and guard against all evil.  In
+all human governments there will be defects and abuses, and he is no
+wise man who expects perfection from imperfection.  But the American
+constitution, taken as a whole, and in all its parts, is the least
+imperfect that has ever existed, and under it individual rights,
+personal freedom and independence, as well as public authority or
+society, are better protected than under any other; and as the few
+barbaric elements retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the
+standard of education elevated, and the whole population Americanized,
+moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to effect all
+the good, with as little of the evil, as can be reasonably expected
+from any possible civil government or political constitution of society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION.
+
+
+The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it its
+population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the unity and
+integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation have been
+effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the secessionists, though
+disposed to submit to superior force, and demean themselves henceforth
+as loyal citizens, most likely hold as firmly to the doctrine as before
+finding themselves unable to reduce it to practice, and the Union
+victory will remain incomplete till they are convinced in their
+understandings that the Union has the better reason as well as the
+superior military resources.  The nation has conquered their bodies,
+but it is hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their
+minds and win their hearts.
+
+The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, or even
+as a conventional right.  The secessionists disclaim revolutionary
+principles, and hold that the right of secession is anterior to the
+convention, a right which the convention could neither give, nor take
+away, because inherent in the very conception of a sovereign State.
+Secession is simply the repeal by the State of the act of accession to
+the Union; and as that act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she
+must always be free to repeal it.  The Union is a copartnership; a
+State in the Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to
+withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.  There is no
+power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any longer
+than be pleases.  He is undoubtedly holden for the obligations
+contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but for none
+contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice thereof.
+
+So of a sovereign State in the Union.  The Union itself, apart from the
+sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and
+binds nobody.  All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by
+which the States constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for
+certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and
+establish an agency under express instructions for the management of
+the general affairs of the firm.  The State is held jointly and
+severally for all the legal obligations of the Union, contracted while
+she is in it but no further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases,
+precisely as an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm.
+The remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion
+against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations already
+contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
+
+The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the domain is
+attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of the State.
+Secession, then, carries the entire State government, people, and
+domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the State to its
+original position of a sovereign State, foreign to the United States.
+Being an independent sovereign State, she may enter into a new
+confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge herself in some other
+foreign state, as she judges proper or finds opportunity.  The States
+that seceded formed among themselves a new confederacy, more to their
+mind than the one formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do,
+and in the war just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but
+a people fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and
+true patriots defending the independence and inviolability of their
+country against foreign invaders.  They are to be honored for their
+loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as
+traitors.
+
+This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of
+revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no
+allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but
+simply on the original and inherent rights of the several States as
+independent sovereign States.  The argument is conclusive, and the
+defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the
+sovereignty vests in the States severally.  The refutation of the
+secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of State
+sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the States
+severally, but in the States united, or that the Union is sovereign,
+and not the States individually.  The Union is not a firm, a
+copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real,
+living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble
+unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.  There is,
+indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are no
+States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union. There is no
+Union without the States, and there are no States without the Union.
+The people are born States, and the States are born United States.  The
+Union and the States are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike
+into the original and essential constitution of the American state.
+This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.
+
+But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into
+States, does not necessarily include the whole population or territory
+included within the jurisdiction of the United States. It is restricted
+to the people and territory or domain organized into States in the
+Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the
+tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its
+boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included
+all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the
+private proprietor and the public sovereign.  The city had vast
+possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by
+conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were
+enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred
+laws. In this class of territory, of which the city was the private
+owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, which was held to
+be only leased to its occupants, who were often dispossessed, and their
+lands given as a recompense by the consul or imperator to his disbanded
+legionaries.  The provincials were subjects of Rome, but formed no part
+of the Roman people, and had no share in the political power of the
+state, till at a late period the privileges of Roman citizens were
+extended to them, and the Roman people became coextensive with the
+Roman empire. So the United States have held and still hold large
+territorial possessions, acquired by the acknowledgment of their
+independence by Great Britain, the former sovereign, the cession of
+particular states, and purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico.  Till
+erected into States and admitted into the Union, this territory, with
+its population, though subject to the United States, makes no part of
+the political or sovereign territory and people of the United States.
+It is under the Union, not in it, as is indicated by the phrase
+admitting into the Union--a legal phrase, since the constitution
+ordains that "new States may be admitted by the Congress into this
+Union."
+
+There can be no secession that separates a State from the national
+domain, and withdraws it from the territorial sovereignty or
+jurisdiction of the United States; yet what hinders a State from going
+out of the Union in the sense that it comes into it, and thus ceasing
+to belong to the political people of the United States?
+
+If the view of the constitution taken in the preceding chapters be
+correct, and certainly no facts tend to disprove it, the accession of a
+Territory as a State in the Union is a free act of the territorial
+people.  The Territory cannot organize and apply for admission as a
+State, without what is called an "enabling act" of Congress or its
+equivalent; but that act is permissive, not mandatory, and nothing
+obliges the Territory to organize under it and apply for admission.  It
+may do so or not, as it chooses. What, then, hinders the State once in
+the Union from going out or returning to its former condition of
+territory subject to the Union?  The original States did not need to
+come in under an enabling act, for they were born States in the Union,
+and were never territory outside of the Union and subject to it.  But
+they and the new States, adopted or naturalized States, once in the
+Union, stand on a footing of perfect equality, and the original States
+are no more and no less bound than they to remain States in the Union.
+The ratification of the constitution by the original States was a free
+act, as much so as the accession of a new State formed from territory
+subject to the Union is a free act, and a free act is an act which one
+is free to do or not to do, as he pleases.  What a State is free to do
+or not to do, it is free to undo, if it chooses.  There is nothing in
+either the State constitution or in that of the United States that
+forbids it.
+
+This is denied.  The population and domain are inseparable in the
+State; and if the State could take itself out of the Union, it would
+take them out, and be ipso facto a sovereign State foreign to the
+Union.  It would take the domain and the population out of the Union,
+it is conceded and even maintained, but not therefore would it take
+them out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or would they exist as a
+State foreign to the Union; for population and territory may coexist,
+as Dacota, Colorado, or New Mexico, out of the Union, and yet be
+subject to the Union, or within the jurisdiction of the United States.
+
+But the Union is formed by the surrender by each of the States of its
+individual sovereignty, and each State by its admission into the Union
+surrenders its individual sovereignty, or binds itself by a
+constitutional compact to merge its individual sovereignty in that of
+the whole.  It then cannot cease to be a State in the Union without
+breach of contract.  Having surrendered its sovereignty to the Union,
+or bound itself by the constitution to exercise its original
+sovereignty only as one of the United States, it can unmake itself of
+its state character, only by consent of the United States, or by a
+successful revolution.  It is by virtue of this fact that secession is
+rebellion against the United States, and that the General government,
+as representing the Union, has the right and the duty to suppress it by
+all the forces at its command.
+
+There can be no rebellion where there is no allegiance.  The States in
+the Union cannot owe allegiance to the Union, for they are it, and for
+any one to go out of it is no more an act of rebellion than it is for a
+king to abdicate his throne.  The Union is not formed by the surrender
+to it by the several States of their respective individual sovereignty.
+Such surrender could, as we have seen, form only an alliance, or a
+confederation, not one sovereign people; and from an alliance, or
+confederation, the ally or confederate has, saving its faith, the
+inherent right to secede.  The argument assumes that the States were
+originally each in its individuality a sovereign state, but by the
+convention which framed the constitution, each surrendered its
+sovereignty to the whole, and thus several sovereign states became one
+sovereign political people, governing in general matters through the
+General government, and in particular matters through particular or
+State governments.  This is Mr. Madison's theory, and also Mr.
+Webster's; but it has been refuted in the refutation of the theory that
+makes government originate in compact.  A sovereign state can,
+undoubtedly, surrender its sovereignty, but can surrender it only to
+something or somebody that really exists; for to Surrender to no one or
+to nothing is, as has been shown, the same thing as not to surrender at
+all; and the Union, being formed only by the surrender, is nothing
+prior to it, or till after it is made, and therefore can be no
+recipient of the surrender.
+
+Besides, the theory is the reverse of the fact.  The State does not
+surrender or part with its sovereignty by coming into the Union, but
+acquires by it all the rights it holds as a State. Between the original
+States and the new States there is a difference of mode by which they
+become States in the Union, but none in their powers, or the tenure by
+which they hold them.  The process by which new States are actually
+formed and admitted into the Union, discloses at once what it is that
+is gained or lost by admission.  The domain and population, before the
+organization of the Territory into one of the United States, are
+subject to the United States, inseparably attached to the domain of the
+Union, and under its sovereignty.  The Territory so remains, organized
+or unorganized, under a Territorial Government created by Congress.
+Congress, by an enabling act, permits it to organize as a State, to
+call a convention to form a State constitution, to elect under it, in
+such way as the convention ordains, State officers, a State
+legislature, and, in the way prescribed by the Constitution of the
+United States, senators and representatives in Congress.  Here is a
+complete organization as a State, yet, though called a State, it is no
+State at all, and is simply territory, without a single particle of
+political power.  To be a State it must be recognized and admitted by
+Congress as a State in the Union, and when so recognized and admitted
+it possesses, in union with the other United States, supreme political
+sovereignty, jointly in all general matters, and individually in all
+private and particular matters.
+
+The Territory gives up no sovereign powers by coming into the Union,
+for before it came into the Union it had no sovereignty, no political
+rights at all.  All the rights and powers it holds are held by the
+simple fact that it has become a State in the Union.  This is as true
+of the original States as of the new States; for it has been shown in
+the chapter on The United States, that the original British sovereignty
+under which the colonies were organized and existed passed, on the fact
+of independence, to the States United, and not to the States severally.
+Hence if nine States had ratified the constitution, and the other four
+had stood out, and refused to do it, which was within their competency,
+they would not have been independent sovereign States, outside of the
+Union, but Territories under the Union.
+
+Texas forms the only exception to the rule that the States have never
+been independent of the Union.  All the other new States have been
+formed from territory subject to the Union.  This is true of all the
+States formed out of the Territory of the Northwest, and out of the
+domain ceded by France, Spain, and Mexico to the United States.  All
+these cessions were held by the United States as territory immediately
+subject to the Union, before being erected into States; and by far the
+larger part is so held even yet.  But Texas was an independent foreign
+state, and was annexed as a State without having been first subjected
+as territory to the United States.  It of course lost by annexation its
+separate sovereignty.  But this annexation was held by many to be
+unconstitutional; it was made when the State sovereignty theory had
+gained possession of the Government, and was annexed as a State instead
+of being admitted as a State formed from territory belonging to the
+United States, for the very purpose of committing the nation to that
+theory.  Its annexation was the prologue, as the Mexican war was the
+first act in the secession drama, and as the epilogue is the
+suppression of the rebellion on Texan soil.  Texas is an exceptional
+case, and forms no precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the
+general rule.  Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire
+all their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of
+losing or surrendering them.
+
+Our American statesmen have overlooked or not duly weighed the facts in
+the case, because, holding the origin of government in compact, they
+felt no need of looking back of the constitution to find the basis of
+that unity of the American people which they assert.  Neither Mr.
+Madison nor Mr. Webster felt any difficulty in asserting it as created
+by the convention of 1787, or in conceding the sovereignty of the
+States prior to the Union, and denying its existence after the
+ratification of the constitution. If it were not that they held that
+the State originates in convention or the social compact, there would
+be unpardonable presumption on the part of the present writer in
+venturing to hazard an assertion contrary to theirs.  But, if their
+theory was unsound, their practical doctrine was not; for they
+maintained that the American people are one sovereign people, and Mr.
+Quincy Adams, an authority inferior to neither, maintained that they
+were always one people, and that the States hold from the Union, not
+the Union from the States.  The States without the Union cease to exist
+as political communities: the Union without the States ceases to be a
+Union, and becomes a vast centralized and consolidated state, ready to
+lapse from a civilized into a barbaric, from a republican to a despotic
+nation.
+
+The State, under the American system, as distinguished from Territory,
+is not in the domain and population fixed to it, nor yet in its
+exterior organization, but solely in the political powers, rights, and
+franchises which it holds from the United States, or as one of the
+United States.  As these are rights, not obligations, the State may
+resign or abdicate them and cease to be a State, on the same principle
+that any man may abdicate or forego his rights.  In doing so, the State
+breaks no oath of allegiance, fails to fulfil no obligation she
+contracted as a State: she simply forgoes her political rights and
+franchises. So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not
+unconstitutional or unlawful.  But it is, as Mr. Sumner and others have
+maintained, simply State suicide.  Nothing hinders a State from
+committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than there was something
+which compelled the Territory to become a State in the Union against
+its will.
+
+It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to the
+Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not destroy
+the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and independence,
+as the secessionists maintain.  Certainly, if the States were, Prior to
+the Union, sovereign States; but this is precisely what has been denied
+and disproved; for prior to the Union there were no States.  Secession
+restores, or reduces, rather, the State to the condition it was in
+before its admission into the Union; but that condition is that of
+Territory, or a Territory subject to the United States, and not that of
+an independent sovereign state.  The State holds all its political
+rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out of it,
+or in the condition in which its population and domain were before
+being a State in the Union.
+
+State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and territory
+from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no rebellion where
+there is no allegiance, resistance by its population and territory to
+the Union, even war against the Union, would not be rebellion, but the
+simple assertion of popular sovereignty.  This is only the same
+objection in another form.  The lapse of the State releases the
+population and territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their
+allegiance to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State,
+and they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the
+United States.  A State owes no allegiance to the United States, for it
+is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.  The relation between the
+United States and the State is not the relation of suzerain and
+liegeman or vassal.  A State owes no allegiance, for it is not subject
+to the Union; it is never in their State capacity that its population
+and territory do or can rebel. Hence, the Government has steadily
+denied that, in the late rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
+
+But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union; and
+therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the States
+that passed secession ordinances are and all along have been States in
+the Union.  No State can rebel, but it does not follow therefrom that
+no State can secede or cease to exist as a State: it only follows that
+secession, in the sense of State suicide, or the abdication by the
+State of its political rights and powers, is not rebellion.  Nor does
+it follow from the fact that no State has rebelled, that no State has
+ceased to be a State; or that the States that passed secession
+ordinances have been all along States in the Union.
+
+The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not within the
+competency of the State, and therefore null and void from the
+beginning.  Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within the competency of
+the State, so far as intended to alienate any portion of the national
+domain and population thereto annexed, they certainly were, and so far
+were void and of no effect; but so far as intended to take the State
+simply as a State out of the Union, they were within the competency of
+the State, were not illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null
+and void. Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in
+others are not wholly void.  The unconstitutionality vitiates only the
+unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and recognized
+and enforced as such by the courts.
+
+The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed by
+the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them and
+usurped the authority of the State.  This argument implies that, if a
+secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of the State, it is
+valid; which is more than they who urge it against the State suicide
+doctrine are prepared to concede.  But the secession ordinances were in
+every instance passed by the people of the State in convention legally
+assembled, therefore by them in their highest State capacity--in the
+same capacity in which they ordain and ratify the State constitution
+itself; and in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and
+confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a genuine
+plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.  In all cases they were
+adopted by a decided majority of the political people of the State, and
+after their adoption they were acquiesced in and indeed actively
+supported by very nearly the whole people. The people of the States
+adopting the secession ordinances were far more unanimous in supporting
+secession than the people of the other States were in sustaining the
+Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion by coercive
+measures.  It will not do, then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to
+a faction.  The people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the
+majority.
+
+There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few Union
+men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious
+and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and
+their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their
+respective States into secession against their convictions and their
+will.  No doubt there were leaders at the South, as there are in every
+great movement at the North; no doubt there were individuals in the
+seceding States that held secession wrong in principle, and were
+conscientiously attached to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men
+who adhered to the Union, not because they disapproved secession, but
+because they disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because
+they were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not succeed, that
+the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it they
+would become the great and leading men of their respective States,
+which they certainly could not be under secession. Others sympathized
+fully with what was called the Southern cause, held firmly the right of
+secession, and hated cordially the Yankees, but doubted either the
+practicability or the expediency of secession, and opposed it till
+resolved on, but, after it was resolved on, yielded to none in their
+earnest support of it. These last comprised the immense majority of
+those who voted against secession.  Never could those called the
+Southern leaders have carried the secession ordinances, never could
+they have carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with
+such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four years,
+making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh doubtful, if they
+had not had the Southern heart with them, if they had not been most
+heartily supported by the overwhelming mass of the people.  They led a
+popular, not a factious movement.
+
+No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.  The State is
+territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its territory and
+population out of the Union, no State can secede. Out of the
+jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the sovereign or
+national domain, very true; but out of the Union as a State, with
+rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not true.  Secession is
+political, not territorial.
+
+But the State holds from the territory or domain.  The people are
+sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the domain
+because held by a sovereign people, as was established by the analysis
+of the early Roman constitution.  The territory of the States
+corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which was attached the
+Roman sovereignty.  That territory, once surveyed and consecrated,
+remained sacred and the ruling territory, and could not be divested of
+its sacred and governing character.  The portions of the territory of
+the United States once erected into States and consecrated as ruling
+territory can never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or
+successful revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
+
+The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by public,
+not by private wealth, and is always respublica or commonwealth, in
+distinction from despotism or monarchy in its oriental sense, which is
+founded on private wealth, or which assumes that the authority to
+govern, or sovereignty, is the private estate of the sovereign.  All
+power is a domain, but there is no domain without a dominus or lord.
+In oriental monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is
+the public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the
+people in their territorial, and not in their personal or genealogical
+relation.  The people of The United States are sovereign only within
+the territory or domain of the United States, and their sovereignty is
+a state, because fixed, attached, or limited to that specific
+territory.  It is fixed to the soil, not nomadic.  In barbaric nations
+power is nomadic and personal, or genealogical, confined to no
+locality, but attaches to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.  The
+Gothic chiefs hold their power by a personal title, and have the same
+authority in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
+Elbe or the Danube.  Power migrates with the chief and his people, and
+may be exercised wherever he and they find themselves, as a Swedish
+queen held when she ordered the execution of one of her subjects at
+Paris, without asking permission of the territorial lord.  In these
+nations, power is a personal right, or a private estate, not a state
+which exists only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the
+domain, exists independently of the chief or the government.  The
+distinction is between public domain and private domain.
+
+The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
+democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is territorial,
+not personal; not territorial because the majority of the people are
+agriculturists or landholders, but because all political rights,
+powers, or franchises are territorial.  The sovereign people of the
+United States are sovereign only within the territory of the United
+States.  The great body of the freemen have the elective franchise, but
+no one has it save in his State, his county, his town, his ward, his
+precinct.  Out of the election district in which he is domiciled, a
+citizen of the United States has no more right to vote than has the
+citizen or subject of a foreign state.  This explains what is meant by
+the attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the
+state on the domain.  The state, in republican states, exists only as
+inseparably united with the public domain; under feudalism, power was
+joined to territory or domain, but the domain was held as a private,
+not as a public domain.  All sovereignty rests on domain or
+proprietorship, and is dominion. The proprietor is the dominus or lord,
+and in republican states the lord is society, or the public, and the
+domain is held for the common or public good of all.  All political
+rights are held from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the
+elective franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as
+distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.
+
+As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone cannot
+possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not a domain.  In
+the American system, the dominus or lord is not the particular State,
+but the United States, and, the domain of the whole territory, whether
+erected into particular States or not, is in the United States alone.
+The United States do not part with the dominion of that portion of the
+national domain included within a particular State.  The State holds
+the domain not separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United
+States: separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a
+joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls into
+the condition of any other territory held by the United States not
+erected into one of the United States.
+
+Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the particular
+State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to the United
+States.  All escheats of private estates, but no public or general
+escheats.  But this has nothing to do with the public domain.  The
+United States are the dominus, but they have, by the constitution,
+divided the powers of government between a General government and
+particular State governments, and ordained that all matters of a
+general nature, common to all the States, should be placed under the
+supreme control of the former, and all matters of a private or
+particular character under the supreme control of the latter.  The
+eminent domain of private estates is in the particular State, but the
+sovereign authority in the particular State is that of the United
+States expressing itself through the State government.  The United
+States, in the States as well as out of them, is the dominus, as the
+States respectively would soon find if they were to undertake to
+alienate any part of their domain to a foreign power, or even to the
+citizens or subjects of a foreign State, as is also evident from the
+fact that the United States, in the way prescribed by the constitution,
+may enlarge or contract at will the rights and powers of the States.
+The mistake on this point grows out of the habit of restricting the
+action of the United States to the General government, and not
+recollecting that the United States govern one class of subjects
+through the General government and another class through State
+governments, but that it is one and the same authority that governs in
+both.
+
+The analogy borrowed from the Roman constitution, as far as applicable,
+proves the reverse of what is intended.  The dominus of the sacred
+territory was the city, or the Roman state, not the sacred territory
+itself.  The territory received the tenant, and gave him as tenant the
+right to a seat in the senate; but the right of the territory was
+derived not from the domain, but from the dominus, that is, the city.
+But the city could revoke its grant, as it practically did when it
+conferred the privileges of Roman citizenship on the provincials, and
+gave to plebeians seats in the senate.  Moreover, nothing in Roman
+history indicates that to the validity of a senatus consultum it was
+necessary to count the vacant domains of the sacred territory.  The
+particular domain must, under the American system, be counted when it
+is held by a State, but of itself alone, or even with its population,
+it is not a State, and therefore as a State domain is vacant and
+without any political rights or powers whatever.
+
+To argue that the territory and population once a State in the Union
+must needs always be so, would be well enough if a State in the Union
+were individually a sovereign state; for territory, with its population
+not subject to another, is always a sovereign state, even though its
+government has been subverted.  But this is not the fact, for territory
+with its population does not constitute a State in the Union; and,
+therefore, when of a State nothing remains but territory and
+population, the State has evidently disappeared.  It will not do then
+to maintain that State suicide is impossible, and that the States that
+adopted secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be
+States in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their
+representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in Congress.
+They must be reorganized first.
+
+There would also be some embarrassment to the government in holding
+that the States that passed the secession ordinance remain,
+notwithstanding, States in the Union.  The citizens of a State in the
+Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless they are rebels to
+their State; and rebels to their State they are not, unless they resist
+its authority and make war on it. The authority of the State in the
+Union is a legal authority, and the citizen in obeying it is disloyal
+neither to the State nor to the Union.  The citizens in the States that
+made war on the United States did not resist their State, for they
+acted by its authority.  The only men, on this supposition, in them,
+who have been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have
+refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted, even
+with armed force, the secession ordinances.  The several State
+governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on the war for
+the destruction of the Union, if the States are in the Union, were
+legal and loyal governments of their respective States, for they were
+legally elected and installed, and conformed to their respective State
+constitutions.  All the acts of these governments have been
+constitutional.  Their entering into a confederacy for attaining a
+separate nationality has been legal, and the debts contracted by the
+States individually, or by the confederacy legally formed by them, have
+been legally contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against
+the United States.  The war against them has been all wrong, and the
+confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United States.
+The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can blockade its own
+ports, and the captures and seizures under it, robberies.  The Supreme
+Court has been wrong in declaring the war a territorial civil war, as
+well as the government in acting accordingly.  Now, all these
+conclusions are manifestly false and absurd, and therefore the
+assumption that the States in question have all along been States in
+the Union cannot be sustained.
+
+It is easy to understand the resistance the Government offers to the
+doctrine that a State may commit suicide, or by its own act abdicate
+its rights and cease to be a State in the Union.  It is admissible on
+no theory of the constitution that has been widely entertained.  It is
+not admissible on Mr. Calhoun's theory of State sovereignty, for on
+that theory a State in going out of the Union does not cease to be a
+State but simply resumes the powers it had delegated to the General
+government.  It cannot be maintained on Mr. Madison's or Mr. Webster's
+theory, that the States prior to the Union were severally sovereign,
+but by the Union were constituted one people; for, if this one people
+are understood to be a federal people, State secession would not be
+State suicide, but State independence; and if understood to be one
+consolidated or centralized people, it would be simply insurrection or
+rebellion against the national authority, laboring to make itself a
+revolution.  The government seems to have understood Mr. Madison's
+theory in both senses--in the consolidated sense, in declaring the
+secessionists insurgents and rebels, and in the federal sense, in
+maintaining that they have never seceded, and are still States in the
+Union, in full possession of all their political or State rights.
+Perhaps, if the government, instead of borrowing from contradictory
+theories of the constitution which have gained currency, had examined
+in the light of historical facts the constitution itself, it would have
+been as constitutional in its doctrine as it has been loyal and
+patriotic, energetic and successful in its military administration.
+
+Another reason why the doctrine that State secession is State suicide
+has appeared so offensive to many, is the supposition entertained at
+one time by some of its friends, that the dissolution of the State
+vacates all rights and franchises held under it.  But this is a
+mistake.  The principle is well known and recognized by the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, that in the transfer of a
+territory from one territorial sovereign to another, the laws in force
+under the old sovereign remain in force after the change, till
+abrogated, or others are enacted in their place by the new sovereign,
+except such as are necessarily abrogated by the change itself of the
+sovereign; not, indeed, because the old sovereign retains any
+authority, but, because such is presumed by the courts to be the will
+of the new sovereign.  The principle applies in the case of the death
+of a State in the Union.  The laws of the State are territorial, till
+abrogated by competent authority, remain the lex loci, and are in full
+force.  All that would be vacated would be the public rights of the
+State, and in no case the private rights of citizens, corporations, or
+laws affecting them.
+
+But the same conclusion is reached in another way.  In the lapse of a
+State or its return to the condition of a Territory, there is really no
+change of sovereignty.  The sovereignty, both before and after, is the
+United States.  The sovereign authority that governs in the State
+government, as we have seen, though independent of the General
+government, is the United States.  The United States govern certain
+matters through a General government, and others through particular
+State governments.  The private rights and interests created,
+regulated, or protected by the particular State, are created,
+regulated, or protected by the United States, as much and as plenarily
+as if done by the General government, and the State laws creating,
+regulating, or protecting them can be abrogated by no power known to
+the constitution, but either the State itself, or the United States in
+convention legally assembled.  If this were what is meant by the States
+that have seceded, or professed to secede, remaining States in the
+Union, they would, indeed, be States still in the Union,
+notwithstanding secession and the government would be right in saying
+that no State can secede.  But this is not what is meant, at least not
+all that is meant.  It is meant not only that the private rights of
+citizens and corporations remain, but the citizens retain all the
+public rights of the State, that is, the right to representation in
+Congress and in the electoral college, and the right to sit in the
+convention, which is not true.
+
+But the correction of the misapprehension that the private rights and
+interests are lost by the lapse of the State may remove the graver
+prejudices against the doctrine of State suicide, and dispose loyal and
+honest Union men to bear the reasons by which it is supported, and
+which nobody has refuted or can refute on constitutional grounds.  A
+Territory by coming into the Union becomes a State; a State by going
+out of the Union becomes a Territory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION.
+
+
+The question of reconstructing the States that seceded will be
+practically settled before these pages can see the light, and will
+therefore be considered here only so far as necessary to complete the
+view of the constitution of the United States.  The manner in which the
+government proposed to settle, has settled, or will settle the
+question, proves that both it and the American people have only
+confused views of the rights and powers of the General government, but
+imperfectly comprehend the distinction between the legislative and
+executive departments of that Government, and are far more familiar
+with party tactics than with constitutional law.
+
+It would be difficult to imagine any thing more unconstitutional, more
+crude, or more glaringly impolitic than the mode of reconstruction
+indicated by the various executive proclamations that have been issued,
+bearing on the subject, or even by the bill for guaranteeing the States
+republican governments, that passed Congress, but which failed to
+obtain the President's signature.  It is, in some measure,
+characteristic of the American government to understand how things
+ought to be done only when they are done and it is too late to do them
+in the right way.  Its wisdom comes after action, as if engaged in a
+series of experiments.  But, happily for the nation, few blunders are
+committed that with our young life and elasticity are irreparable, and
+that, after all, are greater than are ordinarily committed by older and
+more experienced nations.  They are not of the most fatal character,
+and are, for the most part, such as are incident to the conceit, the
+heedlessness, the ardor, and the impatience of youth, and need excite
+no serious alarm for the future.
+
+There has been no little confusion in the public mind, and in that of
+the government itself, as to what reconstruction is, who has the power
+to reconstruct, and how that power is to be exercised.  Are the States
+that seceded States in the Union, with no other disability than that of
+having no legal governments? or are they Territories subject to the
+Union?  Is their reconstruction their erection into new States, or
+their restoration as States previously in the Union?  Is the power to
+reconstruct in the States themselves? or is it in the General
+government?  If partly in the people and partly in the General
+government, is the part in the General government in Congress, or in
+the Executive?  If in Congress, can the Executive, without the
+authority of Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it for
+Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State?   If the power is
+partly in the people of the disorganized States who or what defines
+that people, decides who may or may not vote in the reorganization?  On
+all these questions there has been much crude, if not erroneous,
+thinking, and much inconsistent and contradictory action.
+
+The government started with the theory that no State had seceded or
+could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in rebellion
+continued to be States in the Union.  That is, it held secession to be
+a purely personal and not a territorial insurrection.  Yet it
+proclaimed eleven States to be in insurrection against the United
+States, blockaded their ports, and interdicted all trade and
+intercourse of any kind with them. The Supreme Court, in order to
+sustain the blockade and interdict as legal, decided the war to be not
+a war against simply individual or personal insurgents but "a
+territorial civil war." This negatived the assumption that the States
+that took up arms against the United States remained all the while
+peaceable and loyal States, with all their political rights and powers
+in the Union.  The States in the Union are integral elements of the
+political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation vests
+in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the eleven
+States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a formidable war
+against the United States, were in the Union, an integral element of
+that sovereign authority which was carrying on a yet more formidable
+war against them.  Nevertheless, the government still held to its first
+assumption, that the States in rebellion continued to be States in the
+Union--loyal States, with all their rights and franchises unimpaired!
+
+That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in the
+doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union, is not to
+be wondered at.  The extent and determination of the secession movement
+were imperfectly understood, and the belief among the supporters of the
+government, and, perhaps, of the government itself, was, that it was a
+spasmodic movement for a temporary purpose, rather than a fixed
+determination to found an independent separate nationality; that it was
+and would be sustained by the real majority of the people of none of
+the States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the true
+policy of the government would be to treat the seceders with great
+forbearance, to avoid all measures likely to exasperate them or to
+embarrass their loyal fellow-citizens, to act simply on the defensive,
+and to leave the Union men in the several seceding States to gain a
+political victory at the polls over the secessionists, and to return
+their States to their normal position in the Union.
+
+The government may not have had much faith in this policy, and Mr.
+Lincoln's personal authority might be cited to the effect that it had
+not, but it was urged strongly by the Union men of the Border States.
+The administration was hardly seated in office, and its members were
+new men, without administrative experience; the President, who had been
+legally elected indeed, but without a majority of the popular votes,
+was far from having the full confidence even of the party that elected
+him; opinions were divided; party spirit ran high; the excitement was
+great, the crisis was imminent, the government found itself left by its
+predecessor without an army or a navy, and almost without arms or
+ordnance; it knew not how far it could count on popular support, and
+was hardly aware whom it could trust or should distrust; all was hurry
+and confusion; and what could the government do but to gain time, keep
+off active war as long as possible, conciliate all it could, and take
+ground which at the time seemed likely to rally the largest number of
+the people to its support?  There were men then, warm friends of the
+administration, and still warmer friends of their country, who believed
+that a bolder, a less timid, a less cautious policy would have been
+wiser, that in revolutionary times boldness, what in other times would
+be rashness, is the highest prudence, on the side of the government as
+well as on the side of the revolution; that when once it has shown
+itself, the rebellion that hesitates, deliberates, consults, is
+defeated and so is the government.  The seceders owed from the first
+their successes not to their superior organization, to their better
+preparation, or to the better discipline and appointment of their
+armies, but to their very rashness, to their audacity even, and the
+hesitancy, cautious and deliberation of the government.  Napoleon owed
+his successes as general and civilian far more to the air of power he
+assumed, and the conviction he produced of his invincibility in the
+minds of his opponents, than to his civil or military strategy and
+tactics, admirable as they both were.  But the government believed it
+wisest to adopt a conciliatory and, in many respects, a temporizing
+policy, and to rely more on weakening the secessionists in their
+respective States than on strengthening the hands and hearts of its own
+staunch and uncompromising supporters.  It must strengthen the Union
+party in the insurrectionary States, and as this party hoped to succeed
+by political manipulation rather than by military force, the government
+must rely rather on a show of military power than on gaining any
+decisive battle.  As it hoped, or affected to hope, to suppress the
+rebellion in the States that seceded through their loyal citizens, it
+was obliged to assume that secession was the work of a faction, of a
+few ambitious and disappointed politicians, and that the States were
+all in the Union, and continued in the loyal portion of their
+inhabitants.  Hence its aid to the loyal Virginians to organize as the
+State of Virginia, and its subsequent efforts to organize the Union men
+in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and its disposition to recognize
+their organization in each of those States as the State itself, though
+including only a small minority of the territorial people.  Had the
+facts been as assumed, the government might have treated the loyal
+people of each State as the State itself, without any gross usurpation
+of power; but, unhappily, the facts assumed were not facts, and it was
+soon found that the Union party in all the States that seceded, except
+the western part of Virginia and the eastern section of Tennessee,
+after secession had been carried by the popular vote, went almost
+unanimously with the secessionists; for they as well as the
+secessionists held the doctrine of State sovereignty; and to treat the
+handful of citizens that remained loyal in each State as the State
+itself, became ridiculous, and the government should have seen and
+acknowledged it.
+
+The rebellion being really territorial, and not personal, the State
+that seceded was no more continued in the loyal than in the disloyal
+population.  While the war lasted, both were public enemies of the
+United States, and neither had or could have any rights as a State in
+the Union.  The law recognizes a solidarity of all the citizens of a
+State, and assumes that, when a State is at war, all its citizens are
+at war, whether approving the war or not.  The loyal people in the
+States that seceded incurred none of the pains and penalties of
+treason, but they retained none of the political rights of the State in
+the Union, and, in reorganizing the State after the suppression of the
+rebellion, they have no more right to take part than the secessionists
+themselves.  They, as well as the secessionists, have followed the
+territory.  It was on this point that the government committed its
+gravest mistake.  As to the reorganization or reconstruction of the
+State, the whole territorial people stood on the same footing.
+
+Taking the decision of the Supreme Court as conclusive on the subject,
+the rebellion was territorial, and, therefore, placed all the States as
+States out of the Union, and retained them only as population and
+territory, under or subject to the Union.  The States ceased to exist,
+that is, as integral elements of the national sovereignty.  The
+question then occurred, are they to be erected into new States, or are
+they to be reconstructed and restored to the Union as the identical old
+States that seceded? Shall their identity be revived and preserved, or
+shall they be new States, regardless of that identity?  There can be no
+question that the work to be done was that of restoration, not of
+creation; no tribe should perish from Israel, no star be struck from
+the firmament of the Union.  Every inhabitant of the fallen States, and
+every citizen of the United States must desire them to be revived and
+continued with their old names and boundaries, and all true Americans
+wish to continue the constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.
+Who would see old Virginia, the Virginia of revolutionary fame, of
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, of Monroe, the "Old Dominion," once the
+leading State of the Union, dead without hope of resurrection? or South
+Carolina, the land of Rutledge, Moultrie, Laurens, Hayne, Sumter, and
+Marion?  There is something grating to him who values State
+associations, and would encourage State emulation and State pride, in
+the mutilation of the Old Dominion and the erection within her borders
+of the new State called West Virginia.  States in the Union are not
+mere prefectures, or mere dependencies on the General government,
+created for the convenience of administration.  They have an
+individual, a real existence of their own, as much so as have the
+individual members of society. They are free members, not of a
+confederation indeed, but of a higher political community, and
+reconstruction should restore the identity of their individual life,
+suspended for a moment by secession, but capable of resuscitation.
+
+These States had become, indeed, for a moment, territory under the
+Union; but in no instance had they or could they become territory that
+had never existed as States.  The fact that the territory and people
+had existed as a State, could with regard to none of them be
+obliterated, and, therefore, they could not be erected into absolutely
+new States.  The process of reconstructing them could not be the same
+as that of creating new States.  In creating a new State, Congress, ex
+necessitate, because there is no other power except the national
+convention competent to do it, defines the boundaries of the new State,
+and prescribes the electoral people, or who may take part in the
+preliminary organization but in reconstructing States it does neither,
+for both are done by a law Congress is not competent to abrogate or
+modify, and which can be done only by the United States in convention
+assembled, or by the State itself after its restoration.  The
+government has conceded this, and, in part, has acted on it.  It
+preserves, except in Virginia, the old boundaries, and recognizes, or
+rather professes to recognize the old electoral law, only it claims the
+right to exclude from the electoral people those who have voluntarily
+taken part in the rebellion.
+
+The work to be done in States that have seceded is that of
+reconstruction, not creation; and this work is not and cannot be done,
+exclusively nor chiefly by the General government, either by the
+Executive or by Congress.  That government can appoint military, or
+even provisional governors, who may designate the time and place of
+holding the convention of the electoral people of the disorganized
+State, as also the time and place of holding the elections of delegates
+to it, and superintend the elections so far as to see the polls are
+opened, and that none but qualified electors vote, but nothing more.
+All the rest is the work of the territorial electoral people
+themselves, for the State within its own sphere must, as one of the
+United States, be a self-governing community.  The General government
+may concede or withhold permission to the disorganized State to
+reorganize, as it judges advisable, but it cannot itself reorganize it.
+If it concedes the permission, it must leave the whole electoral people
+under the preexisting electoral law free to take part in the work of
+reorganization, and to vote according to their own judgment. It has no
+authority to purge the electoral people, and say who may or may not
+vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the qualifications of
+electors is left to the State, and can be settled neither by an act of
+Congress nor by an Executive proclamation.
+
+If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized States
+remain States in the Union, the General government could have nothing
+to say on the subject, and could no more interfere with elections in
+any one of them than it could with elections in Massachusetts or New
+York.  But even on the doctrine here defended it can interfere with
+them only by way of general superintendence.  The citizens have,
+indeed, lost their political rights, but not their private rights.
+Secession has not dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws
+of the disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.
+The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws
+survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law, or
+lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the State, that
+has, as a State, really lapsed.  They do so by will of the United
+States, which enacted them through the individual State, and which has
+not in convention abrogated them, save the law authorizing slavery, and
+its dependent laws.
+
+This point has already been made, but as it is one of the niceties of
+the American constitution, it may not be amiss to elaborate it at
+greater length.  The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and the
+majority of our jurists, would see to be that the States, under God,
+are severally sovereign in all matters not expressly confided to the
+General government, and therefore that the American sovereignty is
+divided, and the citizen owes a double allegiance--allegiance to his
+State, and allegiance to the United States--as if there was a United
+States distinguishable from the States.  Hence Mr. Seward, in an
+official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James, says: "The
+citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United States."  And
+nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union at all, hold that it
+is also due to the States, only that which is due to the United States
+is paramount, as that under feudalism due to the overlord.  But this is
+not the case.  There is no divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.
+Sovereignty is one, and vests not in the General government or in the
+State government, but in the United States, and allegiance is due to
+the United States, and to them alone.  Treason can be committed only
+against the United States, and against a State only because against the
+United States, and is properly cognizable only by the Federal courts.
+Hence the Union men committed no treason in refusing to submit to the
+secession ordinances of their respective States, and in sustaining the
+national arms against secession.
+
+There are two very common mistakes: the one that the States
+individually possess all the powers not delegated to the General
+government; and the other that the Union, or United States, have only
+delegated powers.  But the United States possess all the powers of a
+sovereign state, and the States individually and the General government
+possess only such powers as the United States in convention delegate to
+them respectively.  The sovereign is neither the General government nor
+the States severally, but the United States in convention.  The United
+States are the one indivisible sovereign, and this sovereign governs
+alike general matters in the General government, and particular matters
+in the several State governments.  All legal authority in either
+emanates from this one indivisible and plenary sovereign, and hence the
+law enacted by a State are really enacted by the United States, and
+derive from them their force and vitality as laws. Hence, as the United
+States survive the particular State, the lapse of the State does not
+abrogate the State laws, or dissolve civil society within its
+jurisdiction.
+
+This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular State
+does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on the United
+States.  Hence all civil rights of every sort created by the individual
+State are really held from the United States, and therefore it was that
+the people of non-slaveholding States were, as citizens of the United
+States, responsible for the existence of slavery in the States that
+seceded.  There is a solidarity of States in the Union as there is of
+individuals in each of the States.  The political error of the
+Abolitionists was not in calling upon the people of the United States
+to abolish slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the
+General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in their
+sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which were the
+abrogation of all government and civil society itself, instead of
+calling upon them to do it as the United States in convention
+assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of the United States
+in the way ordained by that constitution itself.  This understood, the
+constitution and laws of a defunct State remain in force by virtue of
+the will of the United States, till the State is raised from the dead,
+restored to life and activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they
+are repealed or altered by the United States or the national
+convention.  But as the defunct State could not, and the convention had
+not repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the
+General government had no alternative but to treat them and all rights
+created by them as the territorial law, and to respect them as such.
+
+What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose by
+secession?  They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal, the pains
+and penalties of treason, their political rights, or right, as has just
+been said, to be in their own department self-governing communities,
+with the right of representation in Congress and the electoral
+colleges, and to sit in the national convention, or of being counted in
+the ratification of amendments to the constitution--precisely what it
+was shown a Territorial people gain by being admitted as a State into
+the Union.  This is the difference between the constitutional doctrine
+and that adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.
+But what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General
+government gain over the people of States that secede, that it has not
+over others!  As to their internal constitution, their private rights
+of person or property, it gains none.  It has over them, till they are
+reconstructed and restored to the Union, the right to institute for
+them provisional governments, civil or military, precisely as it has
+for the people of a territory that is not and has never been one of the
+United States; but in their reconstruction it has less, for the
+geographical boundaries and electoral people of each are already
+defined by a law which does not depend on its will, and which it can
+neither abrogate nor modify.  Here is the difference between the
+constitutional doctrine and that of the so-called radicals.  The State
+has gone, but its laws remain, so far as the United States in
+convention does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the
+State survives, but because the United States so will, or are presumed
+to will.  The United States have by a constitutional amendment
+abrogated the laws of the several States authorizing slavery, and
+prohibited slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the Union; and no
+State can now be reconstructed and be admitted into the Union with a
+constitution that permits slavery, for that would be repugnant to the
+constitution of the United States.  If the constitutional amendment is
+not recognized as ratified by the requisite number of States, it is the
+fault of the government in persisting in counting as States what are no
+States.  Negro suffrage, as white suffrage, is at present a question
+for States.
+
+The United States guarantee to such State a republican form of
+government.  And this guarantee, no doubt, authorizes Congress to
+intervene in the internal constitution of a State so far as to force it
+to adopt a republican form of government, but not so far as to organize
+a government for a State, or to compel a territorial people to accept
+or adopt a State constitution for themselves.  If a State attempts to
+organize a form of government not republican, it can prevent it; and if
+a Territory adopts an unrepublican form, it can force it to change its
+constitution to one that is republican, or compel it to remain a
+Territory under a provisional government.  But this gives the General
+government no authority in the organization or re-organization of
+States beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the
+territorial people is republican.  To press it further, to make the
+constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire control of the
+organization or re-organization of a State, is a manifest abuse--a
+palpable violation of the constitution and of the whole American
+system.  The authority given by the clause is specific, and is no
+authority for intervention in the general reconstruction of the lapsed
+State.  It gives authority in no question raised by secession or its
+consequences, and can give none, except, from within or from without,
+there is an overt attempt to organize a State in the Union with an
+unrepublican form of government.
+
+The General government gives permission to the territorial people of
+the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with suffering
+them, without special recognition, to reorganize in their own way, and
+apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to Congress to admit them
+as a State, or not, according to its own discretion, in like manner as
+it admits a new State; but the re-organization itself must be the work
+of the territorial people themselves, under their old electoral law.
+The power that reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that
+admits them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress.  The
+Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that of
+seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever power he
+assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions given to the
+provisional governors, civil or military, is simply a usurpation of the
+power of Congress, which it rests with Congress to condone or not, as
+it may see fit.  Executive proclamations, excluding a larger or a
+smaller portion of the electoral or territorial people from the
+exercise of the elective franchise in reorganizing the State, and
+executive efforts to throw the State into the hands of one political
+party or another, are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the
+President, in relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace
+powers of the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer
+of the Union.  His business is to execute the laws, not to make them.
+His legislative authority is confined to his qualified veto on the acts
+of Congress, and to the recommendation to Congress of such measures as
+he believes are needed by the country.
+
+In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the
+Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace. The
+Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex necessitate, pace
+it ad interim under a military governor, but he cannot appoint even a
+provisional civil governor till Congress has created the office and
+given him authority to fill it; far less can be legally give
+instructions to the civil governor as to the mode or manner of
+reconstructing the disorganized State, or decide who may or may not
+vote in the preliminary reorganization. The Executive could do nothing
+of the sort, even in regard to a Territory never erected into a State.
+It belongs to Congress, not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or
+provisional governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana,
+Nebraska, and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines
+the boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines
+the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act
+herself.  Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life and
+vigor in the Union a disorganized State, has nothing to say as to its
+boundaries or its electoral people, nor any right to interfere between
+parties in the State, to throw the reconstructed State into the hands
+of one or another party.  All that Congress can insist on is, that the
+territorial people shall reconstruct with a government republican in
+form; that its senators and representatives in Congress, and the
+members of the State legislature, and all executive and judicial
+officers of the State shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support
+and defend the constitution of the United States.  In the whole work
+the President has nothing to do with reconstruction, except to see that
+peace is preserved and the laws are fully executed.
+
+It may be at least doubted that the Executive has power to proclaim
+amnesty and pardon to rebels after the civil war has ceased, and ceased
+it has when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted; for
+his pardoning power is only to pardon after conviction and judgment of
+the court: it is certain that he has no power to proscribe or punish
+even traitors, except by due process of law.  When the war is over he
+has only his ordinary peace powers.  He cannot then disfranchise any
+portion of the electoral people of a State that seceded, even though
+there is no doubt that they have taken part in the rebellion, and may
+still be suspected of disloyal sentiments.  Not even Congress can do
+it, and no power known to the constitution till the State is
+reconstructed can do it without due process of law, except the national
+convention.  Should the President do any of the things supposed, he
+would both abuse the power he has and usurp power that he has not, and
+render himself liable to impeachment.  There are many things very
+proper, and even necessary to be done, which are high crimes when done
+by an improper person or agent.  The duty of the President, when there
+are steps to be taken or things to be done which he believes very
+necessary, but which are not within his competency, is, if Congress is
+not in session, to call it together at the earliest practicable moment,
+and submit the matter to its wisdom and discretion.
+
+It must be remembered that the late rebellion was not a merely personal
+but a territorial rebellion.  In such a rebellion, embracing eleven
+States, and, excluding slaves, a population of at least seven millions,
+acting under an organized territorial government, preserving internal
+civil order, supporting an army and navy under regularly commissioned
+officers, and carrying on war as a sovereign nation--in such a
+territorial rebellion no one in particular can be accused and punished
+as a traitor.  The rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or
+reckless leaders, but of the people, and the responsibility of the
+crime, whether civil or military, is not individual, but common to the
+whole territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half
+of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise Their
+defeat and the failure of their cause must be their punishment.  The
+interest of the country, as well the sentiment of the civilized
+world--it might almost be said the law of nations--demands their
+permission to return to their allegiance, to be treated according to
+their future merits, as an integral portion of the American people.
+
+The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its former
+severity toward political offenders.  It regards with horror the savage
+cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate Jacobites, after their
+defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden, in 1746, their barbarous
+treatment of the United Irishmen in 1798, and her brutality to the
+mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the harshness of Russia toward the
+insurgent Poles, defeated in their mad attempts to recover their lost
+nationality; the severity of Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated
+Magyars.  The liberal press kept up for years, especially in England
+and the United States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and
+Neapolitan governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired
+to overthrow them.  Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than Jefferson
+Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release from a Turkish
+prison, and sent a national ship to bring him hither as the nation's
+guest.  The people of the United States have held from the first "the
+right of insurrection," and have given their moral support to every
+insurrection in the Old or New World they discovered, and for them to
+treat with severity any portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at
+the very worst, only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly
+avowed and pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the
+civilized world as little less than infamous.
+
+Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any
+severity toward the people lately in arms against the government. The
+interest of the nation demands not the death or the expulsion of the
+secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes proscribed by the
+President's proclamation of the 29th of May, 1865, nor even their
+disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary; but their restoration to
+citizenship, and their loyal co-operation with all true-hearted
+Americans, in hearing the wounds inflicted on the whole country by the
+civil war.  There need be no fear to trust them.  Their cause is lost;
+they may or may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever.  They
+appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from the
+ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated, terribly
+defeated.  They know it and feel it.  There is no further appeal for
+them; the judgment of the court of last resort has been rendered, and
+rendered against them.  The cause is finished, the controversy closed,
+never to be re-opened. Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is
+worse than idle to attempt to renew the war against it.  Henceforth
+their lot is bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and
+interests, for themselves and their children, and their children's
+children, depend on their being permitted to demean themselves
+henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens. They must seek
+their freedom, greatness, and glory in the freedom, greatness, and
+glory of the American republic, in which, after all, they can be far
+freer, greater, more glorious than in a separate and independent
+confederacy.  All the arguments and considerations urged by Union men
+against their secession, come back to them now with redoubled force to
+keep them henceforth loyal to the Union.
+
+They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot afford to
+lose them.  To hang or exile them, and depopulate and suffer to run to
+waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad thrift, sadder than that
+of deporting four millions of negroes and colored men.  To exchange
+only those excepted from amnesty and pardon by President Johnson,
+embracing some two millions or more, the very pars sanior of the
+Southern population, for what would remain or flock in to supply their
+place, would be only the exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for
+brass; to disfranchise them, confiscate their estates, and place them
+under the political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and
+the ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render
+rebellion chronic, and to convert seven millions of Americans, willing
+and anxious to be free, loyal American citizens, eternal enemies.  They
+have yielded to superior numbers and resources; beaten, but not
+disgraced, for they have, even in rebellion, proved themselves what
+they are--real Americans.  They are the product of the American soil,
+the free growth of the American republic, and to disgrace them were to
+disgrace the whole American character and people.
+
+The wise Romans never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for
+victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.  In civil war, the
+victory won by the government troops is held to be a victory for the
+country, in which all parties are victors, and nobody is vanquished.
+It was as truly for the good of the secessionists to fail, as it was
+for those, who sustained the government to succeed; and the government
+having forced their submission and vindicated its own authority, it
+should now leave them to enjoy, with others, the victory which it his
+won for the common good of all.  When war becomes a stern necessity,
+when it breaks out, and while it lasts, humanity requires it to be
+waged in earnest, prosecuted with vigor, and made as damaging, as
+distressful to the enemy as the laws of civilized nations permit.  It
+is the way to bring it to a speedy close, and to save life and
+property. But when it is over, when the enemy submits, and peace
+returns, the vanquished should be treated with gentleness and love.  No
+rancor should remain, no vengeance should be sought; they who met in
+mortal conflict on the battle-field should be no longer enemies, but
+embrace as comrades, as friends, as brothers.  None but a coward kicks
+a fallen foe; a brave people is generous, and the victors in the late
+war can afford to be generous generously. They fought for the Union,
+and the Union has no longer an enemy; their late enemies are willing
+and proud to be their countrymen, fellow-citizens, and friends; and
+they should look to it that small politicians do not rob them in the
+eyes of the world, by unnecessary and ill-timed severity to the
+submissive, of the glory of being, as they are, a great, noble,
+chivalric, generous, and magnanimous people.
+
+The government and the small politicians, who usually are the most
+influential with all governments, should remember that none of the
+secessionists, however much in error they have been, have committed the
+moral crime of treason.  They held, with the majority of the American
+people, the doctrine of State sovereignty, and on that doctrine they
+had a right to secede, and have committed no treason, been guilty of no
+rebellion.  That was, indeed, no reason why the government should not
+use all its force, if necessary, to preserve the national unity and the
+integrity of the national domain; but it is a reason, and a sufficient
+reason, why no penalty of treason should be inflicted on secessionists
+or their leaders, after their submission, and recognition of the
+sovereignty of the United States as that to which they owe allegiance.
+None of the secessionists have been rebels or traitors, except in
+outward act, and there can, after the act has ceased, be no just
+punishment where there has been no criminal intent.  Treason is the
+highest crime, and deserves exemplary punishment; but not where there
+has been no treasonable intent, where they who committed it did not
+believe it was treason, and on principles held by the majority of their
+countrymen, and by the party that had generally held the government,
+there really was no treason.  Concede State sovereignty, and Jefferson
+Davis was no traitor in the war he made on the United States, for he
+made none till his State had seceded.  He could not then be arraigned
+for his acts after secession, and at most, only for conspiracy, if at
+all, before secession.
+
+But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the State who,
+under the old electoral law, have the elective franchise, you throw the
+State into the hands of those who have been disloyal to the Union.  If
+so, and you cannot trust them, the remedy is not in disfranchising the
+majority, but in prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the
+territorial people still longer under the provisional government, civil
+or military.  The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been
+convicted of treason either to the State or the United States, and
+neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others disqualified
+on account of disloyalty.  But you must throw the State into the hands
+of those who took part, directly or indirectly, in the rebellion, if
+you reconstruct the States at all, for they are undeniably the great
+body of the territorial people in all the States that seceded.  These
+people having submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct
+the State as a State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of
+the United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime
+by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them.  It is
+impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with those
+alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the Union
+throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States. The State,
+resting on so small a portion of the people, would have no internal
+strength, no self-support, and could stand only as upheld by federal
+arms, which would greatly impair the free and healthy action of the
+whole American system.
+
+The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
+Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but without authority
+and without success.  The organizations, effected at great expense, and
+sustained only by military force, were neither States nor State
+governments, nor capable of being made so by any executive or
+congressional action.  If the disorganized States, as the government
+held, were still States in the Union, these organizations were
+flagrantly revolutionary, as effected not only without, but in defiance
+of State authority; if they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was
+the fact, they were equally unconstitutional and void of authority,
+because not created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who
+alone are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.
+
+If the Unionists had retained the State organization and government,
+however small their number, they would have held the State, and the
+government would have been bound to recognize and to defend them as
+such with all the force of the Union.  The rebellion would then have
+been personal, not territorial.  But such was not the case.  The State
+organization, the State government, the whole State authority rebelled,
+made the rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists,
+very respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at home,
+in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective States, and
+shorn of all political status or rights.  Their political status was
+simply that of the old loyalists, or adherents of the British crown in
+the American war for Independence, and it was as absurd to call them
+the State, as it would have been for Great Britain to have called the
+old Tories the colonies.
+
+The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
+disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that the
+people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the power of the
+Union vests in the General government.  The first, as we have seen, is
+the principle of so-called "squatter sovereignty," embodied in the
+famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which gave birth, in opposition, to the
+Republican party of 1856.  The people are sovereign only as the State,
+and the State is inseparable from the domain.  The Unionists without
+the State government, without any State organization, could not hold
+the domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to the
+United States, that is to say, ceases to exist.  The American democracy
+is territorial, not personal.
+
+The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
+invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union. This is
+the war power.  But, though apparently unlimited, the war power is yet
+restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural limitation when
+peace returns; and peace returns, in a civil war, when the rebels have
+thrown down their arms and submitted to the national authority, and
+without any formal declaration. During the war, or while the rebellion
+lasts, it can suspend the civil courts, the civil laws, the State
+constitutions, any thing necessary to the success of the war--and of
+the necessity the military authorities are the judges; but it cannot
+abolish, abrogate, or reconstitute them.  On the return of peace they
+revive of themselves in all their vigor.  The emancipation proclamation
+of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in certain States and
+parts of States, and if those whom it emancipated could not be
+re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish slavery, or change the laws
+authorizing it; and if the Government should be sustained by Congress
+or by the Supreme Court in counting the disorganized States as States
+in the Union, the legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with
+the exception of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before
+the war.[1]
+
+The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
+attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
+reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it is in
+its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being effected by
+military force, since its validity depends entirely on its being the
+free action of the territorial people to be reconstructed, the General
+government had and could have, with regard to it, only its ordinary
+peace powers.  Reconstruction is jure pacis, not jure belli.
+
+Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States nor
+State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any action of
+the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be legalized by being
+indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial people.  They are wrong,
+as are all usurpations; they are undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt
+to give the minority the power to rule the majority; they are dangerous
+inasmuch as they place the State in the hands of a party that can stand
+only as supported by the General government, and thus destroy the
+proper freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to
+corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to retard
+the period of complete pacification, which might be effected in three
+months as well as in three years, or twenty years; yet they can become
+legal, as other governments illegal in their origin become legal, with
+time and popular acquiescence. The right way is always the shortest and
+easiest; but when a government must oftener follow than lead the
+public, it is not always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy
+to take it. The general instincts of the people are right as to the end
+to be gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and
+politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession party,
+have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political control of the
+State when it is reconstructed.
+
+The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would, even
+if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their respective
+States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would the Unionists, if
+left to themselves.  There is no party at the South prepared to adopt
+negro suffrage, and there would be none at the North if the negroes
+constituted any considerable portion of the population.  As the
+reconstruction of a State cannot be done under the war power, the
+General government can no more enfranchise than it can disfranchise any
+portion of the territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage
+must be left, where the constitution leaves it--to the States
+severally, each to dispose of it for itself.  Negro suffrage will, no
+doubt, come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and
+the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.
+
+It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the reconstruction
+of the States disorganized by secession, for it would secure their
+re-construction with antislavery constitutions, and also make sure of
+the proposed antislavery amendment to the Constitution of the United
+States; but there is no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in
+the States needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom,
+the freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they understand
+nothing.  They would vote, for the most part, with their former
+masters, their employers, the wealthier and more intelligent classes,
+whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule, these will treat them with
+greater personal consideration and kindness than others.  The dislike
+of the negro, and hostility to negro equality, increase as you descend
+in the social scale.  The freedmen, without political instruction or
+experience, who have had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of
+loyalty or of disloyalty.  They have strong local attachments, but they
+can have no patriotism.  If they adhered to the Union in the rebellion,
+fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty, but because they
+knew that their freedom could come only from the success of the Union
+arms.  That freedom secured, they have no longer any interest in the
+Union, and their local attachments, personal associations, habits,
+tastes, likes and dislikes, are Southern, not Northern.  In any contest
+between the North and the South, they would take, to a man, the
+Southern side.  After the taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of
+the Union found, until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder
+to bear, when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and
+hootings of the negroes.  Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty, is at
+best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the elective
+franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the friends of the
+negro should, for the present, be contented with securing him simply
+equal rights of person and property.
+
+
+[1] This was the case in August, 1865.  It may be quite otherwise
+before these pages see the light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES.
+
+
+The most marked political tendency of the American people has been,
+since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and simple
+democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely popular
+basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably united to the
+national territory or domain, to the people as simply population,
+either as individuals or as the race.  Their tendency has
+unconsciously, therefore, been to change their constitution from a
+republican to a despotic, or from a civilized to a barbaric
+constitution.
+
+The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the people
+are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their name; that the
+rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to them; but they are
+the people territorially constituted and fixed to the soil,
+constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety perhaps than he
+thinks, calls a "territorial democracy."  To this territorial
+democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed two other
+democracies--the one personal and the other humanitarian--each alike
+hostile to civilization, and tending to destroy the state, and capable
+of sustaining government only on principles common to all despotisms.
+
+In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
+unrestrained action--a strong desire to be himself, not another--to be
+his own master, to go when and where he pleases, to do what he chooses,
+to take what he wants, wherever he can find it, and to keep what he
+takes.  It is strong in all nomadic tribes, who are at once pastoral
+and predatory, and is seldom weak in our bold frontier-men, too often
+real "border ruffians." It takes different forms in different stages of
+social development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
+Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief of
+the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its enjoyment to the
+few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a nobility--for nobleman meant
+originally only freeman, as it does his own consent, express or
+constructive.  This is the so-called Jeffersonian democracy, in which
+government has no powers but such as it derives from the consent of the
+governed, and is personal democracy or pure individualism
+philosophically considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."  Under
+this sort of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual
+sovereignty, expressed by politicians when they call the electoral
+people, half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there
+obviously can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there
+can be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
+confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as long as
+they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from which they may
+separate or secede whenever they find it for their interest or their
+pleasure to do so.  State sovereignty and secession are based on the
+same democratic principle applied to the several States of the Union
+instead of individuals.
+
+The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
+sections of the American people from the first, and has been greatly
+strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that government
+originates in compact.  The full realization of this tendency, which,
+happily, is impracticable save in theory, would be to render every man
+independent alike of every other man and of society, with full right
+and power to make his own will prevail.  This tendency was strongest in
+the slaveholding States, and especially, in those States, in the
+slaveholding class, the American imitation of the feudal nobility of
+mediaeval Europe; and on this side the war just ended was, in its most
+general expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
+sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
+democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
+democracy, represented by the Government.  This personal democracy has
+been signally defeated in the defeat of the late confederacy, and can
+hardly again become strong enough to be dangerous.
+
+But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical lines,
+effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant itself on
+humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength, and is not
+without menace to our future.  The solidarity of the race, which is the
+condition of all human life, founds, as we have seen, society, and
+creates what are called social rights, the rights alike of society in
+regard to individuals, and of individuals in regard to society.
+Territorial divisions or circumscriptions found particular societies,
+states, or nations; yet as the race is one and all its members live by
+communion with God through it and by communion one with another, these
+particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of each
+other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so that there
+is a real solidarity of nations as well as of individuals--the truth
+underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of the solidarity of peoples.
+
+The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law, binding on
+every particular nation, and which every civilized nation recognizes
+and enforces on its own subjects or citizens through its own courts as
+an integral part of its own municipal or national law.
+
+The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the rights
+of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are
+limited by international law, or the rights of universal society--the
+truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked.  The grand error of
+Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the
+race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God.  It
+therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international
+law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus
+leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
+foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real
+world.  Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its
+basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by
+the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the
+living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine
+Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian
+revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all
+Christendom.
+
+The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social
+basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity
+of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual;
+and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its
+personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to
+be free.  Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding
+the black or colored race as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right
+only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it.  Let the
+negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
+freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross
+outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him
+be my servant, which is best for him and for me. Why ask me to free
+him?  I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude.  Why
+appeal to me!  Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, is he my brother?  Is
+this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the
+same race with myself?  I believe it not.  But in some instances, at
+least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and
+sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter.  The tendency of
+the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all
+obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore
+all true civil society.
+
+At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite tendency--a
+tendency to exaggerate the social element, to overlook the territorial
+basis of the state, and to disregard the rights of individuals.  This
+tendency has been and is strong in the people called abolitionists.
+The American abolitionist is so engrossed with the unity that he loses
+the solidarity of the race, which supposes unity of race and
+multiplicity of individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
+authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
+circumscriptions.  Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
+humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and
+laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the
+winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law."  The principle on
+which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical
+democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers.  Were his
+socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found
+in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving
+impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in
+which might makes right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
+
+The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
+generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
+recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much out
+of the order of civilization, and as much in that of barbarism, as is
+the slaveholder himself.  Wendell Phillips is as far removed from true
+Christian civilization as was John C. Calhoun, and William Lloyd
+Garrison is as much of a barbarian and despot in principle and tendency
+as Jefferson Davis.  Hence the great body of the people in the
+non-slaveholding States, wedded to American democracy as they were and
+are could never, as much as they detested slavery, be induced to make
+common cause with the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the
+late civil war was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the
+time the social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
+enemy.  The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt that pure
+socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as pure
+individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that slavery has
+been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic reasons but really
+for reasons of state, in order to save the territorial democracy.  The
+territorial democracy would not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an
+element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional
+right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they
+demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean
+work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
+
+The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding
+its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds. Slavery is really
+a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American
+civilization.  The whole force of the national life opposes it, and
+must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean
+proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of
+modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their
+prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with
+cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the
+anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy.  They
+studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that
+those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in
+spite of slavery.  They failed to take into the account the fact that
+when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
+contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they
+were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times,
+they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized
+nations of all times.  They failed also to perceive that, if the
+Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in
+the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the
+territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on
+pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell,
+and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism
+within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.
+The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves
+were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
+master.  The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
+solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every
+species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.
+
+It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the
+real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise question in debate
+is clearly and distinctly understood by either party.  Slavery was only
+incidentally involved in the late war. The war was occasioned by the
+collision of two extreme parties; but it was itself a war between
+civilization and barbarism, primarily between the territorial democracy
+and the personal democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation,
+as much a war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
+individualism of the slaveholder.  Yet the victory, though complete
+over the former, is only half won over the latter, for it has left the
+humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for the moment stronger
+than ever.  The socialistic democracy was enlisted by the territorial,
+not to strengthen the government at home, as it imagines, for that it
+did not do, and could not do, since the national instinct was even more
+opposed to it than to the personal democracy; but under its antislavery
+aspect, to soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
+intervention, which was seriously threatened.  The populations of
+Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly anti-slavery,
+and if the war here appeared to them a war, not solely for the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, as it really was, in which
+they took and could take no interest, but a war for the abolition of
+slavery, their governments would not venture to intervene.  This was
+the only consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
+assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
+Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the rebellion
+only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors the late
+President only as their supposed liberator, not as the preserver of the
+unity and integrity of the nation.  This is natural enough abroad, and
+proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery policy of the government, which
+had become absolutely necessary to save the Republic long before it was
+adopted; yet it is not as the emancipator of some two or three millions
+of slaves that the American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham
+Lincoln, but, aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and
+troops of unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the
+American state, and the protector of modern civilization.  His
+anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but he
+adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
+
+There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or negro
+freedom.  That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of
+the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves
+at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to
+do it even at first.  This fact alone proves that they had, or believed
+they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro
+slavery.  They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State
+sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and
+independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their
+cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they
+had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same
+time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
+democracy, they would have succeeded.  It is not socialism nor
+abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered.  The
+Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both
+historically and legally false to say that the South has been
+subjugated.  The Union has preserved itself and American civilization,
+alike for North and South, East and West. The armies that so often met
+in the shock of battle were not drawn up respectively by the North and
+the South, but by two rival democracies, to decide which of the two
+should rule the future.  They were the armies of two mutually
+antagonistic systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly
+conscious of the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
+instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it but
+dimly discerned.  On both sides the cause was broader and deeper than
+negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the abolitionists
+have won.  The territorial democracy alone has won, and won what will
+prove to be a final victory over the purely personal democracy, which
+had its chief seat in the Southern States, though by no means confined
+to them.  The danger to American democracy from that quarter is forever
+removed, and democracy à la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
+throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of it.
+
+But in this world victories are never complete.  The socialistic
+democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
+territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not patriotism,
+that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the brave men led by
+McClellan, Grant, and Sherman.  The humanitarians are more dangerous in
+principle than the egoists, for they have the appearance of building on
+a broader and deeper foundation, of being more Christian, more
+philosophic, more generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more
+successful than under the guise of an angel of light.  His favorite
+guise in modern times is that of philanthropy.  He is a genuine
+humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is
+Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming sentiment
+of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes both
+individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when they believe
+they are earnestly and most successfully doing the work of God.  Your
+leading abolitionists are as much affected by satanophany as your
+leading confederates, nor are they one whit more philosophical or less
+sophistical.  The one loses the race, the other the individual, and
+neither has learned to apply practically that fundamental truth that
+there is never the general without the particular, nor the particular
+without the general, the race without individuals, nor individuals
+without the race.  The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we
+are taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race, and
+Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that original sin
+was in him actual or personal sin.
+
+The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men
+in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor to secure
+the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother Jansenist
+sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the freedom of
+grace.  Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of slavery, to-day he
+agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, and announces that when he
+has secured that he will agitate for female suffrage and the equality
+of the sexes, forgetting or ignorant that the relation of equality
+subsists only between individuals of the same sex; that God made the
+man the head of the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for
+the woman. Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in
+social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
+agitate for equality of property.  But since property, if recognized at
+all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther
+still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an
+injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the
+Englishman Godwin.  It is unjust that one should have what another
+wants, or even more than another.  What right have you to ride in your
+coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on
+foot?  Nor can our humanitarian stop there.  Individuals are, and as
+long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and
+some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger
+or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
+therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is
+inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the
+abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals
+to the race, or humanity, man in general.  He can find no limit to his
+agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a
+pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual
+circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder.  This
+is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown,
+if logical, he must go.
+
+The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be
+interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian
+democracy.  It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of
+the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our
+bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in
+prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal,
+hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor
+of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion.  They had no
+wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
+other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have
+regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they
+held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern
+abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization.  For
+the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy,
+all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even
+ostentatious in theirs.  The Catholics feared the war might result in
+encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian
+sects trusted that it would.  If the victory of the Union should turn
+out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world
+will have no reason to applaud it.
+
+That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as
+a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny.
+It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are
+in ecstasies over it.  The party claim it.  The European Socialists and
+Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict
+on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations.  A cause that can
+be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be
+strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element. It is no
+compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert
+not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are
+delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than
+ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more
+contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.
+
+But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host.
+Not they are the real victors.  When the smoke of battle has cleared
+away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and
+that that alone has triumphed.  The abolitionists, in so far as they
+asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that
+unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or
+authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a
+purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a
+watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
+crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary
+States are fully reconstructed.  The Southern or egoistical democrats,
+so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights
+of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every
+individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to
+protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so
+far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society
+neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
+sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
+government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they
+share in the victory, as the future will prove.
+
+European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
+against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no
+lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for
+men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers
+fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in
+modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as
+themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives,
+and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the
+waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to
+repair.  They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and
+civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history.  The
+American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species
+of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
+placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority,
+and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized
+governments--not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.
+The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative;
+but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false
+democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of
+insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an
+aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should
+always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever
+plots its destruction.  They must never be delighted again to have
+their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
+to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.  The people of the Northern
+States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the
+people of the Southern States.  Their press had taught them to call
+every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the
+traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they
+had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the
+Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and
+traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the
+public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they
+will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
+governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of
+lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
+revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign
+of barbarism.
+
+The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the
+failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating
+element, either in the particular State or in the United States, is
+henceforth to be apprehended.  But the tendency in the opposite
+direction may give the American state some trouble.  The tendency now
+is, as to the Union, consolidation, and as to the particular state,
+humanitarianism, socialism, or centralized democracy.  Yet this
+tendency, though it may do much mischief, will hardly become exclusive.
+The States that seceded, when restored, will always, even in abandoning
+State sovereignty, resist it, and still assert State rights.  When
+these States are restored to their normal position, they will always be
+able to protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
+rights by the General government.  The constitution, in the
+distribution of the powers of government, provides the States severally
+with ample means to protect their individuality against the
+centralizing tendency of the General government, however strong it may
+be.
+
+The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
+government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look upon it
+as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to regard the
+several State governments as subordinate instead of co-ordinate
+governments.  It is not improbable that the Executive, since the
+outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded throughout on that
+supposition, and hence his extraordinary assumptions of power; but when
+once peace is fully re-established and the States have all resumed
+their normal position in the Union, every State will be found prompt
+enough to resist any attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.
+Its instinct of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will
+be protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United States.
+
+The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of the
+States is far less than the danger that the Executive will usurp all
+the powers of Congress and the judiciary.  Congress, during the
+rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, with dictatorial
+powers, and these powers the Executive continues to exercise even after
+the rebellion is suppressed.  They were given and held under the rights
+of war, and for war purposes only, and expired by natural limitation
+when the war ceased; but the Executive forgets this, and, instead of
+calling Congress together and submitting the work of reconstruction of
+the States that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
+reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 372 and
+the people seem to like it.  He might and should, as commander-in-chief
+of the army and navy, govern them as military departments, by his
+lieutenants, till Congress could either create provisional civil
+governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the
+Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war
+power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every
+act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and
+done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.
+His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
+inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them.
+Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public sentiment, and a
+deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, which will be long in
+healing.
+
+The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
+originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a long time
+before.  There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to
+throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands
+of the Executive.  The patronage the Executive wields, even in times of
+peace, is so large that he has indirectly an almost supreme control
+over the legislative branch of the government.  For this, which is,
+and, if not checked will continue to be, a growing evil, there is no
+obvious remedy, unless the President is chosen for a longer term of
+office and made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous
+doctrine of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the
+true interests of the public.  Here is matter for the consideration of
+the American statesman.  But as to the usurpations of the Executive in
+these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, and will cease when
+the States are all restored.  They are abuses, but only temporary
+abuses, and the Southern States, when restored to the Union, will
+resume their rights in their own sphere, as self-governing communities,
+and legalize or undo the unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
+
+The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
+individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able to
+become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not begin at
+home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance. In the States
+in which the humanitarian tendency is the strongest, the territorial
+democracy has its most effective organization.  Prior to the outbreak
+of the rebellion the American people had asserted popular sovereignty,
+but had never rendered an account to themselves in what sense the
+people are or are not sovereign.  They had never distinguished the
+three sorts of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of
+the three is the distinctively American democracy.  For them, democracy
+was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought to avoid them
+either by exaggerating one or the other of the two exclusive
+tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself through
+restrictions on suffrage.  The latter class began to distrust universal
+suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to dream of modifying the
+American constitution so as to make it conform more nearly to the
+English model.  The war has proved that the were wrong, for nothing is
+more certain than that the people have saved the national unity and
+integrity almost in spite of their government.  The General government
+either was not disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against
+secession, till forced to do it by the people themselves.  No wise
+American can henceforth distrust American democracy.  The people may be
+trusted.  So much is settled.  But as the two extremes were equally
+democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of popular
+sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling to allow
+separation, and would not and did not engage in the war against
+secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of the national
+domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it was not democracy
+in the sense of either of the extremes that made the war and came out
+of it victorious; and hence the real American democracy must differ
+from them both, and is neither a personal nor a humanitarian, but a
+territorial democracy.  The true idea of American democracy thus comes
+out, for the first time, freed from the two extreme democracies which
+have been identified with it, and henceforth enters into the
+understandings as well as the hearts of the people.  The war has
+enlightened patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes
+reason--a well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional
+conviction.
+
+In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent the
+socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive.  In the States that
+seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not gain it, for
+it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, and habits of the
+Southern people, and the Southern people will not be exterminated nor
+swamped by migrations either from the North or from Europe.  They are
+and always will be an agricultural people, and an agricultural people
+are and always will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless
+unwittingly held for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special
+object in which they take a passionate interest.  The worst of all
+policies is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
+landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and depressed
+whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of the 29th of
+May, 1865.  Of course that policy will not be carried out, and if the
+negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote with the wealthy
+landholding class, and aid them in resisting all socialistic
+tendencies.  The humanitarians will fail for the want of a good social
+grievance against which they can declaim.
+
+In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as a
+speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance.  It is
+aided much by the congregational constitution of their religion; yet it
+is weak at home, and is resisted practically by the territorial
+division of power.  New England means Massachusetts, and nowhere is the
+subdivision of the powers of government carried further, or the
+constitution of the territorial democracy more complete, than in that
+State. Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
+evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the farther
+they are from home and the less its right to interfere with them, the
+more in earnest and the more effective for evil does it become.  Its
+nature is to mind every one's business but its own.  But now that
+slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in the United States a social
+grievance of magnitude enough to enlist any considerable number of the
+people, even of Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it.  Negro
+enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
+something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a question
+that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not serve their
+purpose of prolonged agitation.  They could not and never did carry
+away the nation, even on the question of slavery itself, and
+abolitionism had comparatively little direct influence in abolishing
+slavery; and the exclusion of negro suffrage can never be made to
+appear to the American people as any thing like so great a grievance as
+was slavery.
+
+Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
+numerous and an important portion of the population.  Their increasing
+numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much as the majority may
+dislike their religion, a constantly increasing influence, and it is
+idle to leave them out in counting the future of the country.  They
+will, in a very few years, be the best and most thoroughly educated
+class of the American people; and, aside from their religion, or,
+rather, in consequence of their religion, the most learned,
+enlightened, and intelligent portion of the American population; and as
+much as they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army
+and elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
+has won.  The best things written on the controversy have been written
+by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their religion to
+comprehend the real character of the American constitution than any
+other class of Americans, the moment they study it in the light of
+their own theology.  The American constitution is based on that of
+natural society, on the solidarity of the race, and the difference
+between natural society and the church or Christian society is, that
+the one is initial and the other teleological.  The law of both is the
+same; Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
+exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic. If
+they have been backward in their sympathy with the government, it has
+been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the humanitarian
+or socialistic elements they detected in the Republican party, joined
+with a prejudice against political and social negro equality.  But
+their church everywhere opposes the socialistic movements of the age,
+all movements in behalf of barbarism, and they may always be counted on
+to resist the advance of the socialistic democracy.  If the country has
+had reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
+in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, indeed,
+for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to their religion,
+which has been and is the grand protectress of modern society and
+civilization.
+
+From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to the
+extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private property
+as bases of political rights or franchises.  This tendency has often
+been justified on the ground that the elective franchise is a natural
+right; which is not true, because the elective franchise is political
+power, and political power is always a civil trust, never a natural
+right, and the state judges for itself to whom it will or will not
+confide the trust; but there can be no doubt that it is a normal
+tendency, and in strict accordance with the constitution of American
+civil society, which rests on the unity of the race, and public instead
+of private property.  All political distinctions founded on birth,
+race, or private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
+necessarily eliminated by its normal developments.  To contend that
+none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a particular
+race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary, to the order of
+civilization the New World is developing.  The only qualification for
+the elective franchise the American system can logically insist on is
+that the elector belong to the territorial people--that is, be a
+natural-born or a naturalized citizen, be a major in full possession of
+his natural faculties, and unconvicted of any infamous offence.  The
+State is free to naturalize foreigners or not, and under such
+restrictions as it judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must
+treat them as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
+
+The naturalization question is one of great national importance. The
+migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the national
+population, and to the national wealth and resources, but less,
+perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity of elections, or
+the wisdom and integrity of the government.  It is impossible that
+there should be perfect harmony between the national territorial
+democracy and individuals born, brought up, and formed under a
+political order in many respects widely different from it; and there is
+no doubt that the democracy, in its objectionable sense, has been
+greatly strengthened by the large infusion of naturalized citizens.
+There can be no question that, if the laboring classes, in whom the
+national sentiment is usually the strongest, had been composed almost
+wholly of native Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in
+the cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
+persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
+difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies.  But to
+leave so large a portion of the actual population as the foreign born
+residing in the country without the rights of citizens, would have been
+a far graver evil, and would, in the late struggle, have given the
+victory to secession.  There are great national advantages derived from
+the migration hither of foreign labor, and if the migration be
+encouraged or permitted, naturalization on easy and liberal terms is
+the wisest, the best, and only safe policy.  The children of
+foreign-born parents are real Americans.
+
+Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent powers
+of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually more active,
+more energetic than the children of the older inhabitants of the
+country among whom they settle.  Some of our first men in civil life
+have been sons of foreign-born parents, and so are not a few of our
+greatest and most successful generals.  The most successful of our
+merchants have been foreign-born.  The same thing has been noticed
+elsewhere, especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to
+Holland, Germany, England, and Ireland.  The immigration of so many
+millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American people
+much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, and made them
+a superior people on the whole to what they would otherwise have been.
+This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of race or
+blood, but is a natural effect of breaking men away from routine, and
+throwing them back on their own individual energies and personal
+resources.
+
+Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
+recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to freedom;
+but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward progress of
+American democracy, which asserts equal rights for all, and not for a
+race or class only.  Some would confine suffrage to landholders, or, at
+least, to property-holders; but that is inconsistent with the American
+idea, and is a relic of the barbaric constitution which founds power on
+private instead of public wealth.  Nor are property-owners a whit more
+likely to vote for the public good than are those who own no property
+but their own labor.  The men of wealth, the business men,
+manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who exert
+the worst influence on government in every country, for they always
+strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their own private
+interests.  They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let government take care
+of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor," instead of the
+far safer maxim, "Let government take care of the weak, the strong can
+take care of themselves." Universal suffrage is better than restricted
+suffrage, but even universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private
+property from having an undue political influence.
+
+The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable from it,
+and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an inferior class
+to those elevated by restricted suffrage.  The Congress of 1860, or of
+1862. was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of
+the country, and not inferior to that of 1776, or that of 1789; and the
+Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as
+it was during the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain,
+and not inferior to that of France during the Crimean war.  The Crimean
+war developed and placed in high command, either with the English or
+the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, to say
+nothing of others.  The more aristocratic South proved itself, in both
+statesmanship and generalship, in no respect superior to the
+territorial democracy of the North and West.
+
+The great evil the country experiences is not from universal suffrage,
+but from what may be called rotation in office.  The number of
+political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern and Western
+States especially, the representatives in Congress are changed every
+two or four years, and a member, as soon as he has acquired the
+experience necessary to qualify him for his position, is dropped, not
+through the fickleness of his constituency, but to give place to
+another whose aid had been necessary to his first or second election.
+Employes are "rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful,
+but because there are others who want their places.  This is all bad,
+but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong public
+opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which is mainly
+formed by it.  There is, no doubt, a due share of official corruption,
+but not more than elsewhere, and that would be much diminished by
+increasing the salaries of the public servants, especially in the
+higher offices of the government, both General and State.  The pay to
+the lower officers and employes of the government, and to the privates
+and non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in general,
+too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both the civil and
+military service is too low, and relatively far lower than it was when
+the government was first organized.
+
+The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at all
+by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility to the
+military spirit and a standing army.  The depreciation of the military
+spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental democracy, which,
+like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and brings about the very
+evils it seeks to avoid.  The hostility to standing armies is inherited
+from England, and originated in the quarrels between king and
+parliament, and is a striking evidence of the folly of that bundle of
+antagonistic forces called the British constitution.  In feudal times
+most of the land was held by military service, and the reliance of
+government was on the feudal militia; but no real progress was made in
+eliminating barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at
+its command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies. It
+is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost
+more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary for royal
+supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
+
+No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the military
+spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not held in honor
+and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size is public economy.
+It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who are worth more there than
+anywhere else; it creates honorable places for gentlemen or the sons of
+gentlemen without wealth, in which they can serve both themselves and
+their country.  Under a democratic government the most serious
+embarrassment to the state is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or
+not fitted to support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in
+a democratic government than in any other.  The civil service,
+divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, and
+art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class, and the
+army and navy would be an economy and a real service to the state were
+they maintained only for the sake of the rank and position they give to
+their officers, and the wholesome influence these officers would exert
+on society and the politics of the country--this even in case there
+were no wars or apprehension of wars.  They supply an element needed in
+all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit,
+perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which
+has in it always something low and sordid.
+
+But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations
+to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can
+have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human
+animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor,
+and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for
+war.  A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have
+prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand
+well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President
+on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion,
+or have instantly suppressed it.  The cost of maintaining a land army
+of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would
+have been, in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion
+has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
+been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on
+the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual
+losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand
+millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the assessed value of the whole
+property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860,
+and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of
+property since.  To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require
+a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
+discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been necessary to
+maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the
+prevention of the rebellion.
+
+The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder
+much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its
+military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their
+normal order; but a regular army--not militia or volunteers, who are
+too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a
+navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a
+peace establishment.  The army of a hundred thousand men must form a
+cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to
+place the army on a war footing.  Less will answer neither for peace
+nor war, for the nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain
+henceforth the rank of a first-class military and maritime power, and
+take a leading part in political movements of the civilized world, and,
+to a great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
+
+Canning boasted that he had raised up the New World to redress the
+balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened Spain and gave
+the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the Emperor of the French is
+trying, by strengthening Italy and Spain, and by a French protectorate
+in Mexico, to secure to France, both in the Old World and the New--a
+magnificent dream, but not to be realized.  His uncle judged more
+wisely when he sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought
+only to secure to France the hegemony of the Old.  But the hegemony of
+the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she will
+have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even in Europe.
+To maintain this position, which is imperative on her, she must always
+have a large armed force, either on foot or in reserve, which she can
+call out and put on a war footing at short notice.  The United States
+must henceforth be a great military and naval power, and the old
+hostility to a standing army and the old attempt to bring the military
+into disrepute must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
+
+Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
+egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race and
+socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the race, is the
+most dangerous.  The egoistical form is checked, sufficiently weakened
+by the defeat of the rebels; but the social form believes that it has
+triumphed, and that individuals are effaced in society, and the States
+in the Union.  Against this, more especially should public opinion and
+American statesmanship be now directed, and territorial democracy and
+the division of the powers of government be asserted and vigorously
+maintained. The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy
+is conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet arrived,
+as the Germans say, at self consciousness--_selbsbewusstseyn_--and
+operates only instinctively. All the dominant theories and
+sentimentalities are against it, and it is only Providence that can
+sustain it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY--POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
+
+
+It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every living
+nation receives from Providence a special work or mission in the
+progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, or the end for
+which it exists; and that the special mission of the United States is
+to continue and complete in the political order the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.
+
+Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic
+alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to the
+civilization of the race.  Canada and the other British Provinces,
+Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the
+South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without
+being missed by the civilized world.  They represent no idea, and the
+work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them.  If
+they keep up with the progress of civilization, it is all that can be
+expected of them. France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the
+rest of Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
+laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; and it
+is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or jointly
+advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman Empire, except in
+abolishing slavery and including in the political people the whole
+territorial people.  They can only develop and give a general
+application to the fundamental principles of the Roman constitution.
+That indeed is much, but it adds no new element nor new combination of
+preexisting elements.  But nothing of this can be said of the United
+States.
+
+In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and the
+great principle of the territorial constitution of power, instead of
+the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or the monarchical;
+and yet with true civil or political principles it mixed up nearly all
+the elements of the barbaric constitution. The gentile system of Rome
+recalls the patriarchal, and the relation that subsisted between the
+patron and his clients has a striking resemblance to that which
+subsists between the feudal lord and his retainers, and may have had
+the same origin.  The three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into
+which the Roman people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may
+have been, as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their
+origin, but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
+division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not local,
+but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the
+individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of
+kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with
+our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into
+tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans.  The adopted member
+was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited
+its goods.  Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the
+three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
+restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the
+house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by
+houses, not by individuals en masse.  After all, practically the Roman
+senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for
+no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of noble blood.
+The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being
+included in the three tribes, when they came to be a power in the
+republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and
+patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or
+territorial people.
+
+The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the
+right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state,
+and the tenant held it from the state.  The domain was vested in the
+state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica,
+not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from
+barbarism.  In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more
+republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and
+introduced the principle of territorial democracy.  The division into
+demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial
+division, not personal nor genealogical.  And if the equality of all
+men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class
+stood on the same footing.  Athens and other Greek cities, though
+conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on
+Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors
+than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of
+Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they
+represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship
+were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and
+the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and
+uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
+
+The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
+gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of
+the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in
+the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it
+held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.
+It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if,
+as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic
+equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than
+men and without political rights.  Practically, power was an attribute
+of birth and of private wealth.  Suffrage was almost universal among
+freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and
+were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the
+comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia
+centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and
+noble few.
+
+The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth
+Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality
+of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on
+principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents it as a
+commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right
+to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as
+servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of
+imperial clemency.  But it has never yet been proved that the emperor
+has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a
+just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the
+proud, but spare the submissive."  In a just war the emperor may kill
+on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
+now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does
+not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance,
+have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.  But even if it did, it
+gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their
+innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary
+slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the
+parent.  The law, indeed, assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a
+person and treated him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror,
+and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue
+only to his owner.  But there is no power in heaven or earth that can
+make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a
+clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the
+slave his personality and treats him as a thing. I the unity of all men
+had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have
+attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its penal
+character, or indeed on any ground whatever.  All men are born under
+the law of nature with equal rights, and the civil law can justly
+deprive no man of his liberty, but for a crime, committed by him
+personally, that justly forfeits his liberty to society.
+
+These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European nations
+have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.  They can carry out
+practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, abolish
+slavery in every form, make all men equal before the law, and the
+political people commensurate with the territorial people.  Indeed,
+France has already done it.  She has abolished slavery, villenage,
+serfage, political aristocracy, asserted the equality of all men before
+the law, vindicated the sovereignty of the people, and established
+universal suffrage, complete social and territorial democracy.  The
+other nations may do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or
+advance farther.  Yet in France, territorial democracy the most
+complete results only in establishing the most complete imperial
+centralism, usually called Caesarism.
+
+The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor reigns
+"by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and therefore, that
+by the grace of God and the will of the nation he may cease to reign;
+but while he reigns he is supreme, and his will is law.  The
+constitution imposes no real or effective restraint on his power: while
+he sits upon the throne he is practically France, and the ministers are
+his clerks; the council of state, the senate, and the legislative body
+are merely his agents in governing the nation.  This may, indeed, be
+changed, but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic
+centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of
+antagonisms, checks and balances, called constitutionalism, or
+parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and
+which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
+
+The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all orders
+the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the principle of
+all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all opposites or extremes.
+Mankind will be logical; and the worst of all tyrannies is that which
+forbids them to draw from their principles their last logical
+consequences, or that prohibits them the free explication and
+application of the Divine Idea, in which consists their life, their
+progress.  Such tyranny strikes at the very existence of society, and
+wars against the reality of things.  It is supremely sophistical, and
+its success is death; for the universe in its constitution is supremely
+logical, and man, individually and socially, is rational.  God is the
+author and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its
+order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically Father,
+Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.  The Son or Word is
+the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God is living God a
+real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not abstract or dead
+unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, Plotinus, and Proclus.  In the
+Holy Trinity is the principle and prototype of all society, and what is
+called the solidarity of the race is only the outward expression, or
+copy in the external order, of what theologians term the circumsession
+of the three Divine Persons of the Godhead.
+
+Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature either
+in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity alone, is
+sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality.  It sins
+against God, and must fail of its end.  The English system, which is
+based on antagonistic elements, on opposites, without the middle term
+that conciliates them, unites them, and makes them dialectically one,
+copies the Divine model in its distinctions alone, which, considered
+alone, are opposites or contraries.  It denies, if Englishmen could but
+see it, the unity of God.  The French, or imperial system, which
+excludes the extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites,
+instead of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and
+copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called pantheism.
+The English constitution has no middle term, and the French no
+extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine Trinity, the original
+basis and type of the syllogism.  The human race can be contented with
+neither, for neither allows it free scope for its inherent life and
+activity.  The English system tends to pure individualism; the French
+to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element
+of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.
+
+This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and lifeless
+abstraction, but the highest theological and philosophical truth,
+without which there were no reason, no man, no society; for God is the
+first principle of all being, all existence, all science, all life, and
+it is in Him that we live and move and have our being.  God is at the
+beginning, in the middle, and at the end of all things--the universal
+principle, medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His
+existence being directly or indirectly impugned.  In a deeper sense
+than is commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit
+domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.  The English
+constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of
+reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with the
+others for the mastery.  For a long time the king labored, intrigued,
+and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which he was held by
+the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and people united and
+humbled the crown; and now the people are at work seeking to sap both
+the crown and the nobles.  The state is constituted to nobody's
+satisfaction; and though all may unite in boasting its excellences, all
+are at work trying to alter or amend it.  The work of constituting the
+state with the English is ever beginning, never ending.  Hence the
+eternal clamor for parliamentary reform.
+
+Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains
+of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal
+rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and
+wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish
+either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic
+centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the
+revolutionists of Europe.  The special merit of the American system is
+not in its democracy alone, as too many at home and abroad imagine; but
+along with its democracy in the division of the powers of government,
+between a General government and particular State governments, which
+are not antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters,
+and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
+
+Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without
+creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any
+European state.  There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in
+Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to
+effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of
+them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund,
+similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently
+attempted and have so signally failed to establish.  An intelligent
+Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in
+operation three months before it became evident that the principle on
+which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat. It was
+that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more
+than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused
+the collapse of the Confederacy.  The numbers were relatively about
+equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively
+not much inferior to those of the Government.  So at least the
+Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of
+the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as
+much care and accuracy as any men could.  Foreign powers also, friendly
+as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain
+their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
+loyal States.  The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of
+State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.  The war has
+proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch
+for confederated states.
+
+The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals. As
+equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in
+which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals,
+then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over
+again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the
+Persian war, and its fate.  A union like the American cannot be created
+by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.  The Emperor of the
+French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and
+divide the powers of government between them as individual and as
+united states.  They would necessarily hold from the imperial
+government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its
+functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central
+government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our
+President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to
+make the government of the United States.  The elements of a state
+constituted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor
+in the constitution of European society; and the American constitution
+would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered
+it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
+
+Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it
+in the best way she could.  At first it was a single tribe or people
+distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a
+second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual,
+composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the Tities or Quirites, and,
+afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or
+Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided
+into one hundred houses or gentes.  Each house in each tribe was
+represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number
+of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
+fixed.  Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
+without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
+itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
+cities.  The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into
+gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the
+tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the
+division was not a division of the powers of government between two
+co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the
+British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.
+
+The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial
+veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was
+an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division
+between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and
+the particular.  The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as
+Niebuhr calls them--who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early
+constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and
+especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an
+obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive
+power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
+
+There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the
+American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated
+municipalities.  These municipalities, modelled chiefly after that of
+Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs;
+but their local powers were not co-ordinate in their own sphere with
+those exercised by the Roman municipality, but subordinate and
+dependent.  The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held
+their rights subject to its will.  They were formally, or virtually,
+subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman
+emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.
+Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as
+subjects, and at first these municipal organizations secured the
+progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under
+the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed
+by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal
+agents of the empire.  So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
+burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to
+compel them to enter the municipal government; and it became, under the
+later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves
+into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed.  There are actually
+imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.
+Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover
+in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more
+favorable result.
+
+Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
+common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements
+retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that
+philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it
+from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on
+the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which
+seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power.  No
+greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater
+contribution to civilization to be made.  Nowhere else than in this New
+World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this
+problem be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
+Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
+
+But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny,
+for religion and politics go together.  Church and state, as
+governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state
+is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order--in the
+principles revealed or affirmed by religion--and are inseparable from
+them.  There is no state without God, any more than there is a church
+without Christ or the Incarnation.  An atheist may be a politician, but
+if there were no God there could be no politics, theological principles
+are the basis of political principles.  The created universe is a
+dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its
+parts cohere and are essential to one another.  All has its origin and
+prototype in the Triune God, and throughout expresses unity in
+triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real
+being and no actual or possible life. Every thing has its principle,
+medium, and end.  Natural society is initial, civil government is
+medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions
+in one indissoluble whole.
+
+Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine
+creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the
+Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.  True, he communes with
+God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he
+is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance
+for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the
+source of life--not either the beginning or the end of his communion.
+They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of
+themselves, can impart none.  They are in the order of second causes,
+and second causes, without the first cause, are nought.  Communion
+which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
+instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.
+As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in
+some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both
+individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform
+either their politics to their religion or their religion to their
+politics.  Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political
+society in its own image and likeness, and every political system
+struggles to harmonize Christianity with itself.  If, then, the United
+States have a political destiny, they have a religious destiny
+inseparable from it.
+
+The political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to
+the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine Idea in creation.
+Their religious destiny is to render practicable and to realize the
+normal relations between church and state, religion and politics, as
+concreted in the life of the nation.
+
+In politics, the United States are not realizing a political theory of
+any sort whatever.  They, on the contrary, are successfully refuting
+all political theories, making away with them, and establishing the
+state--not on a theory, not on an artificial basis or a foundation laid
+by human reason or will, but on reality, the eternal and immutable
+principles in relation to which man is created.  They are doing the
+same in regard to religious theories.  Religion is not a theory, a
+subjective view, an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle,
+a law, and a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace,
+practical conformity to what is universally true and real.  The United
+States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad havoc with
+religious theories as with political theories, and are pressing on with
+irresistible force to the real or the Divine order which is expressed
+in the Christian mysteries, which exists independent of man's
+understanding and will, and which man can neither make nor unmake.
+
+The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new
+religion nor to found a new church.  All real religion is catholic, and
+is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true.  Even our
+Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion,
+but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time
+what had been determined in eternity.  God has himself founded the
+church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real
+principles. His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on
+catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are
+universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in
+the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces
+and sustains all things.  Founded on universal and immutable
+principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the
+church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men.
+Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they
+are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and
+independent of him.  Religion is above and independent of the state,
+and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to
+accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles
+of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
+
+But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her dogmas
+are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and unalterable, the
+relations between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities may be
+changed or modified by the changes of time and place.  These relations
+have not been always the same, but have differed in different ages and
+countries.  During the first three centuries of our era the church had
+no legal status, and was either connived at or persecuted by the state.
+Under the Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her
+prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and ecclesiastical
+questions, and were made, in some sense, civil magistrates, and paid as
+such by the empire.  Under feudalism, the prelates received investiture
+as princes and barons, and formed alone, or in connection with the
+temporal lords, an estate in the kingdom.  The Pope became a temporal
+prince and suzerain, at one time, of a large part of Europe, and
+exercised the arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian
+sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects. Since the
+downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized
+monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her
+temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil
+functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.
+
+In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the
+national church is held in strict subjection to the civil authority, as
+in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of the state; in the
+other states of Europe, as France, Austria, Spain, and Italy, she is
+treated with distrust by the civil government, and allowed hardly a
+shadow of freedom and independence.  In France, which has the proud
+title of eldest daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not
+freer than they are in Turkey.  All religious are said to be free, and
+all are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.  The
+emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to concede
+the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he
+judges expedient for his own secular interests.  In Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy
+of the civil authorities is the same, or worse.  It may be safely
+asserted that, except in the United States, the church is either held
+by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy.  The relation
+is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave
+detriment of both religion and civilization.
+
+It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of
+civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages;
+and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations,
+would, in the present state of men's minds in Europe, be construed, if
+approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or
+the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and
+pleasure in utter disregard of the law of God, the moral order, or the
+immutable distinctions between right and wrong.  It could only favor
+the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the
+spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the
+entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
+condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither
+the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can
+understand practically such separation in any other sense than the
+complete emancipation of our entire secular life from the law of God,
+or the Divine order, which is the real order.  It is not the union of
+church and state--that is, the union, or identity rather, of religious
+and political principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the
+disunion or antagonism of church and state.  But this is nowhere
+possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state
+organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting
+from its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or
+the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things
+are created and governed.  Nowhere else is it practicable, at present,
+to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.
+
+But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable
+in the New.  The state here being organized in accordance with catholic
+principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the church.
+Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective
+spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same
+Divine Idea.  The church can trust the state, and the state can trust
+the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.
+Each by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
+other.  It is true the church is not formally established as the civil
+law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there
+is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and
+independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons.  The need of
+establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and
+penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a
+barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not
+organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false
+principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine
+order of things.  When the state is constituted in harmony with that
+order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
+constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or
+what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity.
+The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing
+principle and real interior life.  The external establishment, by legal
+enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add
+nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or
+piety--neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their
+nature, be free-will offerings to God.
+
+In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true
+religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and
+uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by
+their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them.  The American
+state recognizes only the catholic religion.  It eschews all
+sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their
+peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws.  The
+state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and
+everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as
+outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent
+vitality or want of vitality.  The state conscience is catholic, not
+sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all
+religions, the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic
+in its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
+oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true.  The church being
+free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the
+freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can
+ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from
+external institutions, or from social and political organizations.
+
+This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations
+may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority.
+The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as
+they are, not as they are not.  To deal with a child as with an adult,
+or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only
+acting a lie.  The church cannot treat men as free men where they are
+not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is
+undeveloped.  She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and
+culture of individuals, and to the greater or less progress of nations
+in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her
+constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline
+with the variations of time and place.  Many of her canons, very proper
+and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are
+needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World.  Under
+the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and
+trust them as freemen, because free men they are.  The freeman asks,
+why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be
+secured.  The simple reason that the church commands will rarely
+satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that.  The
+full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all
+obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic
+command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
+expected of the people reared under the American system, not because
+they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they
+insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the
+understanding, not of the will or the affections alone.  They are
+trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to distinguish
+between the law and the person of the magistrate.  They can obey God,
+but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in
+the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they
+will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience.  The reason
+that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the
+reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men,
+or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does
+not suffice for them in its maturity.  The appeal to external authority
+was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous
+ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with
+the state.
+
+This trait of the American character is not uncatholic.  An
+intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction,
+after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine
+order--the obedience of a free man, not of a slave--is far more
+consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God,
+than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand
+far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that must be
+governed as children or barbarians.  It is possible that the people of
+the Old World are not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion
+any more than they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have
+been trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed to
+look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in the
+reason of things.  They understand no reason for obedience beyond the
+external command, and do not believe it possible to give or to
+understand the reason why the command itself is given. They regard the
+authority of the church as a thing apart, and see no way by which faith
+and reason can be harmonized.  They look upon them as antagonistic
+forces rather than as integral elements of one and the same whole.
+Concede them the regimen of freedom, and their religion has no support
+but in their good-will, their affections, their associations, their
+habits, and their prejudices.  It has no root in their rational
+convictions, and when they begin to reason they begin to doubt.  This
+is not the state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied
+under the political regime established elsewhere than in the United
+States.  In every state in the world, except the American, the civil
+constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or less, the logic of
+things; and, therefore, in no one of them can the people receive a
+thoroughly dialectic training, or an education in strict conformity to
+the real order.  Hence, in them all, the church is more or less
+obstructed in her operations, and prevented from carrying out in its
+fulness her own Divine Idea. She does the best she can in the
+circumstances and with the materials with which she is supplied, and
+exerts herself continually to bring individuals and nations into
+harmony with her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the
+nations is a struggle, a warfare.
+
+The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on real
+catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents none of
+these obstacles, and must, in their progressive development or
+realization of their political idea, put an end to this warfare, in so
+far as a warfare between church and state, and leave the church in her
+normal position in society, in which she can, without let or hindrance,
+exert her free spirit, and teach and govern men by the Divine law as
+free men.  She may encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and
+indifference in few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from
+the state, which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually
+give way before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the truth and
+reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of her
+ministers.  The American people are, on the surface, sectarians or
+indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less uncatholic than the
+people of any other country because they are, in their intellectual and
+moral development, nearer to the real order, or, in the higher and
+broader sense of the word more truly civilized.  The multitude of sects
+that obtain may excite religious compassion for those who are carried
+away by them, for men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny
+only by truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth,
+and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need excite
+no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more or less of
+catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national life repel them,
+in so far as they are sectarian and not catholic, as substances that
+cannot be assimilated to the national life.  The American state being
+catholic in its organic principles, as is all real religion, and the
+church being free, whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without
+any support in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself,
+it must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.
+
+The sects themselves have a half unavowed conviction that they cannot
+subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil authority.  They
+are free, but do not feel safe in the United States.  They know the
+real church is catholic, and that they themselves are none of them
+catholic.  The most daring among them even pretends to be no more than
+a "branch" of the catholic church.  They know that only the catholic
+church can withstand the pressure of events and survive the shocks of
+time, and hence everywhere their movements to get rid of their
+sectarianism and to gain a catholic character.  They hold conventions
+of delegates from the whole sectarian world, form "unions,"
+"alliances," and "associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the
+catholic church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the
+Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost.  The most
+they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world, is to create
+a confederation, and confederated sects are something very different
+from a church inherently one and catholic.  It is no more the catholic
+church than the late Southern Confederacy was the American state.  The
+sectarian combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and
+retard, for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state
+organized in accordance with catholic principles, and left to
+themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and must
+soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.
+
+Such being the case, no sensible Catholic can imagine that the church
+needs any physical force against the sects, except to repel actual
+violence, and protect her in that freedom of speech and possession
+which is the right of all before the state.  What are called religious
+establishments are needed only where either the state is barbarous or
+the religion is sectarian.  Where the state, in its intrinsic
+constitution, is in accordance with catholic principles, as in the
+United States, the church has all she needs or can receive.  The state
+can add nothing more to her power or her security in her moral and
+spiritual warfare with sectarianism, and any attempt to give her more
+would only weaken her as against the sects, place her in a false light,
+partially justify their hostility to her, render effective their
+declamations against her, mix her up unnecessarily with political
+changes, interests, and passions, and distract the attention of her
+ministers from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on them the
+duties of politicians and statesmen.  Where there is nothing in the
+state hostile to the church, where she is free to act according to her
+own constitution and laws, and exercise her own discipline on her own
+spiritual subjects, civil enactments in her favor or against the sects
+may embarrass or impede her operations, but cannot aid her, for she can
+advance no farther than she wins the heart and convinces the
+understanding.  A spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be
+effected only by spiritual means.  The church wants freedom in relation
+to the state--nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from
+God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.
+
+The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order of
+things, and founded on principles which have their origin and ground in
+the principles on which the church herself is founded, can never
+establish any one of the sects as the religion of the state, for that
+would violate their political constitution, and array all the other
+sects, as well as the church herself, against the government.  They
+cannot be called upon to establish the church by law, because she is
+already in their constitution as far as the state has in itself any
+relation with religion, and because to establish her in any other sense
+would be to make her one of the civil institutions of the land, and to
+bring her under the control of the state, which were equally against
+her interest and her nature.
+
+The religious mission of the United States is not then to establish the
+church by external law, or to protect her by legal disabilities, pains,
+and penalties against the sects, however uncatholic they may be; but to
+maintain catholic freedom, neither absorbing the state in the church
+nor the church in the state, but leaving each to move freely, according
+to its own nature, in the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of
+things.  Their mission separates church and state as external governing
+bodies, but unites them in the interior principles from which each
+derives its vitality and force.  Their union is in the intrinsic unity
+of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in different spheres,
+each obeys one and the same Divine law.  With this the Catholic, who
+knows what Catholicity means, is of course satisfied, for it gives the
+church all the advantage over the sects of the real over the unreal;
+and with this the sects have no right to be dissatisfied, for it
+subjects them to no disadvantage not inherent in sectarianism itself in
+presence of Catholicity, and without any support from the civil
+authority.
+
+The effect of this mission of our country fully realized, would be to
+harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by absorbing
+either in the other, or by obliterating the natural distinction between
+them, but by conforming both to the real or Divine order, which is
+supreme and immutable.  It places the two powers in their normal
+relation, which has hitherto never been done, because hitherto there
+never has been a state normally constituted.  The nearest approach made
+to the realization of the proper relations of church and state, prior
+to the birth of the American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under
+the Christian emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism,
+and the emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be
+made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and persisted
+to the last in treating the church as a civil institution under their
+supervision and control, as does the Emperor of the French in France,
+even yet.  In the Middle Ages the state was so barbarously constituted
+that the church was obliged to supervise its administration, to mix
+herself up with the civil government, in order to infuse some
+intelligence into civil matters, and to preserve her own rightful
+freedom and independence.  When the states broke away from feudalism,
+they revived the Roman constitution, and claimed the authority in
+ecclesiastical matters that had been exercised by the Roman Caesars,
+and the states that adopted a sectarian religion gave the sect adopted
+a civil establishment, and subjected it to the civil government, to
+which the sect not unwillingly consented, on condition that the civil
+authority excluded the church and all other sects, and made it the
+exclusive religion of the state, as in England, Scotland, Sweden,
+Denmark, Russia, and the states of Northern Germany.  Even yet the
+normal relations of church and state are nowhere practicable in the Old
+World; for everywhere either the state is more or less barbaric in its
+constitution, or the religion is sectarian, and the church as well as
+civilization is obliged, to struggle with antagonistic forces, for
+self-preservation.
+
+There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce what
+they take to be the American system; but constitutions are generated,
+not made--providential, not conventional.  Statesmen can only develop
+what is in the existing constitutions of their respective countries,
+and no European constitution contains all the elements of the American.
+European Liberals mistake the American system, and, were they to
+succeed in their efforts, would not introduce it, but something more
+hostile to it than the governments and institutions they are warring
+against.  They start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and
+seek not freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.  They suppress the
+freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call religious
+liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by extinguishing
+the light without which no thought is possible, and advance
+civilization by undermining its foundation.  The condemnation of their
+views and movements by the Holy Father in the Encyclical, which has
+excited so much hostility, may seem to superficial and unthinking
+Americans even, as a condemnation of our American system--indeed, as
+the condemnation of modern science, intelligence, and civilization
+itself; but whoever looks below the surface, has some insight into the
+course of events, understands the propositions and movements censured,
+and the sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy
+Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority to save
+religion, society, science, and civilization from utter corruption or
+destruction.  The opinions, tendencies, and movements, directly or by
+implication censured, are the effect of narrow and superficial
+thinking, of partial and one-sided views, and are sectarian,
+sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, and tend, as far as they
+go, to throw society back into the barbarism from which, after
+centuries of toil and struggle, it is just beginning to emerge.  The
+Holy Father has condemned nothing that real philosophy, real science
+does not also condemn; nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the
+American system itself.  For the mass of the people, it were desirable
+that fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
+various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are not,
+in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were expected by the
+Holy Father to be given by the bishops and prelates, to whom, not to
+the people, save through them, the Encyclical was addressed.  Little is
+to be hoped, and much is to be feared, for liberty, science, and
+civilization from European Liberalism, which has no real affinity with
+American territorial democracy and real civil and religious freedom.
+But God and reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the
+New, and it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
+
+Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission, and
+realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom nothing
+is hidden.  Providence is free, and leaves always a space for human
+free-will.  The American people can fail, and will fail if they neglect
+the appointed means and conditions of success; but there is nothing in
+their present state or in their past history to render their failure
+probable.  They have in their internal constitution what Rome wanted,
+and they are in no danger of being crushed by exterior barbarism.
+Their success as feeble colonies of Great Britain in achieving their
+national independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and
+against the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national
+unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other
+people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their
+future.  The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew or
+more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the Union, counted
+with certainty on success, and the ablest, the most experienced, and
+best informed statesmen of the Old World felt sure that the Republic
+was gone, and spoke of it as the late United States.  Not a few, even
+in the loyal States, who had no sympathy with the rebellion, believed
+it idle to think of suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the
+best terms that could be obtained.  But Ilium fuit was chanted too
+soon; the American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified
+the calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the
+expectations of their friends.
+
+The attitude of the real American people during the fearful struggle
+affords additional confidence in their destiny.  With larger armies on
+foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their line of battle stretching
+from ocean to ocean, across the whole breadth of the continent, they
+never, during four long years of alternate victories and defeats--and
+both unprecedentedly bloody--for a moment lost their equanimity, or
+appeared less calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of
+peace. They not for a moment interrupted their ordinary routine of
+business or pleasure, or seemed conscious of being engaged in any
+serious struggle which required an effort.  There was no hurry, no
+bustle, no excitement, no fear, no misgiving.  They seemed to regard
+the war as a mere bagatelle, not worth being in earnest about.  The
+on-looker was almost angry with their apparent indifference, apparent
+insensibility, and doubted if they moved at all, Yet move they did:
+guided by an unerring instinct, they moved quietly on with an elemental
+force, in spite of a timid and hesitating administration, in spite of
+inexperienced, over-cautious, incompetent, or blundering military
+commanders, whom they gently brushed aside, and desisted not till their
+object was gained, and they saw the flag of the Union floating anew in
+the breeze from the capitol of every State that dared secede.  No man
+could contemplate them without feeling that there was in them a latent
+power vastly superior to any which they judged it necessary to put
+forth.  Their success proves to all that what, prior to the war, was
+treated as American arrogance or self-conceit, was only the outspoken
+confidence in their destiny as a Providential people, conscious that to
+them is reserved the hegemony of the world.
+
+Count de Maistre predicted early in the century the failure of the
+United States, because they have no proper name; but his prediction
+assumed what is not the fact.  The United States have a proper name by
+which all the world knows and calls them.  The proper name of the
+country is America: that of the people is Americans.  Speak of
+Americans simply, and nobody understands you to mean the people of
+Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody
+understands you to mean the people of the United States.  The fact is
+significant, and foretells for the people of the United States a
+continental destiny, as is also foreshadowed in the so-called "Monroe
+doctrine," which France, during our domestic troubles, was permitted,
+on condition of not intervening in our civil war in favor of the
+rebellion, to violate.
+
+There was no statesmanship in proclaiming the "Monroe doctrine," for
+the statesman keeps always, as far as possible, his government free to
+act according to the exigencies of the case when it comes up,
+unembarrassed by previous declarations of principles.  Yet the doctrine
+only expresses the destiny of the American people, and which nothing
+but their own fault can prevent them from realizing in its own good
+time.  Napoleon will not succeed in his Mexican policy, and Mexico will
+add some fifteen or twenty new States to the American Union as soon as
+it is clearly for the interests of all parties that it should be done,
+and it can be done by mutual consent, without war or violence.  The
+Union will fight to maintain the integrity of her domain and the
+supremacy of her laws within it, but she can never, consistently with
+her principles or her interests, enter upon a career of war and
+conquest.  Her system is violated, endangered, not extended, by
+subjugating her neighbors, for subjugation and liberty go not together.
+Annexation, when it takes place, must be on terms of perfect equality
+and by the free act of the state annexed.  The Union can admit of no
+inequality of rights and franchises between the States of which it is
+composed.  The Canadian Provinces and the Mexican and Central American
+States, when annexed, must be as free as the original States of the
+Union, sharing alike in the power and the protection of the
+Republic--alike in its authority, its freedom, its grandeur, and its
+glory, as one free, independent, self-governing people.  They may gain
+much, but must lose nothing by annexation.
+
+The Emperor Napoleon and his very respectable protege, Maximilian, an
+able man and a liberal-minded prince, can change nothing in the destiny
+of the United States, or of Mexico herself; no imperial government can
+be permanent beside the American Republic, no longer liable, since the
+abolition of slavery, to be distracted by sectional dissensions.  The
+States that seceded will soon, in some way, be restored to their rights
+and franchises in the Union, forming not the least patriotic portion of
+the American people; the negro question will be settled, or settle
+itself, as is most likely, by the melting away of the negro population
+before the influx of white laborers; all traces of the late contest in
+a very few years will be wiped out, the national debt paid, or greatly
+reduced, and the prosperity and strength of the Republic be greater
+than ever.  Its moral force will sweep away every imperial throne on
+the continent, without any effort or action on the part of the
+government. There can be no stable government in Mexico till every
+trace of the ecclesiastical policy established by the Council of the
+Indies is obliterated, and the church placed there on the same footing
+as in the United States; and that can hardly be done without
+annexation.  Maximilian cannot divest the church of her temporal
+possessions and place Protestants and Catholics on the same footing,
+without offending the present church party and deeply injuring
+religion, and that too without winning the confidence of the republican
+party.  In all Spanish and Portuguese America the relations between the
+church and state are abnormal, and exceedingly hurtful to both.
+Religion is in a wretched condition, and politics in a worse condition
+still. There is no effectual remedy for either but in religious
+freedom, now impracticable, and to be rendered practicable by no
+European intervention, for that subjects religion to the state, the
+very source of the evils that now exist, instead of emancipating it
+from the state, and leaving it to act according to its own constitution
+and laws, as under the American system.
+
+But the American people need not trouble themselves about their
+exterior expansion.  That will come of itself as fast as desirable.
+Let them devote their attention to their internal destiny, to the
+realization of their mission within, and they will gradually see the
+Whole continent coming under their system, forming one grand nation, a
+really catholic nation, great, glorious, and free.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its
+Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
+
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<HTML>
+<HEAD>
+
+<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+
+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of The American Republic, by A. O. Brownson
+</TITLE>
+
+<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
+BODY { color: Black;
+       background: White;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+P {text-indent: 4% }
+
+P.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
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+P.footnote {font-size: smaller ;
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+
+PRE {font-size: 11pt }
+
+P.finis { text-align: center ;
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+
+<BODY>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its Constitution,
+Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
+
+Author: A. O. Brownson
+
+Posting Date: January 29, 2009 [EBook #2053]
+Release Date: January, 2000
+[Last updated: January 8, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE
+</H3>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+</H1>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ITS
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+NEW YORK:
+<BR>
+P. O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET.
+<BR>
+1866.
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865,
+<BR>
+By P. O'SHEA,
+<BR>
+In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States
+<BR>
+for the Southern District of New York.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+  TO THE<BR>
+  HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,<BR>
+  THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT<BR>
+  Historian of the United States,<BR>
+<BR>
+  THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF<BR>
+  GOVERNMENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF<BR>
+  THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,<BR>
+  IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A<BR>
+  SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,<BR>
+  PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,<BR>
+  AND PUBLIC SERVICE,<BR>
+  BY THE AUTHOR.<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS.
+</H2>
+
+<PRE>
+                                                             PAGE
+
+<A HREF="#chap01">CHAPTER I.</A>
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap02">CHAPTER II.</A>
+
+GOVERNMENT                                                     15
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap03">CHAPTER III.</A>
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT                                           26
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap04">CHAPTER IV.</A>
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;Continued                                 43
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap05">CHAPTER V.</A>
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;Continued                                71
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap06">CHAPTER VI.</A>
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;Concluded                               106
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap07">CHAPTER VII.</A>
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT                                    136
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII.</A>
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;Concluded                         166
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap09">CHAPTER IX.</A>
+
+THE UNITED STATES                                             192
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap10">CHAPTER X.</A>
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES                             218
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap11">CHAPTER XI.</A>
+
+THE CONSTITUTION&mdash;Continued                                   244
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap12">CHAPTER XII.</A>
+
+SECESSION                                                     277
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII.</A>
+
+RECONSTRUCTION                                                309
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV.</A>
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES                                          348
+
+
+<A HREF="#chap15">CHAPTER XV.</A>
+
+DESTINY&mdash;POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS                              392
+</PRE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="preface"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PREFACE.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the
+public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, my
+whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity, extent,
+authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government, and the
+unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny of the
+American Republic.  Many of the points treated have been from time to
+time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views have been
+presented, in my previous writings; but this work is newly and
+independently written from beginning to end, and is as complete on the
+topics treated as I have been able to make it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have used
+their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they came within
+the scope of my present work.  I have not felt myself bound to adhere
+to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther than they coincide
+with my present convictions, and I have written as freely and as
+independently as if I had never written or published any thing before.
+I have never been the slave of my own past, and truth has always been
+dearer to me than my own opinions.  This work is not only my latest,
+but will be my last on politics or government, and must be taken as the
+authentic, and the only authentic statement of my political views and
+convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts with
+the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as retracted,
+and rejected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is an
+essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured critics
+will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of articles
+designed for a review, rather than a book.  It is hard to overcome the
+habits of a lifetime.  I have taken some pains to exchange the reviewer
+for the author, but am fully conscious that I have not succeeded.  My
+work can lay claim to very little artistic merit.  It is full of
+repetitions; the same thought is frequently recurring,&mdash;the result, to
+some extent, no doubt, of carelessness and the want of artistic skill;
+but to a greater extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought."  In
+composing my work I have followed, rather than directed, the course of
+my thought, and, having very little confidence in the memory or
+industry of readers, I have preferred, when the completeness of the
+argument required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with
+perpetual references to what has gone before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting to
+its publication; but how much or how little of it is really mine, I am
+quite unable to say.  I have, from my youth up, been reading,
+observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost said writing, at
+least by fits and starts, on political subjects, especially in their
+connection with philosophy, theology, history, and social progress, and
+have assimilated to my own mind what it would assimilate, without
+keeping any notes of the sources whence the materials assimilated were
+derived.  I have written freely from my own mind as I find it now
+formed; but how it has been so formed, or whence I have borrowed, my
+readers know as well as I. All that is valuable in the thoughts set
+forth, it is safe to assume has been appropriated from others.  Where I
+have been distinctly conscious of borrowing what has not become common
+property, I have given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's
+name, with three important exceptions which I wish to note more
+formally.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality and
+the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions furnished
+by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of Freedom and
+Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning and profound
+philosophic views.  I could not have written my work without the aid
+derived from its suggestions, any more than I could without Plato,
+Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the
+Abbate Gioberti.  To these two last-named authors, one a humanitarian
+sophist, the other a Catholic priest, and certainly one of the
+profoundest philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted,
+though I have followed the political system of neither.  I have taken
+from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity of
+the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation to the
+creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the Credo and the
+first verse of Genesis.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In treating the several questions which the preparation of this volume
+has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of first
+principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one important
+point, the views I had expressed in my previous writings, especially on
+the distinction between civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis
+of civilization itself, and the value to the world of the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.  I have ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism,
+rejected every species of political aristocracy, and represented the
+English constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not
+as its type.  I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and
+defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial
+democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on the one
+hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and defended
+from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the sovereignty of the
+American Republic vests in the States, though in the States
+collectively, or united, not severally, and thus escape alike
+consolidation and disintegration.  I find, with Mr. Madison, our most
+philosophic statesman, the originality of the American system in the
+division of powers between a General government having sole charge of
+the foreign and general, and particular or State governments having,
+within their respective territories, sole charge of the particular
+relations and interests of the American people; but I do not accept his
+concession that this division is of conventional origin, and maintain
+that it enters into the original Providential constitution of the
+American state, as I have done in my Review for October, 1863, and
+January and October, 1864.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I maintain, after Mr.  Senator Sumner, one of the most philosophic and
+accomplished living American statesmen, that "State secession is State
+suicide," but modify the opinion I too hastily expressed that the
+political death of a State dissolves civil society within its territory
+and abrogates all rights held under it, and accept the doctrine that
+the laws in force at the time of secession remain in force till
+superseded or abrogated by competent authority, and also that, till the
+State is revived and restored as a State in the Union, the only
+authority, under the American system, competent to supersede or
+abrogate them is the United States, not Congress, far less the
+Executive.  The error of the Government is not in recognizing the
+territorial laws as surviving secession but in counting a State that
+has seceded as still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted
+as one of the United States in amending the Constitution.  Such State
+goes out of the Union, but comes under it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political views; to
+their general principles, and to show that the general principles
+asserted have their origin and ground in the great, universal, and
+unchanging principles of the universe itself. Hence, I have labored to
+show the scientific relations of political to theological principles,
+the real principles of all science, as of all reality.  An atheist, I
+have said, may be a politician; but if there were no God, there could
+be no politics. This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must
+follow science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
+mistake their darkness for light.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as a
+Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real principles
+are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either in nature or
+revelation.  I am a Catholic by God's grace and great goodness, and
+must write as I am.  I could not write otherwise if I would, and would
+not if I could.  I have not obtruded my religion, and have referred to
+it only where my argument demanded it; but I have had neither the
+weakness nor the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it.  I could
+never have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
+of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with the
+great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of all that
+is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with Catholics or
+non-Catholics.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction of sect
+or party, I have had more especially in view the people of my own
+religious communion.  It is no discredit to a man in the United States
+at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and devout Catholic.  The old
+sectarian prejudice may remain with a few, "whose eyes," as Emerson
+says, "are in their hind-head, not in their fore-head;" but the
+American people are not at heart sectarian, and the nothingarianism so
+prevalent among them only marks their state of transition from
+sectarian opinions to positive Catholic faith.  At any rate, it can no
+longer be denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing
+element in the American population, quite too numerous, too wealthy,
+and too influential to be ignored.  They have played too conspicuous a
+part in the late troubles of the country, and poured out too freely and
+too much of their richest and noblest blood in defence of the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, for that.  Catholics
+henceforth must be treated as standing, in all respects, on a footing
+of equality with any other class of American citizens, and their views
+of political science, or of any other science, be counted of equal
+importance, and listened to with equal attention.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly by a
+Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house.  They who are
+not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the current of
+American literature, if it is one they must read in order to be up with
+the living and growing thought of the age. If it is not a book of that
+sort, it is not worth reading by any one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to exert an
+influence on the future of my country, for which I have made, or,
+rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which I tenderly
+love.  Now, I believe that he who can exert the most influence on our
+Catholic population, especially in giving tone and direction to our
+Catholic youth, will exert the most influence in forming the character
+and shaping the future destiny of the American Republic.  Ambition and
+patriotism alike, as well as my own Catholic faith and sympathies,
+induce me to address myself primarily to Catholics.  I quarrel with
+none of the sects; I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth
+wherever I find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long
+life, or a permanent possession.  I engage in no controversy with any
+one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth is
+brought out and placed in a clear light before the public, whatever is
+sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the morning mists
+before the rising sun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of my book
+from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics; but I speak to
+my countrymen at large.  I could not personally serve my country in the
+field: my habits as well as my infirmities prevented, to say nothing of
+my age; but I have endeavored in this humble work to add my
+contribution, small though it may be, to political science, and to
+discharge, as far as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism.  I
+would the book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a
+more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have
+written it.  All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a sincere
+book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects treated.  If well
+received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I shall endeavor to
+practise resignation, as I have so often done.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+O. A. BROWNSON.
+<BR>
+ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+INTRODUCTION
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, Know
+Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more important as
+there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge of himself, whence
+he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he is for, what he can do,
+what he ought to do, and what are his means of doing it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nations are only individuals on a larger scale.  They have a life, an
+individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of their own, and
+have the same general laws of development and growth, and, perhaps, of
+decay, as the individual man.  Equally important, and no less difficult
+than for the individual, is it for a nation to know itself, understand
+its own existence, its own powers and faculties, rights and duties,
+constitution, instincts, tendencies, and destiny.  A nation has a
+spiritual as well as a material, a moral as well as a physical
+existence, and is subjected to internal as well as external conditions
+of health and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some
+measure understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in
+its growth, and end in premature decay and death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than
+the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.  It has hardly had
+a distinct consciousness of its own national existence, and has lived
+the irreflective life of the child, with no severe trial, till the
+recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and compel it to reflect
+on its own constitution, its own separate existence, individuality,
+tendencies, and end.  The defection of the slaveholding States, and the
+fearful struggle that has followed for national unity and integrity,
+have brought it at once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced
+it to pass from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence
+to grave and reflecting manhood.  The nation has been suddenly
+compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from reflection,
+understanding, science, statesmanship, not from instinct, impulse,
+passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and wherefore it does
+it.  The change which four years of civil war have wrought in the
+nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity,
+the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
+existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
+understanding of its own national constitution.  Its vision is still
+obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and its judgment
+rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild theories and fancies of
+its childhood.  The national mind has been quickened, the national
+heart has been opened, the national disposition prepared, but there
+remains the important work of dissipating the mists that still linger,
+of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to
+form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
+appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,&mdash;and destiny; or, in
+other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the
+means of its actualization in space and time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and
+whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny.  Every
+nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the
+chosen people of God, through whom the primitive traditions were to be
+preserved in their purity and integrity, and the Messiah was to come.
+The Greeks were the chosen people of God, for the development and
+realization of the beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the
+true in science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
+the state, law, and jurisprudence.  The great despotic nations of Asia
+were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a mission,
+they proved false to it&mdash;, and count for nothing in the progressive
+development of the human race.  History has not recorded their mission,
+and as far as they are known they have contributed only to the abnormal
+development or corruption of religion and civilization.  Despotism is
+barbaric and abnormal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
+chosen of God for the realization of a great idea.  It has been chosen
+not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to
+accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either.  In art, it will
+prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science
+and philosophy, if it do not surpass it.  In the state, in law, in
+jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome.  Its idea is liberty,
+indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty.  Yet its mission is
+not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true
+idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public
+and the freedom of the individual&mdash;the sovereignty of the people
+without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.  In
+other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic
+union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those
+of society.  The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the
+detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same,
+or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state.  The
+American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the
+freedom of each with advantage to the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a
+political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of
+the constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and
+secures advantages which none of them did or could possess.  The
+American constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution.  The
+American form of government can be classed throughout with none of the
+forms of government described by Aristotle, or even by later
+authorities.  Aristotle knew only four forms of government: Monarchy,
+Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed Governments.  The American form is
+none of these, nor any combination of them.  It is original, a new
+contribution to political science, and seeks to attain the end of all
+wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
+and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
+political writers themselves.  The originality of the American
+constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own
+statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the
+constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its
+own principles.  They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely,
+if ever, appreciated its distinctive and peculiar merits.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the United States have vindicated their national unity and
+integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history, nothing is
+more important than that they should take that new start with a clear
+and definite view of their national constitution, and with a distinct
+understanding of their political mission in the future of the world.
+The citizen who can help his countrymen to do this will render them an
+important service and deserve well of his country, though he may have
+been unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.
+The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more difficult
+and more delicate than that which has been accomplished by our brave
+armies.  As yet the people are hardly better prepared for the political
+work to be done than they were at the outbreak of the civil war for the
+military work they have so nobly achieved.  But, with time, patience,
+and good-will, the difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past
+corrected, and the Government placed on the right track for the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the United
+States is very defective or it has been very grossly misinterpreted by
+all parties.  If the slave States had not held that the States are
+severally sovereign, and the Constitution of the United States a simple
+agreement or compact, they would never have seceded; and if the Free
+States had not confounded the Union with the General government, and
+shown a tendency to make it the entire national government, no occasion
+or pretext for secession would have been given.  The great problem of
+our statesmen has been from the first, How to assert union without
+consolidation, and State rights without disintegration?  Have they, as
+yet, solved that problem?  The war has silenced the State sovereignty
+doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State rights?
+Has it done it without asserting the General government as the supreme,
+central, or national government?  Has it done it without striking a
+dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution?  In
+suppressing by armed force the doctrine that the States are severally
+sovereign, what barrier is left against consolidation?  Has not one
+danger been removed only to give place to another?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the
+problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through
+misunderstanding of the constitution.  Our statesmen have recognized no
+constitution of the American people themselves; they have confined
+their views to the written constitution, as if that constituted the
+American people a state or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a
+law ordained by the nation already existing and constituted.  Perhaps,
+if they had recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that
+drawn up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in
+the republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the problem,
+and asserts national unity without consolidation, and the rights of the
+several States without danger of disintegration. The whole controversy,
+possibly, has originated in a misunderstanding of the real constitution
+of the United States, and that misunderstanding itself in the
+misunderstanding of the origin and constitution of government in
+general.  The constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay
+is not defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either
+danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and return
+and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and always has
+been.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do with the
+rebellion, but it was not its sole cause.  The real cause must be
+sought in the program that had been made, especially in the States
+themselves, in forming and administering their respective governments,
+as well as the General government, in accordance with political
+theories borrowed from European speculators on government, the
+so-called Liberals and Revolutionists, which have and can have no
+legitimate application in the United States.  The tendency of American
+politics, for the last thirty or forty years, has been, within the
+several States themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy,
+as if the American people had for their mission only the reproduction
+of ancient Athens.  The American system is not that of any of the
+simple forms of government, nor any combination of them.  The attempt
+to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government
+recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in
+the cast-off garments of the past.  The American system, wherever
+practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better
+than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these
+several forms, because it accords more nearly with the principles of
+things, the real order of the universe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states
+more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the
+American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its
+place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or
+corruption.  Under the influence of this false development, the people
+were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people
+are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the
+territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were
+beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to
+govern.  All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves
+have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of
+the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This
+tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking
+secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the
+Northern, Central, and Western States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, in
+spite of the short-sightedness and blundering of the Administration,
+have proved the vitality and strength of the national constitution, and
+the greatness of the American people. They say nothing for or against
+the democratic theory of our demagogues, but every thing in favor of
+the American system or constitution of government, which has found a
+firmer support in American instincts than in American statesmanship.
+In spite of all that had been done by theorists, radicals, and
+revolutionists, no-government men, non-resistants, humanitarians, and
+sickly sentimentalists to corrupt the American people in mind, heart,
+and body, the native vigor of their national constitution has enabled
+them to come forth triumphant from the trial.  Every American patriot
+has reason to be proud of his country-men, and every American lover of
+freedom to be satisfied with the institutions of his country.  But
+there is danger that the politicians and demagogues will ascribe the
+merit, not to the real and living national constitution, but to their
+miserable theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the
+several evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has
+cost so much to suppress.  What is now wanted is, that the people,
+whose instincts are right, should understand the American constitution
+as it is, and so understand it as to render it impossible for political
+theorists, no matter of what school or party, to deceive them again as
+to its real import, or induce them to depart from it in their political
+action.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A work written with temper, without passion or sectional prejudice, in
+a philosophical spirit, explaining to the American people their own
+national constitution, and the mutual relations of the General
+government and the State governments, cannot, at this important crisis
+in our affairs, be inopportune, and, if properly executed, can hardly
+fail to be of real service.  Such a work is now attempted&mdash;would it
+were by another and abler hand&mdash;which, imperfect as it is, may at least
+offer some useful suggestions, give a right direction to political
+thought, although it should fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This much the author may say, in favor of his own work, that it sets
+forth no theory of government in general, or of the United States in
+particular.  The author is not a monarchist, an aristocrat, a democrat,
+a feudalist, nor an advocate of what are called mixed governments like
+the English, at least for his own country; but is simply an American,
+devoted to the real, living, and energizing constitution of the
+American republic as it is, not as some may fancy it might be, or are
+striving to make it. It is, in his judgment, what it ought to be, and
+he has no other ambition than to present it as it is to the
+understanding and love of his countrymen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps simple artistic unity and propriety would require the author to
+commence his essay directly with the United States; but while the
+constitution of the United States is original and peculiar, the
+government of the United States has necessarily something in common
+with all legitimate governments, and he has thought it best to precede
+his discussion of the American republic, its constitution, tendencies,
+and destiny, by some considerations on government in general.  He does
+this because he believes, whether rightly or not, that while the
+American people have received from Providence a most truly profound and
+admirable system of government, they are more or less infected with the
+false theories of government which have been broached during the last
+two centuries.  In attempting to realize these theories, they have
+already provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion which has
+seriously threatened the national existence, and come very near putting
+an end to the American order of civilization itself.  These theories
+have received already a shock in the minds of all serious and thinking
+men; but the men who think are in every nation a small minority, and it
+is necessary to give these theories a public refutation, and bring back
+those who do not think, as well as those who do, from the world of
+dreams to the world of reality.  It is hoped, therefore, that any
+apparent want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay will be
+pardoned for the sake of the end the author has had in view.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+GOVERNMENT.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself.
+He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God.
+He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence only by communion with
+God, through which he participates of the divine being and life.  He
+communes with God through the divine creative act and the Incarnation
+of the Word, through his kind, and through the material world.
+Communion with God through Creation and Incarnation is religion,
+distinctively taken, which binds man to God as his first cause, and
+carries him onward to God as his final cause; communion through the
+material world is expressed by the word property; and communion with
+God through humanity is society.  Religion, society, property, are the
+three terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the
+essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and
+his perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the attainment of
+the end for which he is created.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through his
+kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, to actualize
+the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to his beatitude, since
+humanity is neither God nor the material universe, it is yet a
+necessary and essential condition of his life, his progress, and the
+completion of his existence.  He is born and lives in society, and can
+be born and live nowhere else. It is one of the necessities of his
+nature.  "God saw that it was not good for man to be alone."  Hence,
+wherever man is found he is found in society, living in more or less
+strict intercourse with his kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But society never does and never can exist without government of some
+sort.  As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is government a
+necessity of society.  The simplest form of society is the family&mdash;Adam
+and Eve.  But though Adam and Eve are in many respects equal, and have
+equally important though different parts assigned them, one or the
+other must be head and governor, or they cannot form the society called
+family.  They would be simply two individuals of different sexes, and
+the family would fail for the want of unity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some degree of
+family government, of some authority to direct, control, restrain, or
+prescribe.  Hence the authority of the husband and father is recognized
+by the common consent of mankind.  Still more apparent is the necessity
+of government the moment the family develops and grows into the tribe,
+and the tribe into the nation.  Hence no nation exists without
+government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or degraded,
+that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the elders, or in the
+tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint reminiscences of some sort
+of government, with authority to demand obedience and to punish the
+refractory.  Hence, as man is nowhere found out of society, so nowhere
+is society found without government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that its
+necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the fact that the
+human race by sin has fallen from its primitive integrity, or original
+righteousness.  The fall asserted by Christian theology, though often
+misinterpreted, and its effects underrated or exaggerated, is a fact
+too sadly confirmed by individual experience and universal history; but
+it is not the cause why government is necessary, though it may be an
+additional reason for demanding it.  Government would have been
+necessary if man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well
+as for the bad.  The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man
+retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his nature.  It
+exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven in its perfection.
+Its office is not purely repressive, to restrain violence, to redress
+wrongs, and to punish the transgressor.  It has something more to do
+than to restrict our natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain
+justice between man and man.  Its office is positive as well as
+negative.  It is needed to render effective the solidarity of the
+individuals of a nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a
+mere organization&mdash;to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen
+all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all&mdash;to
+develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and
+direct it to the promotion of the common weal&mdash;to be a social
+providence, imitating in its order and degree the action of the divine
+providence itself, and, while it provides for the common good of all,
+to protect each, the lowest and meanest, with the whole force and
+majesty of society. It is the minister of wrath to wrong-doers, indeed,
+but its nature is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the
+right of property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can
+exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science and
+art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful means to the
+fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his existence.  Next after
+religion, it is man's greatest good; and even religion without it can
+do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call it a
+necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted,
+hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved,
+respected, obeyed, and if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly
+goods, and even of life itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The nature or essence of government is to govern.  A government that
+does not govern, is simply no government at all.  If it has not the
+ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument
+in the bands of individuals for advancing their private interests, but
+it is not government.  To be government it must govern both individuals
+and the community.  If it is a mere machine for making prevail the will
+of one man, of a certain number of men, or even of the community, it
+may be very effective sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest
+for evil, but government in the proper sense of the word it is not.  To
+govern is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and
+directs his ship.  It necessarily implies two terms, governor and
+governed, and a real distinction between them.  The denial of all real
+distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics
+analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real
+distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which
+all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism&mdash;the supreme
+sophism.  If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface
+both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that
+governs is identically the will that is governed.  To make the
+controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all
+control.  There must, then, if there is government at all, be a power,
+force, or will that governs, distinct from that which is governed.  In
+those governments in which it is held that the people govern, the
+people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the people
+governed, or there is no real government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right
+or authority to govern.  Power without right is not government.
+Governments have the right to use force at need, but might does not
+make right, and not every power wielding the physical force of a nation
+is to be regarded as its rightful government.  Whatever resort to
+physical force it may be obliged to make, either in defence of its
+authority or of the rights of the nation, the government itself lies in
+the moral order, and politics is simply a branch of ethics&mdash;that branch
+which treats of the rights and duties of men in their public relations,
+as distinguished from their rights and duties in their private
+relations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the
+right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere
+physical necessity.  The right to govern and the duty to obey are
+correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived without the
+other.  Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable sentiment but a duty, a
+moral virtue.  Treason is not merely a difference in political opinion
+with the governing authority, but a crime against the sovereign, and a
+moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, the Founder of the moral Law.
+Treason, if committed in other Countries, unhappily, has been more
+frequently termed by our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor
+than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human
+governments have authority to punish.  The American people have been
+chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the
+correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law,
+and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority,
+however constituted or wherever lodged.  It is as necessary, as much a
+duty, as much a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler
+examples of the most devoted loyalty are not found in the world's
+history than were exhibited in the ancient Greek and Roman republics,
+or than have been exhibited by both men and women in the young republic
+of the United States. Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most
+generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime
+love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment
+of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice,
+and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike.
+There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly
+loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal,
+criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.
+Such a people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind.  It
+mocks at duty, scorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no
+person, no thing, human or divine, sacred or inviolable.  The assertion
+of government as lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and
+reconciles it with authority.  Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever
+one pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.  Freedom to
+follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any civil
+restraint, is license, not liberty.  There is no lesion to liberty in
+repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of the
+authority that has the right to command.  Tyranny or oppression is not
+in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped
+authority&mdash;to a power that has no right to command, or that commands
+what exceeds its right or its authority.  To say that it is contrary to
+liberty to be forced to forego our own will or inclination in any case
+whatever, is simply denying the right of all government, and falling
+into no-governmentism.  Liberty is violated only when we are required
+to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to
+make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority
+has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a
+rightful command.  The requisition, if made by rightful authority,
+then, violates no right that we have or can have, and where there is no
+violation of our rights there is no violation of our liberty.  The
+moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of obedience,
+presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may meet in
+peace and operate to the same end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience,
+and that the resistance to power can never be lawful. The tyrant may be
+lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of the word itself, is a
+usurper, and without authority.  Abuses of power may be resisted even
+by force when they become too great to be endured, when there is no
+legal or regular way of redressing them, and when there is a reasonable
+prospect that resistance will prove effectual and substitute something
+better in their place.  But it is never lawful to resist the rightful
+sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
+sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be said
+to abuse it.  Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a
+power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no
+abuse or abuses to redress.  All turns, then, on the right of power, or
+its legitimacy.  Whence does government derive its right to govern?
+What is the origin and ground of sovereignty?  This question is
+fundamental and without a true answer to it politics cannot be a
+science, and there can be no scientific statesmanship.  Whence, then,
+comes the sovereign right to govern?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Government is both a fact and a right.  Its origin as a fact, is simply
+a question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is
+a question of ethics.  Whether a certain territory and its population
+are a sovereign state or nation, or not&mdash;whether the actual ruler of a
+country is its rightful ruler, or not&mdash;is to be determined by the
+historical facts in the case; but whence the government derives its
+right to govern, is a question that can be solved only by philosophy,
+or, philosophy failing, only by revelation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and
+the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of
+government, among which may be named&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his child.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are
+sovereign.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of
+God;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual
+society;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+VII. From God through the people;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+VIII. From God through the natural law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin
+of government as a fact.  The patriarchal system is the earliest known
+system of government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly
+all known governments&mdash;in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the
+Irish septs and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman
+qentes, and the Russian and Hindoo villages.  The right of the father
+was held to be his right to govern his family or household, which, with
+his children, included his wife and servants.  From the family to the
+tribe the transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the
+nation.  The father is chief of the family; the chief of the eldest
+family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest tribe becomes
+chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch. The heads of
+families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, and the families
+themselves, represented by their delegates, or publicly assembling for
+public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three forms, with their
+several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and
+mixed governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and have
+generally been held to be all that are possible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from
+the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family.
+Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal,
+which seem to be founded on landed property, may be traced back to a
+patriarchal origin.  The patriarch is sole proprietor, and the
+possessions of the family are vested in him, and he governs as
+proprietor as well as father.  In the tribe, the chief is the
+proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and holds the
+domain.  Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the
+suzerain, holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or
+vacant.  All the great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold
+the domain and govern as proprietors; they have the authority of the
+father and the owner; and their subjects, though theoretically their
+children, are really their slaves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
+transformation.  The father retains all the power of the patriarch
+within his family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of
+it, is met and controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are
+united in the senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state.
+Yet, not all the heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the
+tenants of the sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed
+and marked by the god Terminus.  Hence the great plebeian houses, often
+richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all share in
+the government and the honors of the state, because they were not
+tenants of any portion of the sacred territory.  There is here the
+introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
+transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state,
+and founds the civil order, or what is now called civilization.  The
+city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, and
+territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the
+land.  When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early
+times was to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took
+possession of him, received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only
+such persons as were taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the
+sacred territory or domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens
+with full political rights.  This, in modern language, means that the
+state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
+the state, not the state to the citizen.  Under the patriarchal, the
+tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly
+speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical
+rather than political.  Authority&mdash;even the nation itself&mdash;is personal,
+not territorial.  The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king,
+is the only proprietor.  Under the Graeco-Roman system all this is
+transformed.  The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the
+real proprietor is the city or state.  Under the Empire, no doubt, what
+lawyers call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as
+the representative and trustee of the city or state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
+history does not inform us.  The first-born of Adam, we are told, built
+a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence
+that it was constituted a municipality.  The earliest traces of the
+civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and
+its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as
+well as republican.  It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal
+system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion
+rather than by simple explication.  It has in it an element that, if it
+exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a
+different form, and the transformation marks the passage from the
+economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil
+constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from
+civitas&mdash;city or state.  The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and
+nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished
+from the state, barbarians.  The origin of the word barbarian,
+barbarus, or [Greek] <I>barbaros</I>, is unknown, and its primary sense can
+be only conjectured.  Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild,
+fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks
+and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the
+term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of
+manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and
+sciences&mdash;the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.
+They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an
+aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in
+which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was
+personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right,
+not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
+tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European sense, but
+to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedaemon had kings; yet
+it was no less republican than Athens; and Rome was called and was a
+republic under the emperors no less than under the consuls.  Republic,
+respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or,
+in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on
+personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory,
+or domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
+attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.  France, Spain,
+Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in substance
+though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the word,
+republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own
+private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of
+the state.  The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution
+of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal
+or private right. Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to
+barbarism, and all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian
+in Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern times to breeding
+or refinement of manners, simply because these are characteristics of a
+republican, or polished [from [Greek] <I>polis</I>, city] people.  Every
+people that has a real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity,
+is a republican people; and hence the church and her great doctors when
+they speak of the state as distinguished from the church, call it the
+republic, as may be seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius
+IX., which some have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is
+developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded
+by all Christendom.  In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is
+transformed into that of the city or state, that is, of the republic;
+but in all barbarous nations it retains its Private and personal
+character.  The nation is only the family or tribe, and is called by
+the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical
+denomination.  Race has not been supplanted by country; they are a
+people, not a state. They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may
+find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never
+find among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
+distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern
+Christian nations.  They have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no
+patria, or country.  The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire,
+whether of the West or the East, were nations, or confederacies of
+nations, but not states.  The nation with them was personal, not
+territorial.  Their country was wherever they fed their flocks and
+herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night.  There were
+Germans, but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his
+"father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken.  The Polish,
+Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by
+German states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue,
+are excluded from the Germanic Confederation.  The Turks, or Osmanlis,
+are a race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
+the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or
+predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern
+Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no
+state, no country.  The nation defines the boundaries, not the
+boundaries the nation.  The nation does not belong to the territory,
+but the territory to the nation or its chief.  The Irish and
+Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
+territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
+indivisible, they still held it as private property.  The shah of
+Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the
+landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants.  They hold
+it from him, not from the Persian state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain
+of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.  There is in barbaric states
+no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being
+tempered by parental affection.  The chief is a despot, and rules with
+the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.
+He owns the land and his subjects.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the
+Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
+Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
+constitution.  The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all,
+governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the
+commonwealth.  Under feudalism there are estates, but no state.  The
+king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate,
+and the commons are represented as an estate.  The whole theory of
+power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.
+It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized
+nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
+ages.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
+constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats,
+especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and
+Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and
+anti-republican.  The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that
+power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that
+the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by
+virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
+fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism.  This says nothing in
+favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal
+suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
+theoretically or practically.  Property has of itself advantages
+enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights
+and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as
+the business classes.  The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage,
+or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
+government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis
+Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation
+to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter
+the revolution of 1848.  The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
+universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
+private or personal right.  It is not a private, but a political right,
+and, like all political rights, a public trust.  Extremes meet, and
+thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
+human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in
+principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their
+place with nations on whom the light of civilization has never yet
+dawned.  All is not gold that glisters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
+private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is,
+that it makes it a public trust.  Barbarism knows only persons;
+civilization asserts and maintains the state.  With barbarians the
+authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication;
+in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation.  Keeping
+in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of
+government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the
+patriarchal.  The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
+patriarchal that the human race has begun its career.  The family or
+household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
+historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as
+the initial or inchoate nation.  But its simple direct development
+gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which
+nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan
+and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order is
+republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
+It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or despotic
+nation, and must either find or create civilization, which has been
+developed from the patriarchal system by way of transformation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of government,
+and all governments have been developed or modified from it, the right
+of government to govern cannot be deduced from the right of the father
+to govern his children, for the parental right itself is not ultimate
+or complete.  All governments that assume it to be so, and rest on it
+as the foundation of their authority, are barbaric or despotic, and,
+therefore, without any legitimate authority.  The right to govern rests
+on ownership or dominion.  Where there is no proprietorship, there is
+no dominion; and where there is no dominion, there is no right to
+govern. Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation.  The maker has the
+right to the thing made.  He, so far as he is sole creator, is sole
+proprietor, and may do what he will with it.  God is sovereign lord and
+proprietor of the universe because He is its sole creator.  He hath the
+absolute dominion, because He is absolute maker.  He has made it, He
+owns it; and one may do what he will with his own.  His dominion is
+absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He rightly governs as
+absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises
+only His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
+justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
+conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be
+right, wise, just, and good.  The despot is a man attempting to be God
+upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power.  Despotism is based on,
+the parental right, and the parental right is assumed to be absolute.
+Hence, your despotic rulers claim to reign, and to be loved and
+worshipped as gods.  Even the Roman emperors, in the fourth and fifth
+centuries, were addressed as divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a
+Christian, was addressed as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras&mdash;so far
+did barbarism encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for he is
+the generator, not the creator of his child.  Generation is in the
+order of second causes, and is simply the development or explication of
+the race.  The early Roman law, founded on the confusion of generation
+with creation, gave the father absolute authority over the child&mdash;the
+right of life and death, as over his servants or slaves; but this was
+restricted under the Empire, and in all Christian nations the authority
+of the father is treated, like all power, as a trust.  The child, like
+the father himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father
+is answerable for the use he makes of his authority.  The law fixes the
+age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; and even
+during his nonage, takes him from the father and places him under
+guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly
+abuses his trust.  This is proper, because society contributes to the
+life of the child, and has a right as well as an interest in him.
+Society, again, must suffer if the child is allowed to grow up a
+worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a right to intervene, both in
+behalf of itself and of the child, in case his parents neglect to train
+him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or are training him
+up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the
+community.  How, then, base the right of society on the right of the
+father, since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to
+the right of the parent?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
+authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the ground
+of the right of society to govern.  Assume the parental right to be
+perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, it is no right to
+govern where no such relation exists.  Nothing true, real, solid in
+government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a "sham."  The
+statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms to the
+realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts
+legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable.  The presumptions or
+assumptions of law or politics must have a real and solid basis, or
+they are inadmissible.  How, from the right of the father to govern his
+own child, born from his loins, conclude his right to govern one not
+his child?  Or how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the
+right of society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
+political authority over its members?
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;CONTINUED.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking from
+asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should favor
+theocracy, and place secular society under the control of the clergy,
+and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political writers have sought
+to render government purely human, and maintain that its origin is
+conventional, and that it is founded in compact or agreement.  Their
+theory originated in the seventeenth century, and was predominant in
+the last century and the first third of the present.  It has been, and
+perhaps is yet, generally accepted by American politicians and
+statesmen, at least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the
+question at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of government
+as a social pact or compact, and explained the reciprocal rights and
+obligations of subjects and rulers by the general law of contracts; but
+they have never held that government originates in a voluntary
+agreement between the people and their rulers, or between the several
+individuals composing the community.  They have never held that
+government has only a conventional origin or authority.  They have
+simply meant, by the social compact, the mutual relations and
+reciprocal rights and duties of princes and their subjects, as implied
+in the very existence and nature of civil society.  Where there are
+rights and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an
+agreement voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
+compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in determining
+whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire whether either has
+broken the terms of the social compact.  They were engaged, not with
+the question whence does government derive its authority, but with its
+nature, and the reciprocal rights and duties of governors and the
+governed.  The compact itself they held was not voluntarily formed by
+the people themselves, either individually or collectively, but was
+imposed by God, either immediately, or mediately, through the law of
+nature.  "Every man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains
+there."  They held the same, and maintained that every one born into
+society contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
+society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law, every
+one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+and owes certain duties to society for the protection and assistance it
+affords him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed from the
+theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine which they would
+have been the last to accept.  These theorists or political speculators
+have imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society, in which
+men lived without government, law, or manners, out of which they
+finally came by entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of
+their number to be king and to govern them, or with one another to
+submit to the rule of the majority.  Hobbes, the English materialist,
+is among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of this
+theory.  He held that men lived, prior to the creation of civil
+society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and every one
+had an equal right to every thing, and to take any thing on which he
+could lay his hands and was strong enough to hold.  There was no law
+but the will of the strongest.  Hence, the state of nature was a state
+of continual war.  At length, wearied and disgusted, men sighed for
+peace, and, with one accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest
+among them: Come, be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and
+govern us; we surrender our natural rights and our natural independence
+to you, with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
+among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or cutting
+each other's throats.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, but
+asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had asserted it in
+the interests of power.  Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, followed in the
+next century with his Contrat Social, the text-book of the French
+revolutionists&mdash;almost their Bible&mdash;and put the finishing stroke to the
+theory.  Hitherto the compact or agreement had been assumed to be
+between the governor and the governed; Rousseau supposes it to be
+between the people themselves, or a compact to which the people are the
+only parties. He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men
+lived, antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
+without government or law.  All men in that state were equal, and each
+was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.  These equal,
+independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to have met, in
+convention, and entered into a compact with themselves, each with all,
+and all with each, that they would constitute government, and would
+each submit to the determination and authority of the whole,
+practically of the fluctuating and irresponsible majority.  Civil
+society, the state, the government, originates in this compact, and the
+government, as Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
+Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
+governed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that the
+individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to civil
+society, was generally adopted by the American people in the last
+century, and is still the more prevalent theory with those among them
+who happen to have any theory or opinion on the subject.  It is the
+political tradition of the country.  The state, as defined by the elder
+Adams, is held to be a voluntary association of individuals.
+Individuals create civil society, and may uncreate it whenever they
+judge it advisable.  Prior to the Southern Rebellion, nearly every
+American asserted with Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or
+revolution, and sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and
+revolutionists, wherever they made their appearance.  Loyalty was held
+to be the correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and
+traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent
+lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.  The fearful struggle
+of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its very existence
+may have changed this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory
+assumes, may be questioned.  Certainly nothing proves that it is, or
+ever was, a real state.  That there is a law of nature is undeniable.
+All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and jurisprudence
+assert it; the state assumes it as its own immediate basis, and the
+codes of all nations are founded on it; universal jurisprudence, the
+jus qentium of the Romans, embodies it, and the courts recognize and
+administer it.  It is the reason and conscience of civil society, and
+every state acknowledges its authority.  But the law of nature is as
+much in force in civil society as out of it.  Civil law does not
+abrogate or supersede natural law, but presupposes it, and supports
+itself on it as its own ground and reason.  As the natural law, which
+is only natural justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all
+men, persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its
+informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil state,
+natural society in civil society, which simply develops, applies, and
+protects it.  Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in
+it&mdash;is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and
+government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.
+The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state,
+an actual state, and never was; but an abstraction, in which is
+considered, apart from the concrete existence called society, what is
+derived immediately from the natural law.  But as abstractions have no
+existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature has no
+actual existence in the world of reality as a separate state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a real and
+separate state, in which men at first lived, there is great difficulty
+in understanding how they ever got out of it. Can a man divest himself
+of his nature, or lift himself above it? Man is in his nature, and
+inseparable from it.  If his primitive state was his natural state, and
+if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural,
+how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the
+latter?  The ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of
+creation, asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the
+earth, and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
+and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art,
+law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the
+Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of
+that state alone by his own unaided efforts.  They ascribed the
+invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil
+society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods.  It
+remained for the Epicureans&mdash;who, though unable, like their modern
+successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first
+cause, believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
+care of themselves&mdash;to assert that men could, by their own unassisted
+efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out of the primitive
+state, and institute what in modern times is called civilta, civility,
+or civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which men have
+emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of civil society,
+forget that if government is not the sole condition, it is one of the
+essential conditions of progress. The only progressive nations are
+civilized or republican nations. Savage and barbarous tribes are
+unprogressive.  Ages on ages roll over them without changing any thing
+in their state; and Niebuhr has well remarked with others, that history
+records no instance of a savage tribe or people having become civilized
+by its own spontaneous or indigenous efforts.  If savage tribes have
+ever become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
+aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
+missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
+commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age. Nothing
+in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of
+itself from the savage state to the civilized.  But the primitive man,
+as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke,
+Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage.  The lowest, most
+degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered
+has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social
+state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in
+superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion;
+but the people in the alleged state of nature have none.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting into
+their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of
+the civilized man.  It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been
+civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the
+habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of
+society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away
+on some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all
+intercourse with the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and
+re-establish and maintain civil government.  They are civilized men,
+and bear civil society in their own life.  But these are no
+representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature.
+These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception
+even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they
+have thus far lived.  How then can they, since, on the theory, civil
+society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial creation,
+even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
+abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel
+they could do in case civil society were broken up, what men may do and
+have done in a state of nature.  Men cannot divest themselves of
+themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it, they think, reason,
+and act as they are.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.  The advocates
+of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete, should have
+presented their primitive man as below the lowest known savage,
+unprogressive, and in himself incapable of developing any progressive
+energy.  Unprogressive, and, without foreign assistance, incapable of
+progress, how is it possible for your primitive man to pass, by his own
+unassisted efforts, from the alleged state of nature to that of
+civilization, of which he has no conception, and towards which no
+innate desire, no instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
+supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory&mdash;if by some happy
+inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the state of
+nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil government, how
+could he carry his conception into execution? Conception is always
+easier than its realization, and between the design and its execution
+there is always a weary distance.  The poetry of all nations is a wail
+over unrealized ideals.  It is little that even the wisest and most
+potent statesman can realize of what he conceives to be necessary for
+the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly
+demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not
+seldom generations come and go without effecting them.  The republics
+of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities
+of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because
+intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are
+innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their
+realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life,
+which only their introduction and realization can supply.  So to be
+able to execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
+to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits,
+and characters in the public which are not possible without
+civilization itself.  Some philosophers suppose men have invented
+language, forgetting that it requires language to give the ability to
+invent language.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it
+may be.  They are moved by their affections, passions, instincts, and
+habits.  Routine is more powerful with them than logic.  A few are
+greedy of novelties, and are always for trying experiments; but the
+great body of the people of all nations have an invincible repugnance
+to abandon what they know for what they know not.  They are, to a great
+extent, the slaves of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the
+necessary exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
+better.  Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
+prejudice, habits, and usages.  Never were philosophers more ignorant
+of human nature than they, so numerous in the last century, who
+imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of interest, and that
+enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien entendu, suffices to found
+and sustain the state.  No reform, no change in the constitution of
+government or of society, whatever the advantages it may promise, can
+be successful, if introduced, unless it has its root or germ in the
+past.  Man is never a creator; he can only develop and continue,
+because he is himself a creature, and only a second cause.  The
+children of Israel, when they encountered the privations of the
+wilderness that lay between them and the promised land flowing with
+milk and honey, fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back
+to Egypt, and permit them to return to slavery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, there
+is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil society would
+not be a development, but a complete rupture with the past, and an
+entire new creation.  When it is with the greatest difficulty that
+necessary reforms are introduced in old and highly civilized nations
+and when it can seldom be done at all without terrible political and
+social convulsions, how can we suppose men without society, and knowing
+nothing of it, can deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice
+aforethought," found society?  Without government, and destitute alike
+of habits of obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
+establish, and sustain government?  To suppose it, would be to suppose
+that men in a state of nature, without culture, without science,
+without any of the arts, even the most simple and necessary, are
+infinitely superior to the men formed under the most advanced
+civilization.  Was Rousseau right in asserting civilization as a fall,
+as a deterioration of the race?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some miracle
+or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the origin of
+government as authority in compact is not yet established.  According
+to the theory, the rights of civil society are derived from the rights
+of the individuals who form or enter into the compact.  But individuals
+cannot give what they have not, and no individual has in himself the
+right to govern another.  By the law of nature all men have equal
+rights, are equals, and equals have no authority one over another.  Nor
+has an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right to
+dispose of himself as he pleases.  Man is not God, independent,
+self-existing and self-sufficing.  He is dependent, and dependent not
+only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on
+nature, or the material world.  That on which he depends in the measure
+in which be depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life,
+and to his well-being, and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right
+in him and to him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the
+proud spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation
+to another.  The right of that on which man depends, and by communion
+with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his only
+medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him is neither
+absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it, lives in it, and
+cannot live without it.  It has, then, certain lights over him, and he
+cannot enter into any compact, league, or alliance that society does
+not authorize, or at least permit. These rights of society override his
+rights to himself, and he can neither surrender them nor delegate them.
+Other rights, as the rights of religion and property, which are held
+directly from God and nature, and which are independent of society, are
+included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these rights
+cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they are rights of
+man only before civil society, and therefore not his to cede, and
+because they are precisely the rights that government is bound to
+respect and protect.  The compact, then, cannot be formed as pretended,
+for the only rights individuals could delegate or surrender to society
+to constitute the sum of the rights of government are hers already, and
+those which are not hers are those which cannot be delegated or
+surrendered, and in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is the
+duty, the chief end of government to protect each and every individual.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no
+authority without society, to meet in convention, and enter into the
+alleged compact, because they are not independent, sovereign
+individuals.  But pass over this: suppose the convention, suppose the
+compact, it must still be conceded that it binds and can bind only
+those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into it.  This is conceded
+by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of 1776, in the assertion
+that government derives its "just powers from the consent of the
+governed."  This consent, as the matter is one of life and death, must
+be free, deliberate, formal, explicit, not simply an assumed, implied,
+or constructive consent.  It must be given personally, and not by one
+for another without his express authority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms of the
+compact from the silence of the individual, and also from his continued
+residence in the country and submission to its government.  But
+residence is no evidence of consent, because it may be a matter of
+necessity.  The individual may be unable to emigrate, if he would; and
+by what right can individuals form an agreement to which I must consent
+or else migrate to some strange land?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, be any thing
+but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and therefore
+invalid?  Nothing can be inferred from one's silence, for he may have
+many reasons for being silent besides approval of the government.  He
+may be silent because speech would avail nothing; because to protest
+might be dangerous&mdash;cost him his liberty, if not his life; because he
+sees and knows nothing better, and is ignorant that he has any choice
+in the case; or because, as very likely is the fact with the majority,
+he has never for moment thought of the matter, or ever had his
+attention called to it, and has no mind on the subject.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from the
+compact or obligation to obey the government created by it all the
+women of a nation, all the children too young to be capable of giving
+their consent, and all who are too ignorant, too weak of mind to be
+able to understand the terms of the contract.  These several classes
+cannot be less than three-fourths of the population of any country.
+What is to be done with them? Leave them without government?  Extend
+the power of the government over them?  By what right?  Government
+derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that
+consent they have not given.  Whence does one-fourth of the population
+get its right to govern the other three-fourths?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But what is to be done with the rights of minorities?  Is the rule of
+unanimity to be insisted on in the convention and in the government,
+when it goes into operation?  Unanimity is impracticable, for where
+there are many men there will be differences of opinion.  The rule of
+unanimity gives to each individual a veto on the whole proceeding,
+which was the grand defect of the Polish constitution.  Each member of
+the Polish Diet, which included the whole body of the nobility, had an
+absolute veto, and could, alone, arrest the whole action of the
+government.  Will you substitute the rule of the majority, and say the
+majority must govern?  By what right?  It is agreed to in the
+convention.  Unanimously, or only by a majority?  The right of the
+majority to have their will is, on the social compact theory, a
+conventional right, and therefore cannot come into play before the
+convention is completed, or the social compact is framed and accepted.
+How, in settling the terms of the compact, will you proceed?  By
+majorities?  But suppose a minority objects, and demands two-thirds,
+three-fourths, or four-fifths, and votes against the majority rule,
+which is carried only by a simple plurality of votes, will the
+proceedings of the convention bind the dissenting minority?  What gives
+to the majority the right to govern the minority who dissent from its
+action?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the supposition that society has rights not derived from
+individuals, and which are intrusted to the government, there is a good
+reason why the majority should prevail within the legitimate sphere of
+government, because the majority is the best representative practicable
+of society itself; and if the constitution secures to minorities and
+dissenting individuals their natural rights and their equal rights as
+citizens, they have no just cause of complaint, for the majority in
+such case has no power to tyrannize over them or to oppress them.  But
+the theory under examination denies that society has any rights except
+such as it derives from individuals who all have equal rights.
+According to it, society is itself conventional, and created by free,
+independent, equal, sovereign individuals. Society is a congress of
+sovereigns, in which no one has authority over another, and no one can
+be rightfully forced to submit to any decree against his will.  In such
+a congress the rule of the majority is manifestly improper,
+illegitimate, and invalid, unless adopted by unanimous consent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this is not all.  The individual is always the equal of himself,
+and if the government derives its powers from the consent of the
+governed, he governs in the government, and parts with none of his
+original sovereignty.  The government is not his master, but his agent,
+as the principal only delegates, not surrenders, his rights and powers
+to the agent.  He is free at any time he pleases to recall the powers
+he has delegated, to give new instructions, or to dismiss him.  The
+sovereignty of the individual survives the compact, and persists
+through all the acts of his agent, the government.  He must, then, be
+free to withdraw from the compact whenever he judges it advisable.
+Secession is perfectly legitimate if government is simply a contract
+between equals.  The disaffected, the criminal, the thief the
+government would send to prison, or the murderer it would hang, would
+be very likely to revoke his consent, and to secede from the state.
+Any number of individuals large enough to count a majority among
+themselves, indisposed to pay the government taxes, or to perform the
+military service exacted, might hold a convention, adopt a secession
+ordinance, and declare themselves a free, independent, sovereign state,
+and bid defiance to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and
+that, too, without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.
+Would the government employ military force to coerce them back to their
+allegiance?  By what right?  Government is their agent, their creature,
+and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or creature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment be
+dissolved.  Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently maintained
+that one generation has no power to bind another; and, as if this was
+not enough, he asserted the right of revolution, and gave it as his
+opinion that in every nation a revolution once in every generation is
+desirable, that is, according to his reckoning, once every nineteen
+years.  The doctrine that one generation has no power to bind its
+successor is not only a logical conclusion from the theory that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
+since a generation cannot give its consent before it is born, but is
+very convenient for a nation that has contracted a large national debt;
+yet, perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new
+generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge the
+obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.  No man,
+certainly, can contract for any one but himself; and how then can the
+son be bound, without his own personal or individual consent, freely
+given, by the obligations entered into by his father?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The social compact is necessarily limited to the individuals who form
+it, and as necessarily, unless renewed, expires with them. It thus
+creates no state, no political corporation, which survives in all its
+rights and powers, though individuals die. The state is on this theory
+a voluntary association, and in principle, except that it is not a
+secret society, in no respect differs from the Carbonari, or the
+Knights of the Golden Circle. When Orsini attempted to execute the
+sentence of death on the Emperor of the French, in obedience to the
+order of the Carbonari, of which the Emperor was a member, he was, if
+the theory of the origin of government in compact be true, no more an
+assassin than was the officer who executed on the gallows the rebel
+spies and incendiaries Beal and Kennedy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no social or
+civil element.  It does not and cannot create society.  It can give
+only an aggregation of individuals, and society is not an aggregation
+nor even an organization of individuals.  It is an organism, and
+individuals live in its life as well as it in theirs.  There is a real
+living solidarity, which makes individuals members of the social body,
+and members one of another. There is no society without individuals,
+and there are no individuals without society; but in society there is
+that which is not individual, and is more than all individuals.  The
+social compact is an attempt to substitute for this real living
+solidarity, which gives to society at once unity of life and diversity
+of members, an artificial solidarity, a fictitious unity for a real
+unity, and membership by contract for real living membership, a cork
+leg for that which nature herself gives. Real government has its ground
+in this real living solidarity, and represents the social element,
+which is not individual, but above all individuals, as man is above
+men.  But the theory substitutes a simple agency for government, and
+makes each individual its principal.  It is an abuse of language to
+call this agency a government.  It has no one feature or element of
+government.  It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity; its
+authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a public
+authority, representing a public will, a public right, or a public
+interest.  In no country could government be adopted and sustained if
+men were left to the wisdom or justness of their theories, or in the
+general affairs of life, acted on them. Society, and government as
+representing society, has a real existence, life, faculties, and organs
+of its own, not derived or derivable from individuals.  As well might
+it be maintained that the human body consists in and derives all its
+life from the particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and
+which are constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its
+life, or government its powers, from individuals.  No mechanical
+aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is no
+living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation of
+individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths, can make
+society where there is no informing social principle that aggregates
+and assimilates them to a living body, or produce that mystic existence
+called a state or commonwealth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the nation to
+be a purely personal affair.  It gives the government no territorial
+status, and clothes it with no territorial rights or jurisdiction.  The
+government that could so originate would be, if any thing, a barbaric,
+not a republican government.  It has only the rights conferred on it,
+surrendered or delegated to it by individuals, and therefore, at best,
+only individual rights. Individuals can confer only such rights as they
+have in the supposed state of nature.  In that state there is neither
+private nor public domain.  The earth in that state is not property,
+and is open to the first occupant, and the occupant can lay no claim to
+any more than he actually occupies.  Whence, then, does government
+derive its territorial jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain
+claimed by all national governments?  Whence its title to vacant or
+unoccupied lands?  How does any particular government fix its
+territorial boundaries, and obtain the right to prescribe who may
+occupy, and on what conditions the vacant lands within those
+boundaries? Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers,
+lakes, bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as
+appertaining to its domain?  Here are rights that it could not have
+derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed them in the
+so-called state of nature.  The concocters of the theory evidently
+overlooked these rights, or considered them of no importance.  They
+seem never to have contemplated the existence of territorial states, or
+the division of mankind into nations fixed to the soil.  They seem not
+to have supposed the earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of
+their followers pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of
+a nation are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy them, without
+leave asked of the national authority or granted.  The American people
+retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory habits
+of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they settled on the
+banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern Ocean, in Scania, or
+came in contact with the Graeco-Roman civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations are
+fixed to the soil.  The territory is defined, and is the domain of the
+state, from which all private proprietors hold their title-deeds.
+Individual proprietors hold under the state, and often hold more, than
+they occupy; but it retains in all private estates the eminent domain,
+and prohibits the alienation of land to one who is not a citizen.  It
+defends its domain, its public unoccupied lands, and the lands owned by
+private individuals, against all foreign powers.  Now whence, if
+government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it get
+this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even its
+unoccupied lands as trespassers?  In the state of nature the
+territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are restricted to
+the portion of land they occupy with their rude culture, and with their
+flocks and herds, and in civilized nations to what they hold from the
+state, and, therefore, the right as held and defended by all nations,
+and without which the nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is
+and can be no state, could never have been derived from individuals.
+The earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the sacred
+territory, to which the state and all political power are attached.
+Whence did Rome become a landholder, and the governing people a
+territorial people?  Whence does any nation become a territorial nation
+and lord of the domain?  Certainly never by the cession of individuals,
+and hence no civilized government ever did or could originate in the
+so-called social compact.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;CONTINUED.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+III. The tendency of the last century was to individualism; that of the
+present is to socialism.  The theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and
+Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still held by many, has
+latterly been much modified, if not wholly transformed.  Sovereignty,
+it is now maintained, is inherent in the people; not individually,
+indeed, but collectively, or the people as society.  The constitution
+is held not to be simply a compact or agreement entered into by the
+people as individuals creating civil society and government, but a law
+ordained by the sovereign people, prescribing the constitution of the
+state and defining its rights and powers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This transformation, which is rather going on than completed, is, under
+one aspect at least, a progress, or rather a return to the sounder
+principles of antiquity.  Under it government ceases to be a mere
+agency, which must obtain the assassin's consent to be hung before it
+can rightfully hang him, and becomes authority, which is one and
+imperative.  The people taken collectively are society, and society is
+a living organism, not a mere aggregation of individuals.  It does not,
+of course, exist without individuals, but it is something more than
+individuals, and has rights not derived from them, and which are
+paramount to theirs. There is more truth, and truth of a higher order,
+in this than in the theory of the social compact.  Individuals, to a
+certain extent, derive their life from God through society, and so far
+they depend on her, and they are hers; she owns them, and has the right
+to do as she will with them.  On this theory the state emanates from
+society, and is supreme.  It coincides with the ancient Greek and Roman
+theory, as expressed by Cicero, already cited.  Man is born in society
+and remains there, and it may be regarded as the source of ancient
+Greek and Roman patriotism, which still commands the admiration of the
+civilized world.  The state with Greece and Rome was a living reality,
+and loyalty a religion.  The Romans held Rome to be a divinity, gave
+her statues and altars, and offered her divine worship.  This was
+superstition, no doubt, but it had in it an element of truth.  To every
+true philosopher there is something divine in the state, and truth in
+all theories.  Society stands nearer to God, and participates more
+immediately of the Divine essence, and the state is a more lively image
+of God than the individual.  It was man, the generic and reproductive
+man, not the isolated individual, that was created in the image and
+likeness of his Maker.  "And God created man in his own image; in the
+image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it enlists in
+its support the instincts, the intelligence, the living forces, and
+active tendencies of the age.  Kings, kaisers, and hierarchies are
+powerless before it, and war against it in vain.  The most they can do
+is to restrain its excesses, or to guard against its abuses.  Its
+advocates, in returning to it, sometimes revive in its name the old
+pagan superstition.  Not a few of the European democrats recognize in
+the earth, in heaven, or in hell, no power superior to the people, and
+say not only people-king but people-God.  They say absolutely, without
+any qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and
+make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in religion,
+philosophy, morals, science, and the arts.  The people not only found
+the state, but also the church.  They inspire or reveal the truth,
+ordain or prohibit worships, judge of doctrines, and decide cases of
+conscience.  Mazzini said, when at the head of the Roman Republic in
+1848, the question of religion must be remitted to the judgment of the
+people.  Yet this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in
+all civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this theory has its difficulties.  Who are the collective people
+that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign people?  The
+word people is vague, and in itself determines nothing.  It may include
+a larger or a smaller number; it may mean the political people, or it
+may mean simply population; it may mean peasants, artisans,
+shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as distinguished from the nobility;
+hired laborers or workmen as distinguished from their employer, or
+slaves as distinguished from their master or owner.  In which of these
+senses is the word to be taken when it is said, "The people are
+sovereign?"  The people are the population or inhabitants of one and
+the same country.  That is something.  But who or what determines the
+country?  Is the country the whole territory of the globe?  That will
+not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and their
+division into separate nations.  Is the territory indefinite or
+undefined?  Then indefinite or undefined are its inhabitants, or the
+people invested with the rights of society. Is it defined and its
+boundaries fixed?  Who has done it?  The people.  But who are the
+people?  We are as wise as we were at starting.  The logicians say that
+the definition of idem per idem, or the same by the same, is simply no
+definition at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people the
+sovereign people.  But who are the people constituting the nation?  The
+sovereign people?  This is only to revolve in a vicious circle.  The
+nation is the tribe or the people living under the same regimen, and
+born of the same ancestor, or sprung from the same ancestor or
+progenitor.  But where find a nation in this the primitive sense of the
+word?  Migration, conquest, and intermarriage, have so broken up and
+intermingled the primitive races, that it is more than doubtful if a
+single nation, tribe, or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face
+of the earth. A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman,
+may have the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.
+The nation is the people inhabiting the same country, and united under
+one and the same government, it is further answered.  The nation, then,
+is not purely personal, but also territorial. Then, again, the question
+comes up, who or what determines the territory?  The government?  But
+not before it is constituted, and it cannot be constituted till its
+territorial limits are determined.  The tribe doubtless occupies
+territory, but is not fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it,
+and therefore is not territorial.  But a nation, in the modern or
+civilized sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its
+jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory is
+determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question is not an idle question.  It is one of great practical
+importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither determine who are
+the sovereign people, nor who are united under one and the same
+government.  Laws have no extra-territorial force, and the officer who
+should attempt to enforce the national laws beyond the national
+territory would be a trespasser.  If the limits are undetermined, the
+government is not territorial, and can claim as within its jurisdiction
+only those who choose to acknowledge its authority.  The importance of
+the question has been recently brought home to the American people by
+the secession of eleven or more States from the Union.  Were these
+States a part of the American nation, or were they not?  Was the war
+which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so much
+treasure, a civil war or a foreign war?  Were the secessionists
+traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were they patriots fighting
+for the liberty and independence of their country and the right of
+self-government?  All on both sides agreed that the nation is
+sovereign; the dispute was as to the existence of the nation itself,
+and the extent of its jurisdiction.  Doubtless, when a nation has a
+generally recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the
+difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be got
+over; but the question here concerns the institution of government, and
+determining who constitute society and have the right to meet in
+person, or by their delegates in convention, to institute it.  This
+question, so important, and at times so difficult, the theory of the
+origin of government in the people collectively, or the nation, does
+not solve, or furnish any means of solving.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another, and a
+very grave one, to overcome.  The theory assumes that the people
+collectively, "in their own native right and might," are sovereign.
+According to it the people are ultimate, and free to do whatever they
+please.  This sacrifices individual freedom. The origin of government
+in a compact entered into by individuals, each with all and all with
+each, sacrificed the rights of society, and assumed each individual to
+be in himself an independent sovereignty.  If logically carried out,
+there could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and
+no public authority.  This new theory transfers to society the
+sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social
+despotism, or the absolutism of the state.  It asserts with sufficient
+energy public authority, or the right of the people to govern; but it
+leaves no space for individual rights, which society must recognize,
+respect, and protect.  This was the grand defect of the ancient
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The historian explores in vain the records
+of the old Greek and Roman republics for any recognition of the rights
+of individuals not held as privileges or concessions from the state.
+Society recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed
+over individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his household,
+the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over his subjects.
+The direct and indirect influence of the body of freemen admitted to a
+voice in public affairs, in determining the resolutions and action of
+the state, no doubt tempered in practice to some extent the authority
+of the state, and prevented acts of gross oppression; but in theory the
+state was absolute, and the people individually were placed at the
+mercy of the people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the
+collective people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and rights
+of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently of society,
+and not derived from God through the state.  The recognition of these
+rights by modern society is due to Christianity: some say to the
+barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire; but this last opinion is
+not well founded.  The barbarian chiefs and nobles had no doubt a
+lively sense of personal freedom and independence, but for themselves
+only.  They had no conception of personal freedom as a general or
+universal right, and men never obtain universal principles by
+generalizing particulars.  They may give a general truth a particular
+application, but not a particular truth&mdash;understood to be a particular
+truth&mdash;a general or universal application.  They are too good logicians
+for that.  The barbarian individual freedom and personal independence
+was never generalized into the doctrine of the rights of man, any more
+than the freedom of the master has been generalized into the right of
+his slaves to be free.  The doctrine of individual freedom before the
+state is due to the Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and
+worth of every human soul, the accountability to God of each man for
+himself, and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
+rather than men.  The church practically denied the absolutism of the
+state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the state, in
+converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of the state
+authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death the profession
+of the Christian faith.  In this she practically, as well as
+theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused into modern
+society the doctrine that every individual, even the lowest and
+meanest, has rights which the state neither confers nor can abrogate;
+and it will only be by extinguishing in modern society the Christian
+faith, and obliterating all traces of Christian civilization, that
+state absolutism can be revived with more than a partial and temporary
+success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so explained as
+to deny the rights of society, and to become pure individualism; but no
+political system that runs to the opposite extreme, and absorbs the
+individual in the state, stands the least chance of any general or
+permanent success till Christianity is extinguished.  Yet the assertion
+of principles which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely
+harmless, even in Christian countries.  Error is never harmless, and
+only truth can give a solid foundation on which to build. Individualism
+and socialism are each opposed to the other, and each has only a
+partial truth.  The state founded on either cannot stand, and society
+will only alternate between the two extremes.  To-day it is torn by a
+revolution in favor of socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another
+in favor of individualism, and without effecting any real progress by
+either revolution.  Real progress can be secured only by recognizing
+and building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our
+theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and independent of
+our opinions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth or
+reality.  Society has certain rights over individuals, for she is a
+medium of their communion with God, or through which they derive life
+from God, the primal source of all life; but she is not the only medium
+of man's life.  Man, as was said in the beginning, lives by communion
+with God, and he communes with God in the creative act and the
+Incarnation, through his kind, and, through nature.  This threefold
+communion gives rise to three institutions&mdash;religion or the church,
+society or the state, and property.  The life that man derives from God
+through religion and property, is not derived from him through society,
+and consequently so much of his life be holds independently of society;
+and this constitutes his rights as a man as distinguished from his
+rights as a citizen.  In relation to society, as not held from God
+through her, these are termed his natural rights, which, she must hold
+inviolable, and government protect for every one, whatever his
+complexion or his social position.  These rights&mdash;the rights of
+conscience and the rights of property, with all their necessary
+implications&mdash;are limitations of the rights of society, and the
+individual has the right to plead them against the state.  Society does
+not confer them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
+sacred and as fundamental as her own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all.  The people
+can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and act.  The
+people are not God, whatever some theorists may pretend&mdash;are not
+independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing. They are as dependent
+collectively as individually, and therefore can exist and act only as
+second cause, never as first cause. They can, then, even in the limited
+sphere of their sovereignty, be sovereign only in a secondary sense,
+never absolute sovereign in their own independent right.  They are
+sovereign only to the extent to which they impart life to the
+individual members of society, and only in the sense in which she
+imparts it, or is its cause.  She is not its first cause or creator,
+and is the medial cause or medium through which they derive it from
+God, not its efficient cause or primary source.  Society derives her
+own life from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him.  Then
+she is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God.  Her
+dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
+derivative.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This third theory does not err in assuming that the people collectively
+are more than the people individually, or in denying society to be a
+mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and no rights but what it
+derives from them; nor even in asserting that the people in the sense
+of society are sovereign, but in asserting that they are sovereign in
+their own native or underived right and might.  Society has not in
+herself the absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
+dominion either of herself or her members.  God gave to man dominion
+over the irrational creation, for he made irrational creatures for man;
+but he never gave him either individually or collectively the dominion
+over the rational creation.  The theory that the people are absolutely
+sovereign in their own independent right and might, as some zealous
+democrats explain it, asserts the fundamental principle of despotism,
+and all despotism is false, for it identifies the creature with the
+Creator.  No creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and
+consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign. This third
+theory, therefore, is untenable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers they may
+be called, reject the origin of government in the people individually
+or collectively.  Satisfied that it has never been instituted by a
+voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and confounding government
+as a fact with government as authority, maintain that government is a
+spontaneous development of nature. Nature develops it as the liver
+secretes bile, as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his
+dam.  Nature, working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops
+society, and society develops government.  That is all the secret.
+Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond the
+simple positive fact, belong to the theological or metaphysical stage
+of the development of nature, but are left behind when the race has
+passed beyond that stage, and has reached the epoch of positive
+science, in which all, except the positive fact, is held to be unreal
+and non-existent. Government, like every thing else in the universe, is
+simply a positive development of nature.  Science explains the laws and
+conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin or
+ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world of space
+and time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they only
+oppose theory to theory.  The assertion that reality for the human mind
+is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible order, is purely
+theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact. Principles are as
+really objects of science as facts, and it is only in the light of
+principles that facts themselves are intelligible.  If the human mind
+had no science of reality that transcends the sensible order, or the
+positive fact, it could have no science at all.  As things exist only
+in their principles or causes, so can they be known only in their
+principles and causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as
+they really exist.  The science that pretends to deduce principles from
+particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of reasoning to an
+order that transcends facts, and in which facts have their origin, is
+undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that the positivists are
+unquestionably right.  But to maintain that man has no intelligence of
+any thing beyond the fact, no intuition or intellectual apprehension of
+its principle or cause, is equally chimerical.  The human mind cannot
+have all science, but it has real science as far as it goes, and real
+science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
+Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not
+exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond
+the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or
+transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it
+could never know the fact itself.  The error of modern philosophers, or
+philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred
+from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has direct and
+immediate intuition of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or there
+could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we could never
+assert that development is development, or scientifically explain the
+laws and conditions of development. Development is explication, and
+supposes a germ which precedes it, and is not itself a development; and
+development, however far it may be carried, can never do more than
+realize the possibilities of the germ.  Development is not creation,
+and cannot supply its own germ.  That at least must be given by the
+Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.  If authority has
+not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
+spontaneously or otherwise.  All government has a governing will; and
+without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in
+her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality.
+Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only presents the end and
+the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain
+a law.  An imperative will, the will of a superior who has the right to
+command what reason dictates or approves, is essential to government;
+and that will is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in
+nature. So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
+government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development. Nature is
+no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual
+man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense of
+the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is placed
+by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be confounded with those
+laws of nature so-called, according to which she is productive as
+second cause, or produces her effects, which are not properly laws at
+all.  Fire burns, water flows, rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food
+nourishes, poisons kill, one substance has a chemical affinity for
+another, the needle points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said;
+that is, the effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural
+force. Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
+herself.  The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical law,
+is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on all moral
+creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason and free-will,
+and is called natural because promulgated in natural reason, or the
+reason common and essential to all moral creatures.  This is the moral
+law.  It is what the French call le droit naturell, natural right, and,
+as the theologians teach us, is the transcript of the eternal law, the
+eternal will or reason of God.  It is the foundation of all law, and
+all acts of a state that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains,
+violences rather than laws.  The moral law is no development of nature,
+for it is above nature, and is imposed on nature.  The only development
+there is about it is in our understanding of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered as
+creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in successive
+developments.  Hence the origin of space and time. There would have
+been no space if there had been no external creation, and no time if
+the creation had been completed externally at once, as it was in
+relation to the Creator.  Ideal space is simply the ability of God to
+externize his creative act, and actual space is the relation of
+coexistence in the things created; ideal time is the ability of God to
+create existences with the capacity of being completed by successive
+developments, and actual time is the relation of these in the order of
+succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated
+development ceases, and time is no more.  In relation to himself the
+Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with him there
+is no time, for there is no succession.  But in relation to itself
+creation is incomplete, and there is room for development, which may be
+continued till the whole possibility of creation is actualized.  Here
+is the foundation of what is true in the modern doctrine of progress.
+Man is progressive, because the possibilities of his nature are
+successively unfolded and actualized.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be
+scientifically ascertained and defined.  All generation is development,
+as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual. But everything is
+developed in its own order, and after its kind. The Darwinian theory of
+the development of species is not sustained by science. The development
+starts from the germ, and in the germ is given the law or principle of
+the development. From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or
+the linden.  Every kind generates its kind, never another.  But no
+development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result alone of
+the inherent energy or force of the germ developed. There is not only a
+solidarity of race, but in some sense of all races, or species; all
+created things are bound to their Creator, and to one another.  One and
+the same law or principle of life pervades all creation, binding the
+universe together in a unity that copies or imitates the unity of the
+Creator.  No creature is isolated from the rest, or absolutely
+independent of others.  All are parts of one stupendous whole, and each
+depends on the whole, and the whole on each, and each on each.  All
+creatures are members of one body, and members one of another.  The
+germ of the oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can
+never grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself
+in motion.  Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is absolutely
+deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will you watch for its
+germination.  Germinate it cannot without some external influence, or
+communion, so to speak, with the elements from which it derives its
+sustenance and support.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There can be no absolutely spontaneous development.  All things are
+doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it is an
+active force of some sort; but only God himself alone suffices for his
+own activity.  All created things are dependent, have not their being
+in themselves, and are real only as they participate, through the
+creative act, of the Divine being.  The germ can no more be developed
+than it could exist without God, and no more develop itself than it
+could create itself.  What is called the law of development is in the
+germ; but that law or force can operate only in conjunction with
+another force or other forces.  All development, as all growth, is by
+accretion or assimilation.  The assimilating force is, if you will, in
+the germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
+Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
+supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and knows
+that to raise a crop of corn, he must plant the seed in a soil duly
+prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for its germination,
+growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening.  In all created things, in
+all things not complete in themselves, in all save God, in whom there
+is no development possible, for He is, as say the schoolmen, most pure
+act, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, the same law holds
+good.  Development is always the resultant of two factors, the one the
+thing itself, the other some external force co-operating with it,
+exciting it, and aiding it to act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient and
+adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can begin the
+Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural when the end is
+supernatural.  The principle of life in all orders is the same, and
+human activity no more suffices for itself in one order than in another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a civilized
+state without communion in some form with a people already civilized,
+and why there is no moral or intellectual development and progress
+without education and instruction, consequently without instructors and
+educators.  Hence the value of tradition; and hence, as the first man
+could not instruct himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper
+philosophy than is dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain
+that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a
+full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full
+activity.  Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain
+some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty
+them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe
+to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of
+every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to
+work in iron, to erect a shelter from the storm, and to build a fire to
+warm them and to cook their food.  The common sense, as well as the
+common traditions of mankind, refuses to accept the doctrine that men
+are developed without foreign aid, or progressive without divine
+assistance. Nature of herself can no more develop government than it
+can language.  There can be no language without society, and no society
+without language.  There can be no government without society, and no
+society without government of some sort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But even if nature could spontaneously develop herself, she could never
+develop an institution that has the right to govern, for she has not
+herself that right.  Nature is not God, has not created us, therefore
+has not the right of property in us.  She is not and cannot be our
+sovereign.  We belong not to her, nor does she belong to herself, for
+she is herself creature, and belongs to her Creator.  Not being in
+herself sovereign, she cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she
+develop government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for
+government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is distinct
+from that which is governed; but natural developments are nature, and
+indistinguishable from her.  The governor and the governed, the
+restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be identical.
+Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction in terms.  When an
+individual is said to govern himself, he is never understood to govern
+himself in the sense in which he is governed.  He by his reason and
+will governs or restrains his appetites and passions.  It is man as
+spirit governing man as flesh, the spiritual mind governing the carnal
+mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Natural developments cannot in all cases be even allowed to take their
+own course without injury to nature herself.  "Follow nature" is an
+unsafe maxim, if it means, leave nature to develop herself as she will,
+and follow thy natural inclinations.  Nature is good, but inclinations
+are frequently bad.  All our appetites and passions are given us for
+good, for a purpose useful and necessary to individual and social life,
+but they become morbid and injurious if indulged without restraint.
+Each has its special object, and naturally seeks it exclusively, and
+thus generates discord and war in the individual, which immediately
+find expression in society, and also in the state, if the state be a
+simple natural development.  The Christian maxim, Deny thyself, is far
+better than the Epicurean maxim, Enjoy thyself, for there is no real
+enjoyment without self-denial.  There is deep philosophy in Christian
+asceticism, as the Positivists themselves are aware, and even insist.
+But Christian asceticism aims not to destroy nature, as voluptuaries
+pretend, but to regulate, direct, and restrain its abnormal
+developments for its own good.  It forces nature in her developments to
+submit to a law which is not in her, but above her.  The Positivists
+pretend that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that
+cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and restrains
+natural development.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of nature, and
+at another the law of nature with nature herself, and take what is
+called the natural law to be a natural development. Here is their
+mistake, as it is the mistake of all who accept naturalistic theories.
+Society, no doubt, is authorized by the law of nature to institute and
+maintain government.  But the law of nature is not a natural
+development, nor is it in nature, or any part of nature.  It is not a
+natural force which operates in nature, and which is the developing
+principle of nature.  Do they say reason is natural, and the law of
+nature is only reason? This is not precisely the fact.  The natural law
+is law proper, and is reason only in the sense that reason includes
+both intellect and will, and nobody can pretend that nature in her
+spontaneous developments acts from intelligence and volition. Reason,
+as the faculty of knowing, is subjective and natural; but in the sense
+in which it is coincident with the natural law, it is neither
+subjective nor natural, but objective and divine, and is God affirming
+himself and promulgating his law to his creature, man.  It is, at
+least, an immediate participation of the divine by which He reveals
+himself and His will to the human understanding, and is not natural,
+but supernatural, in the sense that God himself is supernatural.  This
+is wherefore reason is law, and every man is bound to submit or conform
+to reason.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That legitimate governments are instituted under the natural law is
+frankly conceded, but this is by no means the concession of government
+as a natural development.  The reason and will of which the natural law
+is the expression are the reason and will of God.  The natural law is
+the divine law as much as the revealed law itself, and equally
+obligatory.  It is not a natural force developing itself in nature,
+like the law of generation, for instance, and therefore proceeding from
+God as first cause, but it proceeds from God as final cause, and is,
+therefore, theological, and strictly a moral law, founding moral rights
+and duties.  Of course, all morality and all legitimate government rest
+on this law, or, if you will, originate in it.  But not therefore in
+nature, but in the Author of nature.  The authority is not the
+authority of nature, but of Him who holds nature in the hollow of His
+hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+V. In the seventeenth century a class of political writers who very
+well understood that no creature, no man, no number of men, not even,
+nature herself, can be inherently sovereign, defended the opinion that
+governments are founded, constituted, and clothed with their authority
+by the direct and express appointment of God himself.  They denied that
+rulers hold their power from the nation; that, however oppressive may
+be their rule, that they are justiciable by any human tribunal, or that
+power, except by the direct judgment of God, is amissible.  Their
+doctrine is known in history as the doctrine of "the divine right of
+kings, and passive obedience."  All power, says St. Paul, is from God,
+and the powers that be are ordained of God, and to resist them is to
+resist the ordination of God.  They must be obeyed for conscience' sake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would, perhaps, be rash to say that this doctrine had never been
+broached before the seventeenth century, but it received in that
+century, and chiefly in England, its fullest and most systematic
+developments.  It was patronized by the Anglican divines, asserted by
+James I. of England, and lost the Stuarts the crown of three kingdoms.
+It crossed the Channel, into France, where it found a few hesitating
+and stammering defenders among Catholics, under Louis XIV., but it has
+never been very generally held, though it has had able and zealous
+supporters. In England it was opposed by all the Presbyterians,
+Puritans, Independents, and Republicans, and was forgotten or abandoned
+by the Anglican divines themselves in the Revolution of 1688, that
+expelled James II. and crowned William and Mary.  It was ably refuted
+by the Jesuit Suarez in his reply to a Remonstrance for the Divine
+Right of Kings by the James I.; and a Spanish monk who had asserted it
+in Madrid, under Philip II., was compelled by the Inquisition to
+retract it publicly in the place where he had asserted it.  All
+republicans reject it, and the Church has never sanctioned it.  The
+Sovereign Pontiffs have claimed and exercised the right to deprive
+princes of their principality, and to absolve their subjects from the
+oath of fidelity.  Whether the Popes rightly claimed and exercised that
+power is not now the question; but their having claimed and exercised
+it proves that the Church does not admit the inamissibility of power
+and passive obedience; for the action of the Pope was judicial, not
+legislative.  The Pope has never claimed the right to depose a prince
+till by his own act he has, under the moral law or the constitution of
+his state, forfeited his power, nor to absolve subjects from their
+allegiance till their oath, according to its true intent and meaning,
+has ceased to bind.  If the Church has always asserted with the Apostle
+there is no power but from God&mdash;non est potestas nisi a Deo&mdash;she has
+always through her doctors maintained that it is a trust to be
+exercised for the public good, and is forfeited when persistently
+exercised in a contrary sense.  St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Suarez
+all maintain that unjust laws are violences rather than laws, and do
+not oblige, except in charity or prudence, and that the republic may
+change its magistrates, and even its constitution, if it sees proper to
+do so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That God, as universal Creator, is Sovereign Lord and proprietor of all
+created things or existences, visible or invisible, is certain; for the
+maker has the absolute right to the thing made; it is his, and he may
+do with it as he will.  As he is sole creator, he alone hath dominion;
+and as he is absolute creator, he has absolute dominion over all the
+things which he has made. The guaranty against oppression is his own
+essential nature, is in the plenitude of his own being, which is the
+plenitude of wisdom and goodness.  He cannot contradict himself, be
+other than he is, or act otherwise than according to his own essential
+nature.  As he is, in his own eternal and immutable essence, supreme
+reason and supreme good, his dominion must always in its exercise be
+supremely good and supremely reasonable, therefore supremely just and
+equitable.  From him certainly is all power; he is unquestionably King
+of kings, and Lord of lords.  By him kings reign and magistrates decree
+just things.  He may, at his will, set up or pull down kings, rear or
+overwhelm empires, foster the infant colony, and make desolate the
+populous city. All this is unquestionably true, and a simple dictate of
+reason common to all men.  But in what sense is it true?  Is it true in
+a supernatural sense?  Or is it true only in the sense that it is true
+that by him we breathe, perform any or all of our natural functions,
+and in him live, and move, and have our being?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Viewed in their first cause, all things are the immediate creation of
+God, and are supernatural, and from the point of view of the first
+cause the Scriptures usually speak, for the great purpose and paramount
+object of the sacred writers, as of religion itself, is to make
+prominent the fact that God is universal creator, and supreme governor,
+and therefore the first and final cause of all things.  But God creates
+second causes, or substantial existences, capable themselves of acting
+and producing effects in a secondary sense, and hence he is said to be
+causa causarum, cause of causes.  What is done by these second causes
+or creatures is done eminently by him, for they exist only by his
+creative act, and produce only by virtue of his active presence, or
+effective concurrence.  What he does through them or through their
+agency is done by him, not immediately, but mediately, and is said to
+be done naturally, as what he does immediately is said to be done
+supernaturally.  Natural is what God does through second causes, which
+he creates; supernatural is that which he does by himself alone,
+without their intervention or agency.  Sovereignty, or the right to
+govern, is in him, and he may at his will delegate it to men either
+mediately or immediately, by a direct and express appointment, or
+mediately through nature.  In the absence of all facts proving its
+delegation direct and express, it must be assumed to be mediate,
+through second causes.  The natural is always to be presumed, and the
+supernatural is to be admitted only on conclusive proof.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people of Israel had a supernatural vocation, and they received
+their law, embracing their religious and civil constitution and their
+ritual directly from God at the hand of Moses, and various individuals
+from time to time appear to have been specially called to be their
+judges, rulers, or kings.  Saul was so called, and so was David. David
+and his line appear, also, to have been called not only to supplant
+Saul and his line, but to have been supernaturally invested with the
+kingdom forever; but it does not appear that the royal power with which
+David and his line were invested was inamissible.  They lost it in the
+Babylonish captivity, and never afterwards recovered it.  The Asmonean
+princes were of another line, and when our Lord came the sceptre was in
+the hands of Herod, an Idumean Or Edomite.  The promise made, to David
+and his house is generally held by Christian commentators to have
+received its fulfilment in the everlasting spiritual royalty of the
+Messiah, sprung through Mary from David's line.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Christian Church is supernaturally constituted and supernaturally
+governed, but the persons selected to exercise powers supernaturally
+defined, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to the humblest parish priest
+are selected and inducted into office through human agency.  The
+Gentiles very generally claimed to have received their laws from the
+gods, but it does not appear, save in exceptional cases, that they
+claimed that their princes were designated and held their powers by the
+direct and express appointment of the god.  Save in the case of the
+Jews, and that of the Church, there is no evidence that any particular
+government exists or ever has existed by direct or express appointment,
+or otherwise than by the action of the Creator through second causes,
+or what is called his ordinary providence. Except David and his line,
+there is no evidence of the express grant by the Divine Sovereign to
+any individual or family, class or caste of the government of any
+nation or country.  Even those Christian princes who professed to reign
+"by the grace of God," never claimed that they received their
+principalities from God otherwise than through his ordinary providence,
+and meant by it little more than an acknowledgment of their dependence
+on him, their obligation to use their power according to his law and
+their accountability to him for the use they make of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The doctrine is not favorable to human liberty, for it recognizes no
+rights of man in face of civil society.  It consecrates tyranny, and
+makes God the accomplice of the tyrant, if we suppose all governments
+have actually existed by his express appointment.  It puts the king in
+the place of God, and requires us to worship in him the immediate
+representative of the Divine Being.  Power is irresponsible and
+inamissible, and however it may be abused, or however corrupt and
+oppressive may be its exercise, there is no human redress.  Resistance
+to power is resistance to God.  There is nothing for the people but
+passive obedience and unreserved submission.  The doctrine, in fact,
+denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in the
+management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human activity.
+It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes power an hereditary
+and indefeasible right, not a trust which he who holds it may forfeit,
+and of which he may be deprived if he abuses it.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;CONCLUDED.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the direct
+and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as to mean that
+civil authority is derived from God through the spiritual authority.
+The patriarch combined in his person both authorities, and was in his
+own household both priest and king, and so originally was in his own
+tribe the chief, and in his kingdom the king.  When the two offices
+became separated is not known.  In the time of Abraham they were still
+united. Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the
+earliest historical records of kings present them as offering
+sacrifices.  Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well as
+Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were held to be
+inseparable, but because they were both conferred on the same person by
+the republic.  In Egypt, in the time of Moses, the royal authority and
+the priestly were separated and held by different persons.  Moses, in
+his legislation for his nation, separated them, and instituted a
+sacerdotal order or caste.  The heads of tribes and the heads of
+families are, under his law, princes, but not priests, and the
+priesthood is conferred on and restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and
+more especially the family of his own brother Aaron.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly, and in
+all primitive nations with a separate, organized priesthood, whether a
+true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is held to be above the king,
+elects or establishes the law by which is selected the temporal chief,
+and inducts him into his office, as if he received his authority from
+God through the priesthood. The Christian priesthood is not a caste,
+and is transmitted by the election of grace, not as with the Israelites
+and all sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation.  Like Him whose
+priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father or
+mother of the priestly line.  But in being priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, they are both priests and kings, as Melchisedech was, and
+as was our Lord himself, to whom was given by his Father all power in
+heaven and in earth.  The Pope, or Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our
+Lord on earth, his representative&mdash;the representative not only of him
+who is our invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and
+Lord of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power.
+Consequently, no one can have any mission to govern in the state any
+more than in the church, unless derived from God directly or indirectly
+through the Pope or Supreme Pontiff.  Many theologians and canonists in
+the Middle Ages so held, and a few perhaps hold so still.  The bulls
+and briefs of several Popes, as Gregory VII., Innocent Ill., Gregory
+IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII., have the appearance of favoring
+it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At one period the greater part of the medieval kingdoms and
+principalities were fiefs of the Holy See, and recognized the Holy
+Father as their suzerain.  The Pope revived the imperial dignity in the
+person of Charlemagne, and none could claim that dignity in the Western
+world unless elected and crowned by him, that is, unless elected
+directly by the Pope or by electors designated by him, and acting under
+his authority.  There can be no question that the spiritual is superior
+to the temporal, and that the temporal is bound in the very nature of
+things to conform to the spiritual, and any law enacted by the civil
+power in contravention of the law of God is null and void from the
+beginning.  This is what Mr. Seward meant by the higher law, a law
+higher even than the Constitution of the United States. Supposing this
+higher law, and supposing that kings and princes hold from God through
+the spiritual society, it is very evident that the chief of that
+society would have the right to deprive them, and to absolve their
+subjects, as on several occasions he actually has done.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any great
+extent, except for a brief period, maintained by theologians or
+canonists.  The Pope conferred the imperial dignity on Charlemagne and
+his successors, but not the civil power, at least out of the Pope's own
+temporal dominions.  The emperor of Germany was at first elected by the
+Pope, and afterwards by hereditary electors designated or accepted by
+him, but the king of the Germans with the full royal authority could be
+elected and enthroned without the papal intervention or permission.
+The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples, Aragon, Muscovy,
+England, and other European states, was by virtue of feudal relations,
+not by virtue of the spiritual authority of the Holy See or the
+vicarship of the Holy Father.  The right to govern under feudalism was
+simply an estate, or property; and as the church could acquire and hold
+property, nothing prevented her holding fiefs, or her chief from being
+suzerain.  The expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in
+connection with the special relations existing between the Pope and
+emperor in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as
+their feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
+rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
+countenance to the theory in question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain temporal
+rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, as he has still
+in what is left him of the States of the Church; but they were
+exceptional or accidental relations, not the universal and essential
+relations between the church and the state.  The rights that grew out
+of these relations were real rights, sacred and inviolable, but only
+where and while the relations subsisted.  They, for the most part, grew
+out of the feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its
+barbarian conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order
+in which they originated.  Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
+rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or right
+to govern from God through her; but implied that their persons were
+sacred, and that violence to them would be sacrilege; that they held
+the Christian faith, and acknowledged themselves bound to protect it,
+and to govern their subjects justly, according to the law of God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of the two
+powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is chief of the
+spiritual society, his temporal principality, no theologian or canonist
+of the slightest respectability would argue that he derives his rights
+as temporal sovereign from his rights as pontiff.  His rights as
+pontiff depend on the express appointment of God; his rights as
+temporal prince are derived from the same source from which other
+princes derive their rights, and are held by the same tenure.  Hence
+canonists have maintained that the subjects of other states may even
+engage in war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity
+to him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but
+recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not derive
+from God through her.  St. Paul enjoins obedience to the Roman emperors
+for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that infidels and heretics
+may have legitimate government; and if she has ever denied the right of
+any infidel or heretical prince, it has been on the ground that the
+constitution and laws of his principality require him to profess and
+protect the Catholic faith.  She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic
+state no more than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has
+not condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our
+struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks
+against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the doctrine
+of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable doubt whether
+they were really rebels fighting against their legitimate sovereign or
+not.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately from
+God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the state derives
+its authority only mediately from him, in a natural mode, she asserts
+the superiority of her authority, and that, in case of conflict between
+the two powers, the civil must yield. But this is only saying that
+supernatural is above natural. But&mdash;and this is the important
+point&mdash;she does not teach, nor permit the faithful to hold, that the
+supernatural abrogates the natural, or in any way supersedes it.
+Grace, say the theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.
+The church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it,
+elevates it, and is its firmest support.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, Suarez,
+and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive their power
+from God through the people, or that the people, though not the source,
+are the medium of all political authority, and therefore rulers are
+accountable for the use they make of their power to both God and the
+people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting sovereignty
+in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a particular
+individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from it, as democracy
+is commonly explained, in understanding by the people, the people
+collectively, not individually&mdash;the organic people, or people fixed to
+a given territory, not the people as a mere population&mdash;the people in
+the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or
+despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is
+all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead
+of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people
+in their "own native right and might."  The people not being God, and
+being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
+sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.  It asserts the
+divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin. But
+as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as
+men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another;
+and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere
+belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in
+humanity alone can be a legitimate government.  Every such government
+is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great
+mistake&mdash;is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every
+error and every sin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian
+theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political
+writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Gentile philosophy had
+lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in
+so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to
+explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the most
+faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the conception
+of creation, and never gets above that of generation and formation.
+Things are produced by the Divine Being impressing his own ideas,
+eternal in his own mind, on a pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.
+Aristotle teaches substantially the same doctrine.  Things eternally
+exist as matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
+unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, from
+materia informis to materia formata.  Even the Christian Platonists and
+Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation; they assert it,
+indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of revelation, not as a fact of
+science; and hence it is that their theology and their philosophy never
+thoroughly harmonize, or at least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists,
+and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God.
+They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in
+nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural
+laws.  If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a
+supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god.  They saw no
+divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by
+natural laws. Having no conception of the creative act, they could have
+none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
+Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
+themselves.  Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
+government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally
+founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its
+institution.  Their writings may be studied with advantage on the
+constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms
+of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs,
+but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its
+authority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that
+there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a
+religious duty.  Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil
+government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind
+it.  Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate
+sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no
+man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state.  No
+man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil
+duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from
+the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or
+her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
+not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a
+convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally
+important duty of taking care of themselves.  But by asserting the
+divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority,
+clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience,
+sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any
+sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the state.
+For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
+people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
+society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
+recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
+powers&mdash;the civil and the ecclesiastical&mdash;this doctrine of the divine
+origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church
+with most disastrous consequences.  While the Roman Empire of the West
+subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East
+asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of
+Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil
+matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to
+temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his
+possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by
+the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the
+Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor,
+and owed him no civil allegiance.  He became civilly independent of the
+Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it.  To the new
+powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged
+any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his
+civil as well as spiritual independence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to
+be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their
+empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed
+them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the
+Pope's superior.  If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the
+civil power is from God, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a
+Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the
+imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
+emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and
+as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope
+be subject to the emperor in temporals.  As at the time when the
+dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven
+with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted
+practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
+ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the
+state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope
+represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme
+over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty
+itself.  Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the
+emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor
+would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the
+spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
+imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church,
+the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers
+would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy.  It would
+establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible
+governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most
+hostile to social progress.  Even the Jews could not, or would not,
+endure it, and prayed God to give them a king, that they might be like
+other nations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly
+perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and
+partly wrong.  The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of
+civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the
+supremacy of the moral order, or the law of God, without which
+governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being.  The
+real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine
+of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most
+approved theologians.  The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
+society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because
+he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is
+the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, and holds immediately
+from God; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from
+God only mediately, through second causes, or the people.  Yet, though
+derived from God only through the people, civil authority still holds
+from God, and derives its right from Him through another channel than
+the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
+sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and
+respect.  This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as
+we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she
+interprets and applies the law of God, both natural and revealed, she
+makes neither.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false
+charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic
+or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the
+representative of the civil society on the same level with the
+representative of the spiritual, or to emancipate the state from the
+law of God while they conceded the divine origin or right of
+government, they sought to effect its independence by asserting for it
+only a natural or purely human origin.  For nearly two centuries the
+most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the
+divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the
+state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
+to derive authority from man alone.  They have not only separated the
+state from the church as an external corporation, but from God as its
+internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her
+sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at
+loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil authority, but
+what is called "the right of insurrection."  Under their teaching the
+age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and
+protect society, but with those who conspire against it&mdash;the
+insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction.  The
+established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate
+authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic,
+tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God,
+and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
+not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is
+hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself
+for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the
+party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical
+or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical
+principles.  Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can
+sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right
+but might.  No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or
+what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order
+to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual
+or social progress.  The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but
+they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects
+it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be
+no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive.  In civil
+society two things are necessary&mdash;stability and movement. The human is
+the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only
+successively actualized.  But the element of stability can be found
+only in the divine, in God, in whom there is no unactualized
+possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal.  The
+doctrine that derives authority from God through the people, recognizes
+in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability
+and progress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of
+things.  It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real
+order.  It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which
+nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the
+Creator.  Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable
+without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act.
+That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first
+principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than
+in theology.  God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and
+creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
+inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being."
+All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as
+through that act they participate of his being. Through that act he is
+immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every
+creature.  The creature deriving from his creative act can no more
+continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it.  It is as
+bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that God created the universe,
+endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up,
+gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself.  It
+cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself.  It did not
+merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
+creative act.  Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no
+philosopher at all.  Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather,
+Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended
+or discontinued, or not passing over from the creature and returning to
+God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can continue
+to exist, act, or live only by participating through it of his divine
+being.  There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in
+every creature, and therefore it is that God is worshipped in his works
+without idolatry.  But he creates substantial existences capable of
+acting as second causes.  Hence, in all living things there is in their
+life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human
+life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the
+human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great
+Christian theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
+government.  Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence
+of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to
+build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God.  A
+government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in
+the air.  It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much
+as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they
+really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they
+accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God.
+What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason,
+without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real,
+living God himself. Hence government, like man himself, participates of
+the divine being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the
+same time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
+authority with freedom, and stability with progress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
+inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for
+it.  It is not their own.  If it were their own they might do with it
+as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an
+account; but holding it as a trust from God, they are under his law,
+and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes.  Civil rulers, holding
+their authority from God through the people, are accountable for it
+both to Him and to them.  If they abuse it they are justiciable by the
+people and punishable by God himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad government, or
+what in modern times is called the responsibility of power.  At the
+same time the state is guarantied against sedition, insurrection,
+rebellion, revolution, by the elevation of the civic virtues to the
+rank of religious, virtues, and making loyalty a matter of conscience.
+Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign
+auxiliary, but as integral in the political order itself.  Religion
+sustains the state, not because it externally commands us to obey the
+higher powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because
+it trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
+resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but because it
+and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, though distinct,
+parts of one and the same whole.  The church and the state, as
+corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their
+spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state
+the church; but both are from God, and both work to the same end, and
+when each is rightly understood there is no antithesis or antagonism
+between them. Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in
+serving the church.  He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his
+country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith.  Civic
+virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without
+which there are no religious virtues, since no man who loves not his
+brother does or can love God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because it has
+not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and the via
+inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the nation, at its
+command.  The individual has, indeed, only moral guaranties against the
+abuse of power by the sovereign people, which may no doubt sometimes
+prove insufficient.  But moral guaranties are always better than none,
+and there are none where the people are held to be sovereign in their
+own native right and might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside
+of the constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
+since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
+criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
+infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
+against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what they
+please, they can do no wrong.  This would place the individual at the
+mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however
+oppressed or cruelly treated.  This would establish the absolute
+despotism of the state, and deny every thing like the natural rights of
+man, or individual and personal freedom, as has already been shown.
+Now as men do take part in government, and as men, either individually
+or collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never to
+be expected, under any possible constitution or form of government,
+that authority will always be wisely and justly exercised, that wrong
+will ever be done, and the rights of individuals never in any instance
+be infringed; but with the clear understanding that all power is of
+God, that the political sovereignty is vested in the people or the
+collective body, that the civil rulers hold from God through them and
+are responsible to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is
+all the guaranty against the abuse of power by the nation, the
+political or organic people, that the nature of the case admits.  The
+nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you get in
+the government all the available wisdom and virtue the nation has, and
+more is never, under any form or constitution of government,
+practicable or to be expected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king reigns, not
+governs."  The people, though sovereign under God, are not the
+government.  The government is in their name and by virtue of authority
+delegated from God through them, but they are not it, are not their own
+ministers.  It is only when the people forget this and undertake to be
+their own ministers and to manage their own affairs immediately by
+themselves instead of selecting agents to do it for them, and holding
+their agents to a strict account for their management, that they are
+likely to abuse their power or to sanction injustice.  The nation may
+be misled or deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular
+courtiers, but as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all
+natural rights.  The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak
+in their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.
+L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France, and while
+that was conceded the French nation could have in its government no
+more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at least no more than he
+could appreciate.  And under his government France was made responsible
+for many deeds that the nation would never have sanctioned, if it bad
+been recognized as the depositary of the national sovereignty, or as
+the French state, and answerable to God for the use it made of
+political power, or the conduct of its government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force in the
+nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong, for if the
+sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can rightly command or
+authorize the employment of force, and all commissions must run in its
+name.  Written constitutions alone will avail little, for they emanate
+from the people, who can disregard them, if they choose, and alter or
+revoke them at will. The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the
+state must after all be on moral guaranties.  In the very nature of the
+case there are and can be no other.  But these, placed in a clear
+light, with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found
+insufficient.  Hence the necessity for the protection, not of authority
+simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the liberty of religion
+and intelligence in the nation, of the general understanding that the
+nation holds its power to govern as a trust from God, and that to God
+through the people all civil rulers are strictly responsible.  Let the
+mass of the people in any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism
+of atheism, or lose themselves in that supreme sophism called
+pantheism, the grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism,
+and liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty, and
+perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among savages,
+would be lost and irrecoverable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of the
+case.  It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the divine
+origin of government in the sense that the origin of nature is divine;
+it derives it from God through the people, collectively, or as society,
+and therefore concedes it a natural, human, and social element, which
+distinguishes it from pure theocracy.  It, however, does not explain
+how authority comes from God to the people.  The ruler, king, prince,
+or emperor, holds from God through the people, but how do the people
+themselves hold from God?  Mediately or immediately?  If mediately,
+what is the medium?  Surely not the people themselves. The people can
+no more be the medium than the principle of their own sovereignty. If
+immediately, then God governs in them as he does in the church, and no
+man is free to think or act contrary to popular opinion, or in any case
+to question the wisdom or justice of any of the acts of the state,
+which is arriving at state absolutism by another process.  Besides,
+this would theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all
+human intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall
+into either pantheism or atheism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority, is
+derived by the collective people or society, from God through the law
+of nature.  Rulers hold from God through the people or nation, and the
+people or nation hold from God through the natural law.  How nations
+are founded or constituted, or a particular people becomes a sovereign
+political people, invested with the rights of society, will be
+considered in following chapters.  Here it suffices to say that
+supposing a political people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the
+community, not supernaturally, or by an external supernatural
+appointment, as the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural
+law, or law by which God governs the whole moral creation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They who assert the origin of government in nature are right, so far as
+they derive it from God through the law of nature, and are wrong only
+when they understand by the law of nature the physical force or forces
+of nature, which are not laws in the primary and proper sense of the
+term.  The law of nature is not the order or rule of the divine action
+in nature which is rightfully called providence, but is, as has been
+said, law in its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of
+nature, as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his
+creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is called
+natural, because promulgated through the reason common to all men.
+Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first man,
+supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and confirmed by
+Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian code itself.  Man
+needs even yet instruction in relation to matters lying within the
+range of natural reason, or else secular schools, colleges, and
+universities would be superfluous, and manifestly the instructor of the
+first man could have been only the Creator himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam to us
+through two channels&mdash;reason, which is in every man, and in immediate
+relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the primitive
+instruction embodied in language and what the Romans call jus gentium,
+or law common to all civilized nations.  Under this law, whose
+prescriptions are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal
+jurisprudence, nations are providentially constituted, and invested
+with political sovereignty; and as they are constituted under this law
+and hold from God through it, it defines their respective rights and
+powers, their limitation and their extent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the
+people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or political
+society.  It is vested in the political community or nation, not in an
+individual, or family, or a class, because, under the natural law, all
+men are equal, as they are under the Christian law, and one man has, in
+his own right, no authority over another.  The family has in the father
+a natural chief, but political society has no natural chief or chiefs.
+The authority of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when
+his children have attained to majority, have married and become heads
+of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the paternal
+household.  The recognition of the authority of the father beyond the
+limits of his own household, is, if it ever occurs, by virtue of the
+ordinance, the consent, express or tacit, of the political society.
+There are no natural-born political chiefs, and wherever we find men
+claiming or acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the
+Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or
+constitution of the people or the nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically developed
+from the authority of the patriarchs, and have unquestionably been
+sustained by an equally false development of the right of property,
+especially landed property.  The owner of the land, or he who claimed
+to own it, claimed as an incident of his ownership the right to govern
+it, and consequently to govern all who occupied it.  But however valid
+may be the landlord's title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can
+own any thing in land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the
+law of nature no political right.  Property, like all natural rights,
+is entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.
+Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a
+question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme
+political authority.  It was the basis, and almost exclusive basis, in
+the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in most states.
+France and the United States are the principal exceptions in
+Christendom.  Property alone, or coupled with birth, is made elsewhere
+in some form a basis of political power, and where made so by the
+sovereign authority, it is legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for
+it takes from the weak and gives to the strong.  The rich have in their
+riches advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the
+state any additional advantage.  An aristocracy, in the sense of
+families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services, wealth,
+cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable in every
+nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief support, but they
+need and should receive no political recognition.  They should form no
+privileged class in the state or political society.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation,
+and the constitution of the government.  The constitution of the
+government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the
+constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its
+origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through
+historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the
+other in historical fact.  The nation must exist, and exist as a
+political community, before it can give itself a constitution; and no
+state, any more than an individual, can exist without a constitution of
+some sort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The distinction between the providential constitution of the people and
+the constitution of the government, is not always made.  The
+illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers
+who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in
+his work on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions,
+maintains that constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all
+human agency from their formation and growth.  Disgusted with French
+Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much,
+and deeply wedded to monarchy in both  church and state, he had the
+temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal families for the
+government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a
+good government without a king who has descended from one of those
+divinely created royal families.  It was with some such thought, most
+likely, that a French journalist, writing home from the United States,
+congratulated the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army,
+so that when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to
+do, they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
+emperor.  Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the
+descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the
+French, a decided parvenu.  Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a
+parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no
+peer among any of the descendants of the old royal families of Europe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that constitutions
+are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once.
+But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its constitution
+by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done
+so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse.  If the
+constitution once given is fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly
+divine, and contain no human element, and the people have and can have
+no hand in their own government&mdash;the fundamental objection to the
+theocratic constitution of society.  To assume it is to transfer to
+civil society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
+constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or supernatural
+providence, and to maintain that the divine sovereignty governs in
+civil society immediately and supernaturally, as in the spiritual
+society.  But such is not the fact.  God governs the nation by the
+nation itself, through its own reason and free-will.  De Maistre is
+right only as to the constitution the nation starts with, and as to the
+control which that constitution necessarily exerts over the
+constitutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential
+constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a convention
+of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the only constitution,
+both of the people and the government.  Prior to its adoption there is
+no government, no state, no political community or authority.
+Antecedently to it the people are an inorganic mass, simply
+individuals, without any political or national solidarity.  These
+individuals, they suppose, come together in their own native right and
+might, organize themselves into a political community, give themselves
+a constitution, and draw up and vote rules for their government, as a
+number of individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve
+themselves into a temperance society or a debating club.  This might do
+very well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating
+club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join or not
+as they please, and which they are bound to obey no farther and no
+longer than suits their convenience.  But the state is a power, a
+sovereignty; speaks to all within its jurisdiction with an imperative
+voice; commands, and may use physical force to compel obedience, when
+not voluntarily yielded. Men are born its subjects, and no one can
+withdraw from it without its express or tacit permission, unless for
+causes that would justify resistance to its authority.  The right of
+subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a
+tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and
+warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the
+right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and
+authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to
+the state, and is bound to it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a
+territory or country under one political head is a truth; but "the
+solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or political
+authority of their respective countries, so eloquently preached a few
+years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only a falsehood, but a
+falsehood destructive of all government and of all political
+organization.  Kossuth's doctrine supposes the people, or the
+populations of all countries, are, irrespective of their governments,
+bound together in solido, each for all and all for each, and therefore
+not only free, but bound, wherever they find a population struggling
+nominally for liberty against its government, to rush with arms in
+their hands to its assistance&mdash;a doctrine clearly incompatible with any
+recognition of political authority or territorial rights.  Peoples or
+nations commune with each other only through the national authorities,
+and when the state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its
+subjects are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention
+on either side.  There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, more
+or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of the
+populations with and through their governments, not without them.
+Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals of one and
+the same nation.  These are all bound together, all for each and each
+for all.  The individual is born into society and under the government,
+and without the authority of the government, which represents all and
+each, he cannot release himself from his obligations.  The state is
+then by no means a voluntary association.  Every one born or adopted
+into it is bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from
+it, unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no
+protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for his
+rights of conscience.  This is Vattel's doctrine, and the dictate of
+common sense.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation for
+itself is a law&mdash;the organic or fundamental law, if you will, but a
+law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power. That sovereign
+power must exist before it can act, and it cannot exist, if vested in
+the people or nation, without a constitution, or without some sort of
+political organization of the people or nation.  There must, then, be
+for every state or nation a constitution anterior to the constitution
+which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives itself
+derives all its vitality and legal force.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, for
+creation and providence are simply the expression of the Supreme Logic,
+the Logos, by whom all things are made.  Nations have originated in
+various ways, but history records no instance of a nation existing as
+an inorganic mass organizing itself into a political community.  Every
+nation, at its first appearance above the horizon, is found to have an
+organization of some sort. This is evident from the only ways in which
+history shows us nations originating.  These ways are: 1. The union of
+families in the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The
+migration of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.
+4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial,
+religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt, separation,
+and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling of the conquerors
+and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a new people.  These are all
+the ways known to history, and in none of these ways does a people,
+absolutely destitute of all organization, constitute itself a state,
+and institute and carry on civil government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet incipient
+states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a
+centre of social life of their own.  The families and tribes that
+migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and
+tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time.  The Celtic tribes
+retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar
+Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and
+in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth.  It subsists still in
+the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or
+Kabyles of Africa.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, at
+least under, the authority of the mother country, whose political
+constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry with them.  They
+receive from the parent state a political organization, which, though
+subordinate, yet constitutes them embryonic states, with a unity,
+individuality, and centre of public life in themselves, and which, when
+they are detached and recognized as independent, render them complete
+states.  War and conquest effect great national changes, but do not,
+strictly speaking, create new states.  They simply extend and
+consolidate the power of the conquering state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but only
+when they have previously existed as such, and have retained the
+tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when the
+administration has erected them into real though dependent political
+communities.  A portion of the people of a state not so erected or
+organized, that has in no sense had a distinct political existence of
+its own, has never separated from the national body and formed a new
+and independent nation.  It cannot revolt; it may rise up against the
+government, and either revolutionize and take possession of the state,
+or be put down by the government as an insurrection.  The amalgamation
+of the conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies
+the institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation or
+political community.  The English of to-day are very different from
+both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time of Richard
+Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or political
+community.  England is still England.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been cut up
+into several separate and independent nations, but because its several
+provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman arms, been
+independent nations or tribes, and more especially because the
+conquerors themselves were divided into several distinct nations or
+confederacies.  If the barbarians had been united in a single nation or
+state, the Roman empire most likely would have changed masters, indeed,
+but have retained its unity and its constitution, for the Germanic
+nations that finally seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to
+destroy its name or nationality, for they were themselves more than
+half Romanized before conquering Rome.  But the new nations into which
+the empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without
+political or governmental organization, continued from the constitution
+of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or less by what was
+retained from the empire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be altered,
+or that every people starts with a constitution fully developed, as
+would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre.  The constitution of the
+family is rather economical than political, and the tribe is far from
+being a fully developed state. Strictly speaking, the state, the modern
+equivalent for the city of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed
+till men began to build and live in cities, and became fixed to a
+national territory.  But in the first place, the eldest born of the
+human race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find
+traces of the family and tribal organization long after their municipal
+existence&mdash;in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, and in Rome down
+to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the second place, the
+pastoral nations, though they have not precisely the city or state
+organization, yet have a national organization, and obey a national
+authority.  Strictly speaking, no pastoral nation has a civil or
+political constitution, but they have what in our modern tongues can be
+expressed by no other term.  The feudal regime, which was in full vigor
+even in Europe from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century,
+had nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper;
+yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, though
+a very imperfect one?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the early
+ages.  For a long time the national organizations bore unmistakable
+traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from
+the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.
+Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same
+organization.  Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and
+diffused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural
+generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations,
+it was the same.  At first the father was both priest and king, and when
+the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
+hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have
+seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had
+the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and
+integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient
+nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms
+to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark,
+followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
+establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less
+a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than
+the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in
+faith and worship.  In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary
+descent, but every thing is by election of grace.  The Christian
+dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior
+to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural
+generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of
+Christendom.  No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and,
+indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to
+have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
+were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He
+came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive
+him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the nation
+is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and
+efficient constitution of the state.  It is the source of the vitality
+of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines
+its destiny.  The constitution which a nation is said to give itself,
+is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the
+state for the government instituted under it.  Thomas Paine would admit
+nothing to be the constitution but a written document which he could
+fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.  The Abbe
+Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was
+ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than
+that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.
+Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly
+as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with
+the constitution itself. No constitution can be written on paper or
+engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up,
+and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is
+extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it&mdash;is, at best,
+legislative instead of constitutive.  The famous Magna Charta drawn up
+by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons
+at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date
+of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but
+a set of restrictions on power. The constitution is the intrinsic or
+inherent and actual constitution of the people or political community
+itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it
+from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one
+another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and
+established in accordance with any preconceived theory.  What is
+theoretic in a constitution is unreal.  The constitutions conceived by
+philosophers in their closets are constitutions only of Utopia or
+Dreamland.  This world is not governed by abstractions, for
+abstractions are nullities.  Only the concrete is real, and only the
+real or actual has vitality or force.  The French people adopted
+constitution after constitution of the most approved pattern, and amid
+bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and
+thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as
+enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had
+no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no
+element of its life. The English are great constitution-mongers&mdash;for
+other nations. They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own
+will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into
+trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it
+only an embarrassment or encumbrance.  The doctor might as well attempt
+to give an individual a new constitution, or the constitution of
+another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other constitution
+than that which it has, and with which it is born.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves
+this thesis.  The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the
+nations founded on the site of the empire, a double constitution&mdash;the
+barbaric and the civil&mdash;the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the
+Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East.  The key to all
+modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two constitutions
+and the interests respectively associated with them, which created two
+societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same
+national denomination.  The barbaric was the constitution of the
+conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and
+fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of
+barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to
+a very great extent into harmony with itself.  The Pope became a feudal
+sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.
+Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman
+constitution got the upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far
+as it could not be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.  The
+original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its
+constitution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any
+of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same process is going on in the East, though it has not advanced so
+far, having begun there several centuries later, and the Graeco-Roman
+constitution was far feebler there than in the West at the epoch of the
+conquest.  The Germanic tribes that conquered the West had long had
+close relations with the empire, had served as its allies, and even in
+its armies, and were partially Romanized.  Most of their chiefs had
+received a Roman culture; and their early conversion to the Christian
+faith facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
+constitution.  In the East it was different.  The conquerors had no
+touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet, they were
+animated with an intense hatred, which, after the conquest, was changed
+into a superb contempt, of Christians and Romans.  They had their civil
+constitution in the Koran; and the Koran, in its principles, doctrines,
+and spirit, is exclusive and profoundly intolerant.  The Graeco-Roman
+constitution was always much weaker in the East, and had far greater
+obstacles to overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the
+shock of the conquest.  Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of
+the East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily receiving
+rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying outside of the
+boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able to sustain itself.
+The Greek or Christian populations of the empire are no longer in
+danger of being exterminated or absorbed by the Mohammedan state or
+population.  They are the only living and progressive people of the
+Ottoman Empire, and their complete success in absorbing or expelling
+the Turk is only a question of time.  They will, in all present
+probability, reestablish a Christian and Roman East in much less time
+from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the
+fall of Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric
+constitution founded by its Germanic invaders.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, the Roman constitution, 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
+Institutes, 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&mdash;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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All modern European revolutions result only in reviving the Roman
+Empire, whatever the motives, interests, passions, 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&mdash;the head is at Rome&mdash;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 constitution, and
+aided the revival of Roman imperialism.  In no country do the
+revolutionists succeed in establishing 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&mdash;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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+institutions 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
+vassals and serfs have only the guaranty that a slave has against his
+owner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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, embarrasses 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 vassals of the crown singly, or, if
+not singly, in combination&mdash;and they could always combine in the
+interest of their order&mdash;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 nobles
+themselves, than was even dreamed of while the feudal regime was in
+full vigor.  Nobles were themselves free, it is conceded, but not the
+people.  The king was too weak, too restricted in his action by the
+feudal constitution 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 nobility, save when that
+nobility threatened the temporalities of the church. The only reliance,
+under God, 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Popes, under the circumstances, 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 God, 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 nobility 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 nobility&mdash;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 nobles 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Guaranties against excessive centralism are certainly needed, but the
+statesman will not seek them in the feudal organization of society&mdash;in
+a political aristocracy, whether founded on birth or private wealth,
+nor in a privileged class 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 constitution.  This was the great error of Mr. Calhoun.  No man
+saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun the utter worthlessness of simple
+paper constitutions, on which Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit
+reliance, or that the real constitution is in the state itself, in the
+manner in which the people themselves are organized; but his reliance
+was in constituting, as powers in the state, the several popular
+interests that exist, and pitting them against each other&mdash;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 passions 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
+establishing their theory, for, after all, their constitution 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.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT&mdash;CONCLUDED.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the
+constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution.
+But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the
+several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one having
+the ascendency and suppressing the rest.  In the original constitution
+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 constitution.  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
+constitution.  The effective Power, as before, remained in the senate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&mdash;a faculty Mr. Calhoun asserted 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+constitution 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
+constitution.  Retain the dictatorship 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 constitution from an early day, and already developed
+in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, 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 constitution.  There was Providence in the course
+of events, but no fatalism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+anticipated and surpassed 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 associated
+with the patrician party, which distrusted him&mdash;in vain Cicero
+declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and
+Cassius seize the assassin'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 assassination
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 assimilated.  These
+nations she at first governed as tributary states, with their own
+constitutions 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, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric
+and despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only
+partially assimilated.  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 citizenship 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The law of all possible developments is in the providential or
+congenital constitution; 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 assimilated 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 statesmanship 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 he 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 God 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
+substituting 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the constitution of the government, as distinguished from the
+state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign.  The constitution
+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 constitution of government is the constitution 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 analogous 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 God
+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 principal 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+God, are above him.  He holds his power, as the Emperor of the French
+professes to hold his, by the grace of God and the national will&mdash;the
+only title by which a king or emperor can legitimately hold power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The king or emperor not being the state, and the government, whatever
+its form or constitution, 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 institute 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 assembly and
+the constitutional government, there was no legitimate government
+standing, and the power assumed 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 principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him
+discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said.  The imperial
+constitution 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 title, and that he holds his power by a title as high and
+as perfect as there is for any prince or ruler.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 constitutional 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 constitution 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&mdash;except Lombardy, ceded to France
+by Austria, and sold to the Sardinian king&mdash;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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary,
+the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia
+has emancipated her serfs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute government according to
+its own judgment, under any form it pleases&mdash;monarchical, aristocratic,
+democratic, or mixed&mdash;vest all power in an hereditary monarch, in a
+class or hereditary nobles, 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 God 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 God 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All other forms of government are republican in their essential
+constitution, founded on public right, and held under God 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&mdash;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 constitution 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 bloody 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 constitutions do not require or admit
+it, and an attempt to introduce it in any of them would prove a failure
+and a grave evil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fit your shoes to your feet.  The law of the governmental constitution
+is in that of the nation.  The constitution of the government must grow
+out of the constitution 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
+constitutions 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 constitution from it, and harmonize it
+with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions,
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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, assassinations, massacres, 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
+constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, 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 constitution. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 constitution 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
+God, 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 multitude.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By the imperial constitution 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 God and the will of the nation," which means simply that
+he holds his authority from God, through the French people, and is
+bound to exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
+The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+title, 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 locum 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 title, 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 God 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 pronounced 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 constitution
+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.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE UNITED STATES
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Sovereignty, under God, 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 principal.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That no sovereign state can be formed by 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any State,
+saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so, withdraw from the
+Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation to the Federal
+authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere to the Federal
+government.  Secession is, then, an incontestable right; not a right
+held under the constitution or derived from the convention but a right
+held prior to it, independently of it, inherent in the State
+sovereignty, and inseparable from it.  The State is bound by the
+constitution of the Union only while she is in it, and is one of the
+States united.  In ratifying the constitution she did not part with her
+sovereignty, or with any portion of it, any more than France has parted
+with her sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation,
+by vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate heirs
+male.  The principal parts not with his power to his agent, for the
+agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power of the
+principal.  Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French people, and
+governs only by the authority of the French nation, which is as
+competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on him, when it judges
+proper, as it was to confer them.  The Union exists and governs, if the
+States are sovereign, only by the will of the State, and she is as
+competent to revoke the powers she has delegated as she was to delegate
+them.  The Union, as far as she is concerned, is her creation, and what
+she is competent to make she is competent to unmake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very
+unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests of the
+other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she in doing so
+only exercises her unquestionable right.  The other members may regret
+her action, both for her sake and their own, but they cannot accuse her
+or her citizens of disloyalty in seceding, nor of rebellion, if in
+obedience to her authority they defend their independence by force of
+arms against the Union. Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever
+owed allegiance to the Union.  Allegiance is due from the citizen to
+the sovereign state, but never from a sovereign state or from its
+citizens to any other sovereign state.  While the State is in the Union
+the citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his
+State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it and
+all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her territory.
+The repeal by the State of the act of ratification releases the citizen
+from the obligation even of obedience, and renders it criminal for him
+to yield it without her permission.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the States
+as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal to the
+language or provisions of the Federal constitution.  That constitutes
+the government, not the state or the sovereign.  It is ordained by the
+sovereign, and if the States were severally independent and sovereign
+states, that sovereign is the States severally, not the States united.
+The constitution is law for the citizens of a State only so long as the
+State remains one of the United States.  No matter, then, how clear and
+express the language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution,
+they bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.
+The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only while
+the compact is continued by the States, each for itself. The
+sovereignty of the United States as a single or political people must
+be established before any thing in the constitution can be adduced as
+denying the right of secession.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That this doctrine would deprive the General government of all right to
+enforce the laws of the Union on a State that secedes, or the citizens
+thereof, is no doubt true; that it would weaken the central power and
+make the Union a simple voluntary association of states, no better than
+a rope of sand, is no less true; but what then?  It is simply saying
+that a confederation is inferior to a nation, and that a federal
+government lacks many of the advantages of a national government.
+Confederacies are always weak in the centre, always lack unity, and are
+liable to be dissolved by the influence of local passions, prejudices,
+and interests.  But if the United States are a confederation of states
+or nations, not a single nation or sovereign state, then there is no
+remedy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the Anglo-American colonies, when their independence of Great
+Britain was achieved and acknowledged, were severally sovereign states,
+it has never since been in their power to unite and form a single
+sovereign state, or to form themselves into one indivisible sovereign
+nation.  They could unite only by mutual agreement, which gives only a
+confederation, in which each retains its own sovereignty, as two
+individuals, however closely united, retain each his own individuality.
+No sovereignty is of conventional origin, and none can emerge from the
+convention that did not enter it.  Either the states are one sovereign
+people or they are not.  If they are not, it is undoubtedly a great
+disadvantage; but a disadvantage that must be accepted, and submitted
+to without a murmur.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether the United States are one sovereign people or only a
+confederation is a question of very grave importance.  If they are only
+a confederation of states&mdash;and if they ever were severally sovereign
+states, only a confederation they certainly are&mdash;state secession is an
+inalienable right, and the government has had no right to make war on
+the secessionists as rebels, or to treat them, when their military
+power is broken, as traitors, or disloyal persons.  The honor of the
+government, and of the people who have sustained it, is then deeply
+compromised.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What then is the fact?  Are the United States politically one people,
+nation, state, or republic, or are they simply independent sovereign
+states united in close and intimate alliance, league, or federation, by
+a mutual pact or agreement? Were the people of the United States who
+ordained and established the written constitution one people, or were
+they not?  If they were not before ordaining and establishing the
+government, they are not now; for the adoption of the constitution did
+not and could not make them one.  Whether they are one or many is then
+simply a question of fact, to be decided by the facts in the case, not
+by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of jurists, or even
+by constitutional law itself.  The old Articles of Confederation and
+the later Constitution can serve here only as historical documents.
+Constitutions and laws presuppose the existence of a national sovereign
+from which they emanate, and that ordains them, for they are the formal
+expression of a sovereign will.  The nation must exist as an historical
+fact, prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign power, prior to
+the existence of written Constitutions and laws of any kind, and its
+existence must be established before they can be recognized as having
+any legal force or vitality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The existence of any nation, as an independent sovereign nation, is a
+purely historical fact, for its right to exist as such is in the simple
+fact that it does so exist.  A nation de facto is a nation de jure, and
+when we have ascertained the fact, we have ascertained the right.
+There is no right in the case separate from the fact&mdash;only the fact
+must be really a fact.  A people hitherto a part of another people, or
+subject to another sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they
+have declared themselves independent, and have organized a government,
+and are engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for
+independence.  The struggle must be practically over; the former
+sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce them to
+submission, or to bring them back under his authority, and if he
+continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the postulant must have
+proved his ability to maintain civil government, and to fulfil within
+and without the obligations which attach to every civilized nation,
+before it can be recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because
+before it is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.  The prior
+sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right, has
+lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for humanity
+demands not martyrs to lost causes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly
+philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
+nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, not a
+right antecedent to the fact.  The repugnance felt to this assertion
+arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in a strictly
+political sense, and sometimes in its original sense of tribe, and
+understanding by it not simply the body politic, but a certain relation
+of origin, family, kindred, blood, or race.  But God has made of one
+blood, or race, all the nations of men; and, besides, no political
+rights are founded by the law of nature on relations of blood, kindred,
+or family.  Under the patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some
+extent, under feudalism, these relations form the basis of government,
+but they are economical relations rather than civil or political, and,
+under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the
+household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or body
+politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse.  They are protected by
+the state, but do not found or constitute it.  The vicissitudes of
+time, the revolutions of states and empires, migration, conquest, and
+intermixture of families and races, have rendered it impracticable,
+even if it were desirable, to distribute people into nations according
+to their relations of blood or descent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no civilized nation now existing that has been, developed from
+a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most mixed are the most
+civilized.  The nearer a nation approaches to a primitive people of
+pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it is from civilization.  All
+civilized nations are political nations, and are founded in the fact,
+not on rights antecedent to the fact.  A hundred or more lost
+nationalities went to form the Roman empire, and who can tell us how
+many layers of crushed nationalities, superposed one upon another,
+serve for the foundation of the present French, English, Russian,
+Austrian, or Spanish nationalities?  What other title to independence
+and sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any European
+nation?  Every one has absorbed and extinguished&mdash;no one can say how
+many&mdash;nationalities, that once had as good a right to be as it has, or
+can have.  Whether those nationalities have been justly extinguished or
+not, is no question for the statesman; it is the secret of Providence.
+Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of
+right.  The good is sometimes overborne, and the bad sometimes
+triumphs; but it is consoling, and even just, to believe that the good
+oftener triumphs than the bad.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law. The
+nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the nation.
+Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize and apply both
+the law of nature and the law of nations, but only on the ground that
+they are included, or are presumed to be included, in the national law,
+or jurisprudence.  Doubtless, too, the nation holds from God, under the
+law of nature, but only by virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and
+when it is a nation dependent on no other, it holds from God all the
+rights and powers of any independent sovereign nation.  There is no
+right behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation
+that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights. In the
+case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part of another
+people, or subject to another people@ the right of the prior sovereign
+must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction of that right is
+necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise would be only an
+initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli. But that right ceases when
+its claimant, willingly or unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons
+it; and he does so when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows
+no ability or intention of soon renewing it with any reasonable
+prospect of success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to sovereignty,
+is founded in error.  Empty titles to states and kingdoms are of no
+validity.  The sovereignty is, under God, in the nation and the title
+and the possession are inseparable.  The title of the Palaeologi to the
+Roman Empire of the East, of the king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia,
+or the king of Spain&mdash;for they are all claimants&mdash;to the kingdom of
+Jerusalem founded by Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the
+thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the
+throne of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they
+are engrossed.  The contrary opinion, so generally entertained, belongs
+to barbarism, not to civilization.  It is in modern society a relic of
+feudalism, which places the state in the government, and makes the
+government a private estate&mdash;a private, and not a public right&mdash;a right
+to govern the public, not a right to govern held from or by the public.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by violence,
+by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right, and another may
+usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact without acquiring any right
+or legal title to it.  The man who holds the legal title has the right
+to oust him and re-enter upon his estate whenever able to do so.  Here,
+in the economical order, the fact and the right are distinguishable,
+and the actual occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.
+Holding sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very
+properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments de
+jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a prince
+does not invalidate his title.  But sovereignty, it has been shown, is
+not in the government, but in the state, and the state is inseparable
+from the public domain.  The people organized and held by the domain or
+national territory, are under God the sovereign nation, and remain so
+as long as the nation subsists without subjection to another.  The
+government, as distinguished from the state or nation, has only a
+delegated authority, governs only by a commission from the nation.  The
+revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes its
+rights.  The nation is always sovereign, and every organic people fixed
+to the soil, and actually independent of every other, is a nation.
+There can then be no independent nation de facto that is not an
+independent nation de jure, nor de jure that is not de facto.  The
+moment a people cease to be an independent nation in fact, they cease
+to be sovereign, and the moment they become in fact an independent
+nation, they are so of right. Hence in the political order the fact and
+the right are born and expire together; and when it is proved that a
+people, are in fact an independent nation, there is no question to be
+asked as to their right to be such nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the case of the United States there is only the question of fact.
+If they are in fact one people they are so in right, whatever the
+opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the decisions of courts;
+for the courts hold from the national authority, and the theories and
+opinions of statesmen may be erroneous.  Certain it is that the States
+in the American Union have never existed and acted as severally
+sovereign states. Prior to independence, they were colonies under the
+sovereignty of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed
+and acted only as states united.  The colonists, before separation and
+independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the colonies
+had they held by charter or concession from the British crown.  The
+colonists never pretended to be other than British subjects, and the
+alleged ground of their complaint against the mother country was not
+that she had violated their natural rights as men, but their rights as
+British subjects&mdash;rights, as contended by the colonists, secured by the
+English constitution to all Englishmen or British subjects.  The denial
+to them of these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and
+they defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George
+III., on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and
+the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves independent
+states indeed, but not severally independent.  The declaration was not
+made by the states severally, but by the states jointly, as the United
+States.  They unitedly declared their independence; they carried on the
+war for independence, won it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers
+and by the mother country as the United States, not as severally
+independent sovereign states.  Severally they have never exercised the
+full powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag&mdash;symbol of
+sovereignty&mdash;recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign
+treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or
+interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or confederacies
+with foreign states or with one another, and in several respects have
+been more restricted in their powers in the Union than they were as
+British colonies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete states by
+declaring and winning their independence; and if the English colonies,
+now the United States, had separately declared and won their
+independence, they would unquestionably have become separately
+independent states, each invested by the law of nature with all the
+rights and powers of a sovereign nation.  But they did not do this.
+They declared and won their independence jointly, and have since
+existed and exercised sovereignty only as states united, or the United
+States, that is, states sovereign in their union, but not in their
+separation.  This is of itself decisive of the whole question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers of
+sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as one people,
+but they were, so far as a people at all, one people even before
+independence.  The colonies were all erected and endowed with their
+rights and powers by one and the same national authority, and the
+colonists were subjects of one and the same national sovereign.  Mr.
+Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our prominent statesmen maintains
+the unity of the colonial people, adds indeed to their subjection to
+the same sovereign authority, community of origin, of language,
+manners, customs, and law.  All these, except the last, or common law,
+may exist without national unity in the modern political sense of the
+term nation.  The English common law was recognized by the colonial
+courts, and in force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial
+legislation, but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in
+English jurisprudence.  The colonists were under the Common Law,
+because they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
+This proves that they were really one people with the English people,
+though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and not a separate
+people having nothing politically in common with them but in the
+accident of having the same royal person for their king.  The union
+with the mother country was national, not personal, as was the union
+existing between England and Hanover, or that still existing between
+the empire of Austria, formerly Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary;
+and hence the British parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right
+to tax the colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in
+all cases whatsoever&mdash;a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
+principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation laws.
+The people of the several colonies being really one people before
+independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, must be so
+still, unless they have since, by some valid act, divided themselves or
+been divided into separate and independent states.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The king
+is dead!  Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never in
+abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed in
+another.  The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with
+independence, and the American took its place.  Did the sovereignty,
+which before independence was in Great Britain, pass from Great Britain
+to the States severally, or to the States united?  It might have passed
+to them severally, but did it? There is no question of law or
+antecedent right in the case, but a simple question of fact, and the
+fact is determined by determining who it was that assumed it, exercised
+it, and has continued to exercise it.  As to this there is no doubt.
+The sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the United
+States, the States united, and never by the States separately or
+severally.  Then as a fact the sovereignty that before independence was
+in Great Britain, passed, on independence to the States united, and
+reappears in all its vigor in the United States, the only successor to
+Great Britain known to or recognized by the civilized world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies,
+still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed
+into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign
+people, therefore a sovereign state or nation, and not a simple league
+or confederacy of nations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no doubt that all the powers exercised by the General
+Government, though embracing all foreign relations and all general
+interests and relations of all the States, might have been exercised by
+it under the authority of a mutual compact of the several States, and
+practically the difference between the compact theory and the national
+view would be very little, unless in cases like that of secession.  On
+the supposition that the American people are one political people, the
+government would have the right to treat secession, in the sense in
+which the seceders understand it, as rebellion, and to suppress it by
+employing all the physical force at its command; but on the compact
+theory it would have no such right.  But the question now under
+discussion turns simply on what has been and is the historical fact.
+Before the States could enter into the compact and delegate sovereign
+powers to the Union, they must have severally possessed them.  It is
+historically certain that they did not possess them before
+independence; they did not obtain them by independence, for they did
+not severally succeed to the British sovereignty, to which they
+succeeded only as States united.  When, then, and by what means did
+they or could they become severally sovereign States?  The United
+States having succeeded to the British sovereignty in the
+Anglo-American colonies, they came into possession of full national
+sovereignty, and have alone held and exercised it ever since
+independence became a fact.  The States severally succeeding only to
+the colonies, never held, and have never been competent to delegate
+sovereign powers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on the
+assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the several
+States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one nation, and,
+though divided into separate States, the people were regarded as one
+people.  The Legislature of New York, as early as 1782, calls for an
+essential change In the Articles of Confederation, as proved to be
+inadequate to secure the peace, security, and prosperity of "the
+nation."  All the proceedings that preceded and led to the call of the
+convention of 1781 were based on the assumption that the people of the
+United States were one people.  The States were called united, not
+confederated States, even in the very Articles of Confederation
+themselves, and officially the United States were called "the Union."
+That the united colonies by independence became united States, and
+formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the belief,
+the instinct of the great mass of the people.  They acted as they
+existed through State as they had previously acted through colonial
+organization, for in throwing off the British authority there was no
+other organization through which they could act.  The States, or people
+of the States, severally sent their delegates to the Congress of the
+United States, and these delegates adopted the rule of voting in
+Congress by States, a rule that might be revived without detriment to
+national unity. Nothing was more natural, then, than that Congress,
+composed of delegates elected or appointed by States, should draw up
+articles of confederation rather than articles of union, in order, if
+for no other reason, to conciliate the smaller States, and to prevent
+their jealousy of the larger States such as Virginia, Massachusetts,
+and Pennsylvania.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted
+during the transition from colonial dependence to national
+independence.  Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not a fact
+till 1782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it was signed at
+Paris.  Till then the United States were not an independent nation;
+they were only a people struggling to become an independent nation.
+Prior to that preliminary treaty, neither the Union nor the States
+severally were sovereign.  The articles were agreed on in Congress in
+1777, but they were not ratified by all the States till May, 1781, and
+in 1782 the movement was commenced in the Legislature of New York for
+their amendment. Till the organization under the constitution ordained
+by the people of the United States in 1787, and which went into
+operation in 1789, the United States had in reality only a provisional
+government, and it was not till then that the national government was
+definitively organized, and the line of demarcation between the General
+Government and the particular State governments was fixed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected by the
+American people, precisely because it was not in harmony with the
+unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation; and it was not in
+harmony with that constitution precisely because it recognized the
+States as severally sovereign, and substituted confederation for union.
+The failure of confederation and the success of union are ample proofs
+of the unity of the American nation.  The instinct of unity rejected
+State sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861.  The first and the last
+attempt to establish State sovereignty have failed, and the failure
+vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States united, not
+in the States severally.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The constitution of the United States is twofold, written and
+unwritten, the constitution of the people and the constitution of the
+government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The written constitution is simply a law ordained by the nation or
+people instituting and organizing the government; the unwritten
+constitution is the real or actual constitution of the people as a
+state or sovereign community, and constituting them such or such a
+state.  It is Providential, not made by the nation, but born with it.
+The written constitution is made and ordained by the sovereign power,
+and presupposes that power as already existing and constituted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The unwritten or Providential constitution of the United States is
+peculiar, and difficult to understand, because incapable of being fully
+explained by analogies borrowed from any other state historically
+known, or described by political philosophers.  It belongs to the
+Graeco-Roman family, and is republican as distinguished from despotic
+constitutions, but it comes under the head of neither monarchical nor
+aristocratic, neither democratic nor mixed constitutions, and creates a
+state which is neither a centralized state nor a confederacy.  The
+difficulty of understanding it is augmented by the peculiar use under
+it of the word state, which does not in the American system mean a
+sovereign community or political society complete in itself, like
+France, Spain, or Prussia, nor yet a political society subordinate to
+another political society and dependent on it. The American States are
+all sovereign States united, but, disunited, are no States at all.  The
+rights and powers of the States are not derived from the United States,
+nor the rights and powers of the United States derived from the States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The simple fact is, that the political or sovereign people of the
+United States exists as united States, and only as united States. The
+Union and the States are coeval, born together, and can exist only
+together.  Separation is dissolution&mdash;the death of both. The United
+States are a state, a single sovereign state; but this single sovereign
+state consists in the union and solidarity of States instead of
+individuals.  The Union is in each of the States, and each of the
+States is in the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is necessary to distinguish in the outset between the United States
+and the government of the United States, or the so-called Federal
+government, which the convention refused, contrary to its first
+intention to call the national government.  That government is not a
+supreme national government, representing all the powers of the United
+States, but a limited government, restricted by its constitution to
+certain specific relations and interests.  The United States are
+anterior to that government, and the first question to be settled
+relates to their internal and inherent Providential constitution as one
+political people or sovereign state.  The written constitution, in its
+preamble, professes to be ordained by "We, the people of the United
+States."  Who are this people?  How are they constituted, or what the
+mode and conditions of their political existence?  Are they the people
+of the States severally?  No; for they call themselves the people of
+the United States.  Are they a national people, really existing outside
+and independently of their organization into distinct and mutually
+independent States?  No; for they define themselves to be the people of
+the United States.  If they had considered themselves existing as
+States only, they would have said "We, the States," and if
+independently of State organization, they would have said "We, the
+people," do ordain, &amp;c.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The key to the mystery is precisely in this appellation United States,
+which is not the name of the country, for its distinctive name is
+America, but a name expressive of its political organization.  In it
+there are no sovereign people without States, and no States without
+union, or that are not united States.  The term united is not part of a
+proper name, but is simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its
+full and proper sense.  Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in
+the States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally,
+precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in the
+people collectively or as society, not in the people individually.  The
+life is in the body, not in the members, though the body could not
+exist if it had no members; so the sovereignty is in the Union, not in
+the States severally; but there could be no sovereign union without the
+States, for there is no union where there is nothing united.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is not a theory of the constitution, but the constitutional fact
+itself.  It is the simple historical fact that precedes the law and
+constitutes the law-making power.  The people of the United States are
+one people, as has already been proved: they were one people, as far as
+a people at all, prior to independence, because under the same Common
+Law and subject to the same sovereign, and have been so since, for as
+united States they gained their independence and took their place among
+sovereign nations, and as united States they have possessed and still
+possess the government.  As their existence before independence in
+distinct colonies did not prevent their unity, so their existence since
+in distinct States does not hinder them from being one people.  The
+States severally simply continue the colonial organizations, and united
+they hold the sovereignty that was originally in the mother country.
+But if one people, they are one people existing in distinct State
+organizations, as before independence they were one people existing in
+distinct colonial organizations.  This is the original, the unwritten,
+and Providential constitution of the people of the United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This constitution is not conventional, for it existed before the people
+met or could meet in convention.  They have not, as an independent
+sovereign people, either established their union, or distributed
+themselves into distinct and mutually independent States.  The union
+and the distribution, the unity and the distinction, are both original
+in their constitution, and they were born United States, as much and as
+truly so as the son of a citizen is born a citizen, or as every one
+born at all is born a member of society, the family, the tribe, or the
+nation.  The Union and the States were born together, are inseparable
+in their constitution, have lived and grown up together; no serious
+attempt till the late secession movement has been made to separate
+them; and the secession movement, to all persons who knew not the real
+constitution of the United States, appeared sure to succeed, and in
+fact would have succeeded if, as the secessionists pretended, the Union
+had been only a confederacy, and the States had been held together only
+by a conventional compact, and not by a real and living bond of unity.
+The popular instinct of national unity, which seemed so weak, proved to
+be strong enough to defeat the secession forces, to trample out the
+confederacy, and maintain the unity of the nation and the integrity of
+its domain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The people can act only as they exist, as they are, not as they are
+not.  Existing originally only as distributed in distinct and mutually
+independent colonies, they could at first act only through their
+colonial organizations, and afterward only through their State
+organizations.  The colonial people met in convention, in the person of
+representatives chosen by colonies, and after independence in the
+person of representatives chosen by States.  Not existing outside of
+the colonial or State organizations, they could not act outside or
+independently of them.  They chose their representatives or delegates
+by colonies or States, and called at first their convention a Congress;
+but by an instinct surer than their deliberate wisdom, they called it
+not the Congress of the confederate, but of the United States,
+asserting constitutional unity as well as constitutional multiplicity.
+It is true, in their first attempt to organize a general government,
+they called the constitution they devised Articles of Confederation,
+but only because they had not attained to full consciousness of
+themselves; and that they really meant union, not confederation, is
+evident from their adopting, as the official style of the nation or new
+power, united, not confederate States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was represented
+in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the fact that the several
+States, when they wished to adopt State constitutions in place of
+colonial charters, felt not at liberty to do so without asking and
+obtaining the permission of Congress, as the elder Adams informs us in
+his Diary, kept at the time; that is, they asked and obtained the
+equivalent of what has since, in the case of organizing new States,
+been called an "enabling act."  This proves that the States did not
+regard themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as
+completely sovereign only in it.  And this again proves that the
+Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living
+constitution of the people.  Even then it was felt that the
+organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be
+regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no Territory
+can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a State, and adopt
+a State constitution, without an enabling act by Congress, or its
+equivalent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into the
+Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of Kansas, if
+nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular, illicit,
+invalid, and dangerous.  Congress, of course, can condone the wrong and
+validate the act, but it were better that the act should be validly
+done, and that there should be no wrong to condone.  Territories have
+organized as States, adopted State constitutions, and instituted State
+governments under what has been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such
+sovereignty has no existence, because sovereignty is attached to the
+domain; and the domain is in the United States.  It is the offspring of
+that false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people
+personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which makes
+sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to the soil, and
+is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of power.  In all
+civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from the state, and the
+state is inseparable from the domain.  The will of the people, unless
+they are a state, is no law, has no force, binds nobody, and justifies
+no act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains
+admirably the mutual relation of the Union and the several States.  The
+people of a Territory belonging to the United States or included in the
+public domain not yet erected into a State and admitted into the Union,
+are subjects of the United States, without any political rights
+whatever, and, though a part of the population, are no part of the
+sovereign people of the United States.  They become a part of that
+people, with political rights and franchises, only when they are
+erected into a State, and admitted into the Union as one of the United
+States.  They may meet in convention, draw up and adopt a constitution
+declaring or assuming them to be a State, elect State officers,
+senators, and representatives in the State legislature, and
+representatives and senators in Congress, but they are not yet a State,
+and are, as before, under the Territorial government established by the
+General Government.  It does not exist as a State till recognized by
+Congress and admitted into the Union.  The existence of the State, and
+the rights and powers of the people within the State, depend on their
+being a State in the Union, or a State united. Hence a State erected on
+the national domain, but itself outside of the Union, is not an
+independent foreign State, but simply no State at all, in any sense of
+the term.  As there is no union outside of the States, so is there no
+State outside of the Union; and to be a citizen either of a State or of
+the United States, it is necessary to be a citizen of a State, and of a
+State in the Union.  The inhabitants of Territories not yet erected
+into States are subjects, not citizens&mdash;that is, not citizens with
+political rights.  The sovereign people are not the people outside of
+State organization, nor the people of the States severally, but the
+distinct people of the several States united, and therefore most
+appropriately called the people of the United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the peculiarity of the American constitution and is
+substantially the very peculiarity noted and dwelt upon by Mr. Madison
+in his masterly letter to Edward Everett, published in the "North
+American Review," October, 1830.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I In order to understand the true character of the constitution of the
+United States," says Mr. Madison, "the error, not uncommon, must be
+avoided of viewing it through the medium either of a consolidated
+government or of a confederated government, whilst it is neither the
+one nor the other, but a mixture of both.  And having, in no model, the
+similitudes and analogies applicable to other systems of government, it
+must, more than any other, be its own interpreter, according to its
+text and the facts in the case.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"From these it will be seen that the characteristic peculiarities of
+the constitution are: 1. The mode of its formation. 2. The division of
+the supreme powers of government between the States in their united
+capacity and the States in their individual capacities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"1. It was formed not by the governments of the component States, as
+the Federal Government, for which it was substituted, was formed; nor
+was it formed by a majority of the people of the United States as a
+single community, in the manner of a consolidated government.  It was
+formed by the States; that is, by the people in each of the States,
+acting in their highest sovereign capacity, and formed consequently by
+the same authority which formed the State constitution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Being thus derived from the same source as the constitutions of the
+States, it has within each State the same authority as the constitution
+of the State, and is as much a constitution in the strict sense of the
+term, within its prescribed sphere, as the constitutions of the States
+are within their respective spheres; but with this obvious and
+essential difference, that, being a compact among the States in their
+highest capacity, and constituting the people thereof one people for
+certain purposes, it cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the
+States individually, as the constitution of a State may be at its
+individual will.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"2. And that it divides the supreme powers of government between the
+government of the United States and the governments of the individual
+States, is stamped on the face of the instrument; the powers of war and
+of taxation, of commerce and treaties, and other enumerated powers
+vested in the government of the United States, are of high and
+sovereign a character as any of the powers reserved to the State
+governments."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Webster, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and nearly
+all the old Republicans, and even the old Federalists, on the question
+as to what is the actual constitution of the United States, took
+substantially the same view; but they all, as well as Mr. Madison
+himself, speak of the written constitution, which on their theory has
+and can have only a conventional value. Mr. Madison evidently
+recognizes no constitution of the people prior to the written
+constitution, from which the written constitution, or the constitution
+of the government, derives all its force and vitality.  The
+organization of the American people, which he knew well&mdash;no man
+better,&mdash;and which he so justly characterizes, he supposes to have been
+deliberately formed by the people themselves, through the
+convention&mdash;not given them by Providence as their original and inherent
+constitution.  But this was merely the effect of the general doctrine
+which he had adopted, in common with nearly all his contemporaries, of
+the origin of the state in compact, and may be eliminated from his view
+of what the constitution actually is, without affecting that view
+itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Madison lays great stress on the fact that though the constitution
+of the Union was formed by the States, it was formed, not by the
+governments, but by the people of the several States; but this makes no
+essential difference, if the people are the people of the States, and
+sovereign in their severalty, and not in their union.  Had it been
+formed by the State governments with the acquiescence of the people, it
+would have rested on as high authority as if formed by the people of
+the State in convention assembled.  The only difference is, that if the
+State ratified it by the legislature, she could abrogate it by the
+legislature; if in convention, she could abrogate it only in
+convention.  Mr. Madison, following Mr. Jefferson, supposes the
+constitution makes the people of the several States one people for
+certain specific purposes, and leaves it to be supposed that in regard
+to all other matters, or in all other relations, they are sovereign;
+and hence he makes the government a mixture of a consolidated
+government and a confederated government, but neither the one nor the
+other exclusively.  Say the people of the United States were one people
+in all respects, and under a government which is neither a consolidated
+nor a confederated government, nor yet a mixture of the two, but a
+government in which the powers of government are divided between a
+general government and particular governments, each emanating from the
+same source, and you will have the simple fact, and precisely what Mr.
+Madison means, when is eliminated what is derived from his theory of
+the origin of government in compact.  It is this theory of the
+conventional origin of the constitution, and which excludes the
+Providential or real constitution of the people, that has misled him
+and so many other eminent statesmen and constitutional lawyers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The convention did not create the Union or unite the States, for it was
+assembled by the authority of the United States who were present in it.
+The United States or Union existed before the convention, as the
+convention itself affirms in declaring one of its purposes to be "to
+provide for a more perfect union."  If there had been no union, it
+could not and would not have spoken of providing for a more perfect
+union, but would have stated its purpose to be to create or form a
+union.  The convention did not form the Union, nor in fact provide for
+a more perfect union; it simply provided for the more perfect
+representation or expression in the General government of the Union
+already existing.  The convention, in common with the statesmen at the
+time, recognized no unwritten or Providential constitution of a people,
+and regarded the constitution of government as the constitution of the
+state, and consequently sometimes put the state for the government.  In
+interpreting its language, it is necessary to distinguish between its
+act and its theory.  Its act is law, its theory is not.  The convention
+met, among other things, to organize a government which should more
+perfectly represent the union of the States than did the government
+created by the Articles of Confederation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The convention, certainly, professes to grant or concede powers to the
+United States, and to prohibit powers to the States; but it simply puts
+the state for the government.  The powers of the United States are,
+indeed, grants or trusts, but from God through the law of nature, and
+are grants, trusts, or powers always conceded to every nation or
+sovereign people.  But none of them are grants from the convention.
+The powers the convention grants or concedes to the United States are
+powers granted or conceded by the United States to the General
+government it assembled to organize and establish, which, as it extends
+over the whole population and territory of the Union, and, as the
+interests it is charged with relate to all the States in common, or to
+the people as a whole, is with no great impropriety called the
+government of the United States, in contradistinction from the State
+governments, which have each only a local jurisdiction. But the more
+exact term is, for the one, the general government, and for the others,
+particular governments, as having charge only of the particular
+interests of the State; and the two together constitute the government
+of the United States, or the complete national government; for neither
+the General government nor the State government is complete in itself.
+The convention developed a general government, and prescribed its
+powers, and fixed their limits and extent, as well as the bounds of the
+powers of the State or particular governments; but they are the United
+States assembled in convention that do all this, and, therefore,
+strictly speaking, no powers are conceded to the United States that
+they did not previously possess.  The convention itself, in the
+constitution it ordained, defines very clearly from whom the General
+government holds its powers.  It holds them, as we I have seen, from
+"We, the people of the United States;" not we, the people of the States
+severally, but of the States united.  If it had meant the States
+severally, it would have said, We, the States; if it had recognized and
+meant the population of the country irrespective of its organization
+into particular States, it would have said simply, We, the people.  By
+saying "We, the people of the United States," it placed the sovereign
+power where it is, in the people of the States united.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The convention ordains that the powers not conceded to the General
+government or prohibited to the particular governments, "are reserved
+to the States respectively, or to the people." But the powers reserved
+to the States severally are reserved by order of the United States, and
+the powers not so reserved are reserved to the people.  What people?
+The first thought is that they are the people of the States severally;
+for the constitution understands by people the state as distinguished
+from the state government; but if this had been its meaning in this
+place, it would have said, "are reserved to the States respectively, or
+to the people" thereof.  As it does not say so, and does not define the
+people it means, it is necessary to understand by them the people
+called in the preamble "the people of the United States." This is
+confirmed by the authority reserved to amend the constitution, which
+certainly is not reserved to the States severally, but necessarily to
+the power that ordains the constitution&mdash;"We, the people of the United
+States."  No power except that which ordains is or can be competent to
+amend a constitution of government.  The particular mode prescribed by
+the convention in which the constitution of the government may be
+amended has no bearing on the present argument, because it is
+prescribed by the States united, not severally, and the power to amend
+is evidently reserved, not indeed to the General government, but to the
+United States; for the ratification by any State or Territory not in
+the Union counts for nothing.  The States united, can, in the way
+prescribed, give more or less power to the General government, and
+reserve more or less power to the States individually.  The so-called
+reserved powers are really reserved to the people of the United States,
+who can make such disposition of them as seems to them good.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The conclusion, then, that the General government holds from the States
+united, not from the States severally, is not invalidated by the fact
+that its constitution was completed only by the ratification of the
+States in their individual capacity.  The ratification was made
+necessary by the will of the people in convention assembled; but the
+convention was competent to complete it and put it in force without
+that ratification, had it so willed.  The general practice under the
+American system is for the convention to submit the constitution it has
+agreed on to the people, to be accepted or rejected by a plebiscitum;
+but such submission, though it may be wise and prudent, is not
+necessary. The convention is held to be the convention of the people,
+and to be clothed with the full authority of the sovereign people, and
+it is in this that it differs from the congress or the legislature.  It
+is not a congress of delegates or ministers who are obliged to act
+under instructions, to report their acts to their respective sovereigns
+for approval or rejection; it is itself sovereign, and may do whatever
+the people themselves can do.  There is no necessity for it to appeal
+to a plebiscitum to complete its acts.  That the convention, on the
+score of prudence, is wise in doing so, nobody questions; but the
+convention is always competent, if it chooses, to ordain the
+constitution without appeal.  The power competent to ordain the
+constitution is always competent to change, modify, or amend it. That
+amendments to the constitution of the government can be adopted only by
+being proposed by a convention of all the States in the Union, or by
+being proposed, by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and
+ratified by three-fourths of the States, is simply a conventional
+ordinance, which the convention can change at its pleasure.  It proves
+nothing as it stands but the will of the convention.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in
+reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized on,
+since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the constitution
+emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty or compact between
+sovereign states, not an organic or fundamental law ordained by a
+single sovereign will; but this argument is inadmissible, because, as
+we have just seen, the convention is competent to ordain the
+constitution without submitting it for ratification, and because the
+convention uses sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.
+That the framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact,
+or agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held in
+regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as little
+doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly believed that they
+were constituting a real government. Mr. Madison's authority on this
+point is conclusive.  They unquestionably regarded the States, prior to
+the ratification of the constitution they proposed, as severally
+sovereign, as they were declared to be by the old Articles of
+Confederation, but they also believed that all individuals are
+sovereign prior to the formation of civil society.  Yet very few, if
+any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption
+of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
+conventional origin of all government,&mdash;the almost universal belief of
+the time among political philosophers,&mdash;the little account which they
+made of the historical facts that prove that the people of the United
+States were always one people, and that the States never existed as
+severally sovereign states.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The political philosophers of the present day do not generally accept
+the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in these pages to
+be unsound and incompatible with the essential nature of government.
+The statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the state is
+derived from the people individually, and held that sovereignty is
+created by the people in convention. The rights and powers of the
+state, they held, were made up of the rights held by individuals under
+the law of nature, and which the individuals surrendered to civil
+society on its formation. So they supposed that independent sovereign
+states might meet in convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion
+of their rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real
+government, and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of
+their sovereignty.  This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings
+of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by Mr. Webster,
+in his great speech in the Senate against the State sovereignty
+doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won for him the
+honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution&mdash;and expound it he, no
+doubt, did in the sense of its framers.  He boldly concedes that prior
+to the adoption of the constitution, the people of the United States
+were severally sovereign states, but by the constitution they were made
+one sovereign political community or people, and that the States,
+though retaining certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty
+in the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can
+originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could not
+stand; that, if the States went into the convention sovereign States,
+they came out of it sovereign States; and that the constitution they
+formed could from the nature of the case be only a treaty, compact, or
+agreement between sovereigns.  It could create an agency, but not a
+government.  The sovereign States could only delegate the exercise of
+their sovereign powers, not the sovereign powers themselves.  The
+States could agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty
+only in common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on
+the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their
+sovereignty.  Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as before
+the convention, vested in the States severally.  Hence State
+sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that cannot come
+properly before the Supreme Court of the United States for decision,
+each State is free to decide for itself, on which he based the right of
+nullification, or the State veto of acts of Congress whose
+constitutionality the State denies. Mr. Calhoun was himself no
+secessionist, but he laid down the premises from which secession is the
+logical deduction; and large numbers of young men, among the most open,
+the most generous, and the most patriotic in the country, adopted his
+premises, without being aware of this fact any more than he himself
+was, and who have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and
+in their sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebellion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and which
+attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State sovereignty, has
+thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject, and led them to
+re-examine the historical facts in the case from a different point of
+view, to see if Mr. Calhoun's theory is not as unfounded as he had
+proved Mr. Webster's theory to be.  The facts in the case really
+sustain neither, and both failed to see it: Mr. Calhoun because he had
+purposes to accomplish which demanded State sovereignty, and Mr.
+Webster because he examined them in the distorting medium of the theory
+or understanding of the statesmen of the eighteenth century.  The civil
+war has vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the
+State sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as
+far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to
+consolidation or centralism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding of the
+framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the expression will
+be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on their merits.  What binds
+is the thing done, not the theory on which it was done, or on which the
+actors explained their work either to themselves or to others.  Their
+political philosophy, or their political theory, may sometimes affect
+the phraseology they adopt, but forms no rule for interpreting their
+work.  Their work was inspired by and accords with the historical facts
+in the case, and is authorized and explained by them.  The American
+people were not made one people by the written constitution, as Mr.
+Jefferson, Mr. Madison, Mr. Webster, and so many others supposed, but
+were made so by the unwritten constitution, born with and inherent in
+them.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE CONSTITUTION&mdash;CONTINUED.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Providence, or God operating through historical facts, constituted the
+American people one political or sovereign people, existing and acting
+in particular communities, organizations, called states.  This one
+people organized as states, meet in convention, frame and ordain the
+constitution of government, or institute a general government in place
+of the Continental Congress; and the same people, in their respective
+State organizations, meet in convention in each State, and frame and
+ordain a particular government for the State individually, which, in
+union with the General government, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government within the States, as the General government, in union with
+all the particular governments, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government of the nation or whole country.  This is clearly the view
+taken by Mr. Madison in his letter to Mr. Everett, when freed from his
+theory of the origin of government in compact.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The constitution of the people as one people, and the distinction at
+the same time of this one people into particular States, precedes the
+convention, and is the unwritten constitution, the Providential
+constitution, of the American people or civil society, as distinguished
+from the constitution of the government, which, whether general or
+particular, is the ordination of civil society itself.  The unwritten
+constitution is the creation or constitution of the sovereign, and the
+sovereign providentially constituted constitutes in turn the
+government, which is not sovereign, but is clothed with just so much
+and just so little authority as the sovereign wills or ordains.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sovereign in the republican order is the organic people, or State,
+and is with us the United States, for with us the organic people exist
+only as organized into States united, which in their union form one
+compact and indissoluble whole.  That is to say, the organic American
+people do not exist as a consolidated people or state; they exist only
+as organized into distinct but inseparable States.  Each State is a
+living member of the one body, and derives its life from its union with
+the body, so that the American state is one body with many members; and
+the members, instead of being simply individuals, are States, or
+individuals organized into States.  The body consists of many members,
+and is one body, because the members are all members of it, and members
+one of another.  It does not exist as separate or distinct from the
+members, but exists in their solidarity or membership one of another.
+There is no sovereign people or existence of the United States
+distinguishable from the people or existence of the particular States
+united.  The people of the United States, the state called the United
+States, are the people of the particular States united.  The solidarity
+of the members constitutes the unity of the body.  The difference
+between this view and Mr. Madison's is, that while his view supposes
+the solidarity to be conventional, originating and existing in compact,
+or agreement, this supposes it to be real, living, and prior to the
+convention, as much the work of Providence as the existence in the
+human body of the living solidarity of its members.  One law, one life,
+circulates through all the members, constituting them a living
+organism, binding them in living union, all to each and each to all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the sovereign people, and so far the original unwritten
+constitution.  The sovereign, in order to live and act, must have an
+organ through which he expresses his will.  This organ under the
+American system, is primarily the Convention.  The convention is the
+supreme political body, the concrete sovereign authority, and exercises
+practically the whole sovereign power of the people.  The convention
+persists always, although not in permanent session.  It can at any time
+be convened by the ordinary authority of the government, or, in its
+failure, by a plebiscitum.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Next follows the Government created and constituted by the convention.
+The government is constituted in such manner, and has such and only
+such powers, as the convention ordains.  The government has, in the
+strict sense, no political authority under the American system, which
+separates the government from the convention.  All political questions
+proper, such as the elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution
+of the several departments of government, as the legislative, the
+judicial, and the executive, changing, altering, or amending the
+constitution of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a
+word, all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take
+the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the government,
+but to the convention; and where the will of the sovereign is not
+sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a new appeal to the
+convention is necessary, and may always be had. The constitution of
+Great Britain makes no distinction between the convention and the
+government.  Theoretically the constitution of Great Britain is feudal,
+and there is, properly speaking, no British state; there are only the
+estates, king, lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute
+the Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the
+plenitude of political sovereignty.  The British Parliament, composed
+of the three estates, possesses in itself all the powers of the
+convention in the American constitution, and is at once the convention
+and the government.  The imperial constitution of France recognizes no
+convention, but clothes the senate with certain political functions,
+which, in some respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his
+creature. The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God
+and the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the
+sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the
+imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not
+of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the
+people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle
+disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief
+of the government.  The senate, the council of state, the legislative
+body, and the emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have
+properly no political functions, and to give them such functions is to
+place the sovereign under his own subjects!  The real aim of the
+imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the guise of
+republicanism.  It leaves and is intended to leave the nation no way of
+practically asserting its sovereignty but by either a revolution or a
+plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is permissible only where there is no
+regular government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes no
+restriction on the power of the government.  The French imperial
+constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as well as with the
+free action of the nation.  The American constitution has all the
+advantages of both, and the disadvantages of neither.  The convention
+is not the government like the British Parliament, nor a creature of
+the state like the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a
+practical form.  By means of the convention the government is
+restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in practice
+either too great or too small, can be enlarged or contracted in a
+regular, orderly way, without resorting to a revolution or to a
+plebiscitum.  Whatever political grievances there may be, there is
+always present the sovereign convention competent to redress them.  The
+efficiency of power is thus secured without danger to liberty, and
+freedom without danger to power.  The recognition of the convention,
+the real political sovereign of the country and its separation from and
+independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most striking
+features of the American constitution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the constitution
+by the convention of the government.  This constitution, as Mr. Madison
+well observes, divides the powers conceded by the convention to
+government between the General Government and the particular State
+governments.  Strictly speaking, the government is one, and its powers
+only are divided and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.
+This division of the powers of government could never have been
+established by the convention if the American people had not been
+providentially constituted one people, existing and acting through
+particular State organizations.  Here the unwritten constitution, or
+the constitution written in the people themselves, rendered practicable
+and dictated the written constitution, or constitution ordained by the
+convention and engrossed on parchment.  It only expresses in the
+government the fact which pre-existed in the national organization and
+life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the United
+States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal
+disintegration and Roman centralism.  Misled by their prejudices and
+peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United States,
+pleading in their justification the theory of State sovereignty,
+attempted disintegration, secession, and national independence separate
+from that of the United States, but the central force of the
+constitution was too strong for them to succeed.  The unity of the
+nation was too strong to be effectually broken.  No doubt the reaction
+against secession and disintegration will strengthen the tendency to
+centralism, but centralism can succeed no better than disintegration
+has succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no
+suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent of the
+States.  The particular governments are stronger, if there be any
+difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General
+government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after
+swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward
+the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the
+government move on in its constitutional path.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism by the
+tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or obstructive
+power.  Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and wished to effect the
+same end here, where it is secured by other, more effective, and less
+objectionable means, by a State veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual
+executive, and by substituting concurrent for numerical majorities.
+Imperial Rome gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated
+all power in the hands of the emperor, became completely centralized,
+and fell.  The British constitution seeks the same end by substituting
+estates for the state, and establishing a mixed government, in which
+monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy temper, check, or balance each
+other; but practically the commons estate has become supreme, and the
+nobility govern not in the house of lords, and can really influence
+public affairs only through the house of commons.  The principle of the
+British constitution is not the division of the powers of government,
+but the antagonism of estates, or rather of interests, trusting to the
+obstructive influence of that antagonism to preserve the government
+from pure centralism.  Hence the study of the British statesman is to
+manage diverse and antagonistic parties and interests so as to gain the
+ability to act, which he can do only by intrigue, cajolery, bribery in
+one form or another, and corruption of every sort.  The British
+government cannot be carried on by fair, honest, and honorable means,
+any more than could the Roman under the antagonism created by the
+tribunitial veto.  The French tried the English system of organized
+antagonism in 1789, as a cure for the centralism introduced by
+Richelieu and Louis XIV., and again under the Restoration and Louis
+Philippe, and called it the system of constitutional guarantees; but
+they could never manage it, and they have taken refuge in unmitigated
+centralism under Napoleon III., who, however well disposed, finds no
+means in the constitution of the French nation of tempering it.  The
+English system, called the constitutional, and sometimes the
+parliamentary system, will not work in France, and indeed works really
+well nowhere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The American system, sometimes called the Federal system, is not
+founded on antagonism of classes, estates, or interests, and is in no
+sense a system of checks and balances.  It needs and tolerates no
+obstructive forces.  It does not pit section against section, the
+States severally against the General government, nor the General
+government against the State governments, and nothing is more hurtful
+than the attempt to explain it and work it on the principles of British
+constitutionalism.  The convention created no antagonistic powers; it
+simply divided the powers of government, and gave neither to the
+General government nor to the State governments all the powers of
+government, nor in any instance did it give to the two governments
+jurisdiction in the same matters. Hence each has its own sphere, in
+which it can move on without colliding with that of the other.  Each is
+independent and complete in relation to its own work, incomplete and
+dependent on the other for the complete work of government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The division of power is not between a NATIONAL government and State
+governments, but between a GENERAL government and particular
+governments.  The General government, inasmuch as it extends to matters
+common to all the States, is usually called the Government of the
+United States, and sometimes the Federal government, to distinguish it
+from the particular or State governments, but without strict propriety;
+for the government of the United States, or the Federal government,
+means, in strictness, both the General government and the particular
+Governments, since neither is in itself the complete government of the
+country.  The General government has authority within each of the
+States, and each of the State governments has authority in the Union.
+The line between the Union and the States severally, is not precisely
+the line between the General government and the particular governments.
+As, for instance, the General government lays direct taxes on the
+people of the States, and collects internal revenue within them; and
+the citizens of a particular State, and none others, are electors of
+President and Vice-President of the United States, and representatives
+in the lower house of Congress, while senators in Congress are elected
+by the State legislatures themselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The line that distinguishes the two governments is that which
+distinguishes the general relations and interests from the particular
+relations and interests of the people of the United States.  These
+general relations and interests are placed under the General
+government, which, because its jurisdiction is coextensive with the
+Union, is called the Government of the United States; the particular
+relations and interests are placed under particular governments, which,
+because their jurisdiction is only coextensive, with the States
+respectively, are called State governments.  The General government
+governs supremely all the people of the United States and Territories
+belonging to the Union, in all their general relations and interests,
+or relations and interests common alike to them all; the particular or
+State government governs supremely the people of a particular State, as
+Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey, in all that pertains to their
+particular or private rights, relations, and interests.  The powers of
+each are equally sovereign, and neither are derived from the other.
+The State governments are not subordinate to the General government,
+nor the General government to the State governments.  They are
+co-ordinate governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving
+its powers from the same sovereign authority.  In their respective
+spheres neither yields to the other.  In relation to the matters within
+its jurisdiction, each government is independent and supreme in regard
+of the other, and subject only to the convention.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The powers of the General government are the power&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the
+debts and provide for the general welfare of the United States; to
+borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce
+with foreign nations, among the several States, and with the Indian
+tribes; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws
+on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin
+money and regulate the value thereof, and fix the standard of weights
+and measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the
+securities and current coin of the United States; to establish
+post-offices and post-roads; to promote the progress of science and of
+the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors
+the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to
+define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and
+offences against the law of nations; to declare war, grant letters of
+marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and
+water; to raise and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to
+make rules for the government of the land and naval forces; to provide
+for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union,
+suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; to provide for organizing,
+arming, and disciplining the militia, and of governing such part of
+them as may be employed in the service of the United States; to
+exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such
+district, not exceeding ten miles square, as may by cession of
+particular States and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of
+the government of the United States, and to exercise a like authority
+over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the
+State in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines,
+arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings; and to make all laws
+which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the
+foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in
+the government of the United States, or in any department or office
+thereof.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In addition to these, the General government is clothed with the
+treaty-making power, and the whole charge of the foreign relations of
+the country; with power to admit new States into the Union; to dispose
+of and make all needful rules and regulations concerning the territory
+and all other property belonging to the United States; to declare, with
+certain restrictions, the punishment of treason, the constitution
+itself defining what is treason against the United States; and to
+propose, or to call, on the application of the legislatures of
+two-thirds of all the states, a convention for proposing amendments to
+this constitution; and is vested with supreme judicial power, original
+or appellate, in all cases of law and equity arising under this
+constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made or to be
+made under their authority, in all cases affecting ambassadors, other
+public ministers, and consuls, in all cases of admiralty and maritime
+jurisdiction, in all controversies to which the United States shall be
+a party, all controversies between two or more States, between a State
+and citizens of another State, between citizens of different States,
+between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of
+different States, and between a State or the citizens thereof and
+foreign states, citizens, or subjects.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These, with what is incidental to them, and what is necessary and
+proper to carry them into effect, are all the positive powers with
+which the convention vests the General government, or government of the
+United States, as distinguished from the governments of the particular
+States; and these, with the exception of what relates to the district
+in which it has its seat, and places of forts, magazines, &amp;c., are of a
+general nature, and restricted to the common relations and interests of
+the people, or at least to interests and relations which extend beyond
+the limits of a particular State.  They are all powers that regard
+matters which extend beyond not only the individual citizen, but the
+individual State, and affect alike the relations and interests of all
+the States, or matters which cannot be disposed of by a State
+government without the exercise of extra-territorial jurisdiction.
+They give the government no jurisdiction of questions which affect
+individuals or citizens only in their private and domestic relations
+which lie wholly within a particular State.  The General government
+does not legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or
+things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance, wills,
+the transferrence or transmission of property, real or personal; it can
+charter no private corporations, out of the District of Columbia, for
+business, literary, scientific, or eleemosynary purposes, establish no
+schools, found no colleges or universities, and promote science and the
+useful arts only by securing to authors and inventors for a time the
+exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.  The United States
+Bank was manifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present
+so-called national banks.  The United States Bank was a private or
+particular corporation, and the present national banks are only
+corporations of the same sort, though organized under a general law.
+The pretence that they are established to supply a national currency,
+does not save their constitutionality, for the convention has not given
+the General government the power nor imposed on it the duty of
+furnishing a national currency. To coin money, and regulate the value
+thereof, is something very different from authorizing private companies
+to issue bank notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private
+property, or even on what is called a specie basis.  To claim the power
+under the general welfare clause would be a simple mockery of good
+sense.  It is no more for the general welfare than any other successful
+private business.  The private welfare of each is, no doubt, for the
+welfare of all, but not therefore is it the "general welfare," for what
+is private, particular in its nature, is not and cannot be general.  To
+understand by general welfare that which is for the individual welfare
+of all or the greater number, would be to claim for the General
+government all the powers of government, and to deny that very division
+of powers which is the crowning merit of the American system.  The
+general welfare, by the very force of the words themselves, means the
+common as distinguished from the private or individual welfare.  The
+system of national banks may or may not be a good and desirable system,
+but it is difficult to understand the constitutional power of the
+General government to establish it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the ground that its powers are general, not particular, the General
+government has no power to lay a protective tariff.  It can lay a
+tariff for revenue, not for protection of home manufactures or home
+industry; for the interests fostered, even though indirectly
+advantageous to the whole people, are in their nature private or
+particular, not general interests, and chiefly interests of private
+corporations and capitalists.  Their incidental or even consequential
+effects do not change their direct and essential nature.  So with
+domestic slavery.  Slavery comes under the head of private rights,
+whether regarded on the side of the master or on the side of the slave.
+The right of a citizen to hold a slave, if a right at all, is the
+private right of property, and the right of the slave to his freedom is
+a private and personal right, and neither is placed under the safeguard
+of the General government, which has nowhere, unless in the District of
+Columbia and the places over which it has exclusive legislative power
+in all cases whatsoever, either the right to establish it or to abolish
+it, except perhaps under the war power, as a military necessity, an
+indemnity for the past, or a security for the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This applies to what are called Territories as well as to the States.
+The right of the government to govern the Territories in regard to
+private and particular rights and interests, is derived from no express
+grant of power, and is held only ex necessitate&mdash;the United States
+owning the domain, and there being no other authority competent to
+govern them.  But, as in the case of all powers held ex necessitate,
+the power is restricted to the absolute necessity in the case.  What
+are called Territorial governments, to distinguish them from the State
+governments, are only provisional governments, and can touch private
+rights and interests no further than is necessary to preserve order and
+prepare the way for the organization and installation of a regular
+State government.  Till then the law governing private rights is the
+law that was in force, if any such there was, when the territory became
+by purchase, by conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the
+United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance of
+1787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of the
+Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery
+north of the parallel 36° 30'.  The Wilmot proviso was for the same
+reason unconstitutional.  The General government never had and has not
+any power to exclude slavery from the Territories, any more than to
+abolish it in the States. But slavery being a local institution,
+sustained neither by the law of nature nor the law of nations, no
+citizen migrating from a slave State could carry his slaves with him,
+and hold them as slaves in the Territory.  Rights enacted by local law
+are rights only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters
+into a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they are
+carried enacts to the contrary.  The only persons that could be held as
+slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves or the children of
+those who were slaves in the Territory when it passed to the United
+States.  The whole controversy on, slavery in the Territories, and
+which culminated in the civil war, was wholly unnecessary, and never
+could have occurred had the constitution been properly understood and
+adhered to by both sides.  True, Congress could not exclude slavery
+from the Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
+slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded, for the
+inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from the States after
+the cession to the United States, were too few to be counted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
+naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was very
+proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one State from
+gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage over another; but
+the General government has itself no power to naturalize a single
+foreigner, or in any case to say who shall or who shall not be
+citizens, either of a State or of the United States, or to declare who
+may or may not be electors even of its own officers.  The convention
+ordains that members of the house of representatives shall be chosen by
+electors who have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most
+numerous branch of the State legislature, but the State determines
+these qualifications, and who do or do not possess them; that the
+senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures, and that the
+electors of President and Vice-President shall be appointed in such
+manner as the respective State legislatures may direct.  The whole
+question of citizenship, what shall or shall not be the qualifications
+of electors, who shall or shall not be freemen, is reserved to the
+States, as coming under the head of personal or private rights and
+franchises.  In practice, the exact line of demarcation may not always
+have been strictly observed either by the General government or by the
+State governments; but a careful study of the constitution cannot fail
+to show that the division of powers is the division or distinction
+between the public and general relations and interests, rights and
+duties of the people, and their private and particular relations and
+interests, rights and duties.  As these two classes of relations and
+interests, rights and duties, though distinguishable, are really
+inseparable in nature, it follows that the two governments are
+essential to the existence of a complete government, or to the
+existence of a real government in its plenitude and integrity.  Left to
+either alone, the people would have only an incomplete, an initial, or
+inchoate government.  The General government is the complement of the
+State governments, and the State governments are the complement of the
+General government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The consideration of the powers denied by the convention to the General
+government and to the State governments respectively, will lead to the
+same conclusion.  To the General government is denied expressly or by
+necessary implication all jurisdiction in matters of private rights and
+interests, and to the State government is denied all jurisdiction in
+right, or interests which extend, as has been said, beyond the
+boundaries of the State.  "No State shall enter into any treaty,
+alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin
+money, emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a
+tender in the payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post
+facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any
+title of nobility.  No State shall, without the consent of Congress,
+lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be
+absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws and the net
+produce of all duties and imposts laid by any State on imports and
+exports shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States, and
+all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress.
+No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of
+tonnage, keep troops or ships-of-war in time of peace, enter into any
+agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign power, or
+engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as
+will not admit of delay."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The powers denied to the States in some matters which are rather
+private and particular, such as bills of attainder, ex post facto laws,
+laws impairing the obligation of contracts, granting titles of
+nobility, are denied equally to the General government. There is
+evidently a profound logic in the constitution, and there is not a
+single provision in it that is arbitrary, or anomalous, or that does
+not harmonize dialectically with the whole, and with the real
+constitution of the American people.  At first sight the reservation to
+the State of the appointment of the officers of the militia might seem
+an anomaly; but as the whole subject of internal police belongs to the
+State, it should have some military force at its command.  The subject
+of bankruptcies, also, might seem to be more properly within the
+province of the State, and so it would be if commerce between the
+several States had not been placed under Congress, or if trade were
+confined to the citizens of the State and within its boundaries; but as
+such is not the case, it was necessary to place it under the General
+government, in order that laws on the subject might be uniform
+throughout the Union, and that the citizens of all the States, and
+foreigners trading with them, should be placed on an equal footing, and
+have the same remedies. The subject follows naturally in the train of
+commerce, for bankruptcies, as understood at the time, were confined to
+the mercantile class, bankers, and brokers; and since the regulation of
+commerce, foreign and inter-state, was to be placed under the sole
+charge of the General government, it was necessary that bankruptcy
+should be included.  The subject of patents is placed under the General
+government, though the patent is a private right, because it was the
+will of the convention that the patent should be good in all the
+States, as affording more encouragement to science and the useful arts
+than if good only within a single State, or if the power were left to
+each State to recognize or not patents granted by another.  The right
+created, though private in its nature, is Yet general or common to all
+the States in its enjoyment or exercise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The division of the powers of government between a General government
+and particular governments, rendered possible and practicable by the
+original constitution of the people themselves, as one people existing
+and acting through State organizations, is the American method of
+guarding against the undue centralism to which Roman imperialism
+inevitably tends; and it is far simpler and more effective than any of
+the European systems of mixed governments, which seek their end by
+organizing an antagonism of interests or classes.  The American method
+demands no such antagonism, no neutralizing of one social force by
+another, but avails itself of all the forces of society, organizes them
+dialectically, not antagonistically, and thus protects with, equal
+efficiency both public authority and private rights.  The General
+government can never oppress the people as individuals, or abridge
+their private rights or personal freedom and independence, because
+these are not within its jurisdiction, but are placed in charge, within
+each State, of the State government, which, within its sphere, governs
+as supremely as the General government: the State governments cannot
+weaken the public authority of the nation or oppress the people in
+their general rights and interests, for these are withdrawn from State
+jurisdiction, and placed under charge of a General government, which,
+in its sphere, governs as supremely as the State government.  There is
+no resort to a system of checks and balances; there is no restraint on
+power, and no systematic distrust of power, but simply a division of
+powers between two co-ordinate governments, distinct but inseparable,
+moving in distinct spheres, but in the same direction, or to a common
+end. The system is no invention of man, is no creation of the
+convention, but is given us by Providence in the living constitution of
+the American people.  The merit of the statesmen of 1787 is that they
+did not destroy or deface the work of Providence, but accepted it, and
+organized the government in harmony with the real orders the real
+elements given them.  They suffered themselves in all their positive
+substantial work to be governed by reality, not by theories and
+speculations.  In this they proved themselves statesmen, and their work
+survives; and the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present
+and future, the model republic&mdash;as much so as was Rome in her day; and
+it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit that
+pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and more advanced
+order of civilization; such is really the fact.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The only apparently weak point in the system is in the particular
+States themselves.  Feudalism protected the feudal aristocracy
+effectively for a time against both the king and the people, but left
+the king and the people without protection against the aristocracy, and
+hence it fell.  It was not adequate to the wants of civil society, did
+not harmonize all social elements, and protect all social and
+individual rights and interests, and therefore could not but fail.  The
+General government takes care of public authority and rights; the State
+protects private rights and personal freedom as against the General
+government: but what protects the citizens in their private rights,
+their personal freedom and independence, against the particular State
+government?  Universal suffrage, answers the democrat.  Armed with the
+ballot, more powerful than the sword, each citizen is able to protect
+himself.  But this is theory, not reality.  If it were true, the
+division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate,
+governments would be of no practical importance.  Experience does not
+sustain the theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the
+individual may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.
+Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the
+freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly
+pretended.  The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing.
+The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he
+stands alone, as if he had it not.  To render it of any avail he must
+associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success
+of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up
+to it his own private convictions and free will.  In practice,
+individuals are nothing individually, and parties are every thing.
+Even the suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the
+Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the
+government found the leaders of the party opposed to the Republican
+party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount than the chiefs of
+the armies of the so-called Confederate States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one knows
+by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some private or
+personal purposes, for which they wish, through party to use the
+government.  Parties have no conscience, no responsibility, and their
+very reason of being is, the usurpation and concentration of power.
+The real practical tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic,
+instead of an imperial, centralism.  What is to guard against this
+centralism? Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it; and if
+the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the
+will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.  Is the remedy in
+written or paper constitutions?  Party can break through them, and by
+making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and re-eligible,
+can do so with impunity.  In several of the States, the dominant
+majority have gained the power to govern at will, without any let or
+hindrance.  Besides, constitutions can be altered, and have been
+altered, very nearly at the will of the majority.  No mere paper
+constitutions are any protection against the usurpations of party, for
+party will always grasp all the power it can.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the States the
+principle of division of powers is carried into the bosom of the State
+itself; in some States further than in others, but in all it obtains to
+some extent.  In what are called the New England States, the best
+governed portion of the Union, each town is a corporation, having
+important powers and the charge of all purely local matters&mdash;chooses
+its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own
+poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own
+children.  Between these corporations and the State government are the
+counties, that take charge of another class of interests, more general
+than those under the charge of the town, but less general than those of
+the State.  In the great central and Northwestern States the same
+system obtains, though less completely carried out.  In the Southern
+and Southwestern States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the
+rights and interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less
+well protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.  But
+with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the influence of
+the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of peace and the
+revival of agricultural, industrial, and commercial prosperity, the New
+England system, in its main features, is pretty sure to be gradually
+introduced, or developed, and the division of powers in the State to be
+as effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between the
+General government and the particular or State governments. So, though
+universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not alone sufficient,
+the division of powers affords with it a not inadequate protection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or can be
+practically perfect&mdash;secure all good, and guard against all evil.  In
+all human governments there will be defects and abuses, and he is no
+wise man who expects perfection from imperfection.  But the American
+constitution, taken as a whole, and in all its parts, is the least
+imperfect that has ever existed, and under it individual rights,
+personal freedom and independence, as well as public authority or
+society, are better protected than under any other; and as the few
+barbaric elements retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the
+standard of education elevated, and the whole population Americanized,
+moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to effect all
+the good, with as little of the evil, as can be reasonably expected
+from any possible civil government or political constitution of society.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SECESSION.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it its
+population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the unity and
+integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation have been
+effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the secessionists, though
+disposed to submit to superior force, and demean themselves henceforth
+as loyal citizens, most likely hold as firmly to the doctrine as before
+finding themselves unable to reduce it to practice, and the Union
+victory will remain incomplete till they are convinced in their
+understandings that the Union has the better reason as well as the
+superior military resources.  The nation has conquered their bodies,
+but it is hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their
+minds and win their hearts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, or even
+as a conventional right.  The secessionists disclaim revolutionary
+principles, and hold that the right of secession is anterior to the
+convention, a right which the convention could neither give, nor take
+away, because inherent in the very conception of a sovereign State.
+Secession is simply the repeal by the State of the act of accession to
+the Union; and as that act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she
+must always be free to repeal it.  The Union is a copartnership; a
+State in the Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to
+withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.  There is no
+power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any longer
+than be pleases.  He is undoubtedly holden for the obligations
+contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but for none
+contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice thereof.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So of a sovereign State in the Union.  The Union itself, apart from the
+sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and
+binds nobody.  All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by
+which the States constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for
+certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and
+establish an agency under express instructions for the management of
+the general affairs of the firm.  The State is held jointly and
+severally for all the legal obligations of the Union, contracted while
+she is in it but no further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases,
+precisely as an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm.
+The remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion
+against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations already
+contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the domain is
+attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of the State.
+Secession, then, carries the entire State government, people, and
+domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the State to its
+original position of a sovereign State, foreign to the United States.
+Being an independent sovereign State, she may enter into a new
+confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge herself in some other
+foreign state, as she judges proper or finds opportunity.  The States
+that seceded formed among themselves a new confederacy, more to their
+mind than the one formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do,
+and in the war just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but
+a people fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and
+true patriots defending the independence and inviolability of their
+country against foreign invaders.  They are to be honored for their
+loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as
+traitors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of
+revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no
+allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but
+simply on the original and inherent rights of the several States as
+independent sovereign States.  The argument is conclusive, and the
+defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the
+sovereignty vests in the States severally.  The refutation of the
+secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of State
+sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the States
+severally, but in the States united, or that the Union is sovereign,
+and not the States individually.  The Union is not a firm, a
+copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real,
+living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble
+unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.  There is,
+indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are no
+States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union. There is no
+Union without the States, and there are no States without the Union.
+The people are born States, and the States are born United States.  The
+Union and the States are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike
+into the original and essential constitution of the American state.
+This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into
+States, does not necessarily include the whole population or territory
+included within the jurisdiction of the United States. It is restricted
+to the people and territory or domain organized into States in the
+Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the
+tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its
+boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included
+all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the
+private proprietor and the public sovereign.  The city had vast
+possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by
+conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were
+enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred
+laws. In this class of territory, of which the city was the private
+owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, which was held to
+be only leased to its occupants, who were often dispossessed, and their
+lands given as a recompense by the consul or imperator to his disbanded
+legionaries.  The provincials were subjects of Rome, but formed no part
+of the Roman people, and had no share in the political power of the
+state, till at a late period the privileges of Roman citizens were
+extended to them, and the Roman people became coextensive with the
+Roman empire. So the United States have held and still hold large
+territorial possessions, acquired by the acknowledgment of their
+independence by Great Britain, the former sovereign, the cession of
+particular states, and purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico.  Till
+erected into States and admitted into the Union, this territory, with
+its population, though subject to the United States, makes no part of
+the political or sovereign territory and people of the United States.
+It is under the Union, not in it, as is indicated by the phrase
+admitting into the Union&mdash;a legal phrase, since the constitution
+ordains that "new States may be admitted by the Congress into this
+Union."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There can be no secession that separates a State from the national
+domain, and withdraws it from the territorial sovereignty or
+jurisdiction of the United States; yet what hinders a State from going
+out of the Union in the sense that it comes into it, and thus ceasing
+to belong to the political people of the United States?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the view of the constitution taken in the preceding chapters be
+correct, and certainly no facts tend to disprove it, the accession of a
+Territory as a State in the Union is a free act of the territorial
+people.  The Territory cannot organize and apply for admission as a
+State, without what is called an "enabling act" of Congress or its
+equivalent; but that act is permissive, not mandatory, and nothing
+obliges the Territory to organize under it and apply for admission.  It
+may do so or not, as it chooses. What, then, hinders the State once in
+the Union from going out or returning to its former condition of
+territory subject to the Union?  The original States did not need to
+come in under an enabling act, for they were born States in the Union,
+and were never territory outside of the Union and subject to it.  But
+they and the new States, adopted or naturalized States, once in the
+Union, stand on a footing of perfect equality, and the original States
+are no more and no less bound than they to remain States in the Union.
+The ratification of the constitution by the original States was a free
+act, as much so as the accession of a new State formed from territory
+subject to the Union is a free act, and a free act is an act which one
+is free to do or not to do, as he pleases.  What a State is free to do
+or not to do, it is free to undo, if it chooses.  There is nothing in
+either the State constitution or in that of the United States that
+forbids it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is denied.  The population and domain are inseparable in the
+State; and if the State could take itself out of the Union, it would
+take them out, and be ipso facto a sovereign State foreign to the
+Union.  It would take the domain and the population out of the Union,
+it is conceded and even maintained, but not therefore would it take
+them out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or would they exist as a
+State foreign to the Union; for population and territory may coexist,
+as Dacota, Colorado, or New Mexico, out of the Union, and yet be
+subject to the Union, or within the jurisdiction of the United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the Union is formed by the surrender by each of the States of its
+individual sovereignty, and each State by its admission into the Union
+surrenders its individual sovereignty, or binds itself by a
+constitutional compact to merge its individual sovereignty in that of
+the whole.  It then cannot cease to be a State in the Union without
+breach of contract.  Having surrendered its sovereignty to the Union,
+or bound itself by the constitution to exercise its original
+sovereignty only as one of the United States, it can unmake itself of
+its state character, only by consent of the United States, or by a
+successful revolution.  It is by virtue of this fact that secession is
+rebellion against the United States, and that the General government,
+as representing the Union, has the right and the duty to suppress it by
+all the forces at its command.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There can be no rebellion where there is no allegiance.  The States in
+the Union cannot owe allegiance to the Union, for they are it, and for
+any one to go out of it is no more an act of rebellion than it is for a
+king to abdicate his throne.  The Union is not formed by the surrender
+to it by the several States of their respective individual sovereignty.
+Such surrender could, as we have seen, form only an alliance, or a
+confederation, not one sovereign people; and from an alliance, or
+confederation, the ally or confederate has, saving its faith, the
+inherent right to secede.  The argument assumes that the States were
+originally each in its individuality a sovereign state, but by the
+convention which framed the constitution, each surrendered its
+sovereignty to the whole, and thus several sovereign states became one
+sovereign political people, governing in general matters through the
+General government, and in particular matters through particular or
+State governments.  This is Mr. Madison's theory, and also Mr.
+Webster's; but it has been refuted in the refutation of the theory that
+makes government originate in compact.  A sovereign state can,
+undoubtedly, surrender its sovereignty, but can surrender it only to
+something or somebody that really exists; for to Surrender to no one or
+to nothing is, as has been shown, the same thing as not to surrender at
+all; and the Union, being formed only by the surrender, is nothing
+prior to it, or till after it is made, and therefore can be no
+recipient of the surrender.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Besides, the theory is the reverse of the fact.  The State does not
+surrender or part with its sovereignty by coming into the Union, but
+acquires by it all the rights it holds as a State. Between the original
+States and the new States there is a difference of mode by which they
+become States in the Union, but none in their powers, or the tenure by
+which they hold them.  The process by which new States are actually
+formed and admitted into the Union, discloses at once what it is that
+is gained or lost by admission.  The domain and population, before the
+organization of the Territory into one of the United States, are
+subject to the United States, inseparably attached to the domain of the
+Union, and under its sovereignty.  The Territory so remains, organized
+or unorganized, under a Territorial Government created by Congress.
+Congress, by an enabling act, permits it to organize as a State, to
+call a convention to form a State constitution, to elect under it, in
+such way as the convention ordains, State officers, a State
+legislature, and, in the way prescribed by the Constitution of the
+United States, senators and representatives in Congress.  Here is a
+complete organization as a State, yet, though called a State, it is no
+State at all, and is simply territory, without a single particle of
+political power.  To be a State it must be recognized and admitted by
+Congress as a State in the Union, and when so recognized and admitted
+it possesses, in union with the other United States, supreme political
+sovereignty, jointly in all general matters, and individually in all
+private and particular matters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Territory gives up no sovereign powers by coming into the Union,
+for before it came into the Union it had no sovereignty, no political
+rights at all.  All the rights and powers it holds are held by the
+simple fact that it has become a State in the Union.  This is as true
+of the original States as of the new States; for it has been shown in
+the chapter on The United States, that the original British sovereignty
+under which the colonies were organized and existed passed, on the fact
+of independence, to the States United, and not to the States severally.
+Hence if nine States had ratified the constitution, and the other four
+had stood out, and refused to do it, which was within their competency,
+they would not have been independent sovereign States, outside of the
+Union, but Territories under the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Texas forms the only exception to the rule that the States have never
+been independent of the Union.  All the other new States have been
+formed from territory subject to the Union.  This is true of all the
+States formed out of the Territory of the Northwest, and out of the
+domain ceded by France, Spain, and Mexico to the United States.  All
+these cessions were held by the United States as territory immediately
+subject to the Union, before being erected into States; and by far the
+larger part is so held even yet.  But Texas was an independent foreign
+state, and was annexed as a State without having been first subjected
+as territory to the United States.  It of course lost by annexation its
+separate sovereignty.  But this annexation was held by many to be
+unconstitutional; it was made when the State sovereignty theory had
+gained possession of the Government, and was annexed as a State instead
+of being admitted as a State formed from territory belonging to the
+United States, for the very purpose of committing the nation to that
+theory.  Its annexation was the prologue, as the Mexican war was the
+first act in the secession drama, and as the epilogue is the
+suppression of the rebellion on Texan soil.  Texas is an exceptional
+case, and forms no precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the
+general rule.  Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire
+all their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of
+losing or surrendering them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Our American statesmen have overlooked or not duly weighed the facts in
+the case, because, holding the origin of government in compact, they
+felt no need of looking back of the constitution to find the basis of
+that unity of the American people which they assert.  Neither Mr.
+Madison nor Mr. Webster felt any difficulty in asserting it as created
+by the convention of 1787, or in conceding the sovereignty of the
+States prior to the Union, and denying its existence after the
+ratification of the constitution. If it were not that they held that
+the State originates in convention or the social compact, there would
+be unpardonable presumption on the part of the present writer in
+venturing to hazard an assertion contrary to theirs.  But, if their
+theory was unsound, their practical doctrine was not; for they
+maintained that the American people are one sovereign people, and Mr.
+Quincy Adams, an authority inferior to neither, maintained that they
+were always one people, and that the States hold from the Union, not
+the Union from the States.  The States without the Union cease to exist
+as political communities: the Union without the States ceases to be a
+Union, and becomes a vast centralized and consolidated state, ready to
+lapse from a civilized into a barbaric, from a republican to a despotic
+nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The State, under the American system, as distinguished from Territory,
+is not in the domain and population fixed to it, nor yet in its
+exterior organization, but solely in the political powers, rights, and
+franchises which it holds from the United States, or as one of the
+United States.  As these are rights, not obligations, the State may
+resign or abdicate them and cease to be a State, on the same principle
+that any man may abdicate or forego his rights.  In doing so, the State
+breaks no oath of allegiance, fails to fulfil no obligation she
+contracted as a State: she simply forgoes her political rights and
+franchises. So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not
+unconstitutional or unlawful.  But it is, as Mr. Sumner and others have
+maintained, simply State suicide.  Nothing hinders a State from
+committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than there was something
+which compelled the Territory to become a State in the Union against
+its will.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to the
+Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not destroy
+the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and independence,
+as the secessionists maintain.  Certainly, if the States were, Prior to
+the Union, sovereign States; but this is precisely what has been denied
+and disproved; for prior to the Union there were no States.  Secession
+restores, or reduces, rather, the State to the condition it was in
+before its admission into the Union; but that condition is that of
+Territory, or a Territory subject to the United States, and not that of
+an independent sovereign state.  The State holds all its political
+rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out of it,
+or in the condition in which its population and domain were before
+being a State in the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and territory
+from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no rebellion where
+there is no allegiance, resistance by its population and territory to
+the Union, even war against the Union, would not be rebellion, but the
+simple assertion of popular sovereignty.  This is only the same
+objection in another form.  The lapse of the State releases the
+population and territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their
+allegiance to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State,
+and they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the
+United States.  A State owes no allegiance to the United States, for it
+is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.  The relation between the
+United States and the State is not the relation of suzerain and
+liegeman or vassal.  A State owes no allegiance, for it is not subject
+to the Union; it is never in their State capacity that its population
+and territory do or can rebel. Hence, the Government has steadily
+denied that, in the late rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union; and
+therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the States
+that passed secession ordinances are and all along have been States in
+the Union.  No State can rebel, but it does not follow therefrom that
+no State can secede or cease to exist as a State: it only follows that
+secession, in the sense of State suicide, or the abdication by the
+State of its political rights and powers, is not rebellion.  Nor does
+it follow from the fact that no State has rebelled, that no State has
+ceased to be a State; or that the States that passed secession
+ordinances have been all along States in the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not within the
+competency of the State, and therefore null and void from the
+beginning.  Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within the competency of
+the State, so far as intended to alienate any portion of the national
+domain and population thereto annexed, they certainly were, and so far
+were void and of no effect; but so far as intended to take the State
+simply as a State out of the Union, they were within the competency of
+the State, were not illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null
+and void. Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in
+others are not wholly void.  The unconstitutionality vitiates only the
+unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and recognized
+and enforced as such by the courts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed by
+the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them and
+usurped the authority of the State.  This argument implies that, if a
+secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of the State, it is
+valid; which is more than they who urge it against the State suicide
+doctrine are prepared to concede.  But the secession ordinances were in
+every instance passed by the people of the State in convention legally
+assembled, therefore by them in their highest State capacity&mdash;in the
+same capacity in which they ordain and ratify the State constitution
+itself; and in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and
+confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a genuine
+plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.  In all cases they were
+adopted by a decided majority of the political people of the State, and
+after their adoption they were acquiesced in and indeed actively
+supported by very nearly the whole people. The people of the States
+adopting the secession ordinances were far more unanimous in supporting
+secession than the people of the other States were in sustaining the
+Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion by coercive
+measures.  It will not do, then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to
+a faction.  The people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the
+majority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few Union
+men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious
+and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and
+their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their
+respective States into secession against their convictions and their
+will.  No doubt there were leaders at the South, as there are in every
+great movement at the North; no doubt there were individuals in the
+seceding States that held secession wrong in principle, and were
+conscientiously attached to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men
+who adhered to the Union, not because they disapproved secession, but
+because they disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because
+they were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not succeed, that
+the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it they
+would become the great and leading men of their respective States,
+which they certainly could not be under secession. Others sympathized
+fully with what was called the Southern cause, held firmly the right of
+secession, and hated cordially the Yankees, but doubted either the
+practicability or the expediency of secession, and opposed it till
+resolved on, but, after it was resolved on, yielded to none in their
+earnest support of it. These last comprised the immense majority of
+those who voted against secession.  Never could those called the
+Southern leaders have carried the secession ordinances, never could
+they have carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with
+such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four years,
+making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh doubtful, if they
+had not had the Southern heart with them, if they had not been most
+heartily supported by the overwhelming mass of the people.  They led a
+popular, not a factious movement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.  The State is
+territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its territory and
+population out of the Union, no State can secede. Out of the
+jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the sovereign or
+national domain, very true; but out of the Union as a State, with
+rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not true.  Secession is
+political, not territorial.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the State holds from the territory or domain.  The people are
+sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the domain
+because held by a sovereign people, as was established by the analysis
+of the early Roman constitution.  The territory of the States
+corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which was attached the
+Roman sovereignty.  That territory, once surveyed and consecrated,
+remained sacred and the ruling territory, and could not be divested of
+its sacred and governing character.  The portions of the territory of
+the United States once erected into States and consecrated as ruling
+territory can never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or
+successful revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by public,
+not by private wealth, and is always respublica or commonwealth, in
+distinction from despotism or monarchy in its oriental sense, which is
+founded on private wealth, or which assumes that the authority to
+govern, or sovereignty, is the private estate of the sovereign.  All
+power is a domain, but there is no domain without a dominus or lord.
+In oriental monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is
+the public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the
+people in their territorial, and not in their personal or genealogical
+relation.  The people of The United States are sovereign only within
+the territory or domain of the United States, and their sovereignty is
+a state, because fixed, attached, or limited to that specific
+territory.  It is fixed to the soil, not nomadic.  In barbaric nations
+power is nomadic and personal, or genealogical, confined to no
+locality, but attaches to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.  The
+Gothic chiefs hold their power by a personal title, and have the same
+authority in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
+Elbe or the Danube.  Power migrates with the chief and his people, and
+may be exercised wherever he and they find themselves, as a Swedish
+queen held when she ordered the execution of one of her subjects at
+Paris, without asking permission of the territorial lord.  In these
+nations, power is a personal right, or a private estate, not a state
+which exists only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the
+domain, exists independently of the chief or the government.  The
+distinction is between public domain and private domain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
+democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is territorial,
+not personal; not territorial because the majority of the people are
+agriculturists or landholders, but because all political rights,
+powers, or franchises are territorial.  The sovereign people of the
+United States are sovereign only within the territory of the United
+States.  The great body of the freemen have the elective franchise, but
+no one has it save in his State, his county, his town, his ward, his
+precinct.  Out of the election district in which he is domiciled, a
+citizen of the United States has no more right to vote than has the
+citizen or subject of a foreign state.  This explains what is meant by
+the attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the
+state on the domain.  The state, in republican states, exists only as
+inseparably united with the public domain; under feudalism, power was
+joined to territory or domain, but the domain was held as a private,
+not as a public domain.  All sovereignty rests on domain or
+proprietorship, and is dominion. The proprietor is the dominus or lord,
+and in republican states the lord is society, or the public, and the
+domain is held for the common or public good of all.  All political
+rights are held from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the
+elective franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as
+distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone cannot
+possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not a domain.  In
+the American system, the dominus or lord is not the particular State,
+but the United States, and, the domain of the whole territory, whether
+erected into particular States or not, is in the United States alone.
+The United States do not part with the dominion of that portion of the
+national domain included within a particular State.  The State holds
+the domain not separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United
+States: separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a
+joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls into
+the condition of any other territory held by the United States not
+erected into one of the United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the particular
+State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to the United
+States.  All escheats of private estates, but no public or general
+escheats.  But this has nothing to do with the public domain.  The
+United States are the dominus, but they have, by the constitution,
+divided the powers of government between a General government and
+particular State governments, and ordained that all matters of a
+general nature, common to all the States, should be placed under the
+supreme control of the former, and all matters of a private or
+particular character under the supreme control of the latter.  The
+eminent domain of private estates is in the particular State, but the
+sovereign authority in the particular State is that of the United
+States expressing itself through the State government.  The United
+States, in the States as well as out of them, is the dominus, as the
+States respectively would soon find if they were to undertake to
+alienate any part of their domain to a foreign power, or even to the
+citizens or subjects of a foreign State, as is also evident from the
+fact that the United States, in the way prescribed by the constitution,
+may enlarge or contract at will the rights and powers of the States.
+The mistake on this point grows out of the habit of restricting the
+action of the United States to the General government, and not
+recollecting that the United States govern one class of subjects
+through the General government and another class through State
+governments, but that it is one and the same authority that governs in
+both.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The analogy borrowed from the Roman constitution, as far as applicable,
+proves the reverse of what is intended.  The dominus of the sacred
+territory was the city, or the Roman state, not the sacred territory
+itself.  The territory received the tenant, and gave him as tenant the
+right to a seat in the senate; but the right of the territory was
+derived not from the domain, but from the dominus, that is, the city.
+But the city could revoke its grant, as it practically did when it
+conferred the privileges of Roman citizenship on the provincials, and
+gave to plebeians seats in the senate.  Moreover, nothing in Roman
+history indicates that to the validity of a senatus consultum it was
+necessary to count the vacant domains of the sacred territory.  The
+particular domain must, under the American system, be counted when it
+is held by a State, but of itself alone, or even with its population,
+it is not a State, and therefore as a State domain is vacant and
+without any political rights or powers whatever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To argue that the territory and population once a State in the Union
+must needs always be so, would be well enough if a State in the Union
+were individually a sovereign state; for territory, with its population
+not subject to another, is always a sovereign state, even though its
+government has been subverted.  But this is not the fact, for territory
+with its population does not constitute a State in the Union; and,
+therefore, when of a State nothing remains but territory and
+population, the State has evidently disappeared.  It will not do then
+to maintain that State suicide is impossible, and that the States that
+adopted secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be
+States in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their
+representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in Congress.
+They must be reorganized first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There would also be some embarrassment to the government in holding
+that the States that passed the secession ordinance remain,
+notwithstanding, States in the Union.  The citizens of a State in the
+Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless they are rebels to
+their State; and rebels to their State they are not, unless they resist
+its authority and make war on it. The authority of the State in the
+Union is a legal authority, and the citizen in obeying it is disloyal
+neither to the State nor to the Union.  The citizens in the States that
+made war on the United States did not resist their State, for they
+acted by its authority.  The only men, on this supposition, in them,
+who have been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have
+refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted, even
+with armed force, the secession ordinances.  The several State
+governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on the war for
+the destruction of the Union, if the States are in the Union, were
+legal and loyal governments of their respective States, for they were
+legally elected and installed, and conformed to their respective State
+constitutions.  All the acts of these governments have been
+constitutional.  Their entering into a confederacy for attaining a
+separate nationality has been legal, and the debts contracted by the
+States individually, or by the confederacy legally formed by them, have
+been legally contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against
+the United States.  The war against them has been all wrong, and the
+confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United States.
+The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can blockade its own
+ports, and the captures and seizures under it, robberies.  The Supreme
+Court has been wrong in declaring the war a territorial civil war, as
+well as the government in acting accordingly.  Now, all these
+conclusions are manifestly false and absurd, and therefore the
+assumption that the States in question have all along been States in
+the Union cannot be sustained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is easy to understand the resistance the Government offers to the
+doctrine that a State may commit suicide, or by its own act abdicate
+its rights and cease to be a State in the Union.  It is admissible on
+no theory of the constitution that has been widely entertained.  It is
+not admissible on Mr. Calhoun's theory of State sovereignty, for on
+that theory a State in going out of the Union does not cease to be a
+State but simply resumes the powers it had delegated to the General
+government.  It cannot be maintained on Mr. Madison's or Mr. Webster's
+theory, that the States prior to the Union were severally sovereign,
+but by the Union were constituted one people; for, if this one people
+are understood to be a federal people, State secession would not be
+State suicide, but State independence; and if understood to be one
+consolidated or centralized people, it would be simply insurrection or
+rebellion against the national authority, laboring to make itself a
+revolution.  The government seems to have understood Mr. Madison's
+theory in both senses&mdash;in the consolidated sense, in declaring the
+secessionists insurgents and rebels, and in the federal sense, in
+maintaining that they have never seceded, and are still States in the
+Union, in full possession of all their political or State rights.
+Perhaps, if the government, instead of borrowing from contradictory
+theories of the constitution which have gained currency, had examined
+in the light of historical facts the constitution itself, it would have
+been as constitutional in its doctrine as it has been loyal and
+patriotic, energetic and successful in its military administration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another reason why the doctrine that State secession is State suicide
+has appeared so offensive to many, is the supposition entertained at
+one time by some of its friends, that the dissolution of the State
+vacates all rights and franchises held under it.  But this is a
+mistake.  The principle is well known and recognized by the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, that in the transfer of a
+territory from one territorial sovereign to another, the laws in force
+under the old sovereign remain in force after the change, till
+abrogated, or others are enacted in their place by the new sovereign,
+except such as are necessarily abrogated by the change itself of the
+sovereign; not, indeed, because the old sovereign retains any
+authority, but, because such is presumed by the courts to be the will
+of the new sovereign.  The principle applies in the case of the death
+of a State in the Union.  The laws of the State are territorial, till
+abrogated by competent authority, remain the lex loci, and are in full
+force.  All that would be vacated would be the public rights of the
+State, and in no case the private rights of citizens, corporations, or
+laws affecting them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the same conclusion is reached in another way.  In the lapse of a
+State or its return to the condition of a Territory, there is really no
+change of sovereignty.  The sovereignty, both before and after, is the
+United States.  The sovereign authority that governs in the State
+government, as we have seen, though independent of the General
+government, is the United States.  The United States govern certain
+matters through a General government, and others through particular
+State governments.  The private rights and interests created,
+regulated, or protected by the particular State, are created,
+regulated, or protected by the United States, as much and as plenarily
+as if done by the General government, and the State laws creating,
+regulating, or protecting them can be abrogated by no power known to
+the constitution, but either the State itself, or the United States in
+convention legally assembled.  If this were what is meant by the States
+that have seceded, or professed to secede, remaining States in the
+Union, they would, indeed, be States still in the Union,
+notwithstanding secession and the government would be right in saying
+that no State can secede.  But this is not what is meant, at least not
+all that is meant.  It is meant not only that the private rights of
+citizens and corporations remain, but the citizens retain all the
+public rights of the State, that is, the right to representation in
+Congress and in the electoral college, and the right to sit in the
+convention, which is not true.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the correction of the misapprehension that the private rights and
+interests are lost by the lapse of the State may remove the graver
+prejudices against the doctrine of State suicide, and dispose loyal and
+honest Union men to bear the reasons by which it is supported, and
+which nobody has refuted or can refute on constitutional grounds.  A
+Territory by coming into the Union becomes a State; a State by going
+out of the Union becomes a Territory.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIII.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+RECONSTRUCTION.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The question of reconstructing the States that seceded will be
+practically settled before these pages can see the light, and will
+therefore be considered here only so far as necessary to complete the
+view of the constitution of the United States.  The manner in which the
+government proposed to settle, has settled, or will settle the
+question, proves that both it and the American people have only
+confused views of the rights and powers of the General government, but
+imperfectly comprehend the distinction between the legislative and
+executive departments of that Government, and are far more familiar
+with party tactics than with constitutional law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would be difficult to imagine any thing more unconstitutional, more
+crude, or more glaringly impolitic than the mode of reconstruction
+indicated by the various executive proclamations that have been issued,
+bearing on the subject, or even by the bill for guaranteeing the States
+republican governments, that passed Congress, but which failed to
+obtain the President's signature.  It is, in some measure,
+characteristic of the American government to understand how things
+ought to be done only when they are done and it is too late to do them
+in the right way.  Its wisdom comes after action, as if engaged in a
+series of experiments.  But, happily for the nation, few blunders are
+committed that with our young life and elasticity are irreparable, and
+that, after all, are greater than are ordinarily committed by older and
+more experienced nations.  They are not of the most fatal character,
+and are, for the most part, such as are incident to the conceit, the
+heedlessness, the ardor, and the impatience of youth, and need excite
+no serious alarm for the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There has been no little confusion in the public mind, and in that of
+the government itself, as to what reconstruction is, who has the power
+to reconstruct, and how that power is to be exercised.  Are the States
+that seceded States in the Union, with no other disability than that of
+having no legal governments? or are they Territories subject to the
+Union?  Is their reconstruction their erection into new States, or
+their restoration as States previously in the Union?  Is the power to
+reconstruct in the States themselves? or is it in the General
+government?  If partly in the people and partly in the General
+government, is the part in the General government in Congress, or in
+the Executive?  If in Congress, can the Executive, without the
+authority of Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it for
+Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State?   If the power is
+partly in the people of the disorganized States who or what defines
+that people, decides who may or may not vote in the reorganization?  On
+all these questions there has been much crude, if not erroneous,
+thinking, and much inconsistent and contradictory action.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The government started with the theory that no State had seceded or
+could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in rebellion
+continued to be States in the Union.  That is, it held secession to be
+a purely personal and not a territorial insurrection.  Yet it
+proclaimed eleven States to be in insurrection against the United
+States, blockaded their ports, and interdicted all trade and
+intercourse of any kind with them. The Supreme Court, in order to
+sustain the blockade and interdict as legal, decided the war to be not
+a war against simply individual or personal insurgents but "a
+territorial civil war." This negatived the assumption that the States
+that took up arms against the United States remained all the while
+peaceable and loyal States, with all their political rights and powers
+in the Union.  The States in the Union are integral elements of the
+political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation vests
+in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the eleven
+States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a formidable war
+against the United States, were in the Union, an integral element of
+that sovereign authority which was carrying on a yet more formidable
+war against them.  Nevertheless, the government still held to its first
+assumption, that the States in rebellion continued to be States in the
+Union&mdash;loyal States, with all their rights and franchises unimpaired!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in the
+doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union, is not to
+be wondered at.  The extent and determination of the secession movement
+were imperfectly understood, and the belief among the supporters of the
+government, and, perhaps, of the government itself, was, that it was a
+spasmodic movement for a temporary purpose, rather than a fixed
+determination to found an independent separate nationality; that it was
+and would be sustained by the real majority of the people of none of
+the States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the true
+policy of the government would be to treat the seceders with great
+forbearance, to avoid all measures likely to exasperate them or to
+embarrass their loyal fellow-citizens, to act simply on the defensive,
+and to leave the Union men in the several seceding States to gain a
+political victory at the polls over the secessionists, and to return
+their States to their normal position in the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The government may not have had much faith in this policy, and Mr.
+Lincoln's personal authority might be cited to the effect that it had
+not, but it was urged strongly by the Union men of the Border States.
+The administration was hardly seated in office, and its members were
+new men, without administrative experience; the President, who had been
+legally elected indeed, but without a majority of the popular votes,
+was far from having the full confidence even of the party that elected
+him; opinions were divided; party spirit ran high; the excitement was
+great, the crisis was imminent, the government found itself left by its
+predecessor without an army or a navy, and almost without arms or
+ordnance; it knew not how far it could count on popular support, and
+was hardly aware whom it could trust or should distrust; all was hurry
+and confusion; and what could the government do but to gain time, keep
+off active war as long as possible, conciliate all it could, and take
+ground which at the time seemed likely to rally the largest number of
+the people to its support?  There were men then, warm friends of the
+administration, and still warmer friends of their country, who believed
+that a bolder, a less timid, a less cautious policy would have been
+wiser, that in revolutionary times boldness, what in other times would
+be rashness, is the highest prudence, on the side of the government as
+well as on the side of the revolution; that when once it has shown
+itself, the rebellion that hesitates, deliberates, consults, is
+defeated and so is the government.  The seceders owed from the first
+their successes not to their superior organization, to their better
+preparation, or to the better discipline and appointment of their
+armies, but to their very rashness, to their audacity even, and the
+hesitancy, cautious and deliberation of the government.  Napoleon owed
+his successes as general and civilian far more to the air of power he
+assumed, and the conviction he produced of his invincibility in the
+minds of his opponents, than to his civil or military strategy and
+tactics, admirable as they both were.  But the government believed it
+wisest to adopt a conciliatory and, in many respects, a temporizing
+policy, and to rely more on weakening the secessionists in their
+respective States than on strengthening the hands and hearts of its own
+staunch and uncompromising supporters.  It must strengthen the Union
+party in the insurrectionary States, and as this party hoped to succeed
+by political manipulation rather than by military force, the government
+must rely rather on a show of military power than on gaining any
+decisive battle.  As it hoped, or affected to hope, to suppress the
+rebellion in the States that seceded through their loyal citizens, it
+was obliged to assume that secession was the work of a faction, of a
+few ambitious and disappointed politicians, and that the States were
+all in the Union, and continued in the loyal portion of their
+inhabitants.  Hence its aid to the loyal Virginians to organize as the
+State of Virginia, and its subsequent efforts to organize the Union men
+in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and its disposition to recognize
+their organization in each of those States as the State itself, though
+including only a small minority of the territorial people.  Had the
+facts been as assumed, the government might have treated the loyal
+people of each State as the State itself, without any gross usurpation
+of power; but, unhappily, the facts assumed were not facts, and it was
+soon found that the Union party in all the States that seceded, except
+the western part of Virginia and the eastern section of Tennessee,
+after secession had been carried by the popular vote, went almost
+unanimously with the secessionists; for they as well as the
+secessionists held the doctrine of State sovereignty; and to treat the
+handful of citizens that remained loyal in each State as the State
+itself, became ridiculous, and the government should have seen and
+acknowledged it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The rebellion being really territorial, and not personal, the State
+that seceded was no more continued in the loyal than in the disloyal
+population.  While the war lasted, both were public enemies of the
+United States, and neither had or could have any rights as a State in
+the Union.  The law recognizes a solidarity of all the citizens of a
+State, and assumes that, when a State is at war, all its citizens are
+at war, whether approving the war or not.  The loyal people in the
+States that seceded incurred none of the pains and penalties of
+treason, but they retained none of the political rights of the State in
+the Union, and, in reorganizing the State after the suppression of the
+rebellion, they have no more right to take part than the secessionists
+themselves.  They, as well as the secessionists, have followed the
+territory.  It was on this point that the government committed its
+gravest mistake.  As to the reorganization or reconstruction of the
+State, the whole territorial people stood on the same footing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Taking the decision of the Supreme Court as conclusive on the subject,
+the rebellion was territorial, and, therefore, placed all the States as
+States out of the Union, and retained them only as population and
+territory, under or subject to the Union.  The States ceased to exist,
+that is, as integral elements of the national sovereignty.  The
+question then occurred, are they to be erected into new States, or are
+they to be reconstructed and restored to the Union as the identical old
+States that seceded? Shall their identity be revived and preserved, or
+shall they be new States, regardless of that identity?  There can be no
+question that the work to be done was that of restoration, not of
+creation; no tribe should perish from Israel, no star be struck from
+the firmament of the Union.  Every inhabitant of the fallen States, and
+every citizen of the United States must desire them to be revived and
+continued with their old names and boundaries, and all true Americans
+wish to continue the constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.
+Who would see old Virginia, the Virginia of revolutionary fame, of
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, of Monroe, the "Old Dominion," once the
+leading State of the Union, dead without hope of resurrection? or South
+Carolina, the land of Rutledge, Moultrie, Laurens, Hayne, Sumter, and
+Marion?  There is something grating to him who values State
+associations, and would encourage State emulation and State pride, in
+the mutilation of the Old Dominion and the erection within her borders
+of the new State called West Virginia.  States in the Union are not
+mere prefectures, or mere dependencies on the General government,
+created for the convenience of administration.  They have an
+individual, a real existence of their own, as much so as have the
+individual members of society. They are free members, not of a
+confederation indeed, but of a higher political community, and
+reconstruction should restore the identity of their individual life,
+suspended for a moment by secession, but capable of resuscitation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These States had become, indeed, for a moment, territory under the
+Union; but in no instance had they or could they become territory that
+had never existed as States.  The fact that the territory and people
+had existed as a State, could with regard to none of them be
+obliterated, and, therefore, they could not be erected into absolutely
+new States.  The process of reconstructing them could not be the same
+as that of creating new States.  In creating a new State, Congress, ex
+necessitate, because there is no other power except the national
+convention competent to do it, defines the boundaries of the new State,
+and prescribes the electoral people, or who may take part in the
+preliminary organization but in reconstructing States it does neither,
+for both are done by a law Congress is not competent to abrogate or
+modify, and which can be done only by the United States in convention
+assembled, or by the State itself after its restoration.  The
+government has conceded this, and, in part, has acted on it.  It
+preserves, except in Virginia, the old boundaries, and recognizes, or
+rather professes to recognize the old electoral law, only it claims the
+right to exclude from the electoral people those who have voluntarily
+taken part in the rebellion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The work to be done in States that have seceded is that of
+reconstruction, not creation; and this work is not and cannot be done,
+exclusively nor chiefly by the General government, either by the
+Executive or by Congress.  That government can appoint military, or
+even provisional governors, who may designate the time and place of
+holding the convention of the electoral people of the disorganized
+State, as also the time and place of holding the elections of delegates
+to it, and superintend the elections so far as to see the polls are
+opened, and that none but qualified electors vote, but nothing more.
+All the rest is the work of the territorial electoral people
+themselves, for the State within its own sphere must, as one of the
+United States, be a self-governing community.  The General government
+may concede or withhold permission to the disorganized State to
+reorganize, as it judges advisable, but it cannot itself reorganize it.
+If it concedes the permission, it must leave the whole electoral people
+under the preexisting electoral law free to take part in the work of
+reorganization, and to vote according to their own judgment. It has no
+authority to purge the electoral people, and say who may or may not
+vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the qualifications of
+electors is left to the State, and can be settled neither by an act of
+Congress nor by an Executive proclamation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized States
+remain States in the Union, the General government could have nothing
+to say on the subject, and could no more interfere with elections in
+any one of them than it could with elections in Massachusetts or New
+York.  But even on the doctrine here defended it can interfere with
+them only by way of general superintendence.  The citizens have,
+indeed, lost their political rights, but not their private rights.
+Secession has not dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws
+of the disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.
+The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws
+survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law, or
+lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the State, that
+has, as a State, really lapsed.  They do so by will of the United
+States, which enacted them through the individual State, and which has
+not in convention abrogated them, save the law authorizing slavery, and
+its dependent laws.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This point has already been made, but as it is one of the niceties of
+the American constitution, it may not be amiss to elaborate it at
+greater length.  The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and the
+majority of our jurists, would see to be that the States, under God,
+are severally sovereign in all matters not expressly confided to the
+General government, and therefore that the American sovereignty is
+divided, and the citizen owes a double allegiance&mdash;allegiance to his
+State, and allegiance to the United States&mdash;as if there was a United
+States distinguishable from the States.  Hence Mr. Seward, in an
+official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James, says: "The
+citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United States."  And
+nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union at all, hold that it
+is also due to the States, only that which is due to the United States
+is paramount, as that under feudalism due to the overlord.  But this is
+not the case.  There is no divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.
+Sovereignty is one, and vests not in the General government or in the
+State government, but in the United States, and allegiance is due to
+the United States, and to them alone.  Treason can be committed only
+against the United States, and against a State only because against the
+United States, and is properly cognizable only by the Federal courts.
+Hence the Union men committed no treason in refusing to submit to the
+secession ordinances of their respective States, and in sustaining the
+national arms against secession.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are two very common mistakes: the one that the States
+individually possess all the powers not delegated to the General
+government; and the other that the Union, or United States, have only
+delegated powers.  But the United States possess all the powers of a
+sovereign state, and the States individually and the General government
+possess only such powers as the United States in convention delegate to
+them respectively.  The sovereign is neither the General government nor
+the States severally, but the United States in convention.  The United
+States are the one indivisible sovereign, and this sovereign governs
+alike general matters in the General government, and particular matters
+in the several State governments.  All legal authority in either
+emanates from this one indivisible and plenary sovereign, and hence the
+law enacted by a State are really enacted by the United States, and
+derive from them their force and vitality as laws. Hence, as the United
+States survive the particular State, the lapse of the State does not
+abrogate the State laws, or dissolve civil society within its
+jurisdiction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular State
+does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on the United
+States.  Hence all civil rights of every sort created by the individual
+State are really held from the United States, and therefore it was that
+the people of non-slaveholding States were, as citizens of the United
+States, responsible for the existence of slavery in the States that
+seceded.  There is a solidarity of States in the Union as there is of
+individuals in each of the States.  The political error of the
+Abolitionists was not in calling upon the people of the United States
+to abolish slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the
+General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in their
+sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which were the
+abrogation of all government and civil society itself, instead of
+calling upon them to do it as the United States in convention
+assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of the United States
+in the way ordained by that constitution itself.  This understood, the
+constitution and laws of a defunct State remain in force by virtue of
+the will of the United States, till the State is raised from the dead,
+restored to life and activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they
+are repealed or altered by the United States or the national
+convention.  But as the defunct State could not, and the convention had
+not repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the
+General government had no alternative but to treat them and all rights
+created by them as the territorial law, and to respect them as such.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose by
+secession?  They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal, the pains
+and penalties of treason, their political rights, or right, as has just
+been said, to be in their own department self-governing communities,
+with the right of representation in Congress and the electoral
+colleges, and to sit in the national convention, or of being counted in
+the ratification of amendments to the constitution&mdash;precisely what it
+was shown a Territorial people gain by being admitted as a State into
+the Union.  This is the difference between the constitutional doctrine
+and that adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.
+But what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General
+government gain over the people of States that secede, that it has not
+over others!  As to their internal constitution, their private rights
+of person or property, it gains none.  It has over them, till they are
+reconstructed and restored to the Union, the right to institute for
+them provisional governments, civil or military, precisely as it has
+for the people of a territory that is not and has never been one of the
+United States; but in their reconstruction it has less, for the
+geographical boundaries and electoral people of each are already
+defined by a law which does not depend on its will, and which it can
+neither abrogate nor modify.  Here is the difference between the
+constitutional doctrine and that of the so-called radicals.  The State
+has gone, but its laws remain, so far as the United States in
+convention does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the
+State survives, but because the United States so will, or are presumed
+to will.  The United States have by a constitutional amendment
+abrogated the laws of the several States authorizing slavery, and
+prohibited slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the Union; and no
+State can now be reconstructed and be admitted into the Union with a
+constitution that permits slavery, for that would be repugnant to the
+constitution of the United States.  If the constitutional amendment is
+not recognized as ratified by the requisite number of States, it is the
+fault of the government in persisting in counting as States what are no
+States.  Negro suffrage, as white suffrage, is at present a question
+for States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The United States guarantee to such State a republican form of
+government.  And this guarantee, no doubt, authorizes Congress to
+intervene in the internal constitution of a State so far as to force it
+to adopt a republican form of government, but not so far as to organize
+a government for a State, or to compel a territorial people to accept
+or adopt a State constitution for themselves.  If a State attempts to
+organize a form of government not republican, it can prevent it; and if
+a Territory adopts an unrepublican form, it can force it to change its
+constitution to one that is republican, or compel it to remain a
+Territory under a provisional government.  But this gives the General
+government no authority in the organization or re-organization of
+States beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the
+territorial people is republican.  To press it further, to make the
+constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire control of the
+organization or re-organization of a State, is a manifest abuse&mdash;a
+palpable violation of the constitution and of the whole American
+system.  The authority given by the clause is specific, and is no
+authority for intervention in the general reconstruction of the lapsed
+State.  It gives authority in no question raised by secession or its
+consequences, and can give none, except, from within or from without,
+there is an overt attempt to organize a State in the Union with an
+unrepublican form of government.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The General government gives permission to the territorial people of
+the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with suffering
+them, without special recognition, to reorganize in their own way, and
+apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to Congress to admit them
+as a State, or not, according to its own discretion, in like manner as
+it admits a new State; but the re-organization itself must be the work
+of the territorial people themselves, under their old electoral law.
+The power that reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that
+admits them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress.  The
+Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that of
+seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever power he
+assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions given to the
+provisional governors, civil or military, is simply a usurpation of the
+power of Congress, which it rests with Congress to condone or not, as
+it may see fit.  Executive proclamations, excluding a larger or a
+smaller portion of the electoral or territorial people from the
+exercise of the elective franchise in reorganizing the State, and
+executive efforts to throw the State into the hands of one political
+party or another, are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the
+President, in relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace
+powers of the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer
+of the Union.  His business is to execute the laws, not to make them.
+His legislative authority is confined to his qualified veto on the acts
+of Congress, and to the recommendation to Congress of such measures as
+he believes are needed by the country.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the
+Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace. The
+Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex necessitate, pace
+it ad interim under a military governor, but he cannot appoint even a
+provisional civil governor till Congress has created the office and
+given him authority to fill it; far less can be legally give
+instructions to the civil governor as to the mode or manner of
+reconstructing the disorganized State, or decide who may or may not
+vote in the preliminary reorganization. The Executive could do nothing
+of the sort, even in regard to a Territory never erected into a State.
+It belongs to Congress, not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or
+provisional governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana,
+Nebraska, and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines
+the boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines
+the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act
+herself.  Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life and
+vigor in the Union a disorganized State, has nothing to say as to its
+boundaries or its electoral people, nor any right to interfere between
+parties in the State, to throw the reconstructed State into the hands
+of one or another party.  All that Congress can insist on is, that the
+territorial people shall reconstruct with a government republican in
+form; that its senators and representatives in Congress, and the
+members of the State legislature, and all executive and judicial
+officers of the State shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support
+and defend the constitution of the United States.  In the whole work
+the President has nothing to do with reconstruction, except to see that
+peace is preserved and the laws are fully executed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It may be at least doubted that the Executive has power to proclaim
+amnesty and pardon to rebels after the civil war has ceased, and ceased
+it has when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted; for
+his pardoning power is only to pardon after conviction and judgment of
+the court: it is certain that he has no power to proscribe or punish
+even traitors, except by due process of law.  When the war is over he
+has only his ordinary peace powers.  He cannot then disfranchise any
+portion of the electoral people of a State that seceded, even though
+there is no doubt that they have taken part in the rebellion, and may
+still be suspected of disloyal sentiments.  Not even Congress can do
+it, and no power known to the constitution till the State is
+reconstructed can do it without due process of law, except the national
+convention.  Should the President do any of the things supposed, he
+would both abuse the power he has and usurp power that he has not, and
+render himself liable to impeachment.  There are many things very
+proper, and even necessary to be done, which are high crimes when done
+by an improper person or agent.  The duty of the President, when there
+are steps to be taken or things to be done which he believes very
+necessary, but which are not within his competency, is, if Congress is
+not in session, to call it together at the earliest practicable moment,
+and submit the matter to its wisdom and discretion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It must be remembered that the late rebellion was not a merely personal
+but a territorial rebellion.  In such a rebellion, embracing eleven
+States, and, excluding slaves, a population of at least seven millions,
+acting under an organized territorial government, preserving internal
+civil order, supporting an army and navy under regularly commissioned
+officers, and carrying on war as a sovereign nation&mdash;in such a
+territorial rebellion no one in particular can be accused and punished
+as a traitor.  The rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or
+reckless leaders, but of the people, and the responsibility of the
+crime, whether civil or military, is not individual, but common to the
+whole territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half
+of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise Their
+defeat and the failure of their cause must be their punishment.  The
+interest of the country, as well the sentiment of the civilized
+world&mdash;it might almost be said the law of nations&mdash;demands their
+permission to return to their allegiance, to be treated according to
+their future merits, as an integral portion of the American people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its former
+severity toward political offenders.  It regards with horror the savage
+cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate Jacobites, after their
+defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden, in 1746, their barbarous
+treatment of the United Irishmen in 1798, and her brutality to the
+mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the harshness of Russia toward the
+insurgent Poles, defeated in their mad attempts to recover their lost
+nationality; the severity of Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated
+Magyars.  The liberal press kept up for years, especially in England
+and the United States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and
+Neapolitan governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired
+to overthrow them.  Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than Jefferson
+Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release from a Turkish
+prison, and sent a national ship to bring him hither as the nation's
+guest.  The people of the United States have held from the first "the
+right of insurrection," and have given their moral support to every
+insurrection in the Old or New World they discovered, and for them to
+treat with severity any portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at
+the very worst, only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly
+avowed and pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the
+civilized world as little less than infamous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any
+severity toward the people lately in arms against the government. The
+interest of the nation demands not the death or the expulsion of the
+secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes proscribed by the
+President's proclamation of the 29th of May, 1865, nor even their
+disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary; but their restoration to
+citizenship, and their loyal co-operation with all true-hearted
+Americans, in hearing the wounds inflicted on the whole country by the
+civil war.  There need be no fear to trust them.  Their cause is lost;
+they may or may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever.  They
+appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from the
+ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated, terribly
+defeated.  They know it and feel it.  There is no further appeal for
+them; the judgment of the court of last resort has been rendered, and
+rendered against them.  The cause is finished, the controversy closed,
+never to be re-opened. Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is
+worse than idle to attempt to renew the war against it.  Henceforth
+their lot is bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and
+interests, for themselves and their children, and their children's
+children, depend on their being permitted to demean themselves
+henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens. They must seek
+their freedom, greatness, and glory in the freedom, greatness, and
+glory of the American republic, in which, after all, they can be far
+freer, greater, more glorious than in a separate and independent
+confederacy.  All the arguments and considerations urged by Union men
+against their secession, come back to them now with redoubled force to
+keep them henceforth loyal to the Union.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot afford to
+lose them.  To hang or exile them, and depopulate and suffer to run to
+waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad thrift, sadder than that
+of deporting four millions of negroes and colored men.  To exchange
+only those excepted from amnesty and pardon by President Johnson,
+embracing some two millions or more, the very pars sanior of the
+Southern population, for what would remain or flock in to supply their
+place, would be only the exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for
+brass; to disfranchise them, confiscate their estates, and place them
+under the political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and
+the ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render
+rebellion chronic, and to convert seven millions of Americans, willing
+and anxious to be free, loyal American citizens, eternal enemies.  They
+have yielded to superior numbers and resources; beaten, but not
+disgraced, for they have, even in rebellion, proved themselves what
+they are&mdash;real Americans.  They are the product of the American soil,
+the free growth of the American republic, and to disgrace them were to
+disgrace the whole American character and people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The wise Romans never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for
+victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.  In civil war, the
+victory won by the government troops is held to be a victory for the
+country, in which all parties are victors, and nobody is vanquished.
+It was as truly for the good of the secessionists to fail, as it was
+for those, who sustained the government to succeed; and the government
+having forced their submission and vindicated its own authority, it
+should now leave them to enjoy, with others, the victory which it his
+won for the common good of all.  When war becomes a stern necessity,
+when it breaks out, and while it lasts, humanity requires it to be
+waged in earnest, prosecuted with vigor, and made as damaging, as
+distressful to the enemy as the laws of civilized nations permit.  It
+is the way to bring it to a speedy close, and to save life and
+property. But when it is over, when the enemy submits, and peace
+returns, the vanquished should be treated with gentleness and love.  No
+rancor should remain, no vengeance should be sought; they who met in
+mortal conflict on the battle-field should be no longer enemies, but
+embrace as comrades, as friends, as brothers.  None but a coward kicks
+a fallen foe; a brave people is generous, and the victors in the late
+war can afford to be generous generously. They fought for the Union,
+and the Union has no longer an enemy; their late enemies are willing
+and proud to be their countrymen, fellow-citizens, and friends; and
+they should look to it that small politicians do not rob them in the
+eyes of the world, by unnecessary and ill-timed severity to the
+submissive, of the glory of being, as they are, a great, noble,
+chivalric, generous, and magnanimous people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The government and the small politicians, who usually are the most
+influential with all governments, should remember that none of the
+secessionists, however much in error they have been, have committed the
+moral crime of treason.  They held, with the majority of the American
+people, the doctrine of State sovereignty, and on that doctrine they
+had a right to secede, and have committed no treason, been guilty of no
+rebellion.  That was, indeed, no reason why the government should not
+use all its force, if necessary, to preserve the national unity and the
+integrity of the national domain; but it is a reason, and a sufficient
+reason, why no penalty of treason should be inflicted on secessionists
+or their leaders, after their submission, and recognition of the
+sovereignty of the United States as that to which they owe allegiance.
+None of the secessionists have been rebels or traitors, except in
+outward act, and there can, after the act has ceased, be no just
+punishment where there has been no criminal intent.  Treason is the
+highest crime, and deserves exemplary punishment; but not where there
+has been no treasonable intent, where they who committed it did not
+believe it was treason, and on principles held by the majority of their
+countrymen, and by the party that had generally held the government,
+there really was no treason.  Concede State sovereignty, and Jefferson
+Davis was no traitor in the war he made on the United States, for he
+made none till his State had seceded.  He could not then be arraigned
+for his acts after secession, and at most, only for conspiracy, if at
+all, before secession.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the State who,
+under the old electoral law, have the elective franchise, you throw the
+State into the hands of those who have been disloyal to the Union.  If
+so, and you cannot trust them, the remedy is not in disfranchising the
+majority, but in prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the
+territorial people still longer under the provisional government, civil
+or military.  The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been
+convicted of treason either to the State or the United States, and
+neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others disqualified
+on account of disloyalty.  But you must throw the State into the hands
+of those who took part, directly or indirectly, in the rebellion, if
+you reconstruct the States at all, for they are undeniably the great
+body of the territorial people in all the States that seceded.  These
+people having submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct
+the State as a State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of
+the United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime
+by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them.  It is
+impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with those
+alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the Union
+throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States. The State,
+resting on so small a portion of the people, would have no internal
+strength, no self-support, and could stand only as upheld by federal
+arms, which would greatly impair the free and healthy action of the
+whole American system.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
+Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but without authority
+and without success.  The organizations, effected at great expense, and
+sustained only by military force, were neither States nor State
+governments, nor capable of being made so by any executive or
+congressional action.  If the disorganized States, as the government
+held, were still States in the Union, these organizations were
+flagrantly revolutionary, as effected not only without, but in defiance
+of State authority; if they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was
+the fact, they were equally unconstitutional and void of authority,
+because not created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who
+alone are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If the Unionists had retained the State organization and government,
+however small their number, they would have held the State, and the
+government would have been bound to recognize and to defend them as
+such with all the force of the Union.  The rebellion would then have
+been personal, not territorial.  But such was not the case.  The State
+organization, the State government, the whole State authority rebelled,
+made the rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists,
+very respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at home,
+in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective States, and
+shorn of all political status or rights.  Their political status was
+simply that of the old loyalists, or adherents of the British crown in
+the American war for Independence, and it was as absurd to call them
+the State, as it would have been for Great Britain to have called the
+old Tories the colonies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
+disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that the
+people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the power of the
+Union vests in the General government.  The first, as we have seen, is
+the principle of so-called "squatter sovereignty," embodied in the
+famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which gave birth, in opposition, to the
+Republican party of 1856.  The people are sovereign only as the State,
+and the State is inseparable from the domain.  The Unionists without
+the State government, without any State organization, could not hold
+the domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to the
+United States, that is to say, ceases to exist.  The American democracy
+is territorial, not personal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
+invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union. This is
+the war power.  But, though apparently unlimited, the war power is yet
+restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural limitation when
+peace returns; and peace returns, in a civil war, when the rebels have
+thrown down their arms and submitted to the national authority, and
+without any formal declaration. During the war, or while the rebellion
+lasts, it can suspend the civil courts, the civil laws, the State
+constitutions, any thing necessary to the success of the war&mdash;and of
+the necessity the military authorities are the judges; but it cannot
+abolish, abrogate, or reconstitute them.  On the return of peace they
+revive of themselves in all their vigor.  The emancipation proclamation
+of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in certain States and
+parts of States, and if those whom it emancipated could not be
+re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish slavery, or change the laws
+authorizing it; and if the Government should be sustained by Congress
+or by the Supreme Court in counting the disorganized States as States
+in the Union, the legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with
+the exception of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before
+the war.[1]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
+attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
+reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it is in
+its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being effected by
+military force, since its validity depends entirely on its being the
+free action of the territorial people to be reconstructed, the General
+government had and could have, with regard to it, only its ordinary
+peace powers.  Reconstruction is jure pacis, not jure belli.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States nor
+State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any action of
+the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be legalized by being
+indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial people.  They are wrong,
+as are all usurpations; they are undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt
+to give the minority the power to rule the majority; they are dangerous
+inasmuch as they place the State in the hands of a party that can stand
+only as supported by the General government, and thus destroy the
+proper freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to
+corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to retard
+the period of complete pacification, which might be effected in three
+months as well as in three years, or twenty years; yet they can become
+legal, as other governments illegal in their origin become legal, with
+time and popular acquiescence. The right way is always the shortest and
+easiest; but when a government must oftener follow than lead the
+public, it is not always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy
+to take it. The general instincts of the people are right as to the end
+to be gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and
+politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession party,
+have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political control of the
+State when it is reconstructed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would, even
+if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their respective
+States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would the Unionists, if
+left to themselves.  There is no party at the South prepared to adopt
+negro suffrage, and there would be none at the North if the negroes
+constituted any considerable portion of the population.  As the
+reconstruction of a State cannot be done under the war power, the
+General government can no more enfranchise than it can disfranchise any
+portion of the territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage
+must be left, where the constitution leaves it&mdash;to the States
+severally, each to dispose of it for itself.  Negro suffrage will, no
+doubt, come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and
+the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the reconstruction
+of the States disorganized by secession, for it would secure their
+re-construction with antislavery constitutions, and also make sure of
+the proposed antislavery amendment to the Constitution of the United
+States; but there is no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in
+the States needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom,
+the freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they understand
+nothing.  They would vote, for the most part, with their former
+masters, their employers, the wealthier and more intelligent classes,
+whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule, these will treat them with
+greater personal consideration and kindness than others.  The dislike
+of the negro, and hostility to negro equality, increase as you descend
+in the social scale.  The freedmen, without political instruction or
+experience, who have had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of
+loyalty or of disloyalty.  They have strong local attachments, but they
+can have no patriotism.  If they adhered to the Union in the rebellion,
+fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty, but because they
+knew that their freedom could come only from the success of the Union
+arms.  That freedom secured, they have no longer any interest in the
+Union, and their local attachments, personal associations, habits,
+tastes, likes and dislikes, are Southern, not Northern.  In any contest
+between the North and the South, they would take, to a man, the
+Southern side.  After the taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of
+the Union found, until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder
+to bear, when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and
+hootings of the negroes.  Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty, is at
+best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the elective
+franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the friends of the
+negro should, for the present, be contented with securing him simply
+equal rights of person and property.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[1] This was the case in August, 1865.  It may be quite otherwise
+before these pages see the light.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The most marked political tendency of the American people has been,
+since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and simple
+democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely popular
+basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably united to the
+national territory or domain, to the people as simply population,
+either as individuals or as the race.  Their tendency has
+unconsciously, therefore, been to change their constitution from a
+republican to a despotic, or from a civilized to a barbaric
+constitution.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the people
+are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their name; that the
+rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to them; but they are
+the people territorially constituted and fixed to the soil,
+constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety perhaps than he
+thinks, calls a "territorial democracy."  To this territorial
+democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed two other
+democracies&mdash;the one personal and the other humanitarian&mdash;each alike
+hostile to civilization, and tending to destroy the state, and capable
+of sustaining government only on principles common to all despotisms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
+unrestrained action&mdash;a strong desire to be himself, not another&mdash;to be
+his own master, to go when and where he pleases, to do what he chooses,
+to take what he wants, wherever he can find it, and to keep what he
+takes.  It is strong in all nomadic tribes, who are at once pastoral
+and predatory, and is seldom weak in our bold frontier-men, too often
+real "border ruffians." It takes different forms in different stages of
+social development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
+Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief of
+the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its enjoyment to the
+few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a nobility&mdash;for nobleman meant
+originally only freeman, as it does his own consent, express or
+constructive.  This is the so-called Jeffersonian democracy, in which
+government has no powers but such as it derives from the consent of the
+governed, and is personal democracy or pure individualism
+philosophically considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."  Under
+this sort of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual
+sovereignty, expressed by politicians when they call the electoral
+people, half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there
+obviously can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there
+can be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
+confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as long as
+they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from which they may
+separate or secede whenever they find it for their interest or their
+pleasure to do so.  State sovereignty and secession are based on the
+same democratic principle applied to the several States of the Union
+instead of individuals.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
+sections of the American people from the first, and has been greatly
+strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that government
+originates in compact.  The full realization of this tendency, which,
+happily, is impracticable save in theory, would be to render every man
+independent alike of every other man and of society, with full right
+and power to make his own will prevail.  This tendency was strongest in
+the slaveholding States, and especially, in those States, in the
+slaveholding class, the American imitation of the feudal nobility of
+mediaeval Europe; and on this side the war just ended was, in its most
+general expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
+sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
+democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
+democracy, represented by the Government.  This personal democracy has
+been signally defeated in the defeat of the late confederacy, and can
+hardly again become strong enough to be dangerous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical lines,
+effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant itself on
+humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength, and is not
+without menace to our future.  The solidarity of the race, which is the
+condition of all human life, founds, as we have seen, society, and
+creates what are called social rights, the rights alike of society in
+regard to individuals, and of individuals in regard to society.
+Territorial divisions or circumscriptions found particular societies,
+states, or nations; yet as the race is one and all its members live by
+communion with God through it and by communion one with another, these
+particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of each
+other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so that there
+is a real solidarity of nations as well as of individuals&mdash;the truth
+underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of the solidarity of peoples.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law, binding on
+every particular nation, and which every civilized nation recognizes
+and enforces on its own subjects or citizens through its own courts as
+an integral part of its own municipal or national law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the rights
+of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are
+limited by international law, or the rights of universal society&mdash;the
+truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked.  The grand error of
+Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the
+race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God.  It
+therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international
+law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus
+leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
+foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real
+world.  Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its
+basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by
+the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the
+living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine
+Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian
+revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all
+Christendom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social
+basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity
+of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual;
+and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its
+personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to
+be free.  Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding
+the black or colored race as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right
+only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it.  Let the
+negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
+freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross
+outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him
+be my servant, which is best for him and for me. Why ask me to free
+him?  I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude.  Why
+appeal to me!  Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, is he my brother?  Is
+this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the
+same race with myself?  I believe it not.  But in some instances, at
+least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and
+sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter.  The tendency of
+the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all
+obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore
+all true civil society.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite tendency&mdash;a
+tendency to exaggerate the social element, to overlook the territorial
+basis of the state, and to disregard the rights of individuals.  This
+tendency has been and is strong in the people called abolitionists.
+The American abolitionist is so engrossed with the unity that he loses
+the solidarity of the race, which supposes unity of race and
+multiplicity of individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
+authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
+circumscriptions.  Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
+humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and
+laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the
+winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law."  The principle on
+which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical
+democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers.  Were his
+socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found
+in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving
+impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in
+which might makes right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
+generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
+recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much out
+of the order of civilization, and as much in that of barbarism, as is
+the slaveholder himself.  Wendell Phillips is as far removed from true
+Christian civilization as was John C. Calhoun, and William Lloyd
+Garrison is as much of a barbarian and despot in principle and tendency
+as Jefferson Davis.  Hence the great body of the people in the
+non-slaveholding States, wedded to American democracy as they were and
+are could never, as much as they detested slavery, be induced to make
+common cause with the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the
+late civil war was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the
+time the social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
+enemy.  The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt that pure
+socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as pure
+individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that slavery has
+been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic reasons but really
+for reasons of state, in order to save the territorial democracy.  The
+territorial democracy would not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an
+element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional
+right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they
+demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean
+work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding
+its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds. Slavery is really
+a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American
+civilization.  The whole force of the national life opposes it, and
+must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean
+proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of
+modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their
+prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with
+cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the
+anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy.  They
+studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that
+those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in
+spite of slavery.  They failed to take into the account the fact that
+when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
+contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they
+were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times,
+they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized
+nations of all times.  They failed also to perceive that, if the
+Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in
+the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the
+territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on
+pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell,
+and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism
+within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.
+The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves
+were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
+master.  The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
+solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every
+species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the
+real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise question in debate
+is clearly and distinctly understood by either party.  Slavery was only
+incidentally involved in the late war. The war was occasioned by the
+collision of two extreme parties; but it was itself a war between
+civilization and barbarism, primarily between the territorial democracy
+and the personal democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation,
+as much a war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
+individualism of the slaveholder.  Yet the victory, though complete
+over the former, is only half won over the latter, for it has left the
+humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for the moment stronger
+than ever.  The socialistic democracy was enlisted by the territorial,
+not to strengthen the government at home, as it imagines, for that it
+did not do, and could not do, since the national instinct was even more
+opposed to it than to the personal democracy; but under its antislavery
+aspect, to soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
+intervention, which was seriously threatened.  The populations of
+Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly anti-slavery,
+and if the war here appeared to them a war, not solely for the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, as it really was, in which
+they took and could take no interest, but a war for the abolition of
+slavery, their governments would not venture to intervene.  This was
+the only consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
+assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
+Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the rebellion
+only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors the late
+President only as their supposed liberator, not as the preserver of the
+unity and integrity of the nation.  This is natural enough abroad, and
+proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery policy of the government, which
+had become absolutely necessary to save the Republic long before it was
+adopted; yet it is not as the emancipator of some two or three millions
+of slaves that the American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham
+Lincoln, but, aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and
+troops of unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the
+American state, and the protector of modern civilization.  His
+anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but he
+adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or negro
+freedom.  That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of
+the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves
+at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to
+do it even at first.  This fact alone proves that they had, or believed
+they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro
+slavery.  They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State
+sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and
+independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their
+cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they
+had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same
+time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
+democracy, they would have succeeded.  It is not socialism nor
+abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered.  The
+Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both
+historically and legally false to say that the South has been
+subjugated.  The Union has preserved itself and American civilization,
+alike for North and South, East and West. The armies that so often met
+in the shock of battle were not drawn up respectively by the North and
+the South, but by two rival democracies, to decide which of the two
+should rule the future.  They were the armies of two mutually
+antagonistic systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly
+conscious of the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
+instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it but
+dimly discerned.  On both sides the cause was broader and deeper than
+negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the abolitionists
+have won.  The territorial democracy alone has won, and won what will
+prove to be a final victory over the purely personal democracy, which
+had its chief seat in the Southern States, though by no means confined
+to them.  The danger to American democracy from that quarter is forever
+removed, and democracy à la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
+throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in this world victories are never complete.  The socialistic
+democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
+territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not patriotism,
+that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the brave men led by
+McClellan, Grant, and Sherman.  The humanitarians are more dangerous in
+principle than the egoists, for they have the appearance of building on
+a broader and deeper foundation, of being more Christian, more
+philosophic, more generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more
+successful than under the guise of an angel of light.  His favorite
+guise in modern times is that of philanthropy.  He is a genuine
+humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is
+Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming sentiment
+of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes both
+individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when they believe
+they are earnestly and most successfully doing the work of God.  Your
+leading abolitionists are as much affected by satanophany as your
+leading confederates, nor are they one whit more philosophical or less
+sophistical.  The one loses the race, the other the individual, and
+neither has learned to apply practically that fundamental truth that
+there is never the general without the particular, nor the particular
+without the general, the race without individuals, nor individuals
+without the race.  The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we
+are taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race, and
+Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that original sin
+was in him actual or personal sin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men
+in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor to secure
+the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother Jansenist
+sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the freedom of
+grace.  Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of slavery, to-day he
+agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, and announces that when he
+has secured that he will agitate for female suffrage and the equality
+of the sexes, forgetting or ignorant that the relation of equality
+subsists only between individuals of the same sex; that God made the
+man the head of the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for
+the woman. Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in
+social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
+agitate for equality of property.  But since property, if recognized at
+all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther
+still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an
+injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the
+Englishman Godwin.  It is unjust that one should have what another
+wants, or even more than another.  What right have you to ride in your
+coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on
+foot?  Nor can our humanitarian stop there.  Individuals are, and as
+long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and
+some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger
+or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
+therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is
+inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the
+abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals
+to the race, or humanity, man in general.  He can find no limit to his
+agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a
+pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual
+circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder.  This
+is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown,
+if logical, he must go.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be
+interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian
+democracy.  It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of
+the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our
+bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in
+prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal,
+hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor
+of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion.  They had no
+wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
+other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have
+regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they
+held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern
+abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization.  For
+the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy,
+all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even
+ostentatious in theirs.  The Catholics feared the war might result in
+encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian
+sects trusted that it would.  If the victory of the Union should turn
+out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world
+will have no reason to applaud it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as
+a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny.
+It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are
+in ecstasies over it.  The party claim it.  The European Socialists and
+Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict
+on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations.  A cause that can
+be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be
+strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element. It is no
+compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert
+not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are
+delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than
+ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more
+contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host.
+Not they are the real victors.  When the smoke of battle has cleared
+away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and
+that that alone has triumphed.  The abolitionists, in so far as they
+asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that
+unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or
+authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a
+purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a
+watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
+crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary
+States are fully reconstructed.  The Southern or egoistical democrats,
+so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights
+of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every
+individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to
+protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so
+far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society
+neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
+sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
+government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they
+share in the victory, as the future will prove.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
+against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no
+lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for
+men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers
+fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in
+modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as
+themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives,
+and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the
+waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to
+repair.  They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and
+civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history.  The
+American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species
+of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
+placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority,
+and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized
+governments&mdash;not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.
+The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative;
+but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false
+democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of
+insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an
+aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should
+always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever
+plots its destruction.  They must never be delighted again to have
+their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
+to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.  The people of the Northern
+States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the
+people of the Southern States.  Their press had taught them to call
+every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the
+traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they
+had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the
+Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and
+traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the
+public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they
+will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
+governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of
+lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
+revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign
+of barbarism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the
+failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating
+element, either in the particular State or in the United States, is
+henceforth to be apprehended.  But the tendency in the opposite
+direction may give the American state some trouble.  The tendency now
+is, as to the Union, consolidation, and as to the particular state,
+humanitarianism, socialism, or centralized democracy.  Yet this
+tendency, though it may do much mischief, will hardly become exclusive.
+The States that seceded, when restored, will always, even in abandoning
+State sovereignty, resist it, and still assert State rights.  When
+these States are restored to their normal position, they will always be
+able to protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
+rights by the General government.  The constitution, in the
+distribution of the powers of government, provides the States severally
+with ample means to protect their individuality against the
+centralizing tendency of the General government, however strong it may
+be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
+government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look upon it
+as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to regard the
+several State governments as subordinate instead of co-ordinate
+governments.  It is not improbable that the Executive, since the
+outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded throughout on that
+supposition, and hence his extraordinary assumptions of power; but when
+once peace is fully re-established and the States have all resumed
+their normal position in the Union, every State will be found prompt
+enough to resist any attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.
+Its instinct of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will
+be protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of the
+States is far less than the danger that the Executive will usurp all
+the powers of Congress and the judiciary.  Congress, during the
+rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, with dictatorial
+powers, and these powers the Executive continues to exercise even after
+the rebellion is suppressed.  They were given and held under the rights
+of war, and for war purposes only, and expired by natural limitation
+when the war ceased; but the Executive forgets this, and, instead of
+calling Congress together and submitting the work of reconstruction of
+the States that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
+reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 372 and
+the people seem to like it.  He might and should, as commander-in-chief
+of the army and navy, govern them as military departments, by his
+lieutenants, till Congress could either create provisional civil
+governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the
+Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war
+power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every
+act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and
+done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.
+His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
+inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them.
+Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public sentiment, and a
+deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, which will be long in
+healing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
+originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a long time
+before.  There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to
+throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands
+of the Executive.  The patronage the Executive wields, even in times of
+peace, is so large that he has indirectly an almost supreme control
+over the legislative branch of the government.  For this, which is,
+and, if not checked will continue to be, a growing evil, there is no
+obvious remedy, unless the President is chosen for a longer term of
+office and made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous
+doctrine of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the
+true interests of the public.  Here is matter for the consideration of
+the American statesman.  But as to the usurpations of the Executive in
+these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, and will cease when
+the States are all restored.  They are abuses, but only temporary
+abuses, and the Southern States, when restored to the Union, will
+resume their rights in their own sphere, as self-governing communities,
+and legalize or undo the unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
+individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able to
+become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not begin at
+home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance. In the States
+in which the humanitarian tendency is the strongest, the territorial
+democracy has its most effective organization.  Prior to the outbreak
+of the rebellion the American people had asserted popular sovereignty,
+but had never rendered an account to themselves in what sense the
+people are or are not sovereign.  They had never distinguished the
+three sorts of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of
+the three is the distinctively American democracy.  For them, democracy
+was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought to avoid them
+either by exaggerating one or the other of the two exclusive
+tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself through
+restrictions on suffrage.  The latter class began to distrust universal
+suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to dream of modifying the
+American constitution so as to make it conform more nearly to the
+English model.  The war has proved that the were wrong, for nothing is
+more certain than that the people have saved the national unity and
+integrity almost in spite of their government.  The General government
+either was not disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against
+secession, till forced to do it by the people themselves.  No wise
+American can henceforth distrust American democracy.  The people may be
+trusted.  So much is settled.  But as the two extremes were equally
+democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of popular
+sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling to allow
+separation, and would not and did not engage in the war against
+secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of the national
+domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it was not democracy
+in the sense of either of the extremes that made the war and came out
+of it victorious; and hence the real American democracy must differ
+from them both, and is neither a personal nor a humanitarian, but a
+territorial democracy.  The true idea of American democracy thus comes
+out, for the first time, freed from the two extreme democracies which
+have been identified with it, and henceforth enters into the
+understandings as well as the hearts of the people.  The war has
+enlightened patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes
+reason&mdash;a well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional
+conviction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent the
+socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive.  In the States that
+seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not gain it, for
+it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, and habits of the
+Southern people, and the Southern people will not be exterminated nor
+swamped by migrations either from the North or from Europe.  They are
+and always will be an agricultural people, and an agricultural people
+are and always will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless
+unwittingly held for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special
+object in which they take a passionate interest.  The worst of all
+policies is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
+landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and depressed
+whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of the 29th of
+May, 1865.  Of course that policy will not be carried out, and if the
+negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote with the wealthy
+landholding class, and aid them in resisting all socialistic
+tendencies.  The humanitarians will fail for the want of a good social
+grievance against which they can declaim.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as a
+speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance.  It is
+aided much by the congregational constitution of their religion; yet it
+is weak at home, and is resisted practically by the territorial
+division of power.  New England means Massachusetts, and nowhere is the
+subdivision of the powers of government carried further, or the
+constitution of the territorial democracy more complete, than in that
+State. Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
+evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the farther
+they are from home and the less its right to interfere with them, the
+more in earnest and the more effective for evil does it become.  Its
+nature is to mind every one's business but its own.  But now that
+slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in the United States a social
+grievance of magnitude enough to enlist any considerable number of the
+people, even of Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it.  Negro
+enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
+something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a question
+that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not serve their
+purpose of prolonged agitation.  They could not and never did carry
+away the nation, even on the question of slavery itself, and
+abolitionism had comparatively little direct influence in abolishing
+slavery; and the exclusion of negro suffrage can never be made to
+appear to the American people as any thing like so great a grievance as
+was slavery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
+numerous and an important portion of the population.  Their increasing
+numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much as the majority may
+dislike their religion, a constantly increasing influence, and it is
+idle to leave them out in counting the future of the country.  They
+will, in a very few years, be the best and most thoroughly educated
+class of the American people; and, aside from their religion, or,
+rather, in consequence of their religion, the most learned,
+enlightened, and intelligent portion of the American population; and as
+much as they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army
+and elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
+has won.  The best things written on the controversy have been written
+by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their religion to
+comprehend the real character of the American constitution than any
+other class of Americans, the moment they study it in the light of
+their own theology.  The American constitution is based on that of
+natural society, on the solidarity of the race, and the difference
+between natural society and the church or Christian society is, that
+the one is initial and the other teleological.  The law of both is the
+same; Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
+exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic. If
+they have been backward in their sympathy with the government, it has
+been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the humanitarian
+or socialistic elements they detected in the Republican party, joined
+with a prejudice against political and social negro equality.  But
+their church everywhere opposes the socialistic movements of the age,
+all movements in behalf of barbarism, and they may always be counted on
+to resist the advance of the socialistic democracy.  If the country has
+had reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
+in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, indeed,
+for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to their religion,
+which has been and is the grand protectress of modern society and
+civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to the
+extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private property
+as bases of political rights or franchises.  This tendency has often
+been justified on the ground that the elective franchise is a natural
+right; which is not true, because the elective franchise is political
+power, and political power is always a civil trust, never a natural
+right, and the state judges for itself to whom it will or will not
+confide the trust; but there can be no doubt that it is a normal
+tendency, and in strict accordance with the constitution of American
+civil society, which rests on the unity of the race, and public instead
+of private property.  All political distinctions founded on birth,
+race, or private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
+necessarily eliminated by its normal developments.  To contend that
+none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a particular
+race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary, to the order of
+civilization the New World is developing.  The only qualification for
+the elective franchise the American system can logically insist on is
+that the elector belong to the territorial people&mdash;that is, be a
+natural-born or a naturalized citizen, be a major in full possession of
+his natural faculties, and unconvicted of any infamous offence.  The
+State is free to naturalize foreigners or not, and under such
+restrictions as it judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must
+treat them as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The naturalization question is one of great national importance. The
+migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the national
+population, and to the national wealth and resources, but less,
+perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity of elections, or
+the wisdom and integrity of the government.  It is impossible that
+there should be perfect harmony between the national territorial
+democracy and individuals born, brought up, and formed under a
+political order in many respects widely different from it; and there is
+no doubt that the democracy, in its objectionable sense, has been
+greatly strengthened by the large infusion of naturalized citizens.
+There can be no question that, if the laboring classes, in whom the
+national sentiment is usually the strongest, had been composed almost
+wholly of native Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in
+the cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
+persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
+difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies.  But to
+leave so large a portion of the actual population as the foreign born
+residing in the country without the rights of citizens, would have been
+a far graver evil, and would, in the late struggle, have given the
+victory to secession.  There are great national advantages derived from
+the migration hither of foreign labor, and if the migration be
+encouraged or permitted, naturalization on easy and liberal terms is
+the wisest, the best, and only safe policy.  The children of
+foreign-born parents are real Americans.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent powers
+of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually more active,
+more energetic than the children of the older inhabitants of the
+country among whom they settle.  Some of our first men in civil life
+have been sons of foreign-born parents, and so are not a few of our
+greatest and most successful generals.  The most successful of our
+merchants have been foreign-born.  The same thing has been noticed
+elsewhere, especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to
+Holland, Germany, England, and Ireland.  The immigration of so many
+millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American people
+much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, and made them
+a superior people on the whole to what they would otherwise have been.
+This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of race or
+blood, but is a natural effect of breaking men away from routine, and
+throwing them back on their own individual energies and personal
+resources.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
+recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to freedom;
+but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward progress of
+American democracy, which asserts equal rights for all, and not for a
+race or class only.  Some would confine suffrage to landholders, or, at
+least, to property-holders; but that is inconsistent with the American
+idea, and is a relic of the barbaric constitution which founds power on
+private instead of public wealth.  Nor are property-owners a whit more
+likely to vote for the public good than are those who own no property
+but their own labor.  The men of wealth, the business men,
+manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who exert
+the worst influence on government in every country, for they always
+strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their own private
+interests.  They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let government take care
+of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor," instead of the
+far safer maxim, "Let government take care of the weak, the strong can
+take care of themselves." Universal suffrage is better than restricted
+suffrage, but even universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private
+property from having an undue political influence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable from it,
+and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an inferior class
+to those elevated by restricted suffrage.  The Congress of 1860, or of
+1862. was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of
+the country, and not inferior to that of 1776, or that of 1789; and the
+Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as
+it was during the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain,
+and not inferior to that of France during the Crimean war.  The Crimean
+war developed and placed in high command, either with the English or
+the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, to say
+nothing of others.  The more aristocratic South proved itself, in both
+statesmanship and generalship, in no respect superior to the
+territorial democracy of the North and West.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The great evil the country experiences is not from universal suffrage,
+but from what may be called rotation in office.  The number of
+political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern and Western
+States especially, the representatives in Congress are changed every
+two or four years, and a member, as soon as he has acquired the
+experience necessary to qualify him for his position, is dropped, not
+through the fickleness of his constituency, but to give place to
+another whose aid had been necessary to his first or second election.
+Employes are "rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful,
+but because there are others who want their places.  This is all bad,
+but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong public
+opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which is mainly
+formed by it.  There is, no doubt, a due share of official corruption,
+but not more than elsewhere, and that would be much diminished by
+increasing the salaries of the public servants, especially in the
+higher offices of the government, both General and State.  The pay to
+the lower officers and employes of the government, and to the privates
+and non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in general,
+too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both the civil and
+military service is too low, and relatively far lower than it was when
+the government was first organized.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at all
+by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility to the
+military spirit and a standing army.  The depreciation of the military
+spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental democracy, which,
+like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and brings about the very
+evils it seeks to avoid.  The hostility to standing armies is inherited
+from England, and originated in the quarrels between king and
+parliament, and is a striking evidence of the folly of that bundle of
+antagonistic forces called the British constitution.  In feudal times
+most of the land was held by military service, and the reliance of
+government was on the feudal militia; but no real progress was made in
+eliminating barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at
+its command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies. It
+is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost
+more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary for royal
+supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the military
+spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not held in honor
+and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size is public economy.
+It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who are worth more there than
+anywhere else; it creates honorable places for gentlemen or the sons of
+gentlemen without wealth, in which they can serve both themselves and
+their country.  Under a democratic government the most serious
+embarrassment to the state is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or
+not fitted to support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in
+a democratic government than in any other.  The civil service,
+divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, and
+art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class, and the
+army and navy would be an economy and a real service to the state were
+they maintained only for the sake of the rank and position they give to
+their officers, and the wholesome influence these officers would exert
+on society and the politics of the country&mdash;this even in case there
+were no wars or apprehension of wars.  They supply an element needed in
+all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit,
+perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which
+has in it always something low and sordid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations
+to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can
+have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human
+animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor,
+and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for
+war.  A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have
+prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand
+well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President
+on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion,
+or have instantly suppressed it.  The cost of maintaining a land army
+of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would
+have been, in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion
+has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
+been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on
+the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual
+losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand
+millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the assessed value of the whole
+property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860,
+and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of
+property since.  To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require
+a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
+discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been necessary to
+maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the
+prevention of the rebellion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder
+much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its
+military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their
+normal order; but a regular army&mdash;not militia or volunteers, who are
+too expensive&mdash;of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a
+navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a
+peace establishment.  The army of a hundred thousand men must form a
+cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to
+place the army on a war footing.  Less will answer neither for peace
+nor war, for the nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain
+henceforth the rank of a first-class military and maritime power, and
+take a leading part in political movements of the civilized world, and,
+to a great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Canning boasted that he had raised up the New World to redress the
+balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened Spain and gave
+the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the Emperor of the French is
+trying, by strengthening Italy and Spain, and by a French protectorate
+in Mexico, to secure to France, both in the Old World and the New&mdash;a
+magnificent dream, but not to be realized.  His uncle judged more
+wisely when he sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought
+only to secure to France the hegemony of the Old.  But the hegemony of
+the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she will
+have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even in Europe.
+To maintain this position, which is imperative on her, she must always
+have a large armed force, either on foot or in reserve, which she can
+call out and put on a war footing at short notice.  The United States
+must henceforth be a great military and naval power, and the old
+hostility to a standing army and the old attempt to bring the military
+into disrepute must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
+egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race and
+socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the race, is the
+most dangerous.  The egoistical form is checked, sufficiently weakened
+by the defeat of the rebels; but the social form believes that it has
+triumphed, and that individuals are effaced in society, and the States
+in the Union.  Against this, more especially should public opinion and
+American statesmanship be now directed, and territorial democracy and
+the division of the powers of government be asserted and vigorously
+maintained. The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy
+is conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet arrived,
+as the Germans say, at self consciousness&mdash;<I>selbsbewusstseyn</I>&mdash;and
+operates only instinctively. All the dominant theories and
+sentimentalities are against it, and it is only Providence that can
+sustain it.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XV.
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+DESTINY&mdash;POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every living
+nation receives from Providence a special work or mission in the
+progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, or the end for
+which it exists; and that the special mission of the United States is
+to continue and complete in the political order the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic
+alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to the
+civilization of the race.  Canada and the other British Provinces,
+Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the
+South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without
+being missed by the civilized world.  They represent no idea, and the
+work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them.  If
+they keep up with the progress of civilization, it is all that can be
+expected of them. France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the
+rest of Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
+laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; and it
+is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or jointly
+advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman Empire, except in
+abolishing slavery and including in the political people the whole
+territorial people.  They can only develop and give a general
+application to the fundamental principles of the Roman constitution.
+That indeed is much, but it adds no new element nor new combination of
+preexisting elements.  But nothing of this can be said of the United
+States.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and the
+great principle of the territorial constitution of power, instead of
+the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or the monarchical;
+and yet with true civil or political principles it mixed up nearly all
+the elements of the barbaric constitution. The gentile system of Rome
+recalls the patriarchal, and the relation that subsisted between the
+patron and his clients has a striking resemblance to that which
+subsists between the feudal lord and his retainers, and may have had
+the same origin.  The three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into
+which the Roman people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may
+have been, as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their
+origin, but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
+division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not local,
+but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the
+individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of
+kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with
+our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into
+tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans.  The adopted member
+was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited
+its goods.  Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the
+three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
+restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the
+house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by
+houses, not by individuals en masse.  After all, practically the Roman
+senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for
+no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of noble blood.
+The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being
+included in the three tribes, when they came to be a power in the
+republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and
+patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or
+territorial people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the
+right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state,
+and the tenant held it from the state.  The domain was vested in the
+state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica,
+not private property&mdash;the first grand leap of the human race from
+barbarism.  In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more
+republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and
+introduced the principle of territorial democracy.  The division into
+demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial
+division, not personal nor genealogical.  And if the equality of all
+men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class
+stood on the same footing.  Athens and other Greek cities, though
+conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on
+Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors
+than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of
+Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they
+represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship
+were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and
+the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and
+uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
+gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of
+the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in
+the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it
+held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.
+It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if,
+as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic
+equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than
+men and without political rights.  Practically, power was an attribute
+of birth and of private wealth.  Suffrage was almost universal among
+freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and
+were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the
+comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia
+centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and
+noble few.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth
+Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality
+of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on
+principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents it as a
+commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right
+to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as
+servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of
+imperial clemency.  But it has never yet been proved that the emperor
+has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a
+just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the
+proud, but spare the submissive."  In a just war the emperor may kill
+on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
+now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does
+not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance,
+have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.  But even if it did, it
+gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their
+innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary
+slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the
+parent.  The law, indeed, assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a
+person and treated him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror,
+and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue
+only to his owner.  But there is no power in heaven or earth that can
+make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a
+clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the
+slave his personality and treats him as a thing. I the unity of all men
+had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have
+attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its penal
+character, or indeed on any ground whatever.  All men are born under
+the law of nature with equal rights, and the civil law can justly
+deprive no man of his liberty, but for a crime, committed by him
+personally, that justly forfeits his liberty to society.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European nations
+have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.  They can carry out
+practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, abolish
+slavery in every form, make all men equal before the law, and the
+political people commensurate with the territorial people.  Indeed,
+France has already done it.  She has abolished slavery, villenage,
+serfage, political aristocracy, asserted the equality of all men before
+the law, vindicated the sovereignty of the people, and established
+universal suffrage, complete social and territorial democracy.  The
+other nations may do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or
+advance farther.  Yet in France, territorial democracy the most
+complete results only in establishing the most complete imperial
+centralism, usually called Caesarism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor reigns
+"by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and therefore, that
+by the grace of God and the will of the nation he may cease to reign;
+but while he reigns he is supreme, and his will is law.  The
+constitution imposes no real or effective restraint on his power: while
+he sits upon the throne he is practically France, and the ministers are
+his clerks; the council of state, the senate, and the legislative body
+are merely his agents in governing the nation.  This may, indeed, be
+changed, but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic
+centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of
+antagonisms, checks and balances, called constitutionalism, or
+parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and
+which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all orders
+the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the principle of
+all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all opposites or extremes.
+Mankind will be logical; and the worst of all tyrannies is that which
+forbids them to draw from their principles their last logical
+consequences, or that prohibits them the free explication and
+application of the Divine Idea, in which consists their life, their
+progress.  Such tyranny strikes at the very existence of society, and
+wars against the reality of things.  It is supremely sophistical, and
+its success is death; for the universe in its constitution is supremely
+logical, and man, individually and socially, is rational.  God is the
+author and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its
+order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically Father,
+Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.  The Son or Word is
+the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God is living God a
+real, active, living Being&mdash;living, concrete, not abstract or dead
+unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, Plotinus, and Proclus.  In the
+Holy Trinity is the principle and prototype of all society, and what is
+called the solidarity of the race is only the outward expression, or
+copy in the external order, of what theologians term the circumsession
+of the three Divine Persons of the Godhead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature either
+in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity alone, is
+sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality.  It sins
+against God, and must fail of its end.  The English system, which is
+based on antagonistic elements, on opposites, without the middle term
+that conciliates them, unites them, and makes them dialectically one,
+copies the Divine model in its distinctions alone, which, considered
+alone, are opposites or contraries.  It denies, if Englishmen could but
+see it, the unity of God.  The French, or imperial system, which
+excludes the extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites,
+instead of conciliating them&mdash;denies the distinctions in the model, and
+copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called pantheism.
+The English constitution has no middle term, and the French no
+extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine Trinity, the original
+basis and type of the syllogism.  The human race can be contented with
+neither, for neither allows it free scope for its inherent life and
+activity.  The English system tends to pure individualism; the French
+to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element
+of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and lifeless
+abstraction, but the highest theological and philosophical truth,
+without which there were no reason, no man, no society; for God is the
+first principle of all being, all existence, all science, all life, and
+it is in Him that we live and move and have our being.  God is at the
+beginning, in the middle, and at the end of all things&mdash;the universal
+principle, medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His
+existence being directly or indirectly impugned.  In a deeper sense
+than is commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit
+domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.  The English
+constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of
+reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with the
+others for the mastery.  For a long time the king labored, intrigued,
+and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which he was held by
+the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and people united and
+humbled the crown; and now the people are at work seeking to sap both
+the crown and the nobles.  The state is constituted to nobody's
+satisfaction; and though all may unite in boasting its excellences, all
+are at work trying to alter or amend it.  The work of constituting the
+state with the English is ever beginning, never ending.  Hence the
+eternal clamor for parliamentary reform.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains
+of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal
+rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and
+wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish
+either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic
+centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the
+revolutionists of Europe.  The special merit of the American system is
+not in its democracy alone, as too many at home and abroad imagine; but
+along with its democracy in the division of the powers of government,
+between a General government and particular State governments, which
+are not antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters,
+and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without
+creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any
+European state.  There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in
+Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to
+effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of
+them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund,
+similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently
+attempted and have so signally failed to establish.  An intelligent
+Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in
+operation three months before it became evident that the principle on
+which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat. It was
+that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more
+than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused
+the collapse of the Confederacy.  The numbers were relatively about
+equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively
+not much inferior to those of the Government.  So at least the
+Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of
+the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as
+much care and accuracy as any men could.  Foreign powers also, friendly
+as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain
+their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
+loyal States.  The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of
+State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.  The war has
+proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch
+for confederated states.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals. As
+equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in
+which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals,
+then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over
+again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the
+Persian war, and its fate.  A union like the American cannot be created
+by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.  The Emperor of the
+French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and
+divide the powers of government between them as individual and as
+united states.  They would necessarily hold from the imperial
+government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its
+functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central
+government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our
+President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to
+make the government of the United States.  The elements of a state
+constituted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor
+in the constitution of European society; and the American constitution
+would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered
+it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it
+in the best way she could.  At first it was a single tribe or people
+distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a
+second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual,
+composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the Tities or Quirites, and,
+afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or
+Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided
+into one hundred houses or gentes.  Each house in each tribe was
+represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number
+of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
+fixed.  Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
+without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
+itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
+cities.  The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into
+gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the
+tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the
+division was not a division of the powers of government between two
+co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the
+British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial
+veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was
+an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division
+between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and
+the particular.  The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as
+Niebuhr calls them&mdash;who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early
+constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and
+especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch&mdash;was simply an
+obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive
+power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the
+American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated
+municipalities.  These municipalities, modelled chiefly after that of
+Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs;
+but their local powers were not co-ordinate in their own sphere with
+those exercised by the Roman municipality, but subordinate and
+dependent.  The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held
+their rights subject to its will.  They were formally, or virtually,
+subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman
+emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.
+Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as
+subjects, and at first these municipal organizations secured the
+progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under
+the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed
+by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal
+agents of the empire.  So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
+burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to
+compel them to enter the municipal government; and it became, under the
+later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves
+into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed.  There are actually
+imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.
+Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover
+in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more
+favorable result.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
+common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements
+retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that
+philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it
+from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on
+the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which
+seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power.  No
+greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater
+contribution to civilization to be made.  Nowhere else than in this New
+World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this
+problem be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
+Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny,
+for religion and politics go together.  Church and state, as
+governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state
+is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order&mdash;in the
+principles revealed or affirmed by religion&mdash;and are inseparable from
+them.  There is no state without God, any more than there is a church
+without Christ or the Incarnation.  An atheist may be a politician, but
+if there were no God there could be no politics, theological principles
+are the basis of political principles.  The created universe is a
+dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its
+parts cohere and are essential to one another.  All has its origin and
+prototype in the Triune God, and throughout expresses unity in
+triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real
+being and no actual or possible life. Every thing has its principle,
+medium, and end.  Natural society is initial, civil government is
+medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions
+in one indissoluble whole.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine
+creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the
+Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.  True, he communes with
+God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he
+is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance
+for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the
+source of life&mdash;not either the beginning or the end of his communion.
+They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of
+themselves, can impart none.  They are in the order of second causes,
+and second causes, without the first cause, are nought.  Communion
+which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
+instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.
+As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in
+some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both
+individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform
+either their politics to their religion or their religion to their
+politics.  Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political
+society in its own image and likeness, and every political system
+struggles to harmonize Christianity with itself.  If, then, the United
+States have a political destiny, they have a religious destiny
+inseparable from it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to
+the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine Idea in creation.
+Their religious destiny is to render practicable and to realize the
+normal relations between church and state, religion and politics, as
+concreted in the life of the nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In politics, the United States are not realizing a political theory of
+any sort whatever.  They, on the contrary, are successfully refuting
+all political theories, making away with them, and establishing the
+state&mdash;not on a theory, not on an artificial basis or a foundation laid
+by human reason or will, but on reality, the eternal and immutable
+principles in relation to which man is created.  They are doing the
+same in regard to religious theories.  Religion is not a theory, a
+subjective view, an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle,
+a law, and a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace,
+practical conformity to what is universally true and real.  The United
+States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad havoc with
+religious theories as with political theories, and are pressing on with
+irresistible force to the real or the Divine order which is expressed
+in the Christian mysteries, which exists independent of man's
+understanding and will, and which man can neither make nor unmake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new
+religion nor to found a new church.  All real religion is catholic, and
+is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true.  Even our
+Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion,
+but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time
+what had been determined in eternity.  God has himself founded the
+church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real
+principles. His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on
+catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are
+universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in
+the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces
+and sustains all things.  Founded on universal and immutable
+principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the
+church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men.
+Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they
+are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and
+independent of him.  Religion is above and independent of the state,
+and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to
+accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles
+of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her dogmas
+are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and unalterable, the
+relations between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities may be
+changed or modified by the changes of time and place.  These relations
+have not been always the same, but have differed in different ages and
+countries.  During the first three centuries of our era the church had
+no legal status, and was either connived at or persecuted by the state.
+Under the Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her
+prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and ecclesiastical
+questions, and were made, in some sense, civil magistrates, and paid as
+such by the empire.  Under feudalism, the prelates received investiture
+as princes and barons, and formed alone, or in connection with the
+temporal lords, an estate in the kingdom.  The Pope became a temporal
+prince and suzerain, at one time, of a large part of Europe, and
+exercised the arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian
+sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects. Since the
+downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized
+monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her
+temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil
+functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the
+national church is held in strict subjection to the civil authority, as
+in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of the state; in the
+other states of Europe, as France, Austria, Spain, and Italy, she is
+treated with distrust by the civil government, and allowed hardly a
+shadow of freedom and independence.  In France, which has the proud
+title of eldest daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not
+freer than they are in Turkey.  All religious are said to be free, and
+all are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.  The
+emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to concede
+the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he
+judges expedient for his own secular interests.  In Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy
+of the civil authorities is the same, or worse.  It may be safely
+asserted that, except in the United States, the church is either held
+by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy.  The relation
+is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave
+detriment of both religion and civilization.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of
+civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages;
+and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations,
+would, in the present state of men's minds in Europe, be construed, if
+approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or
+the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and
+pleasure in utter disregard of the law of God, the moral order, or the
+immutable distinctions between right and wrong.  It could only favor
+the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the
+spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the
+entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
+condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither
+the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can
+understand practically such separation in any other sense than the
+complete emancipation of our entire secular life from the law of God,
+or the Divine order, which is the real order.  It is not the union of
+church and state&mdash;that is, the union, or identity rather, of religious
+and political principles&mdash;that it is desirable to get rid of, but the
+disunion or antagonism of church and state.  But this is nowhere
+possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state
+organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting
+from its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or
+the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things
+are created and governed.  Nowhere else is it practicable, at present,
+to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable
+in the New.  The state here being organized in accordance with catholic
+principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the church.
+Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective
+spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same
+Divine Idea.  The church can trust the state, and the state can trust
+the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.
+Each by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
+other.  It is true the church is not formally established as the civil
+law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there
+is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and
+independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons.  The need of
+establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and
+penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a
+barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not
+organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false
+principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine
+order of things.  When the state is constituted in harmony with that
+order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
+constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or
+what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity.
+The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing
+principle and real interior life.  The external establishment, by legal
+enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add
+nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or
+piety&mdash;neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their
+nature, be free-will offerings to God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true
+religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and
+uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by
+their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them.  The American
+state recognizes only the catholic religion.  It eschews all
+sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their
+peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws.  The
+state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and
+everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as
+outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent
+vitality or want of vitality.  The state conscience is catholic, not
+sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all
+religions, the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic
+in its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
+oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true.  The church being
+free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the
+freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can
+ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from
+external institutions, or from social and political organizations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations
+may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority.
+The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as
+they are, not as they are not.  To deal with a child as with an adult,
+or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only
+acting a lie.  The church cannot treat men as free men where they are
+not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is
+undeveloped.  She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and
+culture of individuals, and to the greater or less progress of nations
+in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her
+constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline
+with the variations of time and place.  Many of her canons, very proper
+and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are
+needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World.  Under
+the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and
+trust them as freemen, because free men they are.  The freeman asks,
+why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be
+secured.  The simple reason that the church commands will rarely
+satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that.  The
+full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all
+obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic
+command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
+expected of the people reared under the American system, not because
+they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they
+insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the
+understanding, not of the will or the affections alone.  They are
+trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to distinguish
+between the law and the person of the magistrate.  They can obey God,
+but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in
+the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they
+will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience.  The reason
+that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the
+reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men,
+or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does
+not suffice for them in its maturity.  The appeal to external authority
+was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous
+ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with
+the state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This trait of the American character is not uncatholic.  An
+intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction,
+after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine
+order&mdash;the obedience of a free man, not of a slave&mdash;is far more
+consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God,
+than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand
+far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that must be
+governed as children or barbarians.  It is possible that the people of
+the Old World are not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion
+any more than they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have
+been trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed to
+look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in the
+reason of things.  They understand no reason for obedience beyond the
+external command, and do not believe it possible to give or to
+understand the reason why the command itself is given. They regard the
+authority of the church as a thing apart, and see no way by which faith
+and reason can be harmonized.  They look upon them as antagonistic
+forces rather than as integral elements of one and the same whole.
+Concede them the regimen of freedom, and their religion has no support
+but in their good-will, their affections, their associations, their
+habits, and their prejudices.  It has no root in their rational
+convictions, and when they begin to reason they begin to doubt.  This
+is not the state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied
+under the political regime established elsewhere than in the United
+States.  In every state in the world, except the American, the civil
+constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or less, the logic of
+things; and, therefore, in no one of them can the people receive a
+thoroughly dialectic training, or an education in strict conformity to
+the real order.  Hence, in them all, the church is more or less
+obstructed in her operations, and prevented from carrying out in its
+fulness her own Divine Idea. She does the best she can in the
+circumstances and with the materials with which she is supplied, and
+exerts herself continually to bring individuals and nations into
+harmony with her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the
+nations is a struggle, a warfare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on real
+catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents none of
+these obstacles, and must, in their progressive development or
+realization of their political idea, put an end to this warfare, in so
+far as a warfare between church and state, and leave the church in her
+normal position in society, in which she can, without let or hindrance,
+exert her free spirit, and teach and govern men by the Divine law as
+free men.  She may encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and
+indifference in few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from
+the state, which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually
+give way before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the truth and
+reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of her
+ministers.  The American people are, on the surface, sectarians or
+indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less uncatholic than the
+people of any other country because they are, in their intellectual and
+moral development, nearer to the real order, or, in the higher and
+broader sense of the word more truly civilized.  The multitude of sects
+that obtain may excite religious compassion for those who are carried
+away by them, for men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny
+only by truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth,
+and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need excite
+no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more or less of
+catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national life repel them,
+in so far as they are sectarian and not catholic, as substances that
+cannot be assimilated to the national life.  The American state being
+catholic in its organic principles, as is all real religion, and the
+church being free, whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without
+any support in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself,
+it must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sects themselves have a half unavowed conviction that they cannot
+subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil authority.  They
+are free, but do not feel safe in the United States.  They know the
+real church is catholic, and that they themselves are none of them
+catholic.  The most daring among them even pretends to be no more than
+a "branch" of the catholic church.  They know that only the catholic
+church can withstand the pressure of events and survive the shocks of
+time, and hence everywhere their movements to get rid of their
+sectarianism and to gain a catholic character.  They hold conventions
+of delegates from the whole sectarian world, form "unions,"
+"alliances," and "associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the
+catholic church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the
+Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost.  The most
+they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world, is to create
+a confederation, and confederated sects are something very different
+from a church inherently one and catholic.  It is no more the catholic
+church than the late Southern Confederacy was the American state.  The
+sectarian combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and
+retard, for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state
+organized in accordance with catholic principles, and left to
+themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and must
+soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such being the case, no sensible Catholic can imagine that the church
+needs any physical force against the sects, except to repel actual
+violence, and protect her in that freedom of speech and possession
+which is the right of all before the state.  What are called religious
+establishments are needed only where either the state is barbarous or
+the religion is sectarian.  Where the state, in its intrinsic
+constitution, is in accordance with catholic principles, as in the
+United States, the church has all she needs or can receive.  The state
+can add nothing more to her power or her security in her moral and
+spiritual warfare with sectarianism, and any attempt to give her more
+would only weaken her as against the sects, place her in a false light,
+partially justify their hostility to her, render effective their
+declamations against her, mix her up unnecessarily with political
+changes, interests, and passions, and distract the attention of her
+ministers from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on them the
+duties of politicians and statesmen.  Where there is nothing in the
+state hostile to the church, where she is free to act according to her
+own constitution and laws, and exercise her own discipline on her own
+spiritual subjects, civil enactments in her favor or against the sects
+may embarrass or impede her operations, but cannot aid her, for she can
+advance no farther than she wins the heart and convinces the
+understanding.  A spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be
+effected only by spiritual means.  The church wants freedom in relation
+to the state&mdash;nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from
+God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order of
+things, and founded on principles which have their origin and ground in
+the principles on which the church herself is founded, can never
+establish any one of the sects as the religion of the state, for that
+would violate their political constitution, and array all the other
+sects, as well as the church herself, against the government.  They
+cannot be called upon to establish the church by law, because she is
+already in their constitution as far as the state has in itself any
+relation with religion, and because to establish her in any other sense
+would be to make her one of the civil institutions of the land, and to
+bring her under the control of the state, which were equally against
+her interest and her nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The religious mission of the United States is not then to establish the
+church by external law, or to protect her by legal disabilities, pains,
+and penalties against the sects, however uncatholic they may be; but to
+maintain catholic freedom, neither absorbing the state in the church
+nor the church in the state, but leaving each to move freely, according
+to its own nature, in the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of
+things.  Their mission separates church and state as external governing
+bodies, but unites them in the interior principles from which each
+derives its vitality and force.  Their union is in the intrinsic unity
+of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in different spheres,
+each obeys one and the same Divine law.  With this the Catholic, who
+knows what Catholicity means, is of course satisfied, for it gives the
+church all the advantage over the sects of the real over the unreal;
+and with this the sects have no right to be dissatisfied, for it
+subjects them to no disadvantage not inherent in sectarianism itself in
+presence of Catholicity, and without any support from the civil
+authority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The effect of this mission of our country fully realized, would be to
+harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by absorbing
+either in the other, or by obliterating the natural distinction between
+them, but by conforming both to the real or Divine order, which is
+supreme and immutable.  It places the two powers in their normal
+relation, which has hitherto never been done, because hitherto there
+never has been a state normally constituted.  The nearest approach made
+to the realization of the proper relations of church and state, prior
+to the birth of the American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under
+the Christian emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism,
+and the emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be
+made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and persisted
+to the last in treating the church as a civil institution under their
+supervision and control, as does the Emperor of the French in France,
+even yet.  In the Middle Ages the state was so barbarously constituted
+that the church was obliged to supervise its administration, to mix
+herself up with the civil government, in order to infuse some
+intelligence into civil matters, and to preserve her own rightful
+freedom and independence.  When the states broke away from feudalism,
+they revived the Roman constitution, and claimed the authority in
+ecclesiastical matters that had been exercised by the Roman Caesars,
+and the states that adopted a sectarian religion gave the sect adopted
+a civil establishment, and subjected it to the civil government, to
+which the sect not unwillingly consented, on condition that the civil
+authority excluded the church and all other sects, and made it the
+exclusive religion of the state, as in England, Scotland, Sweden,
+Denmark, Russia, and the states of Northern Germany.  Even yet the
+normal relations of church and state are nowhere practicable in the Old
+World; for everywhere either the state is more or less barbaric in its
+constitution, or the religion is sectarian, and the church as well as
+civilization is obliged, to struggle with antagonistic forces, for
+self-preservation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce what
+they take to be the American system; but constitutions are generated,
+not made&mdash;providential, not conventional.  Statesmen can only develop
+what is in the existing constitutions of their respective countries,
+and no European constitution contains all the elements of the American.
+European Liberals mistake the American system, and, were they to
+succeed in their efforts, would not introduce it, but something more
+hostile to it than the governments and institutions they are warring
+against.  They start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and
+seek not freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.  They suppress the
+freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call religious
+liberty&mdash;imagine that they secure freedom of thought by extinguishing
+the light without which no thought is possible, and advance
+civilization by undermining its foundation.  The condemnation of their
+views and movements by the Holy Father in the Encyclical, which has
+excited so much hostility, may seem to superficial and unthinking
+Americans even, as a condemnation of our American system&mdash;indeed, as
+the condemnation of modern science, intelligence, and civilization
+itself; but whoever looks below the surface, has some insight into the
+course of events, understands the propositions and movements censured,
+and the sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy
+Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority to save
+religion, society, science, and civilization from utter corruption or
+destruction.  The opinions, tendencies, and movements, directly or by
+implication censured, are the effect of narrow and superficial
+thinking, of partial and one-sided views, and are sectarian,
+sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, and tend, as far as they
+go, to throw society back into the barbarism from which, after
+centuries of toil and struggle, it is just beginning to emerge.  The
+Holy Father has condemned nothing that real philosophy, real science
+does not also condemn; nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the
+American system itself.  For the mass of the people, it were desirable
+that fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
+various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are not,
+in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were expected by the
+Holy Father to be given by the bishops and prelates, to whom, not to
+the people, save through them, the Encyclical was addressed.  Little is
+to be hoped, and much is to be feared, for liberty, science, and
+civilization from European Liberalism, which has no real affinity with
+American territorial democracy and real civil and religious freedom.
+But God and reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the
+New, and it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission, and
+realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom nothing
+is hidden.  Providence is free, and leaves always a space for human
+free-will.  The American people can fail, and will fail if they neglect
+the appointed means and conditions of success; but there is nothing in
+their present state or in their past history to render their failure
+probable.  They have in their internal constitution what Rome wanted,
+and they are in no danger of being crushed by exterior barbarism.
+Their success as feeble colonies of Great Britain in achieving their
+national independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and
+against the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national
+unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other
+people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their
+future.  The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew or
+more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the Union, counted
+with certainty on success, and the ablest, the most experienced, and
+best informed statesmen of the Old World felt sure that the Republic
+was gone, and spoke of it as the late United States.  Not a few, even
+in the loyal States, who had no sympathy with the rebellion, believed
+it idle to think of suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the
+best terms that could be obtained.  But Ilium fuit was chanted too
+soon; the American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified
+the calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the
+expectations of their friends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The attitude of the real American people during the fearful struggle
+affords additional confidence in their destiny.  With larger armies on
+foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their line of battle stretching
+from ocean to ocean, across the whole breadth of the continent, they
+never, during four long years of alternate victories and defeats&mdash;and
+both unprecedentedly bloody&mdash;for a moment lost their equanimity, or
+appeared less calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of
+peace. They not for a moment interrupted their ordinary routine of
+business or pleasure, or seemed conscious of being engaged in any
+serious struggle which required an effort.  There was no hurry, no
+bustle, no excitement, no fear, no misgiving.  They seemed to regard
+the war as a mere bagatelle, not worth being in earnest about.  The
+on-looker was almost angry with their apparent indifference, apparent
+insensibility, and doubted if they moved at all, Yet move they did:
+guided by an unerring instinct, they moved quietly on with an elemental
+force, in spite of a timid and hesitating administration, in spite of
+inexperienced, over-cautious, incompetent, or blundering military
+commanders, whom they gently brushed aside, and desisted not till their
+object was gained, and they saw the flag of the Union floating anew in
+the breeze from the capitol of every State that dared secede.  No man
+could contemplate them without feeling that there was in them a latent
+power vastly superior to any which they judged it necessary to put
+forth.  Their success proves to all that what, prior to the war, was
+treated as American arrogance or self-conceit, was only the outspoken
+confidence in their destiny as a Providential people, conscious that to
+them is reserved the hegemony of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Count de Maistre predicted early in the century the failure of the
+United States, because they have no proper name; but his prediction
+assumed what is not the fact.  The United States have a proper name by
+which all the world knows and calls them.  The proper name of the
+country is America: that of the people is Americans.  Speak of
+Americans simply, and nobody understands you to mean the people of
+Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody
+understands you to mean the people of the United States.  The fact is
+significant, and foretells for the people of the United States a
+continental destiny, as is also foreshadowed in the so-called "Monroe
+doctrine," which France, during our domestic troubles, was permitted,
+on condition of not intervening in our civil war in favor of the
+rebellion, to violate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no statesmanship in proclaiming the "Monroe doctrine," for
+the statesman keeps always, as far as possible, his government free to
+act according to the exigencies of the case when it comes up,
+unembarrassed by previous declarations of principles.  Yet the doctrine
+only expresses the destiny of the American people, and which nothing
+but their own fault can prevent them from realizing in its own good
+time.  Napoleon will not succeed in his Mexican policy, and Mexico will
+add some fifteen or twenty new States to the American Union as soon as
+it is clearly for the interests of all parties that it should be done,
+and it can be done by mutual consent, without war or violence.  The
+Union will fight to maintain the integrity of her domain and the
+supremacy of her laws within it, but she can never, consistently with
+her principles or her interests, enter upon a career of war and
+conquest.  Her system is violated, endangered, not extended, by
+subjugating her neighbors, for subjugation and liberty go not together.
+Annexation, when it takes place, must be on terms of perfect equality
+and by the free act of the state annexed.  The Union can admit of no
+inequality of rights and franchises between the States of which it is
+composed.  The Canadian Provinces and the Mexican and Central American
+States, when annexed, must be as free as the original States of the
+Union, sharing alike in the power and the protection of the
+Republic&mdash;alike in its authority, its freedom, its grandeur, and its
+glory, as one free, independent, self-governing people.  They may gain
+much, but must lose nothing by annexation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Emperor Napoleon and his very respectable protege, Maximilian, an
+able man and a liberal-minded prince, can change nothing in the destiny
+of the United States, or of Mexico herself; no imperial government can
+be permanent beside the American Republic, no longer liable, since the
+abolition of slavery, to be distracted by sectional dissensions.  The
+States that seceded will soon, in some way, be restored to their rights
+and franchises in the Union, forming not the least patriotic portion of
+the American people; the negro question will be settled, or settle
+itself, as is most likely, by the melting away of the negro population
+before the influx of white laborers; all traces of the late contest in
+a very few years will be wiped out, the national debt paid, or greatly
+reduced, and the prosperity and strength of the Republic be greater
+than ever.  Its moral force will sweep away every imperial throne on
+the continent, without any effort or action on the part of the
+government. There can be no stable government in Mexico till every
+trace of the ecclesiastical policy established by the Council of the
+Indies is obliterated, and the church placed there on the same footing
+as in the United States; and that can hardly be done without
+annexation.  Maximilian cannot divest the church of her temporal
+possessions and place Protestants and Catholics on the same footing,
+without offending the present church party and deeply injuring
+religion, and that too without winning the confidence of the republican
+party.  In all Spanish and Portuguese America the relations between the
+church and state are abnormal, and exceedingly hurtful to both.
+Religion is in a wretched condition, and politics in a worse condition
+still. There is no effectual remedy for either but in religious
+freedom, now impracticable, and to be rendered practicable by no
+European intervention, for that subjects religion to the state, the
+very source of the evils that now exist, instead of emancipating it
+from the state, and leaving it to act according to its own constitution
+and laws, as under the American system.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the American people need not trouble themselves about their
+exterior expansion.  That will come of itself as fast as desirable.
+Let them devote their attention to their internal destiny, to the
+realization of their mission within, and they will gradually see the
+Whole continent coming under their system, forming one grand nation, a
+really catholic nation, great, glorious, and free.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its
+Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its Constitution,
+Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
+
+Author: A. O. Brownson
+
+Posting Date: January 29, 2009 [EBook #2053]
+Release Date: January, 2000
+[Last updated: January 8, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+
+ITS
+
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+
+
+BY
+
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+
+P. O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET.
+
+1866.
+
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865, By P. O'SHEA,
+
+In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for
+the Southern District of New York.
+
+
+
+
+  TO THE
+  HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,
+  THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT
+  Historian of the United States,
+
+  THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF
+  GOVERNMENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF
+  THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
+  IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A
+  SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,
+  PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,
+  AND PUBLIC SERVICE,
+  BY THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT                                                     15
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT                                           26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Continued                                 43
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Continued                                71
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--Concluded                               106
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT                                    136
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT--Concluded                         166
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE UNITED STATES                                             192
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES                             218
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--Continued                                   244
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION                                                     277
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION                                                309
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES                                          348
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY--POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS                              392
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the
+public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, my
+whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity, extent,
+authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government, and the
+unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny of the
+American Republic.  Many of the points treated have been from time to
+time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views have been
+presented, in my previous writings; but this work is newly and
+independently written from beginning to end, and is as complete on the
+topics treated as I have been able to make it.
+
+I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have used
+their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they came within
+the scope of my present work.  I have not felt myself bound to adhere
+to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther than they coincide
+with my present convictions, and I have written as freely and as
+independently as if I had never written or published any thing before.
+I have never been the slave of my own past, and truth has always been
+dearer to me than my own opinions.  This work is not only my latest,
+but will be my last on politics or government, and must be taken as the
+authentic, and the only authentic statement of my political views and
+convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts with
+the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as retracted,
+and rejected.
+
+The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is an
+essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured critics
+will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of articles
+designed for a review, rather than a book.  It is hard to overcome the
+habits of a lifetime.  I have taken some pains to exchange the reviewer
+for the author, but am fully conscious that I have not succeeded.  My
+work can lay claim to very little artistic merit.  It is full of
+repetitions; the same thought is frequently recurring,--the result, to
+some extent, no doubt, of carelessness and the want of artistic skill;
+but to a greater extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought."  In
+composing my work I have followed, rather than directed, the course of
+my thought, and, having very little confidence in the memory or
+industry of readers, I have preferred, when the completeness of the
+argument required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with
+perpetual references to what has gone before.
+
+That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting to
+its publication; but how much or how little of it is really mine, I am
+quite unable to say.  I have, from my youth up, been reading,
+observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost said writing, at
+least by fits and starts, on political subjects, especially in their
+connection with philosophy, theology, history, and social progress, and
+have assimilated to my own mind what it would assimilate, without
+keeping any notes of the sources whence the materials assimilated were
+derived.  I have written freely from my own mind as I find it now
+formed; but how it has been so formed, or whence I have borrowed, my
+readers know as well as I. All that is valuable in the thoughts set
+forth, it is safe to assume has been appropriated from others.  Where I
+have been distinctly conscious of borrowing what has not become common
+property, I have given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's
+name, with three important exceptions which I wish to note more
+formally.
+
+I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality and
+the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions furnished
+by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of Freedom and
+Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning and profound
+philosophic views.  I could not have written my work without the aid
+derived from its suggestions, any more than I could without Plato,
+Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the
+Abbate Gioberti.  To these two last-named authors, one a humanitarian
+sophist, the other a Catholic priest, and certainly one of the
+profoundest philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted,
+though I have followed the political system of neither.  I have taken
+from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity of
+the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation to the
+creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the Credo and the
+first verse of Genesis.
+
+In treating the several questions which the preparation of this volume
+has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of first
+principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one important
+point, the views I had expressed in my previous writings, especially on
+the distinction between civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis
+of civilization itself, and the value to the world of the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.  I have ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism,
+rejected every species of political aristocracy, and represented the
+English constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not
+as its type.  I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and
+defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial
+democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on the one
+hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the other.
+
+I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and defended
+from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the sovereignty of the
+American Republic vests in the States, though in the States
+collectively, or united, not severally, and thus escape alike
+consolidation and disintegration.  I find, with Mr. Madison, our most
+philosophic statesman, the originality of the American system in the
+division of powers between a General government having sole charge of
+the foreign and general, and particular or State governments having,
+within their respective territories, sole charge of the particular
+relations and interests of the American people; but I do not accept his
+concession that this division is of conventional origin, and maintain
+that it enters into the original Providential constitution of the
+American state, as I have done in my Review for October, 1863, and
+January and October, 1864.
+
+I maintain, after Mr.  Senator Sumner, one of the most philosophic and
+accomplished living American statesmen, that "State secession is State
+suicide," but modify the opinion I too hastily expressed that the
+political death of a State dissolves civil society within its territory
+and abrogates all rights held under it, and accept the doctrine that
+the laws in force at the time of secession remain in force till
+superseded or abrogated by competent authority, and also that, till the
+State is revived and restored as a State in the Union, the only
+authority, under the American system, competent to supersede or
+abrogate them is the United States, not Congress, far less the
+Executive.  The error of the Government is not in recognizing the
+territorial laws as surviving secession but in counting a State that
+has seceded as still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted
+as one of the United States in amending the Constitution.  Such State
+goes out of the Union, but comes under it.
+
+I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political views; to
+their general principles, and to show that the general principles
+asserted have their origin and ground in the great, universal, and
+unchanging principles of the universe itself. Hence, I have labored to
+show the scientific relations of political to theological principles,
+the real principles of all science, as of all reality.  An atheist, I
+have said, may be a politician; but if there were no God, there could
+be no politics. This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must
+follow science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
+mistake their darkness for light.
+
+I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as a
+Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real principles
+are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either in nature or
+revelation.  I am a Catholic by God's grace and great goodness, and
+must write as I am.  I could not write otherwise if I would, and would
+not if I could.  I have not obtruded my religion, and have referred to
+it only where my argument demanded it; but I have had neither the
+weakness nor the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it.  I could
+never have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
+of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with the
+great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of all that
+is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with Catholics or
+non-Catholics.
+
+Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction of sect
+or party, I have had more especially in view the people of my own
+religious communion.  It is no discredit to a man in the United States
+at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and devout Catholic.  The old
+sectarian prejudice may remain with a few, "whose eyes," as Emerson
+says, "are in their hind-head, not in their fore-head;" but the
+American people are not at heart sectarian, and the nothingarianism so
+prevalent among them only marks their state of transition from
+sectarian opinions to positive Catholic faith.  At any rate, it can no
+longer be denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing
+element in the American population, quite too numerous, too wealthy,
+and too influential to be ignored.  They have played too conspicuous a
+part in the late troubles of the country, and poured out too freely and
+too much of their richest and noblest blood in defence of the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, for that.  Catholics
+henceforth must be treated as standing, in all respects, on a footing
+of equality with any other class of American citizens, and their views
+of political science, or of any other science, be counted of equal
+importance, and listened to with equal attention.
+
+I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly by a
+Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house.  They who are
+not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the current of
+American literature, if it is one they must read in order to be up with
+the living and growing thought of the age. If it is not a book of that
+sort, it is not worth reading by any one.
+
+Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to exert an
+influence on the future of my country, for which I have made, or,
+rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which I tenderly
+love.  Now, I believe that he who can exert the most influence on our
+Catholic population, especially in giving tone and direction to our
+Catholic youth, will exert the most influence in forming the character
+and shaping the future destiny of the American Republic.  Ambition and
+patriotism alike, as well as my own Catholic faith and sympathies,
+induce me to address myself primarily to Catholics.  I quarrel with
+none of the sects; I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth
+wherever I find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long
+life, or a permanent possession.  I engage in no controversy with any
+one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth is
+brought out and placed in a clear light before the public, whatever is
+sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the morning mists
+before the rising sun.
+
+I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of my book
+from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics; but I speak to
+my countrymen at large.  I could not personally serve my country in the
+field: my habits as well as my infirmities prevented, to say nothing of
+my age; but I have endeavored in this humble work to add my
+contribution, small though it may be, to political science, and to
+discharge, as far as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism.  I
+would the book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a
+more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have
+written it.  All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a sincere
+book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects treated.  If well
+received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I shall endeavor to
+practise resignation, as I have so often done.
+
+
+O. A. BROWNSON.
+
+ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, Know
+Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more important as
+there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge of himself, whence
+he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he is for, what he can do,
+what he ought to do, and what are his means of doing it.
+
+Nations are only individuals on a larger scale.  They have a life, an
+individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of their own, and
+have the same general laws of development and growth, and, perhaps, of
+decay, as the individual man.  Equally important, and no less difficult
+than for the individual, is it for a nation to know itself, understand
+its own existence, its own powers and faculties, rights and duties,
+constitution, instincts, tendencies, and destiny.  A nation has a
+spiritual as well as a material, a moral as well as a physical
+existence, and is subjected to internal as well as external conditions
+of health and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some
+measure understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in
+its growth, and end in premature decay and death.
+
+Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than
+the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.  It has hardly had
+a distinct consciousness of its own national existence, and has lived
+the irreflective life of the child, with no severe trial, till the
+recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and compel it to reflect
+on its own constitution, its own separate existence, individuality,
+tendencies, and end.  The defection of the slaveholding States, and the
+fearful struggle that has followed for national unity and integrity,
+have brought it at once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced
+it to pass from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence
+to grave and reflecting manhood.  The nation has been suddenly
+compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from reflection,
+understanding, science, statesmanship, not from instinct, impulse,
+passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and wherefore it does
+it.  The change which four years of civil war have wrought in the
+nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity,
+the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.
+
+Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
+existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
+understanding of its own national constitution.  Its vision is still
+obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and its judgment
+rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild theories and fancies of
+its childhood.  The national mind has been quickened, the national
+heart has been opened, the national disposition prepared, but there
+remains the important work of dissipating the mists that still linger,
+of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to
+form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
+appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny; or, in
+other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the
+means of its actualization in space and time.
+
+Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and
+whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny.  Every
+nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the
+chosen people of God, through whom the primitive traditions were to be
+preserved in their purity and integrity, and the Messiah was to come.
+The Greeks were the chosen people of God, for the development and
+realization of the beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the
+true in science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
+the state, law, and jurisprudence.  The great despotic nations of Asia
+were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a mission,
+they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the progressive
+development of the human race.  History has not recorded their mission,
+and as far as they are known they have contributed only to the abnormal
+development or corruption of religion and civilization.  Despotism is
+barbaric and abnormal.
+
+The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
+chosen of God for the realization of a great idea.  It has been chosen
+not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to
+accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either.  In art, it will
+prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science
+and philosophy, if it do not surpass it.  In the state, in law, in
+jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome.  Its idea is liberty,
+indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty.  Yet its mission is
+not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true
+idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public
+and the freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people
+without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.  In
+other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic
+union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those
+of society.  The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the
+detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same,
+or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state.  The
+American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the
+freedom of each with advantage to the other.
+
+The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a
+political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of
+the constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and
+secures advantages which none of them did or could possess.  The
+American constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution.  The
+American form of government can be classed throughout with none of the
+forms of government described by Aristotle, or even by later
+authorities.  Aristotle knew only four forms of government: Monarchy,
+Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed Governments.  The American form is
+none of these, nor any combination of them.  It is original, a new
+contribution to political science, and seeks to attain the end of all
+wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
+and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
+political writers themselves.  The originality of the American
+constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own
+statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the
+constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its
+own principles.  They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely,
+if ever, appreciated its distinctive and peculiar merits.
+
+As the United States have vindicated their national unity and
+integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history, nothing is
+more important than that they should take that new start with a clear
+and definite view of their national constitution, and with a distinct
+understanding of their political mission in the future of the world.
+The citizen who can help his countrymen to do this will render them an
+important service and deserve well of his country, though he may have
+been unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.
+The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more difficult
+and more delicate than that which has been accomplished by our brave
+armies.  As yet the people are hardly better prepared for the political
+work to be done than they were at the outbreak of the civil war for the
+military work they have so nobly achieved.  But, with time, patience,
+and good-will, the difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past
+corrected, and the Government placed on the right track for the future.
+
+It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the United
+States is very defective or it has been very grossly misinterpreted by
+all parties.  If the slave States had not held that the States are
+severally sovereign, and the Constitution of the United States a simple
+agreement or compact, they would never have seceded; and if the Free
+States had not confounded the Union with the General government, and
+shown a tendency to make it the entire national government, no occasion
+or pretext for secession would have been given.  The great problem of
+our statesmen has been from the first, How to assert union without
+consolidation, and State rights without disintegration?  Have they, as
+yet, solved that problem?  The war has silenced the State sovereignty
+doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State rights?
+Has it done it without asserting the General government as the supreme,
+central, or national government?  Has it done it without striking a
+dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution?  In
+suppressing by armed force the doctrine that the States are severally
+sovereign, what barrier is left against consolidation?  Has not one
+danger been removed only to give place to another?
+
+But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the
+problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through
+misunderstanding of the constitution.  Our statesmen have recognized no
+constitution of the American people themselves; they have confined
+their views to the written constitution, as if that constituted the
+American people a state or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a
+law ordained by the nation already existing and constituted.  Perhaps,
+if they had recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that
+drawn up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in
+the republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the problem,
+and asserts national unity without consolidation, and the rights of the
+several States without danger of disintegration. The whole controversy,
+possibly, has originated in a misunderstanding of the real constitution
+of the United States, and that misunderstanding itself in the
+misunderstanding of the origin and constitution of government in
+general.  The constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay
+is not defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either
+danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and return
+and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and always has
+been.
+
+There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do with the
+rebellion, but it was not its sole cause.  The real cause must be
+sought in the program that had been made, especially in the States
+themselves, in forming and administering their respective governments,
+as well as the General government, in accordance with political
+theories borrowed from European speculators on government, the
+so-called Liberals and Revolutionists, which have and can have no
+legitimate application in the United States.  The tendency of American
+politics, for the last thirty or forty years, has been, within the
+several States themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy,
+as if the American people had for their mission only the reproduction
+of ancient Athens.  The American system is not that of any of the
+simple forms of government, nor any combination of them.  The attempt
+to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government
+recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in
+the cast-off garments of the past.  The American system, wherever
+practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better
+than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these
+several forms, because it accords more nearly with the principles of
+things, the real order of the universe.
+
+But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states
+more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the
+American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its
+place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or
+corruption.  Under the influence of this false development, the people
+were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people
+are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the
+territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were
+beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to
+govern.  All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves
+have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of
+the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This
+tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking
+secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the
+Northern, Central, and Western States.
+
+The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, in
+spite of the short-sightedness and blundering of the Administration,
+have proved the vitality and strength of the national constitution, and
+the greatness of the American people. They say nothing for or against
+the democratic theory of our demagogues, but every thing in favor of
+the American system or constitution of government, which has found a
+firmer support in American instincts than in American statesmanship.
+In spite of all that had been done by theorists, radicals, and
+revolutionists, no-government men, non-resistants, humanitarians, and
+sickly sentimentalists to corrupt the American people in mind, heart,
+and body, the native vigor of their national constitution has enabled
+them to come forth triumphant from the trial.  Every American patriot
+has reason to be proud of his country-men, and every American lover of
+freedom to be satisfied with the institutions of his country.  But
+there is danger that the politicians and demagogues will ascribe the
+merit, not to the real and living national constitution, but to their
+miserable theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the
+several evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has
+cost so much to suppress.  What is now wanted is, that the people,
+whose instincts are right, should understand the American constitution
+as it is, and so understand it as to render it impossible for political
+theorists, no matter of what school or party, to deceive them again as
+to its real import, or induce them to depart from it in their political
+action.
+
+A work written with temper, without passion or sectional prejudice, in
+a philosophical spirit, explaining to the American people their own
+national constitution, and the mutual relations of the General
+government and the State governments, cannot, at this important crisis
+in our affairs, be inopportune, and, if properly executed, can hardly
+fail to be of real service.  Such a work is now attempted--would it
+were by another and abler hand--which, imperfect as it is, may at least
+offer some useful suggestions, give a right direction to political
+thought, although it should fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.
+
+This much the author may say, in favor of his own work, that it sets
+forth no theory of government in general, or of the United States in
+particular.  The author is not a monarchist, an aristocrat, a democrat,
+a feudalist, nor an advocate of what are called mixed governments like
+the English, at least for his own country; but is simply an American,
+devoted to the real, living, and energizing constitution of the
+American republic as it is, not as some may fancy it might be, or are
+striving to make it. It is, in his judgment, what it ought to be, and
+he has no other ambition than to present it as it is to the
+understanding and love of his countrymen.
+
+Perhaps simple artistic unity and propriety would require the author to
+commence his essay directly with the United States; but while the
+constitution of the United States is original and peculiar, the
+government of the United States has necessarily something in common
+with all legitimate governments, and he has thought it best to precede
+his discussion of the American republic, its constitution, tendencies,
+and destiny, by some considerations on government in general.  He does
+this because he believes, whether rightly or not, that while the
+American people have received from Providence a most truly profound and
+admirable system of government, they are more or less infected with the
+false theories of government which have been broached during the last
+two centuries.  In attempting to realize these theories, they have
+already provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion which has
+seriously threatened the national existence, and come very near putting
+an end to the American order of civilization itself.  These theories
+have received already a shock in the minds of all serious and thinking
+men; but the men who think are in every nation a small minority, and it
+is necessary to give these theories a public refutation, and bring back
+those who do not think, as well as those who do, from the world of
+dreams to the world of reality.  It is hoped, therefore, that any
+apparent want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay will be
+pardoned for the sake of the end the author has had in view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself.
+He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God.
+He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence only by communion with
+God, through which he participates of the divine being and life.  He
+communes with God through the divine creative act and the Incarnation
+of the Word, through his kind, and through the material world.
+Communion with God through Creation and Incarnation is religion,
+distinctively taken, which binds man to God as his first cause, and
+carries him onward to God as his final cause; communion through the
+material world is expressed by the word property; and communion with
+God through humanity is society.  Religion, society, property, are the
+three terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the
+essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and
+his perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the attainment of
+the end for which he is created.
+
+Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through his
+kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, to actualize
+the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to his beatitude, since
+humanity is neither God nor the material universe, it is yet a
+necessary and essential condition of his life, his progress, and the
+completion of his existence.  He is born and lives in society, and can
+be born and live nowhere else. It is one of the necessities of his
+nature.  "God saw that it was not good for man to be alone."  Hence,
+wherever man is found he is found in society, living in more or less
+strict intercourse with his kind.
+
+But society never does and never can exist without government of some
+sort.  As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is government a
+necessity of society.  The simplest form of society is the family--Adam
+and Eve.  But though Adam and Eve are in many respects equal, and have
+equally important though different parts assigned them, one or the
+other must be head and governor, or they cannot form the society called
+family.  They would be simply two individuals of different sexes, and
+the family would fail for the want of unity.
+
+Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some degree of
+family government, of some authority to direct, control, restrain, or
+prescribe.  Hence the authority of the husband and father is recognized
+by the common consent of mankind.  Still more apparent is the necessity
+of government the moment the family develops and grows into the tribe,
+and the tribe into the nation.  Hence no nation exists without
+government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or degraded,
+that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the elders, or in the
+tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint reminiscences of some sort
+of government, with authority to demand obedience and to punish the
+refractory.  Hence, as man is nowhere found out of society, so nowhere
+is society found without government.
+
+Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that its
+necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the fact that the
+human race by sin has fallen from its primitive integrity, or original
+righteousness.  The fall asserted by Christian theology, though often
+misinterpreted, and its effects underrated or exaggerated, is a fact
+too sadly confirmed by individual experience and universal history; but
+it is not the cause why government is necessary, though it may be an
+additional reason for demanding it.  Government would have been
+necessary if man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well
+as for the bad.  The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man
+retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his nature.  It
+exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven in its perfection.
+Its office is not purely repressive, to restrain violence, to redress
+wrongs, and to punish the transgressor.  It has something more to do
+than to restrict our natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain
+justice between man and man.  Its office is positive as well as
+negative.  It is needed to render effective the solidarity of the
+individuals of a nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a
+mere organization--to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen
+all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all--to
+develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and
+direct it to the promotion of the common weal--to be a social
+providence, imitating in its order and degree the action of the divine
+providence itself, and, while it provides for the common good of all,
+to protect each, the lowest and meanest, with the whole force and
+majesty of society. It is the minister of wrath to wrong-doers, indeed,
+but its nature is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the
+right of property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can
+exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science and
+art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful means to the
+fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his existence.  Next after
+religion, it is man's greatest good; and even religion without it can
+do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call it a
+necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted,
+hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved,
+respected, obeyed, and if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly
+goods, and even of life itself.
+
+The nature or essence of government is to govern.  A government that
+does not govern, is simply no government at all.  If it has not the
+ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument
+in the bands of individuals for advancing their private interests, but
+it is not government.  To be government it must govern both individuals
+and the community.  If it is a mere machine for making prevail the will
+of one man, of a certain number of men, or even of the community, it
+may be very effective sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest
+for evil, but government in the proper sense of the word it is not.  To
+govern is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and
+directs his ship.  It necessarily implies two terms, governor and
+governed, and a real distinction between them.  The denial of all real
+distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics
+analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real
+distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which
+all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism--the supreme
+sophism.  If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface
+both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that
+governs is identically the will that is governed.  To make the
+controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all
+control.  There must, then, if there is government at all, be a power,
+force, or will that governs, distinct from that which is governed.  In
+those governments in which it is held that the people govern, the
+people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the people
+governed, or there is no real government.
+
+Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right
+or authority to govern.  Power without right is not government.
+Governments have the right to use force at need, but might does not
+make right, and not every power wielding the physical force of a nation
+is to be regarded as its rightful government.  Whatever resort to
+physical force it may be obliged to make, either in defence of its
+authority or of the rights of the nation, the government itself lies in
+the moral order, and politics is simply a branch of ethics--that branch
+which treats of the rights and duties of men in their public relations,
+as distinguished from their rights and duties in their private
+relations.
+
+Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the
+right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere
+physical necessity.  The right to govern and the duty to obey are
+correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived without the
+other.  Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable sentiment but a duty, a
+moral virtue.  Treason is not merely a difference in political opinion
+with the governing authority, but a crime against the sovereign, and a
+moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, the Founder of the moral Law.
+Treason, if committed in other Countries, unhappily, has been more
+frequently termed by our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor
+than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human
+governments have authority to punish.  The American people have been
+chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the
+correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law,
+and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority,
+however constituted or wherever lodged.  It is as necessary, as much a
+duty, as much a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler
+examples of the most devoted loyalty are not found in the world's
+history than were exhibited in the ancient Greek and Roman republics,
+or than have been exhibited by both men and women in the young republic
+of the United States. Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most
+generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime
+love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment
+of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice,
+and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike.
+There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly
+loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal,
+criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.
+Such a people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind.  It
+mocks at duty, scorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no
+person, no thing, human or divine, sacred or inviolable.  The assertion
+of government as lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and
+reconciles it with authority.  Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever
+one pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.  Freedom to
+follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any civil
+restraint, is license, not liberty.  There is no lesion to liberty in
+repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of the
+authority that has the right to command.  Tyranny or oppression is not
+in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped
+authority--to a power that has no right to command, or that commands
+what exceeds its right or its authority.  To say that it is contrary to
+liberty to be forced to forego our own will or inclination in any case
+whatever, is simply denying the right of all government, and falling
+into no-governmentism.  Liberty is violated only when we are required
+to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to
+make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority
+has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a
+rightful command.  The requisition, if made by rightful authority,
+then, violates no right that we have or can have, and where there is no
+violation of our rights there is no violation of our liberty.  The
+moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of obedience,
+presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may meet in
+peace and operate to the same end.
+
+This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience,
+and that the resistance to power can never be lawful. The tyrant may be
+lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of the word itself, is a
+usurper, and without authority.  Abuses of power may be resisted even
+by force when they become too great to be endured, when there is no
+legal or regular way of redressing them, and when there is a reasonable
+prospect that resistance will prove effectual and substitute something
+better in their place.  But it is never lawful to resist the rightful
+sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
+sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be said
+to abuse it.  Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a
+power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no
+abuse or abuses to redress.  All turns, then, on the right of power, or
+its legitimacy.  Whence does government derive its right to govern?
+What is the origin and ground of sovereignty?  This question is
+fundamental and without a true answer to it politics cannot be a
+science, and there can be no scientific statesmanship.  Whence, then,
+comes the sovereign right to govern?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
+
+
+Government is both a fact and a right.  Its origin as a fact, is simply
+a question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is
+a question of ethics.  Whether a certain territory and its population
+are a sovereign state or nation, or not--whether the actual ruler of a
+country is its rightful ruler, or not--is to be determined by the
+historical facts in the case; but whence the government derives its
+right to govern, is a question that can be solved only by philosophy,
+or, philosophy failing, only by revelation.
+
+Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and
+the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of
+government, among which may be named--
+
+I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his child.
+
+II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
+
+III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are
+sovereign.
+
+IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
+
+V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of
+God;--
+
+VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual
+society;--
+
+VII. From God through the people;--
+
+VIII. From God through the natural law.
+
+I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin
+of government as a fact.  The patriarchal system is the earliest known
+system of government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly
+all known governments--in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the
+Irish septs and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman
+qentes, and the Russian and Hindoo villages.  The right of the father
+was held to be his right to govern his family or household, which, with
+his children, included his wife and servants.  From the family to the
+tribe the transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the
+nation.  The father is chief of the family; the chief of the eldest
+family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest tribe becomes
+chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch. The heads of
+families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, and the families
+themselves, represented by their delegates, or publicly assembling for
+public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three forms, with their
+several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and
+mixed governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and have
+generally been held to be all that are possible.
+
+Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from
+the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family.
+Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal,
+which seem to be founded on landed property, may be traced back to a
+patriarchal origin.  The patriarch is sole proprietor, and the
+possessions of the family are vested in him, and he governs as
+proprietor as well as father.  In the tribe, the chief is the
+proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and holds the
+domain.  Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the
+suzerain, holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or
+vacant.  All the great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold
+the domain and govern as proprietors; they have the authority of the
+father and the owner; and their subjects, though theoretically their
+children, are really their slaves.
+
+In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
+transformation.  The father retains all the power of the patriarch
+within his family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of
+it, is met and controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are
+united in the senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state.
+Yet, not all the heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the
+tenants of the sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed
+and marked by the god Terminus.  Hence the great plebeian houses, often
+richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all share in
+the government and the honors of the state, because they were not
+tenants of any portion of the sacred territory.  There is here the
+introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, and which
+transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the city or state,
+and founds the civil order, or what is now called civilization.  The
+city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, and
+territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.
+
+In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the
+land.  When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early
+times was to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took
+possession of him, received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only
+such persons as were taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the
+sacred territory or domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens
+with full political rights.  This, in modern language, means that the
+state is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
+the state, not the state to the citizen.  Under the patriarchal, the
+tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, properly
+speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is economical
+rather than political.  Authority--even the nation itself--is personal,
+not territorial.  The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the king,
+is the only proprietor.  Under the Graeco-Roman system all this is
+transformed.  The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the
+real proprietor is the city or state.  Under the Empire, no doubt, what
+lawyers call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as
+the representative and trustee of the city or state.
+
+When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected,
+history does not inform us.  The first-born of Adam, we are told, built
+a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence
+that it was constituted a municipality.  The earliest traces of the
+civil order proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and
+its fullest and grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as
+well as republican.  It was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal
+system, and was historically developed from it, but by way of accretion
+rather than by simple explication.  It has in it an element that, if it
+exists in the patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a
+different form, and the transformation marks the passage from the
+economical order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil
+constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
+
+The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from
+civitas--city or state.  The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and
+nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished
+from the state, barbarians.  The origin of the word barbarian,
+barbarus, or ........, is unknown, and its primary sense can be only
+conjectured.  Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild,
+fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks
+and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the
+term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of
+manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and
+sciences--the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.
+They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an
+aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in
+which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was
+personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right,
+not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
+tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians.
+
+Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European sense, but
+to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedaemon had kings; yet
+it was no less republican than Athens; and Rome was called and was a
+republic under the emperors no less than under the consuls.  Republic,
+respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or,
+in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on
+personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory,
+or domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
+attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.  France, Spain,
+Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in substance
+though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of the word,
+republican states; for the king or emperor does not govern in his own
+private right, but solely as representative of the power and majesty of
+the state.  The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution
+of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal
+or private right. Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to
+barbarism, and all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian
+in Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern times to breeding
+or refinement of manners, simply because these are characteristics of a
+republican, or polished [from ....., city] people.  Every people that
+has a real civil order, or a fully developed state or polity, is a
+republican people; and hence the church and her great doctors when they
+speak of the state as distinguished from the church, call it the
+republic, as may be seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius
+IX., which some have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
+
+All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, or is
+developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really so regarded
+by all Christendom.  In civilized nations the patriarchal authority is
+transformed into that of the city or state, that is, of the republic;
+but in all barbarous nations it retains its Private and personal
+character.  The nation is only the family or tribe, and is called by
+the name of its ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical
+denomination.  Race has not been supplanted by country; they are a
+people, not a state. They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may
+find in them ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never
+find among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
+distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among modern
+Christian nations.  They have a family, a race, a chief or king, but no
+patria, or country.  The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire,
+whether of the West or the East, were nations, or confederacies of
+nations, but not states.  The nation with them was personal, not
+territorial.  Their country was wherever they fed their flocks and
+herds, pitched their tents, and encamped for the night.  There were
+Germans, but no German state, and even to-day the German finds his
+"father-land" wherever the German speech is spoken.  The Polish,
+Sclavonian, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by
+German states, in which the German language is not the mother-tongue,
+are excluded from the Germanic Confederation.  The Turks, or Osmanlis,
+are a race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
+the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
+
+Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, pastoral, or
+predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and Persians or modern
+Chinese, and have their geographical boundaries, they have still no
+state, no country.  The nation defines the boundaries, not the
+boundaries the nation.  The nation does not belong to the territory,
+but the territory to the nation or its chief.  The Irish and
+Anglo-Saxons, in former times, held the land in gavelkind, and the
+territory belonged to the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as
+indivisible, they still held it as private property.  The shah of
+Persia holds the whole Persian territory as private property, and the
+landholders among his subjects are held to be his tenants.  They hold
+it from him, not from the Persian state.
+
+The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private domain
+of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.  There is in barbaric states
+no republic, no commonwealth; authority is parental, without being
+tempered by parental affection.  The chief is a despot, and rules with
+the united authority of the father and the harshness of the proprietor.
+He owns the land and his subjects.
+
+Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of the
+Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by reminiscences of
+Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the conquered, was a barbaric
+constitution.  The feudal monarch, as far as he governed at all,
+governed as proprietor or landholder, not as the representative of the
+commonwealth.  Under feudalism there are estates, but no state.  The
+king governs as an estate, the nobles hold their power as an estate,
+and the commons are represented as an estate.  The whole theory of
+power is, that it is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.
+It is not without reason, then that the common sense of civilized
+nations terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous
+ages.
+
+It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
+constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch democrats,
+especially European democrats and revolutionists, and by French and
+Germans settled in our own country, it is essentially barbaric and
+anti-republican.  The characteristic principle of barbarism is, that
+power is a private or personal right, and when democrats assert that
+the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by
+virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the
+fundamental principle of barbarism and despotism.  This says nothing in
+favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal
+suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
+theoretically or practically.  Property has of itself advantages
+enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political rights
+and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as trustworthy as
+the business classes.  The wise statesman will never restrict suffrage,
+or exclude the poorer and more numerous classes from all voice in the
+government of their country. General suffrage is wise, and if Louis
+Philippe had had the sense to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation
+to the support of his government, he would never have had to encounter
+the revolution of 1848.  The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
+universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
+private or personal right.  It is not a private, but a political right,
+and, like all political rights, a public trust.  Extremes meet, and
+thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the head of the
+human race and lead the civilization of the age, are really in
+principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or taking their
+place with nations on whom the light of civilization has never yet
+dawned.  All is not gold that glisters.
+
+The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
+private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is,
+that it makes it a public trust.  Barbarism knows only persons;
+civilization asserts and maintains the state.  With barbarians the
+authority of the patriarch is developed simply by way of explication;
+in civilized states it is developed by way of transformation.  Keeping
+in mind this distinction, it may be maintained that all systems of
+government, as a simple historical fact, have been developed from the
+patriarchal.  The patriarchal has preceded them all, and it is with the
+patriarchal that the human race has begun its career.  The family or
+household is not a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
+historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well as
+the initial or inchoate nation.  But its simple direct development
+gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental despotism, and which
+nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom. It is found only in pagan
+and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in the secular order is
+republican, and continues and completes the work of Greece and Rome.
+It meets with little permanent success in any patriarchal or despotic
+nation, and must either find or create civilization, which has been
+developed from the patriarchal system by way of transformation.
+
+But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of government,
+and all governments have been developed or modified from it, the right
+of government to govern cannot be deduced from the right of the father
+to govern his children, for the parental right itself is not ultimate
+or complete.  All governments that assume it to be so, and rest on it
+as the foundation of their authority, are barbaric or despotic, and,
+therefore, without any legitimate authority.  The right to govern rests
+on ownership or dominion.  Where there is no proprietorship, there is
+no dominion; and where there is no dominion, there is no right to
+govern. Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
+
+Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation.  The maker has the
+right to the thing made.  He, so far as he is sole creator, is sole
+proprietor, and may do what he will with it.  God is sovereign lord and
+proprietor of the universe because He is its sole creator.  He hath the
+absolute dominion, because He is absolute maker.  He has made it, He
+owns it; and one may do what he will with his own.  His dominion is
+absolute, because He is absolute creator, and He rightly governs as
+absolute and universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises
+only His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
+justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
+conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always be
+right, wise, just, and good.  The despot is a man attempting to be God
+upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power.  Despotism is based on,
+the parental right, and the parental right is assumed to be absolute.
+Hence, your despotic rulers claim to reign, and to be loved and
+worshipped as gods.  Even the Roman emperors, in the fourth and fifth
+centuries, were addressed as divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a
+Christian, was addressed as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras--so far
+did barbarism encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
+
+The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for he is
+the generator, not the creator of his child.  Generation is in the
+order of second causes, and is simply the development or explication of
+the race.  The early Roman law, founded on the confusion of generation
+with creation, gave the father absolute authority over the child--the
+right of life and death, as over his servants or slaves; but this was
+restricted under the Empire, and in all Christian nations the authority
+of the father is treated, like all power, as a trust.  The child, like
+the father himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father
+is answerable for the use he makes of his authority.  The law fixes the
+age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; and even
+during his nonage, takes him from the father and places him under
+guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly
+abuses his trust.  This is proper, because society contributes to the
+life of the child, and has a right as well as an interest in him.
+Society, again, must suffer if the child is allowed to grow up a
+worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a right to intervene, both in
+behalf of itself and of the child, in case his parents neglect to train
+him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or are training him
+up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the
+community.  How, then, base the right of society on the right of the
+father, since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to
+the right of the parent?
+
+But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
+authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the ground
+of the right of society to govern.  Assume the parental right to be
+perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, it is no right to
+govern where no such relation exists.  Nothing true, real, solid in
+government can be founded on what Carlyle calls a "sham."  The
+statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains and conforms to the
+realities, the verities of things; and all jurisprudence that accepts
+legal fictions is imperfect, and even censurable.  The presumptions or
+assumptions of law or politics must have a real and solid basis, or
+they are inadmissible.  How, from the right of the father to govern his
+own child, born from his loins, conclude his right to govern one not
+his child?  Or how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the
+right of society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
+political authority over its members?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking from
+asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should favor
+theocracy, and place secular society under the control of the clergy,
+and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political writers have sought
+to render government purely human, and maintain that its origin is
+conventional, and that it is founded in compact or agreement.  Their
+theory originated in the seventeenth century, and was predominant in
+the last century and the first third of the present.  It has been, and
+perhaps is yet, generally accepted by American politicians and
+statesmen, at least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the
+question at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
+
+The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of government
+as a social pact or compact, and explained the reciprocal rights and
+obligations of subjects and rulers by the general law of contracts; but
+they have never held that government originates in a voluntary
+agreement between the people and their rulers, or between the several
+individuals composing the community.  They have never held that
+government has only a conventional origin or authority.  They have
+simply meant, by the social compact, the mutual relations and
+reciprocal rights and duties of princes and their subjects, as implied
+in the very existence and nature of civil society.  Where there are
+rights and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an
+agreement voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
+compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in determining
+whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire whether either has
+broken the terms of the social compact.  They were engaged, not with
+the question whence does government derive its authority, but with its
+nature, and the reciprocal rights and duties of governors and the
+governed.  The compact itself they held was not voluntarily formed by
+the people themselves, either individually or collectively, but was
+imposed by God, either immediately, or mediately, through the law of
+nature.  "Every man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains
+there."  They held the same, and maintained that every one born into
+society contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
+society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law, every
+one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
+and owes certain duties to society for the protection and assistance it
+affords him.
+
+But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed from the
+theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine which they would
+have been the last to accept.  These theorists or political speculators
+have imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society, in which
+men lived without government, law, or manners, out of which they
+finally came by entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of
+their number to be king and to govern them, or with one another to
+submit to the rule of the majority.  Hobbes, the English materialist,
+is among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of this
+theory.  He held that men lived, prior to the creation of civil
+society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and every one
+had an equal right to every thing, and to take any thing on which he
+could lay his hands and was strong enough to hold.  There was no law
+but the will of the strongest.  Hence, the state of nature was a state
+of continual war.  At length, wearied and disgusted, men sighed for
+peace, and, with one accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest
+among them: Come, be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and
+govern us; we surrender our natural rights and our natural independence
+to you, with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
+among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or cutting
+each other's throats.
+
+Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, but
+asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had asserted it in
+the interests of power.  Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, followed in the
+next century with his Contrat Social, the text-book of the French
+revolutionists--almost their Bible--and put the finishing stroke to the
+theory.  Hitherto the compact or agreement had been assumed to be
+between the governor and the governed; Rousseau supposes it to be
+between the people themselves, or a compact to which the people are the
+only parties. He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men
+lived, antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
+without government or law.  All men in that state were equal, and each
+was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.  These equal,
+independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to have met, in
+convention, and entered into a compact with themselves, each with all,
+and all with each, that they would constitute government, and would
+each submit to the determination and authority of the whole,
+practically of the fluctuating and irresponsible majority.  Civil
+society, the state, the government, originates in this compact, and the
+government, as Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
+Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
+governed."
+
+This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that the
+individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to civil
+society, was generally adopted by the American people in the last
+century, and is still the more prevalent theory with those among them
+who happen to have any theory or opinion on the subject.  It is the
+political tradition of the country.  The state, as defined by the elder
+Adams, is held to be a voluntary association of individuals.
+Individuals create civil society, and may uncreate it whenever they
+judge it advisable.  Prior to the Southern Rebellion, nearly every
+American asserted with Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or
+revolution, and sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and
+revolutionists, wherever they made their appearance.  Loyalty was held
+to be the correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and
+traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent
+lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.  The fearful struggle
+of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its very existence
+may have changed this.
+
+That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory
+assumes, may be questioned.  Certainly nothing proves that it is, or
+ever was, a real state.  That there is a law of nature is undeniable.
+All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and jurisprudence
+assert it; the state assumes it as its own immediate basis, and the
+codes of all nations are founded on it; universal jurisprudence, the
+jus qentium of the Romans, embodies it, and the courts recognize and
+administer it.  It is the reason and conscience of civil society, and
+every state acknowledges its authority.  But the law of nature is as
+much in force in civil society as out of it.  Civil law does not
+abrogate or supersede natural law, but presupposes it, and supports
+itself on it as its own ground and reason.  As the natural law, which
+is only natural justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all
+men, persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its
+informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil state,
+natural society in civil society, which simply develops, applies, and
+protects it.  Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in
+it--is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and
+government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.
+The state of nature under the natural law is not, as a separate state,
+an actual state, and never was; but an abstraction, in which is
+considered, apart from the concrete existence called society, what is
+derived immediately from the natural law.  But as abstractions have no
+existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature has no
+actual existence in the world of reality as a separate state.
+
+But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a real and
+separate state, in which men at first lived, there is great difficulty
+in understanding how they ever got out of it. Can a man divest himself
+of his nature, or lift himself above it? Man is in his nature, and
+inseparable from it.  If his primitive state was his natural state, and
+if the political state is supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural,
+how passed he alone, by his own unaided powers, from the former to the
+latter?  The ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of
+creation, asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the
+earth, and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
+and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, art,
+law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the prevalence of the
+Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, that man could come out of
+that state alone by his own unaided efforts.  They ascribed the
+invention of language, art, and science, the institution of civil
+society, government, and laws, to the intervention of the gods.  It
+remained for the Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern
+successors, the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first
+cause, believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
+care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own unassisted
+efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out of the primitive
+state, and institute what in modern times is called civilta, civility,
+or civilization.
+
+The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which men have
+emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of civil society,
+forget that if government is not the sole condition, it is one of the
+essential conditions of progress. The only progressive nations are
+civilized or republican nations. Savage and barbarous tribes are
+unprogressive.  Ages on ages roll over them without changing any thing
+in their state; and Niebuhr has well remarked with others, that history
+records no instance of a savage tribe or people having become civilized
+by its own spontaneous or indigenous efforts.  If savage tribes have
+ever become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
+aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
+missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
+commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age. Nothing
+in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of
+itself from the savage state to the civilized.  But the primitive man,
+as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke,
+Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage.  The lowest, most
+degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered
+has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social
+state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in
+superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion;
+but the people in the alleged state of nature have none.
+
+The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting into
+their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of
+the civilized man.  It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been
+civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the
+habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of
+society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away
+on some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all
+intercourse with the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and
+re-establish and maintain civil government.  They are civilized men,
+and bear civil society in their own life.  But these are no
+representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature.
+These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception
+even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they
+have thus far lived.  How then can they, since, on the theory, civil
+society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial creation,
+even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?
+
+These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
+abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel
+they could do in case civil society were broken up, what men may do and
+have done in a state of nature.  Men cannot divest themselves of
+themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it, they think, reason,
+and act as they are.
+
+Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.  The advocates
+of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete, should have
+presented their primitive man as below the lowest known savage,
+unprogressive, and in himself incapable of developing any progressive
+energy.  Unprogressive, and, without foreign assistance, incapable of
+progress, how is it possible for your primitive man to pass, by his own
+unassisted efforts, from the alleged state of nature to that of
+civilization, of which he has no conception, and towards which no
+innate desire, no instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
+
+But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
+supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some happy
+inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the state of
+nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil government, how
+could he carry his conception into execution? Conception is always
+easier than its realization, and between the design and its execution
+there is always a weary distance.  The poetry of all nations is a wail
+over unrealized ideals.  It is little that even the wisest and most
+potent statesman can realize of what he conceives to be necessary for
+the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly
+demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not
+seldom generations come and go without effecting them.  The republics
+of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities
+of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because
+intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are
+innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their
+realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life,
+which only their introduction and realization can supply.  So to be
+able to execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
+to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits,
+and characters in the public which are not possible without
+civilization itself.  Some philosophers suppose men have invented
+language, forgetting that it requires language to give the ability to
+invent language.
+
+Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it
+may be.  They are moved by their affections, passions, instincts, and
+habits.  Routine is more powerful with them than logic.  A few are
+greedy of novelties, and are always for trying experiments; but the
+great body of the people of all nations have an invincible repugnance
+to abandon what they know for what they know not.  They are, to a great
+extent, the slaves of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the
+necessary exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
+better.  Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
+prejudice, habits, and usages.  Never were philosophers more ignorant
+of human nature than they, so numerous in the last century, who
+imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of interest, and that
+enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien entendu, suffices to found
+and sustain the state.  No reform, no change in the constitution of
+government or of society, whatever the advantages it may promise, can
+be successful, if introduced, unless it has its root or germ in the
+past.  Man is never a creator; he can only develop and continue,
+because he is himself a creature, and only a second cause.  The
+children of Israel, when they encountered the privations of the
+wilderness that lay between them and the promised land flowing with
+milk and honey, fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back
+to Egypt, and permit them to return to slavery.
+
+In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, there
+is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil society would
+not be a development, but a complete rupture with the past, and an
+entire new creation.  When it is with the greatest difficulty that
+necessary reforms are introduced in old and highly civilized nations
+and when it can seldom be done at all without terrible political and
+social convulsions, how can we suppose men without society, and knowing
+nothing of it, can deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice
+aforethought," found society?  Without government, and destitute alike
+of habits of obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
+establish, and sustain government?  To suppose it, would be to suppose
+that men in a state of nature, without culture, without science,
+without any of the arts, even the most simple and necessary, are
+infinitely superior to the men formed under the most advanced
+civilization.  Was Rousseau right in asserting civilization as a fall,
+as a deterioration of the race?
+
+But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some miracle
+or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the origin of
+government as authority in compact is not yet established.  According
+to the theory, the rights of civil society are derived from the rights
+of the individuals who form or enter into the compact.  But individuals
+cannot give what they have not, and no individual has in himself the
+right to govern another.  By the law of nature all men have equal
+rights, are equals, and equals have no authority one over another.  Nor
+has an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right to
+dispose of himself as he pleases.  Man is not God, independent,
+self-existing and self-sufficing.  He is dependent, and dependent not
+only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even on
+nature, or the material world.  That on which he depends in the measure
+in which be depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life,
+and to his well-being, and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right
+in him and to him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the
+proud spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation
+to another.  The right of that on which man depends, and by communion
+with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.
+
+Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his only
+medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him is neither
+absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it, lives in it, and
+cannot live without it.  It has, then, certain lights over him, and he
+cannot enter into any compact, league, or alliance that society does
+not authorize, or at least permit. These rights of society override his
+rights to himself, and he can neither surrender them nor delegate them.
+Other rights, as the rights of religion and property, which are held
+directly from God and nature, and which are independent of society, are
+included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these rights
+cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they are rights of
+man only before civil society, and therefore not his to cede, and
+because they are precisely the rights that government is bound to
+respect and protect.  The compact, then, cannot be formed as pretended,
+for the only rights individuals could delegate or surrender to society
+to constitute the sum of the rights of government are hers already, and
+those which are not hers are those which cannot be delegated or
+surrendered, and in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is the
+duty, the chief end of government to protect each and every individual.
+
+The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no
+authority without society, to meet in convention, and enter into the
+alleged compact, because they are not independent, sovereign
+individuals.  But pass over this: suppose the convention, suppose the
+compact, it must still be conceded that it binds and can bind only
+those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into it.  This is conceded
+by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of 1776, in the assertion
+that government derives its "just powers from the consent of the
+governed."  This consent, as the matter is one of life and death, must
+be free, deliberate, formal, explicit, not simply an assumed, implied,
+or constructive consent.  It must be given personally, and not by one
+for another without his express authority.
+
+It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms of the
+compact from the silence of the individual, and also from his continued
+residence in the country and submission to its government.  But
+residence is no evidence of consent, because it may be a matter of
+necessity.  The individual may be unable to emigrate, if he would; and
+by what right can individuals form an agreement to which I must consent
+or else migrate to some strange land?
+
+Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, be any thing
+but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and therefore
+invalid?  Nothing can be inferred from one's silence, for he may have
+many reasons for being silent besides approval of the government.  He
+may be silent because speech would avail nothing; because to protest
+might be dangerous--cost him his liberty, if not his life; because he
+sees and knows nothing better, and is ignorant that he has any choice
+in the case; or because, as very likely is the fact with the majority,
+he has never for moment thought of the matter, or ever had his
+attention called to it, and has no mind on the subject.
+
+But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from the
+compact or obligation to obey the government created by it all the
+women of a nation, all the children too young to be capable of giving
+their consent, and all who are too ignorant, too weak of mind to be
+able to understand the terms of the contract.  These several classes
+cannot be less than three-fourths of the population of any country.
+What is to be done with them? Leave them without government?  Extend
+the power of the government over them?  By what right?  Government
+derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that
+consent they have not given.  Whence does one-fourth of the population
+get its right to govern the other three-fourths?
+
+But what is to be done with the rights of minorities?  Is the rule of
+unanimity to be insisted on in the convention and in the government,
+when it goes into operation?  Unanimity is impracticable, for where
+there are many men there will be differences of opinion.  The rule of
+unanimity gives to each individual a veto on the whole proceeding,
+which was the grand defect of the Polish constitution.  Each member of
+the Polish Diet, which included the whole body of the nobility, had an
+absolute veto, and could, alone, arrest the whole action of the
+government.  Will you substitute the rule of the majority, and say the
+majority must govern?  By what right?  It is agreed to in the
+convention.  Unanimously, or only by a majority?  The right of the
+majority to have their will is, on the social compact theory, a
+conventional right, and therefore cannot come into play before the
+convention is completed, or the social compact is framed and accepted.
+How, in settling the terms of the compact, will you proceed?  By
+majorities?  But suppose a minority objects, and demands two-thirds,
+three-fourths, or four-fifths, and votes against the majority rule,
+which is carried only by a simple plurality of votes, will the
+proceedings of the convention bind the dissenting minority?  What gives
+to the majority the right to govern the minority who dissent from its
+action?
+
+On the supposition that society has rights not derived from
+individuals, and which are intrusted to the government, there is a good
+reason why the majority should prevail within the legitimate sphere of
+government, because the majority is the best representative practicable
+of society itself; and if the constitution secures to minorities and
+dissenting individuals their natural rights and their equal rights as
+citizens, they have no just cause of complaint, for the majority in
+such case has no power to tyrannize over them or to oppress them.  But
+the theory under examination denies that society has any rights except
+such as it derives from individuals who all have equal rights.
+According to it, society is itself conventional, and created by free,
+independent, equal, sovereign individuals. Society is a congress of
+sovereigns, in which no one has authority over another, and no one can
+be rightfully forced to submit to any decree against his will.  In such
+a congress the rule of the majority is manifestly improper,
+illegitimate, and invalid, unless adopted by unanimous consent.
+
+But this is not all.  The individual is always the equal of himself,
+and if the government derives its powers from the consent of the
+governed, he governs in the government, and parts with none of his
+original sovereignty.  The government is not his master, but his agent,
+as the principal only delegates, not surrenders, his rights and powers
+to the agent.  He is free at any time he pleases to recall the powers
+he has delegated, to give new instructions, or to dismiss him.  The
+sovereignty of the individual survives the compact, and persists
+through all the acts of his agent, the government.  He must, then, be
+free to withdraw from the compact whenever he judges it advisable.
+Secession is perfectly legitimate if government is simply a contract
+between equals.  The disaffected, the criminal, the thief the
+government would send to prison, or the murderer it would hang, would
+be very likely to revoke his consent, and to secede from the state.
+Any number of individuals large enough to count a majority among
+themselves, indisposed to pay the government taxes, or to perform the
+military service exacted, might hold a convention, adopt a secession
+ordinance, and declare themselves a free, independent, sovereign state,
+and bid defiance to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and
+that, too, without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.
+Would the government employ military force to coerce them back to their
+allegiance?  By what right?  Government is their agent, their creature,
+and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or creature.
+
+The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment be
+dissolved.  Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently maintained
+that one generation has no power to bind another; and, as if this was
+not enough, he asserted the right of revolution, and gave it as his
+opinion that in every nation a revolution once in every generation is
+desirable, that is, according to his reckoning, once every nineteen
+years.  The doctrine that one generation has no power to bind its
+successor is not only a logical conclusion from the theory that
+governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
+since a generation cannot give its consent before it is born, but is
+very convenient for a nation that has contracted a large national debt;
+yet, perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new
+generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge the
+obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.  No man,
+certainly, can contract for any one but himself; and how then can the
+son be bound, without his own personal or individual consent, freely
+given, by the obligations entered into by his father?
+
+The social compact is necessarily limited to the individuals who form
+it, and as necessarily, unless renewed, expires with them. It thus
+creates no state, no political corporation, which survives in all its
+rights and powers, though individuals die. The state is on this theory
+a voluntary association, and in principle, except that it is not a
+secret society, in no respect differs from the Carbonari, or the
+Knights of the Golden Circle. When Orsini attempted to execute the
+sentence of death on the Emperor of the French, in obedience to the
+order of the Carbonari, of which the Emperor was a member, he was, if
+the theory of the origin of government in compact be true, no more an
+assassin than was the officer who executed on the gallows the rebel
+spies and incendiaries Beal and Kennedy.
+
+Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no social or
+civil element.  It does not and cannot create society.  It can give
+only an aggregation of individuals, and society is not an aggregation
+nor even an organization of individuals.  It is an organism, and
+individuals live in its life as well as it in theirs.  There is a real
+living solidarity, which makes individuals members of the social body,
+and members one of another. There is no society without individuals,
+and there are no individuals without society; but in society there is
+that which is not individual, and is more than all individuals.  The
+social compact is an attempt to substitute for this real living
+solidarity, which gives to society at once unity of life and diversity
+of members, an artificial solidarity, a fictitious unity for a real
+unity, and membership by contract for real living membership, a cork
+leg for that which nature herself gives. Real government has its ground
+in this real living solidarity, and represents the social element,
+which is not individual, but above all individuals, as man is above
+men.  But the theory substitutes a simple agency for government, and
+makes each individual its principal.  It is an abuse of language to
+call this agency a government.  It has no one feature or element of
+government.  It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity; its
+authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a public
+authority, representing a public will, a public right, or a public
+interest.  In no country could government be adopted and sustained if
+men were left to the wisdom or justness of their theories, or in the
+general affairs of life, acted on them. Society, and government as
+representing society, has a real existence, life, faculties, and organs
+of its own, not derived or derivable from individuals.  As well might
+it be maintained that the human body consists in and derives all its
+life from the particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and
+which are constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its
+life, or government its powers, from individuals.  No mechanical
+aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is no
+living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation of
+individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths, can make
+society where there is no informing social principle that aggregates
+and assimilates them to a living body, or produce that mystic existence
+called a state or commonwealth.
+
+The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the nation to
+be a purely personal affair.  It gives the government no territorial
+status, and clothes it with no territorial rights or jurisdiction.  The
+government that could so originate would be, if any thing, a barbaric,
+not a republican government.  It has only the rights conferred on it,
+surrendered or delegated to it by individuals, and therefore, at best,
+only individual rights. Individuals can confer only such rights as they
+have in the supposed state of nature.  In that state there is neither
+private nor public domain.  The earth in that state is not property,
+and is open to the first occupant, and the occupant can lay no claim to
+any more than he actually occupies.  Whence, then, does government
+derive its territorial jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain
+claimed by all national governments?  Whence its title to vacant or
+unoccupied lands?  How does any particular government fix its
+territorial boundaries, and obtain the right to prescribe who may
+occupy, and on what conditions the vacant lands within those
+boundaries? Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers,
+lakes, bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as
+appertaining to its domain?  Here are rights that it could not have
+derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed them in the
+so-called state of nature.  The concocters of the theory evidently
+overlooked these rights, or considered them of no importance.  They
+seem never to have contemplated the existence of territorial states, or
+the division of mankind into nations fixed to the soil.  They seem not
+to have supposed the earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of
+their followers pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of
+a nation are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy them, without
+leave asked of the national authority or granted.  The American people
+retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory habits
+of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they settled on the
+banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern Ocean, in Scania, or
+came in contact with the Graeco-Roman civilization.
+
+Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations are
+fixed to the soil.  The territory is defined, and is the domain of the
+state, from which all private proprietors hold their title-deeds.
+Individual proprietors hold under the state, and often hold more, than
+they occupy; but it retains in all private estates the eminent domain,
+and prohibits the alienation of land to one who is not a citizen.  It
+defends its domain, its public unoccupied lands, and the lands owned by
+private individuals, against all foreign powers.  Now whence, if
+government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it get
+this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even its
+unoccupied lands as trespassers?  In the state of nature the
+territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are restricted to
+the portion of land they occupy with their rude culture, and with their
+flocks and herds, and in civilized nations to what they hold from the
+state, and, therefore, the right as held and defended by all nations,
+and without which the nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is
+and can be no state, could never have been derived from individuals.
+The earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the sacred
+territory, to which the state and all political power are attached.
+Whence did Rome become a landholder, and the governing people a
+territorial people?  Whence does any nation become a territorial nation
+and lord of the domain?  Certainly never by the cession of individuals,
+and hence no civilized government ever did or could originate in the
+so-called social compact.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+III. The tendency of the last century was to individualism; that of the
+present is to socialism.  The theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and
+Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still held by many, has
+latterly been much modified, if not wholly transformed.  Sovereignty,
+it is now maintained, is inherent in the people; not individually,
+indeed, but collectively, or the people as society.  The constitution
+is held not to be simply a compact or agreement entered into by the
+people as individuals creating civil society and government, but a law
+ordained by the sovereign people, prescribing the constitution of the
+state and defining its rights and powers.
+
+This transformation, which is rather going on than completed, is, under
+one aspect at least, a progress, or rather a return to the sounder
+principles of antiquity.  Under it government ceases to be a mere
+agency, which must obtain the assassin's consent to be hung before it
+can rightfully hang him, and becomes authority, which is one and
+imperative.  The people taken collectively are society, and society is
+a living organism, not a mere aggregation of individuals.  It does not,
+of course, exist without individuals, but it is something more than
+individuals, and has rights not derived from them, and which are
+paramount to theirs. There is more truth, and truth of a higher order,
+in this than in the theory of the social compact.  Individuals, to a
+certain extent, derive their life from God through society, and so far
+they depend on her, and they are hers; she owns them, and has the right
+to do as she will with them.  On this theory the state emanates from
+society, and is supreme.  It coincides with the ancient Greek and Roman
+theory, as expressed by Cicero, already cited.  Man is born in society
+and remains there, and it may be regarded as the source of ancient
+Greek and Roman patriotism, which still commands the admiration of the
+civilized world.  The state with Greece and Rome was a living reality,
+and loyalty a religion.  The Romans held Rome to be a divinity, gave
+her statues and altars, and offered her divine worship.  This was
+superstition, no doubt, but it had in it an element of truth.  To every
+true philosopher there is something divine in the state, and truth in
+all theories.  Society stands nearer to God, and participates more
+immediately of the Divine essence, and the state is a more lively image
+of God than the individual.  It was man, the generic and reproductive
+man, not the isolated individual, that was created in the image and
+likeness of his Maker.  "And God created man in his own image; in the
+image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
+
+This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it enlists in
+its support the instincts, the intelligence, the living forces, and
+active tendencies of the age.  Kings, kaisers, and hierarchies are
+powerless before it, and war against it in vain.  The most they can do
+is to restrain its excesses, or to guard against its abuses.  Its
+advocates, in returning to it, sometimes revive in its name the old
+pagan superstition.  Not a few of the European democrats recognize in
+the earth, in heaven, or in hell, no power superior to the people, and
+say not only people-king but people-God.  They say absolutely, without
+any qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and
+make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in religion,
+philosophy, morals, science, and the arts.  The people not only found
+the state, but also the church.  They inspire or reveal the truth,
+ordain or prohibit worships, judge of doctrines, and decide cases of
+conscience.  Mazzini said, when at the head of the Roman Republic in
+1848, the question of religion must be remitted to the judgment of the
+people.  Yet this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in
+all civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.
+
+But this theory has its difficulties.  Who are the collective people
+that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign people?  The
+word people is vague, and in itself determines nothing.  It may include
+a larger or a smaller number; it may mean the political people, or it
+may mean simply population; it may mean peasants, artisans,
+shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as distinguished from the nobility;
+hired laborers or workmen as distinguished from their employer, or
+slaves as distinguished from their master or owner.  In which of these
+senses is the word to be taken when it is said, "The people are
+sovereign?"  The people are the population or inhabitants of one and
+the same country.  That is something.  But who or what determines the
+country?  Is the country the whole territory of the globe?  That will
+not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and their
+division into separate nations.  Is the territory indefinite or
+undefined?  Then indefinite or undefined are its inhabitants, or the
+people invested with the rights of society. Is it defined and its
+boundaries fixed?  Who has done it?  The people.  But who are the
+people?  We are as wise as we were at starting.  The logicians say that
+the definition of idem per idem, or the same by the same, is simply no
+definition at all.
+
+The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people the
+sovereign people.  But who are the people constituting the nation?  The
+sovereign people?  This is only to revolve in a vicious circle.  The
+nation is the tribe or the people living under the same regimen, and
+born of the same ancestor, or sprung from the same ancestor or
+progenitor.  But where find a nation in this the primitive sense of the
+word?  Migration, conquest, and intermarriage, have so broken up and
+intermingled the primitive races, that it is more than doubtful if a
+single nation, tribe, or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face
+of the earth. A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman,
+may have the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.
+The nation is the people inhabiting the same country, and united under
+one and the same government, it is further answered.  The nation, then,
+is not purely personal, but also territorial. Then, again, the question
+comes up, who or what determines the territory?  The government?  But
+not before it is constituted, and it cannot be constituted till its
+territorial limits are determined.  The tribe doubtless occupies
+territory, but is not fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it,
+and therefore is not territorial.  But a nation, in the modern or
+civilized sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its
+jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory is
+determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.
+
+The question is not an idle question.  It is one of great practical
+importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither determine who are
+the sovereign people, nor who are united under one and the same
+government.  Laws have no extra-territorial force, and the officer who
+should attempt to enforce the national laws beyond the national
+territory would be a trespasser.  If the limits are undetermined, the
+government is not territorial, and can claim as within its jurisdiction
+only those who choose to acknowledge its authority.  The importance of
+the question has been recently brought home to the American people by
+the secession of eleven or more States from the Union.  Were these
+States a part of the American nation, or were they not?  Was the war
+which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so much
+treasure, a civil war or a foreign war?  Were the secessionists
+traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were they patriots fighting
+for the liberty and independence of their country and the right of
+self-government?  All on both sides agreed that the nation is
+sovereign; the dispute was as to the existence of the nation itself,
+and the extent of its jurisdiction.  Doubtless, when a nation has a
+generally recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the
+difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be got
+over; but the question here concerns the institution of government, and
+determining who constitute society and have the right to meet in
+person, or by their delegates in convention, to institute it.  This
+question, so important, and at times so difficult, the theory of the
+origin of government in the people collectively, or the nation, does
+not solve, or furnish any means of solving.
+
+But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another, and a
+very grave one, to overcome.  The theory assumes that the people
+collectively, "in their own native right and might," are sovereign.
+According to it the people are ultimate, and free to do whatever they
+please.  This sacrifices individual freedom. The origin of government
+in a compact entered into by individuals, each with all and all with
+each, sacrificed the rights of society, and assumed each individual to
+be in himself an independent sovereignty.  If logically carried out,
+there could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and
+no public authority.  This new theory transfers to society the
+sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts social
+despotism, or the absolutism of the state.  It asserts with sufficient
+energy public authority, or the right of the people to govern; but it
+leaves no space for individual rights, which society must recognize,
+respect, and protect.  This was the grand defect of the ancient
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The historian explores in vain the records
+of the old Greek and Roman republics for any recognition of the rights
+of individuals not held as privileges or concessions from the state.
+Society recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed
+over individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his household,
+the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over his subjects.
+The direct and indirect influence of the body of freemen admitted to a
+voice in public affairs, in determining the resolutions and action of
+the state, no doubt tempered in practice to some extent the authority
+of the state, and prevented acts of gross oppression; but in theory the
+state was absolute, and the people individually were placed at the
+mercy of the people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the
+collective people.
+
+Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and rights
+of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently of society,
+and not derived from God through the state.  The recognition of these
+rights by modern society is due to Christianity: some say to the
+barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire; but this last opinion is
+not well founded.  The barbarian chiefs and nobles had no doubt a
+lively sense of personal freedom and independence, but for themselves
+only.  They had no conception of personal freedom as a general or
+universal right, and men never obtain universal principles by
+generalizing particulars.  They may give a general truth a particular
+application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a particular
+truth--a general or universal application.  They are too good logicians
+for that.  The barbarian individual freedom and personal independence
+was never generalized into the doctrine of the rights of man, any more
+than the freedom of the master has been generalized into the right of
+his slaves to be free.  The doctrine of individual freedom before the
+state is due to the Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and
+worth of every human soul, the accountability to God of each man for
+himself, and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
+rather than men.  The church practically denied the absolutism of the
+state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the state, in
+converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of the state
+authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death the profession
+of the Christian faith.  In this she practically, as well as
+theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused into modern
+society the doctrine that every individual, even the lowest and
+meanest, has rights which the state neither confers nor can abrogate;
+and it will only be by extinguishing in modern society the Christian
+faith, and obliterating all traces of Christian civilization, that
+state absolutism can be revived with more than a partial and temporary
+success.
+
+The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so explained as
+to deny the rights of society, and to become pure individualism; but no
+political system that runs to the opposite extreme, and absorbs the
+individual in the state, stands the least chance of any general or
+permanent success till Christianity is extinguished.  Yet the assertion
+of principles which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely
+harmless, even in Christian countries.  Error is never harmless, and
+only truth can give a solid foundation on which to build. Individualism
+and socialism are each opposed to the other, and each has only a
+partial truth.  The state founded on either cannot stand, and society
+will only alternate between the two extremes.  To-day it is torn by a
+revolution in favor of socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another
+in favor of individualism, and without effecting any real progress by
+either revolution.  Real progress can be secured only by recognizing
+and building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our
+theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and independent of
+our opinions.
+
+Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth or
+reality.  Society has certain rights over individuals, for she is a
+medium of their communion with God, or through which they derive life
+from God, the primal source of all life; but she is not the only medium
+of man's life.  Man, as was said in the beginning, lives by communion
+with God, and he communes with God in the creative act and the
+Incarnation, through his kind, and, through nature.  This threefold
+communion gives rise to three institutions--religion or the church,
+society or the state, and property.  The life that man derives from God
+through religion and property, is not derived from him through society,
+and consequently so much of his life be holds independently of society;
+and this constitutes his rights as a man as distinguished from his
+rights as a citizen.  In relation to society, as not held from God
+through her, these are termed his natural rights, which, she must hold
+inviolable, and government protect for every one, whatever his
+complexion or his social position.  These rights--the rights of
+conscience and the rights of property, with all their necessary
+implications--are limitations of the rights of society, and the
+individual has the right to plead them against the state.  Society does
+not confer them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
+sacred and as fundamental as her own.
+
+But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all.  The people
+can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and act.  The
+people are not God, whatever some theorists may pretend--are not
+independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing. They are as dependent
+collectively as individually, and therefore can exist and act only as
+second cause, never as first cause. They can, then, even in the limited
+sphere of their sovereignty, be sovereign only in a secondary sense,
+never absolute sovereign in their own independent right.  They are
+sovereign only to the extent to which they impart life to the
+individual members of society, and only in the sense in which she
+imparts it, or is its cause.  She is not its first cause or creator,
+and is the medial cause or medium through which they derive it from
+God, not its efficient cause or primary source.  Society derives her
+own life from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him.  Then
+she is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God.  Her
+dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
+derivative.
+
+This third theory does not err in assuming that the people collectively
+are more than the people individually, or in denying society to be a
+mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and no rights but what it
+derives from them; nor even in asserting that the people in the sense
+of society are sovereign, but in asserting that they are sovereign in
+their own native or underived right and might.  Society has not in
+herself the absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
+dominion either of herself or her members.  God gave to man dominion
+over the irrational creation, for he made irrational creatures for man;
+but he never gave him either individually or collectively the dominion
+over the rational creation.  The theory that the people are absolutely
+sovereign in their own independent right and might, as some zealous
+democrats explain it, asserts the fundamental principle of despotism,
+and all despotism is false, for it identifies the creature with the
+Creator.  No creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and
+consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign. This third
+theory, therefore, is untenable.
+
+IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers they may
+be called, reject the origin of government in the people individually
+or collectively.  Satisfied that it has never been instituted by a
+voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and confounding government
+as a fact with government as authority, maintain that government is a
+spontaneous development of nature. Nature develops it as the liver
+secretes bile, as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his
+dam.  Nature, working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops
+society, and society develops government.  That is all the secret.
+Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond the
+simple positive fact, belong to the theological or metaphysical stage
+of the development of nature, but are left behind when the race has
+passed beyond that stage, and has reached the epoch of positive
+science, in which all, except the positive fact, is held to be unreal
+and non-existent. Government, like every thing else in the universe, is
+simply a positive development of nature.  Science explains the laws and
+conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin or
+ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world of space
+and time.
+
+These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they only
+oppose theory to theory.  The assertion that reality for the human mind
+is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible order, is purely
+theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact. Principles are as
+really objects of science as facts, and it is only in the light of
+principles that facts themselves are intelligible.  If the human mind
+had no science of reality that transcends the sensible order, or the
+positive fact, it could have no science at all.  As things exist only
+in their principles or causes, so can they be known only in their
+principles and causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as
+they really exist.  The science that pretends to deduce principles from
+particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of reasoning to an
+order that transcends facts, and in which facts have their origin, is
+undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that the positivists are
+unquestionably right.  But to maintain that man has no intelligence of
+any thing beyond the fact, no intuition or intellectual apprehension of
+its principle or cause, is equally chimerical.  The human mind cannot
+have all science, but it has real science as far as it goes, and real
+science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
+Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not
+exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond
+the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or
+transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it
+could never know the fact itself.  The error of modern philosophers, or
+philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred
+from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has direct and
+immediate intuition of it.
+
+Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or there
+could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we could never
+assert that development is development, or scientifically explain the
+laws and conditions of development. Development is explication, and
+supposes a germ which precedes it, and is not itself a development; and
+development, however far it may be carried, can never do more than
+realize the possibilities of the germ.  Development is not creation,
+and cannot supply its own germ.  That at least must be given by the
+Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.  If authority has
+not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
+spontaneously or otherwise.  All government has a governing will; and
+without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in
+her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality.
+Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only presents the end and
+the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain
+a law.  An imperative will, the will of a superior who has the right to
+command what reason dictates or approves, is essential to government;
+and that will is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in
+nature. So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
+government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development. Nature is
+no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual
+man.
+
+No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense of
+the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is placed
+by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be confounded with those
+laws of nature so-called, according to which she is productive as
+second cause, or produces her effects, which are not properly laws at
+all.  Fire burns, water flows, rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food
+nourishes, poisons kill, one substance has a chemical affinity for
+another, the needle points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said;
+that is, the effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural
+force. Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
+herself.  The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical law,
+is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on all moral
+creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason and free-will,
+and is called natural because promulgated in natural reason, or the
+reason common and essential to all moral creatures.  This is the moral
+law.  It is what the French call le droit naturell, natural right, and,
+as the theologians teach us, is the transcript of the eternal law, the
+eternal will or reason of God.  It is the foundation of all law, and
+all acts of a state that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains,
+violences rather than laws.  The moral law is no development of nature,
+for it is above nature, and is imposed on nature.  The only development
+there is about it is in our understanding of it.
+
+There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered as
+creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in successive
+developments.  Hence the origin of space and time. There would have
+been no space if there had been no external creation, and no time if
+the creation had been completed externally at once, as it was in
+relation to the Creator.  Ideal space is simply the ability of God to
+externize his creative act, and actual space is the relation of
+coexistence in the things created; ideal time is the ability of God to
+create existences with the capacity of being completed by successive
+developments, and actual time is the relation of these in the order of
+succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated
+development ceases, and time is no more.  In relation to himself the
+Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with him there
+is no time, for there is no succession.  But in relation to itself
+creation is incomplete, and there is room for development, which may be
+continued till the whole possibility of creation is actualized.  Here
+is the foundation of what is true in the modern doctrine of progress.
+Man is progressive, because the possibilities of his nature are
+successively unfolded and actualized.
+
+Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be
+scientifically ascertained and defined.  All generation is development,
+as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual. But everything is
+developed in its own order, and after its kind. The Darwinian theory of
+the development of species is not sustained by science. The development
+starts from the germ, and in the germ is given the law or principle of
+the development. From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or
+the linden.  Every kind generates its kind, never another.  But no
+development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result alone of
+the inherent energy or force of the germ developed. There is not only a
+solidarity of race, but in some sense of all races, or species; all
+created things are bound to their Creator, and to one another.  One and
+the same law or principle of life pervades all creation, binding the
+universe together in a unity that copies or imitates the unity of the
+Creator.  No creature is isolated from the rest, or absolutely
+independent of others.  All are parts of one stupendous whole, and each
+depends on the whole, and the whole on each, and each on each.  All
+creatures are members of one body, and members one of another.  The
+germ of the oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can
+never grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself
+in motion.  Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is absolutely
+deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will you watch for its
+germination.  Germinate it cannot without some external influence, or
+communion, so to speak, with the elements from which it derives its
+sustenance and support.
+
+There can be no absolutely spontaneous development.  All things are
+doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it is an
+active force of some sort; but only God himself alone suffices for his
+own activity.  All created things are dependent, have not their being
+in themselves, and are real only as they participate, through the
+creative act, of the Divine being.  The germ can no more be developed
+than it could exist without God, and no more develop itself than it
+could create itself.  What is called the law of development is in the
+germ; but that law or force can operate only in conjunction with
+another force or other forces.  All development, as all growth, is by
+accretion or assimilation.  The assimilating force is, if you will, in
+the germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
+Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
+supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and knows
+that to raise a crop of corn, he must plant the seed in a soil duly
+prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for its germination,
+growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening.  In all created things, in
+all things not complete in themselves, in all save God, in whom there
+is no development possible, for He is, as say the schoolmen, most pure
+act, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, the same law holds
+good.  Development is always the resultant of two factors, the one the
+thing itself, the other some external force co-operating with it,
+exciting it, and aiding it to act.
+
+Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient and
+adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can begin the
+Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural when the end is
+supernatural.  The principle of life in all orders is the same, and
+human activity no more suffices for itself in one order than in another.
+
+Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a civilized
+state without communion in some form with a people already civilized,
+and why there is no moral or intellectual development and progress
+without education and instruction, consequently without instructors and
+educators.  Hence the value of tradition; and hence, as the first man
+could not instruct himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper
+philosophy than is dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain
+that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a
+full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full
+activity.  Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain
+some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty
+them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe
+to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of
+every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to
+work in iron, to erect a shelter from the storm, and to build a fire to
+warm them and to cook their food.  The common sense, as well as the
+common traditions of mankind, refuses to accept the doctrine that men
+are developed without foreign aid, or progressive without divine
+assistance. Nature of herself can no more develop government than it
+can language.  There can be no language without society, and no society
+without language.  There can be no government without society, and no
+society without government of some sort.
+
+But even if nature could spontaneously develop herself, she could never
+develop an institution that has the right to govern, for she has not
+herself that right.  Nature is not God, has not created us, therefore
+has not the right of property in us.  She is not and cannot be our
+sovereign.  We belong not to her, nor does she belong to herself, for
+she is herself creature, and belongs to her Creator.  Not being in
+herself sovereign, she cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she
+develop government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for
+government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is distinct
+from that which is governed; but natural developments are nature, and
+indistinguishable from her.  The governor and the governed, the
+restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be identical.
+Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction in terms.  When an
+individual is said to govern himself, he is never understood to govern
+himself in the sense in which he is governed.  He by his reason and
+will governs or restrains his appetites and passions.  It is man as
+spirit governing man as flesh, the spiritual mind governing the carnal
+mind.
+
+Natural developments cannot in all cases be even allowed to take their
+own course without injury to nature herself.  "Follow nature" is an
+unsafe maxim, if it means, leave nature to develop herself as she will,
+and follow thy natural inclinations.  Nature is good, but inclinations
+are frequently bad.  All our appetites and passions are given us for
+good, for a purpose useful and necessary to individual and social life,
+but they become morbid and injurious if indulged without restraint.
+Each has its special object, and naturally seeks it exclusively, and
+thus generates discord and war in the individual, which immediately
+find expression in society, and also in the state, if the state be a
+simple natural development.  The Christian maxim, Deny thyself, is far
+better than the Epicurean maxim, Enjoy thyself, for there is no real
+enjoyment without self-denial.  There is deep philosophy in Christian
+asceticism, as the Positivists themselves are aware, and even insist.
+But Christian asceticism aims not to destroy nature, as voluptuaries
+pretend, but to regulate, direct, and restrain its abnormal
+developments for its own good.  It forces nature in her developments to
+submit to a law which is not in her, but above her.  The Positivists
+pretend that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that
+cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and restrains
+natural development.
+
+The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of nature, and
+at another the law of nature with nature herself, and take what is
+called the natural law to be a natural development. Here is their
+mistake, as it is the mistake of all who accept naturalistic theories.
+Society, no doubt, is authorized by the law of nature to institute and
+maintain government.  But the law of nature is not a natural
+development, nor is it in nature, or any part of nature.  It is not a
+natural force which operates in nature, and which is the developing
+principle of nature.  Do they say reason is natural, and the law of
+nature is only reason? This is not precisely the fact.  The natural law
+is law proper, and is reason only in the sense that reason includes
+both intellect and will, and nobody can pretend that nature in her
+spontaneous developments acts from intelligence and volition. Reason,
+as the faculty of knowing, is subjective and natural; but in the sense
+in which it is coincident with the natural law, it is neither
+subjective nor natural, but objective and divine, and is God affirming
+himself and promulgating his law to his creature, man.  It is, at
+least, an immediate participation of the divine by which He reveals
+himself and His will to the human understanding, and is not natural,
+but supernatural, in the sense that God himself is supernatural.  This
+is wherefore reason is law, and every man is bound to submit or conform
+to reason.
+
+That legitimate governments are instituted under the natural law is
+frankly conceded, but this is by no means the concession of government
+as a natural development.  The reason and will of which the natural law
+is the expression are the reason and will of God.  The natural law is
+the divine law as much as the revealed law itself, and equally
+obligatory.  It is not a natural force developing itself in nature,
+like the law of generation, for instance, and therefore proceeding from
+God as first cause, but it proceeds from God as final cause, and is,
+therefore, theological, and strictly a moral law, founding moral rights
+and duties.  Of course, all morality and all legitimate government rest
+on this law, or, if you will, originate in it.  But not therefore in
+nature, but in the Author of nature.  The authority is not the
+authority of nature, but of Him who holds nature in the hollow of His
+hand.
+
+V. In the seventeenth century a class of political writers who very
+well understood that no creature, no man, no number of men, not even,
+nature herself, can be inherently sovereign, defended the opinion that
+governments are founded, constituted, and clothed with their authority
+by the direct and express appointment of God himself.  They denied that
+rulers hold their power from the nation; that, however oppressive may
+be their rule, that they are justiciable by any human tribunal, or that
+power, except by the direct judgment of God, is amissible.  Their
+doctrine is known in history as the doctrine of "the divine right of
+kings, and passive obedience."  All power, says St. Paul, is from God,
+and the powers that be are ordained of God, and to resist them is to
+resist the ordination of God.  They must be obeyed for conscience' sake.
+
+It would, perhaps, be rash to say that this doctrine had never been
+broached before the seventeenth century, but it received in that
+century, and chiefly in England, its fullest and most systematic
+developments.  It was patronized by the Anglican divines, asserted by
+James I. of England, and lost the Stuarts the crown of three kingdoms.
+It crossed the Channel, into France, where it found a few hesitating
+and stammering defenders among Catholics, under Louis XIV., but it has
+never been very generally held, though it has had able and zealous
+supporters. In England it was opposed by all the Presbyterians,
+Puritans, Independents, and Republicans, and was forgotten or abandoned
+by the Anglican divines themselves in the Revolution of 1688, that
+expelled James II. and crowned William and Mary.  It was ably refuted
+by the Jesuit Suarez in his reply to a Remonstrance for the Divine
+Right of Kings by the James I.; and a Spanish monk who had asserted it
+in Madrid, under Philip II., was compelled by the Inquisition to
+retract it publicly in the place where he had asserted it.  All
+republicans reject it, and the Church has never sanctioned it.  The
+Sovereign Pontiffs have claimed and exercised the right to deprive
+princes of their principality, and to absolve their subjects from the
+oath of fidelity.  Whether the Popes rightly claimed and exercised that
+power is not now the question; but their having claimed and exercised
+it proves that the Church does not admit the inamissibility of power
+and passive obedience; for the action of the Pope was judicial, not
+legislative.  The Pope has never claimed the right to depose a prince
+till by his own act he has, under the moral law or the constitution of
+his state, forfeited his power, nor to absolve subjects from their
+allegiance till their oath, according to its true intent and meaning,
+has ceased to bind.  If the Church has always asserted with the Apostle
+there is no power but from God--non est potestas nisi a Deo--she has
+always through her doctors maintained that it is a trust to be
+exercised for the public good, and is forfeited when persistently
+exercised in a contrary sense.  St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Suarez
+all maintain that unjust laws are violences rather than laws, and do
+not oblige, except in charity or prudence, and that the republic may
+change its magistrates, and even its constitution, if it sees proper to
+do so.
+
+That God, as universal Creator, is Sovereign Lord and proprietor of all
+created things or existences, visible or invisible, is certain; for the
+maker has the absolute right to the thing made; it is his, and he may
+do with it as he will.  As he is sole creator, he alone hath dominion;
+and as he is absolute creator, he has absolute dominion over all the
+things which he has made. The guaranty against oppression is his own
+essential nature, is in the plenitude of his own being, which is the
+plenitude of wisdom and goodness.  He cannot contradict himself, be
+other than he is, or act otherwise than according to his own essential
+nature.  As he is, in his own eternal and immutable essence, supreme
+reason and supreme good, his dominion must always in its exercise be
+supremely good and supremely reasonable, therefore supremely just and
+equitable.  From him certainly is all power; he is unquestionably King
+of kings, and Lord of lords.  By him kings reign and magistrates decree
+just things.  He may, at his will, set up or pull down kings, rear or
+overwhelm empires, foster the infant colony, and make desolate the
+populous city. All this is unquestionably true, and a simple dictate of
+reason common to all men.  But in what sense is it true?  Is it true in
+a supernatural sense?  Or is it true only in the sense that it is true
+that by him we breathe, perform any or all of our natural functions,
+and in him live, and move, and have our being?
+
+Viewed in their first cause, all things are the immediate creation of
+God, and are supernatural, and from the point of view of the first
+cause the Scriptures usually speak, for the great purpose and paramount
+object of the sacred writers, as of religion itself, is to make
+prominent the fact that God is universal creator, and supreme governor,
+and therefore the first and final cause of all things.  But God creates
+second causes, or substantial existences, capable themselves of acting
+and producing effects in a secondary sense, and hence he is said to be
+causa causarum, cause of causes.  What is done by these second causes
+or creatures is done eminently by him, for they exist only by his
+creative act, and produce only by virtue of his active presence, or
+effective concurrence.  What he does through them or through their
+agency is done by him, not immediately, but mediately, and is said to
+be done naturally, as what he does immediately is said to be done
+supernaturally.  Natural is what God does through second causes, which
+he creates; supernatural is that which he does by himself alone,
+without their intervention or agency.  Sovereignty, or the right to
+govern, is in him, and he may at his will delegate it to men either
+mediately or immediately, by a direct and express appointment, or
+mediately through nature.  In the absence of all facts proving its
+delegation direct and express, it must be assumed to be mediate,
+through second causes.  The natural is always to be presumed, and the
+supernatural is to be admitted only on conclusive proof.
+
+The people of Israel had a supernatural vocation, and they received
+their law, embracing their religious and civil constitution and their
+ritual directly from God at the hand of Moses, and various individuals
+from time to time appear to have been specially called to be their
+judges, rulers, or kings.  Saul was so called, and so was David. David
+and his line appear, also, to have been called not only to supplant
+Saul and his line, but to have been supernaturally invested with the
+kingdom forever; but it does not appear that the royal power with which
+David and his line were invested was inamissible.  They lost it in the
+Babylonish captivity, and never afterwards recovered it.  The Asmonean
+princes were of another line, and when our Lord came the sceptre was in
+the hands of Herod, an Idumean Or Edomite.  The promise made, to David
+and his house is generally held by Christian commentators to have
+received its fulfilment in the everlasting spiritual royalty of the
+Messiah, sprung through Mary from David's line.
+
+The Christian Church is supernaturally constituted and supernaturally
+governed, but the persons selected to exercise powers supernaturally
+defined, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to the humblest parish priest
+are selected and inducted into office through human agency.  The
+Gentiles very generally claimed to have received their laws from the
+gods, but it does not appear, save in exceptional cases, that they
+claimed that their princes were designated and held their powers by the
+direct and express appointment of the god.  Save in the case of the
+Jews, and that of the Church, there is no evidence that any particular
+government exists or ever has existed by direct or express appointment,
+or otherwise than by the action of the Creator through second causes,
+or what is called his ordinary providence. Except David and his line,
+there is no evidence of the express grant by the Divine Sovereign to
+any individual or family, class or caste of the government of any
+nation or country.  Even those Christian princes who professed to reign
+"by the grace of God," never claimed that they received their
+principalities from God otherwise than through his ordinary providence,
+and meant by it little more than an acknowledgment of their dependence
+on him, their obligation to use their power according to his law and
+their accountability to him for the use they make of it.
+
+The doctrine is not favorable to human liberty, for it recognizes no
+rights of man in face of civil society.  It consecrates tyranny, and
+makes God the accomplice of the tyrant, if we suppose all governments
+have actually existed by his express appointment.  It puts the king in
+the place of God, and requires us to worship in him the immediate
+representative of the Divine Being.  Power is irresponsible and
+inamissible, and however it may be abused, or however corrupt and
+oppressive may be its exercise, there is no human redress.  Resistance
+to power is resistance to God.  There is nothing for the people but
+passive obedience and unreserved submission.  The doctrine, in fact,
+denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in the
+management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human activity.
+It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes power an hereditary
+and indefeasible right, not a trust which he who holds it may forfeit,
+and of which he may be deprived if he abuses it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the direct
+and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as to mean that
+civil authority is derived from God through the spiritual authority.
+The patriarch combined in his person both authorities, and was in his
+own household both priest and king, and so originally was in his own
+tribe the chief, and in his kingdom the king.  When the two offices
+became separated is not known.  In the time of Abraham they were still
+united. Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the
+earliest historical records of kings present them as offering
+sacrifices.  Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well as
+Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were held to be
+inseparable, but because they were both conferred on the same person by
+the republic.  In Egypt, in the time of Moses, the royal authority and
+the priestly were separated and held by different persons.  Moses, in
+his legislation for his nation, separated them, and instituted a
+sacerdotal order or caste.  The heads of tribes and the heads of
+families are, under his law, princes, but not priests, and the
+priesthood is conferred on and restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and
+more especially the family of his own brother Aaron.
+
+The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly, and in
+all primitive nations with a separate, organized priesthood, whether a
+true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is held to be above the king,
+elects or establishes the law by which is selected the temporal chief,
+and inducts him into his office, as if he received his authority from
+God through the priesthood. The Christian priesthood is not a caste,
+and is transmitted by the election of grace, not as with the Israelites
+and all sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation.  Like Him whose
+priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father or
+mother of the priestly line.  But in being priests after the order of
+Melchisedech, they are both priests and kings, as Melchisedech was, and
+as was our Lord himself, to whom was given by his Father all power in
+heaven and in earth.  The Pope, or Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our
+Lord on earth, his representative--the representative not only of him
+who is our invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and
+Lord of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power.
+Consequently, no one can have any mission to govern in the state any
+more than in the church, unless derived from God directly or indirectly
+through the Pope or Supreme Pontiff.  Many theologians and canonists in
+the Middle Ages so held, and a few perhaps hold so still.  The bulls
+and briefs of several Popes, as Gregory VII., Innocent Ill., Gregory
+IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII., have the appearance of favoring
+it.
+
+At one period the greater part of the medieval kingdoms and
+principalities were fiefs of the Holy See, and recognized the Holy
+Father as their suzerain.  The Pope revived the imperial dignity in the
+person of Charlemagne, and none could claim that dignity in the Western
+world unless elected and crowned by him, that is, unless elected
+directly by the Pope or by electors designated by him, and acting under
+his authority.  There can be no question that the spiritual is superior
+to the temporal, and that the temporal is bound in the very nature of
+things to conform to the spiritual, and any law enacted by the civil
+power in contravention of the law of God is null and void from the
+beginning.  This is what Mr. Seward meant by the higher law, a law
+higher even than the Constitution of the United States. Supposing this
+higher law, and supposing that kings and princes hold from God through
+the spiritual society, it is very evident that the chief of that
+society would have the right to deprive them, and to absolve their
+subjects, as on several occasions he actually has done.
+
+But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any great
+extent, except for a brief period, maintained by theologians or
+canonists.  The Pope conferred the imperial dignity on Charlemagne and
+his successors, but not the civil power, at least out of the Pope's own
+temporal dominions.  The emperor of Germany was at first elected by the
+Pope, and afterwards by hereditary electors designated or accepted by
+him, but the king of the Germans with the full royal authority could be
+elected and enthroned without the papal intervention or permission.
+The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples, Aragon, Muscovy,
+England, and other European states, was by virtue of feudal relations,
+not by virtue of the spiritual authority of the Holy See or the
+vicarship of the Holy Father.  The right to govern under feudalism was
+simply an estate, or property; and as the church could acquire and hold
+property, nothing prevented her holding fiefs, or her chief from being
+suzerain.  The expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in
+connection with the special relations existing between the Pope and
+emperor in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as
+their feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
+rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
+countenance to the theory in question.
+
+These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain temporal
+rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, as he has still
+in what is left him of the States of the Church; but they were
+exceptional or accidental relations, not the universal and essential
+relations between the church and the state.  The rights that grew out
+of these relations were real rights, sacred and inviolable, but only
+where and while the relations subsisted.  They, for the most part, grew
+out of the feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its
+barbarian conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order
+in which they originated.  Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
+rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or right
+to govern from God through her; but implied that their persons were
+sacred, and that violence to them would be sacrilege; that they held
+the Christian faith, and acknowledged themselves bound to protect it,
+and to govern their subjects justly, according to the law of God.
+
+The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of the two
+powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is chief of the
+spiritual society, his temporal principality, no theologian or canonist
+of the slightest respectability would argue that he derives his rights
+as temporal sovereign from his rights as pontiff.  His rights as
+pontiff depend on the express appointment of God; his rights as
+temporal prince are derived from the same source from which other
+princes derive their rights, and are held by the same tenure.  Hence
+canonists have maintained that the subjects of other states may even
+engage in war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity
+to him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
+
+The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but
+recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not derive
+from God through her.  St. Paul enjoins obedience to the Roman emperors
+for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that infidels and heretics
+may have legitimate government; and if she has ever denied the right of
+any infidel or heretical prince, it has been on the ground that the
+constitution and laws of his principality require him to profess and
+protect the Catholic faith.  She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic
+state no more than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has
+not condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our
+struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks
+against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the doctrine
+of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable doubt whether
+they were really rebels fighting against their legitimate sovereign or
+not.
+
+No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately from
+God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the state derives
+its authority only mediately from him, in a natural mode, she asserts
+the superiority of her authority, and that, in case of conflict between
+the two powers, the civil must yield. But this is only saying that
+supernatural is above natural. But--and this is the important
+point--she does not teach, nor permit the faithful to hold, that the
+supernatural abrogates the natural, or in any way supersedes it.
+Grace, say the theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.
+The church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it,
+elevates it, and is its firmest support.
+
+VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, Suarez,
+and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive their power
+from God through the people, or that the people, though not the source,
+are the medium of all political authority, and therefore rulers are
+accountable for the use they make of their power to both God and the
+people.
+
+This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting sovereignty
+in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a particular
+individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from it, as democracy
+is commonly explained, in understanding by the people, the people
+collectively, not individually--the organic people, or people fixed to
+a given territory, not the people as a mere population--the people in
+the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or
+despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is
+all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead
+of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people
+in their "own native right and might."  The people not being God, and
+being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
+sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.  It asserts the
+divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin. But
+as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as
+men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another;
+and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere
+belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in
+humanity alone can be a legitimate government.  Every such government
+is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great
+mistake--is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every
+error and every sin.
+
+The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian
+theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political
+writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Gentile philosophy had
+lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in
+so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to
+explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.
+
+Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the most
+faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the conception
+of creation, and never gets above that of generation and formation.
+Things are produced by the Divine Being impressing his own ideas,
+eternal in his own mind, on a pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.
+Aristotle teaches substantially the same doctrine.  Things eternally
+exist as matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
+unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, from
+materia informis to materia formata.  Even the Christian Platonists and
+Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation; they assert it,
+indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of revelation, not as a fact of
+science; and hence it is that their theology and their philosophy never
+thoroughly harmonize, or at least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
+
+Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists,
+and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God.
+They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in
+nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural
+laws.  If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a
+supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god.  They saw no
+divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by
+natural laws. Having no conception of the creative act, they could have
+none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
+Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
+themselves.  Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
+government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally
+founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its
+institution.  Their writings may be studied with advantage on the
+constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms
+of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs,
+but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its
+authority.
+
+The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that
+there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a
+religious duty.  Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil
+government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind
+it.  Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate
+sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no
+man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state.  No
+man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil
+duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from
+the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or
+her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
+not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a
+convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally
+important duty of taking care of themselves.  But by asserting the
+divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority,
+clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience,
+sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any
+sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the state.
+For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
+people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
+society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
+
+After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
+recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
+powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the divine
+origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church
+with most disastrous consequences.  While the Roman Empire of the West
+subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East
+asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of
+Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil
+matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to
+temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his
+possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by
+the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the
+Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor,
+and owed him no civil allegiance.  He became civilly independent of the
+Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it.  To the new
+powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged
+any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his
+civil as well as spiritual independence.
+
+This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to
+be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their
+empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed
+them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the
+Pope's superior.  If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the
+civil power is from God, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a
+Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the
+imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
+emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and
+as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope
+be subject to the emperor in temporals.  As at the time when the
+dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven
+with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted
+practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
+ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the
+state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope
+represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme
+over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty
+itself.  Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the
+emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor
+would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the
+spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.
+
+If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
+imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church,
+the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers
+would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy.  It would
+establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible
+governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most
+hostile to social progress.  Even the Jews could not, or would not,
+endure it, and prayed God to give them a king, that they might be like
+other nations.
+
+In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly
+perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and
+partly wrong.  The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of
+civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the
+supremacy of the moral order, or the law of God, without which
+governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being.  The
+real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine
+of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most
+approved theologians.  The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
+society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because
+he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is
+the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, and holds immediately
+from God; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from
+God only mediately, through second causes, or the people.  Yet, though
+derived from God only through the people, civil authority still holds
+from God, and derives its right from Him through another channel than
+the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
+sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and
+respect.  This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as
+we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she
+interprets and applies the law of God, both natural and revealed, she
+makes neither.
+
+Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false
+charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic
+or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the
+representative of the civil society on the same level with the
+representative of the spiritual, or to emancipate the state from the
+law of God while they conceded the divine origin or right of
+government, they sought to effect its independence by asserting for it
+only a natural or purely human origin.  For nearly two centuries the
+most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the
+divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the
+state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
+to derive authority from man alone.  They have not only separated the
+state from the church as an external corporation, but from God as its
+internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her
+sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at
+loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil authority, but
+what is called "the right of insurrection."  Under their teaching the
+age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and
+protect society, but with those who conspire against it--the
+insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction.  The
+established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate
+authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic,
+tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God,
+and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
+not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is
+hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself
+for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the
+party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.
+
+This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical
+or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical
+principles.  Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can
+sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right
+but might.  No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or
+what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order
+to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual
+or social progress.  The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but
+they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects
+it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be
+no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive.  In civil
+society two things are necessary--stability and movement. The human is
+the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only
+successively actualized.  But the element of stability can be found
+only in the divine, in God, in whom there is no unactualized
+possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal.  The
+doctrine that derives authority from God through the people, recognizes
+in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability
+and progress.
+
+This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of
+things.  It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real
+order.  It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which
+nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the
+Creator.  Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable
+without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act.
+That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first
+principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than
+in theology.  God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and
+creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
+inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being."
+All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as
+through that act they participate of his being. Through that act he is
+immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every
+creature.  The creature deriving from his creative act can no more
+continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it.  It is as
+bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that God created the universe,
+endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up,
+gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself.  It
+cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself.  It did not
+merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
+creative act.  Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no
+philosopher at all.  Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather,
+Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended
+or discontinued, or not passing over from the creature and returning to
+God.
+
+Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can continue
+to exist, act, or live only by participating through it of his divine
+being.  There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in
+every creature, and therefore it is that God is worshipped in his works
+without idolatry.  But he creates substantial existences capable of
+acting as second causes.  Hence, in all living things there is in their
+life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human
+life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the
+human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great
+Christian theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
+government.  Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence
+of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to
+build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God.  A
+government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in
+the air.  It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much
+as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they
+really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they
+accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God.
+What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason,
+without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real,
+living God himself. Hence government, like man himself, participates of
+the divine being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the
+same time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
+authority with freedom, and stability with progress.
+
+The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
+inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for
+it.  It is not their own.  If it were their own they might do with it
+as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an
+account; but holding it as a trust from God, they are under his law,
+and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes.  Civil rulers, holding
+their authority from God through the people, are accountable for it
+both to Him and to them.  If they abuse it they are justiciable by the
+people and punishable by God himself.
+
+Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad government, or
+what in modern times is called the responsibility of power.  At the
+same time the state is guarantied against sedition, insurrection,
+rebellion, revolution, by the elevation of the civic virtues to the
+rank of religious, virtues, and making loyalty a matter of conscience.
+Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign
+auxiliary, but as integral in the political order itself.  Religion
+sustains the state, not because it externally commands us to obey the
+higher powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because
+it trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
+resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but because it
+and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, though distinct,
+parts of one and the same whole.  The church and the state, as
+corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their
+spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state
+the church; but both are from God, and both work to the same end, and
+when each is rightly understood there is no antithesis or antagonism
+between them. Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in
+serving the church.  He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his
+country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith.  Civic
+virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without
+which there are no religious virtues, since no man who loves not his
+brother does or can love God.
+
+The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because it has
+not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and the via
+inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the nation, at its
+command.  The individual has, indeed, only moral guaranties against the
+abuse of power by the sovereign people, which may no doubt sometimes
+prove insufficient.  But moral guaranties are always better than none,
+and there are none where the people are held to be sovereign in their
+own native right and might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside
+of the constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
+since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
+criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
+infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
+against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what they
+please, they can do no wrong.  This would place the individual at the
+mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however
+oppressed or cruelly treated.  This would establish the absolute
+despotism of the state, and deny every thing like the natural rights of
+man, or individual and personal freedom, as has already been shown.
+Now as men do take part in government, and as men, either individually
+or collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never to
+be expected, under any possible constitution or form of government,
+that authority will always be wisely and justly exercised, that wrong
+will ever be done, and the rights of individuals never in any instance
+be infringed; but with the clear understanding that all power is of
+God, that the political sovereignty is vested in the people or the
+collective body, that the civil rulers hold from God through them and
+are responsible to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is
+all the guaranty against the abuse of power by the nation, the
+political or organic people, that the nature of the case admits.  The
+nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you get in
+the government all the available wisdom and virtue the nation has, and
+more is never, under any form or constitution of government,
+practicable or to be expected.
+
+It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king reigns, not
+governs."  The people, though sovereign under God, are not the
+government.  The government is in their name and by virtue of authority
+delegated from God through them, but they are not it, are not their own
+ministers.  It is only when the people forget this and undertake to be
+their own ministers and to manage their own affairs immediately by
+themselves instead of selecting agents to do it for them, and holding
+their agents to a strict account for their management, that they are
+likely to abuse their power or to sanction injustice.  The nation may
+be misled or deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular
+courtiers, but as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all
+natural rights.  The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak
+in their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.
+L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France, and while
+that was conceded the French nation could have in its government no
+more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at least no more than he
+could appreciate.  And under his government France was made responsible
+for many deeds that the nation would never have sanctioned, if it bad
+been recognized as the depositary of the national sovereignty, or as
+the French state, and answerable to God for the use it made of
+political power, or the conduct of its government.
+
+But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force in the
+nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong, for if the
+sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can rightly command or
+authorize the employment of force, and all commissions must run in its
+name.  Written constitutions alone will avail little, for they emanate
+from the people, who can disregard them, if they choose, and alter or
+revoke them at will. The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the
+state must after all be on moral guaranties.  In the very nature of the
+case there are and can be no other.  But these, placed in a clear
+light, with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found
+insufficient.  Hence the necessity for the protection, not of authority
+simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the liberty of religion
+and intelligence in the nation, of the general understanding that the
+nation holds its power to govern as a trust from God, and that to God
+through the people all civil rulers are strictly responsible.  Let the
+mass of the people in any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism
+of atheism, or lose themselves in that supreme sophism called
+pantheism, the grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism,
+and liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty, and
+perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among savages,
+would be lost and irrecoverable.
+
+But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of the
+case.  It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the divine
+origin of government in the sense that the origin of nature is divine;
+it derives it from God through the people, collectively, or as society,
+and therefore concedes it a natural, human, and social element, which
+distinguishes it from pure theocracy.  It, however, does not explain
+how authority comes from God to the people.  The ruler, king, prince,
+or emperor, holds from God through the people, but how do the people
+themselves hold from God?  Mediately or immediately?  If mediately,
+what is the medium?  Surely not the people themselves. The people can
+no more be the medium than the principle of their own sovereignty. If
+immediately, then God governs in them as he does in the church, and no
+man is free to think or act contrary to popular opinion, or in any case
+to question the wisdom or justice of any of the acts of the state,
+which is arriving at state absolutism by another process.  Besides,
+this would theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all
+human intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall
+into either pantheism or atheism.
+
+VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority, is
+derived by the collective people or society, from God through the law
+of nature.  Rulers hold from God through the people or nation, and the
+people or nation hold from God through the natural law.  How nations
+are founded or constituted, or a particular people becomes a sovereign
+political people, invested with the rights of society, will be
+considered in following chapters.  Here it suffices to say that
+supposing a political people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the
+community, not supernaturally, or by an external supernatural
+appointment, as the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural
+law, or law by which God governs the whole moral creation.
+
+They who assert the origin of government in nature are right, so far as
+they derive it from God through the law of nature, and are wrong only
+when they understand by the law of nature the physical force or forces
+of nature, which are not laws in the primary and proper sense of the
+term.  The law of nature is not the order or rule of the divine action
+in nature which is rightfully called providence, but is, as has been
+said, law in its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of
+nature, as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his
+creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is called
+natural, because promulgated through the reason common to all men.
+Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first man,
+supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and confirmed by
+Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian code itself.  Man
+needs even yet instruction in relation to matters lying within the
+range of natural reason, or else secular schools, colleges, and
+universities would be superfluous, and manifestly the instructor of the
+first man could have been only the Creator himself.
+
+The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam to us
+through two channels--reason, which is in every man, and in immediate
+relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the primitive
+instruction embodied in language and what the Romans call jus gentium,
+or law common to all civilized nations.  Under this law, whose
+prescriptions are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal
+jurisprudence, nations are providentially constituted, and invested
+with political sovereignty; and as they are constituted under this law
+and hold from God through it, it defines their respective rights and
+powers, their limitation and their extent.
+
+The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the
+people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or political
+society.  It is vested in the political community or nation, not in an
+individual, or family, or a class, because, under the natural law, all
+men are equal, as they are under the Christian law, and one man has, in
+his own right, no authority over another.  The family has in the father
+a natural chief, but political society has no natural chief or chiefs.
+The authority of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when
+his children have attained to majority, have married and become heads
+of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the paternal
+household.  The recognition of the authority of the father beyond the
+limits of his own household, is, if it ever occurs, by virtue of the
+ordinance, the consent, express or tacit, of the political society.
+There are no natural-born political chiefs, and wherever we find men
+claiming or acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the
+Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or
+constitution of the people or the nation.
+
+Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically developed
+from the authority of the patriarchs, and have unquestionably been
+sustained by an equally false development of the right of property,
+especially landed property.  The owner of the land, or he who claimed
+to own it, claimed as an incident of his ownership the right to govern
+it, and consequently to govern all who occupied it.  But however valid
+may be the landlord's title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can
+own any thing in land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the
+law of nature no political right.  Property, like all natural rights,
+is entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.
+Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a
+question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme
+political authority.  It was the basis, and almost exclusive basis, in
+the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in most states.
+France and the United States are the principal exceptions in
+Christendom.  Property alone, or coupled with birth, is made elsewhere
+in some form a basis of political power, and where made so by the
+sovereign authority, it is legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for
+it takes from the weak and gives to the strong.  The rich have in their
+riches advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the
+state any additional advantage.  An aristocracy, in the sense of
+families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services, wealth,
+cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable in every
+nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief support, but they
+need and should receive no political recognition.  They should form no
+privileged class in the state or political society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation,
+and the constitution of the government.  The constitution of the
+government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the
+constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its
+origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through
+historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the
+other in historical fact.  The nation must exist, and exist as a
+political community, before it can give itself a constitution; and no
+state, any more than an individual, can exist without a constitution of
+some sort.
+
+The distinction between the providential constitution of the people and
+the constitution of the government, is not always made.  The
+illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers
+who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in
+his work on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions,
+maintains that constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all
+human agency from their formation and growth.  Disgusted with French
+Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much,
+and deeply wedded to monarchy in both  church and state, he had the
+temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal families for the
+government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a
+good government without a king who has descended from one of those
+divinely created royal families.  It was with some such thought, most
+likely, that a French journalist, writing home from the United States,
+congratulated the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army,
+so that when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to
+do, they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
+emperor.  Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the
+descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the
+French, a decided parvenu.  Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a
+parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no
+peer among any of the descendants of the old royal families of Europe.
+
+There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that constitutions
+are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once.
+But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its constitution
+by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done
+so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse.  If the
+constitution once given is fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly
+divine, and contain no human element, and the people have and can have
+no hand in their own government--the fundamental objection to the
+theocratic constitution of society.  To assume it is to transfer to
+civil society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
+constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or supernatural
+providence, and to maintain that the divine sovereignty governs in
+civil society immediately and supernaturally, as in the spiritual
+society.  But such is not the fact.  God governs the nation by the
+nation itself, through its own reason and free-will.  De Maistre is
+right only as to the constitution the nation starts with, and as to the
+control which that constitution necessarily exerts over the
+constitutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.
+
+The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential
+constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a convention
+of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the only constitution,
+both of the people and the government.  Prior to its adoption there is
+no government, no state, no political community or authority.
+Antecedently to it the people are an inorganic mass, simply
+individuals, without any political or national solidarity.  These
+individuals, they suppose, come together in their own native right and
+might, organize themselves into a political community, give themselves
+a constitution, and draw up and vote rules for their government, as a
+number of individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve
+themselves into a temperance society or a debating club.  This might do
+very well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating
+club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join or not
+as they please, and which they are bound to obey no farther and no
+longer than suits their convenience.  But the state is a power, a
+sovereignty; speaks to all within its jurisdiction with an imperative
+voice; commands, and may use physical force to compel obedience, when
+not voluntarily yielded. Men are born its subjects, and no one can
+withdraw from it without its express or tacit permission, unless for
+causes that would justify resistance to its authority.  The right of
+subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a
+tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and
+warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the
+right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and
+authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to
+the state, and is bound to it.
+
+The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a
+territory or country under one political head is a truth; but "the
+solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or political
+authority of their respective countries, so eloquently preached a few
+years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only a falsehood, but a
+falsehood destructive of all government and of all political
+organization.  Kossuth's doctrine supposes the people, or the
+populations of all countries, are, irrespective of their governments,
+bound together in solido, each for all and all for each, and therefore
+not only free, but bound, wherever they find a population struggling
+nominally for liberty against its government, to rush with arms in
+their hands to its assistance--a doctrine clearly incompatible with any
+recognition of political authority or territorial rights.  Peoples or
+nations commune with each other only through the national authorities,
+and when the state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its
+subjects are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention
+on either side.  There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, more
+or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of the
+populations with and through their governments, not without them.
+Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals of one and
+the same nation.  These are all bound together, all for each and each
+for all.  The individual is born into society and under the government,
+and without the authority of the government, which represents all and
+each, he cannot release himself from his obligations.  The state is
+then by no means a voluntary association.  Every one born or adopted
+into it is bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from
+it, unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no
+protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for his
+rights of conscience.  This is Vattel's doctrine, and the dictate of
+common sense.
+
+The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation for
+itself is a law--the organic or fundamental law, if you will, but a
+law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power. That sovereign
+power must exist before it can act, and it cannot exist, if vested in
+the people or nation, without a constitution, or without some sort of
+political organization of the people or nation.  There must, then, be
+for every state or nation a constitution anterior to the constitution
+which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives itself
+derives all its vitality and legal force.
+
+Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, for
+creation and providence are simply the expression of the Supreme Logic,
+the Logos, by whom all things are made.  Nations have originated in
+various ways, but history records no instance of a nation existing as
+an inorganic mass organizing itself into a political community.  Every
+nation, at its first appearance above the horizon, is found to have an
+organization of some sort. This is evident from the only ways in which
+history shows us nations originating.  These ways are: 1. The union of
+families in the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The
+migration of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.
+4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial,
+religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt, separation,
+and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling of the conquerors
+and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a new people.  These are all
+the ways known to history, and in none of these ways does a people,
+absolutely destitute of all organization, constitute itself a state,
+and institute and carry on civil government.
+
+The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet incipient
+states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a
+centre of social life of their own.  The families and tribes that
+migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and
+tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time.  The Celtic tribes
+retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar
+Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and
+in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth.  It subsists still in
+the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or
+Kabyles of Africa.
+
+Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, at
+least under, the authority of the mother country, whose political
+constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry with them.  They
+receive from the parent state a political organization, which, though
+subordinate, yet constitutes them embryonic states, with a unity,
+individuality, and centre of public life in themselves, and which, when
+they are detached and recognized as independent, render them complete
+states.  War and conquest effect great national changes, but do not,
+strictly speaking, create new states.  They simply extend and
+consolidate the power of the conquering state.
+
+Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but only
+when they have previously existed as such, and have retained the
+tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when the
+administration has erected them into real though dependent political
+communities.  A portion of the people of a state not so erected or
+organized, that has in no sense had a distinct political existence of
+its own, has never separated from the national body and formed a new
+and independent nation.  It cannot revolt; it may rise up against the
+government, and either revolutionize and take possession of the state,
+or be put down by the government as an insurrection.  The amalgamation
+of the conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies
+the institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation or
+political community.  The English of to-day are very different from
+both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time of Richard
+Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or political
+community.  England is still England.
+
+The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been cut up
+into several separate and independent nations, but because its several
+provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman arms, been
+independent nations or tribes, and more especially because the
+conquerors themselves were divided into several distinct nations or
+confederacies.  If the barbarians had been united in a single nation or
+state, the Roman empire most likely would have changed masters, indeed,
+but have retained its unity and its constitution, for the Germanic
+nations that finally seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to
+destroy its name or nationality, for they were themselves more than
+half Romanized before conquering Rome.  But the new nations into which
+the empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without
+political or governmental organization, continued from the constitution
+of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or less by what was
+retained from the empire.
+
+It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be altered,
+or that every people starts with a constitution fully developed, as
+would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre.  The constitution of the
+family is rather economical than political, and the tribe is far from
+being a fully developed state. Strictly speaking, the state, the modern
+equivalent for the city of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed
+till men began to build and live in cities, and became fixed to a
+national territory.  But in the first place, the eldest born of the
+human race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find
+traces of the family and tribal organization long after their municipal
+existence--in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, and in Rome down
+to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the second place, the
+pastoral nations, though they have not precisely the city or state
+organization, yet have a national organization, and obey a national
+authority.  Strictly speaking, no pastoral nation has a civil or
+political constitution, but they have what in our modern tongues can be
+expressed by no other term.  The feudal regime, which was in full vigor
+even in Europe from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century,
+had nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper;
+yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, though
+a very imperfect one?
+
+The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the early
+ages.  For a long time the national organizations bore unmistakable
+traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from
+the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.
+Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same
+organization.  Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and
+diffused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural
+generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations,
+it was the same.  At first the father was both priest and king, and when
+the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
+hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have
+seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had
+the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and
+integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient
+nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms
+to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark,
+followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
+establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the
+Graeco-Roman civilization.  The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less
+a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than
+the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in
+faith and worship.  In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary
+descent, but every thing is by election of grace.  The Christian
+dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior
+to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural
+generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of
+Christendom.  No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and,
+indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to
+have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
+were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He
+came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive
+him.
+
+The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the nation
+is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and
+efficient constitution of the state.  It is the source of the vitality
+of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines
+its destiny.  The constitution which a nation is said to give itself,
+is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the
+state for the government instituted under it.  Thomas Paine would admit
+nothing to be the constitution but a written document which he could
+fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.  The Abbe
+Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was
+ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no other defect than
+that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.
+Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly
+as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with
+the constitution itself. No constitution can be written on paper or
+engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up,
+and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is
+extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best,
+legislative instead of constitutive.  The famous Magna Charta drawn up
+by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons
+at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date
+of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but
+a set of restrictions on power. The constitution is the intrinsic or
+inherent and actual constitution of the people or political community
+itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it
+from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one
+another.
+
+The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and
+established in accordance with any preconceived theory.  What is
+theoretic in a constitution is unreal.  The constitutions conceived by
+philosophers in their closets are constitutions only of Utopia or
+Dreamland.  This world is not governed by abstractions, for
+abstractions are nullities.  Only the concrete is real, and only the
+real or actual has vitality or force.  The French people adopted
+constitution after constitution of the most approved pattern, and amid
+bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and
+thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as
+enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had
+no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no
+element of its life. The English are great constitution-mongers--for
+other nations. They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own
+will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into
+trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it
+only an embarrassment or encumbrance.  The doctor might as well attempt
+to give an individual a new constitution, or the constitution of
+another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other constitution
+than that which it has, and with which it is born.
+
+The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves
+this thesis.  The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the
+nations founded on the site of the empire, a double constitution--the
+barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the
+Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East.  The key to all
+modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two constitutions
+and the interests respectively associated with them, which created two
+societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same
+national denomination.  The barbaric was the constitution of the
+conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and
+fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of
+barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to
+a very great extent into harmony with itself.  The Pope became a feudal
+sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.
+Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman
+constitution got the upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far
+as it could not be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.  The
+original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its
+constitution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any
+of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
+
+The same process is going on in the East, though it has not advanced so
+far, having begun there several centuries later, and the Graeco-Roman
+constitution was far feebler there than in the West at the epoch of the
+conquest.  The Germanic tribes that conquered the West had long had
+close relations with the empire, had served as its allies, and even in
+its armies, and were partially Romanized.  Most of their chiefs had
+received a Roman culture; and their early conversion to the Christian
+faith facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
+constitution.  In the East it was different.  The conquerors had no
+touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet, they were
+animated with an intense hatred, which, after the conquest, was changed
+into a superb contempt, of Christians and Romans.  They had their civil
+constitution in the Koran; and the Koran, in its principles, doctrines,
+and spirit, is exclusive and profoundly intolerant.  The Graeco-Roman
+constitution was always much weaker in the East, and had far greater
+obstacles to overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the
+shock of the conquest.  Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of
+the East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily receiving
+rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying outside of the
+boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able to sustain itself.
+The Greek or Christian populations of the empire are no longer in
+danger of being exterminated or absorbed by the Mohammedan state or
+population.  They are the only living and progressive people of the
+Ottoman Empire, and their complete success in absorbing or expelling
+the Turk is only a question of time.  They will, in all present
+probability, reestablish a Christian and Roman East in much less time
+from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the
+fall of Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric
+constitution founded by its Germanic invaders.
+
+Indeed, the Roman constitution, 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
+Institutes, 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, passions, 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 constitution, and
+aided the revival of Roman imperialism.  In no country do the
+revolutionists succeed in establishing 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
+institutions 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
+vassals 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, embarrasses 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 vassals 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 nobles
+themselves, than was even dreamed of while the feudal regime was in
+full vigor.  Nobles were themselves free, it is conceded, but not the
+people.  The king was too weak, too restricted in his action by the
+feudal constitution 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 nobility, save when that
+nobility threatened the temporalities of the church. The only reliance,
+under God, 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 circumstances, 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 God, 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 nobility 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 nobility--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 nobles 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 class 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 constitution.  This was the great error of Mr. Calhoun.  No man
+saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun the utter worthlessness of simple
+paper constitutions, on which Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit
+reliance, or that the real constitution is in the state itself, in the
+manner in which the people themselves are organized; but his reliance
+was in constituting, 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 passions 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
+establishing their theory, for, after all, their constitution 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.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the
+constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution.
+But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the
+several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one having
+the ascendency and suppressing the rest.  In the original constitution
+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 constitution.  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
+constitution.  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 asserted 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
+constitution 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
+constitution.  Retain the dictatorship 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 constitution from an early day, and already developed
+in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, 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 constitution.  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
+anticipated and surpassed 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 associated
+with the patrician party, which distrusted him--in vain Cicero
+declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and
+Cassius seize the assassin'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 assassination
+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 assimilated.  These
+nations she at first governed as tributary states, with their own
+constitutions 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, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric
+and despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only
+partially assimilated.  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 citizenship 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 constitution; 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 assimilated 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 statesmanship 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 he 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 God 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
+substituting 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 constitution of the government, as distinguished from the
+state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign.  The constitution
+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 constitution of government is the constitution 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 analogous 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 God
+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 principal 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
+God, are above him.  He holds his power, as the Emperor of the French
+professes to hold his, by the grace of God and the national will--the
+only title 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 constitution, 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 institute 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 assembly and
+the constitutional government, there was no legitimate government
+standing, and the power assumed 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 principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him
+discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said.  The imperial
+constitution 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 title, and that he holds his power by a title 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 constitutional 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 constitution 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" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary,
+the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia
+has emancipated her serfs.
+
+The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute 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
+class or hereditary nobles, 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 God 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 God 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
+constitution, founded on public right, and held under God 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 constitution 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 bloody 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 constitutions 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 constitution
+is in that of the nation.  The constitution of the government must grow
+out of the constitution 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
+constitutions 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 constitution from it, and harmonize it
+with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions,
+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, assassinations, massacres, 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
+constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, 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 constitution. 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 constitution 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
+God, 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 multitude.  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 constitution 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 God and the will of the nation," which means simply that
+he holds his authority from God, through the French people, and is
+bound to exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
+The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution 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
+title, 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 locum 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 title, 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 God 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 pronounced 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 constitution
+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 God, 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 principal.  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 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 constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution 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.
+
+But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any State,
+saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so, withdraw from the
+Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation to the Federal
+authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere to the Federal
+government.  Secession is, then, an incontestable right; not a right
+held under the constitution or derived from the convention but a right
+held prior to it, independently of it, inherent in the State
+sovereignty, and inseparable from it.  The State is bound by the
+constitution of the Union only while she is in it, and is one of the
+States united.  In ratifying the constitution she did not part with her
+sovereignty, or with any portion of it, any more than France has parted
+with her sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation,
+by vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate heirs
+male.  The principal parts not with his power to his agent, for the
+agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power of the
+principal.  Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French people, and
+governs only by the authority of the French nation, which is as
+competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on him, when it judges
+proper, as it was to confer them.  The Union exists and governs, if the
+States are sovereign, only by the will of the State, and she is as
+competent to revoke the powers she has delegated as she was to delegate
+them.  The Union, as far as she is concerned, is her creation, and what
+she is competent to make she is competent to unmake.
+
+In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very
+unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests of the
+other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she in doing so
+only exercises her unquestionable right.  The other members may regret
+her action, both for her sake and their own, but they cannot accuse her
+or her citizens of disloyalty in seceding, nor of rebellion, if in
+obedience to her authority they defend their independence by force of
+arms against the Union. Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever
+owed allegiance to the Union.  Allegiance is due from the citizen to
+the sovereign state, but never from a sovereign state or from its
+citizens to any other sovereign state.  While the State is in the Union
+the citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his
+State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it and
+all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her territory.
+The repeal by the State of the act of ratification releases the citizen
+from the obligation even of obedience, and renders it criminal for him
+to yield it without her permission.
+
+It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the States
+as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal to the
+language or provisions of the Federal constitution.  That constitutes
+the government, not the state or the sovereign.  It is ordained by the
+sovereign, and if the States were severally independent and sovereign
+states, that sovereign is the States severally, not the States united.
+The constitution is law for the citizens of a State only so long as the
+State remains one of the United States.  No matter, then, how clear and
+express the language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution,
+they bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.
+The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only while
+the compact is continued by the States, each for itself. The
+sovereignty of the United States as a single or political people must
+be established before any thing in the constitution can be adduced as
+denying the right of secession.
+
+That this doctrine would deprive the General government of all right to
+enforce the laws of the Union on a State that secedes, or the citizens
+thereof, is no doubt true; that it would weaken the central power and
+make the Union a simple voluntary association of states, no better than
+a rope of sand, is no less true; but what then?  It is simply saying
+that a confederation is inferior to a nation, and that a federal
+government lacks many of the advantages of a national government.
+Confederacies are always weak in the centre, always lack unity, and are
+liable to be dissolved by the influence of local passions, prejudices,
+and interests.  But if the United States are a confederation of states
+or nations, not a single nation or sovereign state, then there is no
+remedy.
+
+If the Anglo-American colonies, when their independence of Great
+Britain was achieved and acknowledged, were severally sovereign states,
+it has never since been in their power to unite and form a single
+sovereign state, or to form themselves into one indivisible sovereign
+nation.  They could unite only by mutual agreement, which gives only a
+confederation, in which each retains its own sovereignty, as two
+individuals, however closely united, retain each his own individuality.
+No sovereignty is of conventional origin, and none can emerge from the
+convention that did not enter it.  Either the states are one sovereign
+people or they are not.  If they are not, it is undoubtedly a great
+disadvantage; but a disadvantage that must be accepted, and submitted
+to without a murmur.
+
+Whether the United States are one sovereign people or only a
+confederation is a question of very grave importance.  If they are only
+a confederation of states--and if they ever were severally sovereign
+states, only a confederation they certainly are--state secession is an
+inalienable right, and the government has had no right to make war on
+the secessionists as rebels, or to treat them, when their military
+power is broken, as traitors, or disloyal persons.  The honor of the
+government, and of the people who have sustained it, is then deeply
+compromised.
+
+What then is the fact?  Are the United States politically one people,
+nation, state, or republic, or are they simply independent sovereign
+states united in close and intimate alliance, league, or federation, by
+a mutual pact or agreement? Were the people of the United States who
+ordained and established the written constitution one people, or were
+they not?  If they were not before ordaining and establishing the
+government, they are not now; for the adoption of the constitution did
+not and could not make them one.  Whether they are one or many is then
+simply a question of fact, to be decided by the facts in the case, not
+by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of jurists, or even
+by constitutional law itself.  The old Articles of Confederation and
+the later Constitution can serve here only as historical documents.
+Constitutions and laws presuppose the existence of a national sovereign
+from which they emanate, and that ordains them, for they are the formal
+expression of a sovereign will.  The nation must exist as an historical
+fact, prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign power, prior to
+the existence of written Constitutions and laws of any kind, and its
+existence must be established before they can be recognized as having
+any legal force or vitality.
+
+The existence of any nation, as an independent sovereign nation, is a
+purely historical fact, for its right to exist as such is in the simple
+fact that it does so exist.  A nation de facto is a nation de jure, and
+when we have ascertained the fact, we have ascertained the right.
+There is no right in the case separate from the fact--only the fact
+must be really a fact.  A people hitherto a part of another people, or
+subject to another sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they
+have declared themselves independent, and have organized a government,
+and are engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for
+independence.  The struggle must be practically over; the former
+sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce them to
+submission, or to bring them back under his authority, and if he
+continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the postulant must have
+proved his ability to maintain civil government, and to fulfil within
+and without the obligations which attach to every civilized nation,
+before it can be recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because
+before it is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.  The prior
+sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right, has
+lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for humanity
+demands not martyrs to lost causes.
+
+This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly
+philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
+nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, not a
+right antecedent to the fact.  The repugnance felt to this assertion
+arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in a strictly
+political sense, and sometimes in its original sense of tribe, and
+understanding by it not simply the body politic, but a certain relation
+of origin, family, kindred, blood, or race.  But God has made of one
+blood, or race, all the nations of men; and, besides, no political
+rights are founded by the law of nature on relations of blood, kindred,
+or family.  Under the patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some
+extent, under feudalism, these relations form the basis of government,
+but they are economical relations rather than civil or political, and,
+under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the
+household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or body
+politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse.  They are protected by
+the state, but do not found or constitute it.  The vicissitudes of
+time, the revolutions of states and empires, migration, conquest, and
+intermixture of families and races, have rendered it impracticable,
+even if it were desirable, to distribute people into nations according
+to their relations of blood or descent.
+
+There is no civilized nation now existing that has been, developed from
+a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most mixed are the most
+civilized.  The nearer a nation approaches to a primitive people of
+pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it is from civilization.  All
+civilized nations are political nations, and are founded in the fact,
+not on rights antecedent to the fact.  A hundred or more lost
+nationalities went to form the Roman empire, and who can tell us how
+many layers of crushed nationalities, superposed one upon another,
+serve for the foundation of the present French, English, Russian,
+Austrian, or Spanish nationalities?  What other title to independence
+and sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any European
+nation?  Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one can say how
+many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to be as it has, or
+can have.  Whether those nationalities have been justly extinguished or
+not, is no question for the statesman; it is the secret of Providence.
+Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of
+right.  The good is sometimes overborne, and the bad sometimes
+triumphs; but it is consoling, and even just, to believe that the good
+oftener triumphs than the bad.
+
+In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law. The
+nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the nation.
+Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize and apply both
+the law of nature and the law of nations, but only on the ground that
+they are included, or are presumed to be included, in the national law,
+or jurisprudence.  Doubtless, too, the nation holds from God, under the
+law of nature, but only by virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and
+when it is a nation dependent on no other, it holds from God all the
+rights and powers of any independent sovereign nation.  There is no
+right behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation
+that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights. In the
+case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part of another
+people, or subject to another people@ the right of the prior sovereign
+must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction of that right is
+necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise would be only an
+initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli. But that right ceases when
+its claimant, willingly or unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons
+it; and he does so when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows
+no ability or intention of soon renewing it with any reasonable
+prospect of success.
+
+The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to sovereignty,
+is founded in error.  Empty titles to states and kingdoms are of no
+validity.  The sovereignty is, under God, in the nation and the title
+and the possession are inseparable.  The title of the Palaeologi to the
+Roman Empire of the East, of the king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia,
+or the king of Spain--for they are all claimants--to the kingdom of
+Jerusalem founded by Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the
+thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the
+throne of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they
+are engrossed.  The contrary opinion, so generally entertained, belongs
+to barbarism, not to civilization.  It is in modern society a relic of
+feudalism, which places the state in the government, and makes the
+government a private estate--a private, and not a public right--a right
+to govern the public, not a right to govern held from or by the public.
+
+The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by violence,
+by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right, and another may
+usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact without acquiring any right
+or legal title to it.  The man who holds the legal title has the right
+to oust him and re-enter upon his estate whenever able to do so.  Here,
+in the economical order, the fact and the right are distinguishable,
+and the actual occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.
+Holding sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very
+properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments de
+jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a prince
+does not invalidate his title.  But sovereignty, it has been shown, is
+not in the government, but in the state, and the state is inseparable
+from the public domain.  The people organized and held by the domain or
+national territory, are under God the sovereign nation, and remain so
+as long as the nation subsists without subjection to another.  The
+government, as distinguished from the state or nation, has only a
+delegated authority, governs only by a commission from the nation.  The
+revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes its
+rights.  The nation is always sovereign, and every organic people fixed
+to the soil, and actually independent of every other, is a nation.
+There can then be no independent nation de facto that is not an
+independent nation de jure, nor de jure that is not de facto.  The
+moment a people cease to be an independent nation in fact, they cease
+to be sovereign, and the moment they become in fact an independent
+nation, they are so of right. Hence in the political order the fact and
+the right are born and expire together; and when it is proved that a
+people, are in fact an independent nation, there is no question to be
+asked as to their right to be such nation.
+
+In the case of the United States there is only the question of fact.
+If they are in fact one people they are so in right, whatever the
+opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the decisions of courts;
+for the courts hold from the national authority, and the theories and
+opinions of statesmen may be erroneous.  Certain it is that the States
+in the American Union have never existed and acted as severally
+sovereign states. Prior to independence, they were colonies under the
+sovereignty of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed
+and acted only as states united.  The colonists, before separation and
+independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the colonies
+had they held by charter or concession from the British crown.  The
+colonists never pretended to be other than British subjects, and the
+alleged ground of their complaint against the mother country was not
+that she had violated their natural rights as men, but their rights as
+British subjects--rights, as contended by the colonists, secured by the
+English constitution to all Englishmen or British subjects.  The denial
+to them of these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and
+they defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George
+III., on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and
+the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his allegiance.
+
+In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves independent
+states indeed, but not severally independent.  The declaration was not
+made by the states severally, but by the states jointly, as the United
+States.  They unitedly declared their independence; they carried on the
+war for independence, won it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers
+and by the mother country as the United States, not as severally
+independent sovereign states.  Severally they have never exercised the
+full powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag--symbol of
+sovereignty--recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign
+treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or
+interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or confederacies
+with foreign states or with one another, and in several respects have
+been more restricted in their powers in the Union than they were as
+British colonies.
+
+Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete states by
+declaring and winning their independence; and if the English colonies,
+now the United States, had separately declared and won their
+independence, they would unquestionably have become separately
+independent states, each invested by the law of nature with all the
+rights and powers of a sovereign nation.  But they did not do this.
+They declared and won their independence jointly, and have since
+existed and exercised sovereignty only as states united, or the United
+States, that is, states sovereign in their union, but not in their
+separation.  This is of itself decisive of the whole question.
+
+But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers of
+sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as one people,
+but they were, so far as a people at all, one people even before
+independence.  The colonies were all erected and endowed with their
+rights and powers by one and the same national authority, and the
+colonists were subjects of one and the same national sovereign.  Mr.
+Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our prominent statesmen maintains
+the unity of the colonial people, adds indeed to their subjection to
+the same sovereign authority, community of origin, of language,
+manners, customs, and law.  All these, except the last, or common law,
+may exist without national unity in the modern political sense of the
+term nation.  The English common law was recognized by the colonial
+courts, and in force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial
+legislation, but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in
+English jurisprudence.  The colonists were under the Common Law,
+because they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
+This proves that they were really one people with the English people,
+though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and not a separate
+people having nothing politically in common with them but in the
+accident of having the same royal person for their king.  The union
+with the mother country was national, not personal, as was the union
+existing between England and Hanover, or that still existing between
+the empire of Austria, formerly Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary;
+and hence the British parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right
+to tax the colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in
+all cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
+principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation laws.
+The people of the several colonies being really one people before
+independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, must be so
+still, unless they have since, by some valid act, divided themselves or
+been divided into separate and independent states.
+
+The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The king
+is dead!  Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never in
+abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed in
+another.  The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with
+independence, and the American took its place.  Did the sovereignty,
+which before independence was in Great Britain, pass from Great Britain
+to the States severally, or to the States united?  It might have passed
+to them severally, but did it? There is no question of law or
+antecedent right in the case, but a simple question of fact, and the
+fact is determined by determining who it was that assumed it, exercised
+it, and has continued to exercise it.  As to this there is no doubt.
+The sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the United
+States, the States united, and never by the States separately or
+severally.  Then as a fact the sovereignty that before independence was
+in Great Britain, passed, on independence to the States united, and
+reappears in all its vigor in the United States, the only successor to
+Great Britain known to or recognized by the civilized world.
+
+As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct colonies,
+still one people, the people of the United States, though distributed
+into distinct and mutually independent States, are yet one sovereign
+people, therefore a sovereign state or nation, and not a simple league
+or confederacy of nations.
+
+There is no doubt that all the powers exercised by the General
+Government, though embracing all foreign relations and all general
+interests and relations of all the States, might have been exercised by
+it under the authority of a mutual compact of the several States, and
+practically the difference between the compact theory and the national
+view would be very little, unless in cases like that of secession.  On
+the supposition that the American people are one political people, the
+government would have the right to treat secession, in the sense in
+which the seceders understand it, as rebellion, and to suppress it by
+employing all the physical force at its command; but on the compact
+theory it would have no such right.  But the question now under
+discussion turns simply on what has been and is the historical fact.
+Before the States could enter into the compact and delegate sovereign
+powers to the Union, they must have severally possessed them.  It is
+historically certain that they did not possess them before
+independence; they did not obtain them by independence, for they did
+not severally succeed to the British sovereignty, to which they
+succeeded only as States united.  When, then, and by what means did
+they or could they become severally sovereign States?  The United
+States having succeeded to the British sovereignty in the
+Anglo-American colonies, they came into possession of full national
+sovereignty, and have alone held and exercised it ever since
+independence became a fact.  The States severally succeeding only to
+the colonies, never held, and have never been competent to delegate
+sovereign powers.
+
+The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on the
+assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the several
+States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one nation, and,
+though divided into separate States, the people were regarded as one
+people.  The Legislature of New York, as early as 1782, calls for an
+essential change In the Articles of Confederation, as proved to be
+inadequate to secure the peace, security, and prosperity of "the
+nation."  All the proceedings that preceded and led to the call of the
+convention of 1781 were based on the assumption that the people of the
+United States were one people.  The States were called united, not
+confederated States, even in the very Articles of Confederation
+themselves, and officially the United States were called "the Union."
+That the united colonies by independence became united States, and
+formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the belief,
+the instinct of the great mass of the people.  They acted as they
+existed through State as they had previously acted through colonial
+organization, for in throwing off the British authority there was no
+other organization through which they could act.  The States, or people
+of the States, severally sent their delegates to the Congress of the
+United States, and these delegates adopted the rule of voting in
+Congress by States, a rule that might be revived without detriment to
+national unity. Nothing was more natural, then, than that Congress,
+composed of delegates elected or appointed by States, should draw up
+articles of confederation rather than articles of union, in order, if
+for no other reason, to conciliate the smaller States, and to prevent
+their jealousy of the larger States such as Virginia, Massachusetts,
+and Pennsylvania.
+
+Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted
+during the transition from colonial dependence to national
+independence.  Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not a fact
+till 1782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it was signed at
+Paris.  Till then the United States were not an independent nation;
+they were only a people struggling to become an independent nation.
+Prior to that preliminary treaty, neither the Union nor the States
+severally were sovereign.  The articles were agreed on in Congress in
+1777, but they were not ratified by all the States till May, 1781, and
+in 1782 the movement was commenced in the Legislature of New York for
+their amendment. Till the organization under the constitution ordained
+by the people of the United States in 1787, and which went into
+operation in 1789, the United States had in reality only a provisional
+government, and it was not till then that the national government was
+definitively organized, and the line of demarcation between the General
+Government and the particular State governments was fixed.
+
+The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected by the
+American people, precisely because it was not in harmony with the
+unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation; and it was not in
+harmony with that constitution precisely because it recognized the
+States as severally sovereign, and substituted confederation for union.
+The failure of confederation and the success of union are ample proofs
+of the unity of the American nation.  The instinct of unity rejected
+State sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861.  The first and the last
+attempt to establish State sovereignty have failed, and the failure
+vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States united, not
+in the States severally.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+
+The constitution of the United States is twofold, written and
+unwritten, the constitution of the people and the constitution of the
+government.
+
+The written constitution is simply a law ordained by the nation or
+people instituting and organizing the government; the unwritten
+constitution is the real or actual constitution of the people as a
+state or sovereign community, and constituting them such or such a
+state.  It is Providential, not made by the nation, but born with it.
+The written constitution is made and ordained by the sovereign power,
+and presupposes that power as already existing and constituted.
+
+The unwritten or Providential constitution of the United States is
+peculiar, and difficult to understand, because incapable of being fully
+explained by analogies borrowed from any other state historically
+known, or described by political philosophers.  It belongs to the
+Graeco-Roman family, and is republican as distinguished from despotic
+constitutions, but it comes under the head of neither monarchical nor
+aristocratic, neither democratic nor mixed constitutions, and creates a
+state which is neither a centralized state nor a confederacy.  The
+difficulty of understanding it is augmented by the peculiar use under
+it of the word state, which does not in the American system mean a
+sovereign community or political society complete in itself, like
+France, Spain, or Prussia, nor yet a political society subordinate to
+another political society and dependent on it. The American States are
+all sovereign States united, but, disunited, are no States at all.  The
+rights and powers of the States are not derived from the United States,
+nor the rights and powers of the United States derived from the States.
+
+The simple fact is, that the political or sovereign people of the
+United States exists as united States, and only as united States. The
+Union and the States are coeval, born together, and can exist only
+together.  Separation is dissolution--the death of both. The United
+States are a state, a single sovereign state; but this single sovereign
+state consists in the union and solidarity of States instead of
+individuals.  The Union is in each of the States, and each of the
+States is in the Union.
+
+It is necessary to distinguish in the outset between the United States
+and the government of the United States, or the so-called Federal
+government, which the convention refused, contrary to its first
+intention to call the national government.  That government is not a
+supreme national government, representing all the powers of the United
+States, but a limited government, restricted by its constitution to
+certain specific relations and interests.  The United States are
+anterior to that government, and the first question to be settled
+relates to their internal and inherent Providential constitution as one
+political people or sovereign state.  The written constitution, in its
+preamble, professes to be ordained by "We, the people of the United
+States."  Who are this people?  How are they constituted, or what the
+mode and conditions of their political existence?  Are they the people
+of the States severally?  No; for they call themselves the people of
+the United States.  Are they a national people, really existing outside
+and independently of their organization into distinct and mutually
+independent States?  No; for they define themselves to be the people of
+the United States.  If they had considered themselves existing as
+States only, they would have said "We, the States," and if
+independently of State organization, they would have said "We, the
+people," do ordain, &c.
+
+The key to the mystery is precisely in this appellation United States,
+which is not the name of the country, for its distinctive name is
+America, but a name expressive of its political organization.  In it
+there are no sovereign people without States, and no States without
+union, or that are not united States.  The term united is not part of a
+proper name, but is simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its
+full and proper sense.  Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in
+the States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally,
+precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in the
+people collectively or as society, not in the people individually.  The
+life is in the body, not in the members, though the body could not
+exist if it had no members; so the sovereignty is in the Union, not in
+the States severally; but there could be no sovereign union without the
+States, for there is no union where there is nothing united.
+
+This is not a theory of the constitution, but the constitutional fact
+itself.  It is the simple historical fact that precedes the law and
+constitutes the law-making power.  The people of the United States are
+one people, as has already been proved: they were one people, as far as
+a people at all, prior to independence, because under the same Common
+Law and subject to the same sovereign, and have been so since, for as
+united States they gained their independence and took their place among
+sovereign nations, and as united States they have possessed and still
+possess the government.  As their existence before independence in
+distinct colonies did not prevent their unity, so their existence since
+in distinct States does not hinder them from being one people.  The
+States severally simply continue the colonial organizations, and united
+they hold the sovereignty that was originally in the mother country.
+But if one people, they are one people existing in distinct State
+organizations, as before independence they were one people existing in
+distinct colonial organizations.  This is the original, the unwritten,
+and Providential constitution of the people of the United States.
+
+This constitution is not conventional, for it existed before the people
+met or could meet in convention.  They have not, as an independent
+sovereign people, either established their union, or distributed
+themselves into distinct and mutually independent States.  The union
+and the distribution, the unity and the distinction, are both original
+in their constitution, and they were born United States, as much and as
+truly so as the son of a citizen is born a citizen, or as every one
+born at all is born a member of society, the family, the tribe, or the
+nation.  The Union and the States were born together, are inseparable
+in their constitution, have lived and grown up together; no serious
+attempt till the late secession movement has been made to separate
+them; and the secession movement, to all persons who knew not the real
+constitution of the United States, appeared sure to succeed, and in
+fact would have succeeded if, as the secessionists pretended, the Union
+had been only a confederacy, and the States had been held together only
+by a conventional compact, and not by a real and living bond of unity.
+The popular instinct of national unity, which seemed so weak, proved to
+be strong enough to defeat the secession forces, to trample out the
+confederacy, and maintain the unity of the nation and the integrity of
+its domain.
+
+The people can act only as they exist, as they are, not as they are
+not.  Existing originally only as distributed in distinct and mutually
+independent colonies, they could at first act only through their
+colonial organizations, and afterward only through their State
+organizations.  The colonial people met in convention, in the person of
+representatives chosen by colonies, and after independence in the
+person of representatives chosen by States.  Not existing outside of
+the colonial or State organizations, they could not act outside or
+independently of them.  They chose their representatives or delegates
+by colonies or States, and called at first their convention a Congress;
+but by an instinct surer than their deliberate wisdom, they called it
+not the Congress of the confederate, but of the United States,
+asserting constitutional unity as well as constitutional multiplicity.
+It is true, in their first attempt to organize a general government,
+they called the constitution they devised Articles of Confederation,
+but only because they had not attained to full consciousness of
+themselves; and that they really meant union, not confederation, is
+evident from their adopting, as the official style of the nation or new
+power, united, not confederate States.
+
+That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was represented
+in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the fact that the several
+States, when they wished to adopt State constitutions in place of
+colonial charters, felt not at liberty to do so without asking and
+obtaining the permission of Congress, as the elder Adams informs us in
+his Diary, kept at the time; that is, they asked and obtained the
+equivalent of what has since, in the case of organizing new States,
+been called an "enabling act."  This proves that the States did not
+regard themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as
+completely sovereign only in it.  And this again proves that the
+Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living
+constitution of the people.  Even then it was felt that the
+organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be
+regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no Territory
+can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a State, and adopt
+a State constitution, without an enabling act by Congress, or its
+equivalent.
+
+New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into the
+Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of Kansas, if
+nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular, illicit,
+invalid, and dangerous.  Congress, of course, can condone the wrong and
+validate the act, but it were better that the act should be validly
+done, and that there should be no wrong to condone.  Territories have
+organized as States, adopted State constitutions, and instituted State
+governments under what has been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such
+sovereignty has no existence, because sovereignty is attached to the
+domain; and the domain is in the United States.  It is the offspring of
+that false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people
+personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which makes
+sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to the soil, and
+is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of power.  In all
+civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from the state, and the
+state is inseparable from the domain.  The will of the people, unless
+they are a state, is no law, has no force, binds nobody, and justifies
+no act.
+
+The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains
+admirably the mutual relation of the Union and the several States.  The
+people of a Territory belonging to the United States or included in the
+public domain not yet erected into a State and admitted into the Union,
+are subjects of the United States, without any political rights
+whatever, and, though a part of the population, are no part of the
+sovereign people of the United States.  They become a part of that
+people, with political rights and franchises, only when they are
+erected into a State, and admitted into the Union as one of the United
+States.  They may meet in convention, draw up and adopt a constitution
+declaring or assuming them to be a State, elect State officers,
+senators, and representatives in the State legislature, and
+representatives and senators in Congress, but they are not yet a State,
+and are, as before, under the Territorial government established by the
+General Government.  It does not exist as a State till recognized by
+Congress and admitted into the Union.  The existence of the State, and
+the rights and powers of the people within the State, depend on their
+being a State in the Union, or a State united. Hence a State erected on
+the national domain, but itself outside of the Union, is not an
+independent foreign State, but simply no State at all, in any sense of
+the term.  As there is no union outside of the States, so is there no
+State outside of the Union; and to be a citizen either of a State or of
+the United States, it is necessary to be a citizen of a State, and of a
+State in the Union.  The inhabitants of Territories not yet erected
+into States are subjects, not citizens--that is, not citizens with
+political rights.  The sovereign people are not the people outside of
+State organization, nor the people of the States severally, but the
+distinct people of the several States united, and therefore most
+appropriately called the people of the United States.
+
+This is the peculiarity of the American constitution and is
+substantially the very peculiarity noted and dwelt upon by Mr. Madison
+in his masterly letter to Edward Everett, published in the "North
+American Review," October, 1830.
+
+"I In order to understand the true character of the constitution of the
+United States," says Mr. Madison, "the error, not uncommon, must be
+avoided of viewing it through the medium either of a consolidated
+government or of a confederated government, whilst it is neither the
+one nor the other, but a mixture of both.  And having, in no model, the
+similitudes and analogies applicable to other systems of government, it
+must, more than any other, be its own interpreter, according to its
+text and the facts in the case.
+
+"From these it will be seen that the characteristic peculiarities of
+the constitution are: 1. The mode of its formation. 2. The division of
+the supreme powers of government between the States in their united
+capacity and the States in their individual capacities.
+
+"1. It was formed not by the governments of the component States, as
+the Federal Government, for which it was substituted, was formed; nor
+was it formed by a majority of the people of the United States as a
+single community, in the manner of a consolidated government.  It was
+formed by the States; that is, by the people in each of the States,
+acting in their highest sovereign capacity, and formed consequently by
+the same authority which formed the State constitution.
+
+"Being thus derived from the same source as the constitutions of the
+States, it has within each State the same authority as the constitution
+of the State, and is as much a constitution in the strict sense of the
+term, within its prescribed sphere, as the constitutions of the States
+are within their respective spheres; but with this obvious and
+essential difference, that, being a compact among the States in their
+highest capacity, and constituting the people thereof one people for
+certain purposes, it cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the
+States individually, as the constitution of a State may be at its
+individual will.
+
+"2. And that it divides the supreme powers of government between the
+government of the United States and the governments of the individual
+States, is stamped on the face of the instrument; the powers of war and
+of taxation, of commerce and treaties, and other enumerated powers
+vested in the government of the United States, are of high and
+sovereign a character as any of the powers reserved to the State
+governments."
+
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Webster, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and nearly
+all the old Republicans, and even the old Federalists, on the question
+as to what is the actual constitution of the United States, took
+substantially the same view; but they all, as well as Mr. Madison
+himself, speak of the written constitution, which on their theory has
+and can have only a conventional value. Mr. Madison evidently
+recognizes no constitution of the people prior to the written
+constitution, from which the written constitution, or the constitution
+of the government, derives all its force and vitality.  The
+organization of the American people, which he knew well--no man
+better,--and which he so justly characterizes, he supposes to have been
+deliberately formed by the people themselves, through the
+convention--not given them by Providence as their original and inherent
+constitution.  But this was merely the effect of the general doctrine
+which he had adopted, in common with nearly all his contemporaries, of
+the origin of the state in compact, and may be eliminated from his view
+of what the constitution actually is, without affecting that view
+itself.
+
+Mr. Madison lays great stress on the fact that though the constitution
+of the Union was formed by the States, it was formed, not by the
+governments, but by the people of the several States; but this makes no
+essential difference, if the people are the people of the States, and
+sovereign in their severalty, and not in their union.  Had it been
+formed by the State governments with the acquiescence of the people, it
+would have rested on as high authority as if formed by the people of
+the State in convention assembled.  The only difference is, that if the
+State ratified it by the legislature, she could abrogate it by the
+legislature; if in convention, she could abrogate it only in
+convention.  Mr. Madison, following Mr. Jefferson, supposes the
+constitution makes the people of the several States one people for
+certain specific purposes, and leaves it to be supposed that in regard
+to all other matters, or in all other relations, they are sovereign;
+and hence he makes the government a mixture of a consolidated
+government and a confederated government, but neither the one nor the
+other exclusively.  Say the people of the United States were one people
+in all respects, and under a government which is neither a consolidated
+nor a confederated government, nor yet a mixture of the two, but a
+government in which the powers of government are divided between a
+general government and particular governments, each emanating from the
+same source, and you will have the simple fact, and precisely what Mr.
+Madison means, when is eliminated what is derived from his theory of
+the origin of government in compact.  It is this theory of the
+conventional origin of the constitution, and which excludes the
+Providential or real constitution of the people, that has misled him
+and so many other eminent statesmen and constitutional lawyers.
+
+The convention did not create the Union or unite the States, for it was
+assembled by the authority of the United States who were present in it.
+The United States or Union existed before the convention, as the
+convention itself affirms in declaring one of its purposes to be "to
+provide for a more perfect union."  If there had been no union, it
+could not and would not have spoken of providing for a more perfect
+union, but would have stated its purpose to be to create or form a
+union.  The convention did not form the Union, nor in fact provide for
+a more perfect union; it simply provided for the more perfect
+representation or expression in the General government of the Union
+already existing.  The convention, in common with the statesmen at the
+time, recognized no unwritten or Providential constitution of a people,
+and regarded the constitution of government as the constitution of the
+state, and consequently sometimes put the state for the government.  In
+interpreting its language, it is necessary to distinguish between its
+act and its theory.  Its act is law, its theory is not.  The convention
+met, among other things, to organize a government which should more
+perfectly represent the union of the States than did the government
+created by the Articles of Confederation.
+
+The convention, certainly, professes to grant or concede powers to the
+United States, and to prohibit powers to the States; but it simply puts
+the state for the government.  The powers of the United States are,
+indeed, grants or trusts, but from God through the law of nature, and
+are grants, trusts, or powers always conceded to every nation or
+sovereign people.  But none of them are grants from the convention.
+The powers the convention grants or concedes to the United States are
+powers granted or conceded by the United States to the General
+government it assembled to organize and establish, which, as it extends
+over the whole population and territory of the Union, and, as the
+interests it is charged with relate to all the States in common, or to
+the people as a whole, is with no great impropriety called the
+government of the United States, in contradistinction from the State
+governments, which have each only a local jurisdiction. But the more
+exact term is, for the one, the general government, and for the others,
+particular governments, as having charge only of the particular
+interests of the State; and the two together constitute the government
+of the United States, or the complete national government; for neither
+the General government nor the State government is complete in itself.
+The convention developed a general government, and prescribed its
+powers, and fixed their limits and extent, as well as the bounds of the
+powers of the State or particular governments; but they are the United
+States assembled in convention that do all this, and, therefore,
+strictly speaking, no powers are conceded to the United States that
+they did not previously possess.  The convention itself, in the
+constitution it ordained, defines very clearly from whom the General
+government holds its powers.  It holds them, as we I have seen, from
+"We, the people of the United States;" not we, the people of the States
+severally, but of the States united.  If it had meant the States
+severally, it would have said, We, the States; if it had recognized and
+meant the population of the country irrespective of its organization
+into particular States, it would have said simply, We, the people.  By
+saying "We, the people of the United States," it placed the sovereign
+power where it is, in the people of the States united.
+
+The convention ordains that the powers not conceded to the General
+government or prohibited to the particular governments, "are reserved
+to the States respectively, or to the people." But the powers reserved
+to the States severally are reserved by order of the United States, and
+the powers not so reserved are reserved to the people.  What people?
+The first thought is that they are the people of the States severally;
+for the constitution understands by people the state as distinguished
+from the state government; but if this had been its meaning in this
+place, it would have said, "are reserved to the States respectively, or
+to the people" thereof.  As it does not say so, and does not define the
+people it means, it is necessary to understand by them the people
+called in the preamble "the people of the United States." This is
+confirmed by the authority reserved to amend the constitution, which
+certainly is not reserved to the States severally, but necessarily to
+the power that ordains the constitution--"We, the people of the United
+States."  No power except that which ordains is or can be competent to
+amend a constitution of government.  The particular mode prescribed by
+the convention in which the constitution of the government may be
+amended has no bearing on the present argument, because it is
+prescribed by the States united, not severally, and the power to amend
+is evidently reserved, not indeed to the General government, but to the
+United States; for the ratification by any State or Territory not in
+the Union counts for nothing.  The States united, can, in the way
+prescribed, give more or less power to the General government, and
+reserve more or less power to the States individually.  The so-called
+reserved powers are really reserved to the people of the United States,
+who can make such disposition of them as seems to them good.
+
+The conclusion, then, that the General government holds from the States
+united, not from the States severally, is not invalidated by the fact
+that its constitution was completed only by the ratification of the
+States in their individual capacity.  The ratification was made
+necessary by the will of the people in convention assembled; but the
+convention was competent to complete it and put it in force without
+that ratification, had it so willed.  The general practice under the
+American system is for the convention to submit the constitution it has
+agreed on to the people, to be accepted or rejected by a plebiscitum;
+but such submission, though it may be wise and prudent, is not
+necessary. The convention is held to be the convention of the people,
+and to be clothed with the full authority of the sovereign people, and
+it is in this that it differs from the congress or the legislature.  It
+is not a congress of delegates or ministers who are obliged to act
+under instructions, to report their acts to their respective sovereigns
+for approval or rejection; it is itself sovereign, and may do whatever
+the people themselves can do.  There is no necessity for it to appeal
+to a plebiscitum to complete its acts.  That the convention, on the
+score of prudence, is wise in doing so, nobody questions; but the
+convention is always competent, if it chooses, to ordain the
+constitution without appeal.  The power competent to ordain the
+constitution is always competent to change, modify, or amend it. That
+amendments to the constitution of the government can be adopted only by
+being proposed by a convention of all the States in the Union, or by
+being proposed, by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and
+ratified by three-fourths of the States, is simply a conventional
+ordinance, which the convention can change at its pleasure.  It proves
+nothing as it stands but the will of the convention.
+
+The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in
+reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized on,
+since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the constitution
+emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty or compact between
+sovereign states, not an organic or fundamental law ordained by a
+single sovereign will; but this argument is inadmissible, because, as
+we have just seen, the convention is competent to ordain the
+constitution without submitting it for ratification, and because the
+convention uses sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.
+That the framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact,
+or agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held in
+regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as little
+doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly believed that they
+were constituting a real government. Mr. Madison's authority on this
+point is conclusive.  They unquestionably regarded the States, prior to
+the ratification of the constitution they proposed, as severally
+sovereign, as they were declared to be by the old Articles of
+Confederation, but they also believed that all individuals are
+sovereign prior to the formation of civil society.  Yet very few, if
+any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption
+of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
+conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal belief of
+the time among political philosophers,--the little account which they
+made of the historical facts that prove that the people of the United
+States were always one people, and that the States never existed as
+severally sovereign states.
+
+The political philosophers of the present day do not generally accept
+the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in these pages to
+be unsound and incompatible with the essential nature of government.
+The statesmen of the eighteenth century believed that the state is
+derived from the people individually, and held that sovereignty is
+created by the people in convention. The rights and powers of the
+state, they held, were made up of the rights held by individuals under
+the law of nature, and which the individuals surrendered to civil
+society on its formation. So they supposed that independent sovereign
+states might meet in convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion
+of their rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real
+government, and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of
+their sovereignty.  This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings
+of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by Mr. Webster,
+in his great speech in the Senate against the State sovereignty
+doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won for him the
+honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and expound it he, no
+doubt, did in the sense of its framers.  He boldly concedes that prior
+to the adoption of the constitution, the people of the United States
+were severally sovereign states, but by the constitution they were made
+one sovereign political community or people, and that the States,
+though retaining certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty
+in the Union.
+
+The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can
+originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could not
+stand; that, if the States went into the convention sovereign States,
+they came out of it sovereign States; and that the constitution they
+formed could from the nature of the case be only a treaty, compact, or
+agreement between sovereigns.  It could create an agency, but not a
+government.  The sovereign States could only delegate the exercise of
+their sovereign powers, not the sovereign powers themselves.  The
+States could agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty
+only in common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on
+the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their
+sovereignty.  Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as before
+the convention, vested in the States severally.  Hence State
+sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that cannot come
+properly before the Supreme Court of the United States for decision,
+each State is free to decide for itself, on which he based the right of
+nullification, or the State veto of acts of Congress whose
+constitutionality the State denies. Mr. Calhoun was himself no
+secessionist, but he laid down the premises from which secession is the
+logical deduction; and large numbers of young men, among the most open,
+the most generous, and the most patriotic in the country, adopted his
+premises, without being aware of this fact any more than he himself
+was, and who have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and
+in their sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebellion.
+
+The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and which
+attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State sovereignty, has
+thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject, and led them to
+re-examine the historical facts in the case from a different point of
+view, to see if Mr. Calhoun's theory is not as unfounded as he had
+proved Mr. Webster's theory to be.  The facts in the case really
+sustain neither, and both failed to see it: Mr. Calhoun because he had
+purposes to accomplish which demanded State sovereignty, and Mr.
+Webster because he examined them in the distorting medium of the theory
+or understanding of the statesmen of the eighteenth century.  The civil
+war has vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the
+State sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as
+far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to
+consolidation or centralism.
+
+But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding of the
+framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the expression will
+be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on their merits.  What binds
+is the thing done, not the theory on which it was done, or on which the
+actors explained their work either to themselves or to others.  Their
+political philosophy, or their political theory, may sometimes affect
+the phraseology they adopt, but forms no rule for interpreting their
+work.  Their work was inspired by and accords with the historical facts
+in the case, and is authorized and explained by them.  The American
+people were not made one people by the written constitution, as Mr.
+Jefferson, Mr. Madison, Mr. Webster, and so many others supposed, but
+were made so by the unwritten constitution, born with and inherent in
+them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--CONTINUED.
+
+
+Providence, or God operating through historical facts, constituted the
+American people one political or sovereign people, existing and acting
+in particular communities, organizations, called states.  This one
+people organized as states, meet in convention, frame and ordain the
+constitution of government, or institute a general government in place
+of the Continental Congress; and the same people, in their respective
+State organizations, meet in convention in each State, and frame and
+ordain a particular government for the State individually, which, in
+union with the General government, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government within the States, as the General government, in union with
+all the particular governments, constitutes the complete and supreme
+government of the nation or whole country.  This is clearly the view
+taken by Mr. Madison in his letter to Mr. Everett, when freed from his
+theory of the origin of government in compact.
+
+The constitution of the people as one people, and the distinction at
+the same time of this one people into particular States, precedes the
+convention, and is the unwritten constitution, the Providential
+constitution, of the American people or civil society, as distinguished
+from the constitution of the government, which, whether general or
+particular, is the ordination of civil society itself.  The unwritten
+constitution is the creation or constitution of the sovereign, and the
+sovereign providentially constituted constitutes in turn the
+government, which is not sovereign, but is clothed with just so much
+and just so little authority as the sovereign wills or ordains.
+
+The sovereign in the republican order is the organic people, or State,
+and is with us the United States, for with us the organic people exist
+only as organized into States united, which in their union form one
+compact and indissoluble whole.  That is to say, the organic American
+people do not exist as a consolidated people or state; they exist only
+as organized into distinct but inseparable States.  Each State is a
+living member of the one body, and derives its life from its union with
+the body, so that the American state is one body with many members; and
+the members, instead of being simply individuals, are States, or
+individuals organized into States.  The body consists of many members,
+and is one body, because the members are all members of it, and members
+one of another.  It does not exist as separate or distinct from the
+members, but exists in their solidarity or membership one of another.
+There is no sovereign people or existence of the United States
+distinguishable from the people or existence of the particular States
+united.  The people of the United States, the state called the United
+States, are the people of the particular States united.  The solidarity
+of the members constitutes the unity of the body.  The difference
+between this view and Mr. Madison's is, that while his view supposes
+the solidarity to be conventional, originating and existing in compact,
+or agreement, this supposes it to be real, living, and prior to the
+convention, as much the work of Providence as the existence in the
+human body of the living solidarity of its members.  One law, one life,
+circulates through all the members, constituting them a living
+organism, binding them in living union, all to each and each to all.
+
+Such is the sovereign people, and so far the original unwritten
+constitution.  The sovereign, in order to live and act, must have an
+organ through which he expresses his will.  This organ under the
+American system, is primarily the Convention.  The convention is the
+supreme political body, the concrete sovereign authority, and exercises
+practically the whole sovereign power of the people.  The convention
+persists always, although not in permanent session.  It can at any time
+be convened by the ordinary authority of the government, or, in its
+failure, by a plebiscitum.
+
+Next follows the Government created and constituted by the convention.
+The government is constituted in such manner, and has such and only
+such powers, as the convention ordains.  The government has, in the
+strict sense, no political authority under the American system, which
+separates the government from the convention.  All political questions
+proper, such as the elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution
+of the several departments of government, as the legislative, the
+judicial, and the executive, changing, altering, or amending the
+constitution of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a
+word, all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take
+the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the government,
+but to the convention; and where the will of the sovereign is not
+sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a new appeal to the
+convention is necessary, and may always be had. The constitution of
+Great Britain makes no distinction between the convention and the
+government.  Theoretically the constitution of Great Britain is feudal,
+and there is, properly speaking, no British state; there are only the
+estates, king, lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute
+the Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the
+plenitude of political sovereignty.  The British Parliament, composed
+of the three estates, possesses in itself all the powers of the
+convention in the American constitution, and is at once the convention
+and the government.  The imperial constitution of France recognizes no
+convention, but clothes the senate with certain political functions,
+which, in some respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his
+creature. The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God
+and the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the
+sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but the
+imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the government, not
+of the state, studies, while acknowledging the sovereignty of the
+people, to render it nugatory, by transferring it, under various subtle
+disguises, to the government, and practically to the emperor as chief
+of the government.  The senate, the council of state, the legislative
+body, and the emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have
+properly no political functions, and to give them such functions is to
+place the sovereign under his own subjects!  The real aim of the
+imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the guise of
+republicanism.  It leaves and is intended to leave the nation no way of
+practically asserting its sovereignty but by either a revolution or a
+plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is permissible only where there is no
+regular government.
+
+The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes no
+restriction on the power of the government.  The French imperial
+constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as well as with the
+free action of the nation.  The American constitution has all the
+advantages of both, and the disadvantages of neither.  The convention
+is not the government like the British Parliament, nor a creature of
+the state like the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a
+practical form.  By means of the convention the government is
+restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in practice
+either too great or too small, can be enlarged or contracted in a
+regular, orderly way, without resorting to a revolution or to a
+plebiscitum.  Whatever political grievances there may be, there is
+always present the sovereign convention competent to redress them.  The
+efficiency of power is thus secured without danger to liberty, and
+freedom without danger to power.  The recognition of the convention,
+the real political sovereign of the country and its separation from and
+independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most striking
+features of the American constitution.
+
+The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the constitution
+by the convention of the government.  This constitution, as Mr. Madison
+well observes, divides the powers conceded by the convention to
+government between the General Government and the particular State
+governments.  Strictly speaking, the government is one, and its powers
+only are divided and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.
+This division of the powers of government could never have been
+established by the convention if the American people had not been
+providentially constituted one people, existing and acting through
+particular State organizations.  Here the unwritten constitution, or
+the constitution written in the people themselves, rendered practicable
+and dictated the written constitution, or constitution ordained by the
+convention and engrossed on parchment.  It only expresses in the
+government the fact which pre-existed in the national organization and
+life.
+
+This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the United
+States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal
+disintegration and Roman centralism.  Misled by their prejudices and
+peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United States,
+pleading in their justification the theory of State sovereignty,
+attempted disintegration, secession, and national independence separate
+from that of the United States, but the central force of the
+constitution was too strong for them to succeed.  The unity of the
+nation was too strong to be effectually broken.  No doubt the reaction
+against secession and disintegration will strengthen the tendency to
+centralism, but centralism can succeed no better than disintegration
+has succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no
+suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent of the
+States.  The particular governments are stronger, if there be any
+difference, to protect the States against centralism than the General
+government is to protect the Union against disintegration; and after
+swinging for a time too far toward one extreme and then too far toward
+the other, the public mind will recover its equilibrium, and the
+government move on in its constitutional path.
+
+Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism by the
+tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or obstructive
+power.  Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and wished to effect the
+same end here, where it is secured by other, more effective, and less
+objectionable means, by a State veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual
+executive, and by substituting concurrent for numerical majorities.
+Imperial Rome gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated
+all power in the hands of the emperor, became completely centralized,
+and fell.  The British constitution seeks the same end by substituting
+estates for the state, and establishing a mixed government, in which
+monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy temper, check, or balance each
+other; but practically the commons estate has become supreme, and the
+nobility govern not in the house of lords, and can really influence
+public affairs only through the house of commons.  The principle of the
+British constitution is not the division of the powers of government,
+but the antagonism of estates, or rather of interests, trusting to the
+obstructive influence of that antagonism to preserve the government
+from pure centralism.  Hence the study of the British statesman is to
+manage diverse and antagonistic parties and interests so as to gain the
+ability to act, which he can do only by intrigue, cajolery, bribery in
+one form or another, and corruption of every sort.  The British
+government cannot be carried on by fair, honest, and honorable means,
+any more than could the Roman under the antagonism created by the
+tribunitial veto.  The French tried the English system of organized
+antagonism in 1789, as a cure for the centralism introduced by
+Richelieu and Louis XIV., and again under the Restoration and Louis
+Philippe, and called it the system of constitutional guarantees; but
+they could never manage it, and they have taken refuge in unmitigated
+centralism under Napoleon III., who, however well disposed, finds no
+means in the constitution of the French nation of tempering it.  The
+English system, called the constitutional, and sometimes the
+parliamentary system, will not work in France, and indeed works really
+well nowhere.
+
+The American system, sometimes called the Federal system, is not
+founded on antagonism of classes, estates, or interests, and is in no
+sense a system of checks and balances.  It needs and tolerates no
+obstructive forces.  It does not pit section against section, the
+States severally against the General government, nor the General
+government against the State governments, and nothing is more hurtful
+than the attempt to explain it and work it on the principles of British
+constitutionalism.  The convention created no antagonistic powers; it
+simply divided the powers of government, and gave neither to the
+General government nor to the State governments all the powers of
+government, nor in any instance did it give to the two governments
+jurisdiction in the same matters. Hence each has its own sphere, in
+which it can move on without colliding with that of the other.  Each is
+independent and complete in relation to its own work, incomplete and
+dependent on the other for the complete work of government.
+
+The division of power is not between a NATIONAL government and State
+governments, but between a GENERAL government and particular
+governments.  The General government, inasmuch as it extends to matters
+common to all the States, is usually called the Government of the
+United States, and sometimes the Federal government, to distinguish it
+from the particular or State governments, but without strict propriety;
+for the government of the United States, or the Federal government,
+means, in strictness, both the General government and the particular
+Governments, since neither is in itself the complete government of the
+country.  The General government has authority within each of the
+States, and each of the State governments has authority in the Union.
+The line between the Union and the States severally, is not precisely
+the line between the General government and the particular governments.
+As, for instance, the General government lays direct taxes on the
+people of the States, and collects internal revenue within them; and
+the citizens of a particular State, and none others, are electors of
+President and Vice-President of the United States, and representatives
+in the lower house of Congress, while senators in Congress are elected
+by the State legislatures themselves.
+
+The line that distinguishes the two governments is that which
+distinguishes the general relations and interests from the particular
+relations and interests of the people of the United States.  These
+general relations and interests are placed under the General
+government, which, because its jurisdiction is coextensive with the
+Union, is called the Government of the United States; the particular
+relations and interests are placed under particular governments, which,
+because their jurisdiction is only coextensive, with the States
+respectively, are called State governments.  The General government
+governs supremely all the people of the United States and Territories
+belonging to the Union, in all their general relations and interests,
+or relations and interests common alike to them all; the particular or
+State government governs supremely the people of a particular State, as
+Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey, in all that pertains to their
+particular or private rights, relations, and interests.  The powers of
+each are equally sovereign, and neither are derived from the other.
+The State governments are not subordinate to the General government,
+nor the General government to the State governments.  They are
+co-ordinate governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving
+its powers from the same sovereign authority.  In their respective
+spheres neither yields to the other.  In relation to the matters within
+its jurisdiction, each government is independent and supreme in regard
+of the other, and subject only to the convention.
+
+The powers of the General government are the power--
+
+To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the
+debts and provide for the general welfare of the United States; to
+borrow money on the credit of the United States; to regulate commerce
+with foreign nations, among the several States, and with the Indian
+tribes; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws
+on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin
+money and regulate the value thereof, and fix the standard of weights
+and measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the
+securities and current coin of the United States; to establish
+post-offices and post-roads; to promote the progress of science and of
+the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors
+the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to
+define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and
+offences against the law of nations; to declare war, grant letters of
+marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and
+water; to raise and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to
+make rules for the government of the land and naval forces; to provide
+for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union,
+suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; to provide for organizing,
+arming, and disciplining the militia, and of governing such part of
+them as may be employed in the service of the United States; to
+exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such
+district, not exceeding ten miles square, as may by cession of
+particular States and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of
+the government of the United States, and to exercise a like authority
+over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the
+State in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines,
+arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings; and to make all laws
+which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the
+foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in
+the government of the United States, or in any department or office
+thereof.
+
+In addition to these, the General government is clothed with the
+treaty-making power, and the whole charge of the foreign relations of
+the country; with power to admit new States into the Union; to dispose
+of and make all needful rules and regulations concerning the territory
+and all other property belonging to the United States; to declare, with
+certain restrictions, the punishment of treason, the constitution
+itself defining what is treason against the United States; and to
+propose, or to call, on the application of the legislatures of
+two-thirds of all the states, a convention for proposing amendments to
+this constitution; and is vested with supreme judicial power, original
+or appellate, in all cases of law and equity arising under this
+constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made or to be
+made under their authority, in all cases affecting ambassadors, other
+public ministers, and consuls, in all cases of admiralty and maritime
+jurisdiction, in all controversies to which the United States shall be
+a party, all controversies between two or more States, between a State
+and citizens of another State, between citizens of different States,
+between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of
+different States, and between a State or the citizens thereof and
+foreign states, citizens, or subjects.
+
+These, with what is incidental to them, and what is necessary and
+proper to carry them into effect, are all the positive powers with
+which the convention vests the General government, or government of the
+United States, as distinguished from the governments of the particular
+States; and these, with the exception of what relates to the district
+in which it has its seat, and places of forts, magazines, &c., are of a
+general nature, and restricted to the common relations and interests of
+the people, or at least to interests and relations which extend beyond
+the limits of a particular State.  They are all powers that regard
+matters which extend beyond not only the individual citizen, but the
+individual State, and affect alike the relations and interests of all
+the States, or matters which cannot be disposed of by a State
+government without the exercise of extra-territorial jurisdiction.
+They give the government no jurisdiction of questions which affect
+individuals or citizens only in their private and domestic relations
+which lie wholly within a particular State.  The General government
+does not legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or
+things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance, wills,
+the transferrence or transmission of property, real or personal; it can
+charter no private corporations, out of the District of Columbia, for
+business, literary, scientific, or eleemosynary purposes, establish no
+schools, found no colleges or universities, and promote science and the
+useful arts only by securing to authors and inventors for a time the
+exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.  The United States
+Bank was manifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present
+so-called national banks.  The United States Bank was a private or
+particular corporation, and the present national banks are only
+corporations of the same sort, though organized under a general law.
+The pretence that they are established to supply a national currency,
+does not save their constitutionality, for the convention has not given
+the General government the power nor imposed on it the duty of
+furnishing a national currency. To coin money, and regulate the value
+thereof, is something very different from authorizing private companies
+to issue bank notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private
+property, or even on what is called a specie basis.  To claim the power
+under the general welfare clause would be a simple mockery of good
+sense.  It is no more for the general welfare than any other successful
+private business.  The private welfare of each is, no doubt, for the
+welfare of all, but not therefore is it the "general welfare," for what
+is private, particular in its nature, is not and cannot be general.  To
+understand by general welfare that which is for the individual welfare
+of all or the greater number, would be to claim for the General
+government all the powers of government, and to deny that very division
+of powers which is the crowning merit of the American system.  The
+general welfare, by the very force of the words themselves, means the
+common as distinguished from the private or individual welfare.  The
+system of national banks may or may not be a good and desirable system,
+but it is difficult to understand the constitutional power of the
+General government to establish it.
+
+On the ground that its powers are general, not particular, the General
+government has no power to lay a protective tariff.  It can lay a
+tariff for revenue, not for protection of home manufactures or home
+industry; for the interests fostered, even though indirectly
+advantageous to the whole people, are in their nature private or
+particular, not general interests, and chiefly interests of private
+corporations and capitalists.  Their incidental or even consequential
+effects do not change their direct and essential nature.  So with
+domestic slavery.  Slavery comes under the head of private rights,
+whether regarded on the side of the master or on the side of the slave.
+The right of a citizen to hold a slave, if a right at all, is the
+private right of property, and the right of the slave to his freedom is
+a private and personal right, and neither is placed under the safeguard
+of the General government, which has nowhere, unless in the District of
+Columbia and the places over which it has exclusive legislative power
+in all cases whatsoever, either the right to establish it or to abolish
+it, except perhaps under the war power, as a military necessity, an
+indemnity for the past, or a security for the future.
+
+This applies to what are called Territories as well as to the States.
+The right of the government to govern the Territories in regard to
+private and particular rights and interests, is derived from no express
+grant of power, and is held only ex necessitate--the United States
+owning the domain, and there being no other authority competent to
+govern them.  But, as in the case of all powers held ex necessitate,
+the power is restricted to the absolute necessity in the case.  What
+are called Territorial governments, to distinguish them from the State
+governments, are only provisional governments, and can touch private
+rights and interests no further than is necessary to preserve order and
+prepare the way for the organization and installation of a regular
+State government.  Till then the law governing private rights is the
+law that was in force, if any such there was, when the territory became
+by purchase, by conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the
+United States.
+
+Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance of
+1787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of the
+Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery
+north of the parallel 36 deg. 30'.  The Wilmot proviso was for the same
+reason unconstitutional.  The General government never had and has not
+any power to exclude slavery from the Territories, any more than to
+abolish it in the States. But slavery being a local institution,
+sustained neither by the law of nature nor the law of nations, no
+citizen migrating from a slave State could carry his slaves with him,
+and hold them as slaves in the Territory.  Rights enacted by local law
+are rights only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters
+into a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they are
+carried enacts to the contrary.  The only persons that could be held as
+slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves or the children of
+those who were slaves in the Territory when it passed to the United
+States.  The whole controversy on, slavery in the Territories, and
+which culminated in the civil war, was wholly unnecessary, and never
+could have occurred had the constitution been properly understood and
+adhered to by both sides.  True, Congress could not exclude slavery
+from the Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
+slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded, for the
+inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from the States after
+the cession to the United States, were too few to be counted.
+
+The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
+naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was very
+proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one State from
+gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage over another; but
+the General government has itself no power to naturalize a single
+foreigner, or in any case to say who shall or who shall not be
+citizens, either of a State or of the United States, or to declare who
+may or may not be electors even of its own officers.  The convention
+ordains that members of the house of representatives shall be chosen by
+electors who have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most
+numerous branch of the State legislature, but the State determines
+these qualifications, and who do or do not possess them; that the
+senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures, and that the
+electors of President and Vice-President shall be appointed in such
+manner as the respective State legislatures may direct.  The whole
+question of citizenship, what shall or shall not be the qualifications
+of electors, who shall or shall not be freemen, is reserved to the
+States, as coming under the head of personal or private rights and
+franchises.  In practice, the exact line of demarcation may not always
+have been strictly observed either by the General government or by the
+State governments; but a careful study of the constitution cannot fail
+to show that the division of powers is the division or distinction
+between the public and general relations and interests, rights and
+duties of the people, and their private and particular relations and
+interests, rights and duties.  As these two classes of relations and
+interests, rights and duties, though distinguishable, are really
+inseparable in nature, it follows that the two governments are
+essential to the existence of a complete government, or to the
+existence of a real government in its plenitude and integrity.  Left to
+either alone, the people would have only an incomplete, an initial, or
+inchoate government.  The General government is the complement of the
+State governments, and the State governments are the complement of the
+General government.
+
+The consideration of the powers denied by the convention to the General
+government and to the State governments respectively, will lead to the
+same conclusion.  To the General government is denied expressly or by
+necessary implication all jurisdiction in matters of private rights and
+interests, and to the State government is denied all jurisdiction in
+right, or interests which extend, as has been said, beyond the
+boundaries of the State.  "No State shall enter into any treaty,
+alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin
+money, emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a
+tender in the payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post
+facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any
+title of nobility.  No State shall, without the consent of Congress,
+lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be
+absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws and the net
+produce of all duties and imposts laid by any State on imports and
+exports shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States, and
+all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress.
+No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of
+tonnage, keep troops or ships-of-war in time of peace, enter into any
+agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign power, or
+engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as
+will not admit of delay."
+
+The powers denied to the States in some matters which are rather
+private and particular, such as bills of attainder, ex post facto laws,
+laws impairing the obligation of contracts, granting titles of
+nobility, are denied equally to the General government. There is
+evidently a profound logic in the constitution, and there is not a
+single provision in it that is arbitrary, or anomalous, or that does
+not harmonize dialectically with the whole, and with the real
+constitution of the American people.  At first sight the reservation to
+the State of the appointment of the officers of the militia might seem
+an anomaly; but as the whole subject of internal police belongs to the
+State, it should have some military force at its command.  The subject
+of bankruptcies, also, might seem to be more properly within the
+province of the State, and so it would be if commerce between the
+several States had not been placed under Congress, or if trade were
+confined to the citizens of the State and within its boundaries; but as
+such is not the case, it was necessary to place it under the General
+government, in order that laws on the subject might be uniform
+throughout the Union, and that the citizens of all the States, and
+foreigners trading with them, should be placed on an equal footing, and
+have the same remedies. The subject follows naturally in the train of
+commerce, for bankruptcies, as understood at the time, were confined to
+the mercantile class, bankers, and brokers; and since the regulation of
+commerce, foreign and inter-state, was to be placed under the sole
+charge of the General government, it was necessary that bankruptcy
+should be included.  The subject of patents is placed under the General
+government, though the patent is a private right, because it was the
+will of the convention that the patent should be good in all the
+States, as affording more encouragement to science and the useful arts
+than if good only within a single State, or if the power were left to
+each State to recognize or not patents granted by another.  The right
+created, though private in its nature, is Yet general or common to all
+the States in its enjoyment or exercise.
+
+The division of the powers of government between a General government
+and particular governments, rendered possible and practicable by the
+original constitution of the people themselves, as one people existing
+and acting through State organizations, is the American method of
+guarding against the undue centralism to which Roman imperialism
+inevitably tends; and it is far simpler and more effective than any of
+the European systems of mixed governments, which seek their end by
+organizing an antagonism of interests or classes.  The American method
+demands no such antagonism, no neutralizing of one social force by
+another, but avails itself of all the forces of society, organizes them
+dialectically, not antagonistically, and thus protects with, equal
+efficiency both public authority and private rights.  The General
+government can never oppress the people as individuals, or abridge
+their private rights or personal freedom and independence, because
+these are not within its jurisdiction, but are placed in charge, within
+each State, of the State government, which, within its sphere, governs
+as supremely as the General government: the State governments cannot
+weaken the public authority of the nation or oppress the people in
+their general rights and interests, for these are withdrawn from State
+jurisdiction, and placed under charge of a General government, which,
+in its sphere, governs as supremely as the State government.  There is
+no resort to a system of checks and balances; there is no restraint on
+power, and no systematic distrust of power, but simply a division of
+powers between two co-ordinate governments, distinct but inseparable,
+moving in distinct spheres, but in the same direction, or to a common
+end. The system is no invention of man, is no creation of the
+convention, but is given us by Providence in the living constitution of
+the American people.  The merit of the statesmen of 1787 is that they
+did not destroy or deface the work of Providence, but accepted it, and
+organized the government in harmony with the real orders the real
+elements given them.  They suffered themselves in all their positive
+substantial work to be governed by reality, not by theories and
+speculations.  In this they proved themselves statesmen, and their work
+survives; and the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present
+and future, the model republic--as much so as was Rome in her day; and
+it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit that
+pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and more advanced
+order of civilization; such is really the fact.
+
+The only apparently weak point in the system is in the particular
+States themselves.  Feudalism protected the feudal aristocracy
+effectively for a time against both the king and the people, but left
+the king and the people without protection against the aristocracy, and
+hence it fell.  It was not adequate to the wants of civil society, did
+not harmonize all social elements, and protect all social and
+individual rights and interests, and therefore could not but fail.  The
+General government takes care of public authority and rights; the State
+protects private rights and personal freedom as against the General
+government: but what protects the citizens in their private rights,
+their personal freedom and independence, against the particular State
+government?  Universal suffrage, answers the democrat.  Armed with the
+ballot, more powerful than the sword, each citizen is able to protect
+himself.  But this is theory, not reality.  If it were true, the
+division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate,
+governments would be of no practical importance.  Experience does not
+sustain the theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the
+individual may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.
+Experience proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the
+freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is commonly
+pretended.  The ballot of an isolated individual counts for nothing.
+The individual, though armed with the ballot, is as powerless, if he
+stands alone, as if he had it not.  To render it of any avail he must
+associate himself with a party, and look for his success in the success
+of his party; and to secure the success of his party, he must give up
+to it his own private convictions and free will.  In practice,
+individuals are nothing individually, and parties are every thing.
+Even the suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the
+Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the
+government found the leaders of the party opposed to the Republican
+party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount than the chiefs of
+the armies of the so-called Confederate States.
+
+Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one knows
+by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some private or
+personal purposes, for which they wish, through party to use the
+government.  Parties have no conscience, no responsibility, and their
+very reason of being is, the usurpation and concentration of power.
+The real practical tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic,
+instead of an imperial, centralism.  What is to guard against this
+centralism? Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it; and if
+the government is left to it, the government becomes practically the
+will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.  Is the remedy in
+written or paper constitutions?  Party can break through them, and by
+making the judges elective by party, for short terms, and re-eligible,
+can do so with impunity.  In several of the States, the dominant
+majority have gained the power to govern at will, without any let or
+hindrance.  Besides, constitutions can be altered, and have been
+altered, very nearly at the will of the majority.  No mere paper
+constitutions are any protection against the usurpations of party, for
+party will always grasp all the power it can.
+
+Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the States the
+principle of division of powers is carried into the bosom of the State
+itself; in some States further than in others, but in all it obtains to
+some extent.  In what are called the New England States, the best
+governed portion of the Union, each town is a corporation, having
+important powers and the charge of all purely local matters--chooses
+its own officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own
+poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its own
+children.  Between these corporations and the State government are the
+counties, that take charge of another class of interests, more general
+than those under the charge of the town, but less general than those of
+the State.  In the great central and Northwestern States the same
+system obtains, though less completely carried out.  In the Southern
+and Southwestern States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the
+rights and interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less
+well protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.  But
+with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the influence of
+the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of peace and the
+revival of agricultural, industrial, and commercial prosperity, the New
+England system, in its main features, is pretty sure to be gradually
+introduced, or developed, and the division of powers in the State to be
+as effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between the
+General government and the particular or State governments. So, though
+universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not alone sufficient,
+the division of powers affords with it a not inadequate protection.
+
+No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or can be
+practically perfect--secure all good, and guard against all evil.  In
+all human governments there will be defects and abuses, and he is no
+wise man who expects perfection from imperfection.  But the American
+constitution, taken as a whole, and in all its parts, is the least
+imperfect that has ever existed, and under it individual rights,
+personal freedom and independence, as well as public authority or
+society, are better protected than under any other; and as the few
+barbaric elements retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the
+standard of education elevated, and the whole population Americanized,
+moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to effect all
+the good, with as little of the evil, as can be reasonably expected
+from any possible civil government or political constitution of society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION.
+
+
+The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it its
+population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the unity and
+integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation have been
+effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the secessionists, though
+disposed to submit to superior force, and demean themselves henceforth
+as loyal citizens, most likely hold as firmly to the doctrine as before
+finding themselves unable to reduce it to practice, and the Union
+victory will remain incomplete till they are convinced in their
+understandings that the Union has the better reason as well as the
+superior military resources.  The nation has conquered their bodies,
+but it is hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their
+minds and win their hearts.
+
+The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, or even
+as a conventional right.  The secessionists disclaim revolutionary
+principles, and hold that the right of secession is anterior to the
+convention, a right which the convention could neither give, nor take
+away, because inherent in the very conception of a sovereign State.
+Secession is simply the repeal by the State of the act of accession to
+the Union; and as that act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she
+must always be free to repeal it.  The Union is a copartnership; a
+State in the Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to
+withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.  There is no
+power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any longer
+than be pleases.  He is undoubtedly holden for the obligations
+contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but for none
+contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice thereof.
+
+So of a sovereign State in the Union.  The Union itself, apart from the
+sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and
+binds nobody.  All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by
+which the States constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for
+certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and
+establish an agency under express instructions for the management of
+the general affairs of the firm.  The State is held jointly and
+severally for all the legal obligations of the Union, contracted while
+she is in it but no further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases,
+precisely as an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm.
+The remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion
+against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations already
+contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
+
+The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the domain is
+attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of the State.
+Secession, then, carries the entire State government, people, and
+domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the State to its
+original position of a sovereign State, foreign to the United States.
+Being an independent sovereign State, she may enter into a new
+confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge herself in some other
+foreign state, as she judges proper or finds opportunity.  The States
+that seceded formed among themselves a new confederacy, more to their
+mind than the one formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do,
+and in the war just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but
+a people fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and
+true patriots defending the independence and inviolability of their
+country against foreign invaders.  They are to be honored for their
+loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as
+traitors.
+
+This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of
+revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no
+allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but
+simply on the original and inherent rights of the several States as
+independent sovereign States.  The argument is conclusive, and the
+defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the
+sovereignty vests in the States severally.  The refutation of the
+secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of State
+sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the States
+severally, but in the States united, or that the Union is sovereign,
+and not the States individually.  The Union is not a firm, a
+copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real,
+living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble
+unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.  There is,
+indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are no
+States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union. There is no
+Union without the States, and there are no States without the Union.
+The people are born States, and the States are born United States.  The
+Union and the States are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike
+into the original and essential constitution of the American state.
+This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.
+
+But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into
+States, does not necessarily include the whole population or territory
+included within the jurisdiction of the United States. It is restricted
+to the people and territory or domain organized into States in the
+Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the
+tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its
+boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included
+all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the
+private proprietor and the public sovereign.  The city had vast
+possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by
+conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were
+enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred
+laws. In this class of territory, of which the city was the private
+owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, which was held to
+be only leased to its occupants, who were often dispossessed, and their
+lands given as a recompense by the consul or imperator to his disbanded
+legionaries.  The provincials were subjects of Rome, but formed no part
+of the Roman people, and had no share in the political power of the
+state, till at a late period the privileges of Roman citizens were
+extended to them, and the Roman people became coextensive with the
+Roman empire. So the United States have held and still hold large
+territorial possessions, acquired by the acknowledgment of their
+independence by Great Britain, the former sovereign, the cession of
+particular states, and purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico.  Till
+erected into States and admitted into the Union, this territory, with
+its population, though subject to the United States, makes no part of
+the political or sovereign territory and people of the United States.
+It is under the Union, not in it, as is indicated by the phrase
+admitting into the Union--a legal phrase, since the constitution
+ordains that "new States may be admitted by the Congress into this
+Union."
+
+There can be no secession that separates a State from the national
+domain, and withdraws it from the territorial sovereignty or
+jurisdiction of the United States; yet what hinders a State from going
+out of the Union in the sense that it comes into it, and thus ceasing
+to belong to the political people of the United States?
+
+If the view of the constitution taken in the preceding chapters be
+correct, and certainly no facts tend to disprove it, the accession of a
+Territory as a State in the Union is a free act of the territorial
+people.  The Territory cannot organize and apply for admission as a
+State, without what is called an "enabling act" of Congress or its
+equivalent; but that act is permissive, not mandatory, and nothing
+obliges the Territory to organize under it and apply for admission.  It
+may do so or not, as it chooses. What, then, hinders the State once in
+the Union from going out or returning to its former condition of
+territory subject to the Union?  The original States did not need to
+come in under an enabling act, for they were born States in the Union,
+and were never territory outside of the Union and subject to it.  But
+they and the new States, adopted or naturalized States, once in the
+Union, stand on a footing of perfect equality, and the original States
+are no more and no less bound than they to remain States in the Union.
+The ratification of the constitution by the original States was a free
+act, as much so as the accession of a new State formed from territory
+subject to the Union is a free act, and a free act is an act which one
+is free to do or not to do, as he pleases.  What a State is free to do
+or not to do, it is free to undo, if it chooses.  There is nothing in
+either the State constitution or in that of the United States that
+forbids it.
+
+This is denied.  The population and domain are inseparable in the
+State; and if the State could take itself out of the Union, it would
+take them out, and be ipso facto a sovereign State foreign to the
+Union.  It would take the domain and the population out of the Union,
+it is conceded and even maintained, but not therefore would it take
+them out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or would they exist as a
+State foreign to the Union; for population and territory may coexist,
+as Dacota, Colorado, or New Mexico, out of the Union, and yet be
+subject to the Union, or within the jurisdiction of the United States.
+
+But the Union is formed by the surrender by each of the States of its
+individual sovereignty, and each State by its admission into the Union
+surrenders its individual sovereignty, or binds itself by a
+constitutional compact to merge its individual sovereignty in that of
+the whole.  It then cannot cease to be a State in the Union without
+breach of contract.  Having surrendered its sovereignty to the Union,
+or bound itself by the constitution to exercise its original
+sovereignty only as one of the United States, it can unmake itself of
+its state character, only by consent of the United States, or by a
+successful revolution.  It is by virtue of this fact that secession is
+rebellion against the United States, and that the General government,
+as representing the Union, has the right and the duty to suppress it by
+all the forces at its command.
+
+There can be no rebellion where there is no allegiance.  The States in
+the Union cannot owe allegiance to the Union, for they are it, and for
+any one to go out of it is no more an act of rebellion than it is for a
+king to abdicate his throne.  The Union is not formed by the surrender
+to it by the several States of their respective individual sovereignty.
+Such surrender could, as we have seen, form only an alliance, or a
+confederation, not one sovereign people; and from an alliance, or
+confederation, the ally or confederate has, saving its faith, the
+inherent right to secede.  The argument assumes that the States were
+originally each in its individuality a sovereign state, but by the
+convention which framed the constitution, each surrendered its
+sovereignty to the whole, and thus several sovereign states became one
+sovereign political people, governing in general matters through the
+General government, and in particular matters through particular or
+State governments.  This is Mr. Madison's theory, and also Mr.
+Webster's; but it has been refuted in the refutation of the theory that
+makes government originate in compact.  A sovereign state can,
+undoubtedly, surrender its sovereignty, but can surrender it only to
+something or somebody that really exists; for to Surrender to no one or
+to nothing is, as has been shown, the same thing as not to surrender at
+all; and the Union, being formed only by the surrender, is nothing
+prior to it, or till after it is made, and therefore can be no
+recipient of the surrender.
+
+Besides, the theory is the reverse of the fact.  The State does not
+surrender or part with its sovereignty by coming into the Union, but
+acquires by it all the rights it holds as a State. Between the original
+States and the new States there is a difference of mode by which they
+become States in the Union, but none in their powers, or the tenure by
+which they hold them.  The process by which new States are actually
+formed and admitted into the Union, discloses at once what it is that
+is gained or lost by admission.  The domain and population, before the
+organization of the Territory into one of the United States, are
+subject to the United States, inseparably attached to the domain of the
+Union, and under its sovereignty.  The Territory so remains, organized
+or unorganized, under a Territorial Government created by Congress.
+Congress, by an enabling act, permits it to organize as a State, to
+call a convention to form a State constitution, to elect under it, in
+such way as the convention ordains, State officers, a State
+legislature, and, in the way prescribed by the Constitution of the
+United States, senators and representatives in Congress.  Here is a
+complete organization as a State, yet, though called a State, it is no
+State at all, and is simply territory, without a single particle of
+political power.  To be a State it must be recognized and admitted by
+Congress as a State in the Union, and when so recognized and admitted
+it possesses, in union with the other United States, supreme political
+sovereignty, jointly in all general matters, and individually in all
+private and particular matters.
+
+The Territory gives up no sovereign powers by coming into the Union,
+for before it came into the Union it had no sovereignty, no political
+rights at all.  All the rights and powers it holds are held by the
+simple fact that it has become a State in the Union.  This is as true
+of the original States as of the new States; for it has been shown in
+the chapter on The United States, that the original British sovereignty
+under which the colonies were organized and existed passed, on the fact
+of independence, to the States United, and not to the States severally.
+Hence if nine States had ratified the constitution, and the other four
+had stood out, and refused to do it, which was within their competency,
+they would not have been independent sovereign States, outside of the
+Union, but Territories under the Union.
+
+Texas forms the only exception to the rule that the States have never
+been independent of the Union.  All the other new States have been
+formed from territory subject to the Union.  This is true of all the
+States formed out of the Territory of the Northwest, and out of the
+domain ceded by France, Spain, and Mexico to the United States.  All
+these cessions were held by the United States as territory immediately
+subject to the Union, before being erected into States; and by far the
+larger part is so held even yet.  But Texas was an independent foreign
+state, and was annexed as a State without having been first subjected
+as territory to the United States.  It of course lost by annexation its
+separate sovereignty.  But this annexation was held by many to be
+unconstitutional; it was made when the State sovereignty theory had
+gained possession of the Government, and was annexed as a State instead
+of being admitted as a State formed from territory belonging to the
+United States, for the very purpose of committing the nation to that
+theory.  Its annexation was the prologue, as the Mexican war was the
+first act in the secession drama, and as the epilogue is the
+suppression of the rebellion on Texan soil.  Texas is an exceptional
+case, and forms no precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the
+general rule.  Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire
+all their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of
+losing or surrendering them.
+
+Our American statesmen have overlooked or not duly weighed the facts in
+the case, because, holding the origin of government in compact, they
+felt no need of looking back of the constitution to find the basis of
+that unity of the American people which they assert.  Neither Mr.
+Madison nor Mr. Webster felt any difficulty in asserting it as created
+by the convention of 1787, or in conceding the sovereignty of the
+States prior to the Union, and denying its existence after the
+ratification of the constitution. If it were not that they held that
+the State originates in convention or the social compact, there would
+be unpardonable presumption on the part of the present writer in
+venturing to hazard an assertion contrary to theirs.  But, if their
+theory was unsound, their practical doctrine was not; for they
+maintained that the American people are one sovereign people, and Mr.
+Quincy Adams, an authority inferior to neither, maintained that they
+were always one people, and that the States hold from the Union, not
+the Union from the States.  The States without the Union cease to exist
+as political communities: the Union without the States ceases to be a
+Union, and becomes a vast centralized and consolidated state, ready to
+lapse from a civilized into a barbaric, from a republican to a despotic
+nation.
+
+The State, under the American system, as distinguished from Territory,
+is not in the domain and population fixed to it, nor yet in its
+exterior organization, but solely in the political powers, rights, and
+franchises which it holds from the United States, or as one of the
+United States.  As these are rights, not obligations, the State may
+resign or abdicate them and cease to be a State, on the same principle
+that any man may abdicate or forego his rights.  In doing so, the State
+breaks no oath of allegiance, fails to fulfil no obligation she
+contracted as a State: she simply forgoes her political rights and
+franchises. So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not
+unconstitutional or unlawful.  But it is, as Mr. Sumner and others have
+maintained, simply State suicide.  Nothing hinders a State from
+committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than there was something
+which compelled the Territory to become a State in the Union against
+its will.
+
+It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to the
+Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not destroy
+the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and independence,
+as the secessionists maintain.  Certainly, if the States were, Prior to
+the Union, sovereign States; but this is precisely what has been denied
+and disproved; for prior to the Union there were no States.  Secession
+restores, or reduces, rather, the State to the condition it was in
+before its admission into the Union; but that condition is that of
+Territory, or a Territory subject to the United States, and not that of
+an independent sovereign state.  The State holds all its political
+rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out of it,
+or in the condition in which its population and domain were before
+being a State in the Union.
+
+State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and territory
+from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no rebellion where
+there is no allegiance, resistance by its population and territory to
+the Union, even war against the Union, would not be rebellion, but the
+simple assertion of popular sovereignty.  This is only the same
+objection in another form.  The lapse of the State releases the
+population and territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their
+allegiance to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State,
+and they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the
+United States.  A State owes no allegiance to the United States, for it
+is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.  The relation between the
+United States and the State is not the relation of suzerain and
+liegeman or vassal.  A State owes no allegiance, for it is not subject
+to the Union; it is never in their State capacity that its population
+and territory do or can rebel. Hence, the Government has steadily
+denied that, in the late rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
+
+But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union; and
+therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the States
+that passed secession ordinances are and all along have been States in
+the Union.  No State can rebel, but it does not follow therefrom that
+no State can secede or cease to exist as a State: it only follows that
+secession, in the sense of State suicide, or the abdication by the
+State of its political rights and powers, is not rebellion.  Nor does
+it follow from the fact that no State has rebelled, that no State has
+ceased to be a State; or that the States that passed secession
+ordinances have been all along States in the Union.
+
+The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not within the
+competency of the State, and therefore null and void from the
+beginning.  Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within the competency of
+the State, so far as intended to alienate any portion of the national
+domain and population thereto annexed, they certainly were, and so far
+were void and of no effect; but so far as intended to take the State
+simply as a State out of the Union, they were within the competency of
+the State, were not illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null
+and void. Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in
+others are not wholly void.  The unconstitutionality vitiates only the
+unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and recognized
+and enforced as such by the courts.
+
+The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed by
+the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them and
+usurped the authority of the State.  This argument implies that, if a
+secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of the State, it is
+valid; which is more than they who urge it against the State suicide
+doctrine are prepared to concede.  But the secession ordinances were in
+every instance passed by the people of the State in convention legally
+assembled, therefore by them in their highest State capacity--in the
+same capacity in which they ordain and ratify the State constitution
+itself; and in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and
+confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a genuine
+plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.  In all cases they were
+adopted by a decided majority of the political people of the State, and
+after their adoption they were acquiesced in and indeed actively
+supported by very nearly the whole people. The people of the States
+adopting the secession ordinances were far more unanimous in supporting
+secession than the people of the other States were in sustaining the
+Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion by coercive
+measures.  It will not do, then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to
+a faction.  The people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the
+majority.
+
+There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few Union
+men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious
+and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and
+their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their
+respective States into secession against their convictions and their
+will.  No doubt there were leaders at the South, as there are in every
+great movement at the North; no doubt there were individuals in the
+seceding States that held secession wrong in principle, and were
+conscientiously attached to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men
+who adhered to the Union, not because they disapproved secession, but
+because they disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because
+they were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not succeed, that
+the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it they
+would become the great and leading men of their respective States,
+which they certainly could not be under secession. Others sympathized
+fully with what was called the Southern cause, held firmly the right of
+secession, and hated cordially the Yankees, but doubted either the
+practicability or the expediency of secession, and opposed it till
+resolved on, but, after it was resolved on, yielded to none in their
+earnest support of it. These last comprised the immense majority of
+those who voted against secession.  Never could those called the
+Southern leaders have carried the secession ordinances, never could
+they have carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with
+such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four years,
+making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh doubtful, if they
+had not had the Southern heart with them, if they had not been most
+heartily supported by the overwhelming mass of the people.  They led a
+popular, not a factious movement.
+
+No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.  The State is
+territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its territory and
+population out of the Union, no State can secede. Out of the
+jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the sovereign or
+national domain, very true; but out of the Union as a State, with
+rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not true.  Secession is
+political, not territorial.
+
+But the State holds from the territory or domain.  The people are
+sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the domain
+because held by a sovereign people, as was established by the analysis
+of the early Roman constitution.  The territory of the States
+corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which was attached the
+Roman sovereignty.  That territory, once surveyed and consecrated,
+remained sacred and the ruling territory, and could not be divested of
+its sacred and governing character.  The portions of the territory of
+the United States once erected into States and consecrated as ruling
+territory can never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or
+successful revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
+
+The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by public,
+not by private wealth, and is always respublica or commonwealth, in
+distinction from despotism or monarchy in its oriental sense, which is
+founded on private wealth, or which assumes that the authority to
+govern, or sovereignty, is the private estate of the sovereign.  All
+power is a domain, but there is no domain without a dominus or lord.
+In oriental monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is
+the public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the
+people in their territorial, and not in their personal or genealogical
+relation.  The people of The United States are sovereign only within
+the territory or domain of the United States, and their sovereignty is
+a state, because fixed, attached, or limited to that specific
+territory.  It is fixed to the soil, not nomadic.  In barbaric nations
+power is nomadic and personal, or genealogical, confined to no
+locality, but attaches to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.  The
+Gothic chiefs hold their power by a personal title, and have the same
+authority in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
+Elbe or the Danube.  Power migrates with the chief and his people, and
+may be exercised wherever he and they find themselves, as a Swedish
+queen held when she ordered the execution of one of her subjects at
+Paris, without asking permission of the territorial lord.  In these
+nations, power is a personal right, or a private estate, not a state
+which exists only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the
+domain, exists independently of the chief or the government.  The
+distinction is between public domain and private domain.
+
+The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
+democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is territorial,
+not personal; not territorial because the majority of the people are
+agriculturists or landholders, but because all political rights,
+powers, or franchises are territorial.  The sovereign people of the
+United States are sovereign only within the territory of the United
+States.  The great body of the freemen have the elective franchise, but
+no one has it save in his State, his county, his town, his ward, his
+precinct.  Out of the election district in which he is domiciled, a
+citizen of the United States has no more right to vote than has the
+citizen or subject of a foreign state.  This explains what is meant by
+the attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the
+state on the domain.  The state, in republican states, exists only as
+inseparably united with the public domain; under feudalism, power was
+joined to territory or domain, but the domain was held as a private,
+not as a public domain.  All sovereignty rests on domain or
+proprietorship, and is dominion. The proprietor is the dominus or lord,
+and in republican states the lord is society, or the public, and the
+domain is held for the common or public good of all.  All political
+rights are held from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the
+elective franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as
+distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.
+
+As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone cannot
+possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not a domain.  In
+the American system, the dominus or lord is not the particular State,
+but the United States, and, the domain of the whole territory, whether
+erected into particular States or not, is in the United States alone.
+The United States do not part with the dominion of that portion of the
+national domain included within a particular State.  The State holds
+the domain not separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United
+States: separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a
+joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls into
+the condition of any other territory held by the United States not
+erected into one of the United States.
+
+Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the particular
+State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to the United
+States.  All escheats of private estates, but no public or general
+escheats.  But this has nothing to do with the public domain.  The
+United States are the dominus, but they have, by the constitution,
+divided the powers of government between a General government and
+particular State governments, and ordained that all matters of a
+general nature, common to all the States, should be placed under the
+supreme control of the former, and all matters of a private or
+particular character under the supreme control of the latter.  The
+eminent domain of private estates is in the particular State, but the
+sovereign authority in the particular State is that of the United
+States expressing itself through the State government.  The United
+States, in the States as well as out of them, is the dominus, as the
+States respectively would soon find if they were to undertake to
+alienate any part of their domain to a foreign power, or even to the
+citizens or subjects of a foreign State, as is also evident from the
+fact that the United States, in the way prescribed by the constitution,
+may enlarge or contract at will the rights and powers of the States.
+The mistake on this point grows out of the habit of restricting the
+action of the United States to the General government, and not
+recollecting that the United States govern one class of subjects
+through the General government and another class through State
+governments, but that it is one and the same authority that governs in
+both.
+
+The analogy borrowed from the Roman constitution, as far as applicable,
+proves the reverse of what is intended.  The dominus of the sacred
+territory was the city, or the Roman state, not the sacred territory
+itself.  The territory received the tenant, and gave him as tenant the
+right to a seat in the senate; but the right of the territory was
+derived not from the domain, but from the dominus, that is, the city.
+But the city could revoke its grant, as it practically did when it
+conferred the privileges of Roman citizenship on the provincials, and
+gave to plebeians seats in the senate.  Moreover, nothing in Roman
+history indicates that to the validity of a senatus consultum it was
+necessary to count the vacant domains of the sacred territory.  The
+particular domain must, under the American system, be counted when it
+is held by a State, but of itself alone, or even with its population,
+it is not a State, and therefore as a State domain is vacant and
+without any political rights or powers whatever.
+
+To argue that the territory and population once a State in the Union
+must needs always be so, would be well enough if a State in the Union
+were individually a sovereign state; for territory, with its population
+not subject to another, is always a sovereign state, even though its
+government has been subverted.  But this is not the fact, for territory
+with its population does not constitute a State in the Union; and,
+therefore, when of a State nothing remains but territory and
+population, the State has evidently disappeared.  It will not do then
+to maintain that State suicide is impossible, and that the States that
+adopted secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be
+States in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their
+representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in Congress.
+They must be reorganized first.
+
+There would also be some embarrassment to the government in holding
+that the States that passed the secession ordinance remain,
+notwithstanding, States in the Union.  The citizens of a State in the
+Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless they are rebels to
+their State; and rebels to their State they are not, unless they resist
+its authority and make war on it. The authority of the State in the
+Union is a legal authority, and the citizen in obeying it is disloyal
+neither to the State nor to the Union.  The citizens in the States that
+made war on the United States did not resist their State, for they
+acted by its authority.  The only men, on this supposition, in them,
+who have been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have
+refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted, even
+with armed force, the secession ordinances.  The several State
+governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on the war for
+the destruction of the Union, if the States are in the Union, were
+legal and loyal governments of their respective States, for they were
+legally elected and installed, and conformed to their respective State
+constitutions.  All the acts of these governments have been
+constitutional.  Their entering into a confederacy for attaining a
+separate nationality has been legal, and the debts contracted by the
+States individually, or by the confederacy legally formed by them, have
+been legally contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against
+the United States.  The war against them has been all wrong, and the
+confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United States.
+The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can blockade its own
+ports, and the captures and seizures under it, robberies.  The Supreme
+Court has been wrong in declaring the war a territorial civil war, as
+well as the government in acting accordingly.  Now, all these
+conclusions are manifestly false and absurd, and therefore the
+assumption that the States in question have all along been States in
+the Union cannot be sustained.
+
+It is easy to understand the resistance the Government offers to the
+doctrine that a State may commit suicide, or by its own act abdicate
+its rights and cease to be a State in the Union.  It is admissible on
+no theory of the constitution that has been widely entertained.  It is
+not admissible on Mr. Calhoun's theory of State sovereignty, for on
+that theory a State in going out of the Union does not cease to be a
+State but simply resumes the powers it had delegated to the General
+government.  It cannot be maintained on Mr. Madison's or Mr. Webster's
+theory, that the States prior to the Union were severally sovereign,
+but by the Union were constituted one people; for, if this one people
+are understood to be a federal people, State secession would not be
+State suicide, but State independence; and if understood to be one
+consolidated or centralized people, it would be simply insurrection or
+rebellion against the national authority, laboring to make itself a
+revolution.  The government seems to have understood Mr. Madison's
+theory in both senses--in the consolidated sense, in declaring the
+secessionists insurgents and rebels, and in the federal sense, in
+maintaining that they have never seceded, and are still States in the
+Union, in full possession of all their political or State rights.
+Perhaps, if the government, instead of borrowing from contradictory
+theories of the constitution which have gained currency, had examined
+in the light of historical facts the constitution itself, it would have
+been as constitutional in its doctrine as it has been loyal and
+patriotic, energetic and successful in its military administration.
+
+Another reason why the doctrine that State secession is State suicide
+has appeared so offensive to many, is the supposition entertained at
+one time by some of its friends, that the dissolution of the State
+vacates all rights and franchises held under it.  But this is a
+mistake.  The principle is well known and recognized by the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, that in the transfer of a
+territory from one territorial sovereign to another, the laws in force
+under the old sovereign remain in force after the change, till
+abrogated, or others are enacted in their place by the new sovereign,
+except such as are necessarily abrogated by the change itself of the
+sovereign; not, indeed, because the old sovereign retains any
+authority, but, because such is presumed by the courts to be the will
+of the new sovereign.  The principle applies in the case of the death
+of a State in the Union.  The laws of the State are territorial, till
+abrogated by competent authority, remain the lex loci, and are in full
+force.  All that would be vacated would be the public rights of the
+State, and in no case the private rights of citizens, corporations, or
+laws affecting them.
+
+But the same conclusion is reached in another way.  In the lapse of a
+State or its return to the condition of a Territory, there is really no
+change of sovereignty.  The sovereignty, both before and after, is the
+United States.  The sovereign authority that governs in the State
+government, as we have seen, though independent of the General
+government, is the United States.  The United States govern certain
+matters through a General government, and others through particular
+State governments.  The private rights and interests created,
+regulated, or protected by the particular State, are created,
+regulated, or protected by the United States, as much and as plenarily
+as if done by the General government, and the State laws creating,
+regulating, or protecting them can be abrogated by no power known to
+the constitution, but either the State itself, or the United States in
+convention legally assembled.  If this were what is meant by the States
+that have seceded, or professed to secede, remaining States in the
+Union, they would, indeed, be States still in the Union,
+notwithstanding secession and the government would be right in saying
+that no State can secede.  But this is not what is meant, at least not
+all that is meant.  It is meant not only that the private rights of
+citizens and corporations remain, but the citizens retain all the
+public rights of the State, that is, the right to representation in
+Congress and in the electoral college, and the right to sit in the
+convention, which is not true.
+
+But the correction of the misapprehension that the private rights and
+interests are lost by the lapse of the State may remove the graver
+prejudices against the doctrine of State suicide, and dispose loyal and
+honest Union men to bear the reasons by which it is supported, and
+which nobody has refuted or can refute on constitutional grounds.  A
+Territory by coming into the Union becomes a State; a State by going
+out of the Union becomes a Territory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION.
+
+
+The question of reconstructing the States that seceded will be
+practically settled before these pages can see the light, and will
+therefore be considered here only so far as necessary to complete the
+view of the constitution of the United States.  The manner in which the
+government proposed to settle, has settled, or will settle the
+question, proves that both it and the American people have only
+confused views of the rights and powers of the General government, but
+imperfectly comprehend the distinction between the legislative and
+executive departments of that Government, and are far more familiar
+with party tactics than with constitutional law.
+
+It would be difficult to imagine any thing more unconstitutional, more
+crude, or more glaringly impolitic than the mode of reconstruction
+indicated by the various executive proclamations that have been issued,
+bearing on the subject, or even by the bill for guaranteeing the States
+republican governments, that passed Congress, but which failed to
+obtain the President's signature.  It is, in some measure,
+characteristic of the American government to understand how things
+ought to be done only when they are done and it is too late to do them
+in the right way.  Its wisdom comes after action, as if engaged in a
+series of experiments.  But, happily for the nation, few blunders are
+committed that with our young life and elasticity are irreparable, and
+that, after all, are greater than are ordinarily committed by older and
+more experienced nations.  They are not of the most fatal character,
+and are, for the most part, such as are incident to the conceit, the
+heedlessness, the ardor, and the impatience of youth, and need excite
+no serious alarm for the future.
+
+There has been no little confusion in the public mind, and in that of
+the government itself, as to what reconstruction is, who has the power
+to reconstruct, and how that power is to be exercised.  Are the States
+that seceded States in the Union, with no other disability than that of
+having no legal governments? or are they Territories subject to the
+Union?  Is their reconstruction their erection into new States, or
+their restoration as States previously in the Union?  Is the power to
+reconstruct in the States themselves? or is it in the General
+government?  If partly in the people and partly in the General
+government, is the part in the General government in Congress, or in
+the Executive?  If in Congress, can the Executive, without the
+authority of Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it for
+Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State?   If the power is
+partly in the people of the disorganized States who or what defines
+that people, decides who may or may not vote in the reorganization?  On
+all these questions there has been much crude, if not erroneous,
+thinking, and much inconsistent and contradictory action.
+
+The government started with the theory that no State had seceded or
+could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in rebellion
+continued to be States in the Union.  That is, it held secession to be
+a purely personal and not a territorial insurrection.  Yet it
+proclaimed eleven States to be in insurrection against the United
+States, blockaded their ports, and interdicted all trade and
+intercourse of any kind with them. The Supreme Court, in order to
+sustain the blockade and interdict as legal, decided the war to be not
+a war against simply individual or personal insurgents but "a
+territorial civil war." This negatived the assumption that the States
+that took up arms against the United States remained all the while
+peaceable and loyal States, with all their political rights and powers
+in the Union.  The States in the Union are integral elements of the
+political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation vests
+in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the eleven
+States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a formidable war
+against the United States, were in the Union, an integral element of
+that sovereign authority which was carrying on a yet more formidable
+war against them.  Nevertheless, the government still held to its first
+assumption, that the States in rebellion continued to be States in the
+Union--loyal States, with all their rights and franchises unimpaired!
+
+That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in the
+doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union, is not to
+be wondered at.  The extent and determination of the secession movement
+were imperfectly understood, and the belief among the supporters of the
+government, and, perhaps, of the government itself, was, that it was a
+spasmodic movement for a temporary purpose, rather than a fixed
+determination to found an independent separate nationality; that it was
+and would be sustained by the real majority of the people of none of
+the States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the true
+policy of the government would be to treat the seceders with great
+forbearance, to avoid all measures likely to exasperate them or to
+embarrass their loyal fellow-citizens, to act simply on the defensive,
+and to leave the Union men in the several seceding States to gain a
+political victory at the polls over the secessionists, and to return
+their States to their normal position in the Union.
+
+The government may not have had much faith in this policy, and Mr.
+Lincoln's personal authority might be cited to the effect that it had
+not, but it was urged strongly by the Union men of the Border States.
+The administration was hardly seated in office, and its members were
+new men, without administrative experience; the President, who had been
+legally elected indeed, but without a majority of the popular votes,
+was far from having the full confidence even of the party that elected
+him; opinions were divided; party spirit ran high; the excitement was
+great, the crisis was imminent, the government found itself left by its
+predecessor without an army or a navy, and almost without arms or
+ordnance; it knew not how far it could count on popular support, and
+was hardly aware whom it could trust or should distrust; all was hurry
+and confusion; and what could the government do but to gain time, keep
+off active war as long as possible, conciliate all it could, and take
+ground which at the time seemed likely to rally the largest number of
+the people to its support?  There were men then, warm friends of the
+administration, and still warmer friends of their country, who believed
+that a bolder, a less timid, a less cautious policy would have been
+wiser, that in revolutionary times boldness, what in other times would
+be rashness, is the highest prudence, on the side of the government as
+well as on the side of the revolution; that when once it has shown
+itself, the rebellion that hesitates, deliberates, consults, is
+defeated and so is the government.  The seceders owed from the first
+their successes not to their superior organization, to their better
+preparation, or to the better discipline and appointment of their
+armies, but to their very rashness, to their audacity even, and the
+hesitancy, cautious and deliberation of the government.  Napoleon owed
+his successes as general and civilian far more to the air of power he
+assumed, and the conviction he produced of his invincibility in the
+minds of his opponents, than to his civil or military strategy and
+tactics, admirable as they both were.  But the government believed it
+wisest to adopt a conciliatory and, in many respects, a temporizing
+policy, and to rely more on weakening the secessionists in their
+respective States than on strengthening the hands and hearts of its own
+staunch and uncompromising supporters.  It must strengthen the Union
+party in the insurrectionary States, and as this party hoped to succeed
+by political manipulation rather than by military force, the government
+must rely rather on a show of military power than on gaining any
+decisive battle.  As it hoped, or affected to hope, to suppress the
+rebellion in the States that seceded through their loyal citizens, it
+was obliged to assume that secession was the work of a faction, of a
+few ambitious and disappointed politicians, and that the States were
+all in the Union, and continued in the loyal portion of their
+inhabitants.  Hence its aid to the loyal Virginians to organize as the
+State of Virginia, and its subsequent efforts to organize the Union men
+in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and its disposition to recognize
+their organization in each of those States as the State itself, though
+including only a small minority of the territorial people.  Had the
+facts been as assumed, the government might have treated the loyal
+people of each State as the State itself, without any gross usurpation
+of power; but, unhappily, the facts assumed were not facts, and it was
+soon found that the Union party in all the States that seceded, except
+the western part of Virginia and the eastern section of Tennessee,
+after secession had been carried by the popular vote, went almost
+unanimously with the secessionists; for they as well as the
+secessionists held the doctrine of State sovereignty; and to treat the
+handful of citizens that remained loyal in each State as the State
+itself, became ridiculous, and the government should have seen and
+acknowledged it.
+
+The rebellion being really territorial, and not personal, the State
+that seceded was no more continued in the loyal than in the disloyal
+population.  While the war lasted, both were public enemies of the
+United States, and neither had or could have any rights as a State in
+the Union.  The law recognizes a solidarity of all the citizens of a
+State, and assumes that, when a State is at war, all its citizens are
+at war, whether approving the war or not.  The loyal people in the
+States that seceded incurred none of the pains and penalties of
+treason, but they retained none of the political rights of the State in
+the Union, and, in reorganizing the State after the suppression of the
+rebellion, they have no more right to take part than the secessionists
+themselves.  They, as well as the secessionists, have followed the
+territory.  It was on this point that the government committed its
+gravest mistake.  As to the reorganization or reconstruction of the
+State, the whole territorial people stood on the same footing.
+
+Taking the decision of the Supreme Court as conclusive on the subject,
+the rebellion was territorial, and, therefore, placed all the States as
+States out of the Union, and retained them only as population and
+territory, under or subject to the Union.  The States ceased to exist,
+that is, as integral elements of the national sovereignty.  The
+question then occurred, are they to be erected into new States, or are
+they to be reconstructed and restored to the Union as the identical old
+States that seceded? Shall their identity be revived and preserved, or
+shall they be new States, regardless of that identity?  There can be no
+question that the work to be done was that of restoration, not of
+creation; no tribe should perish from Israel, no star be struck from
+the firmament of the Union.  Every inhabitant of the fallen States, and
+every citizen of the United States must desire them to be revived and
+continued with their old names and boundaries, and all true Americans
+wish to continue the constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.
+Who would see old Virginia, the Virginia of revolutionary fame, of
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, of Monroe, the "Old Dominion," once the
+leading State of the Union, dead without hope of resurrection? or South
+Carolina, the land of Rutledge, Moultrie, Laurens, Hayne, Sumter, and
+Marion?  There is something grating to him who values State
+associations, and would encourage State emulation and State pride, in
+the mutilation of the Old Dominion and the erection within her borders
+of the new State called West Virginia.  States in the Union are not
+mere prefectures, or mere dependencies on the General government,
+created for the convenience of administration.  They have an
+individual, a real existence of their own, as much so as have the
+individual members of society. They are free members, not of a
+confederation indeed, but of a higher political community, and
+reconstruction should restore the identity of their individual life,
+suspended for a moment by secession, but capable of resuscitation.
+
+These States had become, indeed, for a moment, territory under the
+Union; but in no instance had they or could they become territory that
+had never existed as States.  The fact that the territory and people
+had existed as a State, could with regard to none of them be
+obliterated, and, therefore, they could not be erected into absolutely
+new States.  The process of reconstructing them could not be the same
+as that of creating new States.  In creating a new State, Congress, ex
+necessitate, because there is no other power except the national
+convention competent to do it, defines the boundaries of the new State,
+and prescribes the electoral people, or who may take part in the
+preliminary organization but in reconstructing States it does neither,
+for both are done by a law Congress is not competent to abrogate or
+modify, and which can be done only by the United States in convention
+assembled, or by the State itself after its restoration.  The
+government has conceded this, and, in part, has acted on it.  It
+preserves, except in Virginia, the old boundaries, and recognizes, or
+rather professes to recognize the old electoral law, only it claims the
+right to exclude from the electoral people those who have voluntarily
+taken part in the rebellion.
+
+The work to be done in States that have seceded is that of
+reconstruction, not creation; and this work is not and cannot be done,
+exclusively nor chiefly by the General government, either by the
+Executive or by Congress.  That government can appoint military, or
+even provisional governors, who may designate the time and place of
+holding the convention of the electoral people of the disorganized
+State, as also the time and place of holding the elections of delegates
+to it, and superintend the elections so far as to see the polls are
+opened, and that none but qualified electors vote, but nothing more.
+All the rest is the work of the territorial electoral people
+themselves, for the State within its own sphere must, as one of the
+United States, be a self-governing community.  The General government
+may concede or withhold permission to the disorganized State to
+reorganize, as it judges advisable, but it cannot itself reorganize it.
+If it concedes the permission, it must leave the whole electoral people
+under the preexisting electoral law free to take part in the work of
+reorganization, and to vote according to their own judgment. It has no
+authority to purge the electoral people, and say who may or may not
+vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the qualifications of
+electors is left to the State, and can be settled neither by an act of
+Congress nor by an Executive proclamation.
+
+If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized States
+remain States in the Union, the General government could have nothing
+to say on the subject, and could no more interfere with elections in
+any one of them than it could with elections in Massachusetts or New
+York.  But even on the doctrine here defended it can interfere with
+them only by way of general superintendence.  The citizens have,
+indeed, lost their political rights, but not their private rights.
+Secession has not dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws
+of the disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.
+The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws
+survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law, or
+lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the State, that
+has, as a State, really lapsed.  They do so by will of the United
+States, which enacted them through the individual State, and which has
+not in convention abrogated them, save the law authorizing slavery, and
+its dependent laws.
+
+This point has already been made, but as it is one of the niceties of
+the American constitution, it may not be amiss to elaborate it at
+greater length.  The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and the
+majority of our jurists, would see to be that the States, under God,
+are severally sovereign in all matters not expressly confided to the
+General government, and therefore that the American sovereignty is
+divided, and the citizen owes a double allegiance--allegiance to his
+State, and allegiance to the United States--as if there was a United
+States distinguishable from the States.  Hence Mr. Seward, in an
+official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James, says: "The
+citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United States."  And
+nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union at all, hold that it
+is also due to the States, only that which is due to the United States
+is paramount, as that under feudalism due to the overlord.  But this is
+not the case.  There is no divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.
+Sovereignty is one, and vests not in the General government or in the
+State government, but in the United States, and allegiance is due to
+the United States, and to them alone.  Treason can be committed only
+against the United States, and against a State only because against the
+United States, and is properly cognizable only by the Federal courts.
+Hence the Union men committed no treason in refusing to submit to the
+secession ordinances of their respective States, and in sustaining the
+national arms against secession.
+
+There are two very common mistakes: the one that the States
+individually possess all the powers not delegated to the General
+government; and the other that the Union, or United States, have only
+delegated powers.  But the United States possess all the powers of a
+sovereign state, and the States individually and the General government
+possess only such powers as the United States in convention delegate to
+them respectively.  The sovereign is neither the General government nor
+the States severally, but the United States in convention.  The United
+States are the one indivisible sovereign, and this sovereign governs
+alike general matters in the General government, and particular matters
+in the several State governments.  All legal authority in either
+emanates from this one indivisible and plenary sovereign, and hence the
+law enacted by a State are really enacted by the United States, and
+derive from them their force and vitality as laws. Hence, as the United
+States survive the particular State, the lapse of the State does not
+abrogate the State laws, or dissolve civil society within its
+jurisdiction.
+
+This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular State
+does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on the United
+States.  Hence all civil rights of every sort created by the individual
+State are really held from the United States, and therefore it was that
+the people of non-slaveholding States were, as citizens of the United
+States, responsible for the existence of slavery in the States that
+seceded.  There is a solidarity of States in the Union as there is of
+individuals in each of the States.  The political error of the
+Abolitionists was not in calling upon the people of the United States
+to abolish slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the
+General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in their
+sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which were the
+abrogation of all government and civil society itself, instead of
+calling upon them to do it as the United States in convention
+assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of the United States
+in the way ordained by that constitution itself.  This understood, the
+constitution and laws of a defunct State remain in force by virtue of
+the will of the United States, till the State is raised from the dead,
+restored to life and activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they
+are repealed or altered by the United States or the national
+convention.  But as the defunct State could not, and the convention had
+not repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the
+General government had no alternative but to treat them and all rights
+created by them as the territorial law, and to respect them as such.
+
+What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose by
+secession?  They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal, the pains
+and penalties of treason, their political rights, or right, as has just
+been said, to be in their own department self-governing communities,
+with the right of representation in Congress and the electoral
+colleges, and to sit in the national convention, or of being counted in
+the ratification of amendments to the constitution--precisely what it
+was shown a Territorial people gain by being admitted as a State into
+the Union.  This is the difference between the constitutional doctrine
+and that adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.
+But what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General
+government gain over the people of States that secede, that it has not
+over others!  As to their internal constitution, their private rights
+of person or property, it gains none.  It has over them, till they are
+reconstructed and restored to the Union, the right to institute for
+them provisional governments, civil or military, precisely as it has
+for the people of a territory that is not and has never been one of the
+United States; but in their reconstruction it has less, for the
+geographical boundaries and electoral people of each are already
+defined by a law which does not depend on its will, and which it can
+neither abrogate nor modify.  Here is the difference between the
+constitutional doctrine and that of the so-called radicals.  The State
+has gone, but its laws remain, so far as the United States in
+convention does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the
+State survives, but because the United States so will, or are presumed
+to will.  The United States have by a constitutional amendment
+abrogated the laws of the several States authorizing slavery, and
+prohibited slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the Union; and no
+State can now be reconstructed and be admitted into the Union with a
+constitution that permits slavery, for that would be repugnant to the
+constitution of the United States.  If the constitutional amendment is
+not recognized as ratified by the requisite number of States, it is the
+fault of the government in persisting in counting as States what are no
+States.  Negro suffrage, as white suffrage, is at present a question
+for States.
+
+The United States guarantee to such State a republican form of
+government.  And this guarantee, no doubt, authorizes Congress to
+intervene in the internal constitution of a State so far as to force it
+to adopt a republican form of government, but not so far as to organize
+a government for a State, or to compel a territorial people to accept
+or adopt a State constitution for themselves.  If a State attempts to
+organize a form of government not republican, it can prevent it; and if
+a Territory adopts an unrepublican form, it can force it to change its
+constitution to one that is republican, or compel it to remain a
+Territory under a provisional government.  But this gives the General
+government no authority in the organization or re-organization of
+States beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the
+territorial people is republican.  To press it further, to make the
+constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire control of the
+organization or re-organization of a State, is a manifest abuse--a
+palpable violation of the constitution and of the whole American
+system.  The authority given by the clause is specific, and is no
+authority for intervention in the general reconstruction of the lapsed
+State.  It gives authority in no question raised by secession or its
+consequences, and can give none, except, from within or from without,
+there is an overt attempt to organize a State in the Union with an
+unrepublican form of government.
+
+The General government gives permission to the territorial people of
+the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with suffering
+them, without special recognition, to reorganize in their own way, and
+apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to Congress to admit them
+as a State, or not, according to its own discretion, in like manner as
+it admits a new State; but the re-organization itself must be the work
+of the territorial people themselves, under their old electoral law.
+The power that reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that
+admits them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress.  The
+Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that of
+seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever power he
+assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions given to the
+provisional governors, civil or military, is simply a usurpation of the
+power of Congress, which it rests with Congress to condone or not, as
+it may see fit.  Executive proclamations, excluding a larger or a
+smaller portion of the electoral or territorial people from the
+exercise of the elective franchise in reorganizing the State, and
+executive efforts to throw the State into the hands of one political
+party or another, are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the
+President, in relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace
+powers of the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer
+of the Union.  His business is to execute the laws, not to make them.
+His legislative authority is confined to his qualified veto on the acts
+of Congress, and to the recommendation to Congress of such measures as
+he believes are needed by the country.
+
+In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the
+Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace. The
+Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex necessitate, pace
+it ad interim under a military governor, but he cannot appoint even a
+provisional civil governor till Congress has created the office and
+given him authority to fill it; far less can be legally give
+instructions to the civil governor as to the mode or manner of
+reconstructing the disorganized State, or decide who may or may not
+vote in the preliminary reorganization. The Executive could do nothing
+of the sort, even in regard to a Territory never erected into a State.
+It belongs to Congress, not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or
+provisional governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana,
+Nebraska, and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines
+the boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines
+the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act
+herself.  Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life and
+vigor in the Union a disorganized State, has nothing to say as to its
+boundaries or its electoral people, nor any right to interfere between
+parties in the State, to throw the reconstructed State into the hands
+of one or another party.  All that Congress can insist on is, that the
+territorial people shall reconstruct with a government republican in
+form; that its senators and representatives in Congress, and the
+members of the State legislature, and all executive and judicial
+officers of the State shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support
+and defend the constitution of the United States.  In the whole work
+the President has nothing to do with reconstruction, except to see that
+peace is preserved and the laws are fully executed.
+
+It may be at least doubted that the Executive has power to proclaim
+amnesty and pardon to rebels after the civil war has ceased, and ceased
+it has when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted; for
+his pardoning power is only to pardon after conviction and judgment of
+the court: it is certain that he has no power to proscribe or punish
+even traitors, except by due process of law.  When the war is over he
+has only his ordinary peace powers.  He cannot then disfranchise any
+portion of the electoral people of a State that seceded, even though
+there is no doubt that they have taken part in the rebellion, and may
+still be suspected of disloyal sentiments.  Not even Congress can do
+it, and no power known to the constitution till the State is
+reconstructed can do it without due process of law, except the national
+convention.  Should the President do any of the things supposed, he
+would both abuse the power he has and usurp power that he has not, and
+render himself liable to impeachment.  There are many things very
+proper, and even necessary to be done, which are high crimes when done
+by an improper person or agent.  The duty of the President, when there
+are steps to be taken or things to be done which he believes very
+necessary, but which are not within his competency, is, if Congress is
+not in session, to call it together at the earliest practicable moment,
+and submit the matter to its wisdom and discretion.
+
+It must be remembered that the late rebellion was not a merely personal
+but a territorial rebellion.  In such a rebellion, embracing eleven
+States, and, excluding slaves, a population of at least seven millions,
+acting under an organized territorial government, preserving internal
+civil order, supporting an army and navy under regularly commissioned
+officers, and carrying on war as a sovereign nation--in such a
+territorial rebellion no one in particular can be accused and punished
+as a traitor.  The rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or
+reckless leaders, but of the people, and the responsibility of the
+crime, whether civil or military, is not individual, but common to the
+whole territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half
+of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise Their
+defeat and the failure of their cause must be their punishment.  The
+interest of the country, as well the sentiment of the civilized
+world--it might almost be said the law of nations--demands their
+permission to return to their allegiance, to be treated according to
+their future merits, as an integral portion of the American people.
+
+The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its former
+severity toward political offenders.  It regards with horror the savage
+cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate Jacobites, after their
+defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden, in 1746, their barbarous
+treatment of the United Irishmen in 1798, and her brutality to the
+mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the harshness of Russia toward the
+insurgent Poles, defeated in their mad attempts to recover their lost
+nationality; the severity of Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated
+Magyars.  The liberal press kept up for years, especially in England
+and the United States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and
+Neapolitan governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired
+to overthrow them.  Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than Jefferson
+Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release from a Turkish
+prison, and sent a national ship to bring him hither as the nation's
+guest.  The people of the United States have held from the first "the
+right of insurrection," and have given their moral support to every
+insurrection in the Old or New World they discovered, and for them to
+treat with severity any portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at
+the very worst, only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly
+avowed and pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the
+civilized world as little less than infamous.
+
+Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any
+severity toward the people lately in arms against the government. The
+interest of the nation demands not the death or the expulsion of the
+secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes proscribed by the
+President's proclamation of the 29th of May, 1865, nor even their
+disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary; but their restoration to
+citizenship, and their loyal co-operation with all true-hearted
+Americans, in hearing the wounds inflicted on the whole country by the
+civil war.  There need be no fear to trust them.  Their cause is lost;
+they may or may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever.  They
+appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from the
+ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated, terribly
+defeated.  They know it and feel it.  There is no further appeal for
+them; the judgment of the court of last resort has been rendered, and
+rendered against them.  The cause is finished, the controversy closed,
+never to be re-opened. Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is
+worse than idle to attempt to renew the war against it.  Henceforth
+their lot is bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and
+interests, for themselves and their children, and their children's
+children, depend on their being permitted to demean themselves
+henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens. They must seek
+their freedom, greatness, and glory in the freedom, greatness, and
+glory of the American republic, in which, after all, they can be far
+freer, greater, more glorious than in a separate and independent
+confederacy.  All the arguments and considerations urged by Union men
+against their secession, come back to them now with redoubled force to
+keep them henceforth loyal to the Union.
+
+They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot afford to
+lose them.  To hang or exile them, and depopulate and suffer to run to
+waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad thrift, sadder than that
+of deporting four millions of negroes and colored men.  To exchange
+only those excepted from amnesty and pardon by President Johnson,
+embracing some two millions or more, the very pars sanior of the
+Southern population, for what would remain or flock in to supply their
+place, would be only the exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for
+brass; to disfranchise them, confiscate their estates, and place them
+under the political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and
+the ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render
+rebellion chronic, and to convert seven millions of Americans, willing
+and anxious to be free, loyal American citizens, eternal enemies.  They
+have yielded to superior numbers and resources; beaten, but not
+disgraced, for they have, even in rebellion, proved themselves what
+they are--real Americans.  They are the product of the American soil,
+the free growth of the American republic, and to disgrace them were to
+disgrace the whole American character and people.
+
+The wise Romans never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for
+victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.  In civil war, the
+victory won by the government troops is held to be a victory for the
+country, in which all parties are victors, and nobody is vanquished.
+It was as truly for the good of the secessionists to fail, as it was
+for those, who sustained the government to succeed; and the government
+having forced their submission and vindicated its own authority, it
+should now leave them to enjoy, with others, the victory which it his
+won for the common good of all.  When war becomes a stern necessity,
+when it breaks out, and while it lasts, humanity requires it to be
+waged in earnest, prosecuted with vigor, and made as damaging, as
+distressful to the enemy as the laws of civilized nations permit.  It
+is the way to bring it to a speedy close, and to save life and
+property. But when it is over, when the enemy submits, and peace
+returns, the vanquished should be treated with gentleness and love.  No
+rancor should remain, no vengeance should be sought; they who met in
+mortal conflict on the battle-field should be no longer enemies, but
+embrace as comrades, as friends, as brothers.  None but a coward kicks
+a fallen foe; a brave people is generous, and the victors in the late
+war can afford to be generous generously. They fought for the Union,
+and the Union has no longer an enemy; their late enemies are willing
+and proud to be their countrymen, fellow-citizens, and friends; and
+they should look to it that small politicians do not rob them in the
+eyes of the world, by unnecessary and ill-timed severity to the
+submissive, of the glory of being, as they are, a great, noble,
+chivalric, generous, and magnanimous people.
+
+The government and the small politicians, who usually are the most
+influential with all governments, should remember that none of the
+secessionists, however much in error they have been, have committed the
+moral crime of treason.  They held, with the majority of the American
+people, the doctrine of State sovereignty, and on that doctrine they
+had a right to secede, and have committed no treason, been guilty of no
+rebellion.  That was, indeed, no reason why the government should not
+use all its force, if necessary, to preserve the national unity and the
+integrity of the national domain; but it is a reason, and a sufficient
+reason, why no penalty of treason should be inflicted on secessionists
+or their leaders, after their submission, and recognition of the
+sovereignty of the United States as that to which they owe allegiance.
+None of the secessionists have been rebels or traitors, except in
+outward act, and there can, after the act has ceased, be no just
+punishment where there has been no criminal intent.  Treason is the
+highest crime, and deserves exemplary punishment; but not where there
+has been no treasonable intent, where they who committed it did not
+believe it was treason, and on principles held by the majority of their
+countrymen, and by the party that had generally held the government,
+there really was no treason.  Concede State sovereignty, and Jefferson
+Davis was no traitor in the war he made on the United States, for he
+made none till his State had seceded.  He could not then be arraigned
+for his acts after secession, and at most, only for conspiracy, if at
+all, before secession.
+
+But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the State who,
+under the old electoral law, have the elective franchise, you throw the
+State into the hands of those who have been disloyal to the Union.  If
+so, and you cannot trust them, the remedy is not in disfranchising the
+majority, but in prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the
+territorial people still longer under the provisional government, civil
+or military.  The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been
+convicted of treason either to the State or the United States, and
+neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others disqualified
+on account of disloyalty.  But you must throw the State into the hands
+of those who took part, directly or indirectly, in the rebellion, if
+you reconstruct the States at all, for they are undeniably the great
+body of the territorial people in all the States that seceded.  These
+people having submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct
+the State as a State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of
+the United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime
+by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them.  It is
+impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with those
+alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the Union
+throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States. The State,
+resting on so small a portion of the people, would have no internal
+strength, no self-support, and could stand only as upheld by federal
+arms, which would greatly impair the free and healthy action of the
+whole American system.
+
+The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
+Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but without authority
+and without success.  The organizations, effected at great expense, and
+sustained only by military force, were neither States nor State
+governments, nor capable of being made so by any executive or
+congressional action.  If the disorganized States, as the government
+held, were still States in the Union, these organizations were
+flagrantly revolutionary, as effected not only without, but in defiance
+of State authority; if they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was
+the fact, they were equally unconstitutional and void of authority,
+because not created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who
+alone are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.
+
+If the Unionists had retained the State organization and government,
+however small their number, they would have held the State, and the
+government would have been bound to recognize and to defend them as
+such with all the force of the Union.  The rebellion would then have
+been personal, not territorial.  But such was not the case.  The State
+organization, the State government, the whole State authority rebelled,
+made the rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists,
+very respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at home,
+in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective States, and
+shorn of all political status or rights.  Their political status was
+simply that of the old loyalists, or adherents of the British crown in
+the American war for Independence, and it was as absurd to call them
+the State, as it would have been for Great Britain to have called the
+old Tories the colonies.
+
+The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
+disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that the
+people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the power of the
+Union vests in the General government.  The first, as we have seen, is
+the principle of so-called "squatter sovereignty," embodied in the
+famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which gave birth, in opposition, to the
+Republican party of 1856.  The people are sovereign only as the State,
+and the State is inseparable from the domain.  The Unionists without
+the State government, without any State organization, could not hold
+the domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to the
+United States, that is to say, ceases to exist.  The American democracy
+is territorial, not personal.
+
+The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
+invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union. This is
+the war power.  But, though apparently unlimited, the war power is yet
+restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural limitation when
+peace returns; and peace returns, in a civil war, when the rebels have
+thrown down their arms and submitted to the national authority, and
+without any formal declaration. During the war, or while the rebellion
+lasts, it can suspend the civil courts, the civil laws, the State
+constitutions, any thing necessary to the success of the war--and of
+the necessity the military authorities are the judges; but it cannot
+abolish, abrogate, or reconstitute them.  On the return of peace they
+revive of themselves in all their vigor.  The emancipation proclamation
+of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in certain States and
+parts of States, and if those whom it emancipated could not be
+re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish slavery, or change the laws
+authorizing it; and if the Government should be sustained by Congress
+or by the Supreme Court in counting the disorganized States as States
+in the Union, the legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with
+the exception of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before
+the war.[1]
+
+The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
+attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
+reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it is in
+its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being effected by
+military force, since its validity depends entirely on its being the
+free action of the territorial people to be reconstructed, the General
+government had and could have, with regard to it, only its ordinary
+peace powers.  Reconstruction is jure pacis, not jure belli.
+
+Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States nor
+State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any action of
+the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be legalized by being
+indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial people.  They are wrong,
+as are all usurpations; they are undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt
+to give the minority the power to rule the majority; they are dangerous
+inasmuch as they place the State in the hands of a party that can stand
+only as supported by the General government, and thus destroy the
+proper freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to
+corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to retard
+the period of complete pacification, which might be effected in three
+months as well as in three years, or twenty years; yet they can become
+legal, as other governments illegal in their origin become legal, with
+time and popular acquiescence. The right way is always the shortest and
+easiest; but when a government must oftener follow than lead the
+public, it is not always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy
+to take it. The general instincts of the people are right as to the end
+to be gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and
+politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession party,
+have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political control of the
+State when it is reconstructed.
+
+The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would, even
+if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their respective
+States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would the Unionists, if
+left to themselves.  There is no party at the South prepared to adopt
+negro suffrage, and there would be none at the North if the negroes
+constituted any considerable portion of the population.  As the
+reconstruction of a State cannot be done under the war power, the
+General government can no more enfranchise than it can disfranchise any
+portion of the territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage
+must be left, where the constitution leaves it--to the States
+severally, each to dispose of it for itself.  Negro suffrage will, no
+doubt, come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and
+the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.
+
+It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the reconstruction
+of the States disorganized by secession, for it would secure their
+re-construction with antislavery constitutions, and also make sure of
+the proposed antislavery amendment to the Constitution of the United
+States; but there is no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in
+the States needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom,
+the freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they understand
+nothing.  They would vote, for the most part, with their former
+masters, their employers, the wealthier and more intelligent classes,
+whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule, these will treat them with
+greater personal consideration and kindness than others.  The dislike
+of the negro, and hostility to negro equality, increase as you descend
+in the social scale.  The freedmen, without political instruction or
+experience, who have had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of
+loyalty or of disloyalty.  They have strong local attachments, but they
+can have no patriotism.  If they adhered to the Union in the rebellion,
+fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty, but because they
+knew that their freedom could come only from the success of the Union
+arms.  That freedom secured, they have no longer any interest in the
+Union, and their local attachments, personal associations, habits,
+tastes, likes and dislikes, are Southern, not Northern.  In any contest
+between the North and the South, they would take, to a man, the
+Southern side.  After the taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of
+the Union found, until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder
+to bear, when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and
+hootings of the negroes.  Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty, is at
+best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the elective
+franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the friends of the
+negro should, for the present, be contented with securing him simply
+equal rights of person and property.
+
+
+[1] This was the case in August, 1865.  It may be quite otherwise
+before these pages see the light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES.
+
+
+The most marked political tendency of the American people has been,
+since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and simple
+democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely popular
+basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably united to the
+national territory or domain, to the people as simply population,
+either as individuals or as the race.  Their tendency has
+unconsciously, therefore, been to change their constitution from a
+republican to a despotic, or from a civilized to a barbaric
+constitution.
+
+The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the people
+are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their name; that the
+rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to them; but they are
+the people territorially constituted and fixed to the soil,
+constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety perhaps than he
+thinks, calls a "territorial democracy."  To this territorial
+democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed two other
+democracies--the one personal and the other humanitarian--each alike
+hostile to civilization, and tending to destroy the state, and capable
+of sustaining government only on principles common to all despotisms.
+
+In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
+unrestrained action--a strong desire to be himself, not another--to be
+his own master, to go when and where he pleases, to do what he chooses,
+to take what he wants, wherever he can find it, and to keep what he
+takes.  It is strong in all nomadic tribes, who are at once pastoral
+and predatory, and is seldom weak in our bold frontier-men, too often
+real "border ruffians." It takes different forms in different stages of
+social development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
+Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief of
+the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its enjoyment to the
+few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a nobility--for nobleman meant
+originally only freeman, as it does his own consent, express or
+constructive.  This is the so-called Jeffersonian democracy, in which
+government has no powers but such as it derives from the consent of the
+governed, and is personal democracy or pure individualism
+philosophically considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."  Under
+this sort of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual
+sovereignty, expressed by politicians when they call the electoral
+people, half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there
+obviously can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there
+can be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
+confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as long as
+they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from which they may
+separate or secede whenever they find it for their interest or their
+pleasure to do so.  State sovereignty and secession are based on the
+same democratic principle applied to the several States of the Union
+instead of individuals.
+
+The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
+sections of the American people from the first, and has been greatly
+strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that government
+originates in compact.  The full realization of this tendency, which,
+happily, is impracticable save in theory, would be to render every man
+independent alike of every other man and of society, with full right
+and power to make his own will prevail.  This tendency was strongest in
+the slaveholding States, and especially, in those States, in the
+slaveholding class, the American imitation of the feudal nobility of
+mediaeval Europe; and on this side the war just ended was, in its most
+general expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
+sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
+democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
+democracy, represented by the Government.  This personal democracy has
+been signally defeated in the defeat of the late confederacy, and can
+hardly again become strong enough to be dangerous.
+
+But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical lines,
+effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant itself on
+humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength, and is not
+without menace to our future.  The solidarity of the race, which is the
+condition of all human life, founds, as we have seen, society, and
+creates what are called social rights, the rights alike of society in
+regard to individuals, and of individuals in regard to society.
+Territorial divisions or circumscriptions found particular societies,
+states, or nations; yet as the race is one and all its members live by
+communion with God through it and by communion one with another, these
+particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of each
+other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so that there
+is a real solidarity of nations as well as of individuals--the truth
+underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of the solidarity of peoples.
+
+The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law, binding on
+every particular nation, and which every civilized nation recognizes
+and enforces on its own subjects or citizens through its own courts as
+an integral part of its own municipal or national law.
+
+The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the rights
+of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are
+limited by international law, or the rights of universal society--the
+truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked.  The grand error of
+Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the
+race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God.  It
+therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international
+law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus
+leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
+foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real
+world.  Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its
+basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by
+the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the
+living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine
+Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian
+revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all
+Christendom.
+
+The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social
+basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity
+of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual;
+and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its
+personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to
+be free.  Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding
+the black or colored race as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right
+only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it.  Let the
+negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
+freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross
+outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him
+be my servant, which is best for him and for me. Why ask me to free
+him?  I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude.  Why
+appeal to me!  Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, is he my brother?  Is
+this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the
+same race with myself?  I believe it not.  But in some instances, at
+least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and
+sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter.  The tendency of
+the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all
+obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore
+all true civil society.
+
+At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite tendency--a
+tendency to exaggerate the social element, to overlook the territorial
+basis of the state, and to disregard the rights of individuals.  This
+tendency has been and is strong in the people called abolitionists.
+The American abolitionist is so engrossed with the unity that he loses
+the solidarity of the race, which supposes unity of race and
+multiplicity of individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
+authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
+circumscriptions.  Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
+humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, governments, and
+laws, and holds that he may trample on them all or give them to the
+winds at the call of humanity or "the higher law."  The principle on
+which he acts is as indefensible as the personal or egoistical
+democracy of the slaveholders and their sympathizers.  Were his
+socialistic tendency to become exclusive and realized, it would found
+in the name of humanity a complete social despotism, which, proving
+impracticable from its very generality, would break up in anarchy, in
+which might makes right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
+
+The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
+generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
+recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much out
+of the order of civilization, and as much in that of barbarism, as is
+the slaveholder himself.  Wendell Phillips is as far removed from true
+Christian civilization as was John C. Calhoun, and William Lloyd
+Garrison is as much of a barbarian and despot in principle and tendency
+as Jefferson Davis.  Hence the great body of the people in the
+non-slaveholding States, wedded to American democracy as they were and
+are could never, as much as they detested slavery, be induced to make
+common cause with the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the
+late civil war was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the
+time the social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
+enemy.  The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt that pure
+socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as pure
+individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that slavery has
+been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic reasons but really
+for reasons of state, in order to save the territorial democracy.  The
+territorial democracy would not unite to eliminate even so barbaric an
+element as slavery, till the rebellion gave them the constitutional
+right to abolish it; and even then so scrupulous were they, that they
+demanded a constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean
+work of it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
+
+The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in demanding
+its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds. Slavery is really
+a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American
+civilization.  The whole force of the national life opposes it, and
+must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean
+proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of
+modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their
+prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with
+cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the
+anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy.  They
+studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that
+those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in
+spite of slavery.  They failed to take into the account the fact that
+when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
+contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they
+were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times,
+they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized
+nations of all times.  They failed also to perceive that, if the
+Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in
+the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the
+territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on
+pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell,
+and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism
+within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.
+The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves
+were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
+master.  The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
+solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every
+species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.
+
+It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the
+real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise question in debate
+is clearly and distinctly understood by either party.  Slavery was only
+incidentally involved in the late war. The war was occasioned by the
+collision of two extreme parties; but it was itself a war between
+civilization and barbarism, primarily between the territorial democracy
+and the personal democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation,
+as much a war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
+individualism of the slaveholder.  Yet the victory, though complete
+over the former, is only half won over the latter, for it has left the
+humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for the moment stronger
+than ever.  The socialistic democracy was enlisted by the territorial,
+not to strengthen the government at home, as it imagines, for that it
+did not do, and could not do, since the national instinct was even more
+opposed to it than to the personal democracy; but under its antislavery
+aspect, to soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
+intervention, which was seriously threatened.  The populations of
+Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly anti-slavery,
+and if the war here appeared to them a war, not solely for the unity of
+the nation and the integrity of its domain, as it really was, in which
+they took and could take no interest, but a war for the abolition of
+slavery, their governments would not venture to intervene.  This was
+the only consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
+assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
+Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the rebellion
+only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors the late
+President only as their supposed liberator, not as the preserver of the
+unity and integrity of the nation.  This is natural enough abroad, and
+proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery policy of the government, which
+had become absolutely necessary to save the Republic long before it was
+adopted; yet it is not as the emancipator of some two or three millions
+of slaves that the American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham
+Lincoln, but, aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and
+troops of unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the
+American state, and the protector of modern civilization.  His
+anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but he
+adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
+
+There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or negro
+freedom.  That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of
+the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves
+at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to
+do it even at first.  This fact alone proves that they had, or believed
+they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro
+slavery.  They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State
+sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and
+independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their
+cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they
+had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same
+time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
+democracy, they would have succeeded.  It is not socialism nor
+abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered.  The
+Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both
+historically and legally false to say that the South has been
+subjugated.  The Union has preserved itself and American civilization,
+alike for North and South, East and West. The armies that so often met
+in the shock of battle were not drawn up respectively by the North and
+the South, but by two rival democracies, to decide which of the two
+should rule the future.  They were the armies of two mutually
+antagonistic systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly
+conscious of the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
+instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it but
+dimly discerned.  On both sides the cause was broader and deeper than
+negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the abolitionists
+have won.  The territorial democracy alone has won, and won what will
+prove to be a final victory over the purely personal democracy, which
+had its chief seat in the Southern States, though by no means confined
+to them.  The danger to American democracy from that quarter is forever
+removed, and democracy a la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
+throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of it.
+
+But in this world victories are never complete.  The socialistic
+democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
+territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not patriotism,
+that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the brave men led by
+McClellan, Grant, and Sherman.  The humanitarians are more dangerous in
+principle than the egoists, for they have the appearance of building on
+a broader and deeper foundation, of being more Christian, more
+philosophic, more generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more
+successful than under the guise of an angel of light.  His favorite
+guise in modern times is that of philanthropy.  He is a genuine
+humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is
+Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming sentiment
+of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes both
+individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when they believe
+they are earnestly and most successfully doing the work of God.  Your
+leading abolitionists are as much affected by satanophany as your
+leading confederates, nor are they one whit more philosophical or less
+sophistical.  The one loses the race, the other the individual, and
+neither has learned to apply practically that fundamental truth that
+there is never the general without the particular, nor the particular
+without the general, the race without individuals, nor individuals
+without the race.  The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we
+are taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race, and
+Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that original sin
+was in him actual or personal sin.
+
+The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men
+in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor to secure
+the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother Jansenist
+sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the freedom of
+grace.  Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of slavery, to-day he
+agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, and announces that when he
+has secured that he will agitate for female suffrage and the equality
+of the sexes, forgetting or ignorant that the relation of equality
+subsists only between individuals of the same sex; that God made the
+man the head of the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for
+the woman. Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in
+social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
+agitate for equality of property.  But since property, if recognized at
+all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther
+still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an
+injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the
+Englishman Godwin.  It is unjust that one should have what another
+wants, or even more than another.  What right have you to ride in your
+coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on
+foot?  Nor can our humanitarian stop there.  Individuals are, and as
+long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and
+some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger
+or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
+therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is
+inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the
+abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals
+to the race, or humanity, man in general.  He can find no limit to his
+agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a
+pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual
+circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder.  This
+is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown,
+if logical, he must go.
+
+The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be
+interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian
+democracy.  It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of
+the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our
+bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in
+prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal,
+hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor
+of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion.  They had no
+wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
+other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have
+regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they
+held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern
+abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization.  For
+the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy,
+all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even
+ostentatious in theirs.  The Catholics feared the war might result in
+encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian
+sects trusted that it would.  If the victory of the Union should turn
+out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world
+will have no reason to applaud it.
+
+That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as
+a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny.
+It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are
+in ecstasies over it.  The party claim it.  The European Socialists and
+Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict
+on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations.  A cause that can
+be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be
+strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element. It is no
+compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert
+not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are
+delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than
+ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more
+contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.
+
+But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host.
+Not they are the real victors.  When the smoke of battle has cleared
+away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and
+that that alone has triumphed.  The abolitionists, in so far as they
+asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that
+unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or
+authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a
+purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a
+watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
+crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary
+States are fully reconstructed.  The Southern or egoistical democrats,
+so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights
+of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every
+individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to
+protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so
+far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society
+neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
+sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
+government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they
+share in the victory, as the future will prove.
+
+European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
+against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no
+lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for
+men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers
+fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in
+modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as
+themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives,
+and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the
+waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to
+repair.  They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and
+civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history.  The
+American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species
+of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
+placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority,
+and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized
+governments--not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.
+The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative;
+but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false
+democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of
+insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an
+aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should
+always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever
+plots its destruction.  They must never be delighted again to have
+their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
+to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.  The people of the Northern
+States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the
+people of the Southern States.  Their press had taught them to call
+every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the
+traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they
+had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the
+Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and
+traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the
+public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they
+will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
+governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of
+lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
+revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign
+of barbarism.
+
+The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the
+failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating
+element, either in the particular State or in the United States, is
+henceforth to be apprehended.  But the tendency in the opposite
+direction may give the American state some trouble.  The tendency now
+is, as to the Union, consolidation, and as to the particular state,
+humanitarianism, socialism, or centralized democracy.  Yet this
+tendency, though it may do much mischief, will hardly become exclusive.
+The States that seceded, when restored, will always, even in abandoning
+State sovereignty, resist it, and still assert State rights.  When
+these States are restored to their normal position, they will always be
+able to protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
+rights by the General government.  The constitution, in the
+distribution of the powers of government, provides the States severally
+with ample means to protect their individuality against the
+centralizing tendency of the General government, however strong it may
+be.
+
+The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
+government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look upon it
+as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to regard the
+several State governments as subordinate instead of co-ordinate
+governments.  It is not improbable that the Executive, since the
+outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded throughout on that
+supposition, and hence his extraordinary assumptions of power; but when
+once peace is fully re-established and the States have all resumed
+their normal position in the Union, every State will be found prompt
+enough to resist any attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.
+Its instinct of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will
+be protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United States.
+
+The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of the
+States is far less than the danger that the Executive will usurp all
+the powers of Congress and the judiciary.  Congress, during the
+rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, with dictatorial
+powers, and these powers the Executive continues to exercise even after
+the rebellion is suppressed.  They were given and held under the rights
+of war, and for war purposes only, and expired by natural limitation
+when the war ceased; but the Executive forgets this, and, instead of
+calling Congress together and submitting the work of reconstruction of
+the States that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
+reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 372 and
+the people seem to like it.  He might and should, as commander-in-chief
+of the army and navy, govern them as military departments, by his
+lieutenants, till Congress could either create provisional civil
+governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the
+Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war
+power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every
+act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and
+done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.
+His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
+inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them.
+Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public sentiment, and a
+deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, which will be long in
+healing.
+
+The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
+originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a long time
+before.  There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to
+throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands
+of the Executive.  The patronage the Executive wields, even in times of
+peace, is so large that he has indirectly an almost supreme control
+over the legislative branch of the government.  For this, which is,
+and, if not checked will continue to be, a growing evil, there is no
+obvious remedy, unless the President is chosen for a longer term of
+office and made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous
+doctrine of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the
+true interests of the public.  Here is matter for the consideration of
+the American statesman.  But as to the usurpations of the Executive in
+these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, and will cease when
+the States are all restored.  They are abuses, but only temporary
+abuses, and the Southern States, when restored to the Union, will
+resume their rights in their own sphere, as self-governing communities,
+and legalize or undo the unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
+
+The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
+individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able to
+become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not begin at
+home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance. In the States
+in which the humanitarian tendency is the strongest, the territorial
+democracy has its most effective organization.  Prior to the outbreak
+of the rebellion the American people had asserted popular sovereignty,
+but had never rendered an account to themselves in what sense the
+people are or are not sovereign.  They had never distinguished the
+three sorts of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of
+the three is the distinctively American democracy.  For them, democracy
+was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought to avoid them
+either by exaggerating one or the other of the two exclusive
+tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself through
+restrictions on suffrage.  The latter class began to distrust universal
+suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to dream of modifying the
+American constitution so as to make it conform more nearly to the
+English model.  The war has proved that the were wrong, for nothing is
+more certain than that the people have saved the national unity and
+integrity almost in spite of their government.  The General government
+either was not disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against
+secession, till forced to do it by the people themselves.  No wise
+American can henceforth distrust American democracy.  The people may be
+trusted.  So much is settled.  But as the two extremes were equally
+democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of popular
+sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling to allow
+separation, and would not and did not engage in the war against
+secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of the national
+domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it was not democracy
+in the sense of either of the extremes that made the war and came out
+of it victorious; and hence the real American democracy must differ
+from them both, and is neither a personal nor a humanitarian, but a
+territorial democracy.  The true idea of American democracy thus comes
+out, for the first time, freed from the two extreme democracies which
+have been identified with it, and henceforth enters into the
+understandings as well as the hearts of the people.  The war has
+enlightened patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes
+reason--a well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional
+conviction.
+
+In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent the
+socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive.  In the States that
+seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not gain it, for
+it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, and habits of the
+Southern people, and the Southern people will not be exterminated nor
+swamped by migrations either from the North or from Europe.  They are
+and always will be an agricultural people, and an agricultural people
+are and always will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless
+unwittingly held for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special
+object in which they take a passionate interest.  The worst of all
+policies is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
+landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and depressed
+whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of the 29th of
+May, 1865.  Of course that policy will not be carried out, and if the
+negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote with the wealthy
+landholding class, and aid them in resisting all socialistic
+tendencies.  The humanitarians will fail for the want of a good social
+grievance against which they can declaim.
+
+In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as a
+speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance.  It is
+aided much by the congregational constitution of their religion; yet it
+is weak at home, and is resisted practically by the territorial
+division of power.  New England means Massachusetts, and nowhere is the
+subdivision of the powers of government carried further, or the
+constitution of the territorial democracy more complete, than in that
+State. Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
+evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the farther
+they are from home and the less its right to interfere with them, the
+more in earnest and the more effective for evil does it become.  Its
+nature is to mind every one's business but its own.  But now that
+slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in the United States a social
+grievance of magnitude enough to enlist any considerable number of the
+people, even of Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it.  Negro
+enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
+something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a question
+that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not serve their
+purpose of prolonged agitation.  They could not and never did carry
+away the nation, even on the question of slavery itself, and
+abolitionism had comparatively little direct influence in abolishing
+slavery; and the exclusion of negro suffrage can never be made to
+appear to the American people as any thing like so great a grievance as
+was slavery.
+
+Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
+numerous and an important portion of the population.  Their increasing
+numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much as the majority may
+dislike their religion, a constantly increasing influence, and it is
+idle to leave them out in counting the future of the country.  They
+will, in a very few years, be the best and most thoroughly educated
+class of the American people; and, aside from their religion, or,
+rather, in consequence of their religion, the most learned,
+enlightened, and intelligent portion of the American population; and as
+much as they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army
+and elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
+has won.  The best things written on the controversy have been written
+by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their religion to
+comprehend the real character of the American constitution than any
+other class of Americans, the moment they study it in the light of
+their own theology.  The American constitution is based on that of
+natural society, on the solidarity of the race, and the difference
+between natural society and the church or Christian society is, that
+the one is initial and the other teleological.  The law of both is the
+same; Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
+exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic. If
+they have been backward in their sympathy with the government, it has
+been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the humanitarian
+or socialistic elements they detected in the Republican party, joined
+with a prejudice against political and social negro equality.  But
+their church everywhere opposes the socialistic movements of the age,
+all movements in behalf of barbarism, and they may always be counted on
+to resist the advance of the socialistic democracy.  If the country has
+had reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
+in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, indeed,
+for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to their religion,
+which has been and is the grand protectress of modern society and
+civilization.
+
+From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to the
+extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private property
+as bases of political rights or franchises.  This tendency has often
+been justified on the ground that the elective franchise is a natural
+right; which is not true, because the elective franchise is political
+power, and political power is always a civil trust, never a natural
+right, and the state judges for itself to whom it will or will not
+confide the trust; but there can be no doubt that it is a normal
+tendency, and in strict accordance with the constitution of American
+civil society, which rests on the unity of the race, and public instead
+of private property.  All political distinctions founded on birth,
+race, or private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
+necessarily eliminated by its normal developments.  To contend that
+none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a particular
+race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary, to the order of
+civilization the New World is developing.  The only qualification for
+the elective franchise the American system can logically insist on is
+that the elector belong to the territorial people--that is, be a
+natural-born or a naturalized citizen, be a major in full possession of
+his natural faculties, and unconvicted of any infamous offence.  The
+State is free to naturalize foreigners or not, and under such
+restrictions as it judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must
+treat them as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
+
+The naturalization question is one of great national importance. The
+migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the national
+population, and to the national wealth and resources, but less,
+perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity of elections, or
+the wisdom and integrity of the government.  It is impossible that
+there should be perfect harmony between the national territorial
+democracy and individuals born, brought up, and formed under a
+political order in many respects widely different from it; and there is
+no doubt that the democracy, in its objectionable sense, has been
+greatly strengthened by the large infusion of naturalized citizens.
+There can be no question that, if the laboring classes, in whom the
+national sentiment is usually the strongest, had been composed almost
+wholly of native Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in
+the cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
+persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
+difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies.  But to
+leave so large a portion of the actual population as the foreign born
+residing in the country without the rights of citizens, would have been
+a far graver evil, and would, in the late struggle, have given the
+victory to secession.  There are great national advantages derived from
+the migration hither of foreign labor, and if the migration be
+encouraged or permitted, naturalization on easy and liberal terms is
+the wisest, the best, and only safe policy.  The children of
+foreign-born parents are real Americans.
+
+Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent powers
+of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually more active,
+more energetic than the children of the older inhabitants of the
+country among whom they settle.  Some of our first men in civil life
+have been sons of foreign-born parents, and so are not a few of our
+greatest and most successful generals.  The most successful of our
+merchants have been foreign-born.  The same thing has been noticed
+elsewhere, especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to
+Holland, Germany, England, and Ireland.  The immigration of so many
+millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American people
+much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, and made them
+a superior people on the whole to what they would otherwise have been.
+This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority of race or
+blood, but is a natural effect of breaking men away from routine, and
+throwing them back on their own individual energies and personal
+resources.
+
+Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
+recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to freedom;
+but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward progress of
+American democracy, which asserts equal rights for all, and not for a
+race or class only.  Some would confine suffrage to landholders, or, at
+least, to property-holders; but that is inconsistent with the American
+idea, and is a relic of the barbaric constitution which founds power on
+private instead of public wealth.  Nor are property-owners a whit more
+likely to vote for the public good than are those who own no property
+but their own labor.  The men of wealth, the business men,
+manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who exert
+the worst influence on government in every country, for they always
+strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their own private
+interests.  They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let government take care
+of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor," instead of the
+far safer maxim, "Let government take care of the weak, the strong can
+take care of themselves." Universal suffrage is better than restricted
+suffrage, but even universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private
+property from having an undue political influence.
+
+The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable from it,
+and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an inferior class
+to those elevated by restricted suffrage.  The Congress of 1860, or of
+1862. was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of
+the country, and not inferior to that of 1776, or that of 1789; and the
+Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as
+it was during the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain,
+and not inferior to that of France during the Crimean war.  The Crimean
+war developed and placed in high command, either with the English or
+the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, to say
+nothing of others.  The more aristocratic South proved itself, in both
+statesmanship and generalship, in no respect superior to the
+territorial democracy of the North and West.
+
+The great evil the country experiences is not from universal suffrage,
+but from what may be called rotation in office.  The number of
+political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern and Western
+States especially, the representatives in Congress are changed every
+two or four years, and a member, as soon as he has acquired the
+experience necessary to qualify him for his position, is dropped, not
+through the fickleness of his constituency, but to give place to
+another whose aid had been necessary to his first or second election.
+Employes are "rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful,
+but because there are others who want their places.  This is all bad,
+but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong public
+opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which is mainly
+formed by it.  There is, no doubt, a due share of official corruption,
+but not more than elsewhere, and that would be much diminished by
+increasing the salaries of the public servants, especially in the
+higher offices of the government, both General and State.  The pay to
+the lower officers and employes of the government, and to the privates
+and non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in general,
+too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both the civil and
+military service is too low, and relatively far lower than it was when
+the government was first organized.
+
+The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at all
+by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility to the
+military spirit and a standing army.  The depreciation of the military
+spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental democracy, which,
+like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and brings about the very
+evils it seeks to avoid.  The hostility to standing armies is inherited
+from England, and originated in the quarrels between king and
+parliament, and is a striking evidence of the folly of that bundle of
+antagonistic forces called the British constitution.  In feudal times
+most of the land was held by military service, and the reliance of
+government was on the feudal militia; but no real progress was made in
+eliminating barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at
+its command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies. It
+is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost
+more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary for royal
+supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
+
+No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the military
+spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not held in honor
+and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size is public economy.
+It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who are worth more there than
+anywhere else; it creates honorable places for gentlemen or the sons of
+gentlemen without wealth, in which they can serve both themselves and
+their country.  Under a democratic government the most serious
+embarrassment to the state is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or
+not fitted to support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in
+a democratic government than in any other.  The civil service,
+divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, and
+art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class, and the
+army and navy would be an economy and a real service to the state were
+they maintained only for the sake of the rank and position they give to
+their officers, and the wholesome influence these officers would exert
+on society and the politics of the country--this even in case there
+were no wars or apprehension of wars.  They supply an element needed in
+all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit,
+perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which
+has in it always something low and sordid.
+
+But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations
+to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can
+have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human
+animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor,
+and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for
+war.  A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have
+prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand
+well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President
+on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion,
+or have instantly suppressed it.  The cost of maintaining a land army
+of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would
+have been, in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion
+has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
+been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on
+the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual
+losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand
+millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the assessed value of the whole
+property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860,
+and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of
+property since.  To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require
+a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
+discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been necessary to
+maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the
+prevention of the rebellion.
+
+The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder
+much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its
+military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their
+normal order; but a regular army--not militia or volunteers, who are
+too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a
+navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a
+peace establishment.  The army of a hundred thousand men must form a
+cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to
+place the army on a war footing.  Less will answer neither for peace
+nor war, for the nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain
+henceforth the rank of a first-class military and maritime power, and
+take a leading part in political movements of the civilized world, and,
+to a great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
+
+Canning boasted that he had raised up the New World to redress the
+balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened Spain and gave
+the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the Emperor of the French is
+trying, by strengthening Italy and Spain, and by a French protectorate
+in Mexico, to secure to France, both in the Old World and the New--a
+magnificent dream, but not to be realized.  His uncle judged more
+wisely when he sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought
+only to secure to France the hegemony of the Old.  But the hegemony of
+the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she will
+have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even in Europe.
+To maintain this position, which is imperative on her, she must always
+have a large armed force, either on foot or in reserve, which she can
+call out and put on a war footing at short notice.  The United States
+must henceforth be a great military and naval power, and the old
+hostility to a standing army and the old attempt to bring the military
+into disrepute must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
+
+Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
+egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race and
+socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the race, is the
+most dangerous.  The egoistical form is checked, sufficiently weakened
+by the defeat of the rebels; but the social form believes that it has
+triumphed, and that individuals are effaced in society, and the States
+in the Union.  Against this, more especially should public opinion and
+American statesmanship be now directed, and territorial democracy and
+the division of the powers of government be asserted and vigorously
+maintained. The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy
+is conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet arrived,
+as the Germans say, at self consciousness--_selbsbewusstseyn_--and
+operates only instinctively. All the dominant theories and
+sentimentalities are against it, and it is only Providence that can
+sustain it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY--POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
+
+
+It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every living
+nation receives from Providence a special work or mission in the
+progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, or the end for
+which it exists; and that the special mission of the United States is
+to continue and complete in the political order the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.
+
+Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic
+alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to the
+civilization of the race.  Canada and the other British Provinces,
+Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the
+South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without
+being missed by the civilized world.  They represent no idea, and the
+work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them.  If
+they keep up with the progress of civilization, it is all that can be
+expected of them. France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the
+rest of Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
+laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; and it
+is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or jointly
+advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman Empire, except in
+abolishing slavery and including in the political people the whole
+territorial people.  They can only develop and give a general
+application to the fundamental principles of the Roman constitution.
+That indeed is much, but it adds no new element nor new combination of
+preexisting elements.  But nothing of this can be said of the United
+States.
+
+In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and the
+great principle of the territorial constitution of power, instead of
+the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or the monarchical;
+and yet with true civil or political principles it mixed up nearly all
+the elements of the barbaric constitution. The gentile system of Rome
+recalls the patriarchal, and the relation that subsisted between the
+patron and his clients has a striking resemblance to that which
+subsists between the feudal lord and his retainers, and may have had
+the same origin.  The three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into
+which the Roman people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may
+have been, as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their
+origin, but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
+division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not local,
+but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the
+individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of
+kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with
+our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into
+tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans.  The adopted member
+was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited
+its goods.  Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the
+three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
+restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the
+house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by
+houses, not by individuals en masse.  After all, practically the Roman
+senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for
+no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of noble blood.
+The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being
+included in the three tribes, when they came to be a power in the
+republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and
+patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or
+territorial people.
+
+The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the
+right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state,
+and the tenant held it from the state.  The domain was vested in the
+state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica,
+not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from
+barbarism.  In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more
+republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and
+introduced the principle of territorial democracy.  The division into
+demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial
+division, not personal nor genealogical.  And if the equality of all
+men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class
+stood on the same footing.  Athens and other Greek cities, though
+conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on
+Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors
+than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of
+Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they
+represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship
+were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and
+the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and
+uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
+
+The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
+gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of
+the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in
+the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it
+held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.
+It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if,
+as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic
+equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than
+men and without political rights.  Practically, power was an attribute
+of birth and of private wealth.  Suffrage was almost universal among
+freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and
+were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the
+comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia
+centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and
+noble few.
+
+The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth
+Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality
+of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on
+principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents it as a
+commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right
+to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as
+servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of
+imperial clemency.  But it has never yet been proved that the emperor
+has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a
+just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the
+proud, but spare the submissive."  In a just war the emperor may kill
+on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
+now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does
+not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance,
+have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.  But even if it did, it
+gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their
+innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary
+slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the
+parent.  The law, indeed, assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a
+person and treated him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror,
+and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue
+only to his owner.  But there is no power in heaven or earth that can
+make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a
+clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the
+slave his personality and treats him as a thing. I the unity of all men
+had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have
+attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its penal
+character, or indeed on any ground whatever.  All men are born under
+the law of nature with equal rights, and the civil law can justly
+deprive no man of his liberty, but for a crime, committed by him
+personally, that justly forfeits his liberty to society.
+
+These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European nations
+have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.  They can carry out
+practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, abolish
+slavery in every form, make all men equal before the law, and the
+political people commensurate with the territorial people.  Indeed,
+France has already done it.  She has abolished slavery, villenage,
+serfage, political aristocracy, asserted the equality of all men before
+the law, vindicated the sovereignty of the people, and established
+universal suffrage, complete social and territorial democracy.  The
+other nations may do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or
+advance farther.  Yet in France, territorial democracy the most
+complete results only in establishing the most complete imperial
+centralism, usually called Caesarism.
+
+The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor reigns
+"by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and therefore, that
+by the grace of God and the will of the nation he may cease to reign;
+but while he reigns he is supreme, and his will is law.  The
+constitution imposes no real or effective restraint on his power: while
+he sits upon the throne he is practically France, and the ministers are
+his clerks; the council of state, the senate, and the legislative body
+are merely his agents in governing the nation.  This may, indeed, be
+changed, but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic
+centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of
+antagonisms, checks and balances, called constitutionalism, or
+parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and
+which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
+
+The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all orders
+the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the principle of
+all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all opposites or extremes.
+Mankind will be logical; and the worst of all tyrannies is that which
+forbids them to draw from their principles their last logical
+consequences, or that prohibits them the free explication and
+application of the Divine Idea, in which consists their life, their
+progress.  Such tyranny strikes at the very existence of society, and
+wars against the reality of things.  It is supremely sophistical, and
+its success is death; for the universe in its constitution is supremely
+logical, and man, individually and socially, is rational.  God is the
+author and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its
+order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically Father,
+Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.  The Son or Word is
+the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God is living God a
+real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not abstract or dead
+unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, Plotinus, and Proclus.  In the
+Holy Trinity is the principle and prototype of all society, and what is
+called the solidarity of the race is only the outward expression, or
+copy in the external order, of what theologians term the circumsession
+of the three Divine Persons of the Godhead.
+
+Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature either
+in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity alone, is
+sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality.  It sins
+against God, and must fail of its end.  The English system, which is
+based on antagonistic elements, on opposites, without the middle term
+that conciliates them, unites them, and makes them dialectically one,
+copies the Divine model in its distinctions alone, which, considered
+alone, are opposites or contraries.  It denies, if Englishmen could but
+see it, the unity of God.  The French, or imperial system, which
+excludes the extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites,
+instead of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and
+copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called pantheism.
+The English constitution has no middle term, and the French no
+extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine Trinity, the original
+basis and type of the syllogism.  The human race can be contented with
+neither, for neither allows it free scope for its inherent life and
+activity.  The English system tends to pure individualism; the French
+to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element
+of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.
+
+This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and lifeless
+abstraction, but the highest theological and philosophical truth,
+without which there were no reason, no man, no society; for God is the
+first principle of all being, all existence, all science, all life, and
+it is in Him that we live and move and have our being.  God is at the
+beginning, in the middle, and at the end of all things--the universal
+principle, medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His
+existence being directly or indirectly impugned.  In a deeper sense
+than is commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit
+domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.  The English
+constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of
+reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with the
+others for the mastery.  For a long time the king labored, intrigued,
+and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which he was held by
+the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and people united and
+humbled the crown; and now the people are at work seeking to sap both
+the crown and the nobles.  The state is constituted to nobody's
+satisfaction; and though all may unite in boasting its excellences, all
+are at work trying to alter or amend it.  The work of constituting the
+state with the English is ever beginning, never ending.  Hence the
+eternal clamor for parliamentary reform.
+
+Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains
+of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal
+rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and
+wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish
+either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic
+centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the
+revolutionists of Europe.  The special merit of the American system is
+not in its democracy alone, as too many at home and abroad imagine; but
+along with its democracy in the division of the powers of government,
+between a General government and particular State governments, which
+are not antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters,
+and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
+
+Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without
+creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any
+European state.  There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in
+Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to
+effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of
+them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund,
+similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently
+attempted and have so signally failed to establish.  An intelligent
+Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in
+operation three months before it became evident that the principle on
+which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat. It was
+that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more
+than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused
+the collapse of the Confederacy.  The numbers were relatively about
+equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively
+not much inferior to those of the Government.  So at least the
+Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of
+the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as
+much care and accuracy as any men could.  Foreign powers also, friendly
+as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain
+their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
+loyal States.  The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of
+State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.  The war has
+proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch
+for confederated states.
+
+The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals. As
+equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in
+which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals,
+then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over
+again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the
+Persian war, and its fate.  A union like the American cannot be created
+by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.  The Emperor of the
+French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and
+divide the powers of government between them as individual and as
+united states.  They would necessarily hold from the imperial
+government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its
+functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central
+government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our
+President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to
+make the government of the United States.  The elements of a state
+constituted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor
+in the constitution of European society; and the American constitution
+would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered
+it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
+
+Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it
+in the best way she could.  At first it was a single tribe or people
+distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a
+second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual,
+composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the Tities or Quirites, and,
+afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or
+Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided
+into one hundred houses or gentes.  Each house in each tribe was
+represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number
+of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
+fixed.  Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
+without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
+itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
+cities.  The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into
+gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the
+tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the
+division was not a division of the powers of government between two
+co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the
+British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.
+
+The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial
+veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was
+an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division
+between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and
+the particular.  The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as
+Niebuhr calls them--who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early
+constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and
+especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an
+obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive
+power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
+
+There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the
+American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated
+municipalities.  These municipalities, modelled chiefly after that of
+Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs;
+but their local powers were not co-ordinate in their own sphere with
+those exercised by the Roman municipality, but subordinate and
+dependent.  The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held
+their rights subject to its will.  They were formally, or virtually,
+subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman
+emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.
+Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as
+subjects, and at first these municipal organizations secured the
+progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under
+the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed
+by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal
+agents of the empire.  So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
+burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to
+compel them to enter the municipal government; and it became, under the
+later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves
+into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed.  There are actually
+imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.
+Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover
+in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more
+favorable result.
+
+Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
+common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements
+retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that
+philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it
+from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on
+the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which
+seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power.  No
+greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater
+contribution to civilization to be made.  Nowhere else than in this New
+World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this
+problem be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
+Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
+
+But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny,
+for religion and politics go together.  Church and state, as
+governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state
+is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order--in the
+principles revealed or affirmed by religion--and are inseparable from
+them.  There is no state without God, any more than there is a church
+without Christ or the Incarnation.  An atheist may be a politician, but
+if there were no God there could be no politics, theological principles
+are the basis of political principles.  The created universe is a
+dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its
+parts cohere and are essential to one another.  All has its origin and
+prototype in the Triune God, and throughout expresses unity in
+triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real
+being and no actual or possible life. Every thing has its principle,
+medium, and end.  Natural society is initial, civil government is
+medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions
+in one indissoluble whole.
+
+Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine
+creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the
+Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.  True, he communes with
+God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he
+is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance
+for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the
+source of life--not either the beginning or the end of his communion.
+They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of
+themselves, can impart none.  They are in the order of second causes,
+and second causes, without the first cause, are nought.  Communion
+which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
+instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.
+As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in
+some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both
+individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform
+either their politics to their religion or their religion to their
+politics.  Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political
+society in its own image and likeness, and every political system
+struggles to harmonize Christianity with itself.  If, then, the United
+States have a political destiny, they have a religious destiny
+inseparable from it.
+
+The political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to
+the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine Idea in creation.
+Their religious destiny is to render practicable and to realize the
+normal relations between church and state, religion and politics, as
+concreted in the life of the nation.
+
+In politics, the United States are not realizing a political theory of
+any sort whatever.  They, on the contrary, are successfully refuting
+all political theories, making away with them, and establishing the
+state--not on a theory, not on an artificial basis or a foundation laid
+by human reason or will, but on reality, the eternal and immutable
+principles in relation to which man is created.  They are doing the
+same in regard to religious theories.  Religion is not a theory, a
+subjective view, an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle,
+a law, and a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace,
+practical conformity to what is universally true and real.  The United
+States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad havoc with
+religious theories as with political theories, and are pressing on with
+irresistible force to the real or the Divine order which is expressed
+in the Christian mysteries, which exists independent of man's
+understanding and will, and which man can neither make nor unmake.
+
+The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new
+religion nor to found a new church.  All real religion is catholic, and
+is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true.  Even our
+Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion,
+but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time
+what had been determined in eternity.  God has himself founded the
+church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real
+principles. His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on
+catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are
+universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in
+the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces
+and sustains all things.  Founded on universal and immutable
+principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the
+church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men.
+Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they
+are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and
+independent of him.  Religion is above and independent of the state,
+and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to
+accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles
+of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
+
+But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her dogmas
+are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and unalterable, the
+relations between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities may be
+changed or modified by the changes of time and place.  These relations
+have not been always the same, but have differed in different ages and
+countries.  During the first three centuries of our era the church had
+no legal status, and was either connived at or persecuted by the state.
+Under the Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her
+prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and ecclesiastical
+questions, and were made, in some sense, civil magistrates, and paid as
+such by the empire.  Under feudalism, the prelates received investiture
+as princes and barons, and formed alone, or in connection with the
+temporal lords, an estate in the kingdom.  The Pope became a temporal
+prince and suzerain, at one time, of a large part of Europe, and
+exercised the arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian
+sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects. Since the
+downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized
+monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her
+temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil
+functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.
+
+In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the
+national church is held in strict subjection to the civil authority, as
+in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of the state; in the
+other states of Europe, as France, Austria, Spain, and Italy, she is
+treated with distrust by the civil government, and allowed hardly a
+shadow of freedom and independence.  In France, which has the proud
+title of eldest daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not
+freer than they are in Turkey.  All religious are said to be free, and
+all are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.  The
+emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to concede
+the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he
+judges expedient for his own secular interests.  In Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy
+of the civil authorities is the same, or worse.  It may be safely
+asserted that, except in the United States, the church is either held
+by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy.  The relation
+is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave
+detriment of both religion and civilization.
+
+It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of
+civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages;
+and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations,
+would, in the present state of men's minds in Europe, be construed, if
+approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or
+the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and
+pleasure in utter disregard of the law of God, the moral order, or the
+immutable distinctions between right and wrong.  It could only favor
+the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the
+spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the
+entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
+condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither
+the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can
+understand practically such separation in any other sense than the
+complete emancipation of our entire secular life from the law of God,
+or the Divine order, which is the real order.  It is not the union of
+church and state--that is, the union, or identity rather, of religious
+and political principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the
+disunion or antagonism of church and state.  But this is nowhere
+possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state
+organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting
+from its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or
+the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things
+are created and governed.  Nowhere else is it practicable, at present,
+to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.
+
+But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable
+in the New.  The state here being organized in accordance with catholic
+principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the church.
+Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective
+spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same
+Divine Idea.  The church can trust the state, and the state can trust
+the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.
+Each by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
+other.  It is true the church is not formally established as the civil
+law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there
+is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and
+independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons.  The need of
+establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and
+penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a
+barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not
+organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false
+principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine
+order of things.  When the state is constituted in harmony with that
+order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
+constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or
+what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity.
+The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing
+principle and real interior life.  The external establishment, by legal
+enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add
+nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or
+piety--neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their
+nature, be free-will offerings to God.
+
+In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true
+religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and
+uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by
+their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them.  The American
+state recognizes only the catholic religion.  It eschews all
+sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their
+peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws.  The
+state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and
+everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as
+outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent
+vitality or want of vitality.  The state conscience is catholic, not
+sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all
+religions, the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic
+in its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
+oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true.  The church being
+free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the
+freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can
+ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from
+external institutions, or from social and political organizations.
+
+This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations
+may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority.
+The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as
+they are, not as they are not.  To deal with a child as with an adult,
+or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only
+acting a lie.  The church cannot treat men as free men where they are
+not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is
+undeveloped.  She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and
+culture of individuals, and to the greater or less progress of nations
+in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her
+constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline
+with the variations of time and place.  Many of her canons, very proper
+and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are
+needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World.  Under
+the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and
+trust them as freemen, because free men they are.  The freeman asks,
+why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be
+secured.  The simple reason that the church commands will rarely
+satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that.  The
+full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all
+obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic
+command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
+expected of the people reared under the American system, not because
+they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they
+insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the
+understanding, not of the will or the affections alone.  They are
+trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to distinguish
+between the law and the person of the magistrate.  They can obey God,
+but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in
+the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they
+will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience.  The reason
+that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the
+reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men,
+or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does
+not suffice for them in its maturity.  The appeal to external authority
+was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous
+ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with
+the state.
+
+This trait of the American character is not uncatholic.  An
+intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction,
+after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine
+order--the obedience of a free man, not of a slave--is far more
+consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God,
+than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand
+far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that must be
+governed as children or barbarians.  It is possible that the people of
+the Old World are not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion
+any more than they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have
+been trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed to
+look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in the
+reason of things.  They understand no reason for obedience beyond the
+external command, and do not believe it possible to give or to
+understand the reason why the command itself is given. They regard the
+authority of the church as a thing apart, and see no way by which faith
+and reason can be harmonized.  They look upon them as antagonistic
+forces rather than as integral elements of one and the same whole.
+Concede them the regimen of freedom, and their religion has no support
+but in their good-will, their affections, their associations, their
+habits, and their prejudices.  It has no root in their rational
+convictions, and when they begin to reason they begin to doubt.  This
+is not the state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied
+under the political regime established elsewhere than in the United
+States.  In every state in the world, except the American, the civil
+constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or less, the logic of
+things; and, therefore, in no one of them can the people receive a
+thoroughly dialectic training, or an education in strict conformity to
+the real order.  Hence, in them all, the church is more or less
+obstructed in her operations, and prevented from carrying out in its
+fulness her own Divine Idea. She does the best she can in the
+circumstances and with the materials with which she is supplied, and
+exerts herself continually to bring individuals and nations into
+harmony with her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the
+nations is a struggle, a warfare.
+
+The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on real
+catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents none of
+these obstacles, and must, in their progressive development or
+realization of their political idea, put an end to this warfare, in so
+far as a warfare between church and state, and leave the church in her
+normal position in society, in which she can, without let or hindrance,
+exert her free spirit, and teach and govern men by the Divine law as
+free men.  She may encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and
+indifference in few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from
+the state, which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually
+give way before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the truth and
+reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of her
+ministers.  The American people are, on the surface, sectarians or
+indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less uncatholic than the
+people of any other country because they are, in their intellectual and
+moral development, nearer to the real order, or, in the higher and
+broader sense of the word more truly civilized.  The multitude of sects
+that obtain may excite religious compassion for those who are carried
+away by them, for men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny
+only by truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth,
+and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need excite
+no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more or less of
+catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national life repel them,
+in so far as they are sectarian and not catholic, as substances that
+cannot be assimilated to the national life.  The American state being
+catholic in its organic principles, as is all real religion, and the
+church being free, whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without
+any support in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself,
+it must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.
+
+The sects themselves have a half unavowed conviction that they cannot
+subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil authority.  They
+are free, but do not feel safe in the United States.  They know the
+real church is catholic, and that they themselves are none of them
+catholic.  The most daring among them even pretends to be no more than
+a "branch" of the catholic church.  They know that only the catholic
+church can withstand the pressure of events and survive the shocks of
+time, and hence everywhere their movements to get rid of their
+sectarianism and to gain a catholic character.  They hold conventions
+of delegates from the whole sectarian world, form "unions,"
+"alliances," and "associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the
+catholic church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the
+Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost.  The most
+they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world, is to create
+a confederation, and confederated sects are something very different
+from a church inherently one and catholic.  It is no more the catholic
+church than the late Southern Confederacy was the American state.  The
+sectarian combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and
+retard, for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state
+organized in accordance with catholic principles, and left to
+themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and must
+soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.
+
+Such being the case, no sensible Catholic can imagine that the church
+needs any physical force against the sects, except to repel actual
+violence, and protect her in that freedom of speech and possession
+which is the right of all before the state.  What are called religious
+establishments are needed only where either the state is barbarous or
+the religion is sectarian.  Where the state, in its intrinsic
+constitution, is in accordance with catholic principles, as in the
+United States, the church has all she needs or can receive.  The state
+can add nothing more to her power or her security in her moral and
+spiritual warfare with sectarianism, and any attempt to give her more
+would only weaken her as against the sects, place her in a false light,
+partially justify their hostility to her, render effective their
+declamations against her, mix her up unnecessarily with political
+changes, interests, and passions, and distract the attention of her
+ministers from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on them the
+duties of politicians and statesmen.  Where there is nothing in the
+state hostile to the church, where she is free to act according to her
+own constitution and laws, and exercise her own discipline on her own
+spiritual subjects, civil enactments in her favor or against the sects
+may embarrass or impede her operations, but cannot aid her, for she can
+advance no farther than she wins the heart and convinces the
+understanding.  A spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be
+effected only by spiritual means.  The church wants freedom in relation
+to the state--nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from
+God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.
+
+The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order of
+things, and founded on principles which have their origin and ground in
+the principles on which the church herself is founded, can never
+establish any one of the sects as the religion of the state, for that
+would violate their political constitution, and array all the other
+sects, as well as the church herself, against the government.  They
+cannot be called upon to establish the church by law, because she is
+already in their constitution as far as the state has in itself any
+relation with religion, and because to establish her in any other sense
+would be to make her one of the civil institutions of the land, and to
+bring her under the control of the state, which were equally against
+her interest and her nature.
+
+The religious mission of the United States is not then to establish the
+church by external law, or to protect her by legal disabilities, pains,
+and penalties against the sects, however uncatholic they may be; but to
+maintain catholic freedom, neither absorbing the state in the church
+nor the church in the state, but leaving each to move freely, according
+to its own nature, in the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of
+things.  Their mission separates church and state as external governing
+bodies, but unites them in the interior principles from which each
+derives its vitality and force.  Their union is in the intrinsic unity
+of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in different spheres,
+each obeys one and the same Divine law.  With this the Catholic, who
+knows what Catholicity means, is of course satisfied, for it gives the
+church all the advantage over the sects of the real over the unreal;
+and with this the sects have no right to be dissatisfied, for it
+subjects them to no disadvantage not inherent in sectarianism itself in
+presence of Catholicity, and without any support from the civil
+authority.
+
+The effect of this mission of our country fully realized, would be to
+harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by absorbing
+either in the other, or by obliterating the natural distinction between
+them, but by conforming both to the real or Divine order, which is
+supreme and immutable.  It places the two powers in their normal
+relation, which has hitherto never been done, because hitherto there
+never has been a state normally constituted.  The nearest approach made
+to the realization of the proper relations of church and state, prior
+to the birth of the American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under
+the Christian emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism,
+and the emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be
+made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and persisted
+to the last in treating the church as a civil institution under their
+supervision and control, as does the Emperor of the French in France,
+even yet.  In the Middle Ages the state was so barbarously constituted
+that the church was obliged to supervise its administration, to mix
+herself up with the civil government, in order to infuse some
+intelligence into civil matters, and to preserve her own rightful
+freedom and independence.  When the states broke away from feudalism,
+they revived the Roman constitution, and claimed the authority in
+ecclesiastical matters that had been exercised by the Roman Caesars,
+and the states that adopted a sectarian religion gave the sect adopted
+a civil establishment, and subjected it to the civil government, to
+which the sect not unwillingly consented, on condition that the civil
+authority excluded the church and all other sects, and made it the
+exclusive religion of the state, as in England, Scotland, Sweden,
+Denmark, Russia, and the states of Northern Germany.  Even yet the
+normal relations of church and state are nowhere practicable in the Old
+World; for everywhere either the state is more or less barbaric in its
+constitution, or the religion is sectarian, and the church as well as
+civilization is obliged, to struggle with antagonistic forces, for
+self-preservation.
+
+There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce what
+they take to be the American system; but constitutions are generated,
+not made--providential, not conventional.  Statesmen can only develop
+what is in the existing constitutions of their respective countries,
+and no European constitution contains all the elements of the American.
+European Liberals mistake the American system, and, were they to
+succeed in their efforts, would not introduce it, but something more
+hostile to it than the governments and institutions they are warring
+against.  They start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and
+seek not freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.  They suppress the
+freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call religious
+liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by extinguishing
+the light without which no thought is possible, and advance
+civilization by undermining its foundation.  The condemnation of their
+views and movements by the Holy Father in the Encyclical, which has
+excited so much hostility, may seem to superficial and unthinking
+Americans even, as a condemnation of our American system--indeed, as
+the condemnation of modern science, intelligence, and civilization
+itself; but whoever looks below the surface, has some insight into the
+course of events, understands the propositions and movements censured,
+and the sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy
+Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority to save
+religion, society, science, and civilization from utter corruption or
+destruction.  The opinions, tendencies, and movements, directly or by
+implication censured, are the effect of narrow and superficial
+thinking, of partial and one-sided views, and are sectarian,
+sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, and tend, as far as they
+go, to throw society back into the barbarism from which, after
+centuries of toil and struggle, it is just beginning to emerge.  The
+Holy Father has condemned nothing that real philosophy, real science
+does not also condemn; nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the
+American system itself.  For the mass of the people, it were desirable
+that fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
+various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are not,
+in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were expected by the
+Holy Father to be given by the bishops and prelates, to whom, not to
+the people, save through them, the Encyclical was addressed.  Little is
+to be hoped, and much is to be feared, for liberty, science, and
+civilization from European Liberalism, which has no real affinity with
+American territorial democracy and real civil and religious freedom.
+But God and reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the
+New, and it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
+
+Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission, and
+realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom nothing
+is hidden.  Providence is free, and leaves always a space for human
+free-will.  The American people can fail, and will fail if they neglect
+the appointed means and conditions of success; but there is nothing in
+their present state or in their past history to render their failure
+probable.  They have in their internal constitution what Rome wanted,
+and they are in no danger of being crushed by exterior barbarism.
+Their success as feeble colonies of Great Britain in achieving their
+national independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and
+against the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national
+unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other
+people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their
+future.  The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew or
+more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the Union, counted
+with certainty on success, and the ablest, the most experienced, and
+best informed statesmen of the Old World felt sure that the Republic
+was gone, and spoke of it as the late United States.  Not a few, even
+in the loyal States, who had no sympathy with the rebellion, believed
+it idle to think of suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the
+best terms that could be obtained.  But Ilium fuit was chanted too
+soon; the American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified
+the calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the
+expectations of their friends.
+
+The attitude of the real American people during the fearful struggle
+affords additional confidence in their destiny.  With larger armies on
+foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their line of battle stretching
+from ocean to ocean, across the whole breadth of the continent, they
+never, during four long years of alternate victories and defeats--and
+both unprecedentedly bloody--for a moment lost their equanimity, or
+appeared less calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of
+peace. They not for a moment interrupted their ordinary routine of
+business or pleasure, or seemed conscious of being engaged in any
+serious struggle which required an effort.  There was no hurry, no
+bustle, no excitement, no fear, no misgiving.  They seemed to regard
+the war as a mere bagatelle, not worth being in earnest about.  The
+on-looker was almost angry with their apparent indifference, apparent
+insensibility, and doubted if they moved at all, Yet move they did:
+guided by an unerring instinct, they moved quietly on with an elemental
+force, in spite of a timid and hesitating administration, in spite of
+inexperienced, over-cautious, incompetent, or blundering military
+commanders, whom they gently brushed aside, and desisted not till their
+object was gained, and they saw the flag of the Union floating anew in
+the breeze from the capitol of every State that dared secede.  No man
+could contemplate them without feeling that there was in them a latent
+power vastly superior to any which they judged it necessary to put
+forth.  Their success proves to all that what, prior to the war, was
+treated as American arrogance or self-conceit, was only the outspoken
+confidence in their destiny as a Providential people, conscious that to
+them is reserved the hegemony of the world.
+
+Count de Maistre predicted early in the century the failure of the
+United States, because they have no proper name; but his prediction
+assumed what is not the fact.  The United States have a proper name by
+which all the world knows and calls them.  The proper name of the
+country is America: that of the people is Americans.  Speak of
+Americans simply, and nobody understands you to mean the people of
+Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody
+understands you to mean the people of the United States.  The fact is
+significant, and foretells for the people of the United States a
+continental destiny, as is also foreshadowed in the so-called "Monroe
+doctrine," which France, during our domestic troubles, was permitted,
+on condition of not intervening in our civil war in favor of the
+rebellion, to violate.
+
+There was no statesmanship in proclaiming the "Monroe doctrine," for
+the statesman keeps always, as far as possible, his government free to
+act according to the exigencies of the case when it comes up,
+unembarrassed by previous declarations of principles.  Yet the doctrine
+only expresses the destiny of the American people, and which nothing
+but their own fault can prevent them from realizing in its own good
+time.  Napoleon will not succeed in his Mexican policy, and Mexico will
+add some fifteen or twenty new States to the American Union as soon as
+it is clearly for the interests of all parties that it should be done,
+and it can be done by mutual consent, without war or violence.  The
+Union will fight to maintain the integrity of her domain and the
+supremacy of her laws within it, but she can never, consistently with
+her principles or her interests, enter upon a career of war and
+conquest.  Her system is violated, endangered, not extended, by
+subjugating her neighbors, for subjugation and liberty go not together.
+Annexation, when it takes place, must be on terms of perfect equality
+and by the free act of the state annexed.  The Union can admit of no
+inequality of rights and franchises between the States of which it is
+composed.  The Canadian Provinces and the Mexican and Central American
+States, when annexed, must be as free as the original States of the
+Union, sharing alike in the power and the protection of the
+Republic--alike in its authority, its freedom, its grandeur, and its
+glory, as one free, independent, self-governing people.  They may gain
+much, but must lose nothing by annexation.
+
+The Emperor Napoleon and his very respectable protege, Maximilian, an
+able man and a liberal-minded prince, can change nothing in the destiny
+of the United States, or of Mexico herself; no imperial government can
+be permanent beside the American Republic, no longer liable, since the
+abolition of slavery, to be distracted by sectional dissensions.  The
+States that seceded will soon, in some way, be restored to their rights
+and franchises in the Union, forming not the least patriotic portion of
+the American people; the negro question will be settled, or settle
+itself, as is most likely, by the melting away of the negro population
+before the influx of white laborers; all traces of the late contest in
+a very few years will be wiped out, the national debt paid, or greatly
+reduced, and the prosperity and strength of the Republic be greater
+than ever.  Its moral force will sweep away every imperial throne on
+the continent, without any effort or action on the part of the
+government. There can be no stable government in Mexico till every
+trace of the ecclesiastical policy established by the Council of the
+Indies is obliterated, and the church placed there on the same footing
+as in the United States; and that can hardly be done without
+annexation.  Maximilian cannot divest the church of her temporal
+possessions and place Protestants and Catholics on the same footing,
+without offending the present church party and deeply injuring
+religion, and that too without winning the confidence of the republican
+party.  In all Spanish and Portuguese America the relations between the
+church and state are abnormal, and exceedingly hurtful to both.
+Religion is in a wretched condition, and politics in a worse condition
+still. There is no effectual remedy for either but in religious
+freedom, now impracticable, and to be rendered practicable by no
+European intervention, for that subjects religion to the state, the
+very source of the evils that now exist, instead of emancipating it
+from the state, and leaving it to act according to its own constitution
+and laws, as under the American system.
+
+But the American people need not trouble themselves about their
+exterior expansion.  That will come of itself as fast as desirable.
+Let them devote their attention to their internal destiny, to the
+realization of their mission within, and they will gradually see the
+Whole continent coming under their system, forming one grand nation, a
+really catholic nation, great, glorious, and free.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The American Republic: Its
+Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, by A. O. Brownson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC ***
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+Project Gutenberg Etext The American Republic, by O. A. Brownson
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+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+
+BY
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE
+HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,
+THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT
+Historian of the United States,
+
+THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERN-
+MENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF
+THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
+IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A
+SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,
+PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,
+AND PUBLIC SERVICE,
+BY THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT                                                     15
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT                                           26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERMENT-Continued                                  43
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Continued                                 71
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded                                106
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT                                    136
+
+vi
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded                          166
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE UNITED STATES                                             192
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES                             218
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION-Continued                                    244
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION                                                     277
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION                                                309
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES                                          348
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS                               392
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the 
+public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, 
+my whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity, 
+extent, authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government, 
+and the unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny 
+of the American Republic.  Many of the points treated have been 
+from time to time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views 
+have been presented, in my previous writings; but this work is 
+newly and independently written from beginning to end, and is as 
+complete on the topics treated as I have been able to make it.
+
+I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have 
+used their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they 
+came within the scope of my present work.  I have not felt myself 
+bound to adhere to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther 
+than they coincide with my present convictions, and I have written 
+as freely and as independently as if I had never 
+viii
+                                                 written or 
+published any thing before.  I have never been the slave of my 
+own past, and truth has always been dearer to me than my own 
+opinions.  This work is not only my latest, but will be my last 
+on politics or government, and must be taken as the authentic, 
+and the only authentic statement of my political views and 
+convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts 
+with the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as 
+retracted, and rejected.
+
+The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is 
+an essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured 
+critics will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of 
+articles designed for a review, rather than a book.  It is hard to 
+overcome the habits of a lifetime.  I have taken some pains to 
+exchange the reviewer for the author, but am fully conscious that 
+I have not succeeded.  My work can lay claim to very little 
+artistic merit.  It is full of repetitions; the same thought is 
+frequently recurring,--the result, to some extent, no doubt, of 
+carelessness and the want of artistic skill; but to a greater 
+extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought."  In composing my work I 
+have followed, rather than directed, the course of my thought, 
+and, having very little confidence in the memory or industry of 
+readers, I have preferred, when the completeness 
+ix
+                                                 of the argument 
+required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with 
+perpetual references to what has gone before.
+
+That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting 
+to its publication; but how much or how little of it is really 
+mine, I am quite unable to say.  I have, from my youth up, been 
+reading, observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost 
+said writing, at least by fits and starts, on political subjects, 
+especially in their connection with philosophy, theology, history, 
+and social progress, and have assimilated to my own mind what it 
+would assimilate, without keeping any notes of the sources whence 
+the materials assimilated were derived.  I have written freely 
+from my own mind as I find it now formed; but how it has been so 
+formed, or whence I have borrowed, my readers know as well as I.  
+All that is valuable in the thoughts set forth, it is safe to assume 
+has been appropriated from others.  Where I have been distinctly 
+conscious of borrowing what has not become common property, I have 
+given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's name, with three 
+important exceptions which I wish to note more formally.
+
+I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality 
+and the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions 
+furnished
+x
+          by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of 
+Freedom and Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning 
+and profound philosophic views.  I could not have written my work 
+without the aid derived from its suggestions, any more than I 
+could without Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, 
+Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the Abbate Gioberti.  To these two 
+last-named authors, one a humanitarian sophist, the other a 
+Catholic priest, and certainly one of the profoundest 
+philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted, though 
+I have followed the political system of neither.  I have taken 
+from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity 
+of the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation 
+to the creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the 
+Credo and the first verse of Genesis.
+
+In treating the several questions which the preparation of this 
+volume has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of 
+first principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one 
+important point, the views I had expressed in my previous 
+writings, especially on the distinction between civilized and 
+barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and the 
+value to the world of the Graeco-Roman civilization.  I have 
+ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism,
+xi
+                                              rejected every 
+species of political aristocracy, and represented the English 
+constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as 
+its type.  I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and 
+defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial 
+democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on 
+the one hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the 
+other.
+
+I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and 
+defended from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the 
+sovereignty of the American Republic vests in the States, though 
+in the States collectively, or united, not severally, and thus 
+escape alike consolidation and disintegration.  I find, with Mr. 
+Madison, our most philosophic statesman, the originality of the 
+American system in the division of powers between a General 
+government having sole charge of the foreign and general, and 
+particular or State governments having, within their respective 
+territories, sole charge of the particular relations and 
+interests of the American people; but I do not accept his 
+concession that this division is of conventional origin, and 
+maintain that it enters into the original Providential 
+constitution of the American state, as I have done in my Review 
+for October, 1863, and January and October, 1864.
+xii
+I maintain, after Mr.  Senator Sumner, one of the most 
+philosophic and accomplished living American statesmen, that 
+"State secession is State suicide," but modify the opinion I too 
+hastily expressed that the political death of a State dissolves 
+civil society within its territory and abrogates all rights held 
+under it, and accept the doctrine that the laws in force at the 
+time of secession remain in force till superseded or abrogated by 
+competent authority, and also that, till the State is revived and 
+restored as a State in the Union, the only authority, under the 
+American system, competent to supersede or abrogate them is the 
+United States, not Congress, far less the Executive.  The error 
+of the Government is not in recognizing the territorial laws as 
+surviving secession but in counting a State that has seceded as 
+still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted as one 
+of the United States in amending the Constitution.  Such State 
+goes out of the Union, but comes under it.
+
+I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political 
+views; to their general principles, and to show that the general 
+principles asserted have their origin and ground in the great, 
+universal, and unchanging principles of the universe itself.  
+Hence, I have labored to show the scientific relations of 
+political to theological principles, the
+xiii.
+                                         real principles of all 
+science, as of all reality.  An atheist, I have said, may be a 
+politician; but if there were no God, there could be no politics.  
+This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must follow 
+science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who 
+mistake their darkness for light.
+
+I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as 
+a Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real 
+principles are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either 
+in nature or revelation.  I am a Catholic by God's grace and 
+great goodness, and must write as I am.  I could not write 
+otherwise if I would, and would not if I could.  I have not 
+obtruded my religion, and have referred to it only where my 
+argument demanded it; but I have had neither the weakness nor 
+the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it.  I could never 
+have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic, 
+of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with 
+the great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of 
+all that is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with 
+Catholics or non-Catholics.
+
+Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction 
+of sect or party, I have had more especially in view the people 
+of my own
+xiv
+          religious communion.  It is no discredit to a man in 
+the United States at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and 
+devout Catholic.  The old sectarian prejudice may remain with a 
+few, "whose eyes," as Emerson says, "are in their hind-head, not 
+in their fore-head;" but the American people are not at heart 
+sectarian, and the nothingarianism so prevalent among them only 
+marks their state of transition from sectarian opinions to 
+positive Catholic faith.  At any rate, it can no longer be 
+denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing 
+element in the American population, quite too numerous, too 
+wealthy, and too influential to be ignored.  They have played too 
+conspicuous a part in the late troubles of the country, and 
+poured out too freely and too much of their richest and noblest 
+blood in defence of the unity of the nation and the integrity of 
+its domain, for that.  Catholics henceforth must be treated as 
+standing, in all respects, on a footing of equality with any 
+other class of American citizens, and their views of political 
+science, or of any other science, be counted of equal importance, 
+and listened to with equal attention.
+
+I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly 
+by a Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house.  They
+xv
+who are not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the 
+current of American literature, if it is one they must read in 
+order to be up with the living and growing thought of the age.  
+If it is not a book of that sort, it is not worth reading by any 
+one.
+
+Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to 
+exert an influence on the future of my country, for which I have 
+made, or, rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which 
+I tenderly love.  Now, I believe that he who can exert the most 
+influence on our Catholic population, especially in giving tone 
+and direction to our Catholic youth, will exert the most 
+influence in forming the character and shaping the future destiny 
+of the American Republic.  Ambition and patriotism alike, as well 
+as my own Catholic faith and sympathies, induce me to address 
+myself primarily to Catholics.  I quarrel with none of the sects; 
+I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth wherever I 
+find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long life, 
+or a permanent possession.  I engage in no controversy with any 
+one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth 
+is brought out and placed in a clear light before the public, 
+whatever is sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the 
+morning mists before the rising sun.
+
+xvi
+I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of 
+my book from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics; 
+but I speak to my countrymen at large.  I could not personally 
+serve my country in the field: my habits as well as my 
+infirmities prevented, to say nothing of my age; but I have 
+endeavored in this humble work to add my contribution, small 
+though it may be, to political science, and to discharge, as far 
+as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism.  I would the 
+book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a 
+more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have 
+written it.  All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a 
+sincere book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects 
+treated.  If well received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I 
+shall endeavor to practise resignation, as I have so often done.
+
+
+O. A. BROWNSON.
+
+ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, 
+Know Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more 
+important as there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge 
+of himself, whence he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he 
+is for, what he can do, what he ought to do, and what are his 
+means of doing it.
+
+Nations are only individuals on a larger scale.  They have a 
+life, an individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of 
+their own, and have the same general laws of development and 
+growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as the individual man.  Equally 
+important, and no less difficult than for the individual, is it 
+for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, its 
+own powers and faculties, rights and duties, constitution, 
+instincts, tendencies, and
+2
+                           destiny.  A nation has a spiritual as 
+well as a material, a moral as well as a physical existence, and 
+is subjected to internal as well as external conditions of health 
+and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some measure 
+understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in its 
+growth, and end in premature decay and death.
+
+Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself 
+than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.  It has 
+hardly had a distinct consciousness of its own national existence, 
+and has lived the irreflective life of the child, with no severe 
+trial, till the recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and 
+compel it to reflect on its own constitution, its own separate 
+existence, individuality, tendencies, and end.  The defection of 
+the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that has 
+followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at 
+once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass 
+from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to 
+grave and reflecting manhood.  The nation has been suddenly 
+compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from 
+reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from 
+instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what
+3
+                                                          it does, 
+and wherefore it does it.  The change which four years of civil 
+war have wrought in the nation is great, and is sure to give it 
+the seriousness, the gravity, the dignity, the manliness it has 
+heretofore lacked.
+
+Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own 
+existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear 
+understanding of its own national constitution.  Its vision is 
+still obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and 
+its judgment rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild 
+theories and fancies of its childhood.  The national mind has 
+been quickened, the national heart has been opened, the national 
+disposition prepared, but there remains the important work of 
+dissipating the mists that still linger, of brushing away these 
+wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to form a clear 
+and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just 
+appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny; 
+or, in other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own 
+idea, and the means of its actualization in space and time.
+
+Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to 
+realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or 
+destiny.  Every nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of
+4
+                                                             God.  
+The Jews were the chosen people of God, through whom the 
+primitive traditions were to be preserved in their purity and 
+integrity, and the Messiah was to come.  The Greeks were the 
+chosen people of God, for the development and realization of the 
+beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the true in 
+science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of 
+the state, law, and jurisprudence.  The great despotic nations of 
+Asia were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a 
+mission, they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the 
+progressive development of the human race.  History has not 
+recorded their mission, and as far as they are known they have 
+contributed only to the abnormal development or corruption of 
+religion and civilization.  Despotism is barbaric and abnormal.
+
+The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and 
+is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea.  It has 
+been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and 
+Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to 
+either.  In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not 
+rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass 
+it.  In the state, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and 
+surpass Rome.  Its idea
+5
+                        is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, 
+and law with liberty.  Yet its mission is not so much the 
+realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the 
+state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the 
+freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people without 
+social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.  In 
+other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the 
+dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights 
+of man and those of society.  The Greek and Roman republics 
+asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern 
+republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the 
+detriment of the state.  The American republic has been 
+instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with 
+advantage to the other.
+
+The real mission of the United States is to introduce and 
+establish a political constitution, which, while it retains all 
+the advantages of the constitutions of states thus far known, is 
+unlike any of them, and secures advantages which none of them did 
+or could possess.  The American constitution has no prototype in 
+any prior constitution.  The American form of government can be 
+classed throughout with none of the forms of government described 
+by Aristotle, or
+6
+                 even by later authorities.  Aristotle knew only 
+four forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and 
+Mixed Governments.  The American form is none of these, nor any 
+combination of them.  It is original, a new contribution to 
+political science, and seeks to attain the end of all wise and 
+just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients, 
+and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American 
+political writers themselves.  The originality of the American 
+constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of 
+our own statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed 
+from the constitutions of other states rather than by a profound 
+study of its own principles.  They have taken too low a view of 
+it, and have rarely, if ever, appreciated its distinctive and 
+peculiar merits.
+
+As the United States have vindicated their national unity and 
+integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history, 
+nothing is more important than that they should take that new 
+start with a clear and definite view of their national 
+constitution, and with a distinct understanding of their 
+political mission in the future of the world.  The citizen who 
+can help his countrymen to do this will render them an im-
+7
+                                                         portant 
+service and deserve well of his country, though he may have been 
+unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.  
+The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more 
+difficult and more delicate than that which has been accomplished 
+by our brave armies.  As yet the people are hardly better 
+prepared for the political work to be done than they were at the 
+outbreak of the civil war for the military work they have so 
+nobly achieved.  But, with time, patience, and good-will, the 
+difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past corrected, 
+and the Government placed on the right track for the future.
+
+It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the 
+United States is very defective or it has been very grossly 
+misinterpreted by all parties.  If the slave States had not held 
+that the States are severally sovereign, and the Constitution of 
+the United States a simple agreement or compact, they would never 
+have seceded; and if the Free States had not confounded the Union 
+with the General government, and shown a tendency to make it the 
+entire national government, no occasion or pretext for secession 
+would have been given.  The great problem of our statesmen has 
+been from the first, How to assert union without
+8
+                                                 consolidation, 
+and State rights without disintegration?  Have they, as yet, 
+solved that problem?  The war has silenced the State sovereignty 
+doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State 
+rights?  Has it done it without asserting the General government 
+as the supreme, central, or national government?  Has it done it 
+without striking a dangerous blow at the federal element of the 
+constitution?  In suppressing by armed force the doctrine that 
+the States are severally sovereign, what barrier is left against 
+consolidation?  Has not one danger been removed only to give 
+place to another?
+
+But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, 
+solves the problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised 
+precisely through misunderstanding of the constitution.  Our 
+statesmen have recognized no constitution of the American people 
+themselves; they have confined their views to the written 
+constitution, as if that constituted the American people a state 
+or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a law ordained by the 
+nation already existing and constituted.  Perhaps, if they had 
+recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that drawn 
+up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in 
+the
+9
+    republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the 
+problem, and asserts national unity without consolidation, and 
+the rights of the several States without danger of disintegration.  
+The whole controversy, possibly, has originated in a 
+misunderstanding of the real constitution of the United States, 
+and that misunderstanding itself in the misunderstanding of the 
+origin and constitution of government in general.  The 
+constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay is not 
+defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either 
+danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and 
+return and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and 
+always has been.
+
+There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do 
+with the rebellion, but it was not its sole cause.  The real 
+cause must be sought in the program that had been made, 
+especially in the States themselves, in forming and administering 
+their respective governments, as well as the General government, 
+in accordance with political theories borrowed from European 
+speculators on government, the socalled Liberals and 
+Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application 
+in the United States.  The tendency of American politics, for the 
+last thirty or forty years, has
+10
+                                been, within the several States 
+themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy, as if the 
+American people had for their mission only the reproduction of 
+ancient Athens.  The American system is not that of any of the 
+simple forms of government, nor any combination of them.  The 
+attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of 
+government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to 
+clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past.  The 
+American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy, 
+better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better 
+than any possible combination of these several forms, because it 
+accords more nearly with the principles of things, the real order 
+of the universe.
+
+But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other 
+states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in 
+obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and 
+giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its 
+false development or corruption.  Under the influence of this 
+false development, the people were fast losing sight of the 
+political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the 
+organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not 
+the people as
+11
+              simple population, and were beginning to assert the 
+absolute God-given right of the majority to govern.  All the 
+changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted 
+in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the 
+majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy.  
+This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with 
+provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery 
+sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States.
+
+The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, 
+in spite of the short-sightedness and blundering of the 
+Administration, have proved the vitality and strength of the 
+national constitution, and the greatness of the American people.  
+They say nothing for or against the democratic theory of our 
+demagogues, but every thing in favor of the American system or 
+constitution of government, which has found a firmer support in 
+American instincts than in American statesmanship.  In spite of 
+all that had been done by theorists, radicals, and revolutionists, 
+no-government men, non-resistants, humanitarians, and sickly 
+sentimentalists to corrupt the American people in mind, heart, 
+and body, the native vigor of their national constitution has 
+enabled them to come forth 
+12
+                           triumphant from the trial.  Every 
+American patriot has reason to be proud of his country-men, and 
+every American lover of freedom to be satisfied with the 
+institutions of his country.  But there is danger that the 
+politicians and demagogues will ascribe the merit, not to the 
+real and living national constitution, but to their miserable 
+theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the several 
+evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has 
+cost so much to suppress.  What is now wanted is, that the people, 
+whose instincts are right, should understand the American 
+constitution as it is, and so understand it as to render it 
+impossible for political theorists, no matter of what school or 
+party, to deceive them again as to its real import, or induce 
+them to depart from it in their political action.
+
+A work written with temper, without passion or sectional 
+prejudice, in a philosophical spirit, explaining to the American 
+people their own national constitution, and the mutual relations 
+of the General government and the State governments, cannot, at 
+this important crisis in our affairs, be inopportune, and, if 
+properly executed, can hardly fail to be of real service.  Such a 
+work is now attempted--would it were by another and abler hand--
+13
+which, imperfect as it is, may at least offer some useful 
+suggestions, give a right direction to political thought, 
+although it should fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.
+
+This much the author may say, in favor of his own work, that it 
+sets forth no theory of government in general, or of the United 
+States in particular.  The author is not a monarchist, an 
+aristocrat, a democrat, a feudalist, nor an advocate of what are 
+called mixed governments like the English, at least for his own 
+country; but is simply an American, devoted to the real, living, 
+and energizing constitution of the American republic as it is, 
+not as some may fancy it might be, or are striving to make it.  
+It is, in his judgment, what it ought to be, and he has no other 
+ambition than to present it as it is to the understanding and 
+love of his countrymen.
+
+Perhaps simple artistic unity and propriety would require the 
+author to commence his essay directly with the United States; but 
+while the constitution of the United States is original and 
+peculiar, the government of the United States has necessarily 
+something in common with all legitimate governments, and he has 
+thought it best to precede his discussion of the American 
+republic, its constitution, tenden-
+14
+                                  cies, and destiny, by some 
+considerations on government in general.  He does this because he 
+believes, whether rightly or not, that while the American people 
+have received from Providence a most truly profound and admirable 
+system of government, they are more or less infected with the 
+false theories of government which have been broached during the 
+last two centuries.  In attempting to realize these theories, 
+they have already provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion 
+which has seriously threatened the national existence, and come 
+very near putting an end to the American order of civilization 
+itself.  These theories have received already a shock in the 
+minds of all serious and thinking men; but the men who think are 
+in every nation a small minority, and it is necessary to give 
+these theories a public refutation, and bring back those who do 
+not think, as well as those who do, from the world of dreams to 
+the world of reality.  It is hoped, therefore, that any apparent 
+want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay will be pardoned 
+for the sake of the end the author has had in view.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for 
+himself.  He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has 
+his being in God.  He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence 
+only by communion with God, through which he participates of the 
+divine being and life.  He communes with God through the divine 
+creative act and the Incarnation of the Word, through his kind, 
+and through the material world.  Communion with God through 
+Creation and Incarnation is religion, distinctively taken, which 
+binds man to God as his first cause, and carries him onward to 
+God as his final cause; communion through the material world is 
+expressed by the word property; and communion with God through 
+humanity is society.  Religion, society, property, are the three 
+terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the 
+essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, 
+and his perfec-
+16
+               tion, or the fulfilment of his existence, the 
+attainment of the end for which he is created.
+
+Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through 
+his kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, 
+to actualize the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to 
+his beatitude, since humanity is neither God nor the material 
+universe, it is yet a necessary and essential condition of his 
+life, his progress, and the completion of his existence.  He is 
+born and lives in society, and can be born and live nowhere else.  
+It is one of the necessities of his nature.  "God saw that it was 
+not good for man to be alone."  Hence, wherever man is found he 
+is found in society, living in more or less strict intercourse 
+with his kind.
+
+But society never does and never can exist without government of 
+some sort.  As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is 
+government a necessity of society.  The simplest form of society 
+is the family--Adam and Eve.  But though Adam and Eve are in many 
+respects equal, and have equally important though different parts 
+assigned them, one or the other must be head and governor, or 
+they cannot form the society called family.  They would be simply 
+two individuals of different sexes, and the family would fail for 
+the want of unity.
+
+17
+Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some 
+degree of family government, of some authority to direct, 
+control, restrain, or prescribe.  Hence the authority of the 
+husband and father is recognized by the common consent of 
+mankind.  Still more apparent is the necessity of government the 
+moment the family develops and grows into the tribe, and the 
+tribe into the nation.  Hence no nation exists without 
+government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or 
+degraded, that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the 
+elders, or in the tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint 
+reminiscences of some sort of government, with authority to 
+demand obedience and to punish the refractory.  Hence, as man is 
+nowhere found out of society, so nowhere is society found without 
+government.
+
+Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that 
+its necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the 
+fact that the human race by sin has fallen from its primitive 
+integrity, or original righteousness.  The fall asserted by 
+Christian theology, though often misinterpreted, and its effects 
+underrated or exaggerated, is a fact too sadly confirmed by 
+individual experience and universal history; but it is not the 
+cause why government is neces-
+18
+                             sary, though it may be an additional 
+reason for demanding it.  Government would have been necessary if 
+man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well as for 
+the bad.  The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man 
+retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his 
+nature.  It exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven 
+in its perfection.  Its office is not purely repressive, to 
+restrain violence, to redress wrongs, and to punish the 
+transgressor.  It has something more to do than to restrict our 
+natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain justice between 
+man and man.  Its office is positive as well as negative.  It is 
+needed to render effective the solidarity of the individuals of a 
+nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a mere 
+organization--to combine men in one living body, and to 
+strengthen all with the strength of each, and each with the 
+strength of all--to develop, strengthen, and sustain individual 
+liberty, and to utilize and direct it to the promotion of the 
+common weal--to be a social providence, imitating in its order 
+and degree the action of the divine providence itself, and, while 
+it provides for the common good of all, to protect each, the 
+lowest and meanest, with the whole force and majesty of society.  
+It is the minister of wrath to wrong-
+19
+                                    doers, indeed, but its nature 
+is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the right of 
+property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can 
+exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science 
+and art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful 
+means to the fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his 
+existence.  Next after religion, it is man's greatest good; and 
+even religion without it can do only a small portion of her work.  
+They wrong it who call it a necessary evil; it is a great good, 
+and, instead of being distrusted, hated, or resisted, except in 
+its abuses, it should be loved, respected, obeyed, and if need 
+be, defended at the cost of all earthly goods, and even of life 
+itself.
+
+The nature or essence of government is to govern.  A government 
+that does not govern, is simply no government at all.  If it has 
+not the ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, 
+an instrument in the bands of individuals for advancing their 
+private interests, but it is not government.  To be government it 
+must govern both individuals and the community.  If it is a mere 
+machine for making prevail the will of one man, of a certain 
+number of men, or even of the community, it may be very effective 
+sometimes for good, sometimes
+20
+                              for evil, oftenest for evil, but 
+government in the proper sense of the word it is not.  To govern 
+is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and 
+directs his ship.  It necessarily implies two terms, governor and 
+governed, and a real distinction between them.  The denial of all 
+real distinction between governor and governed is an error in 
+politics analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying 
+all real distinction between creator and creature, God and the 
+universe, which all the world knows is either pantheism or pure 
+atheism--the supreme sophism.  If we make governor and governed 
+one and the same, we efface both terms; for there is no governor 
+nor governed, if the will that governs is identically the will 
+that is governed.  To make the controller and the controlled the 
+same is precisely to deny all control.  There must, then, if 
+there is government at all, be a power, force, or will that 
+governs, distinct from that which is governed.  In those 
+governments in which it is held that the people govern, the 
+people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the 
+people governed, or there is no real government.
+
+Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the 
+right or authority to govern.  Power without right is not 
+govern-
+21
+      ment.  Governments have the right to use force at need, but 
+might does not make right, and not every power wielding the 
+physical force of a nation is to be regarded as its rightful 
+government.  Whatever resort to physical force it may be obliged 
+to make, either in defence of its authority or of the rights of 
+the nation, the government itself lies in the moral order, and 
+politics is simply a branch of ethics--that branch which treats 
+of the rights and duties of men in their public relations, as 
+distinguished from their rights and duties in their private 
+relations.
+
+Government being not only that which governs, but that which has 
+the right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a 
+mere physical necessity.  The right to govern and the duty to 
+obey are correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived 
+without the other.  Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable 
+sentiment but a duty, a moral virtue.  Treason is not merely a 
+difference in political opinion with the governing authority, but 
+a crime against the sovereign, and a moral wrong, therefore a sin 
+against God, the Founder of the moral Law.  Treason, if committed 
+in other Countries, unhappily, has been more frequently termed by 
+our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor than branded as a 
+crime, the
+22
+           greatest of crimes, as it is, that human governments 
+have authority to punish.  The American people have been chary of 
+the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the 
+correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of 
+law, and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign 
+authority, however constituted or wherever lodged.  It is as 
+necessary, as much a duty, as much a virtue in republics as in 
+monarchies; and nobler examples of the most devoted loyalty are 
+not found in the world's history than were exhibited in the 
+ancient Greek and Roman republics, or than have been exhibited by 
+both men and women in the young republic of the United States.  
+Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human 
+virtues, and is the human element of that sublime love or charity 
+which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment of the law.  
+It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice, and 
+is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most 
+Godlike.  There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of 
+which a truly loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, 
+base, cruel, brutal, criminal, detestable, not to be expected of 
+a really disloyal people.  Such a people no generous sentiment 
+can move, no love can bind.  It mocks at duty, scorns vir-
+23
+                                                         tue, 
+tramples on all rights, and holds no person, no thing, human or 
+divine, sacred or inviolable.  The assertion of government as 
+lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and reconciles 
+it with authority.  Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever one 
+pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.  Freedom to 
+follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any 
+civil restraint, is license, not liberty.  There is no lesion to 
+liberty in repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the 
+commands of the authority that has the right to command.  Tyranny 
+or oppression is not in being subjected to authority, but in 
+being subjected to usurped authority--to a power that has no 
+right to command, or that commands what exceeds its right or its 
+authority.  To say that it is contrary to liberty to be forced to 
+forego our own will or inclination in any case whatever, is 
+simply denying the right of all government, and falling into 
+no-governmentism.  Liberty is violated only when we are required 
+to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no 
+right to make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as 
+far as authority has right to govern, and we can never have the 
+right to disobey a rightful command.  The requisition, if made by 
+right-
+24
+     ful authority, then, violates no right that we have or can 
+have, and where there is no violation of our rights there is no 
+violation of our liberty.  The moral right of authority, which 
+involves the moral duty of obedience, presents, then, the ground 
+on which liberty and authority may meet in peace and operate to 
+the same end.
+
+This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive 
+obedience, and that the resistance to power can never be lawful.  
+The tyrant may be lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of 
+the word itself, is a usurper, and without authority.  Abuses of 
+power may be resisted even by force when they become too great to 
+be endured, when there is no legal or regular way of redressing 
+them, and when there is a reasonable prospect that resistance 
+will prove effectual and substitute something better in their 
+place.  But it is never lawful to resist the rightful sovereign, 
+for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful 
+sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never 
+be said to abuse it.  Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful 
+exercise of a power rightfully held, and when it is not so 
+exercised there is no abuse or abuses to redress.  All turns, 
+then, on the right of power, or its legitimacy.  Whence does 
+government de-
+25
+             rive its right to govern?  What is the origin and 
+ground of sovereignty?  This question is fundamental and without 
+a true answer to it politics cannot be a science, and there can 
+be no scientific statesmanship.  Whence, then, comes the 
+sovereign right to govern?
+
+
+
+
+
+26
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
+
+
+Government is both a fact and a right.  Its origin as a fact, is 
+simply a question of history; its origin as a right or authority 
+to govern, is a question of ethics.  Whether a certain territory 
+and its population are a sovereign state or nation, or 
+not--whether the actual ruler of a country is its rightful ruler, 
+or not--is to be determined by the historical facts in the case; 
+but whence the government derives its right to govern, is a 
+question that can be solved only by philosophy, or, philosophy 
+failing, only by revelation.
+
+Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact 
+and the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of 
+government, among which may be named--
+I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his 
+child.
+II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
+27
+III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are 
+sovereign.
+IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
+V. It derives its right from the immediate and express 
+appointment of God;--
+VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual 
+society;--
+VII. From God through the people;--
+VIII. From God through the natural law.
+
+I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the 
+origin of government as a fact.  The patriarchal system is the 
+earliest known system of government, and unmistakable traces of 
+it are found in nearly all known governments--in the tribes of 
+Arabia and Northern Africa, the Irish septs and the Scottish 
+clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman qentes, and the Russian and 
+Hindoo villages.  The right of the father was held to be his 
+right to govern his family or household, which, with his children, 
+included his wife and servants.  From the family to the tribe the 
+transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the 
+nation.  The father is chief of the family; the chief of the 
+eldest family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest 
+tribe becomes chief of the nation,
+28
+                                   and, as such, king or monarch.  
+The heads of families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, 
+and the families themselves, represented by their delegates, or 
+publicly assembling for public affairs, constitute a democracy.  
+These three forms, with their several combinations, to wit, 
+monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and mixed governments, are all 
+the forms known to Aristotle, and have generally been held to be 
+all that are possible.
+
+Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed 
+from the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the 
+family.  Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the 
+modern feudal, which seem to be founded on landed property, may 
+be traced back to a patriarchal origin.  The patriarch is sole 
+proprietor, and the possessions of the family are vested in him, 
+and he governs as proprietor as well as father.  In the tribe, 
+the chief is the proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the 
+landlord, and holds the domain.  Hence, the feudal baron is 
+invested with his fief by the suzerain, holds it from him, and to 
+him it escheats when forfeited or vacant.  All the great Asiatic 
+kings of ancient or modern times hold the domain and govern as 
+proprietors; they have the authority of the father and
+29
+                                                       the owner; 
+and their subjects, though theoretically their children, are 
+really their slaves.
+
+In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important 
+transformation.  The father retains all the power of the 
+patriarch within his family, the patrician in his gens or house, 
+but, outside of it, is met and controlled by the city or state.  
+The heads of houses are united in the senate, and collectively 
+constitute and govern the state.  Yet, not all the heads of 
+houses have seats in the senate, but only the tenants of the 
+sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed and marked 
+by the god Terminus.  Hence the great plebeian houses, often 
+richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all 
+share in the government and the honors of the state, because they 
+were not tenants of any portion of the sacred territory.  There 
+is here the introduction of an element which is not patriarchal, 
+and which transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the 
+city or state, and founds the civil order, or what is now called 
+civilization.  The city or state takes the place of the private 
+proprietor, and territorial rights take the place of purely 
+personal rights.
+
+In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the 
+man the land.  When land was transferred to a new tenant, the 
+prac-
+30
+    tice in early times was to bury him in it, in order to 
+indicate that it took possession of him, received, accepted, or 
+adopted him; and it was only such persons as were taken 
+possession of, accepted or adopted by the sacred territory or 
+domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens with full 
+political rights.  This, in modern language, means that the state 
+is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to 
+the state, not the state to the citizen.  Under the patriarchal, 
+the tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is, 
+properly speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is 
+economical rather than political.  Authority--even the nation 
+itself--is personal, not territorial.  The patriarch, the chief 
+of the tribe, or the king, is the only proprietor.  Under the 
+Graeco-Roman system all this is transformed.  The nation is 
+territorial as well as personal, and the real proprietor is the 
+city or state.  Under the Empire, no doubt, what lawyers call the 
+eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as the 
+representative and trustee of the city or state.
+
+When or by what combination of events this transformation was 
+effected, history does not inform us.  The first-born of Adam, we 
+are told, built a city, and called it after his son
+31
+                                                    Enoch; but 
+there is no evidence that it was constituted a municipality.  The 
+earliest traces of the civil order proper are found in the Greek 
+and Italian republics, and its fullest and grandest developments 
+are found in Rome, imperial as well as republican.  It was no 
+doubt preceded by the patriarchal system, and was historically 
+developed from it, but by way of accretion rather than by simple 
+explication.  It has in it an element that, if it exists in the 
+patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a different form, 
+and the transformation marks the passage from the economical 
+order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil 
+constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
+
+The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived 
+from civitas--city or state.  The Greeks and Romans call all 
+tribes and nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as 
+distinguished from the state, barbarians.  The origin of the word 
+barbarian, barbarus, or ........, is unknown, and its primary 
+sense can be only conjectured.  Webster regards its primary sense 
+as foreign, wild, fierce; but this could not have been its 
+original sense; for the Greeks and Romans never termed all 
+foreigners barbarians, and they applied the
+32
+                                            term to nations that 
+had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that 
+had made respectable progress in art and sciences--the Indians, 
+Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.  They applied the 
+term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical 
+sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which 
+the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, 
+not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not 
+as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or 
+tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others 
+barbarians.
+
+Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European 
+sense, but to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense.  
+Lacedaemon had kings; yet it was no less republican than Athens; 
+and Rome was called and was a republic under the emperors no less 
+than under the consuls.  Republic, respublica, by the very force 
+of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English, the 
+commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or 
+private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or 
+domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and 
+attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.  France, 
+Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great
+33
+                                                    Britain in 
+substance though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of 
+the word, republican states; for the king or emperor does not 
+govern in his own private right, but solely as representative of 
+the power and majesty of the state.  The distinctive mark of 
+republicanism is the substitution of the state for the personal 
+chief, and public authority for personal or private right.  
+Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to barbarism, and 
+all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian in 
+Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern tiles to 
+breeding or refinement of manners, simply because these are 
+characteristics of a republican, or polished [from ....., city] 
+people.  Every people that has a real civil order, or a fully 
+developed state or polity, is a republican people; and hence the 
+church and her great doctors when they speak of the state as 
+distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be 
+seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some 
+have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
+
+All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains, 
+or is developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really 
+so regarded by all Christendom.  In civilized nations the 
+patriarchal authority is transformed into
+34
+                                          that of the city or 
+state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous nations it 
+retains its Private and personal character.  The nation is only 
+the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor, 
+founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomination.  Race has 
+not been supplanted by country; they are a people, not a state.  
+They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may find in them 
+ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find 
+among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so 
+distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among 
+modern Christian nations.  They have a family, a race, a chief or 
+king, but no patria, or country.  The barbarians who overthrew 
+the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East, were nations, 
+or confederacies of nations, but not states.  The nation with 
+them was personal, not territorial.  Their country was wherever 
+they fed their flocks and herds, pitched their tents, and 
+encamped for the night.  There were Germans, but no German state, 
+and even to-day the German finds his "father-land" wherever the 
+German speech is spoken.  The Polish, Sclavonian, Hungarian, 
+Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by German states, in 
+which the German language is not the mother-tongue, are excluded 
+from
+35
+     the Germanic Confederation.  The Turks, or Osmanlis, are a 
+race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of 
+the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
+
+Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic, 
+pastoral, or predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and 
+Persians or modern Chinese, and have their geographical 
+boundaries, they have still no state, no country.  The nation 
+defines the boundaries, not the boundaries the nation.  The 
+nation does not belong to the territory, but the territory to the 
+nation or its chief.  The Irish and Anglo-Saxons, in former 
+times, held the land in gavelkind, and the territory belonged to 
+the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as indivisible, they 
+still held it as private property.  The shah of Persia holds the 
+whole Persian territory as private property, and the landholders 
+among his subjects are held to be his tenants.  They hold it from 
+him, not from the Persian state.
+
+The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private 
+domain of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.  There is in 
+barbaric states no republic, no commonwealth; authority is 
+parental, without being tempered by parental affection.  The 
+chief is a despot, and rules with the united authority of the
+36
+father and the harshness of the proprietor.  He owns the land and 
+his subjects.
+
+Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of 
+the Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by 
+reminiscences of Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the 
+conquered, was a barbaric constitution.  The feudal monarch, as 
+far as he governed at all, governed as proprietor or landholder, 
+not as the representative of the commonwealth.  Under feudalism 
+there are estates, but no state.  The king governs as an estate, 
+the nobles hold their power as an estate, and the commons are 
+represented as an estate.  The whole theory of power is, that it 
+is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.  It is not 
+without reason, then that the common sense of civilized nations 
+terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous ages.
+
+It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric 
+constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch 
+democrats, especially European democrats and revolutionists, and 
+by French and Germans settled in our own country, it is 
+essentially barbaric and anti-republican.  The characteristic 
+principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal 
+right, and when democrats assert that the elective fran-
+37
+                                                       chise is a 
+natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact 
+that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle 
+of barbarism and despotism.  This says nothing in favor of 
+restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage.  
+To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing, 
+theoretically or practically.  Property has of itself advantages 
+enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political 
+rights and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as 
+trustworthy as the business classes.  The wise statesman will 
+never restrict suffrage, or exclude the poorer and more numerous 
+classes from all voice in the government of their country.  
+General suffrage is wise, and if Louis Philippe had had the sense 
+to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation to the support of 
+his government, he would never have had to encounter the 
+revolution of 1848.  The barbarism, the despotism, is not in 
+universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a 
+private or personal right.  It is not a private, but a political 
+right, and, like all political rights, a public trust.  Extremes 
+meet, and thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the 
+head of the human race and lead the civilization of the age, are 
+really in principle retrograding to the
+38
+                                        barbarism of the past, or 
+taking their place with nations on whom the light of civilization 
+has never yet dawned.  All is not gold that glisters.
+
+The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a 
+private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization 
+is, that it makes it a public trust.  Barbarism knows only 
+persons; civilization asserts and maintains the state.  With 
+barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply by 
+way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of 
+transformation.  Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be 
+maintained that all systems of government, as a simple historical 
+fact, have been developed from the patriarchal.  The patriarchal 
+has preceded them all, and it is with the patriarchal that the 
+human race has begun its career.  The family or household is not 
+a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and, 
+historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well 
+as the initial or inchoate nation.  But its simple direct 
+development gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental 
+despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom.  
+It is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in 
+the secular order is republican, and continues
+39
+                                               and completes the 
+work of Greece and Rome.  It meets with little permanent success 
+in any patriarchal or despotic nation, and must either find or 
+create civilization, which has been developed from the patriarchal 
+system by way of transformation.
+
+But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of 
+government, and all governments have been developed or modified 
+from it, the right of government to govern cannot be deduced from 
+the right of the father to govern his children, for the parental 
+right itself is not ultimate or complete.  All governments that 
+assume it to be so, and rest on it as the foundation of their 
+authority, are barbaric or despotic, and, therefore , without any 
+legitimate authority.  The right to govern rests on ownership or 
+dominion.  Where there is no proprietorship, there is no dominion; 
+and where there is no dominion, there is no right to govern.  
+Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
+
+Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation.  The maker has 
+the right to the thing made.  He, so far as he is sole creator, 
+is sole proprietor, and may do what he will with it.  God is 
+sovereign lord and proprietor of the universe because He is its 
+sole creator.  He
+40
+                  hath the absolute dominion, because He is 
+absolute maker.  He has made it, He owns it; and one may do what 
+he will with his own.  His dominion is absolute, because He is 
+absolute creator, and He rightly governs as absolute and 
+universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises only 
+His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness, 
+justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all 
+conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always 
+be right, wise, just, and good.  The despot is a man attempting 
+to be God upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power.  Despotism 
+is based on, the parental right, and the parental right is 
+assumed to be absolute.  Hence, your despotic rulers claim to 
+reign, and to be loved and worshipped as gods.  Even the Roman 
+emperors, in the fourth and fifth centuries, were addressed as 
+divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a Christian , was addressed 
+as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras--so far did barbarism 
+encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
+
+The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for 
+he is the generator, not the creator of his child.  Generation is 
+in the order of second causes, and is simply the development or 
+explication of the race.  The
+41
+                              early Roman law, founded on the 
+confusion of generation with creation, gave the father absolute 
+authority over the child--the right of life and death, as over 
+his servants or slaves; but this was restricted under the Empire, 
+and in all Christian nations the authority of the father is 
+treated, like all power, as a trust.  The child, like the father 
+himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father is 
+answerable for the use he makes of his authority.  The law fixes 
+the age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated; 
+and even during his nonage, takes him from the father and places 
+him under guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil 
+or grossly abuses his trust.  This is proper, because society 
+contributes to the life of the child, and has a right as well as 
+an interest in him.  Society, again, must suffer if the child is 
+allowed to grow up a worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a 
+right to intervene, both in behalf of itself and of the child, in 
+case his parents neglect to train him up in the nurture and 
+admonition of the Lord, or are training him up to be a liar, a 
+thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the community.  How, 
+then, base the right of society on the right of the father, 
+since, in point of fact, the
+42
+                             right of society is paramount to the 
+right of the parent?
+
+But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the 
+authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the 
+ground of the right of society to govern.  Assume the parental 
+right to be perfect and inseparable from the parental relation, 
+it is no right to govern where no such relation exists.  Nothing 
+true, real, solid in government can be founded on what Carlyle 
+calls a "sham."  The statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains 
+and conforms to the realities, the verities of things; and all 
+jurisprudence that accepts legal fictions is imperfect, and even 
+censurable.  The presumptions or assumptions of law or politics 
+must have a real and solid basis, or they are inadmissible.  How, 
+from the right of the father to govern his own child, born from 
+his loins, conclude his right to govern one not his child?  Or 
+how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the right of 
+society to found the state, institute government, and exercise 
+political authority over its members?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking 
+from asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should 
+favor theocracy, and place secular society under the control of 
+the clergy, and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political 
+writers have sought to render government purely human, and 
+maintain that its origin is conventional, and that it is founded 
+in compact or agreement.  Their theory originated in the 
+seventeenth century, and was predominant in the last century and 
+the first third of the present.  It has been, and perhaps is yet, 
+generally accepted by American politicians and statesmen, at 
+least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the question 
+at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
+
+The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of 
+government as a social pact or compact, and explained the 
+reciprocal rights and obligations of subjects and rulers by the 
+44
+general law of contracts; but they have never held that 
+government originates in a voluntary agreement between the people 
+and their rulers, or between the several individuals composing 
+the community.  They have never held that government has only a 
+conventional origin or authority.  They have simply meant, by the 
+social compact, the mutual relations and reciprocal rights and 
+duties of princes and their subjects, as implied in the very 
+existence and nature of civil society.  Where there are rights 
+and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an agreement 
+voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a 
+compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in 
+determining whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire 
+whether either has broken the terms of the social compact.  They 
+were engaged, not with the question whence does government derive 
+its authority, but with its nature, and the reciprocal rights and 
+duties of governors and the governed.  The compact itself they 
+held was not voluntarily formed by the people themselves, either 
+individually or collectively, but was imposed by God, either 
+immediately, or mediately, through the law of nature.  "Every 
+man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains there."  They 
+held the
+45
+         same, and maintained that every one born into society 
+contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and 
+society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law, 
+every one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit 
+of happiness, and owes certain duties to society for the 
+protection and assistance it affords him.
+
+But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed 
+from the theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine 
+which they would have been the last to accept.  These theorists 
+or political speculators have imagined a state of nature 
+antecedently to civil society, in which men lived without 
+government, law, or manners, out of which they finally came by 
+entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of their number 
+to be king and to govern them, or with one another to submit to 
+the rule of the majority.  Hobbes, the English materialist, is 
+among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of 
+this theory.  He held that men lived, prior to the creation of 
+civil society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and 
+every one had an equal right to every thing, and to take any 
+thing on which he could lay his hands and was strong enough to 
+hold.  There was no law but the will of the strongest.  Hence, 
+the state of nature was a state of con-
+46
+                                      tinual war.  At length, 
+wearied and disgusted, men sighed for peace, and, with one 
+accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest among them: Come, 
+be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and govern us; we 
+surrender our natural rights and our natural independence to you, 
+with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace 
+among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or 
+cutting each other's throats.
+
+Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, 
+but asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had 
+asserted it in the interests of power.  Rousseau, a citizen of 
+Geneva, followed in the next century with his Contrat Social, the 
+text-book of the French revolutionists--almost their Bible--and 
+put the finishing stroke to the theory.  Hitherto the compact or 
+agreement had been assumed to be between the governor and the 
+governed; Rousseau supposes it to be between the people 
+themselves, or a compact to which the people are the only parties.  
+He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men lived, 
+antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society, 
+without government or law.  All men in that state were equal, and 
+each was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.  These 
+equal, independent, sovereign
+47
+                              individuals met, or are held to 
+have met, in convention, and entered into a compact with 
+themselves, each with all, and all with each, that they would 
+constitute government, and would each submit to the determination 
+and authority of the whole, practically of the fluctuating and 
+irresponsible majority.  Civil society, the state, the 
+government, originates in this compact, and the government, as 
+Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American 
+Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the 
+governed."
+
+This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that 
+the individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to 
+civil society, was generally adopted by the American people in 
+the last century, and is still the more prevalent theory with 
+those among them who happen to have any theory or opinion on the 
+subject.  It is the political tradition of the country.  The 
+state, as defined by the elder Adams, is held to be a voluntary 
+association of individuals.  Individuals create civil society, 
+and may uncreate it whenever they judge it advisable.  Prior to 
+the Southern Rebellion, nearly every American asserted with 
+Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or revolution, and 
+sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and revolutionists, 
+48
+wherever they made their appearance.  Loyalty was held to be the 
+correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and 
+traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent 
+lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.  The fearful 
+struggle of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its 
+very existence may have changed this.
+
+That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory 
+assumes, may be questioned.  Certainly nothing proves that it is, 
+or ever was, a real state.  That there is a law of nature is 
+undeniable.  All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and 
+jurisprudence assert it; the state assumes it as its own 
+immediate basis, and the codes of all nations are founded on it; 
+universal jurisprudence, the jus qentium of the Romans, embodies 
+it, and the courts recognize and administer it.  It is the reason 
+and conscience of civil society, and every state acknowledges its 
+authority.  But the law of nature is as much in force in civil 
+society as out of it.  Civil law does not abrogate or supersede 
+natural law, but presupposes it, and supports itself on it as its 
+own ground and reason.  As the natural law, which is only natural 
+justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all men, 
+persists in the civil law, municipal or
+49 
+                                        international, as its 
+informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil 
+state, natural society in civil society, which simply develops, 
+applies, and protects it.  Man in civil society is not out of 
+nature, but is in it--is in his most natural state; for society 
+is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in 
+some form inseparable from it.  The state of nature under the 
+natural law is not, as a separate state, an actual state, and 
+never was; but an abstraction, in which is considered, apart from 
+the concrete existence called society, what is derived 
+immediately from the natural law.  But as abstractions have no 
+existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature 
+has no actual existence in the world of reality as a separate 
+state.
+
+But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a 
+real and separate state, in which men at first lived, there is 
+great difficulty in understanding how they ever got out of it.  
+Can a man divest himself of his nature, or lift himself above it?  
+Man is in his nature, and inseparable from it.  If his primitive 
+state was his natural state, and if the political state is 
+supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural, how passed he alone, 
+by his own unaided powers, from the former to the latter?  The 
+ancients, 
+50
+          who had lost the primitive tradition of creation, 
+asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the earth, 
+and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees, 
+and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science, 
+art, law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the 
+prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended, 
+that man could come out of that state alone by his own unaided 
+efforts.  They ascribed the invention of language, art, and 
+science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws, 
+to the intervention of the gods.  It remained for the 
+Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern successors, 
+the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first cause, 
+believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take 
+care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own 
+unassisted efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out 
+of the primitive state, and institute what in modern times is 
+called civilta, civility, or civilization.
+
+The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which 
+men have emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of 
+civil society, forget that if government is not the sole 
+condition, it is one of the essential conditions of progress.  
+The only progressive nations are
+51
+                                 civilized or republican nations.  
+Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive.  Ages on ages roll 
+over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr 
+has well remarked with others, that history records no instance 
+of a savage tribe or people having become civilized by its own 
+spontaneous or indigenous efforts.  If savage tribes have ever 
+become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the 
+aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or 
+missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by 
+commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age.  
+Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people 
+to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized.  But 
+the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and 
+asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the 
+savage.  The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe 
+that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or 
+feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, 
+law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there 
+is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged 
+state of nature have none.
+
+The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting 
+into their imaginary
+52
+                     state of nature the views, habits, and 
+capacities of the civilized man.  It is, perhaps, not difficult 
+for men who have been civilized, who have the intelligence, the 
+arts, the affections, and the habits of civilization, if deprived 
+by some great social convulsion of society, and thrown back on 
+the so-called state of nature, or cast away on some uninhabited 
+island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with the 
+rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish 
+and maintain civil government.  They are civilized men, and bear 
+civil society in their own life.  But these are no 
+representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of 
+nature.  These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no 
+conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to 
+that in which they have thus far lived.  How then can they, 
+since, on the theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is 
+a purely artificial creation, even conceive of civilization, 
+much less realize it?
+
+These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete 
+abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they 
+feel they could do in case civil society were broken up, what 
+men may do and have done in a state of nature.  Men cannot divest 
+themselves of
+53
+              themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it, 
+they think, reason, and act as they are.
+
+Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.  The 
+advocates of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete, 
+should have presented their primitive man as below the lowest 
+known savage, unprogressive, and in himself incapable of 
+developing any progressive energy.  Unprogressive, and, without 
+foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for 
+your primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from 
+the alleged state of nature to that of civilization, of which he 
+has no conception, and towards which no innate desire, no 
+instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
+
+But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without 
+supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some 
+happy inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the 
+state of nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil 
+government, how could he carry his conception into execution?  
+Conception is always easier than its realization, and between the 
+design and its execution there is always a weary distance.  The 
+poetry of all nations is a wail over unrealized ideals.  It is 
+little that even the wisest and most potent statesman can realize 
+of what he conceives to
+54
+                        be necessary for the state: political, 
+legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and 
+favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom 
+generations come and go without effecting them.  The republics of 
+Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the 
+communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not 
+solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but 
+chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in 
+experience, and require for their realization the modes of 
+thought, habits, manners, character, life, which only their 
+introduction and realization can supply.  So to be able to 
+execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature 
+to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the 
+habits, and characters in the public which are not possible 
+without civilization itself.  Some philosophers suppose men have 
+invented language, forgetting that it requires language to give 
+the ability to invent language.
+
+Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and 
+convincing it may be.  They are moved by their affections, 
+passions, instincts, and habits.  Routine is more powerful with 
+them than logic.  A few are greedy of novelties, and are always 
+for trying experiments;
+55
+                        but the great body of the people of all 
+nations have an invincible repugnance to abandon what they know 
+for what they know not.  They are, to a great extent, the slaves 
+of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the necessary 
+exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a 
+better.  Interest itself is powerless before their indolence, 
+prejudice, habits, and usages.  Never were philosophers more 
+ignorant of human nature than they, so numerous in the last 
+century, who imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of 
+interest, and that enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien 
+entendu, suffices to found and sustain the state.  No reform, no 
+change in the constitution of government or of society, whatever 
+the advantages it may promise, can be successful, if introduced, 
+unless it has its root or germ in the past.  Man is never a 
+creator; he can only develop and continue, because he is himself 
+a creature, and only a second cause.  The children of Israel, 
+when they encountered the privations of the wilderness that lay 
+between them and the promised land flowing with milk and honey, 
+fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back to Egypt, 
+and permit them to return to slavery.
+
+In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, 
+there is no germ of civ-
+56
+                       ilization, and the transition to civil 
+society would not be a development, but a complete rupture with 
+the past, and an entire new creation.  When it is with the 
+greatest difficulty that necessary reforms are introduced in old 
+and highly civilized nations and when it can seldom be done at 
+all without terrible political and social convulsions, how can we 
+suppose men without society, and knowing nothing of it, can 
+deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice aforethought," found 
+society?  Without government, and destitute alike of habits of 
+obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate, 
+establish, and sustain government?  To suppose it, would be to 
+suppose that men in a state of nature, without culture, without 
+science, without any of the arts, even the most simple and 
+necessary, are infinitely superior to the men formed under the 
+most advanced civilization.  Was Rousseau right in asserting 
+civilization as a fall, as a deterioration of the race?
+
+But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some 
+miracle or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the 
+origin of government as authority in compact is not yet 
+established.  According to the theory, the rights of civil 
+society are derived from the rights of the individuals who form 
+or enter into
+57
+              the compact.  But individuals cannot give what they 
+have not, and no individual has in himself the right to govern 
+another.  By the law of nature all men have equal rights, are 
+equals, and equals have no authority one over another.  Nor has 
+an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right 
+to dispose of himself as he pleases.  Man is not God, 
+independent, self-existing and self-sufficing.  He is dependent, 
+and dependent not only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on 
+society, and even on nature, or the material world.  That on 
+which he depends in the measure in which be depends on it, 
+contributes to his existence, to his life, and to his well-being, 
+and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right in him and to 
+him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the proud 
+spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation 
+to another.  The right of that on which man depends, and by 
+communion with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.
+
+Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his 
+only medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him 
+is neither absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it, 
+lives in it, and cannot live without it.  It has, then, certain 
+lights over him, and
+58
+                     he cannot enter into any compact, league, or 
+alliance that society does not authorize, or at least permit.  
+These rights of society override his rights to himself, and he 
+can neither surrender them nor delegate them.  Other rights, as 
+the rights of religion and property, which are held directly from 
+God and nature, and which are independent of society, are 
+included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these 
+rights cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they 
+are rights of man only before civil society, and therefore not 
+his to cede, and because they are precisely the rights that 
+government is bound to respect and protect.  The compact, then, 
+cannot be formed as pretended, for the only rights individuals 
+could delegate or surrender to society to constitute the sum of 
+the rights of government are hers already, and those which are 
+not hers are those which cannot be delegated or surrendered, and 
+in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is the duty, the 
+chief end of government to protect each and every individual.
+
+The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no 
+authority without society, to meet in convention, and enter into 
+the alleged compact, because they are not independent, sovereign 
+individuals.  But pass over this: sup-
+59
+                                     pose the convention, suppose 
+the compact, it must still be conceded that it binds and can bind 
+only those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into it.  This 
+is conceded by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of l776, 
+in the assertion that government derives its "just powers from 
+the consent of the governed."  This consent, as the matter is one 
+of life and death, must be free, deliberate, formal, explicit, 
+not simply an assumed, implied, or constructive consent.  It must 
+be given personally, and not by one for another without his 
+express authority.
+
+It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms 
+of the compact from the silence of the individual, and also from 
+his continued residence in the country and submission to its 
+government.  But residence is no evidence of consent, because it 
+may be a matter of necessity.  The individual may be unable to 
+emigrate, if he would; and by what right can individuals form an 
+agreement to which I must consent or else migrate to some strange 
+land?
+
+Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, be any 
+thing but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and 
+therefore invalid?  Nothing can be inferred from one's silence, 
+for he may have many reasons for being 
+60
+                                       silent besides approval of 
+the government.  He may be silent because speech would avail 
+nothing; because to protest might be dangerous--cost him his 
+liberty, if not his life; because he sees and knows nothing 
+better, and is ignorant that he has any choice in the case; or 
+because, as very likely is the fact with the majority, he has 
+never for moment thought of the matter, or ever had his attention 
+called to it, and has no mind on the subject.
+
+But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from 
+the compact or obligation to obey the government created by it 
+all the women of a nation, all the children too young to be 
+capable of giving their consent, and all who are too ignorant, 
+too weak of mind to be able to understand the terms of the 
+contract.  These several classes cannot be less than three-fourths 
+of the population of any country.  What is to be done with them?  
+Leave them without government?  Extend the power of the 
+government over them?  By what right?  Government derives its 
+just powers from the consent of the governed, and that consent 
+they have not given.  Whence does one-fourth of the population 
+get its right to govern the other three-fourths?
+
+But what is to be done with the rights of
+61
+                                          minorities?  Is the 
+rule of unanimity to be insisted on in the convention and in the 
+government, when it goes into operation?  Unanimity is 
+impracticable, for where there are many men there will be 
+differences of opinion.  The rule of unanimity gives to each 
+individual a veto on the whole proceeding, which was the grand 
+defect of the Polish constitution.  Each member of the Polish 
+Diet, which included the whole body of the nobility, had an 
+absolute veto, and could, alone, arrest the whole action of the 
+government.  Will you substitute the rule of the majority, and 
+say the majority must govern?  By what right?  It is agreed to in 
+the convention.  Unanimously, or only by a majority?  The right 
+of the majority to have their will is, on the social compact 
+theory, a conventional right, and therefore cannot come into play 
+before the convention is completed, or the social compact is 
+framed and accepted.  How, in settling the terms of the compact, 
+will you proceed?  By majorities?  But suppose a minority 
+objects, and demands two-thirds, three-fourths, or four-fifths, 
+and votes against the majority rule, which is carried only by a 
+simple plurality of votes, will the proceedings of the convention 
+bind the dissenting minority?
+62
+                               What gives to the majority the 
+right to govern the minority who dissent from its action?
+
+On the supposition that society has rights not derived from 
+individuals, and which are intrusted to the government, there is 
+a good reason why the majority should prevail within the 
+legitimate sphere of government, because the majority is the best 
+representative practicable of society itself; and if the 
+constitution secures to minorities and dissenting individuals 
+their natural rights and their equal rights as citizens, they 
+have no just cause of complaint, for the majority in such case 
+has no power to tyrannize over them or to oppress them.  But the 
+theory under examination denies that society has any rights 
+except such as it derives from individuals who all have equal 
+rights.  According to it, society is itself conventional, and 
+created by free, independent, equal, sovereign individuals.  
+Society is a congress of sovereigns, in which no one has 
+authority over another, and no one can be rightfully forced to 
+submit to any decree against his will.  In such a congress the 
+rule of the majority is manifestly improper, illegitimate, and 
+invalid, unless adopted by unanimous consent.
+
+But this is not all.  The individual is always the equal of 
+himself, and if the government
+63
+                               derives its powers from the 
+consent of the governed, he governs in the government, and parts 
+with none of his original sovereignty.  The government is not his 
+master, but his agent, as the principal only delegates, not 
+surrenders, his rights and powers to the agent.  He is free at 
+any time he pleases to recall the powers he has delegated, to 
+give new instructions, or to dismiss him.  The sovereignty of the 
+individual survives the compact, and persists through all the 
+acts of his agent, the government.  He must, then, be free to 
+withdraw from the compact whenever be judges it advisable.  
+Secession is perfectly legitimate if government is simply a 
+contract between equals.  The disaffected, the criminal, the 
+thief the government would send to prison, or the murderer it 
+would hang, would be very likely to revoke his consent, and to 
+secede from the state.  Any number of individuals large enough to 
+count a majority among themselves, indisposed to pay the 
+government taxes, or to perform the military service exacted, 
+might hold a convention, adopt a secession ordinance, and declare 
+themselves a free, independent, sovereign state, and bid defiance 
+to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and that, too, 
+without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.  
+Would
+64
+      the government employ military force to coerce them back to 
+their allegiance?  By what right?  Government is their agent, 
+their creature, and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or 
+creature.
+
+The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment 
+be dissolved.  Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently 
+maintained that one generation has no power to bind another; and, 
+as if this was not enough, he asserted the right of revolution, 
+and gave it as his opinion that in every nation a revolution once 
+in every generation is desirable, that is, according to his 
+reckoning, once every nineteen years.  The doctrine that one 
+generation has no power to bind its successor is not only a 
+logical conclusion from the theory that governments derive their 
+just powers from the consent of the governed, since a generation 
+cannot give its consent before it is born, but is very convenient 
+for a nation that has contracted a large national debt; yet, 
+perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new 
+generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge 
+the obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.  No 
+man, certainly, can contract for any one but himself; and how 
+then can the son be bound, without his own personal or
+65
+                                                       individual 
+consent, freely given, by the obligations entered into by his 
+father?
+
+The social compact is necessarily limited to the individuals who 
+form it, and as necessarily, unless renewed, expires with them.  
+It thus creates no state, no political corporation, which 
+survives in all its rights and powers, though individuals die.  
+The state is on this theory a voluntary association, and in 
+principle, except that it is not a secret society, in no respect 
+differs from the Carbonari, or the Knights of the Golden Circle.  
+When Orsini attempted to execute the sentence of death on the 
+Emperor of the French, in obedience to the order of the 
+Carbonari, of which the Emperor was a member, he was, if the 
+theory of the origin of government in compact be true, no more an 
+assassin than was the officer who executed on the gallows the 
+rebel spies and incendiaries Beal and Kennedy.
+
+Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no social 
+or civil element.  It does not and cannot create society.  It can 
+give only an aggregation of individuals, and society is not an 
+aggregation nor even an organization of individuals.  It is an 
+organism, and individuals live in its life as well as it in 
+theirs.  There is a real living solidarity, which makes 
+individuals members of the social body, and members one
+66
+                                                        of another.  
+There is no society without individuals, and there are no 
+individuals without society; but in society there is that which 
+is not individual, and is more than all individuals.  The social 
+compact is an attempt to substitute for this real living 
+solidarity, which gives to society at once unity of life and 
+diversity of members, an artificial solidarity, a fictitious 
+unity for a real unity, and membership by contract for real 
+living membership, a cork leg for that which nature herself gives.  
+Real government has its ground in this real living solidarity, 
+and represents the social element, which is not individual, but 
+above all individuals, as man is above men.  But the theory 
+substitutes a simple agency for government, and makes each 
+individual its principal.  It is an abuse of language to call 
+this agency a government.  It has no one feature or element of 
+government.  It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity; 
+its authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a 
+public authority, representing a public will, a public right, or 
+a public interest.  In no country could government be adopted and 
+sustained if men were left to the wisdom or justness of their 
+theories, or in the general affairs of life, acted on them.  
+Society, and government as representing society, has a real 
+existence, life, facul-
+67
+                      ties, and organs of its own, not derived or 
+derivable from individuals.  As well might it be maintained that 
+the human body consists in and derives all its life from the 
+particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and which are 
+constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its life, 
+or government its powers, from individuals.  No mechanical 
+aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is 
+no living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation 
+of individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths, 
+can make society where there is no informing social principle 
+that aggregates and assimilates them to a living body, or produce 
+that mystic existence called a state or commonwealth.
+
+The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the 
+nation to be a purely personal affair.  It gives the government 
+no territorial status, and clothes it with no territorial rights 
+or jurisdiction.  The government that could so originate would be, 
+if any thing, a barbaric, not a republican government.  It has 
+only the rights conferred on it, surrendered or delegated to it 
+by individuals, and therefore, at best, only individual rights.  
+Individuals can confer only such rights as they have in the 
+supposed state of nature.  In that state there is 
+68
+neither private nor public domain.  The earth in 
+that state is not property, and is open to the first occupant, 
+and the occupant can lay no claim to any more than he actually 
+occupies.  Whence, then, does government derive its territorial 
+jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain claimed by all 
+national governments?  Whence its title to vacant or unoccupied 
+lands?  How does any particular government fix its territorial 
+boundaries, and obtain the right to prescribe who may occupy, and 
+on what conditions the vacant lands within those boundaries?  
+Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers, lakes, 
+bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as 
+appertaining to its domain?  Here are rights that it could not 
+have derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed 
+them in the so-called state of nature.  The concocters of the 
+theory evidently overlooked these rights, or considered them of 
+no importance.  They seem never to have contemplated the 
+existence of territorial states, or the division of mankind into 
+nations fixed to the soil.  They seem not to have supposed the 
+earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of their followers 
+pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of a nation 
+are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy
+69
+                                             them, without leave 
+asked of the national authority or granted.  The American people 
+retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory 
+habits of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they 
+settled on the banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern 
+Ocean, in Scania, or came in contact with the Graeco-Roman 
+civilization.
+
+Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations 
+are fixed to the soil.  The territory is defined, and is the 
+domain of the state, from which all private proprietors hold 
+their title-deeds.  Individual proprietors hold under the state, 
+and often hold more, than they occupy; but it retains in all 
+private estates the eminent domain, and prohibits the alienation 
+of land to one who is not a citizen.  It defends its domain, its 
+public unoccupied lauds, and the lands owned by private 
+individuals, against all foreign powers.  Now whence, if 
+government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it 
+get this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even 
+its unoccupied lands as trespassers?  In the state of nature the 
+territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are 
+restricted to the portion of land they occupy with their rude 
+culture, and with their flocks and herds, and in civilized 
+nations to what they
+70
+                     hold from the state, and, therefore, the 
+right as held and defended by all nations, and without which the 
+nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is and can be no 
+state, could never have been derived from individuals.  The 
+earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the 
+sacred territory, to which the state and all political power are 
+attached.  Whence did Rome become a landholder, and the 
+governing people a territorial people?  Whence does any nation 
+become a territorial nation and lord of the domain?  Certainly 
+never by the cession of individuals, and hence no civilized 
+government ever did or could originate in the so-called social 
+compact.
+
+
+
+
+
+71
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-CONTINUED.
+
+
+III. The tendency of the last century was to individualism; that 
+of the present is to socialism.  The theory of Hobbes, Locke, 
+Rousseau, and Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still 
+held by many, has latterly been much modified, if not wholly 
+transformed.  Sovereignty, it is now maintained, is inherent in 
+the people; not individually, indeed, but collectively, or the 
+people as society.  The constitution is held not to be simply a 
+compact or agreement entered into by the people as individuals 
+creating civil society and government, but a law ordained by the 
+sovereign people, prescribing the constitution of the state and 
+defining its rights and powers.
+
+This transformation, which is rather going on than completed, is, 
+under one aspect at least, a progress, or rather a return to the 
+sounder principles of antiquity.  Under it government ceases to 
+be a mere agency, which must obtain 
+72
+                                    the assassin's consent to be 
+hung before it can rightfully hang him, and becomes authority, 
+which is one and imperative.  The people taken collectively are 
+society, and society is a living organism, not a mere aggregation 
+of individuals.  It does not, of course, exist without 
+individuals, but it is something more than individuals, and has 
+rights not derived from them, and which are paramount to theirs.  
+There is more truth, and truth of a higher order, in this than in 
+the theory of the social compact.  Individuals, to a certain 
+extent, derive their life from God through society, and so far 
+they depend on her, and they are hers; she owns them, and has the 
+right to do as she will with them.  On this theory the state 
+emanates from society, and is supreme.  It coincides with the 
+ancient Greek and Roman theory, as expressed by Cicero, already 
+cited.  Man is born in society and remains there, and it may be 
+regarded as the source of ancient Greek and Roman patriotism, 
+which still commands the admiration of the civilized world.  The 
+state with Greece and Rome was a living reality, and loyalty a 
+religion.  The Romans held Rome to be a divinity, gave her 
+statues and altars, and offered her divine worship.  This was 
+superstition, no doubt, but it had in it an ele-
+73
+                                               ment of truth.  To 
+every true philosopher there is something divine in the state, 
+and truth in all theories.  Society stands nearer to God, and 
+participates more immediately of the Divine essence, and the 
+state is a more lively image of God than the individual.  It was 
+man, the generic and reproductive man, not the isolated 
+individual, that was created in the image and likeness of his 
+Maker.  "And God created man in his own image; in the image of 
+God created he him; male and female created he them."
+
+This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it 
+enlists in its support the instincts, the intelligence, the 
+living forces, and active tendencies of the age.  Kings, kaisers, 
+and hierarchies are powerless before it, and war against it in 
+vain.  The most they can do is to restrain its excesses, or to 
+guard against its abuses.  Its advocates, in returning to it, 
+sometimes revive in its name the old pagan superstition.  Not a 
+few of the European democrats recognize in the earth, in heaven, 
+or in hell, no power superior to the people, and say not only
+people-king but people-God.  They say absolutely, without any 
+qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and 
+make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in 
+religion, philosophy, morals, science, and the
+74
+                                               arts.  The people 
+not only found the state, but also the church.  They inspire or 
+reveal the truth, ordain or prohibit worships, judge of 
+doctrines, and decide cases of conscience.  Mazzini said , when 
+at the bead of the Roman Republic in 1848, the question of 
+religion must be remitted to the judgment of the people.  Yet 
+this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in all 
+civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.
+
+But this theory has its difficulties.  Who are the collective 
+people that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign 
+people?  The word people is vague, and in itself determines 
+nothing.  It may include a larger or a smaller number; it may 
+mean the political people, or it may mean simply population; it 
+may mean peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as 
+distinguished from the nobility; hired laborers or workmen as 
+distinguished from their employer, or slaves as distinguished 
+from their master or owner.  In which of these senses is the word 
+to be taken when it is said, "The people are sovereign?"  The 
+people are the population or inhabitants of one and the same 
+country.  That is something.  But who or what determines the 
+country?  Is the country the whole territory of the globe?  That 
+will
+75
+     not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and 
+their division into separate nations.  Is the territory 
+indefinite or undefined?  Then indefinite or undefined are its 
+inhabitants, or the people invested with the rights of society.  
+Is it defined and its boundaries fixed?  Who has done it?  The 
+people.  But who are the people?  We are as wise as we were at 
+starting.  The logicians say that the definition of idem per 
+idem, or the same by the same, is simply no definition at all.
+
+The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people 
+the sovereign people.  But who are the people constituting the 
+nation?  The sovereign people?  This is only to revolve in a 
+vicious circle.  The nation is the tribe or the people living 
+under the same regimen, and born of the same ancestor, or sprung 
+from the same ancestor or progenitor.  But where find a nation in 
+this the primitive sense of the word?  Migration, conquest, and 
+intermarriage, have so broken up and intermingled the primitive 
+races, that it is more than doubtful if a single nation, tribe, 
+or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face of the earth.  
+A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman, may have 
+the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.  
+The nation is the people
+76
+                         inhabiting the same country, and united 
+under one and the same government, it is further answered.  The 
+nation, then, is not purely personal, but also territorial.  
+Then, again, the question comes up, who or what determines the 
+territory?  The government?  But not before it is constituted, 
+and it cannot be constituted till its territorial limits are 
+determined.  The tribe doubtless occupies territory, but is not 
+fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it, and therefore 
+is not territorial.  But a nation, in the modern or civilized 
+sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its 
+jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory 
+is determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.
+
+The question is not an idle question.  It is one of great 
+practical importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither 
+determine who are the sovereign people, nor who are united under 
+one and the same government.  Laws have no extra-territorial 
+force, and the officer who should attempt to enforce the national 
+laws beyond the national territory would be a trespasser.  If the 
+limits are undetermined, the government is not territorial, and 
+can claim as within its jurisdiction only those who choose to 
+acknowledge its authority.  The importance of the question has
+77
+been recently brought home to the American people by the 
+secession of eleven or more States from the Union.  Were these 
+States a part of the American nation, or were they not?  Was the 
+war which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so 
+much treasure, a civil war or a foreign war?  Were the 
+secessionists traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were 
+they patriots fighting for the liberty and independence of their 
+country and the right of self-government?  All on both sides 
+agreed that the nation is sovereign; the dispute was as to the 
+existence of the nation itself, and the extent of its 
+jurisdiction.  Doubtless, when a nation has a generally 
+recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the 
+difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be 
+got over; but the question here concerns the institution of 
+government, and determining who constitute society and have the 
+right to meet in person, or by their delegates in convention, 
+to institute it.  This question, so important, and at times so 
+difficult, the theory of the origin of government in the people 
+collectively, or the nation, does not solve, or furnish any means 
+of solving.
+
+But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another, 
+and a very grave one, to over-
+78
+                             come.  The theory assumes that the 
+people collectively, "in their own native right and might," are 
+sovereign.  According to it the people are ultimate, and free to 
+do whatever they please.  This sacrifices individual freedom.  
+The origin of government in a compact entered into by 
+individuals, each with all and all with each, sacrificed the 
+rights of society, and assumed each individual to be in himself 
+an independent sovereignty.  If logically carried out, there 
+could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and 
+no public authority.  This new theory transfers to society the 
+sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts 
+social despotism, or the absolutism of the state.  It asserts 
+with sufficient energy public authority, or the right of the 
+people to govern; but it leaves no space for individual rights, 
+which society must recognize, respect, and protect.  This was the 
+grand defect of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilization.  The 
+historian explores in vain the records of the old Greek and Roman 
+republics for any recognition of the rights of individuals not 
+held as privileges or concessions from the state.  Society 
+recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed over 
+individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his 
+household,
+79
+           the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over 
+his subjects.  The direct and indirect influence of the body of 
+freemen admitted to a voice in public affairs, in determining the 
+resolutions and action of the state, no doubt tempered in 
+practice to some extent the authority of the state, and prevented 
+acts of gross oppression; but in theory the state was absolute, 
+and the people individually were placed at the mercy of the 
+people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the collective 
+people.
+
+Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and 
+rights of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently 
+of society, and not derived from God through the state.  The 
+recognition of these rights by modern society is due to 
+Christianity: some say to the barbarians, who overthrew the Roman 
+empire; but this last opinion is not well founded.  The barbarian 
+chiefs and nobles had no doubt a lively sense of personal freedom 
+and independence, but for themselves only.  They had no 
+conception of personal freedom as a general or universal right, 
+and men never obtain universal principles by generalizing 
+particulars.  They may give a general truth a particular 
+application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a 
+particular truth--a general or universal
+80
+                                         application.  They are 
+too good logicians for that.  The barbarian individual freedom 
+and personal independence was never generalized into the doctrine 
+of the rights of man, any more than the freedom of the master has 
+been generalized into the right of his slaves to be free.  The 
+doctrine of individual freedom before the state is due to the 
+Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and worth of every 
+human soul, the accountability to God of each man for himself, 
+and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed 
+rather than men.  The church practically denied the absolutism of 
+the state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the 
+state, in converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of 
+the state authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death 
+the profession of the Christian faith.  In this she practically, 
+as well as theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused 
+into modern society the doctrine that every individual, even the 
+lowest and meanest, has rights which the state neither confers 
+nor can abrogate; and it will only be by extinguishing in modern 
+society the Christian faith, and obliterating all traces of 
+Christian civilization, that state absolutism can be revived with 
+more than a partial and temporary success.
+
+81
+The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so 
+explained as to deny the rights of society, and to become pure 
+individualism; but no political system that runs to the opposite 
+extreme, and absorbs the individual in the state, stands the 
+least chance of any general or permanent success till 
+Christianity is extinguished.  Yet the assertion of principles 
+which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely harmless, 
+even in Christian countries.  Error is never harmless, and only 
+truth can give a solid foundation on which to build.  
+Individualism and socialism are each opposed to the other, and 
+each has only a partial truth.  The state founded on either 
+cannot stand, and society will only alternate between the two 
+extremes.  To-day it is torn by a revolution in favor of 
+socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another in favor of 
+individualism, and without effecting any real progress by either 
+revolution.  Real progress can be secured only by recognizing and 
+building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our 
+theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and 
+independent of our opinions.
+
+Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth 
+or reality.  Society has certain rights over individuals, for she 
+is a
+82
+     medium of their communion with God, or through which they 
+derive life from God, the primal source of all life; but she is 
+not the only medium of man's life.  Man, as was said in the 
+beginning, lives by communion with God, and he communes with God 
+in the creative act and the Incarnation, through his kind, and, 
+through nature.  This threefold communion gives rise to three 
+institutions--religion or the church, society or the state, and 
+property.  The life that man derives from God through religion 
+and property, is not derived from him through society, and 
+consequently so much of his life be holds independently of 
+society; and this constitutes his rights as a man as 
+distinguished from his rights as a citizen.  In relation to 
+society, as not held from God through her, these are termed his 
+natural rights, which, she must hold inviolable, and government 
+protect for every one, whatever his complexion or his social 
+position.  These rights--the rights of conscience and the rights 
+of property, with all their necessary implications--are 
+limitations of the rights of society, and the individual has the 
+right to plead them against the state.  Society does not confer 
+them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as 
+sacred and as fundamental as her own.
+
+83
+But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all.  The 
+people can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and 
+act.  The people are not God, whatever some theorists may 
+pretend--are not independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing.  
+They are as dependent collectively as individually, and therefore 
+can exist and act only as second cause, never as first cause.  
+They can, then, even in the limited sphere of their sovereignty, 
+be sovereign only in a secondary sense, never absolute sovereign 
+in their own independent right.  They are sovereign only to the 
+extent to which they impart life to the individual members of 
+society, and only in the sense in which she imparts it, or is its 
+cause.  She is not its first cause or creator, and is the medial 
+cause or medium through which they derive it from God, not its 
+efficient cause or primary source.  Society derives her own life 
+from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him.  Then she 
+is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God.  Her 
+dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and 
+derivative.
+
+This third theory does not err in assuming that the people 
+collectively are more than the people individually, or in denying 
+society to be a mere aggregation of individuals with no life, 
+84
+                                                              and 
+no rights but what it derives from them; nor even in asserting 
+that the people in the sense of society are sovereign, but in 
+asserting that they are sovereign in their own native or 
+underived right and might.  Society has not in herself the 
+absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute 
+dominion either of herself or her members.  God gave to man 
+dominion over the irrational creation, for he made irrational 
+creatures for man; but he never gave him either individually or 
+collectively the dominion over the rational creation.  The theory 
+that the people are absolutely sovereign in their own independent 
+right and might, as some zealous democrats explain it, asserts 
+the fundamental principle of despotism, and all despotism is 
+false, for it identifies the creature with the Creator.  No 
+creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and 
+consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign.  
+This third theory, therefore, is untenable.
+
+IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers 
+they may be called, reject the origin of government in the people 
+individually or collectively.  Satisfied that it has never been 
+instituted by a voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and 
+confounding government as a
+85
+                            fact with government as authority, 
+maintain that government is a spontaneous development of nature.  
+Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee 
+constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his dam.  Nature, 
+working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops society, 
+and society develops government.  That is all the secret.  
+Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond 
+the simple positive fact, belong to the theological or 
+metaphysical stage of the development of nature, but are left 
+behind when the race has passed beyond that stage, and has 
+reached the epoch of positive science, in which all, except the 
+positive fact, is held to be unreal and non-existent.  
+Government, like every thing else in the universe, is simply a 
+positive development of nature.  Science explains the laws and 
+conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin 
+or ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world 
+of space and time.
+
+These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they 
+only oppose theory to theory.  The assertion that reality for the 
+human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible 
+order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact.  
+Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is 
+only
+86
+     in the light of principles that facts themselves are 
+intelligible.  If the human mind had no science of reality that 
+transcends the sensible order, or the positive fact, it could 
+have no science at all.  As things exist only in their principles 
+or causes, so can they be known only in their principles and 
+causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as they 
+really exist.  The science that pretends to deduce principles 
+from particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of 
+reasoning to an order that transcends facts, and in which facts 
+have their origin, is undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that 
+the positivists are unquestionably right.  But to maintain that 
+man has no intelligence of any thing beyond the fact, no 
+intuition or intellectual apprehension of its principle or cause, 
+is equally chimerical.  The human mind cannot have all science, 
+but it has real science as far as it goes, and real science is 
+the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.  
+Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they 
+do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not 
+penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the 
+methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the 
+individual fact, it could never know the fact itself.  The error 
+of modern
+87
+          philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the 
+principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying 
+that the human mind has direct and immediate intuition of it.
+
+Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or 
+there could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we 
+could never assert that development is development, or 
+scientifically explain the laws and conditions of development.  
+Development is explication, and supposes a germ which precedes 
+it, and is not itself a development; and development, however far 
+it may be carried, can never do more than realize the 
+possibilities of the germ.  Development is not creation, and 
+cannot supply its own germ.  That at least must be given by the 
+Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.  If authority 
+has not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature 
+spontaneously or otherwise.  All government has a governing will; 
+and without a will that commands, there is no government; and 
+nature has in her spontaneous developments no will, for she has 
+no personality.  Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only 
+presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it 
+prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law.  An imperative will, 
+the will of a superior who has the right to
+88
+                                            command what reason 
+dictates or approves, is essential to government; and that will 
+is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in nature.  
+So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or 
+government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development.  
+Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is 
+the individual man.
+
+No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense 
+of the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is 
+placed by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be 
+confounded with those laws of nature so-called, according to 
+which she is productive as second cause, or produces her effects, 
+which are not properly laws at all.  Fire burns, water flows, 
+rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food nourishes, poisons kill, 
+one substance has a chemical affinity for another, the needle 
+points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said; that is, the 
+effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural force.  
+Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature 
+herself.  The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical 
+law, is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on 
+all moral creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason 
+and free-will, and is called natural because promul-
+89
+                                                   gated in 
+natural reason, or the reason common and essential to all moral 
+creatures.  This is the moral law.  It is what the French call le 
+droit naturell, natural right, and, as the theologians teach us, 
+is the transcript of the eternal law, the eternal will or reason 
+of God.  It is the foundation of all law, and all acts of a state 
+that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains, violences 
+rather than laws.  The moral law is no development of nature, for 
+it is above nature, and is imposed on nature.  The only 
+development there is about it is in our understanding of it.
+
+There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered 
+as creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in 
+successive developments.  Hence the origin of space and time.  
+There would have been no space if there had been no external 
+creation, and no time if the creation had been completed 
+externally at once, as it was in relation to the Creator.  Ideal 
+space is simply the ability of God to externize his creative act, 
+and actual space is the relation of coexistence in the things 
+created; ideal time is the ability of God to create existences 
+with the capacity of being completed by successive developments, 
+and actual time is the relation of these in the order of 
+90
+succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated 
+development ceases, and time is no more.  In relation to himself 
+the Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with 
+him there is no time, for there is no succession.  But in 
+relation to itself creation is incomplete, and there is room for 
+development, which may be continued till the whole possibility of 
+creation is actualized.  Here is the foundation of what is true 
+in the modern doctrine of progress.  Man is progressive, because 
+the possibilities of his nature are successively unfolded and 
+actualized.
+
+Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be 
+scientifically ascertained and defined.  All generation is 
+development, as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual.  
+But everything is developed in its own order, and after its kind.  
+The Darwinian theory of the development of species is not 
+sustained by science. The development starts from the germ, and	
+in the germ is given the law or principle of the development.  
+>From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or the 
+linden.  Every kind generates its kind, never another.  But no 
+development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result 
+alone of the inherent energy or force of the germ developed.
+91
+There is not only a solidarity of race, but in some sense of all 
+races, or species; all created things are bound to their Creator, 
+and to one another.  One and the same law or principle of life 
+pervades all creation, binding the universe together in a unity 
+that copies or imitates the unity of the Creator.  No creature is 
+isolated from the rest, or absolutely independent of others.  All 
+are parts of one stupendous whole, and each depends on the whole, 
+and the whole on each, and each on each.  All creatures are 
+members of one body, and members one of another.  The germ of the 
+oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can never 
+grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself 
+in motion.  Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is 
+absolutely deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will 
+you watch for its germination.  Germinate it cannot without some 
+external influence, or communion, so to speak, with the elements 
+from which it derives its sustenance and support.
+
+There can be no absolutely spontaneous development.  All things 
+are doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it 
+is an active force of some sort; but only God himself alone 
+suffices for his own activity.  All created things are dependent, 
+have not their being 
+92
+                     in themselves, and are real only as they 
+participate, through the creative act, of the Divine being.  The 
+germ can no more be developed than it could exist without God, 
+and no more develop itself than it could create itself.  What is 
+called the law of development is in the germ; but that law or 
+force can operate only in conjunction with another force or other 
+forces.  All development, as all growth, is by accretion or 
+assimilation.  The assimilating force is, if you will, in the 
+germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.  
+Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must 
+supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and 
+knows that to raise a crop of corn, be must plant the seed in a 
+soil duly prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for 
+its germination, growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening.  In 
+all created things, in all things not complete in themselves, in 
+all save God, in whom there is no development possible, for He 
+is, as say the schoolmen, most pure act, in whom there is no 
+unactualized possibility, the same law holds good.  Development 
+is always the resultant of two factors, the one the thing itself, 
+the other some external force co-operating with it, exciting 
+it, and aiding it to act.
+93
+Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient 
+and adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can 
+begin the Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural 
+when the end is supernatural.  The principle of life in all 
+orders is the same, and human activity no more suffices for 
+itself in one order than in another.
+
+Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a 
+civilized state without communion in some form with a people 
+already civilized, and why there is no moral or intellectual 
+development and progress without education and instruction, 
+consequently without instructors and educators.  Hence the value 
+of tradition; and hence, as the first man could not instruct 
+himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper philosophy than is 
+dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain that God himself 
+was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a full-grown 
+man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full 
+activity.  Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always 
+contain some elements of truth, however they may distort, 
+mutilate, or travesty them, make the gods the first teachers of 
+the human race, and ascribe to their instruction even the most 
+simple and ordinary arts of every-day life.
+94
+                                            The gods teach men to 
+plough, to plant, to reap, to work in iron, to erect a shelter 
+from the storm, and to build a fire to warm them and to cook 
+their food.  The common sense, as well as the common traditions 
+of mankind, refuses to accept the doctrine that men are developed 
+without foreign aid, or progressive without divine assistance.  
+Nature of herself can no more develop government than it can 
+language.  There can be no language without society, and no 
+society without language.  There can be no government without 
+society, and no society without government of some sort.
+
+But even if nature could spontaneously develop herself, she could 
+never develop an institution that has the right to govern, for 
+she has not herself that right.  Nature is not God, has not 
+created us, therefore has not the right of property in us.  She 
+is not and cannot be our sovereign.  We belong not to her, nor 
+does she belong to herself, for she is herself creature, and 
+belongs to her Creator.  Not being in herself sovereign, she 
+cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she develop 
+government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for 
+government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is 
+distinct from that which is governed; but natural de-
+95
+                                                    velopments 
+are nature, and indistinguishable from her.  The governor and the 
+governed, the restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be 
+identical.  Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction 
+in terms.  When an individual is said to govern himself, he is 
+never understood to govern himself in the sense in which be is 
+governed.  He by his reason and will governs or restrains his 
+appetites and passions.  It is man as spirit governing man as 
+flesh, the spiritual mind governing the carnal mind.
+
+Natural developments cannot in all cases be even allowed to take 
+their own course without injury to nature herself.  "Follow 
+nature" is an unsafe maxim, if it means, leave nature to develop 
+herself as she will, and follow thy natural inclinations.  Nature 
+is good, but inclinations are frequently bad.  All our appetites 
+and passions are given us for good, for a purpose useful and 
+necessary to individual and social life, but they become morbid 
+and injurious if indulged without restraint.  Each has its 
+special object, and naturally seeks it exclusively, and thus 
+generates discord and war in the individual, which immediately 
+find expression in society, and also in the state, if the state 
+be a simple natural development.  The Christian maxim,
+96
+                                                       Deny 
+thyself, is far better than the Epicurean maxim, Enjoy thyself, 
+for there is no real enjoyment without self-denial.  There is 
+deep philosophy in Christian asceticism, as the Positivists 
+themselves are aware, and even insist.  But Christian asceticism 
+aims not to destroy nature, as voluptuaries pretend, but to 
+regulate, direct, and restrain its abnormal developments for its 
+own good.  It forces nature in her developments to submit to a 
+law which is not in her, but above her.  The Positivists pretend 
+that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that 
+cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and 
+restrains natural development.
+
+The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of 
+nature, and at another the law of nature with nature herself, and 
+take what is called the natural law to be a natural development.  
+Here is their mistake, as it is the mistake of all who accept 
+naturalistic theories.  Society, no doubt, is authorized by the 
+law of nature to institute and maintain government.  But the law 
+of nature is not a natural development, nor is it in nature, or 
+any part of nature.  It is not a natural force which operates in 
+nature, and which is the developing principle of nature.  Do they 
+say reason is natural, and the law of
+97
+                                      nature is only reason?  
+This is not precisely the fact.  The natural law is law proper, 
+and is reason only in the sense that reason includes both 
+intellect and will, and nobody can pretend that nature in her 
+spontaneous developments acts from intelligence and volition.  
+Reason, as the faculty of knowing, is subjective and natural; but 
+in the sense in which it is coincident with the natural law, it 
+is neither subjective nor natural, but objective and divine, and 
+is God affirming himself and promulgating his law to his 
+creature, man.  It is, at least, an immediate participation of 
+the divine by which He reveals himself and His will to the human 
+understanding, and is not natural, but supernatural, in the sense 
+that God himself is supernatural.  This is wherefore reason is 
+law, and every man is bound to submit or conform to reason.
+
+That legitimate governments are instituted under the natural law 
+is frankly conceded, but this is by no means the concession of 
+government as a natural development.  The reason and will of 
+which the natural law is the expression are the reason and will 
+of God.  The natural law is the divine law as much as the 
+revealed law itself, and equally obligatory.  It is not a natural 
+force developing itself in na-
+98
+                             ture, like the law of generation, 
+for instance, and therefore proceeding from God as first cause, 
+but it proceeds from God as final cause, and is, therefore, 
+theological, and strictly a moral law, founding moral rights and 
+duties.  Of course, all morality and all legitimate government 
+rest on this law, or, if you will, originate in it.  But not 
+therefore in nature, but in the Author of nature.  The authority 
+is not the authority of nature, but of Him who holds nature in 
+the hollow of His hand.
+
+V. In the seventeenth century a class of political writers who 
+very well understood that no creature, no man, no number of men, 
+not even, nature herself, can be inherently sovereign, defended 
+the opinion that governments are founded, constituted, and 
+clothed with their authority by the direct and express 
+appointment of God himself.  They denied that rulers hold their 
+power from the nation; that, however oppressive may be their 
+rule, that they are justiciable by any human tribunal, or that 
+power, except by the direct judgment of God, is amissible.  Their 
+doctrine is known in history as the doctrine of "the divine right 
+of kings, and passive obedience."  All power, says St. Paul, is 
+from God, and the powers that be are ordained of God, and to 
+resist them is to resist
+99
+                         the ordination of God.  They must be 
+obeyed for conscience' sake.
+
+It would, perhaps, be rash to say that this doctrine had never 
+been broached before the seventeenth century, but it received in 
+that century, and chiefly in England, its fullest and most 
+systematic developments.  It was patronized by the Anglican 
+divines, asserted by James I. of England, and lost the Stuarts 
+the crown of three kingdoms.  It crossed the Channel, into 
+France, where it found a few hesitating and stammering defenders 
+among Catholics, under Louis XIV., but it has never been very 
+generally held, though it has had able and zealous supporters.  
+In England it was opposed by all the Presbyterians, Puritans, 
+Independents, and Republicans, and was forgotten or abandoned by 
+the Anglican divines themselves in the Revolution of 1688, that 
+expelled James II. and crowned William and Mary.  It was ably 
+refuted by the Jesuit Suarez in his reply to a Remonstrance for 
+the Divine Right of Kings by the James I.; and a Spanish monk who 
+had asserted it in Madrid, under Philip II., was compelled by the 
+Inquisition to retract it publicly in the place where he had 
+asserted it.  All republicans reject it, and the Church has never 
+sanctioned it.  The Sovereign
+100
+                              Pontiffs have claimed and exercised 
+the right to deprive princes of their principality, and to 
+absolve their subjects from the oath of fidelity.  Whether the 
+Popes rightly claimed and exercised that power is not now the 
+question; but their having claimed and exercised it proves that 
+the Church does not admit the inamissibility of power and passive 
+obedience; for the action of the Pope was judicial, not 
+legislative.  The Pope has never claimed the right to depose a 
+prince till by his own act he has, under the moral law or the 
+constitution of his state, forfeited his power, nor to absolve 
+subjects from their allegiance till their oath, according to its 
+true intent and meaning, has ceased to bind.  If the Church has 
+always asserted with the Apostle there is no power but from 
+God--non est potestas nisi a Deo--she has always through her 
+doctors maintained that it is a trust to be exercised for the 
+public good, and is forfeited when persistently exercised in a 
+contrary sense.  St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Suarez all 
+maintain that unjust laws are violences rather than laws, and do 
+not oblige, except in charity or prudence, and that the republic 
+may change its magistrates, and even its constitution, if it sees
+proper to do so.
+
+That God, as universal Creator, is Sovereign
+101
+                                             Lord and proprietor 
+of all created things or existences, visible or invisible, is 
+certain; for the maker has the absolute right to the thing made; 
+it is his, and he may do with it as he will.  As he is sole 
+creator, he alone hath dominion; and as he is absolute creator, 
+he has absolute dominion over all the things which he has made.  
+The guaranty against oppression is his own essential nature, is 
+in the plenitude of his own being, which is the plenitude of 
+wisdom and goodness.  He cannot contradict himself, be other than 
+he is, or act otherwise than according to his own essential 
+nature.  As he is, in his own eternal and immutable essence, 
+supreme reason and supreme good, his dominion must always in its 
+exercise be supremely good and supremely reasonable, therefore 
+supremely just and equitable.  From him certainly is all power; 
+he is unquestionably King of kings, and Lord of lords.  By him 
+kings reign and magistrates decree just things.  He may, at his 
+will, set up or pull down kings, rear or overwhelm empires, 
+foster the infant colony, and make desolate the populous city.  
+All this is unquestionably true, and a simple dictate of reason 
+common to all men.  But in what sense is it true?  Is it true in 
+a supernatural sense?  Or is it true only in the sense
+102
+                                                       that it is 
+true that by him we breathe, perform any or all of our natural 
+functions, and in him live, and move, and have our being?
+
+Viewed in their first cause, all things are the immediate 
+creation of God, and are supernatural, and from the point of view 
+of the first cause the Scriptures usually speak, for the great 
+purpose and paramount object of the sacred writers, as of 
+religion itself, is to make prominent the fact that God is 
+universal creator, and supreme governor, and therefore the first 
+and final cause of all things.  But God creates second causes, or 
+substantial existences, capable themselves of acting and 
+producing effects in a secondary sense, and hence he is said to 
+be causa causarum, cause of causes.  What is done by these second 
+causes or creatures is done eminently by him, for they exist only 
+by his creative act, and produce only by virtue of his active 
+presence, or effective concurrence.  What he does through them or 
+through their agency is done by him, not immediately, but 
+mediately, and is said to be done naturally, as what he does 
+immediately is said to be done supernaturally.  Natural is what 
+God does through second causes, which he creates; supernatural is 
+that which he does by himself alone, without their intervention 
+or agency.  Sovereignty, or
+105
+                            the right to govern, is in him, and 
+he may at his will delegate it to men either mediately or 
+immediately, by a direct and express appointment, or mediately 
+through nature.  In the absence of all facts proving its 
+delegation direct and express, it must be assumed to be mediate, 
+through second causes.  The natural is always to be presumed, and 
+the supernatural is to be admitted only on conclusive proof.
+
+The people of Israel had a supernatural vocation, and they 
+received their law, embracing their religious and civil 
+constitution and their ritual directly from God at the hand of 
+Moses, and various individuals from time to time appear to have 
+been specially called to be their judges, rulers, or kings.  Saul 
+was so called, and so was David. David and his line appear, also, 
+to have been called not only to supplant Saul and his line, but 
+to have been supernaturally invested with the kingdom forever; 
+but it does not appear that the royal power with which David and 
+his line were invested was inamissible.  They lost it in the 
+Babylonish captivity, and never afterwards recovered it.  The 
+Asmonean princes were of another line, and when our Lord came the 
+sceptre was in the hands of Herod, an Idumean Or Edomite.  The 
+promise made, to David and
+104
+                           his house is generally held by 
+Christian commentators to have received its fulfilment in the 
+everlasting spiritual royalty of the Messiah, sprung through Mary 
+from David's line.
+
+The Christian Church is supernaturally constituted and 
+supernaturally governed, but the persons selected to exercise 
+powers supernaturally defined, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to 
+the humblest parish priest are selected and inducted into office 
+through human agency.  The Gentiles very generally claimed to 
+have received their laws from the gods, but it does not appear, 
+save in exceptional cases, that they claimed that their princes 
+were designated and held their powers by the direct and express 
+appointment of the god.  Save in the case of the Jews, and that 
+of the Church, there is no evidence that any particular 
+government exists or ever has existed by direct or express 
+appointment, or otherwise than by the action of the Creator 
+through second causes, or what is called his ordinary providence.  
+Except David and his line, there is no evidence of the express 
+grant by the Divine Sovereign to any individual or family, class 
+or caste of the government of any nation or country.  Even those 
+Christian princes who professed to reign "by the grace of God," 
+never claimed that they received their principalities 
+105
+                                                      from God 
+otherwise than through his ordinary providence, and meant by it 
+little more than an acknowledgment of their dependence on him, 
+their obligation to use their power according to his law and 
+their accountability to him for the use they make of it.
+
+The doctrine is not favorable to human liberty, for it recognizes 
+no rights of man in face of civil society.  It consecrates 
+tyranny, and makes God the accomplice of the tyrant, if we 
+suppose all governments have actually existed by his express 
+appointment.  It puts the king in the place of God, and requires 
+us to worship in him the immediate representative of the Divine 
+Being.  Power is irresponsible and inamissible, and however it 
+may be abused, or however corrupt and oppressive may be its 
+exercise, there is no human redress.  Resistance to power is 
+resistance to God.  There is nothing for the people but passive 
+obedience and unreserved submission.  The doctrine, in fact, 
+denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in 
+the management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human 
+activity.  It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes 
+power an hereditary and indefeasible right, not a trust which he 
+who holds it may forfeit, and of which he may be deprived if he 
+abuses it.
+
+
+
+
+
+106
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the 
+direct and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as 
+to mean that civil authority is derived from God through the 
+spiritual authority.  The patriarch combined in his person both 
+authorities, and was in his own household both priest and king, 
+and so originally was in his own tribe the chief, and in his 
+kingdom the king.  When the two offices became separated is not 
+known.  In the time of Abraham they were still united.  
+Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the 
+earliest historical records of kings present them as offering 
+sacrifices.  Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well 
+as Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were 
+held to be inseparable, but because they were both conferred on 
+the same person by the republic.  In Egypt, in the time of Moses, 
+the royal authority and
+107
+                        the priestly were separated and held by 
+different persons.  Moses, in his legislation for his nation, 
+separated them, and instituted a sacerdotal order or caste.  The 
+heads of tribes and the heads of families are, under his law, 
+princes, but not priests, and the priesthood is conferred on and 
+restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and more especially the 
+family of his own brother Aaron.
+
+The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly, 
+and in all primitive nations with a separate, organized 
+priesthood, whether a true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is 
+held to be above the king, elects or establishes the law by which 
+is selected the temporal chief, and inducts him into his office, 
+as if he received his authority from God through the priesthood.  
+The Christian priesthood is not a caste, and is transmitted by 
+the election of grace, not as with the Israelites and all 
+sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation.  Like Him whose 
+priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order 
+of Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father 
+or mother of the priestly line.  But in being priests after the 
+order of Melchisedech, they are both priests and kings, as 
+Melchisedech was, and as was our Lord himself, to whom was given 
+by his
+108
+       Father all power in heaven and in earth.  The Pope, or 
+Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our Lord on earth, his 
+representative--the representative not only of him who is our 
+invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and Lord 
+of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power.  
+Consequently, no one can have any mission to govern in the state 
+any more than in the church, unless derived from God directly or 
+indirectly through the Pope or Supreme Pontiff.  Many theologians 
+and canonists in the Middle Ages so held, and a few perhaps hold 
+so still.  The bulls and briefs of several Popes, as Gregory VII., 
+Innocent Ill., Gregory IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII., 
+have the appearance of favoring it.
+
+At one period the greater part of the medieval kingdoms and 
+principalities were fiefs of the Holy See, and recognized the 
+Holy Father as their suzerain.  The Pope revived the imperial 
+diunity in the person of Charlemagne, and none could claim that 
+dignity in the Western world unless elected and crowned by him, 
+that is, unless elected directly by the Pope or by electors 
+designated by him, and acting under his authority.  There can be 
+no question that the spiritual is superior to the temporal, and 
+that the temporal is bound in the very nature of things
+109
+                                                        to conform 
+to the spiritual, and any law enacted by the civil power in 
+contravention of the law of God is null and void from the 
+beginning.  This is what Mr. Seward meant by the higher law, a 
+law higher even than the Constitution of the United States.  
+Supposing this higher law, and supposing that kings and princes 
+hold from God through the spiritual society, it is very evident 
+that the chief of that society would have the right to deprive 
+them, and to absolve their subjects, as on several occasions he 
+actually has done.
+
+But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any 
+great extent, except for a brief period, maintained by 
+theologians or canonists.  The Pope conferred the imperial 
+dignity on Charlemagne and his successors, but not the civil 
+power, at least out of the Pope's own temporal dominions.  The 
+emperor of Germany was at first elected by the Pope, and 
+afterwards by hereditary electors designated or accepted by him, 
+but the king of the Germans with the full royal authority could 
+be elected and enthroned without the papal intervention or 
+permission.  The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples, 
+Aragon, Muscovy, England, and other European states, was by 
+virtue of feudal relations, not by virtue of the spiritual au-
+110
+                                                             thority 
+of the Holy See or the vicarship of the Holy Father.  The right 
+to govern under feudalism was simply an estate, or property; and 
+as the church could acquire and hold property, nothing prevented 
+her holding fiefs, or her chief from being suzerain.  The 
+expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in connection 
+with the special relations existing between the Pope and emperor 
+in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as their 
+feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning 
+rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no 
+countenance to the theory in question.
+
+These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain 
+temporal rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, 
+as he has still in what is left him of the States of the Church; 
+but they were exceptional or accidental relations, not the 
+universal and essential relations between the church and the 
+state.  The rights that grew out of these relations were real 
+rights, sacred and inviolable, but only where and while the 
+relations subsisted.  They, for the most part, grew out of the 
+feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its barbarian 
+conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order in 
+which they originated.  Undoubtedly the church consecrated
+111
+                                                           civil 
+rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or 
+right to govern from God through her; but implied that their 
+persons were sacred, and that violence to them would be 
+sacrilege; that they held the Christian faith, and acknowledged 
+themselves bound to protect it, and to govern their subjects 
+justly, according to the law of God.
+
+The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of 
+the two powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is 
+chief of the spiritual society, his temporal principality, no 
+theologian or canonist of the slightest respectability would 
+argue that he derives his rights as temporal sovereign from his 
+rights as pontiff.  His rights as pontiff depend on the express 
+appointment of God; his rights as temporal prince are derived 
+from the same source from which other princes derive their 
+rights, and are held by the same tenure.  Hence canonists have 
+maintained that the subjects of other states may even engage in 
+war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity to 
+him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
+
+The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but 
+recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not 
+derive from God through her.  St. Paul enjoins obedience
+112
+                                                         to the 
+Roman emperors for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that 
+infidels and heretics may have legitimate government; and if she 
+has ever denied the right of any infidel or heretical prince, it 
+has been on the ground that the constitution and laws of his 
+principality require him to profess and protect the Catholic 
+faith.  She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic state no more 
+than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has not 
+condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our 
+struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks 
+against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the 
+doctrine of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable 
+doubt whether they were really rebels fighting against their 
+legitimate sovereign or not.
+
+No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately 
+from God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the 
+state derives its authority only mediately from him, in a natural 
+mode, she asserts the superiority of her authority, and that, in 
+case of conflict between the two powers, the civil must yield.  
+But this is only saying that supernatural is above natural.  
+But--and this is the important point--she does not teach, nor 
+permit the faithful to
+113
+                       hold, that the supernatural abrogates the 
+natural, or in any way supersedes it.  Grace, say the 
+theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.  The 
+church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it, 
+elevates it, and is its firmest support.
+
+VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, 
+Suarez, and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive 
+their power from God through the people, or that the people, 
+though not the source, are the medium of all political authority, 
+and therefore rulers are accountable for the use they make of 
+their power to both God and the people.
+
+This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting 
+sovereignty in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a 
+particular individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from 
+it, as democracy is commonly explained, in understanding by the 
+people, the people collectively, not individually--the organic 
+people, or people fixed to a given territory, not the people as a 
+mere population--the people in the republican sense of the word 
+nation, not in the barbaric or despotic sense; and in deriving 
+the sovereignty from God, from whom is all power, and except from 
+whom there is and can be no power, in-
+114
+                                     stead of asserting it as the 
+underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own 
+native right and might."  The people not being God, and being 
+only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be 
+sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.  It asserts the 
+divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin.  
+But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal 
+rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to 
+govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but 
+always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no 
+government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate 
+government.  Every such government is founded on the assumption 
+that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the 
+fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.
+
+The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by 
+Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the 
+political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers.  
+Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some 
+modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast 
+losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government 
+as they were the origin of man himself.
+
+115
+Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the 
+most faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the 
+conception of creation, and never gets above that of generation 
+and formation.  Things are produced by the Divine Being 
+impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a 
+pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.  Aristotle teaches 
+substantially the same doctrine.  Things eternally exist as 
+matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to 
+unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, 
+from materia informis to materia formata.  Even the Christian 
+Platonists and Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation; 
+they assert it, indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of 
+revelation, not as a fact of science; and hence it is that their 
+theology and their philosophy never thoroughly harmonize, or at 
+least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
+
+Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were 
+pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an 
+emanation from God.  They had no proper conception of Providence, 
+or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as 
+modern physicists say, natural laws.  If they recognized the 
+action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural
+116
+                                                 or miraculous 
+intervention of some god.  They saw no divine intervention in any 
+thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws.  
+Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of 
+its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the 
+Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes 
+themselves.  Hence they could not assert the divine origin of 
+government, or civil authority, without supposing it 
+supernaturally founded, and excluding all human and natural 
+agencies from its institution.  Their writings may be studied 
+with advantage on the constitution of the state, on the practical 
+workings of different forms of government, as well as on the 
+practical administration of affairs, but never on the origin of 
+the state, and the real ground of its authority.
+
+The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches 
+that there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil 
+obedience as a religious duty.  Conscience is accountable to God 
+alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human 
+origin, could not bind it.  Yet Christianity makes the civil law, 
+within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the 
+divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not 
+blameless before the state.  No man performs faithfully his 
+religious
+117
+          duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the 
+law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and 
+enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to 
+the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is 
+not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes 
+enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or 
+the equally important duty of taking care of themselves.  But by 
+asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity 
+consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious 
+character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection, 
+rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree, 
+sins against God as well as crimes against the state.  For the 
+same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the 
+people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against 
+society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
+
+After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public 
+recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two 
+powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the 
+divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against 
+the church with most disastrous consequences.  While the Roman 
+Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its
+118
+                                                 fall, so long as 
+the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his 
+authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the 
+Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the 
+Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence.  
+But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his possessions in 
+Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by the 
+barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the 
+Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the 
+emperor, and owed him no civil allegiance.  He became civilly 
+independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations 
+with it.  To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears 
+never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly 
+asserted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual 
+independence.
+
+This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who 
+pretended to be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, 
+and called their empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and 
+maintained that the Pope owed them civil allegiance, or that, in 
+temporals, the emperor was the Pope's superior.  If, said the 
+emperor, or his lawyers for him, the civil power is from God, as 
+it must be, since non est potestas 
+119
+                                   nisi a Deo, the state stands 
+on the same footing with the church, and the imperial power 
+emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The 
+emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in 
+spirituals, and as the emperor is subject to the pope in 
+spirituals, so must the Pope be subject to the emperor in 
+temporals.  As at the time when the dispute arose, the temporal 
+interests of churchmen were so interwoven with their spiritual 
+rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted practically to 
+the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the 
+ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in 
+the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The 
+Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and 
+everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order 
+is the divine sovereignty itself.  Always and everywhere, then, 
+is the Pope independent of the emperor, his superior, and to 
+subject him in any thing to the emperor would be as repugnant to 
+reason as to subject the soul to the body, the spirit to the 
+flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.
+
+If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the 
+imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the 
+church, the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and
+120
+civil rulers would have no functions but to do the bidding of the 
+clergy.  It would establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, 
+clerocracy, of all possible governments the government the most 
+odious to mankind, and the most hostile to social progress.  Even 
+the Jews could not, or would not, endure it, and prayed God to 
+give them a king, that they might be like other nations.
+
+In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and 
+distinctly perceived the true state of the question, and each was 
+partly right and partly wrong.  The imperialists wanted room for 
+the free activity of civil society, the church wanted to 
+establish in that society the supremacy of the moral order, or 
+the law of God, without which governments can have no stability, 
+and society no real well-being.  The real solution of the 
+difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine of the church 
+herself, and had been given time and again by her most approved 
+theologians.  The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual 
+society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely 
+because he represents a superior order, but because the church, 
+of which he is the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, 
+and holds immediately from God; whereas civil society,
+121
+represented by the emperor, holds from God only mediately, 
+through second causes, or the people.  Yet, though derived from 
+God only through the people, civil authority still holds from God, 
+and derives its right from Him through another channel than the 
+church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a 
+sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must 
+recognize and respect.  This she herself teaches in teaching that 
+even infidels, as we have seen, may have legitimate government, 
+and since, though she interprets and applies the law of God, both 
+natural and revealed, she makes neither.
+
+Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their 
+false charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely 
+theocratic or clerocratic government, and finding themselves 
+unable to place the representative of the civil society on the 
+same level with the representative of the spiritual, or to 
+emancipate the state from the law of God while they conceded the 
+divine origin or right of government, they sought to effect its 
+independence by asserting for it only a natural or purely human 
+origin.  For nearly two centuries the most popular and 
+influential writers on government have rejected the divine origin 
+and ground of civil authority,
+122
+                               and excluded God from the state.  
+They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored 
+to derive authority from man alone.  They have not only separated 
+the state from the church as an external corporation, but from 
+God as its internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the 
+state of her sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, 
+scoffed at loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil 
+authority, but what is called "the right of insurrection."  Under 
+their teaching the age sympathizes not with authority in its 
+efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who 
+conspire against it--the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists 
+seeking its destruction.  The established government that seeks 
+to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel 
+obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic, tyrannical, 
+oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God, and a 
+wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will 
+not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat.  
+There is hardly a government now in the civilized world that can 
+sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to 
+overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracy 
+against it.
+
+This result is not what was aimed at or de-
+123
+                                          sired, but it is the 
+logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on 
+atheistical principles.  Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, 
+authority can sustain itself only by force, for political atheism 
+recognizes no right but might.  No doubt the politicians have 
+sought an atheistical, or what is the same thing, a purely human, 
+basis for government, in order to secure an open field for human 
+freedom and activity, or individual or social progress.  The end 
+aimed at has been good, laudable even, but they forgot that 
+freedom is possible only with authority that protects it against 
+license as well as against despotism, and that there can be no 
+progress where there is nothing that is not progressive.  In 
+civil society two things are necessary--stability and movement.  
+The human is the element of movement, for in it are possibilities 
+that can be only successively actualized.  But the element of 
+stability can be found only in the divine, in God, in whom there 
+is no unactualized possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, 
+immutable, and eternal.  The doctrine that derives authority from 
+God through the people, recognizes in the state both of these 
+elements, and provides alike for stability and progress.
+
+This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply
+124
+                                            states the real order 
+of things.  It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in 
+the real order.  It only asserts for civil government the 
+relation to God which nature herself holds to him, which the 
+entire universe holds to the Creator.  Nothing in man, in nature, 
+in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of God, 
+for nothing exists without that act.  That God "in the beginning 
+created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science 
+as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology.  God 
+and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though 
+distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is 
+inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our 
+being."  All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and 
+exist only as through that act they participate of his being.  
+Through that act he is immanent as first cause in all creatures 
+and in every act of every creature.  The creature deriving from 
+his creative act can no more continue to exist than it could 
+begin to exist without it.  It is as bad philosophy as theology, 
+to suppose that God created the universe, endowed it with certain 
+laws of development or activity, wound it up, gave it a jog, set 
+it agoing, and then left it to go of itself.  It cannot go of 
+itself, because it does not exist
+125
+                                  of itself.  It did not merely 
+not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the 
+creative act.  Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, 
+no philosopher at all.  Providence is as necessary as creation, 
+or rather, Providence is only continuous creation, the creative 
+act not suspended or discontinued, or not passing over from the 
+creature and returning to God.
+
+Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can 
+continue to exist, act, or live only by participating through it 
+of his divine being.  There is, therefore , something of divinity, 
+so to speak, in every creature, and therefore it is that God is 
+worshipped in his works without idolatry.  But he creates 
+substantial existences capable of acting as second causes.  Hence, 
+in all living things there is in their life a divine element and 
+a natural element; in what is called human life, there are the 
+divine and the human, the divine as first and the human as second 
+cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great Christian 
+theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real 
+government.  Government cannot exist without the efficacious 
+presence of God any more than man himself, and men might as well 
+attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state 
+without
+126
+        God.  A government founded on atheistical principles were 
+less than a castle in the air.  It would have nothing to rest on, 
+would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision," 
+and they who imagine that they really do exclude God from their 
+politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles 
+which, though they know it not, are God.  What they call abstract 
+principles, or abstract forms of reason, without which there were 
+no logic, are not abstract, but the real, living God himself.  
+Hence government, like man himself, participates of the divine 
+being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the same 
+time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling 
+authority with freedom, and stability with progress.
+
+The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an 
+inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to 
+Him for it.  It is not their own.  If it were their own they 
+might do with it as they pleased, and no one would have any right 
+to call them to an account; but holding it as a trust from God, 
+they are under his law, and bound to exercise it as that law 
+prescribes.  Civil rulers, holding their authority from God 
+through the people, are accountable for it both to Him and to 
+them.  If
+127
+          they abuse it they are justiciable by the people and 
+punishable by God himself.
+
+Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad 
+government, or what in modern times is called the responsibility 
+of power.  At the same time the state is guarantied against 
+sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, by the elevation 
+of the civic virtues to the rank of religious, virtues, and 
+making loyalty a matter of conscience.  Religion is brought to 
+the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign auxiliary, but as 
+integral in the political order itself.  Religion sustains the 
+state, not because it externally commands us to obey the higher 
+powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because it 
+trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be 
+resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but 
+because it and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, 
+though distinct, parts of one and the same whole.  The church and 
+the state, as corporations or external governing bodies, are 
+indeed separate in their spheres, and the church does not absorb 
+the state, nor does the state the church; but both are from God, 
+and both work to the same end, and when each is rightly 
+understood there is no antithesis or antagonism between them.  
+Men serve God in serving the state as
+128
+                                      directly as in serving the 
+church.  He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his country 
+ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith.  Civic 
+virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues 
+without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who 
+loves not his brother does or can love God.
+
+The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because 
+it has not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and 
+the via inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the 
+nation, at its command.  The individual has, indeed, only moral 
+guaranties against the abuse of power by the sovereign people, 
+which may no doubt sometimes prove insufficient.  But moral 
+guaranties are always better than none, and there are none where 
+the people are held to be sovereign in their own native right and 
+might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside of the 
+constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain; 
+since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the 
+criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is 
+infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded 
+against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what 
+they please, they can do no wrong.  This would place the 
+individual at the mercy
+129
+                        of the state, and deprive him of all 
+right to complain, however oppressed or cruelly treated.  This 
+would establish the absolute despotism of the state, and deny 
+every thing like the natural rights of man, or individual and 
+personal freedom, as has already been shown.  Now as men do take 
+part in government, and as men, either individually or 
+collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never 
+to be expected, under any possible constitution or form of 
+government, that authority will always be wisely and justly 
+exercised, that wrong will ever be done, and the rights of 
+individuals never in any instance be infringed; but with the 
+clear understanding that all power is of God, that the political 
+sovereignty is vested in the people or the collective body, that 
+the civil rulers hold from God through them and are responsible 
+to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is all the 
+guaranty against the abuse of power by the, nation, the political 
+or organic people, that the nature of the case admits.  The 
+nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you 
+get in the government all the available wisdom and virtue the 
+nation has, and more is never, under any form or constitution of 
+government, practicable or to be expected,
+
+130
+It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king 
+reigns, not governs."  The people, though sovereign under God, 
+are not the government.  The government is in their name and by 
+virtue of authority delegated from God through them, but they are 
+not it, are not their own ministers.  It is only when the people 
+forget this and undertake to be their own ministers and to manage 
+their own affairs immediately by themselves instead of selecting 
+agents to do it for them, and holding their agents to a strict 
+account for their management, that they are likely to abuse their 
+power or to sanction injustice.  The nation may be misled or 
+deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular courtiers, but 
+as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all natural 
+rights.  The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak in 
+their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.  
+L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France,
+and while that was conceded the French nation could have in its 
+government no more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at 
+least no more than he could appreciate.  And under his government 
+France was made responsible for many deeds that the nation would 
+never have sanctioned, if it bad been recognized as the 
+deposi-
+131
+      tary of the national sovereignty, or as the French state, 
+and answerable to God for the use it made of political power, or 
+the conduct of its government.
+
+But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force 
+in the nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong, 
+for if the sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can 
+rightly command or authorize the employment of force, and all 
+commissions must run in its name.  Written constitutions alone 
+will avail little, for they emanate from the people, who can 
+disregard them, if they choose, and alter or revoke them at will.  
+The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the state must after 
+all be on moral guaranties.  In the very nature of the case there 
+are and can be no other.  But these, placed in a clear light, 
+with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found 
+insufficient.  Hence the necessity for the protection, not of 
+authority simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the 
+liberty of religion and intelligence in the nation, of the 
+general understanding that the nation holds its power to govern 
+as a trust from God, and that to God through the people all civil 
+rulers are strictly responsible.  Let the mass of the people in 
+any nation lapse into the ignorance and barba-
+132
+                                             rism of atheism, or 
+lose themselves in that supreme sophism called pantheism, the 
+grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism, and 
+liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty, 
+and perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among 
+savages, would be lost and irrecoverable.
+
+But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of 
+the case.  It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the 
+divine origin of government in the sense that the origin of 
+nature is divine; it derives it from God through the people, 
+collectively, or as society, and therefore concedes it a natural, 
+human, and social element, which distinguishes it from pure 
+theocracy.  It, however, does not explain how authority comes 
+from God to the people.  The ruler, king, prince, or emperor, 
+holds from God through the people, but how do the people 
+themselves hold from God?  Mediately or immediately?  If 
+mediately, what is the medium?  Surely not the people themselves.  
+The people can no more be the medium than the principle of their 
+own sovereignty. If immediately, then God governs in them as he 
+does in the church, and no man is free to think or act contrary 
+to popular opinion, or in any case to question the wisdom or 
+justice
+133
+        of any of the acts of the state, which is arriving at 
+state absolutism by another process.  Besides, this would 
+theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all human 
+intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall 
+into either pantheism or atheism.
+
+VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority, 
+is derived by the collective people or society, from God through 
+the law of nature.  Rulers hold from God through the people or 
+nation, and the people or nation hold from God through the 
+natural law.  How nations are founded or constituted, or a 
+particular people becomes a sovereign political people, invested 
+with the rights of society, will be considered in following 
+chapters.  Here it suffices to say that supposing a political 
+people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the community, not 
+supernaturally, or by an external supernatural appointment, as 
+the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural law, or law 
+by which God governs the whole moral creation.
+
+They who assert the origin of government in nature are right, so 
+far as they derive it from God through the law of nature, and 
+are wrong only when they understand by the law of nature the 
+physical force or forces of nature, which
+134
+                                          are not laws in the 
+primary and proper sense of the term.  The law of nature is not 
+the order or rule of the divine action in nature which is 
+rightfully called providence, but is, as has been said, law in 
+its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of nature, 
+as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his 
+creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is 
+called natural, because promulgated through the reason common to 
+all men.  Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first 
+man, supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and 
+confirmed by Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian 
+code itself.  Man needs even yet instruction in relation to 
+matters lying within the range of natural reason, or else secular 
+schools, colleges, and universities would be superfluous, and 
+manifestly the instructor of the first man could have been only 
+the Creator himself.
+
+The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam 
+to us through two channels--reason, which is in every man, and in 
+immediate relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the 
+primitive instruction embodied in language and what the Romans 
+call jus gentium, or law common to all civilized nations.  Under 
+this law. whose prescriptions are promul-
+135
+                                        gated through reason and 
+embodied in universal jurisprudence, nations are providentially 
+constituted, and invested with political sovereignty; and as they 
+are constituted under this law and hold from God through it, it 
+defines their respective rights and powers, their limitation and 
+their extent.
+
+The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to 
+the people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or 
+political society.  It is vested in the political community or 
+nation, not in an individual, or family, or a class, because, 
+under the natural law, all men are equal, as they are under the 
+Christian law, and one man has, in his own right, no authority 
+over another.  The family has in the father a natural chief, but 
+political society has no natural chief or chiefs.  The authority 
+of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when his 
+children have attained to majority, have married and become heads 
+of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the 
+paternal household.  The recognition of the authority of the 
+father beyond the limits of his own household, is, if it ever 
+occurs, by virtue of the ordinance, the consent, express or 
+tacit, of the political society.  There are no natural-born 
+political chiefs, and wherever we find men claiming
+136
+                                                    or 
+acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the 
+Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or 
+constitution of the people or the nation.
+
+Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically 
+developed from the authority of the patriarchs, and have 
+unquestionably been sustained by an equally false development of 
+the right of property, especially landed property.  The owner of 
+the land, or he who claimed to own it, claimed as an incident of 
+his ownership the right to govern it, and consequently to govern 
+all who occupied it.  But however valid may be the landlord's 
+title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can own any thing in 
+land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the law of nature 
+no political right.  Property, like all natural rights, is 
+entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.  
+Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a 
+question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme 
+political authority.  It was the basis, and almost exclusive 
+basis, in the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in 
+most states.  France and the United States are the principal 
+exceptions in Christendom.  Property alone, or coupled with 
+birth, is made elsewhere in some form a basis of political
+137
+power, and where made so by the sovereign authority, it is 
+legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for it takes from the 
+weak and gives to the strong.  The rich have in their riches 
+advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the state 
+any additional advantage.  An aristocracy, in the sense of 
+families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services, 
+wealth, cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable 
+in every nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief 
+support, but they need and should receive no political 
+recognition.  They should form no privileged class in the state 
+or political society.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or 
+nation, and the constitution of the government.  The constitution 
+of the government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation 
+itself; the constitution of the state, or the people of the 
+state, is, in its origin at least, providential, given by God 
+himself, operating through historical events or natural causes.  
+The one originates in law, the other in historical fact.  The 
+nation must exist, and exist as a political community, before it 
+can give itself a constitution; and no state, any more than an 
+individual, can exist without a constitution of some sort.
+
+The distinction between the providential constitution of the 
+people and the constitution of the government, is not always 
+made.  The illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest 
+political philosophers who wrote in the last century, or the 
+first quarter of the present, in his work 
+139
+                                          on the Generative 
+Principle of Political Constitutions, maintains that
+constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all human 
+agency from their formation and growth.  Disgusted with French 
+Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so 
+much, and deeply wedded to monarchy in both church and state, he 
+had the temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal 
+families for the government of nations, and that it is idle for a 
+nation to expect a good government without a king who has 
+descended from one of those divinely created royal families.  It 
+was with some such thought, most likely, that a French 
+journalist, writing home from the United States, congratulated 
+the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army, so that 
+when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to do, 
+they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or 
+emperor.  Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was 
+not the descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present 
+Emperor of the French, a decided parvenu.  Still, the Emperor of 
+the French, if only a parvenu, bears himself right imperially 
+among sovereigns, and has no peer among any of the descendants of 
+the old royal families of Europe 
+
+140
+There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that 
+constitutions are generated, or developed, not created de novo, 
+or made all at once.  But nothing is more true than that a nation 
+can alter its constitution by its own deliberate and voluntary 
+action, and many nations have done so, and sometimes for the 
+better, as well as for the worse.  If the constitution once given is 
+fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly divine, and contain no 
+human element, and the people have and can have no hand in their 
+own government--the fundamental objection to the theocratic 
+constitution of society.  To assume it is to transfer to civil 
+society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the 
+constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or 
+supernatural providence, and to maintain that the divine 
+sovereignty governs in civil society immediately and 
+supernaturally, as in the spiritual society.  But such is not the 
+fact.  God governs the nation by the nation itself, through its 
+own reason and free-will.  De Maistre is right only as to the 
+constitution the nation starts with, and as to the control which 
+that constitution necessarily exerts over the constitutional 
+changes the nation can successfully introduce.
+
+The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau rec-
+141
+                                          ognize no providential 
+constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a 
+convention of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the 
+only constitution, both of the people and the government.  Prior 
+to its adoption there is no government, no state, no political 
+community or authority.  Antecedently to it the people are an 
+inorganic mass, simply individuals, without any political or 
+national solidarity.  These individuals, they suppose, come 
+together in their own native right and might, organize themselves 
+into a political community, give themselves a constitution, and 
+draw up and vote rules for their government, as a number of 
+individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve themselves 
+into a temperance society or a debating club.  This might do very 
+well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating 
+club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join 
+or not as they please, and which they are bound to obey no 
+farther and no longer than suits their convenience.  But the 
+state is a power, a sovereignty; speaks to all within its 
+jurisdiction with an imperative voice; commands, and may use 
+physical force to compel obedience, when not voluntarily yielded.  
+Men are born its subjects, and no one can withdraw from it
+142
+without its express or tacit permission, unless for causes that 
+would justify resistance to its authority.  The right of subjects 
+to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a 
+tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power 
+and warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more 
+than the right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the 
+consent and authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or 
+subject belongs to the state, and is bound to it.
+
+The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a 
+territory or country under one political head is a truth; but 
+"the solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or 
+political authority of their respective countries, so eloquently 
+preached a few years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only 
+a falsehood, but a falsehood destructive of all government and of 
+all political organization.  Kossuth's doctrine supposes the 
+people, or the populations of all countries, are, irrespective of 
+their governments, bound together in solido, each for all and all 
+for each, and therefore not only free, but bound, wherever they 
+find a population struggling nominally for liberty against its 
+government, to rush with arms in their hands to its assistance--a 
+doctrine clearly incompati-
+143
+                          ble with any recognition of political 
+authority or territorial rights.  Peoples or nations commune with 
+each other only through the national authorities, and when the 
+state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its subjects 
+are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention on 
+either side.  There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, 
+more or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of 
+the populations with and through their governments, not without 
+them.  Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals 
+of one and the same nation.  These are all bound together, all 
+for each and each for all.  The individual is born into society 
+and under the government, and without the authority of the 
+government, which represents all and each, he cannot release 
+himself from his obligations.  The state is then by no means a 
+voluntary association.  Every one born or adopted into it is 
+bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from it, 
+unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no 
+protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for 
+his rights of conscience.  This is Vattel's doctrine, and the 
+dictate of common sense.
+
+The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation 
+for itself is a law--the 
+144
+                         organic or fundamental law, if you will, 
+but a law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power.  
+That sovereign power must exist before it can act, and it cannot 
+exist, if vested in the people or nation, without a constitution, 
+or without some sort of political organization of the people or 
+nation.  There must, then, be for every state or nation a 
+constitution anterior to the constitution which the nation gives 
+itself, and from which the one it gives itself derives all its 
+vitality and legal force.
+
+Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, 
+for creation and providence are simply the expression of the 
+Supreme Logic, the Logos, by whom all things are made.  Nations 
+have originated in various ways, but history records no instance 
+of a nation existing as an inorganic mass organizing itself into 
+a political community.  Every nation, at its first appearance 
+above the horizon, is found to have an organization of some sort.  
+This is evident from the only ways in which history shows us 
+nations originating.  These ways are: 1. The union of families in 
+the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The migration 
+of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements. 
+4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial, 
+religious, or penal. 5. War 
+145
+                            and conquest. 6. The revolt, 
+separation, and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling 
+of the conquerors and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a 
+new people.  These are all the ways known to history, and in none 
+of these ways does a people, absolutely destitute of all 
+organization, constitute itself a state, and institute and carry 
+on civil government.
+
+The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet 
+incipient states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, 
+individuality, and a centre of social life of their own.  The 
+families and tribes that migrate in search of new settlements 
+carry with them their family and tribal organizations, and 
+retain it for a long time.  The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul 
+till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in 
+Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in 
+Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth.  It subsists still 
+in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the 
+Berbers or Kabyles of Africa.
+
+Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, 
+at least under, the authority of the mother country, whose 
+political constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry 
+with them.  They receive from the parent state 
+146
+                                               a political 
+organization, which, though subordinate, yet constitutes them 
+embryonic states, with a unity, individuality, and centre of 
+public life in themselves, and which, when they are detached and 
+recognized as independent, render them complete states.  War and 
+conquest effect great national changes, but do not, strictly 
+speaking, create new states.  They simply extend and consolidate 
+the power of the conquering state.
+
+Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but 
+only when they have previously existed as such, and have retained 
+the tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when 
+the administration has erected them into real though dependent 
+political communities.  A portion of the people of a state not so 
+erected or organized, that has in no sense had a distinct 
+political existence of its own, has never separated from the 
+national body and formed a new and independent nation.  It cannot 
+revolt; it may rise up against the government, and either 
+revolutionize and take possession of the state, or be put down by 
+the government as an insurrection.  The amalgamation of the 
+conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies the 
+institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a 
+147
+                                                      new nation 
+or political community.  The English of to-day are very different 
+from both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time 
+of Richard Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or 
+political community.  England is still England.
+
+The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been 
+cut up into several separate and independent nations, but because 
+its several provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman 
+arms, been independent nations or tribes, and more especially 
+because the conquerors themselves were divided into several 
+distinct nations or confederacies.  If the barbarians had been 
+united in a single nation or state, the Roman empire most likely 
+would have changed masters, indeed, but have retained its unity 
+and its constitution, for the Germanic nations that finally 
+seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to destroy its name or 
+nationality, for they were themselves more than half Romanized 
+before conquering Rome.  But the new nations into which the 
+empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without 
+political or governmental organization, continued from the 
+constitution of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or 
+less by what was retained from the empire.
+
+148
+It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be 
+altered, or that every people starts with a constitution fully 
+developed, as would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre.  The 
+constitution of the family is rather economical than political, 
+and the tribe is far from being a fully developed state.  
+Strictly speaking, the state, the modern equivalent for the city 
+of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed till men began to 
+build and live in cities, and became fixed to a national 
+territory.  But in the first place, the eldest born of the human 
+race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find 
+traces of the family and tribal organization long after their 
+municipal existence--in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, 
+and in Rome down to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the 
+second place, the pastoral nations, though they have not 
+precisely the city or state organization, yet have a national 
+organization, and obey a national authority.  Strictly speaking, 
+no pastoral nation has a civil or political constitution, but 
+they have what in our modern tongues can be expressed by no other 
+term.  The feudal regime, which was in full vigor even in Europe 
+from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century, had 
+nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state
+149
+                                                          proper; 
+yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, 
+though a very imperfect one?
+
+The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the 
+early ages.  For a long time the national organizations bore 
+unmistakable traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, 
+and modelled from the family or tribe, as they do still in all 
+the non-Christian world.  Religion itself, before the Incarnation, 
+bore traces of the same organization.  Even with the Jews, 
+religion was transmitted and disused, not as under Christianity 
+by conversion, but by natural generation or family adoption.  
+With all the Gentile tribes or nations, it was the same.  At 
+first the father was both priest and king, an when the two 
+offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and 
+hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we 
+have seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech.  
+The Jews had the synagogue, and preserved the primitive 
+revelation in its purity and integrity; but the Greeks and 
+Romans, more fully than any other ancient nations, preserved or 
+developed the political order that best conforms to the Christian 
+religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark, followed in 
+the track of the Roman armies, and it gains 
+150
+                                            a permanent 
+establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to 
+plant, the Graeco-Roman civilization.  The Graeco-Roman republics 
+were hardly less a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in 
+the civil order, than the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in 
+the spiritual order, or in faith and worship.  In the Christian 
+order nothing is by hereditary descent, but every thing is by 
+election of grace.  The Christian dispensation is teleological, 
+palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior to the Incarnation, was 
+initial, genesiac, and continued by natural generation, as it is 
+still in all nations and tribes outside of Christendom.  No 
+non-Christian people is a civilized people, and, indeed, the 
+human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to have 
+attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race 
+were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated.  
+He came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to 
+receive him.
+
+The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the 
+nation is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real 
+living and efficient constitution of the state.  It is the source 
+of the vitality of the state, that which controls or governs its 
+action, and determines its destiny.  
+151
+                                     The constitution which a 
+nation is said to give itself, is never the constitution of the 
+state, but is the law ordained by the state for the government 
+instituted under it.  Thomas Paine would admit nothing to be the 
+constitution but a written document which he could fold up and 
+put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.  The Abbe 
+Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and 
+he was ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no 
+other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, 
+and could not go.  Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, 
+in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs, 
+confounded the written instrument with the constitution itself.  
+No constitution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment.  
+What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people 
+ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to 
+the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best, 
+legislative instead of constitutive.  The famous Magna Charta 
+drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the 
+English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till 
+long after the date of its concession, and even then was no 
+constitution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power.  
+The constitution is
+152
+                    the intrinsic or inherent and actual 
+constitution of the people or political community itself; that 
+which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it from 
+every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from 
+one another.
+
+The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up 
+and established in accordance with any preconceived theory.  What 
+is theoretic in a constitution is unreal.  The constitutions 
+conceived by philosophers in their closets are constitutions only 
+of Utopia or Dreamland.  This world is not governed by 
+abstractions, for abstractions are nullities.  Only the concrete 
+is real, and only the real or actual has vitality or force.  The 
+French people adopted constitution after constitution of the most 
+approved pattern, and amid bonfires, beating of drums, sound of 
+trumpets, roar of musketry, and thunder of artillery, swore, no 
+doubt, sincerely as well as enthusiastically, to observe them, 
+but all to no effect; for they had no authority for the nation, 
+no hold on its affections, and formed no element of its life.  
+The English are great constitution-mongers--for other nations.  
+They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own will fit 
+any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into 
+153
+trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have 
+found it only an embarrassment or encumbrance.  The doctor might 
+as well attempt to give an individual a new constitution, or the 
+constitution of another man, as the statesman to give a nation 
+any other constitution than that which it has, and with which it 
+is born.
+
+The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, 
+proves this thesis.  The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced 
+into the nations founded on the site of the empire, a double 
+constitution--the barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the 
+Roman in the West, and the Tartaric or Turkish and the 
+Graeco-Roman in the East.  The key to all modern history is in 
+the mutual struggles of these two constitutions and the interests 
+respectively associated with them, which created two societies on 
+the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same 
+national denomination.  The barbaric was the constitution of the 
+conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and 
+fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh 
+hordes of barbarians, and had even brought the external 
+ecclesiastical society to a very great extent into harmony with 
+itself.  The Pope became a 
+154
+                           feudal sovereign, and the bishops and 
+mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.  Yet, after eight 
+hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman constitution got the 
+upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far as it could not 
+be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.  The original Empire 
+of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its constitution, its 
+laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any of its 
+Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
+
+The same process is going on in the East, though it has not 
+advanced so far, having begun there several centuries later, and 
+the Graeco-Roman constitution was far feebler there than in the 
+West at the epoch of the conquest.  The Germanic tribes that 
+conquered the West had long had close relations with the empire, 
+had served as its allies, and even in its armies, and were 
+partially Romanized.  Most of their chiefs had received a Roman 
+culture; and their early conversion to the Christian faith 
+facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman 
+constitution.  In the East it was different.  The conquerors had 
+no touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet, 
+they were animated with an intense hatred, which, after the 
+conquest, was changed into a superb contempt,
+155
+                                              of Christians and 
+Romans.  They had their civil constitution in the Koran; and the 
+Koran, in its principles, doctrines, and spirit, is exclusive and 
+profoundly intolerant.  The Graeco-Roman constitution was always 
+much weaker in the East, and had far greater obstacles to 
+overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the shock of 
+the conquest.  Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of the 
+East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily 
+receiving rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying 
+outside of the boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able 
+to sustain itself.  The Greek or Christian populations of the 
+empire are no longer in danger of being exterminated or absorbed 
+by the Mohammedan state or population.  They are the only living 
+and progressive people of the Ottoman Empire, and their complete 
+success in absorbing or expelling the Turk is only a question of 
+time.  They will, in all present probability, reestablish a 
+Christian and Roman East in much less time from the fall of 
+Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the fall of 
+Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric constitution 
+founded by its Germanic invaders.
+
+Indeed, the Roman constitution, laws, and
+156
+                                          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 Institutes, 
+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
+157
+             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, passions, 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
+158
+                                       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 constitution, and aided the revival of Roman 
+imperialism.  In no country do the revolutionists succeed in 
+establishing 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
+159
+                                           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 
+institutions 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 
+vassals 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, 
+embarrasses 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 
+160
+                                                      people, any 
+more than the General government in the United States was to 
+intervene between the negro slave and his master.  The great 
+vassals 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 nobles themselves, than was even dreamed of 
+while the feudal regime was in full vigor.  Nobles were 
+themselves free, it is conceded, but not the people.  The king 
+was too weak, too restricted in his action by the feudal 
+constitution 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 nobility, save 
+when that nobility threatened the temporalities of the church.  
+The only reliance, under God, 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
+161
+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 circumstances, 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.
+162
+                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 God, 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
+163
+                                   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 nobility 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 
+nobility--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 nobles 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 class of any sort.  Better 
+trust Caesar than Brutus, or even Cato.  Nor will he seek them
+164
+                                                               in 
+the antagonism of interests intended to neutralize or balance 
+each other, as in the English constitution.  This was the great 
+error of Mr. Calhoun.  No man saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun 
+the utter worthlessness of simple paper constitutions, on which 
+Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit reliance, or that the real 
+constitution is in the state itself, in the manner in which the 
+people themselves are organized; but his reliance was in 
+constituting, 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 be 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 passions engendered by the struggle against
+165
+despotism or arbitrary power, not from a calm and philosophical 
+appreciation of government itself.  The English have not 
+succeeded in establishing their theory, for, after all, their 
+constitution 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+166
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-CONCLUDED.
+
+
+Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the 
+constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution.  
+But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the 
+several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one 
+having the ascendency and suppressing the rest.  In the original 
+constitution of Rome the patrician ele-
+167
+                                      ment 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 constitution.  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 constitution.  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, 
+168
+                 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 asserted 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 constitution had disappeared, and Marius, the head of a 
+great plebeian house, could be elected consul 
+169
+                                              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 constitution.  Retain the 
+dictatorship 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 constitution from an early day, and already developed in the 
+Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, 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 
+constitution.  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
+170
+            exclusively patrician government.  But it was too late.  
+His proscriptions, confiscations, butcheries, unheard-of cruelties 
+which anticipated and surpassed 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 associated with the patrician party, which 
+distrusted him--in vain Cicero declaims, Cato scolds, or parades 
+his impractical virtues, Brutus and Cassius seize the assassin'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 assassination 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 
+171
+                        the barbaric element of slavery in her 
+bosom, and had conquered more barbaric nations than she had 
+assimilated.  These nations she at first governed as tributary 
+states, with their own constitutions 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, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric and 
+despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only 
+partially assimilated.  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 citizenship 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 barba-
+172
+                                 rism 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 constitution; 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 assimilated 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 
+173
+                           statesmanship 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 God intervening through
+174
+                                                             the 
+laws he by his creative act gives to creatures, not their 
+suspension or abrogation.  It was the corruption of the 
+statesmen, in substituting 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 constitution of the government, as distinguished from 
+the state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign.  The 
+constitution 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 constitution of government is the constitution 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
+175
+                                               act and conduct 
+the matters intrusted to him.  The distinction which the English 
+make between the sovereign and the ministry is analogous 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 God 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 
+principal 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
+176
+               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 God, are above him.  He 
+holds his power, as the Emperor of the French professes to hold 
+his, by the grace of God and the national will--the only title 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 constitution, 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 be was originally to 
+institute it.  When, in 1848, Louis Philippe was dethroned by the 
+Parisian mob, and fled the kingdom, there was in France no
+177
+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 assembly and the constitutional government, there was 
+no legitimate government standing, and the power assumed 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 principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him 
+discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said.  The 
+imperial constitution 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 title, and that he holds his 
+power by a
+178
+           title 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 constitutional 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 constitution 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
+179
+                                        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
+180
+                   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 stabil-
+181
+                                                            ity 
+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" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary 
+ex-governor of Hungary, the last stronghold of feudal barbarism 
+in Christian Europe; for Russia has emancipated her serfs.
+
+The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute 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 class or hereditary 
+nobles, 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 
+God 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
+182
+                                                           is 
+necessarily illegal is the despotic.  That can never be a truly 
+civilized government, nor a legitimate government, for God 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 
+constitution, founded on public right, and held under God 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,
+183
+                                             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 constitution 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
+184
+    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 
+bloody 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 
+gov-
+185
+   ernments 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 constitutions 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 
+constitution is in that of the nation.  The constitution of the 
+government must grow out of the constitution of the state, and
+186
+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 constitutions 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 constitution from it, and harmonize it with it.  
+Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, 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 patri-
+187
+                         cian 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, 
+assassinations, massacres, 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 constitution 
+of government foreign to the national constitution, 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 constitution.  
+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 
+188
+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 constitution of l789, 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 God, 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 multitude.  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 under-
+189
+                                           standing, 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 constitution 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 God and the 
+will of the nation," which means simply that he holds his 
+authority from God, through the French people, and is bound to 
+exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.  
+The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution 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
+190
+       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 title, 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 locum 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 title, that no 
+republican, that none but a despot
+191
+                                   or a no-government man can 
+dispute.  As the will of the nation, in so far as it contravenes 
+not the law of God 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 pronounced 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 
+constitution 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+192
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE UNITED STATES
+
+
+Sovereignty, under God, 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
+193
+                       appointment of an agent affect the rights 
+and powers of the principal.  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
+194
+                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 
+individ-
+195
+       uals 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 
+constitution 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 constitution 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 
+196
+                                                       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 
+constitution 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.
+
+But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any 
+State, saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so, 
+withdraw from the Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation 
+to the Federal authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere 
+to the Federal government.  Secession is, then, an incontestable 
+right; not a right held under the constitution or derived from 
+the convention but a right held prior to it, independently of it, 
+inherent in the State sovereignty, and inseparable from it.  The 
+State is bound by the constitution of the Union only while she is 
+in it, and is one of the States united.  In ratifying the 
+constitution she did not part with her sovereignty, or with any 
+portion of it, any more than France has parted with her 
+sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation, by 
+vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate 
+heirs male.  The principal parts not with his power
+197
+                                                    to his agent, 
+for the agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power 
+of the principal.  Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French 
+people, and governs only by the authority of the French nation, 
+which is as competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on 
+him, when it judges proper, as it was to confer them.  The Union 
+exists and governs, if the States are sovereign, only by the will 
+of the State, and she is as competent to revoke the powers she 
+has delegated as she was to delegate them.  The, Union, as far as 
+she is concerned, is her creation, and what she is competent to 
+make she is competent to unmake.
+
+In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very 
+unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests 
+of the other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she 
+in doing so only exercises her unquestionable right.  The other 
+members may regret her action, both for her sake and their own, 
+but they cannot accuse her or her citizens of disloyalty in 
+seceding, nor of rebellion, if in obedience to her authority they 
+defend their independence by force of arms against the Union.  
+Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever owed allegiance to 
+the Union.  Allegiance is due from the citizen to the sovereign 
+state, but never from
+198
+                      a sovereign state or from its citizens to 
+any other sovereign state.  While the State is in the Union the 
+citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his 
+State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it 
+and all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her 
+territory.  The repeal by the State of the act of ratification 
+releases the citizen from the obligation even of obedience, and 
+renders it criminal for him to yield it without her permission.
+
+It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the 
+States as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal 
+to the language or provisions of the Federal constitution.  That 
+constitutes the government, not the state or the sovereign.  It 
+is ordained by the sovereign, and if the States were severally 
+independent and sovereign states, that sovereign is the States 
+severally, not the States united.  The constitution is law for 
+the citizens of a State only so long as the State remains one of 
+the United States.  No matter, then, how clear and express the 
+language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution, they 
+bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.  
+The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only 
+while the compact is continued by the
+199
+                                      States, each for itself.  
+The sovereignty of the United States as a single or political 
+people must be established before any thing in the constitution 
+can be adduced as denying the right of secession.
+
+That this doctrine would deprive the General government of all 
+right to enforce the laws of the Union on a State that secedes, 
+or the citizens thereof, is no doubt true; that it would weaken 
+the central power and make the Union a simple voluntary 
+association of states, no better than a rope of sand, is no less 
+true; but what then?  It is simply saying that a confederation is 
+inferior to a nation, and that a federal government lacks many of 
+the advantages of a national government.  Confederacies are 
+always weak in the centre, always lack unity, and are liable to 
+be dissolved by the influence of local passions, prejudices, and 
+interests.  But if the United States are a confederation of 
+states or nations, not a single nation or sovereign state, then 
+there is no remedy.
+
+If the Anglo-American colonies, when their independence of Great 
+Britain was achieved and acknowledged, were severally sovereign 
+states, it has never since been in their power to unite and form 
+a single sovereign state, or to form themselves into one 
+indivisible sovereign
+200
+                      nation.  They could unite only by mutual
+agreement, which gives only a confederation, in which each 
+retains its own sovereignty, as two individuals, however closely 
+united, retain each his own individuality.  No sovereignty is of 
+conventional origin, and none can emerge from the convention that 
+did not enter it.  Either the states are one sovereign people or 
+they are not.  If they are not, it is undoubtedly a great 
+disadvantage; but a disadvantage that must be accepted, and 
+submitted to without a murmur.
+
+Whether the United States are one sovereign people or only a 
+confederation is a question of very grave importance.  If they 
+are only a confederation of states--and if they ever were 
+severally sovereign states, only a confederation they certainly 
+are--state secession is an inalienable right, and the government 
+has had no right to make war on the secessionists as rebels, or 
+to treat them, when their military power is broken, as traitors, 
+or disloyal persons.  The honor of the government, and of the 
+people who have sustained it, is then deeply compromised.
+
+What then is the fact?  Are the United States politically one 
+people, nation, state, or republic, or are they simply 
+independent sovereign states united in close and intimate 
+alliance, league, or federation, by a mutual pact or
+201
+                                                     agreement?  
+Were the people of the United States who ordained and established 
+the written constitution one people, or were they not?  If they 
+were not before ordaining and establishing the government, they 
+are not now; for the adoption of the constitution did not and 
+could not make them one.  Whether they are one or many is then 
+simply a question of fact, to be decided by the facts in the 
+case, not by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of 
+jurists, or even by constitutional law itself.  The old Articles 
+of Conferation and the later Constitution can serve here only as 
+historical documents.  Constitutions and laws presuppose the 
+existence of a national sovereign from which they emanate, and 
+that ordains them, for they are the formal expression of a 
+sovereign will.  The nation must exist as an historical fact, 
+prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign power, prior to 
+the existence of written Constitutions and laws of any kind, and 
+its existence must be established before they can be recognized 
+as having any legal force or vitality.
+
+The existence of any nation, as an independent sovereign nation, 
+is a purely historical fact, for its right to exist as such is in 
+the simple fact that it does so exist.  A nation de facto is a 
+nation de jure, and when we have ascertained
+202
+                                             the fact, we have 
+ascertained the right.  There is no right in the case separate 
+from the fact--only the fact must be really a fact.  A people 
+hitherto a part of another people, or subject to another 
+sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they have declared 
+themselves independent, and have organized a government, and are 
+engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for 
+independence.  The struggle must be practically over; the former 
+sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce 
+them to submission, or to bring them back under his authority, 
+and if he continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the 
+postulant must have proved his ability to maintain civil 
+government, and to fulfil within and without the obligations 
+which attach to every civilized nation, before it can be 
+recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because before it 
+is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.  The prior 
+sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right, 
+has lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for 
+humanity demands not martyrs to lost causes.
+
+This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly 
+philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
+203
+nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, 
+not a right antecedent to the fact.  The repugnance felt to this 
+assertion arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in 
+a strictly political sense, and sometimes in its original sense 
+of tribe, and understanding by it not simply the body politic, 
+but a certain relation of origin, family, kindred, blood, or 
+race.  But God has made of one blood, or race, all the nations of 
+men; and, besides, no political rights are founded by the law of 
+nature on relations of blood, kindred, or family.  Under the 
+patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some extent, under 
+feudalism, these relations form the basis of government, but they 
+are economical relations rather than civil or political, and, 
+under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the 
+household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or 
+body politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse.  They are 
+protected by the state, but do not found or constitute it.  The 
+vicissitudes of time, the revolutions of states and empires, 
+migration, conquest, and intermixture of families and races, have 
+rendered it impracticable, even if it were desirable, to 
+distribute people into nations according to their relations of 
+blood or descent.
+
+204
+There is no civilized nation now existing that has been, 
+developed from a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most 
+mixed are the most civilized.  The nearer a nation approaches to 
+a primitive people of pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it 
+is from civilization.  All civilized nations are political 
+nations, and are founded in the fact, not on rights antecedent to 
+the fact.  A hundred or more lost nationalities went to form the 
+Roman empire, and who can tell us how many layers of crushed 
+nationalities, superposed one upon another, serve for the 
+foundation of the present French, English, Russian, Austrian, or 
+Spanish nationalities?  What other title to independence and 
+sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any 
+European nation?  Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one 
+can say how many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to 
+be as it has, or can have.  Whether those nationalities have been 
+justly extinguished or not, is no question for the statesman; it 
+is the secret of Providence.  Failure in this world is not always 
+a proof of wrong; nor success, of right.  The good is sometimes 
+overborne, and the bad sometimes triumphs; but it is 
+consoling, and even just, to believe that the good oftener 
+triumphs than the bad.
+
+205
+In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law.  
+The nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the 
+nation.  Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize 
+and apply both the law of nature and the law of nations, but only 
+on the ground that they are included, or are presumed to be 
+included, in the national law, or jurisprudence.  Doubtless, too, 
+the nation holds from God, under the law of nature, but only by 
+virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and when it is a nation 
+dependent on no other, it holds from God all the rights and 
+powers of any independent sovereign nation.  There is no right 
+behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation 
+that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights.  
+In the case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part 
+of another people, or subject to another people@ the right of the 
+prior sovereign must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction 
+of that right is necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise 
+would be only an initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli.  
+But that right ceases when its claimant, willingly or 
+unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons it; and he does so 
+when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows no ability 
+or intention
+206
+             of soon renewing it with any reasonable prospect of 
+success.
+
+The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to 
+sovereignty, is founded in error.  Empty titles to states and 
+kingdoms are of no validity.  The sovereignty is, under God, in 
+the nation and the title and the possession are inseparable.  The 
+title of the Palaeologi to the Roman Empire of the East, of the 
+king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia, or the king of Spain--for 
+they are all claimants--to the kingdom of Jerusalem founded by 
+Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the thrones of 
+England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the throne 
+of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they 
+are engrossed.  The contrary opinion, so generally entertained, 
+belongs to barbarism, not to civilization.  It is in modern 
+society a relic of feudalism, which places the state in the 
+government, and makes the government a private estate--a private, 
+and not a public right--a right to govern the public, not a right 
+to govern held from or by the public.
+
+The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by 
+violence, by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right, 
+and another may usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact 
+without acquiring any right or legal title to it.
+207
+                                                   The man who 
+holds the legal title has the right to oust him and re-enter upon 
+his estate whenever able to do so.  Here, in the economical 
+order, the fact and the right are distinguishable, and the actual 
+occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.  Holding 
+sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very 
+properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments 
+de jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a 
+prince does not invalidate his title.  But sovereignty, it has 
+been shown, is not in the government, but in the state, and the 
+state is inseparable from the public domain.  The people 
+organized and held by the domain or national territory, are under 
+God the sovereign nation, and remain so as long as the nation 
+subsists without subjection to another.  The government, as 
+distinguished from the state or nation, has only a delegated 
+authority, governs only by a commission from the nation.  The 
+revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes 
+its rights.  The nation is always sovereign, and every organic 
+people fixed to the soil, and actually independent of every 
+other, is a nation.  There can then be no independent nation de 
+facto that is not an independent nation de jure, nor de jure that 
+is not de facto.  The moment a
+208
+                               people cease to be an independent 
+nation in fact, they cease to be sovereign, and the moment they 
+become in fact an independent nation, they are so of right.  
+Hence in the political order the fact and the right are born and 
+expire together; and when it is proved that a people, are in fact 
+an independent nation, there is no question to be asked as to 
+their right to be such nation.
+
+In the case of the United States there is only the question of 
+fact.  If they are in fact one people they are so in right, 
+whatever the opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the 
+decisions of courts; for the courts hold from the national 
+authority, and the theories and opinions of statesmen may be 
+erroneous.  Certain it is that the States in the American Union 
+have never existed and acted as severally sovereign states.  
+Prior to independence, they were colonies under the sovereignty 
+of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed and 
+acted only as states united.  The colonists, before separation 
+and independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the 
+colonies had they held by charter or concession from the British 
+crown.  The colonists never pretended to be other than British 
+subjects, and the alleged ground of their complaint against the 
+mother country was not that she had violated their
+209
+                                                   natural rights 
+as men, but their rights as British subjects--rights, as 
+contended by the colonists, secured by the English constitution 
+to all Englishmen or British su6jects.  The denial to them of 
+these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and they 
+defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George III., 
+on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and 
+the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his 
+allegiance.
+
+In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves 
+independent states indeed, but not severally independent.  The 
+declaration was not made by the states severally, but by the 
+states jointly, as the United States.  They unitedly declared 
+their independence; they carried on the war for independence, won 
+it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers and by the mother 
+country as the United States, not as severally independent 
+sovereign states.  Severally they have never exercised the full 
+powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag--symbol of 
+sovereignty--recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign 
+treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or 
+interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or 
+confederacies with foreign states or with one another, and in 
+several re-
+210
+          spects have been more restricted in their powers in the 
+Union than they were as British colonies.
+
+Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete 
+states by declaring and winning their independence; and if the 
+English colonies, now the United States, had separately declared 
+and won their independence, they would unquestionably have become 
+separately independent states, each invested by the law of nature 
+with all the rights and powers of a sovereign nation.  But they 
+did not do this.  They declared and won their independence 
+jointly, and have since existed and exercised sovereignty only as 
+states united, or the United States, that is, states sovereign in 
+their union, but not in their separation.  This is of itself 
+decisive of the whole question.
+
+But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers 
+of sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as 
+one people, but they were, so far as a people at all, one people 
+even before independence.  The colonies were all erected and 
+endowed with their rights and powers by one and the same national 
+authority, and the colonists were subjects of one and the same 
+national sovereign.  Mr. Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our 
+prominent statesmen maintains the unity of
+211
+                                           the colonial people, 
+adds indeed to their subjection to the same sovereign authority, 
+community of origin, of language, manners, customs, and law.  All 
+these, except the last, or common law, may exist without national 
+unity in the modern political sense of the term nation.  The 
+English common law was recognized by the colonial courts, and in 
+force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial legislation, 
+but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in English 
+jurisprudence.  The colonists were under the Common Law, because 
+they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.  
+This proves that they were really one people with the English 
+people, though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and 
+not a separate people having nothing politically in common with 
+them but in the accident of having the same royal person for 
+their king.  The union with the mother country was national, not 
+personal, as was the union existing between England and Hanover, 
+or that still existing between the empire of Austria, formerly 
+Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary; and hence the British 
+parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right to tax the 
+colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in all 
+cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies them-
+212
+                                           selves admitted in 
+principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation 
+laws.  The people of the several colonies being really one people 
+before independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country, 
+must be so still, unless they have since, by some valid act, 
+divided themselves or been divided into separate and independent 
+states.
+
+The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The 
+king is dead!  Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never 
+in abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed 
+in another.  The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with 
+independence, and the American took its place.  Did the 
+sovereignty, which before independence was in Great Britain, pass 
+from Great Britain to the States severally, or to the States 
+united?  It might have passed to them severally, but did it? 
+There is no question of law or antecedent right in the case, but 
+a simple question of fact, and the fact is determined by 
+determining who it was that assumed it, exercised it, and has 
+continued to exercise it.  As to this there is no doubt.  The 
+sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the 
+United States, the States united, and never by the States 
+separately or severally.  Then as a fact the sover-
+213
+                                                  eignty that 
+before independence was in Great Britain, passed, on independence 
+to the States united, and reappears in all its vigor in the 
+United States, the only successor to Great Britain known to or 
+recognized by the civilized world.
+
+As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct 
+colonies, still one people, the people of the United States, 
+though distributed into distinct and mutually independent States, 
+are yet one sovereign people, therefore a sovereign state or 
+nation, and not a simple league or confederacy of nations.
+
+There is no doubt that all the powers exercised by the General 
+Government, though embracing all foreign relations and all 
+general interests and relations of all the States, might have 
+been exercised by it under the authority of a mutual compact of 
+the several States, and practically the difference between the 
+compact theory and the national view would be very little, unless 
+in cases like that of secession.  On the supposition that the 
+American people are one political people, the government would 
+have the right to treat secession, in the sense in which the 
+seceders understand it, as rebellion, and to suppress it by 
+employing all the physical force at its command; but on the 
+compact
+214
+        theory it would have no such right.  But the question now 
+under discussion turns simply on what has been and is the 
+historical fact.  Before the States could enter into the compact 
+and delegate sovereign powers to the Union, they must have 
+severally possessed them.  It is historically certain that they 
+did not possess them before independence; they did not obtain 
+them by independence, for they did not severally succeed to the 
+British sovereignty, to which they succeeded only as States 
+united.  When, then, and by what means did they or could they 
+become severally sovereign States?  The United States having 
+succeeded to the British sovereignty in the Anglo-American 
+colonies, they came into possession of full national sovereignty, 
+and have alone held and exercised it ever since independence 
+became a fact.  The States severally succeeding only to the 
+colonies, never held, and have never been competent to delegate 
+sovereign powers.
+
+The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on 
+the assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the 
+several States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one 
+nation, and, though divided into separate States, the people were 
+regarded as one people.  The Legislature of New York, as
+216
+                                                         early as 
+1782, calls for an essential change In the Articles of 
+Confederation, as proved to be inadequate to secure the peace, 
+security, and prosperity of "the nation."  All the proceedings 
+that preceded and led to the call of the convention of 1781 were 
+based on the assumption that the people of the United States were 
+one people.  The States were called united, not confederated 
+States, even in the very Articles of Confederation themselves, 
+and officially the United States were called "the Union."  That 
+the united colonies by independence became united States, and 
+formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the 
+belief, the instinct of the great mass of the people.  They acted 
+as they existed through State as they had previously acted 
+through colonial organization, for in throwing off the British 
+authority there was no other organization through which they 
+could act.  The States, or people of the States, severally sent 
+their delegates to the Congress of the United States, and these 
+delegates adopted the rule of voting in Congress by States, a 
+rule that might be revived without detriment to national unity.  
+Nothing was more natural, then, than that Congress, composed of 
+delegates elected or appointed by States, should draw up articles 
+of confederation
+216
+                 rather than articles of union, in order, if for 
+no other reason, to conciliate the smaller States, and to prevent 
+their jealousy of the larger States such as Virginia, 
+Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
+
+Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted 
+during the transition from colonial dependence to national 
+independence.  Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not 
+a fact till l782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it 
+was signed at Paris.  Till then the United States were not an 
+independent nation; they were only a people struggling to become 
+an independent nation.  Prior to that preliminary treaty, neither 
+the Union nor the States severally were sovereign.  The articles 
+were agreed on in Congress in 1777, but they were not ratified by 
+all the States till May, 1781, and in 1782 the movement was 
+commenced in the Legislature of New York for their amendment.  
+Till the organization under the constitution ordained by the 
+people of the United States in l787, and which went into 
+operation in 1789, the United States had in reality only a 
+provisional government, and it was not till then that the 
+national government was definitively organized, and the line of 
+demarcation between the General Gov-
+217
+                                   ernment and the particular 
+State governments was fixed.
+
+The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected 
+by the American people, precisely because it was not in harmony 
+with the unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation; 
+and it was not in harmony with that constitution precisely 
+because it recognized the States as severally sovereign, and 
+substituted confederation for union.  The failure of 
+confederation and the success of union are ample proofs of the 
+unity of the American nation.  The instinct of unity rejected 
+State sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861.  The first and the 
+last attempt to establish State sovereignty have failed, and the 
+failure vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States 
+united, not in the States severally.
+
+
+
+
+218
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+
+The constitution of the United States is twofold, written and 
+unwritten, the constitution of the people and the constitution of 
+the government.
+
+The written constitution is simply a law ordained by the nation 
+or people instituting and organizing the government; the 
+unwritten constitution is the real or actual constitution of the 
+people as a state or sovereign community, and constituting them 
+such or such a state.  It is Providential, not made by the 
+nation, but born with it.  The written constitution is made and 
+ordained by the sovereign power, and presupposes that power as 
+already existing and constituted.
+
+The unwritten or Providential constitution of the United States 
+is peculiar, and difficult to understand, because incapable of 
+being fully explained by analogies borrowed from any other state 
+historically known, or described
+219
+                                 by political philosophers.  It 
+belongs	to the Graeco-Roman family, and is republican as	
+distinguished from despotic constitutions, but it comes under the 
+head of neither monarchical nor aristocratic, neither democratic 
+nor mixed constitutions, and creates a state which is neither a 
+centralized state nor a confederacy.  The difficulty of 
+understanding it is augmented by the peculiar use under it of the 
+word state, which does not in the American system mean a 
+sovereign community or political society complete in itself, like 
+France, Spain, or Prussia, nor yet a political society 
+subordinate to another political society and dependent on it.  
+The American States are all sovereign States united, but, 
+disunited, are no States at all.  The rights and powers of the 
+States are not derived from the United States, nor the rights and 
+powers of the United States derived from the States.
+
+The simple fact is, that the political or sovereign people of the 
+United States exists as united States, and only as united States.  
+The Union and the States are coeval, born together, and can exist 
+only together.  Separation is dissolution--the death of both.  
+The United States are a state, a single sovereign state; but this 
+single sovereign state consists in the union and solidarity of 
+States instead of individuals.  The
+220
+                                    Union is in each of the 
+States, and each of the States is in the Union.
+
+It is necessary to distinguish in the outset between the United 
+States and the government of the United States, or the so-called 
+Federal government, which the convention refused, contrary to its 
+first intention to call the national government.  That government 
+is not a supreme national government, representing all the powers 
+of the United States, but a limited government, restricted by its 
+constitution to certain specific relations and interests.  The 
+United States are anterior to that government, and the first 
+question to be settled relates to their internal and inherent 
+Providential constitution as one political people or sovereign 
+state.  The written constitution, in its preamble, professes to 
+be ordained by "We, the people of the United States."  Who are 
+this people?  How are they constituted, or what the mode and 
+conditions of their political existence?  Are they the people of 
+the States severally?  No; for they call themselves the people of 
+the United States.  Are they a national people, really existing 
+outside and independently of their organization into distinct and 
+mutually independent States?  No; for they define themselves to 
+be the people of the United States.  If they had considered
+221
+themselves existing as States only, they would have said "We, the 
+States," and if independently of State organization, they would 
+have said "We, the people," do ordain, &c.
+
+The key to the mystery is precisely in this appellation United 
+States, which is not the name of the country, for its distinctive 
+name is America, but a name expressive of its political 
+organization.  In it there are no sovereign people without 
+States, and no States without union, or that are not united 
+States.  The term united is not part of a proper name, but is 
+simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its full and 
+proper sense.  Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in the 
+States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally, 
+precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in 
+the people collectively or as society, not in the people 
+individually.  The life is in the body, not in the members, 
+though the body could not exist if it had no members; so the 
+sovereignty is in the Union, not in the States severally; but 
+there could be no sovereign union without the States, for there 
+is no union where there is nothing united.
+
+This is not a theory of the constitution, but the constitutional 
+fact itself.  It is the simple historical fact that precedes the 
+law and con-
+222
+           stitutes the law-making power.  The people of the 
+United States are one people, as has already been proved: they 
+were one people, as far as a people at all, prior to 
+independence, because under the same Common Law and subject to 
+the same sovereign, and have been so since, for as united States 
+they gained their independence and took their place among 
+sovereign nations, and as united States they have possessed and 
+still possess the government.  As their existence before 
+independence in distinct colonies did not prevent their unity, 
+so their existence since in distinct States does not hinder them 
+from being one people.  The States severally simply continue the 
+colonial organizations, and united they hold the sovereignty that 
+was originally in the mother country.  But if one people, they 
+are one people existing in distinct State organizations, as 
+before independence they were one people existing in distinct 
+colonial organizations.  This is the original, the unwritten, and 
+Providential constitution of the people of the United States.
+
+This constitution is not conventional, for it existed before the 
+people met or could meet in convention.  They have not, as an 
+independent sovereign people, either established their union, or 
+distributed themselves into distinct and mu-
+223
+                                           tually independent 
+States.  The union and the distribution, the unity and the 
+distinction, are both original in their constitution, and they 
+were born United States, as much and as truly so as the son of a 
+citizen is born a citizen, or as every one born at all is born a 
+member of society, the family, the tribe, or the nation.  The 
+Union and the States were born together, are inseparable in their 
+constitution, have lived and grown up together; no serious 
+attempt till the late secession movement has been made to 
+separate them; and the secession movement, to all persons who 
+knew not the real constitution of the United States, appeared 
+sure to succeed, and in fact would have succeeded if, as the 
+secessionists pretended, the Union had been only a confederacy, 
+and the States had been held together only by a conventional 
+compact, and not by a real and living bond of unity.  The popular 
+instinct of national unity, which seemed so weak, proved to be 
+strong enough to defeat the secession forces, to trample out the 
+confederacy, and maintain the unity of the nation and the 
+integrity of its domain.
+
+The people can act only as they exist, as they are, not as they 
+are not.  Existing originally only as distributed in distinct and 
+mutually independent colonies, they could at first act only
+224
+through their colonial organizations, and afterward only through 
+their State organizations.  The colonial people met in 
+convention, in the person of representatives chosen by colonies, 
+and after independence in the person of representatives chosen by 
+States.  Not existing outside of the colonial or State 
+organizations, they could not act outside or independently of 
+them.  They chose their representatives or delegates by colonies 
+or States, and called at first their convention a Congress; but 
+by an instinct surer than their deliberate wisdom, they called it 
+not the Congress of the confederate, but of the United States, 
+asserting constitutional unity as well as constitutional 
+multiplicity.  It is true, in their first attempt to organize a 
+general government, they called the constitution they devised 
+Articles of Confederation, but only because they had not attained 
+to full consciousness of themselves; and that they really meant 
+union, not confederation, is evident from their adopting, as the 
+official style of the nation or new power, united, not 
+confederate States.
+
+That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was 
+represented in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the 
+fact that the several States, when they wished to adopt State 
+constitutions in place of colonial charters, felt not
+225
+                                                      at liberty 
+to do so without asking and obtaining the permission of Congress, 
+as the elder Adams informs us in his Diary, kept at the time; 
+that is, they asked and obtained the equivalent of what has 
+since, in the case of organizing new States, been called an 
+"enabling act."  This proves that the States did not regard 
+themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as 
+completely sovereign only in it.  And this again proves that the 
+Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living 
+constitution of the people.  Even then it was felt that the 
+organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be 
+regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no 
+Territory can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a 
+State, and adopt a State constitution, without an enabling act by 
+Congress, or its equivalent.
+
+New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into 
+the Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of 
+Kansas, if nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular, 
+illicit, invalid, and dangerous.  Congress, of course, can 
+condone the wrong and validate the act, but it were better that 
+the act should be validly done, and that there should be no wrong 
+to condone.  Territories have organized
+226
+                                        as States, adopted State 
+constitutions, and instituted State governments under what has 
+been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such sovereignty has no 
+existence, because sovereignty is attached to the domain; and the 
+domain is in the United States.  It is the offspring of that 
+false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people 
+personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which 
+makes sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to 
+the soil, and is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of 
+power.  In all civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from 
+the state, and the state is inseparable from the domain.  The 
+will of the people, unless they are a state, is no law, has no 
+force, binds nobody, and justifies no act.
+
+The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains 
+admirably the mutual relation of the Union and the several 
+States.  The people of a Territory belonging to the United States 
+or included in the public domain not yet erected into a State and 
+admitted into the Union, are subjects of the United States, 
+without any political rights whatever, and, though a part of the 
+population, are no part of the sovereign people of the United 
+States.  They become a part of that people, with political rights
+227
+and franchises, only when they are erected into a State, and 
+admitted into the Union as one of the United States.  They may 
+meet in convention, draw up and adopt a constitution declaring or 
+assuming them to be a State, elect State officers, senators, and 
+representatives in the State legislature, and representatives and 
+senators in Congress, but they are not yet a State, and are, as 
+before, under the Territorial government established by the 
+General Government.  It does not exist as a State till recognized 
+by Congress and admitted into the Union.  The existence of the 
+State, and the rights and powers of the people within the State, 
+depend on their being a State in the Union, or a State united.  
+Hence a State erected on the national domain, but itself outside 
+of the Union, is not an independent foreign State, but simply no 
+State at all, in any sense of the term.  As there is no union 
+outside of the States, so is there no State outside of the Union; 
+and to be a citizen either of a State or of the United States, it 
+is necessary to be a citizen of a State, and of a State in the 
+Union.  The inhabitants of Territories not yet erected into 
+States are subjects, not citizens--that is, not citizens with 
+political rights.  The sovereign people are not the people 
+outside of State organization, nor the people of the States 
+sever-
+228
+     ally, but the distinct people of the several States united, 
+and therefore most appropriately called the people of the United 
+States.
+
+This is the peculiarity of the American constitution and is 
+substantially the very peculiarity noted and dwelt upon by 
+Mr. Madison in his masterly letter to Edward Everett, published 
+in the "North American Review," October, 1830.
+
+"I In order to understand the true character of the constitution 
+of the United States," says Mr. Madison, "the error, not 
+uncommon, must be avoided of viewing it through the medium either 
+of a consolidated government or of a confederated government, 
+whilst it is neither the one nor the other, but a mixture of 
+both.  And having, in no model, the similitudes and analogies 
+applicable to other systems of government, it must, more than any 
+other, be its own interpreter, according to its text and the 
+facts in the case.
+
+"From these it will be seen that the characteristic peculiarities 
+of the constitution are: 1. The mode of its formation. 2. The 
+division of the supreme powers of government between the States 
+in their united capacity and the States in their individual 
+capacities.
+
+"1. It was formed not by the governments of the component States, 
+as the Federal Govern-
+229
+                     ment, for which it was substituted, was 
+formed; nor was it formed by a majority of the people of the 
+United States as a single community, in the manner of a 
+consolidated government.  It was formed by the States; that is, 
+by the people in each of the States, acting in their highest 
+sovereign capacity, and formed consequently by the same authority 
+which formed the State constitution.
+
+"Being thus derived from the same source as the constitutions of 
+the States, it has within each State the same authority as the 
+constitution of the State, and is as much a constitution in the 
+strict sense of the term, within its prescribed sphere, as the 
+constitutions of the States are within their respective spheres; 
+but with this obvious and essential difference, that, being a 
+compact among the States in their highest capacity, and 
+constituting the people thereof one people for certain purposes, 
+it cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the States 
+individually, as the constitution of a State may be at its 
+individual will.
+
+"2. And that it divides the supreme powers of government between 
+the government of the United States and the governments of the 
+individual States, is stamped on the face of the instrument; the 
+powers of war and of taxation,
+230
+                               of commerce and treaties, and 
+other enumerated powers vested in the government of the United 
+States, are of high and sovereign a character as any of the 
+powers reserved to the State governments."
+
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Webster, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and 
+nearly all the old Republicans, and even the old Federalists, on 
+the question as to what is the actual constitution of the United 
+States, took substantially the same view; but they all, as well 
+as Mr. Madison himself, speak of the written constitution, which 
+on their theory has and can have only a conventional value.  
+Mr. Madison evidently recognizes no constitution of the people 
+prior to the written constitution, from which the written 
+constitution, or the constitution of the government, derives all 
+its force and vitality.  The organization of the American people, 
+which he knew well--no man better,--and which he so justly 
+characterizes, he supposes to have been deliberately formed by 
+the people themselves, through the convention--not given them by 
+Providence as their original and inherent constitution.  But this 
+was merely the effect of the general doctrine which he had 
+adopted, in common with nearly all his contemporaries, of the 
+origin of the state in compact, and may be
+231
+                                           eliminated from his 
+view of what the constitution actually is, without affecting that 
+view itself.
+
+Mr. Madison lays great stress on the fact that though the 
+constitution of the Union was formed by the States, it was 
+formed, not by the governments, but by the people of the several 
+States; but this makes no essential difference, if the people are 
+the people of the States, and sovereign in their severalty, and 
+not in their union.  Had it been formed by the State governments 
+with the acquiescence of the people, it would have rested on as 
+high authority as if formed by the people of the State in 
+convention assembled.  The only difference is, that if the State 
+ratified it by the legislature, she could abrogate it by the 
+legislature; if in convention, she could abrogate it only in 
+convention.  Mr. Madison, following Mr. Jefferson, supposes the 
+constitution makes the people of the several States one people 
+for certain specific purposes, and leaves it to be supposed that 
+in regard to all other matters, or in all other relations, they 
+are sovereign; and hence he makes the government a mixture of a 
+consolidated government and a confederated government, but 
+neither the one nor the other exclusively.  Say the people of the 
+United States were one people in all
+232
+                                     respects, and under a 
+government which is neither a consolidated nor a confederated 
+government, nor yet a mixture of the two, but a government in 
+which the powers of government are divided between a general 
+government and particular governments, each emanating from the 
+same source, and you will have the simple fact, and precisely 
+what Mr. Madison means, when is eliminated what is derived from 
+his theory of the origin of government in compact.  It is this 
+theory of the conventional origin of the constitution, and which 
+excludes the Providential or real constitution of the people, 
+that has misled him and so many other eminent statesmen and 
+constitutional lawyers.
+
+The convention did not create the Union or unite the States, for 
+it was assembled by the authority of the United States who were 
+present in it.  The United States or Union existed before the 
+convention, as the convention itself affirms in declaring one of 
+its purposes to be "to provide for a more perfect union."  If 
+there had been no union, it could not and would not have spoken 
+of providing for a more perfect union, but would have stated its 
+purpose to be to create or form a union.  The convention did not 
+form the Union, nor in fact provide for a more perfect union; it 
+simply provided for the
+233
+                        more perfect representation or expression 
+in the General government of the Union already existing.  The 
+convention, in common with the statesmen at the time, recognized 
+no unwritten or Providential constitution of a people, and 
+regarded the constitution of government as the constitution of 
+the state, and consequently sometimes put the state for the 
+government.  In intepreting its language, it is necessary to 
+distinguish between its act and its theory.  Its act is law, its 
+theory is not.  The convention met, among other things, to 
+organize a government which should more perfectly represent the 
+union of the States than did the government created by the 
+Articles of Confederation.
+
+The convention, certainly, professes to grant or concede powers 
+to the United States, and to prohibit powers to the States; but 
+it simply puts the state for the government.  The powers of the 
+United States are, indeed, grants or trusts, but from God through 
+the law of nature, and are grants, trusts, or powers always 
+conceded to every nation or sovereign people.  But none of them 
+are grants from the convention.  The powers the convention grants 
+or concedes to the United States are powers granted or conceded 
+by the United States to the General government it assembled to 
+organize and establish, 
+234
+                        which, as it extends over the whole 
+population and territory of the Union, and, as the interests it 
+is charged with relate to all the States in common, or to the 
+people as a whole, is with no great impropriety called the 
+government of the United States, in contradistinction from the 
+State governments, which have each only a local jurisdiction.  
+But the more exact term is, for the one, the general government, 
+and for the others, particular governments, as having charge only 
+of the particular interests of the State; and the two together 
+constitute the government of the United States, or the complete 
+national government; for neither the General government nor the 
+State government is complete in itself.  The convention developed 
+a general government, and prescribed its powers, and fixed their 
+limits and extent, as well as the bounds of the powers of the 
+State or particular governments; but they are the United States 
+assembled in convention that do all this, and, therefore, 
+strictly speaking, no powers are conceded to the United States 
+that they did not previously possess.  The convention itself, in 
+the constitution it ordained, defines very clearly from whom the 
+General government holds its powers.  It holds them, as we I 
+have seen, from "We, the people
+235
+                                 of the United States;" not we, 
+the people of the States severally, but of the States united.  If
+it had meant the States severally, it would have said, We, the 
+States; if it had recognized and meant the population of the 
+country irrespective of its organization into particular States, 
+it would have said simply, We, the people.  By saying "We, the 
+people of the United States," it placed the sovereign power where 
+it is, in the people of the States united.
+
+The convention ordains that the powers not conceded to the 
+General government or prohibited to the particular governments, 
+"are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." But 
+the powers reserved to the States severally are reserved by order 
+of the United States, and the powers not so reserved are reserved 
+to the people.  What people?  The first thought is that they are 
+the people of the States severally; for the constitution 
+understands by people the state as distinguished from the state 
+government; but if this had been its meaning in this place, it 
+would have said, "are reserved to the States respectively, or to 
+the people" thereof.  As it does not say so, and does not define 
+the people it means, it is necessary to understand by them the 
+people called in the preamble "the people of the United States."  
+This is con-
+236
+           firmed by the authority reserved to amend the 
+constitution, which certainly is not reserved to the States 
+severally, but necessarily to the power that ordains the 
+constitution--"We, the people of the United States."  No power 
+except that which ordains is or can be competent to amend a 
+constitution of government.  The particular mode prescribed by 
+the convention in which the constitution of the government may be 
+amended has no bearing on the present argument, because it is 
+prescribed by the States united, not severally, and the power to 
+amend is evidently reserved, not indeed to the General 
+government, but to the United States; for the ratification by any 
+State or Territory not in the Union counts for nothing.  The 
+States united, can, in the way prescribed, give more or less 
+power to the General government, and reserve more or less power 
+to the States individually.  The so-called reserved powers are 
+really reserved to the people of the United States, who can make 
+such disposition of them as seems to them good.
+
+The conclusion, then, that the General government holds from the 
+States united, not from the States severally, is not invalidated 
+by the fact that its constitution was completed only by the 
+ratification of the States in their individ-
+237
+                                           ual capacity.  The 
+ratification was made necessary by the will of the people in 
+convention assembled; but the convention was competent to 
+complete it and put it in force without that ratification, had it 
+so willed.  The general practice under the American system is for 
+the convention to submit the constitution it has agreed on to the 
+people, to be accepted or rejected by a plebiscitum; but such 
+submission, though it may be wise and prudent, is not necessary.  
+The convention is held to be the convention of the people, and to 
+be clothed with the full authority of the sovereign people, and 
+it is in this that it differs from the congress or the 
+legislature.  It is not a congress of delegates or ministers who 
+are obliged to act under instructions, to report their acts to 
+their respective sovereigns for approval or rejection; it is 
+itself sovereign, and may do whatever the people themselves can 
+do.  There is no necessity for it to appeal to a plebiscitum to 
+complete its acts.  That the convention, on the score of 
+prudence, is wise in doing so, nobody questions; but the 
+convention is always competent, if it chooses, to ordain the 
+constitution without appeal.  The power competent to ordain the 
+constitution is always competent to change, modify, or amend it.  
+That amend-
+238
+          ments to the constitution of the government can be 
+adopted only by being proposed by a convention of all the States 
+in the Union, or by being proposed, by a two-thirds vote of both 
+houses of Congress, and ratified by three-fourths of the States, 
+is simply a conventional ordinance, which the convention can 
+change at its pleasure.  It proves nothing as it stands but the 
+will of the convention.
+
+The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in 
+reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized 
+on, since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the 
+constitution emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty 
+or compact between sovereign states, not an organic or 
+fundamental law ordained by a single sovereign will; but this 
+argument is inadmissible, because, as we have just seen, the 
+convention is competent to ordain the constitution without 
+submitting it for ratification, and because the convention uses 
+sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.  That the 
+framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact, or 
+agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held 
+in regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as 
+little doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly 
+believed that
+239
+              they were constituting a real government.  
+Mr. Madison's authority on this point is conclusive.  They 
+unquestionably regarded the States, prior to the ratification of 
+the constitution they proposed, as severally sovereign, as they 
+were declared to be by the old Articles of Confederation, but 
+they also believed that all individuals are sovereign prior to 
+the formation of civil society.  Yet very few, if any, of them 
+believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption of the 
+constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the 
+conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal 
+belief of the time among political philosophers,--the little 
+account which they made of the historical facts that prove that 
+the people of the United States were always one people, and that 
+the States never existed as severally sovereign states.
+
+The political philosophers of the present day do not generally 
+accept the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in 
+these pages to be unsound and incompatible with the essential 
+nature of government.  The statesmen of the eighteenth century 
+believed that the state is derived from the people individually, 
+and held that sovereignty is created by the people in convention.  
+The rights and powers of the state, they held, were made up of 
+the 
+240
+    rights held by individuals under the law of nature, and which 
+the individuals surrendered to civil society on its formation.  
+So they supposed that independent sovereign states might meet in 
+convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion of their 
+rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real government, 
+and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of their 
+sovereignty.  This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings 
+of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by 
+Mr. Webster, in his great speech in the Senate against the State 
+sovereignty doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won 
+for him the honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and 
+expound it he, no doubt, did in the sense of its framers.  He 
+boldly concedes that prior to the adoption of the constitution, 
+the people of the United States were severally sovereign states, 
+but by the constitution they were made one sovereign political 
+community or people, and that the States, though retaining 
+certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty in the 
+Union.
+
+The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can 
+originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could 
+not stand; that, if the States went into
+241
+                                         the convention sovereign 
+States, they came out of it sovereign States; and that the 
+constitution they formed could from the nature of the case be 
+only a treaty, compact, or agreement between sovereigns.  It 
+could create an agency, but not a government.  The sovereign 
+States could only delegate the exercise of their sovereign 
+powers, not the sovereign powers themselves.  The States could 
+agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty only in 
+common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on 
+the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their 
+sovereignty.  Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as 
+before the convention, vested in the States severally.  Hence 
+State sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that 
+cannot come properly before the Supreme Court of the United 
+States for decision, each State is free to decide for itself, on 
+which he based the right of nullification, or the State veto of 
+acts of Congress whose constitutionality the State denies.  
+Mr. Calhoun was himself no secessionist, but he laid down the 
+premises from which secession is the logical deduction; and large 
+numbers of young men, among the most open, the most generous, and 
+the most patriotic in the country, adopted his premises,
+242
+                                                         without 
+being aware of this fact any more than he himself was, and who 
+have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and in their 
+sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebellion.
+
+The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and 
+which attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State 
+sovereignty, has thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject, 
+and led them to re-examine the historical facts in the case from 
+a different point of view, to see if Mr. Calhoun's theory is not 
+as unfounded as be had proved Mr. Webster's theory to be.  The 
+facts in the case really sustain neither, and both failed to see 
+it: Mr. Calhoun because be had purposes to accomplish which 
+demanded State sovereignty, and Mr. Webster because he examined 
+them in the distorting medium of the theory or understanding of 
+the statesmen of the eighteenth century.  The civil war has 
+vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the State 
+sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as 
+far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to 
+consolidation or centralism.
+
+But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding 
+of the framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the 
+expres-
+243
+      sion will be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on 
+their merits.  What binds is the thing done, not the theory on 
+which it was done, or on which the actors explained their work 
+either to themselves or to others.  Their political philosophy, 
+or their political theory, may sometimes affect the phraseology 
+they adopt, but forms no rule for interpreting their work.  Their 
+work was inspired by and accords with the historical facts in the 
+case, and is authorized and explained by them.  The American 
+people were not made one people by the written constitution, as 
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, Mr. Webster, and so many others 
+supposed, but were made so by the unwritten constitution, born 
+with and inherent in them.
+
+
+
+
+244
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--CONTINUED.
+
+
+Providence, or God operating through historical facts, 
+constituted the American people one political or sovereign 
+people, existing and acting in particular communities, 
+organizations, called states.  This one people organized as 
+states, meet in convention, frame and ordain the constitution of 
+government, or institute a general government in place of the 
+Continental Congress; and the same people, in their respective 
+State organizations, meet in convention in each State, and frame 
+and ordain a particular government for the State individually, 
+which, in union with the General government, constitutes the 
+complete and supreme government within the States, as the General 
+government, in union with all the particular governments, 
+constitutes the complete and supreme government of the nation or 
+whole country.  This is clearly the view taken by Mr. Madison in 
+his letter to Mr. Everett, 
+245
+                           when freed from his theory of the 
+origin of government in compact.
+
+The constitution of the people as one people, and the 
+distinction at the same time of this one people into particular 
+States, precedes the convention, and is the unwritten 
+constitution, the Providential constitution, of the American 
+people or civil society, as distinguished from the constitution 
+of the government, which, whether general or particular, is the 
+ordination of civil society itself.  The unwritten constitution 
+is the creation or constitution of the sovereign, and the 
+sovereign providentially constituted constitutes in turn the 
+government, which is not sovereign, but is clothed with just so 
+much and just so little authority as the sovereign wills or 
+ordains.
+
+The sovereign in the republican order is the organic people, or 
+State, and is with us the United States, for with us the organic 
+people exist only as organized into States united, which in their 
+union form one compact and indissoluble whole.  That is to say, 
+the organic American people do not exist as a consolidated people 
+or state; they exist only as organized into distinct but 
+inseparable States.  Each State is a living member of the one 
+body, and derives its life from its union with the body, so that 
+the Amer-
+246
+        ican state is one body with many members; and the 
+members, instead of being simply individuals, are States, or 
+individuals organized into States.  The body consists of many 
+members, and is one body, because the members are all members of 
+it, and members one of another.  It does not exist as separate 
+or distinct from the members, but exists in their solidarity or 
+membership one of another.  There is no sovereign people or 
+existence of the United States distinguishable from the people 
+or existence of the particular States united.  The people of the 
+United States, the state called the United States, are the 
+people of the particular States united.  The solidarity of the 
+members constitutes the unity of the body.  The difference 
+between this view and Mr. Madison's is, that while his view 
+supposes the solidarity to be conventional, originating and 
+existing in compact, or agreement, this supposes it to be real, 
+living, and prior to the convention, as much the work of 
+Providence as the existence in the human body of the living 
+solidarity of its members.  One law, one life, circulates 
+through all the members, constituting them a living organism, 
+binding them in living union, all to each and each to all.
+
+Such is the sovereign people, and so far the original unwritten 
+constitution.  The sovereign, 
+247
+                              in order to live and act, must 
+have an organ through which be expresses his will.  This organ 
+under the American system, is primarily the Convention.  The 
+convention is the supreme political body, the concrete sovereign 
+authority, and exercises practically the whole sovereign power 
+of the people.  The convention persists always, although not in 
+permanent session.  It can at any time be convened by the 
+ordinary authority of the government, or, in its failure, by a 
+plebiscitum.
+
+Next follows the Government created and constituted by the 
+convention.  The government is constituted in such manner, and 
+has such and only such powers, as the convention ordains.  The 
+government has, in the strict sense, no political authority 
+under the American system, which separates the government from 
+the convention.  All political questions proper, such as the 
+elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution of the several 
+departments of government, as the legislative, the judicial, and 
+the executive, changing, altering, or amending the constitution 
+of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a word, 
+all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take 
+the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the 
+government, but to the convention; and where the will of the 
+sover-
+248
+     eign is not sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a 
+new appeal to the convention is necessary, and may always be had.  
+The constitution of Great Britain makes no distinction between 
+the convention and the government.  Theoretically the 
+constitution of Great Britain is feudal, and there is, properly 
+speaking, no British state; there are only the estates, king, 
+lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute the 
+Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the 
+plenitude of political sovereignty.  The British Parliament, 
+composed of the three estates, possesses in itself all the 
+powers of the convention in the American constitution, and is at 
+once the convention and the government.  The imperial 
+constitution of France recognizes no convention, but clothes the 
+senate with certain political functions, which, in some 
+respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his creature.  
+The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God and 
+the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the 
+sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but 
+the imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the 
+government, not of the state, studies, while acknowledging the 
+sovereignty of the people, to render it nugatory, by 
+249
+                                                     transferring 
+it, under various subtle disguises, to the government, and 
+practically to the emperor as chief of the government.  The 
+senate, the council of state, the legislative body, and the 
+emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have properly 
+no political functions, and to give them such functions is to 
+place the sovereign under his own subjects!  The real aim of the 
+imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the 
+guise of republicanism.  It leaves and is intended to leave the 
+nation no way of practically asserting its sovereignty but by 
+either a revolution or a plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is 
+permissible only where there is no regular government.
+
+The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes 
+no restriction on the power of the government.  The French 
+imperial constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as 
+well as with the free action of the nation.  The American 
+constitution has all the advantages of both, and the 
+disadvantages of neither.  The convention is not the government 
+like the British Parliament, nor a creature of the state like 
+the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a 
+practical form.  By means of the convention the government is 
+restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in 
+practice either 
+250
+                too great or too small, can be enlarged or 
+contracted in a regular, orderly way, without resorting to a 
+revolution or to a plebiscitum.  Whatever political grievances 
+there may be, there is always present the sovereign convention 
+competent to redress them.  The efficiency of power is thus 
+secured without danger to liberty, and freedom without danger to 
+power.  The recognition of the convention, the real political 
+sovereign of the country and its separation from and 
+independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most 
+striking features of the American constitution.
+
+The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the 
+constitution by the convention of the government.  This 
+constitution, as Mr. Madison well observes, divides the powers 
+conceded by the convention to government between the General 
+Government and the particular State governments.  Strictly 
+speaking, the government is one, and its powers only are divided 
+and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.  This 
+division of the powers of government could never have been 
+established by the convention if the American people had not 
+been providentially constituted one people, existing and acting 
+through particular State organizations.  Here the unwritten 
+constitution, or the constitution 
+251
+                                  written in the people 
+themselves, rendered practicable and dictated the written 
+constitution, or constitution ordained by the convention and 
+engrossed on parchment.  It only expresses in the government the 
+fact which pre-existed in the national organization and life.
+
+This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the 
+United States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal 
+disintegration and Roman centralism.  Misled by their prejudices 
+and peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United 
+States, pleading in their justification the theory of State 
+sovereignty, attempted disintegration, secession, and national 
+independence separate from that of the United States, but the 
+central force of the constitution was too strong for them to 
+succeed.  The unity of the nation was too strong to be 
+effectually broken.  No doubt the reaction against secession and 
+disintegration will strengthen the tendency to centralism, but 
+centralism can succeed no better than disintegration has 
+succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no 
+suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent 
+of the States.  The particular governments are stronger, if 
+there be any difference, to protect the States against 
+centralism than the General government is to protect the
+252
+                                                         Union 
+against disintegration; and after swinging for a time too far 
+toward one extreme and then too far toward the other, the public 
+mind will recover its equilibrium, and the government move on in 
+its constitutional path.
+
+Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism 
+by the tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or 
+obstructive power.  Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and 
+wished to effect the same end here, where it is secured by 
+other, more effective, and less objectionable means, by a State 
+veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual executive, and by 
+substituting concurrent for numerical majorities.  Imperial Rome 
+gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated all 
+power in the hands of the emperor, became completely 
+centralized, and fell.  The British constitution seeks the same 
+end by substituting estates for the state, and establishing a 
+mixed government, in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy 
+temper, check, or balance each other; but practically the 
+commons estate has become supreme, and the nobility govern not 
+in the house of lords, and can really influence public affairs 
+only through the house of commons.  The principle of the British 
+constitution is not the division of the powers of government, 
+but the an-
+253
+          tagonism of estates, or rather of interests, trusting 
+to the obstructive influence of that antagonism to preserve the 
+government from pure centralism.  Hence the study of the British 
+statesman is to manage diverse and antagonistic parties and 
+interests so as to gain the ability to act, which he can do only 
+by intrigue, cajolery, bribery in one form or another, and 
+corruption of every sort.  The British government cannot be 
+carried on by fair, honest, and honorable means, any more than 
+could the Roman under the antagonism created by the tribunitial 
+veto.  The French tried the English system of organized 
+antagonism in 1789, as a cure for the centralism introduced by 
+Richelieu and Louis XIV., and again under the Restoration and 
+Louis Philippe, and called it the system of constitutional 
+guarantees; but they could never manage it, and they have taken 
+refuge in unmitigated centralism under Napoleon III., who, 
+however well disposed, finds no means in the constitution of the 
+French nation of tempering it.  The English system, called the 
+constitutional, and sometimes the parliamentary system, will not 
+work in France, and indeed works really well nowhere.
+
+The American system, sometimes called the Federal system, is not 
+founded on antagonism
+254
+                      of classes, estates, or interests, and is 
+in no sense a system of checks and balances.  It needs and 
+tolerates no obstructive forces.  It does not pit section 
+against section, the States severally against the General 
+government, nor the General government against the State 
+governments, and nothing is more hurtful than the attempt to 
+explain it and work it on the principles of British 
+constitutionalism.  The convention created no antagonistic 
+powers; it simply divided the powers of government, and gave 
+neither to the General government nor to the State governments 
+all the powers of government, nor in any instance did it give to 
+the two governments jurisdiction in the same matters. Hence each 
+has its own sphere, in which it can move on without colliding 
+with that of the other.  Each is independent and complete in 
+relation to its own work, incomplete and dependent on the other 
+for the complete work of government.
+
+The division of power is not between a NATIONAL government and 
+State governments, but between a GENERAL government and 
+particular governments.  The General government, inasmuch as it 
+extends to matters common to all the States, is usually called 
+the Government of the United States, and sometimes the Federal 
+255
+government, to distinguish it from the particular or State 
+governments, but without strict propriety; for the government of 
+the United States, or the Federal government, means, in 
+strictness, both the General government and the particular 
+Governments, since neither is in itself the complete government 
+of the country.  The General government has authority within 
+each of the States, and each of the State governments has 
+authority in the Union.  The line between the Union and the 
+States severally, is not precisely the line between the General 
+government and the particular governments.  As, for instance, 
+the General government lays direct taxes on the people of the 
+States, and collects internal revenue within them; and the 
+citizens of a particular State, and none others, are electors of 
+President and Vice-President of the United States, and 
+representatives in the lower house of Congress, while senators 
+in Congress are elected by the State legislatures themselves.
+
+The line that distinguishes the two governments is that which 
+distinguishes the general relations and interests from the 
+particular relations and interests of the people of the United 
+States.  These general relations and interests are placed under 
+the General government, which, because its jurisdiction is 
+coextensive with the
+256
+                     Union, is called the Government of the 
+United States; the particular relations and interests are placed 
+under particular governments, which, because their jurisdiction 
+is only coextensive, with the States respectively, are called 
+State governments.  The General government governs supremely all 
+the people of the United States and Territories belonging to the 
+Union, in all their general relations and interests, or 
+relations and interests common alike to them all; the particular 
+or State government governs supremely the people of a particular 
+State, as Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey, in all that 
+pertains to their particular or private rights, relations, and 
+interests.  The powers of each are equally sovereign, and 
+neither are derived from the other.  The State governments are 
+not subordinate to the General government, nor the General 
+government to the State governments.  They are co-ordinate 
+governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving its 
+powers from the same sovereign authority.  In their respective 
+spheres neither yields to the other.  In relation to the matters 
+within its jurisdiction, each government is independent and 
+supreme in regard of the other, and subject only to the 
+convention.
+
+257
+The powers of the General government are the power--
+
+To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay 
+the debts and provide for the general welfare of the United 
+States; to borrow money on the credit of the United States; to 
+regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several 
+States, and with the Indian tribes; to establish a uniform rule 
+of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of 
+bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin money and 
+regulate the value thereof, and fix the standard of weights and 
+measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the 
+securities and current coin of the United States; to establish 
+post-offices and post-roads; to promote the progress of science 
+and of the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors 
+and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings 
+and discoveries; to define and punish piracies and felonies 
+committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of 
+nations; to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, 
+and make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise 
+and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to make 
+rules for the government of the land and naval forces; to 
+provide for calling forth the militia to 
+258
+                                         execute the laws of the 
+Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; to provide 
+for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and of 
+governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of 
+the United States; to exercise exclusive legislation in all 
+cases whatsoever over such district, not exceeding ten miles 
+square, as may by cession of particular States and the 
+acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the 
+United States, and to exercise a like authority over all places 
+purchased by the consent of the legislature of the State in 
+which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, 
+arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings; and to make 
+all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into 
+execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by 
+this constitution in the government of the United States, or in 
+any department or office thereof.
+
+In addition to these, the General government is clothed with the 
+treaty-making power, and the whole charge of the foreign 
+relations of the country; with power to admit new States into 
+the Union; to dispose of and make all needful rules and 
+regulations concerning the territory and all other property 
+belonging to the United States; to declare, with certain 
+restrictions, the punishment
+259
+                             of treason, the constitution itself 
+defining what is treason against the United States; and to 
+propose, or to call, on the application of the legislatures of 
+two-thirds of all the states, a convention for proposing 
+amendments to this constitution; and is vested with supreme 
+judicial power, original or appellate, in all cases of law and 
+equity arising under this constitution, the laws of the United 
+States, and treaties made or to be made under their authority, 
+in all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and 
+consuls, in all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, in 
+all controversies to which the United States shall be a party, 
+all controversies between two or more States, between a State 
+and citizens of another State, between citizens of different 
+States, between citizens of the same State claiming lands under 
+grants of different States, and between a State or the citizens 
+thereof and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.
+
+These, with what is incidental to them, and what is necessary 
+and proper to carry them into effect, are all the positive 
+powers with which the convention vests the General government, 
+or government of the United States, as distinguished from the 
+governments of the particular States; and these, with the 
+exception of what relates to the district in which it has
+260
+                                                          its 
+seat, and places of forts, magazines, &c., are of a general 
+nature, and restricted to the common relations and interests of 
+the people, or at least to interests and relations which extend 
+beyond the limits of a particular State.  They are all powers 
+that regard matters which extend beyond not only the individual 
+citizen, but the individual State, and affect alike the 
+relations and interests of all the States, or matters which 
+cannot be disposed of by a State government without the exercise 
+of extra-territorial jurisdiction.  They give the government no 
+jurisdiction of questions which affect individuals or citizens 
+only in their private and domestic relations which lie wholly 
+within a particular State.  The General government does not 
+legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or 
+things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance, 
+wills, the transferrence or transmission of property, real or 
+personal; it can charter no private corporations, out of the 
+District of Columbia, for business, literary, scientific, or 
+eleemosynary purposes, establish no schools, found no colleges 
+or universities, and promote science and the useful arts only by 
+securing to authors and inventors for a time the exclusive right 
+to their writings and discoveries.  The United States Bank was 
+man-
+261
+   ifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present 
+so-called national banks.  The United States Bank was a private 
+or particular corporation, and the present national banks are 
+only corporations of the same sort, though organized under a 
+general law.  The pretence that they are established to supply a 
+national currency, does not save their constitutionality, for 
+the convention has not given the General government the power 
+nor imposed on it the duty of furnishing a national currency.  
+To coin money, and regulate the value thereof, is something very 
+different from authorizing private companies to issue bank 
+notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private 
+property, or even on what is called a specie basis.  To claim 
+the power under the general welfare clause would be a simple 
+mockery of good sense.  It is no more for the general welfare 
+than any other successful private business.  The private welfare 
+of each is, no doubt, for the welfare of all, but not therefore 
+is it the "general welfare," for what is private, particular in 
+its nature, is not and cannot be general.  To understand by 
+general welfare that which is for the individual welfare of all 
+or the greater number, would be to claim for the General 
+government all the powers of government, and
+262
+                                             to deny that very 
+division of powers which is the crowning merit of the American 
+system.  The general welfare, by the very force of the words 
+themselves, means the common as distinguished from the private 
+or individual welfare.  The system of national banks may or may 
+not be a good and desirable system, but it is difficult to 
+understand the constitutional power of the General government to 
+establish it.
+
+On the ground that its powers are general, not particular, the 
+General government has no power to lay a protective tariff.  It 
+can lay a tariff for revenue, not for protection of home 
+manufactures or home industry; for the interests fostered, even 
+though indirectly advantageous to the whole people, are in their 
+nature private or particular, not general interests, and chiefly 
+interests of private corporations and capitalists.  Their 
+incidental or even consequential effects do not change their 
+direct and essential nature.  So with domestic slavery.  Slavery 
+comes under the head of private rights, whether regarded on the 
+side of the master or on the side of the slave.  The right of a 
+citizen to hold a slave, if a right at all, is the private right 
+of property, and the right of the slave to his freedom is a 
+private and personal right, and neither is placed under the 
+safeguard of the General government,
+263
+                                     which has nowhere, unless 
+in the District of Columbia and the places over which it has 
+exclusive legislative power in all cases whatsoever, either the 
+right to establish it or to abolish it, except perhaps under the 
+war power, as a military necessity, an indemnity for the past, 
+or a security for the future.
+
+This applies to what are called Territories as well as to the 
+States.  The right of the government to govern the Territories 
+in regard to private and particular rights and interests, is 
+derived from no express grant of power, and is held only ex 
+necessitate--the United States owning the domain, and there 
+being no other authority competent to govern them.  But, as in 
+the case of all powers held ex necessitate, the power is 
+restricted to the absolute necessity in the case.  What are 
+called Territorial governments, to distinguish them from the 
+State governments, are only provisional governments, and can 
+touch private rights and interests no further than is necessary 
+to preserve order and prepare the way for the organization and 
+installation of a regular State government.  Till then the law 
+governing private rights is the law that was in force, if any 
+such there was, when the territory became by purchase, by
+264
+conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the United 
+States.
+
+Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance 
+of l787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of 
+the Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise, 
+prohibiting slavery north of the parallel 36' 30'.  The Wilmot 
+proviso was for the same reason unconstitutional.  The General 
+government never had and has not any power to exclude slavery 
+from the Territories, any more than to abolish it in the States.  
+But slavery being a local institution, sustained neither by the 
+law of nature nor the law of nations, no citizen migrating from 
+a slave State could carry his slaves with him, and hold them as 
+slaves in the Territory.  Rights enacted by local law are rights 
+only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters into 
+a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they 
+are carried enacts to the contrary.  The only persons that could 
+be held as slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves 
+or the children of those who were slaves in the Territory when 
+it passed to the United States.  The whole controversy on, 
+slavery in the Territories, and which culminated in the civil 
+war, was wholly unnecessary, and never could have 
+265
+                                                  occurred had 
+the constitution been properly understood and adhered to by both 
+sides.  True, Congress could not exclude slavery from the 
+Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold 
+slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded, 
+for the inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from 
+the States after the cession to the United States, were too few 
+to be counted.
+
+The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of 
+naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was 
+very proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one 
+State from gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage 
+over another; but the General government has itself no power to 
+naturalize a single foreigner, or in any case to say who shall 
+or who shall not be citizens, either of a State or of the United 
+States, or to declare who may or may not be electors even of its 
+own officers.  The convention ordains that members of the house 
+of representatives shall be chosen by electors who have the 
+qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous 
+branch of the State legislature, but the State determines these 
+qualifications, and who do or do not possess them; that the 
+senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures, and 
+266
+                                                   that the 
+electors of President and Vice-President shall be appointed in 
+such manner as the respective State legislatures may direct.  The 
+whole question of citizenship, what shall or shall not be the 
+qualifications of electors, who shall or shall not be freemen, is 
+reserved to the, States, as coming under the head of personal or 
+private rights and franchises.  In practice, the exact line of 
+demarcation may not always have been strictly observed either by 
+the General government or by the State governments; but a 
+careful study of the constitution cannot fail to show that the 
+division of powers is the division or distinction between the 
+public and general relations and interests, rights and duties of 
+the people, and their private and particular relations and 
+interests, rights and duties.  As these two classes of relations 
+and interests, rights and duties, though distinguishable, are 
+really inseparable in nature, it follows that the two governments 
+are essential to the existence of a complete government, or to 
+the existence of a real government in its plenitude and 
+integrity.  Left to either alone, the people would have only an 
+incomplete, an initial, or inchoate government.  The General 
+government is the complement of the State governments, and the 
+267
+State governments are the complement of the General government.
+
+The consideration of the powers denied by the convention to the 
+General government and to the State governments respectively, 
+will lead to the same conclusion.  To the General government is 
+denied expressly or by necessary implication all jurisdiction in 
+matters of private rights and interests, and to the State 
+government is denied all jurisdiction in right, or interests 
+which extend, as has been said, beyond the boundaries of the 
+State.  "No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or 
+confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money, 
+emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a 
+tender in the payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex 
+post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or 
+grant any title of nobility.  No State shall, without the 
+consent of Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or 
+exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing 
+its inspection laws and the net produce of all duties and 
+imposts laid by any State on imports and exports shall be for the 
+use of the treasury of the United States, and all such laws 
+shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress.  No 
+State shall, with-
+268
+                 out the consent of Congress, lay any duty of 
+tonnage, keep troops or ships-of-war in time of peace, enter into 
+any agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign 
+power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such 
+imminent danger as will not admit of delay."
+
+The powers denied to the States in some matters which are rather 
+private and particular, such as bills of attainder, ex post 
+facto laws, laws impairing the obligation of contracts, granting 
+titles of nobility, are denied equally to the General government.  
+There is evidently a profound logic in the constitution, and 
+there is not a single provision in it that is arbitrary, or 
+anomalous, or that does not harmonize dialectically with the 
+whole, and with the real constitution of the American people.  At 
+first sight the reservation to the State of the appointment of 
+the officers of the militia might seem an anomaly; but as the 
+whole subject of internal police belongs to the State, it should 
+have some military force at its command.  The subject of 
+bankruptcies, also, might seem to be more properly within the 
+province of the State, and so it would be if commerce between the 
+several States had not been placed under Congress, or if trade 
+were confined to the citizens
+269
+                              of the State and within its 
+boundaries; but as such is not the case, it was necessary to 
+place it under the General government, in order that laws on the 
+subject might be uniform throughout the Union, and that the 
+citizens of all the States, and foreigners trading with them, 
+should be placed on an equal footing, and have the same remedies.  
+The subject follows naturally in the train of commerce, for 
+bankruptcies, as understood at the time, were confined to the 
+mercantile class, bankers, and brokers; and since the regulation 
+of commerce, foreign and inter-state, was to be placed under the 
+sole charge of the General government, it was necessary that 
+bankruptcy should be included.  The subject of patents is placed 
+under the General government, though the patent is a private 
+right, because it was the will of the convention that the patent 
+should be good in all the States, as affording more encouragement 
+to science and the useful arts than if good only within a single 
+State, or if the power were left to each State to recognize or 
+not patents granted by another.  The right created, though 
+private in its nature, is Yet general or common to all the States 
+in its enjoyment or exercise.
+
+The division of the powers of government between a General 
+government and particular
+270
+                          governments, rendered possible and 
+practicable by the original constitution of the people 
+themselves, as one people existing and acting through State 
+organizations, is the American method of guarding against the 
+undue centralism to which Roman imperialism inevitably tends; 
+and it is far simpler and more effective than any of the 
+European systems of mixed governments, which seek their end by 
+organizing an antagonism of interests or classes.  The American 
+method demands no such antagonism, no neutralizing of one social 
+force by another, but avails itself of all the forces of society, 
+organizes them dialectically, not antagonistically, and thus 
+protects with, equal efficiency both public authority and 
+private rights.  The General government can never oppress the 
+people as individuals, or abridge their private rights or 
+personal freedom and independence, because these are not within 
+its jurisdiction, but are placed in charge, within each State, 
+of the State government, which, within its sphere, governs as 
+supremely as the General government: the State governments 
+cannot weaken the public authority of the nation or oppress the 
+people in their general rights and interests, for these are 
+withdrawn from State jurisdiction, and placed under charge of a 
+Gen-
+271
+eral government, which, in its sphere, governs as supremely as 
+the State government.  There is no resort to a system of checks 
+and balances; there is no restraint on power, and no systematic 
+distrust of power, but simply a division of powers between two 
+co-ordinate governments, distinct but inseparable, moving in 
+distinct spheres, but in the same direction, or to a common end.  
+The system is no invention of man, is no creation of the 
+convention, but is given us by Providence in the living 
+constitution of the American people.  The merit of the statesmen 
+of 1787 is that they did not destroy or deface the work of 
+Providence, but accepted it, and organized the government in 
+harmony with the real orders the real elements given them.  They 
+suffered themselves in all their positive substantial work to be 
+governed by reality, not by theories and speculations.  In this 
+they proved themselves statesmen, and their work survives; and 
+the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present and 
+future, the model republic--as much so as was Rome in her day; 
+and it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit 
+that pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and 
+more advanced order of civilization; such is really the fact.
+
+The only apparently weak point in the sys-
+272
+                                         tem is in the 
+particular States themselves.  Feudalism protected the feudal 
+aristocracy effectively for a time against both the king and the 
+people, but left the king and the, people without protection 
+against the aristocracy, and hence it fell.  It was not adequate 
+to the wants of civil society, did not harmonize all social 
+elements, and protect all social and individual rights and 
+interests, and therefore could not but fail.  The General 
+government takes care of public authority and rights; the State 
+protects private rights and personal freedom as against the 
+General government: but what protects the citizens in their 
+private rights, their personal freedom and independence, against 
+the particular State government?  Universal suffrage, answers 
+the democrat.  Armed with the ballot, more powerful than the 
+sword, each citizen is able to protect himself.  But this is 
+theory, not reality.  If it were true, the division of the 
+powers of government between two co-ordinate, governments would 
+be of no practical importance.  Experience does not sustain the 
+theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the individual 
+may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.  Experience 
+proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the 
+freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is
+273
+commonly pretended.  The ballot of an isolated individual counts 
+for nothing.  The individual, though armed with the ballot, is 
+as powerless, if he stands alone, as if he had it not.  To 
+render it of any avail he must associate himself with a party, 
+and look for his success in the success of his party; and to 
+secure the success of his party, he must give up to it his own 
+private convictions and free will.  In practice, individuals are 
+nothing individually, and parties are every thing.  Even the 
+suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the 
+Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the 
+government found the leaders of the party opposed to the 
+Republican party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount 
+than the chiefs of the armies of the so-called Confederate 
+States.
+
+Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one 
+knows by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some 
+private or personal purposes, for which they wish, through party 
+to use the government.  Parties have no conscience, no 
+responsibility, and their very reason of being is, the 
+usurpation and concentration of power.  The real practical 
+tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic, instead of an 
+imperial, centralism.
+274
+                       What is to guard against this centralism?  
+Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it;, and if the 
+government is left to it, the government becomes practically the 
+will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.  Is the 
+remedy in written or paper constitutions?  Party can break 
+through them, and by making the judges elective by party, for 
+short terms, and re-eligible, can do so with impunity.  In 
+several of the States, the dominant majority have gained the 
+power to govern at will, without any let or hindrance.  Besides, 
+constitutions can be altered, and have been altered, very nearly 
+at the will of the majority.  No mere paper constitutions are 
+any protection against the usurpations of party, for party will 
+always grasp all the power it can.
+
+Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the 
+States the principle of division of powers is carried into the 
+bosom of the State itself; in some States further than in 
+others, but in all it obtains to some extent.  In what are 
+called the New England States, the best governed portion of the 
+Union, each town is a corporation, having important powers and 
+the charge of all purely local matters--chooses its own 
+officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own 
+poor, of its own roads
+275
+                       and bridges, and of the education of its 
+own children.  Between these corporations and the State 
+government are the counties, that take charge of another class 
+of interests, more general than those under the charge of the 
+town, but less general than those of the State.  In the great 
+central and Northwestern States the same system obtains, though 
+less completely carried out.  In the Southern and Southwestern 
+States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the rights and 
+interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less well 
+protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.  But 
+with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the 
+influence of the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of 
+peace and the revival of agricultural, industrial, and 
+commercial prosperity, the New England system, in its main 
+features, is pretty sure to be gradually introduced, or 
+developed, and the division of powers in the State to be as 
+effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between 
+the General government and the particular or State governments.  
+So, though universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not 
+alone sufficient, the division of powers affords with it a not 
+inadequate protection.
+
+No government, whose workings are intrusted
+276
+                                            to men, ever is or 
+can be practically perfect--secure all good, and guard against 
+all evil.  In all human governments there will be defects and 
+abuses, and he is no wise man who expects perfection from 
+imperfection.  But the American constitution, taken as a whole, 
+and in all its parts, is the least imperfect that has ever 
+existed, and under it individual rights, personal freedom and 
+independence, as well as public authority or society, are better 
+protected than under any other; and as the few barbaric elements 
+retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the standard of 
+education elevated, and the whole population Americanized, 
+moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to 
+effect all the good, with as little of the evil, as can be 
+reasonably expected from any possible civil government or 
+political constitution of society.
+
+
+
+
+277
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+SECESSION.
+
+
+The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it 
+its population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the 
+unity and integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation 
+have been effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the 
+secessionists, though disposed to submit to superior force, and 
+demean themselves henceforth as loyal citizens, most likely hold 
+as firmly to the doctrine as before finding themselves unable to 
+reduce it to practice, and the Union victory will remain 
+incomplete till they are convinced in their understandings that 
+the Union has the better reason as well as the superior military 
+resources.  The nation has conquered their bodies, but it is 
+hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their minds 
+and win their hearts.
+
+The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, 
+or even as a conventional right.  The secessionists disclaim 
+revolutionary
+278
+              principles, and hold that the right of secession is 
+anterior to the convention, a right which the convention could 
+neither give, nor take away, because inherent in the very 
+conception of a sovereign State.  Secession is simply the repeal 
+by the State of the act of accession to the Union; and as that 
+act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she must always be 
+free to repeal it.  The Union is a copartnership; a State in the 
+Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to 
+withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.  There is 
+no power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any 
+longer than be pleases.  He is undoubtedly holden for the 
+obligations contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but 
+for none contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice 
+thereof.
+
+So of a sovereign State in the Union.  The Union itself, apart 
+from the sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, 
+a nullity, and binds nobody.  All its substance and vitality are 
+in the agreement by which the States constitute themselves a firm 
+or copartnership, for certain specific purposes, and for which 
+they open an office and establish an agency under express 
+instructions for the management of the general affairs of the 
+firm.  The State is held
+279
+                         jointly and severally for all the legal 
+obligations of the Union, contracted while she is in it but no 
+further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases, precisely as 
+an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm. The 
+remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion 
+against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations 
+already contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
+
+The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the 
+domain is attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of 
+the State.  Secession, then, carries the entire State government, 
+people, and domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the 
+State to its original position of a sovereign State, foreign to 
+the United States.  Being an independent sovereign State, she may 
+enter into a new confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge 
+herself in some other foreign state, as she judges proper or 
+finds opportunity.  The States that seceded formed among 
+themselves a new confederacy, more to their mind than the one 
+formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do, and in the war 
+just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but a people 
+fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and 
+true patriots de-
+280
+                fending the independence and inviolability of 
+their country against foreign invaders.  They are to be honored 
+for their loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and 
+punished as traitors.
+
+This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of 
+revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no 
+allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, 
+but simply on the original and inherent rights of the several 
+States as independent sovereign States.  The argument is 
+conclusive, and the defence complete, if the Union is only a firm 
+or copartnership, and the sovereignty vests in the States 
+severally.  The refutation of the secessionists is in the facts 
+adduced that disprove the theory of State sovereignty, and prove 
+that the sovereignty vests not in the States severally, but in 
+the States united, or that the Union is sovereign, and not the 
+States individually.  The Union is not a firm, a copartnership, 
+nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real, living, 
+constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble 
+unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.  There is, 
+indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are 
+no States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union.  
+There is
+281
+         no Union without the States, and there are no States 
+without the Union.  The people are born States, and the States 
+are born United States.  The Union and the States are 
+simultaneous, born together, and enter alike into the original 
+and essential constitution of the American state.  This the facts 
+and reasonings adduced fully establish.
+
+But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into 
+States, does not necessarily include the whole population or 
+territory included within the jurisdiction of the United States.  
+It is restricted to the people and territory or domain organized 
+into States in the Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people 
+were restricted to the tenants of the sacred territory, which had 
+been surveyed, and its boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and 
+which by no means included all the territory held by the city, 
+and of which she was both the private proprietor and the public 
+sovereign.  The city had vast possessions acquired by 
+confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by conquest, and in 
+reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were enacted, and 
+which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred laws.  
+In this class of territory, of which the city was the private 
+owner, was the territory of all the
+282
+                                    Roman provinces, which was 
+held to be only leased to its occupants, who were often 
+dispossessed, and their lands given as a recompense by the consul 
+or imperator to his disbanded legionaries.  The provincials were 
+subjects of Rome, but formed no part of the Roman people, and had 
+no share in the political power of the state, till at a late 
+period the privileges of Roman citizens were extended to them, 
+and the Roman people became coextensive with the Roman empire.  
+So the United States have held and still hold large territorial 
+possessions, acquired by the acknowledgment of their independence 
+by Great Britain, the former sovereign, the cession of particular 
+states, and purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico.  Till 
+erected into States and admitted into the Union, this territory, 
+with its population, though subject to the United States, makes 
+no part of the political or sovereign territory and people of the 
+United States.  It is under the Union, not in it, as is indicated 
+by the phrase admitting into the Union--a legal phrase, since the 
+constitution ordains that "new States may be admitted by the 
+Congress into this Union."
+
+There can be no secession that separates a State from the 
+national domain, and withdraws it from the territorial 
+sovereignty or jurisdic-
+283
+                       tion of the United States; yet what 
+hinders a State from going out of the Union in the sense that it 
+comes into it, and thus ceasing to belong to the political people 
+of the United States?
+
+If the view of the constitution taken in the preceding chapters 
+be correct, and certainly no facts tend to disprove it, the 
+accession of a Territory as a State in the Union is a free act of 
+the territorial people.  The Territory cannot organize and apply 
+for admission as a State, without what is called an "enabling act" 
+of Congress or its equivalent; but that act is permissive, not 
+mandatory, and nothing obliges the Territory to organize under it 
+and apply for admission.  It may do so or not, as it chooses.  
+What, then, hinders the State once in the Union from going out or 
+returning to its former condition of territory subject to the 
+Union?  The original States did not need to come in under an 
+enabling act, for they were born States in the Union, and were 
+never territory outside of the Union and subject to it.  But they 
+and the new States, adopted or naturalized States, once in the 
+Union, stand on a footing of perfect equality, and the original 
+States are no more and no less bound than they to remain States 
+in the Union.  The ratification of the constitution by the 
+original States was a
+284
+                      free act, as much so as the accession of a 
+new State formed from territory subject to the Union is a free 
+act, and a free act is an act which one is free to do or not to 
+do, as he pleases.  What a State is free to do or not to do, it 
+is free to undo, if it chooses.  There is nothing in either the 
+State constitution or in that of the United States that forbids 
+it.
+
+This is denied.  The population and domain are inseparable in the 
+State; and if the State could take itself out of the Union, it 
+would take them out, and be ipso facto a sovereign State foreign 
+to the Union.  It would take the domain and the population out of 
+the Union, it is conceded and even maintained, but not therefore 
+would it take them out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or would 
+they exist as a State foreign to the Union; for population and 
+territory may coexist, as Dacota, Colorado, or New Mexico, out of 
+the Union, and yet be subject to the Union, or within the 
+jurisdiction of the United States.
+
+But the Union is formed by the surrender by each of the States of 
+its individual sovereignty, and each State by its admission into 
+the Union surrenders its individual sovereignty, or binds itself 
+by a constitutional compact to merge its individual sovereignty 
+in that of
+285
+           the whole.  It then cannot cease to be a State in the 
+Union without breach of contract.  Having surrendered its 
+sovereignty to the Union, or bound itself by the constitution to 
+exercise its original sovereignty only as one of the United States, 
+it can unmake itself of its state character, only by consent of 
+the United States, or by a successful revolution.  It is by 
+virtue of this fact that secession is rebellion against the 
+United States, and that the General government, as representing 
+the Union, has the right and the duty to suppress it by all the 
+forces at its command.
+
+There can be no rebellion where there is no allegiance.  The 
+States in the Union cannot owe allegiance to the Union, for they 
+are it, and for any one to go out of it is no more an act of 
+rebellion than it is for a king to abdicate his throne.  The 
+Union is not formed by the surrender to it by the several States 
+of their respective individual sovereignty.  Such surrender 
+could, as we have seen, form only an alliance, or a 
+confederation, not one sovereign people; and from an alliance, or 
+confederation, the ally or confederate has, saving its faith, the 
+inherent right to secede.  The argument assumes that the States 
+were originally each in its individuality a sovereign state, but by 
+the con-
+286
+       vention which framed the constitution, each surrendered 
+its sovereignty to the whole, and thus several sovereign states 
+became one sovereign political people, governing in general 
+matters through the General government, and in particular matters 
+through particular or State governments.  This is Mr. Madison's 
+theory, and also Mr. Webster's; but it has been refuted in the 
+refutation of the theory that makes government originate in 
+compact.  A sovereign state can, undoubtedly, surrender its 
+sovereignty, but can surrender it only to something or somebody 
+that really exists; for to Surrender to no one or to nothing is, 
+as has been shown, the same thing as not to surrender at all; and 
+the Union, being formed only by the surrender, is nothing prior 
+to it, or till after it is made, and therefore can be no 
+recipient of the surrender.
+
+Besides, the theory is the reverse of the fact.  The State does 
+not surrender or part with its sovereignty by coming into the 
+Union, but acquires by it all the rights it holds as a State.  
+Between the original States and the new States there is a 
+difference of mode by which they become States in the Union, but 
+none in their powers, or the tenure by which they hold them.  The 
+process by which new States are
+287
+                                actually formed and admitted into 
+the Union, discloses at once what it is that is gained or lost by 
+admission.  The domain and population, before the organization of 
+the Territory into one of the United States, are subject to the 
+United States, inseparably attached to the domain of the Union, 
+and under its sovereignty.  The Territory so remains, organized 
+or unorganized, under a Territorial Government created by 
+Congress.  Congress, by an enabling act, permits it to organize 
+as a State, to call a convention to form a State constitution, to 
+elect under it, in such way as the convention ordains, State 
+officers, a State legislature, and, in the way prescribed by the 
+Constitution of the United States, senators and representatives 
+in Congress.  Here is a complete organization as a State, yet, 
+though called a State, it is no State at all, and is simply 
+territory, without a single particle of political power.  To be a 
+State it must be recognized and admitted by Congress as a State 
+in the Union, and when so recognized and admitted it possesses, 
+in union with the other United States, supreme political 
+sovereignty, jointly in all general matters, and individually in 
+all private and particular matters.
+
+The Territory gives up no sovereign powers
+288
+                                           by coming into the 
+Union, for before it came into the Union it had no sovereignty, 
+no political rights at all.  All the rights and powers it holds 
+are held by the simple fact that it has become a State in the 
+Union.  This is as true of the original States as of the new 
+States; for it has been shown in the chapter on The United States, 
+that the original British sovereignty under which the colonies 
+were organized and existed passed, on the fact of independence, 
+to the States United, and not to the States severally.  Hence if 
+nine States had ratified the constitution, and the other four had 
+stood out, and refused to do it, which was within their 
+competency, they would not have been independent sovereign 
+States, outside of the Union, but Territories under the Union.
+
+Texas forms the only exception to the rule that the States have 
+never been independent of the Union.  All the other new States 
+have been formed from territory subject to the Union.  This is 
+true of all the States formed out of the Territory of the 
+Northwest, and out of the domain ceded by France, Spain, and 
+Mexico to the United States.  All these cessions were held by the 
+United States as territory immediately subject to the Union, 
+before being erected into States; and by far the larger
+289
+                                                        part is 
+so held even yet.  But Texas was an independent foreign state, 
+and was annexed as a State without having been first subjected as 
+territory to the United States.  It of course lost by annexation 
+its separate sovereignty.  But this annexation was held by many 
+to be unconstitutional; it was made when the State sovereignty 
+theory had gained possession of the Government, and was annexed 
+as a State instead of being admitted as a State formed from 
+territory belonging to the United States, for the very purpose of 
+committing the nation to that theory.  Its annexation was the 
+prologue, as the Mexican war was the first act in the secession 
+drama, and as the epilogue is the suppression of the rebellion on 
+Texan soil.  Texas is an exceptional case, and forms no 
+precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the general 
+rule.  Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire all 
+their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of 
+losing or surrendering them.
+
+Our American statesmen have overlooked or not duly weighed the 
+facts in the case, because, holding the origin of government in 
+compact, they felt no need of looking back of the constitution to 
+find the basis of that unity of the American people which they 
+assert.  Neither Mr. Madi-
+190
+                         son nor Mr. Webster felt any difficulty 
+in asserting it as created by the convention of 1787, or in 
+conceding the sovereignty of the States prior to the Union, and 
+denying its existence after the ratification of the constitution.  
+If it were not that they held that the State originates in 
+convention or the social compact, there would be unpardonable 
+presumption on the part of the present writer in venturing to 
+hazard an assertion contrary to theirs.  But, if their theory was 
+unsound, their practical doctrine was not; for they maintained 
+that the American people are one sovereign people, and Mr. Quincy 
+Adams, an authority inferior to neither, maintained that they 
+were always one people, and that the States hold from the Union, 
+not the Union from the States.  The States without the Union 
+cease to exist as political communities: the Union without the 
+States ceases to be a Union, and becomes a vast centralized and 
+consolidated state, ready to lapse from a civilized into a 
+barbaric, from a republican to a despotic nation.
+
+The State, under the American system, as distinguished from 
+Territory, is not in the domain and population fixed to it, nor 
+yet in its exterior organization, but solely in the political 
+powers, rights, and franchises which it
+291
+                                        holds from the United 
+States, or as one of the United States.  As these are rights, not 
+obligations, the State may resign or abdicate them and cease to 
+be a State, on the same principle that any man may abdicate or 
+forego his rights.  In doing so, the State breaks no oath of 
+allegiance, fails to fulfil no obligation she contracted as a 
+State: she simply forgoes her political rights and franchises.  
+So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not 
+unconstitutional or unlawful.  But it is, as Mr. Sumner and 
+others have maintained, simply State suicide.  Nothing hinders a 
+State from committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than 
+there was something which compelled the Territory to become a 
+State in the Union against its will.
+
+It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to 
+the Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not 
+destroy the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and 
+independence, as the secessionists maintain.  Certainly, if the 
+States were, Prior to the Union, sovereign States; but this is 
+precisely what has been denied and disproved; for prior to the 
+Union there were no States.  Secession restores, or reduces, 
+rather, the State to the condition it was in before its admission 
+into the Union; but that condition
+292
+                                   is that of Territory, or a 
+Territory subject to the United States, and not that of an 
+independent sovereign state.  The State holds all its political 
+rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out 
+of it, or in the condition in which its population and domain 
+were before being a State in the Union.
+
+State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and 
+territory from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no 
+rebellion where there is no allegiance, resistance by its 
+population and territory to the Union, even war against the 
+Union, would not be rebellion, but the simple assertion of 
+popular sovereignty.  This is only the same objection in another 
+form.  The lapse of the State releases the population and 
+territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their allegiance 
+to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State, and 
+they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the 
+United States.  A State owes no allegiance to the United States, 
+for it is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.  The relation 
+between the United States and the State is not the relation of 
+suzerain and liegeman or vassal.  A State owes no allegiance, for 
+it is not subject to the Union; it is never in their State 
+capacity that its population and territory do or
+293
+                                                 can rebel.  
+Hence, the Government has steadily denied that, in the late 
+rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
+
+But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union; 
+and therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the 
+States that passed secession ordinances are and all along have 
+been States in the Union.  No State can rebel, but it does not 
+follow therefrom that no State can secede or cease to exist as a 
+State: it only follows that secession, in the sense of State 
+suicide, or the abdication by the State of its political rights 
+and powers, is not rebellion.  Nor does it follow from the fact 
+that no State has rebelled, that no State has ceased to be a 
+State; or that the States that passed secession ordinances have 
+been all along States in the Union.
+
+The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not 
+within the competency of the State, and	therefore null and void 
+from the beginning.  Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within 
+the competency of the State, so far as intended to alienate any 
+portion of the national domain and population thereto annexed, 
+they certainly were, and so far were void and of no effect; but 
+so far as intended to take the State simply as a State out of the 
+Union, they were
+294
+                 within the competency of the State, were not 
+illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null and void.  
+Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in others 
+are not wholly void.  The unconstitutionality vitiates only the 
+unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and 
+recognized and enforced as such by the courts.
+
+The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed 
+by the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them 
+and usurped the authority of the State.  This argument implies 
+that, if a secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of 
+the State, it is valid; which is more than they who urge it 
+against the State suicide doctrine are prepared to concede.  But 
+the secession ordinances were in every instance passed by the 
+people of the State in convention legally assembled, therefore by 
+them in their highest State capacity--in the same capacity in 
+which they ordain and ratify the State constitution itself; and 
+in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and 
+confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a 
+genuine plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.  In all cases 
+they were adopted by a decided majority of the political people 
+of the State, and after their adoption they were
+295
+                                                 acquiesced in 
+and indeed actively supported by very nearly the whole people.  
+The people of the States adopting the secession ordinances were 
+far more unanimous in supporting secession than the people of the 
+other States were in sustaining the Government in its efforts to
+suppress the rebellion by coercive measures.  It will not do, 
+then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to a faction.  The 
+people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the majority.
+
+There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few 
+Union men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few 
+ambitious and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their 
+violence, and their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the 
+people of their respective States into secession against their 
+convictions and their will.  No doubt there were leaders at the 
+South, as there are in every great movement at the North; no 
+doubt there were individuals in the seceding States that held 
+secession wrong in principle, and were conscientiously attached 
+to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men who adhered to the 
+Union, not because they disapproved secession, but because they 
+disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because they 
+were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not
+296
+                                                  succeed, that 
+the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it 
+they would become the great and leading men of their respective 
+States, which they certainly could not be under secession.  
+Others sympathized fully with what was called the Southern cause, 
+held firmly the right of secession, and hated cordially the 
+Yankees, but doubted either the practicability or the expediency 
+of secession, and opposed it till resolved on, but, after it was 
+resolved on, yielded to none in their earnest support of it.  
+These last comprised the immense majority of those who voted 
+against secession.  Never could those called the Southern leaders 
+have carried the secession ordinances, never could they have 
+carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with 
+such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four 
+years, making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh 
+doubtful, if they had not had the Southern heart with them, if 
+they had not been most heartily supported by the overwhelming 
+mass of the people.  They led a popular, not a factious movement.
+
+No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.  The 
+State is territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its 
+territory and population out of the Union, no State can
+297
+                                                        secede.  
+Out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the 
+sovereign or national domain, very true; but out of the Union as 
+a State, with rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not 
+true.  Secession is political, not territorial.
+
+But the State holds from the territory or domain.  The people are 
+sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the 
+domain because held by a sovereign people, as was established by 
+the analysis of the early Roman constitution.  The territory of 
+the States corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which 
+was attached the Roman sovereignty.  That territory, once 
+surveyed and consecrated, remained sacred and the ruling 
+territory, and could not be divested of its sacred and governing 
+character.  The portions of the territory of the United States 
+once erected into States and consecrated as ruling territory can 
+never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or successful 
+revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
+
+The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by 
+public, not by private wealth, and is always respublica or 
+commonwealth, in distinction from despotism or monarchy in its 
+oriental sense, which is founded on private wealth, or which 
+assumes that the authority to
+298
+                              govern, or sovereignty, is the 
+private estate of the sovereign.  All power is a domain, but 
+there is no domain without a dominus or lord.  In oriental 
+monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is the 
+public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the 
+people in their territorial, and not in their personal or 
+genealogical relation.  The people of The United States are 
+sovereign only within the territory or domain of the United 
+States, and their sovereignty is a state, because fixed, 
+attached, or limited to that specific territory.  It is fixed to 
+the soil, not nomadic.  In barbaric nations power is nomadic and 
+personal, or genealogical, confined to no locality, but attaches 
+to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.  The Gothic chiefs 
+hold their power by a personal title, and have the same authority 
+in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the 
+Elbe or the Danube.  Power migrates with the chief and his 
+people, and may be exercised wherever he and they find 
+themselves, as a Swedish queen held when she ordered the 
+execution of one of her subjects at Paris, without asking 
+permission of the territorial lord.  In these nations, power is a 
+personal right, or a private estate, not a state which exists 
+only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the domain,
+299
+exists independently of the chief or the government.  The 
+distinction is between public domain and private domain.
+
+The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some 
+democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is 
+territorial, not personal; not territorial because the majority 
+of the people are agriculturists or landholders, but because all 
+political rights, powers, or franchises are territorial.  The 
+sovereign people of the United States are sovereign only within 
+the territory of the United States.  The great body of the 
+freemen have the elective franchise, but no one has it save in 
+his State, his county, his town, his ward, his precinct.  Out of 
+the election district in which he is domiciled, a citizen of the 
+United States has no more right to vote than has the citizen or 
+subject of a foreign state.  This explains what is meant by the 
+attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the 
+state on the domain.  The state, in republican states, exists 
+only as inseparably united with the public domain; under 
+feudalism, power was joined to territory or domain, but the 
+domain was held as a private, not as a public domain.  All 
+sovereignty rests on domain or proprietorship, and is dominion.  
+The proprietor is the dominus or lord, and in
+300
+                                              republican states 
+the lord is society, or the public, and the domain is held for 
+the common or public good of all.  All political rights are held 
+from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the elective 
+franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as 
+distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.
+
+As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone 
+cannot possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not 
+a domain.  In the American system, the dominus or lord is not the 
+particular State, but the United States, and, the domain of the 
+whole territory, whether erected into particular States or not, 
+is in the United States alone.  The United States do not part 
+with the dominion of that portion of the national domain included 
+within a particular State.  The State holds the domain not 
+separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United States: 
+separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a 
+joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls 
+into the condition of any other territory held by the United 
+States not erected into one of the United States.
+
+Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the 
+particular State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to 
+the United
+301
+           States.  All escheats of private estates, but no 
+public or general escheats.  But this has nothing to do with the 
+public domain.  The United States are the dominus, but they have, 
+by the constitution, divided the powers of government between a 
+General government and particular State governments, and ordained 
+that all matters of a general nature, common to all the States, 
+should be placed under the supreme control of the former, and all 
+matters of a private or particular character under the supreme 
+control of the latter.  The eminent domain of private estates is 
+in the particular State, but the sovereign authority in the 
+particular State is that of the United States expressing itself 
+through the State government.  The United States, in the States 
+as well as out of them, is the dominus, as the States 
+respectively would soon find if they were to undertake to 
+alienate any part of their domain to a foreign power, or even to 
+the citizens or subjects of a foreign State, as is also evident 
+from the fact that the United States, in the way prescribed by 
+the constitution, may enlarge or contract at will the rights and 
+powers of the States.  The mistake on this point grows out of the 
+habit of restricting the action of the United States to the 
+General government, and not recollecting
+302
+                                         that the United States 
+govern one class of subjects through the General government and 
+another class through State governments, but that it is one and 
+the same authority that governs in both.
+
+The analogy borrowed from the Roman constitution, as far as 
+applicable, proves the reverse of what is intended.  The dominus 
+of the sacred territory was the city, or the Roman state, not the 
+sacred territory itself.  The territory received the tenant, and 
+gave him as tenant the right to a seat in the senate; but the 
+right of the territory was derived not from the domain, but from 
+the dominus, that is, the city.  But the city could revoke its 
+grant, as it practically did when it conferred the privileges of 
+Roman citizenship on the provincials, and gave to plebeians seats 
+in the senate.  Moreover, nothing in Roman history indicates that 
+to the validity of a senatus consultum it was necessary to count 
+the vacant domains of the sacred territory.  The particular 
+domain must, under the American system, be counted when it is 
+held by a State, but of itself alone, or even with its 
+population, it is not a State, and therefore as a State domain is 
+vacant and without any political rights or powers whatever.
+
+To argue that the territory and population
+303
+                                           once a State in the 
+Union must needs always be so, would be well enough if a State in 
+the Union were individually a sovereign state; for territory, 
+with its population not subject to another, is always a sovereign 
+state, even though its government has been subverted.  But this 
+is not the fact, for territory with its population does not 
+constitute a State in the Union; and, therefore, when of a State 
+nothing remains but territory and population, the State has 
+evidently disappeared.  It will not do then to maintain that 
+State suicide is impossible, and that the States that adopted 
+secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be States 
+in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their 
+representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in 
+Congress.  They must be reorganized first.
+
+There would also be some embarrassment to the government in 
+holding that the States that passed the secession ordinance 
+remain, notwithstanding, States in the Union.  The citizens of a 
+State in the Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless 
+they are rebels to their State; and rebels to their State they 
+are not, unless they resist its authority and make war on it.  
+The authority of the State in the Union is a legal authority, and 
+the citizen in obeying
+304
+                       it is disloyal neither to the State nor to 
+the Union.  The citizens in the States that made war on the 
+United States did not resist their State, for they acted by its 
+authority.  The only men, on this supposition, in them, who have 
+been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have 
+refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted, 
+even with armed force, the secession ordinances.  The several 
+State governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on 
+the war for the destruction of the Union, if the States are in 
+the Union, were legal and loyal governments of their respective 
+States, for they were legally elected and installed, and 
+conformed to their respective State constitutions.  All the acts 
+of these governments have been constitutional.  Their entering 
+into a confederacy for attaining a separate nationality has been 
+legal, and the debts contracted by the States individually, or by 
+the confederacy legally formed by them, have been legally 
+contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against the 
+United States.  The war against them has been all wrong, and the 
+confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United 
+States.  The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can 
+blockade its own ports, and the captures and seizures under
+305
+                                                            it, 
+robberies.  The Supreme Court has been wrong in declaring the war 
+a territorial civil war, as well as the government in acting 
+accordingly.  Now, all these conclusions are manifestly false and 
+absurd, and therefore the assumption that the States in question 
+have all along been States in the Union cannot be sustained.
+
+It is easy to understand the resistance the Government offers to 
+the doctrine that a State may commit suicide, or by its own act 
+abdicate its rights and cease to be a State in the Union.  It is 
+admissible on no theory of the constitution that has been widely 
+entertained.  It is not admissible on Mr. Calhoun's theory of 
+State sovereignty, for on that theory a State in going out of the 
+Union does not cease to be a State but simply resumes the powers 
+it had delegated to the General government.  It cannot be 
+maintained on Mr. Madison's or Mr. Webster's theory, that the 
+States prior to the Union were severally sovereign, but by the 
+Union were constituted one people; for, if this one people are 
+understood to be a federal people, State secession would not be 
+State suicide, but State independence; and if understood to be 
+one consolidated or centralized people, it would be simply 
+insurrection or rebellion against the national 
+306
+                                               authority, 
+laboring to make itself a revolution.  The government seems to 
+have understood Mr. Madison's theory in both senses--in the 
+consolidated sense, in declaring the secessionists insurgents and 
+rebels, and in the federal sense, in maintaining that they have 
+never seceded, and are still States in the Union, in full 
+possession of all their political or State rights.  Perhaps, if 
+the government, instead of borrowing from contradictory theories 
+of the constitution which have gained currency, had examined in 
+the light of historical facts the constitution itself, it would 
+have been as constitutional in its doctrine as it has been loyal 
+and patriotic, energetic and successful in its military 
+administration.
+
+Another reason why the doctrine that State secession is State 
+suicide has appeared so offensive to many, is the supposition 
+entertained at one time by some of its friends, that the 
+dissolution of the State vacates all rights and franchises held 
+under it.  But this is a mistake.  The principle is well known 
+and recognized by the jurisprudence of all civilized nations, 
+that in the transfer of a territory from one territorial 
+sovereign to another, the laws in force under the old sovereign 
+remain in force after the change, till abrogated, or others are 
+enacted
+307
+        in their place by the new sovereign, except such as are 
+necessarily abrogated by the change itself of the sovereign; not, 
+indeed, because the old sovereign retains any authority, but, 
+because such is presumed by the courts to be the will of the new 
+sovereign.  The principle applies in the case of the death of a 
+State in the Union.  The laws of the State are territorial, till 
+abrogated by competent authority, remain the lex loci, and are in 
+full force.  All that would be vacated would be the public rights 
+of the State, and in no case the private rights of citizens, 
+corporations, or laws affecting them.
+
+But the same conclusion is reached in another way.  In the lapse 
+of a State or its return to the condition of a Territory, there 
+is really no change of sovereignty.  The sovereignty, both before 
+and after, is the United States.  The sovereign authority that 
+governs in the State government, as we have seen, though 
+independent of the General government, is the United States.  The 
+United States govern certain matters through a General 
+government, and others through particular State governments.  The 
+private rights and interests created, regulated, or protected by 
+the particular State, are created, regulated, or protected by the 
+United States, as much and as plenarily as
+308
+                                           if done by the General 
+government, and the State laws creating, regulating, or protecting 
+them can be abrogated by no power known to the constitution, but 
+either the State itself, or the United States in convention legally 
+assembled.  If this were what is meant by the States that have 
+seceded, or professed to secede, remaining States in the Union, 
+they would, indeed, be States still in the Union, notwithstanding 
+secession and the government would be right in saying that no 
+State can secede.  But this is not what is meant, at least not 
+all that is meant.  It is meant not only that the private rights 
+of citizens and corporations remain, but the citizens retain all 
+the public rights of the State, that is, the right to 
+representation in Congress and in the electoral college, and the 
+right to sit in the convention, which is not true.
+
+But the correction of the misapprehension that the private rights 
+and interests are lost by the lapse of the State may remove the 
+graver prejudices against the doctrine of State suicide, and 
+dispose loyal and honest Union men to bear the reasons by which 
+it is supported, and which nobody has refuted or can refute on 
+constitutional grounds.  A Territory by coming into the Union 
+becomes a State; a State by going out of the Union becomes a 
+Territory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION.
+
+
+The question of reconstructing the States that seceded will be 
+practically settled before these pages can see the light, and 
+will therefore be considered here only so far as necessary to 
+complete the view of the constitution of the United States.  The 
+manner in which the government proposed to settle, has settled, 
+or will settle the question, proves that both it and the American 
+people have only confused views of the rights and powers of the 
+General government, but imperfectly comprehend the distinction 
+between the legislative and executive departments of that 
+Government, and are far more familiar with party tactics than 
+with constitutional law.
+
+It would be difficult to imagine any thing more unconstitutional, 
+more crude, or more glaringly impolitic than the mode of 
+reconstruction indicated by the various executive proclamations 
+that have been issued, bearing on the subject, or even by the 
+bill for guaranteeing the States republican governments, that 
+passed
+310
+       Congress, but which failed to obtain the President's 
+signature.  It is, in some measure, characteristic of the 
+American government to understand how things ought to be done 
+only when they are done and it is too late to do them in the 
+right way.  Its wisdom comes after action, as if engaged in a 
+series of experiments.  But, happily for the nation, few blunders 
+are committed that with our young life and elasticity are 
+irreparable, and that, after all, are greater than are ordinarily 
+committed by older and more experienced nations.  They are not of 
+the most fatal character, and are, for the most part, such as are 
+incident to the conceit, the heedlessness, the ardor, and the 
+impatience of youth, and need excite no serious alarm for the 
+future.
+
+There has been no little confusion in the public mind, and in 
+that of the government itself, as to what reconstruction is, who 
+has the power to reconstruct, and how that power is to be 
+exercised.  Are the States that seceded States in the Union, with 
+no other disability than that of having no legal governments? or 
+are they Territories subject to the Union?  Is their 
+reconstruction their erection into new States, or their 
+restoration as States previously in the Union?  Is the power to 
+reconstruct in the States themselves? or is it in the General 
+government?
+311
+             If partly in the people and partly in the General 
+government, is the part in the General government in Congress, or 
+in the Executive?  If in Congress, can the Executive, without the 
+authority of Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it 
+for Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State?   If 
+the power is partly in the people of the disorganized States who 
+or what defines that people, decides who may or may not vote in 
+the reorganization?  On all these questions there has been much 
+crude, if not erroneous, thinking, and much inconsistent and 
+contradictory action.
+
+The government started with the theory that no State had seceded 
+or could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in 
+rebellion continued to be States in the Union.  That is, it held 
+secession to be a purely personal and not a territorial 
+insurrection.  Yet it proclaimed eleven States to be in 
+insurrection against the United States, blockaded their ports, 
+and interdicted all trade and intercourse of any kind with them.  
+The Supreme Court, in order to sustain the blockade and interdict 
+as legal, decided the war to be not a war against simply 
+individual or personal insurgents but "a territorial civil war."  
+This negatived the assumption that the States that took up arms 
+against 
+312
+        the United States remained all the while peaceable and 
+loyal States, with all their political rights and powers in the 
+Union.  The States in the Union are integral elements of the 
+political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation 
+vests in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the 
+eleven States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a 
+formidable war against the United States, were in the Union, an 
+integral element of that sovereign authority which was carrying 
+on a yet more formidable war against them.  Nevertheless, the 
+government still held to its first assumption, that the States in 
+rebellion continued to be States in the Union--loyal States, with 
+all their rights and franchises unimpaired!
+
+That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in 
+the doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union, 
+is not to be wondered at.  The extent and determination of the 
+secession movement were imperfectly understood, and the belief 
+among the supporters of the government, and, perhaps, of the 
+government itself, was, that it was a spasmodic movement for a 
+temporary purpose, rather than a fixed determination to found an 
+independent separate nationality; that it was and would be 
+sustained by the real majority
+313
+                               of the people of none of the 
+States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the 
+true policy of the government would be to treat the seceders with 
+great forbearance, to avoid all measures likely to exasperate 
+them or to embarrass their loyal fellow-citizens, to act simply 
+on the defensive, and to leave the Union men in the several 
+seceding States to gain a political victory at the polls over the 
+secessionists, and to return their States to their normal 
+position in the Union.
+
+The government may not have had much faith in this policy, and 
+Mr. Lincoln's personal authority might be cited to the effect 
+that it had not, but it was urged strongly by the Union men of 
+the Border States.  The administration was hardly seated in 
+office, and its members were new men, without administrative 
+experience; the President, who had been legally elected indeed, 
+but without a majority of the popular votes, was far from having 
+the full confidence even of the party that elected him; opinions 
+were divided; party spirit ran high; the excitement was great, 
+the crisis was imminent, the government found itself left by its 
+predecessor without an army or a navy, and almost without arms or 
+ordnance; it knew not how far it could count on popular support, 
+and
+314
+    was hardly aware whom it could trust or should distrust; all 
+was hurry and confusion; and what could the government do but to 
+gain time, keep off active war as long as possible, conciliate 
+all it could, and take ground which at the time seemed likely to 
+rally the largest number of the people to its support?  There 
+were men then, warm friends of the administration, and still 
+warmer friends of their country, who believed that a bolder, a 
+less timid, a less cautious policy would have been wiser, that in 
+revolutionary times boldness, what in other times would be 
+rashness, is the highest prudence, on the side of the government 
+as well as on the side of the revolution; that when once it has 
+shown itself, the rebellion that hesitates, deliberates, consults, 
+is defeated and so is the government.  The seceders owed from the 
+first their successes not to their superior organization, to 
+their better preparation, or to the better discipline and 
+appointment of their armies, but to their very rashness, to their 
+audacity even, and the hesitancy, cautious and deliberation of 
+the government.  Napoleon owed his successes as general and 
+civilian far more to the air of power he assumed, and the 
+conviction he produced of his invincibility in the minds of his 
+opponents, than to his civil or
+315
+                                military strategy and tactics, 
+admirable as they both were.  But the government believed it 
+wisest to adopt a conciliatory and, in many respects, a 
+temporizing policy, and to rely more on weakening the 
+secessionists in their respective States than on strengthening 
+the hands and hearts of its own staunch and uncompromising 
+supporters.  It must strengthen the Union party in the 
+insurrectionary States, and as this party hoped to succeed by 
+political manipulation rather than by military force, the 
+government must rely rather on a show of military power than on 
+gaining any decisive battle.  As it hoped, or affected to hope, 
+to suppress the rebellion in the States that seceded through 
+their loyal citizens, it was obliged to assume that secession was 
+the work of a faction, of a few ambitious and disappointed 
+politicians, and that the States were all in the Union, and 
+continued in the loyal portion of their inhabitants.  Hence its 
+aid to the loyal Virginians to organize as the State of Virginia, 
+and its subsequent efforts to organize the Union men in 
+Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and its disposition to 
+recognize their organization in each of those States as the State 
+itself, though including only a small minority of the territorial 
+people.  Had the facts been
+316
+                            as assumed, the government might have 
+treated the loyal people of each State as the State itself, 
+without any gross usurpation of power; but, unhappily, the facts 
+assumed were not facts, and it was soon found that the Union 
+party in all the States that seceded, except the western part of 
+Virginia and the eastern section of Tennessee, after secession 
+had been carried by the popular vote, went almost unanimously 
+with the secessionists; for they as well as the secessionists 
+held the doctrine of State sovereignty; and to treat the handful 
+of citizens that remained loyal in each State as the State 
+itself, became ridiculous, and the government should have seen 
+and acknowledged it.
+
+The rebellion being really territorial, and not personal, the 
+State that seceded was no more continued in the loyal than in the 
+disloyal population.  While the war lasted, both were public 
+enemies of the United States, and neither had or could have any 
+rights as a State in the Union.  The law recognizes a solidarity 
+of all the citizens of a State, and assumes that, when a State is 
+at war, all its citizens are at war, whether approving the war or 
+not.  The loyal people in the States that seceded incurred none 
+of the pains and penalties of treason, but they retained none of 
+the political rights of the
+317
+                            State in the Union, and, in 
+reorganizing the State after the suppression of the rebellion, 
+they have no more right to take part than the secessionists 
+themselves.  They, as well as the secessionists, have followed 
+the territory.  It was on this point that the government 
+committed its gravest mistake.  As to the reorganization or 
+reconstruction of the State, the whole territorial people stood 
+on the same footing.
+
+Taking the decision of the Supreme Court as conclusive on the 
+subject, the rebellion was territorial, and, therefore, placed 
+all the States as States out of the Union, and retained them only 
+as population and territory, under or subject to the Union.  The 
+States ceased to exist, that is, as integral elements of the 
+national sovereignty.  The question then occurred, are they to be 
+erected into new States, or are they to be reconstructed and 
+restored to the Union as the identical old States that seceded?  
+Shall their identity be revived and preserved, or shall they be 
+new States, regardless of that identity ?  There can be no 
+question that the work to be done was that of restoration, not of 
+creation; no tribe should perish from Israel, no star be struck 
+from the firmament of the Union.  Every inhabitant of the fallen 
+States, and every citi-
+318
+                      zen of the United States must desire them 
+to be revived and continued with their old names and boundaries, 
+and all true Americans wish to continue the constitution as it 
+is, and the Union as it was.  Who would see old Virginia, the 
+Virginia of revolutionary fame, of Washington, Jefferson, 
+Madison, of Monroe, the "Old Dominion," once the leading State of 
+the Union, dead without hope of resurrection? or South Carolina, 
+the land of Rutledge, Moultrie, Laurens, Hayne, Sumter, and 
+Marion?  There is something grating to him who values State 
+associations, and would encourage State emulation and State 
+pride, in the mutilation of the Old Dominion and the erection 
+within her borders of the new State called West Virginia.  States 
+in the Union are not mere prefectures, or mere dependencies on 
+the General government, created for the convenience of 
+administration.  They have an individual, a real existence of 
+their own, as much so as have the individual members of society.  
+They are free members, not of a confederation indeed, but of a 
+higher political community, and reconstruction should restore the 
+identity of their individual life, suspended for a moment by 
+secession, but capable of resuscitation.
+
+These States had become, indeed, for a mo-
+319
+                                         ment, territory under 
+the Union; but in no instance had they or could they become 
+territory that had never existed as States.  The fact that the 
+territory and people had existed as a State, could with regard to 
+none of them be obliterated, and, therefore, they could not be 
+erected into absolutely new States.  The process of 
+reconstructing them could not be the same as that of creating new 
+States.  In creating a new State, Congress, ex necessitate, 
+because there is no other power except the national convention 
+competent to do it, defines the boundaries of the new State, and 
+prescribes the electoral people, or who may take part in the 
+preliminary organization but in reconstructing States it does 
+neither, for both are done by a law Congress is not competent to 
+abrogate or modify, and which can be done only by the United 
+States in convention assembled, or by the State itself after its 
+restoration.  The government has conceded this, and, in part, has 
+acted on it.  It preserves, except in Virginia, the old 
+boundaries, and recognizes, or rather professes to recognize the 
+old electoral law, only it claims the right to exclude from the 
+electoral people those who have voluntarily taken part in the 
+rebellion.
+
+The work to be done in States that have se-
+320
+                                          ceded is that of 
+reconstruction, not creation; and this work is not and cannot be 
+done, exclusively nor chiefly by the General government, either 
+by the Executive or by Congress.  That government can appoint 
+military, or even provisional governors, who may designate the 
+time and place of holding the convention of the electoral people 
+of the disorganized State, as also the time and place of holding 
+the elections of delegates to it, and superintend the elections 
+so far as to see the polls are opened, and that none but 
+qualified electors vote, but nothing more.  All the rest is the 
+work of the territorial electoral people themselves, for the 
+State within its own sphere must, as one of the United States, be 
+a self-governing community.  The General government may concede 
+or withhold permission to the disorganized State to reorganize, 
+as it judges advisable, but it cannot itself reorganize it.  If it 
+concedes the permission, it must leave the whole electoral people 
+under the preexisting electoral law free to take part in the work 
+of reorganization, and to vote according to their own judgment.  
+It has no authority to purge the electoral people, and say who 
+may or may not vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the 
+qualifications of electors is left to the State, and can be 
+settled neither
+321
+                by an act of Congress nor by an Executive 
+proclamation.
+
+If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized 
+States remain States in the Union, the General government could 
+have nothing to say on the subject, and could no more interfere 
+with elections in any one of them than it could with elections in 
+Massachusetts or New York.  But even on the doctrine here 
+defended it can interfere with them only by way of general 
+superintendence.  The citizens have, indeed, lost their political 
+rights, but not their private rights.  Secession has not 
+dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws of the 
+disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.  
+The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws 
+survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law, 
+or lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the 
+State, that has, as a State, really lapsed.  They do so by will 
+of the United States, which enacted them through the individual 
+State, and which has not in convention abrogated them, save the 
+law authorizing slavery, and its dependent laws.
+
+This point has already been made, but as it is one of the 
+niceties of the American constitution, it may not be amiss to 
+elaborate it at
+322
+                greater length.  The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson, 
+Mr. Madison, and the majority of our jurists, would see to be 
+that the States, under God, are severally sovereign in all 
+matters not expressly confided to the General government, and 
+therefore that the American sovereignty is divided, and the 
+citizen owes a double allegiance--allegiance to his State, and 
+allegiance to the United States--as if there was a United States 
+distinguishable from the States.  Hence Mr. Seward, in an 
+official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James, 
+says: "The citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United 
+States."  And nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union 
+at all, hold that it is also due to the States, only that which 
+is due to the United States is paramount, as that under feudalism 
+due to the overlord.  But this is not the case.  There is no 
+divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.  Sovereignty is one, 
+and vests not in the General government or in the State 
+government, but in the United States, and allegiance is due to 
+the United States, and to them alone.  Treason can be committed 
+only against the United States, and against a State only because 
+against the United States, and is properly cognizable only by the 
+Federal courts.  Hence the Union men committed no treason in
+323
+refusing to submit to the secession ordinances of their 
+respective States, and in sustaining the national arms against 
+secession.
+
+There are two very common mistakes: the one that the States 
+individually possess all the powers not delegated to the General 
+government; and the other that the Union, or United States, have 
+only delegated powers.  But the United States possess all the 
+powers of a sovereign state, and the States individually and the 
+General government possess only such powers as the United States 
+in convention delegate to them respectively.  The sovereign is 
+neither the General government nor the States severally, but the 
+United States in convention.  The United States are the one 
+indivisible sovereign, and this sovereign governs alike general 
+matters in the General government, and particular matters in the 
+several State governments.  All legal authority in either 
+emanates from this one indivisible and plenary sovereign, and 
+hence the law enacted by a State are really enacted by the United 
+States, and derive from them their force and vitality as laws.  
+Hence, as the United States survive the particular State, the 
+lapse of the State does not abrogate the State laws, or dissolve 
+civil society within its jurisdiction.
+
+324
+This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular 
+State does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on 
+the United States.  Hence all civil rights of every sort created 
+by the individual State are really held from the United States, 
+and therefore it was that the people of non-slaveholding States 
+were, as citizens of the United States, responsible for the 
+existence of slavery in the States that seceded.  There is a 
+solidarity of States in the Union as there is of individuals in 
+each of the States.  The political error of the Abolitionists was 
+not in calling upon the people of the United States to abolish 
+slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the 
+General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in 
+their sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which 
+were the abrogation of all government and civil society itself, 
+instead of calling upon them to do it as the United States in 
+convention assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of 
+the United States in the way ordained by that constitution 
+itself.  This understood, the constitution and laws of a defunct 
+State remain in force by virtue of the will of the United States, 
+till the State is raised from the dead, restored to life and 
+activity, and repeals or al-
+325
+                           ters them, or till they are repealed 
+or altered by the United States or the national convention.  But 
+as the defunct State could not, and the convention had not 
+repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the 
+General government had no alternative but to treat them and all 
+rights created by them as the territorial law, and to respect 
+them as such.
+
+What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose 
+by secession?  They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal, 
+the pains and penalties of treason, their political rights, or 
+right, as has just been said, to be in their own department 
+self-governing communities, with the right of representation in 
+Congress and the electoral colleges, and to sit in the national 
+convention, or of being counted in the ratification of amendments 
+to the constitution--precisely what it was shown a Territorial 
+people gain by being admitted as a State into the Union.  This is 
+the difference between the constitutional doctrine and that 
+adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.  But 
+what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General 
+government gain over the people of States that secede, that it 
+has not over others!  As to their internal
+326
+                                           constitution, their 
+private rights of person or property, it gains none.  It has over 
+them, till they are reconstructed and restored to the Union, the 
+right to institute for them provisional governments, civil or 
+military, precisely as it has for the people of a territory that 
+is not and has never been one of the United States; but in their 
+reconstruction it has less, for the geographical boundaries and 
+electoral people of each are already defined by a law which does 
+not depend on its will, and which it can neither abrogate nor 
+modify.  Here is the difference between the constitutional 
+doctrine and that of the so-called radicals.  The State has gone, 
+but its laws remain, so far as the United States in convention 
+does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the State 
+survives, but because the United States so will, or are presumed 
+to will.  The United States have by a constitutional amendment 
+abrogated the laws of the several States authorizing slavery, and 
+prohibited slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the Union; 
+and no State can now be reconstructed and be admitted into the 
+Union with a constitution that permits slavery, for that would be 
+repugnant to the constitution of the United States.  If the 
+constitutional amendment is not recognized as rati-
+327
+                                                  fied by the 
+requisite number of States, it is the fault of the government in 
+persisting in counting as States what are no States.  Negro 
+suffrage, as white suffrage, is at present a question for 
+States.
+
+The United States guarantee to such State a republican form of 
+government.  And this guarantee, no doubt, authorizes Congress to 
+intervene in the internal constitution of a State so far as to 
+force it to adopt a republican form of government, but not so far 
+as to organize a government for a State, or to compel a 
+territorial people to accept or adopt a State constitution for 
+themselves.  If a State attempts to organize a form of government 
+not republican, it can prevent it; and if a Territory adopts an 
+unrepublican form, it can force it to change its constitution to 
+one that is republican, or compel it to remain a Territory under 
+a provisional government.  But this gives the General government 
+no authority in the organization or re-organization of States 
+beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the 
+territorial people is republican.  To press it further, to make 
+the constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire 
+control of the organization or re-organization of a State, is a 
+manifest abuse--a palpable violation of the constitution and
+328
+                                                             of 
+the whole American system.  The authority given by the clause is 
+specific, and is no authority for intervention in the general 
+reconstruction of the lapsed State.  It gives authority in no 
+question raised by secession or its consequences, and can give 
+none, except, from within or from without, there is an overt 
+attempt to organize a State in the Union with an unrepublican 
+form of government.
+
+The General government gives permission to the territorial people 
+of the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with 
+suffering them, without special recognition, to reorganize in 
+their own way, and apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to 
+Congress to admit them as a State, or not, according to its own 
+discretion, in like manner as it admits a new State; but the 
+re-organization itself must be the work of the territorial people 
+themselves, under their old electoral law.  The power that 
+reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that admits 
+them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress.  The 
+Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that 
+of seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever 
+power he assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions 
+given to the provisional governors, civil or military, is 
+329
+                                                          simply 
+a usurpation of the power of Congress, which it rests with 
+Congress to condone or not, as it may see fit.  Executive 
+proclamations, excluding a larger or a smaller portion of the 
+electoral or territorial people from the exercise of the elective 
+franchise in reorganizing the State, and executive efforts to 
+throw the State into the hands of one political party or another, 
+are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the President, in 
+relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace powers of 
+the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer of 
+the Union.  His business is to execute the laws, not to make 
+them.  His legislative authority is confined to his qualified 
+veto on the acts of Congress, and to the recommendation to 
+Congress of such measures as he believes are needed by the 
+country.
+
+In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the 
+Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace.  
+The Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex 
+necessitate, pace it ad interim under a military governor, but he 
+cannot appoint even a provisional civil governor till Congress 
+has created the office and given him authority to fill it; far 
+less can be legally give instructions to the civil governor as to 
+the mode or manner of recon-
+330
+                           structing the disorganized State, or 
+decide who may or may not vote in the preliminary reorganization.  
+The Executive could do nothing of the sort, even in regard to a 
+Territory never erected into a State.  It belongs to Congress, 
+not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or provisional 
+governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, 
+and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines the 
+boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines 
+the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act 
+herself.  Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life 
+and vigor in the Union a disorganized State, has nothing to say 
+as to its boundaries or its electoral people, nor any right to 
+interfere between parties in the State, to throw the 
+reconstructed State into the hands of one or another party.  All 
+that Congress can insist on is, that the territorial people shall 
+reconstruct with a government republican in form; that its 
+senators and representatives in Congress, and the members of the 
+State legislature, and all executive and judicial officers of the 
+State shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support and defend 
+the constitution of the United States.  In the whole work the 
+President has nothing to do with reconstruction, except to see 
+that
+331
+     peace is preserved and the laws are fully executed.
+
+It may be at least doubted that the Executive has power to 
+proclaim amnesty and pardon to rebels after the civil war has 
+ceased, and ceased it has when the rebels have thrown down their 
+arms and submitted; for his pardoning power is only to pardon 
+after conviction and judgment of the court: it is certain that he 
+has no power to proscribe or punish even traitors, except by due 
+process of law.  When the war is over he has only his ordinary 
+peace powers.  He cannot then disfranchise any portion of the 
+electoral people of a State that seceded, even though there is no 
+doubt that they have taken part in the rebellion, and may still 
+be suspected of disloyal sentiments.  Not even Congress can do 
+it, and no power known to the constitution till the State is 
+reconstructed can do it without due process of law, except the 
+national convention.  Should the President do any of the things 
+supposed, he would both abuse the power he has and usurp power 
+that he has not, and render himself liable to impeachment.  There 
+are many things very proper, and even necessary to be done, which 
+are high crimes when done by an improper person or agent.  The 
+duty of the President, when there are
+332
+                                      steps to be taken or things 
+to be done which he believes very necessary, but which are not 
+within his competency, is, if Congress is not in session, to 
+call it together at the earliest practicable moment, and submit 
+the matter to its wisdom and discretion.
+
+It must be remembered that the late rebellion was not a merely 
+personal but a territorial rebellion.  In such a rebellion, 
+embracing eleven States, and, excluding slaves, a population of 
+at least seven millions, acting under an organized territorial 
+government, preserving internal civil order, supporting an army 
+and navy under regularly commissioned officers, and carrying on 
+war as a sovereign nation--in such a territorial rebellion no one 
+in particular can be accused and punished as a traitor.  The 
+rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or reckless leaders, 
+but of the people, and the responsibility of the crime, whether 
+civil or military, is not individual, but common to the whole 
+territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half 
+of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise
+Their defeat and the failure of their cause must be their 
+punishment.  The interest of the country, as well the sentiment 
+of the civilized world--it might almost be said the law of 
+nations--demands their permission
+333
+                                  to return to their allegiance, 
+to be treated according to their future merits, as an integral 
+portion of the American people.
+
+The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its 
+former severity toward political offenders.  It regards with 
+horror the savage cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate 
+Jacobites, after their defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden, 
+in 1746, their barbarous treatment of the United Irishmen in 
+1798, and her brutality to the mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the 
+harshness of Russia toward the insurgent Poles, defeated in their 
+mad attempts to recover their lost nationality; the severity of 
+Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated Magyars.  The liberal 
+press kept up for years, especially in England and the United 
+States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and Neapolitan 
+governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired to 
+overthrow them.  Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than 
+Jefferson Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release 
+from a Turkish prison, and sent a national ship to bring him 
+hither as the nation's guest.  The people of the United States 
+have held from the first "the right of insurrection," and have 
+given their moral support to every insurrection in the Old or New 
+World they discovered, and for them
+334
+                                    to treat with severity any 
+portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at the very worst, 
+only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly avowed and 
+pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the 
+civilized world as little less than infamous.
+
+Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any 
+severity toward the people lately in arms against the government.  
+The interest of the nation demands not the death or the expulsion 
+of the secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes 
+proscribed by the President's proclamation of the 29th of May, 
+1865, nor even their disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary; 
+but their restoration to citizenship, and their loyal 
+co-operation with all true-hearted Americans, in hearing the 
+wounds inflicted on the whole country by the civil war.  There 
+need be no fear to trust them.  Their cause is lost; they may or 
+may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever.  They 
+appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from 
+the ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated, 
+terribly defeated.  They know it and feel it.  There is no 
+further appeal for them; the judgment of the court of last resort 
+has been rendered, and rendered against them.  The cause is 
+finished, the controversy closed,
+335
+                                  never to be re-opened.  
+Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is worse than idle to 
+attempt to renew the war against it.  Henceforth their lot is 
+bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and 
+interests, for themselves and their children, and their 
+children's children, depend on their being permitted to demean 
+themselves henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens.  
+They must seek their freedom, greatness, and glory in the 
+freedom, greatness, and glory of the American republic, in which, 
+after all, they can be far freer, greater, more glorious than in 
+a separate and independent confederacy.  All the arguments and 
+considerations urged by Union men against their secession, come 
+back to them now with redoubled force to keep them henceforth 
+loyal to the Union.
+
+They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot 
+afford to lose them.  To hang or exile them, and depopulate and 
+suffer to run to waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad 
+thrift, sadder than that of deporting four millions of negroes 
+and colored men.  To exchange only those excepted from amnesty 
+and pardon by President Johnson, embracing some two millions or 
+more, the very pars sanior of the Southern population, for what 
+would re-
+336
+        main or flock in to supply their place, would be only the 
+exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for brass; to disfranchise 
+them, confiscate their estates, and place them under the 
+political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and the 
+ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render 
+rebellion chronic, and to convert seven millions of Americans, 
+willing and anxious to be free, loyal American citizens, 
+eternal enemies.  They have yielded to superior numbers and 
+resources; beaten, but not disgraced, for they have, even in 
+rebellion, proved themselves what they are--real Americans.  They 
+are the product of the American soil, the free growth of the 
+American republic, and to disgrace them were to disgrace the 
+whole American character and people.
+
+The wise Romans never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for 
+victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.  In civil war, the 
+victory won by the government troops is held to be a victory for 
+the country, in which all parties are victors, and nobody is 
+vanquished.  It was as truly for the good of the secessionists to 
+fail, as it was for those, who sustained the government to 
+succeed; and the government having forced their submission and 
+vindicated its own author-
+337
+                         ity, it should now leave them to enjoy, 
+with others, the victory which it his won for the common good of 
+all.  When war becomes a stern necessity, when it breaks out, and 
+while it lasts, humanity requires it to be waged in earnest, 
+prosecuted with vigor, and made as damaging, as distressful to 
+the enemy as the laws of civilized nations permit.  It is the way 
+to bring it to a speedy close, and to save life and property.  
+But when it is over, when the enemy submits, and peace returns, 
+the vanquished should be treated with gentleness and love.  No 
+rancor should remain, no vengeance should be sought; they who met 
+in mortal conflict on the battle-field should be no longer 
+enemies, but embrace as comrades, as friends, as brothers.  None 
+but a coward kicks a fallen foe; a brave people is generous, and 
+the victors in the late war can afford to be generous generously.  
+They fought for the Union, and the Union has no longer an enemy; 
+their late enemies are willing and proud to be their countrymen, 
+fellow-citizens, and friends; and they should look to it that 
+small politicians do not rob them in the eyes of the world, by 
+unnecessary and ill-timed severity to the submissive, of the 
+glory of being, as they are, a great, noble, chivalric, generous, 
+and magnanimous people.
+
+338
+The government and the small politicians, who usually are the 
+most influential with all governments, should remember that none 
+of the secessionists, however much in error they have been, have 
+committed the moral crime of treason.  They held, with the 
+majority of the American people, the doctrine of State 
+sovereignty, and on that doctrine they had a right to secede, and 
+have committed no treason, been guilty of no rebellion.  That 
+was, indeed, no reason why the government should not use all its 
+force, if necessary, to preserve the national unity and the 
+integrity of the national domain; but it is a reason, and a 
+sufficient reason, why no penalty of treason should be inflicted 
+on secessionists or their leaders, after their submission, and 
+recognition of the sovereignty of the United States as that to 
+which they owe allegiance.  None of the secessionists have been 
+rebels or traitors, except in outward act, and there can, after 
+the act has ceased, be no just punishment where there has been no 
+criminal intent.  Treason is the highest crime, and deserves 
+exemplary punishment; but not where there has been no treasonable 
+intent, where they who committed it did not believe it was 
+treason, and on principles held by the majority of their 
+countrymen, and by the party that had gener-
+339
+                                           ally held the 
+government, there really was no treason.  Concede State 
+sovereignty, and Jefferson Davis was no traitor in the war he 
+made on the United States, for he made none till his State had 
+seceded.  He could not then be arraigned for his acts after 
+secession, and at most, only for conspiracy, if at all, before 
+secession.
+
+But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the 
+State who, under the old electoral law, have the elective 
+franchise, you throw the State into the hands of those who have 
+been disloyal to the Union.  If so, and you cannot trust them, 
+the remedy is not in disfranchising the majority, but in 
+prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the territorial 
+people still longer under the provisional government, civil or 
+military.  The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been 
+convicted of treason either to the State or the United States, 
+and neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others 
+disqualified on account of disloyalty.  But you must throw the 
+State into the hands of those who took part, directly or 
+indirectly, in the rebellion, if you reconstruct the States at 
+all, for they are undeniably the great body of the territorial 
+people in all the States that seceded.  These people having 
+submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct the State 
+as a
+340
+     State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of the 
+United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime 
+by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them.  It is 
+impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with 
+those alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the 
+Union throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States.  
+The State, resting on so small a portion of the people, would 
+have no internal strength, no self-support, and could stand only 
+as upheld by federal arms, which would greatly impair the free 
+and healthy action of the whole American system.
+
+The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana, 
+Arkansas, and Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but 
+without authority and without success.  The organizations, 
+effected at great expense, and sustained only by military force, 
+were neither States nor State governments, nor capable of being 
+made so by any executive or congressional action.  If the 
+disorganized States, as the government held, were still States in 
+the Union, these organizations were flagrantly revolutionary, as 
+effected not only without, but in defiance of State authority; if 
+they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was the fact, they 
+were equally
+341
+             unconstitutional and void of authority, because not 
+created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who alone 
+are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.
+
+If the Unionists had retained the State organization and 
+government, however small their number, they would have held the 
+State, and the government would have been bound to recognize and 
+to defend them as such with all the force of the Union.  The 
+rebellion would then have been personal, not territorial.  But 
+such was not the case.  The State organization, the State 
+government, the whole State authority rebelled, made the 
+rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists, very 
+respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at 
+home, in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective 
+States, and shorn of all political status or rights.  Their 
+political status was simply that of the old loyalists, or 
+adherents of the British crown in the American war for 
+Independence, and it was as absurd to call them the State, as it 
+would have been for Great Britain to have called the old Tories 
+the colonies.
+
+The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the 
+disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that 
+the
+342           
+    people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the 
+power of the Union vests in the General government.  The first, 
+as we have seen, is the principle of so-called "squatter 
+sovereignty," embodied in the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which 
+gave birth, in opposition, to the Republican party of 1856.  The 
+people are sovereign only as the State, and the State is 
+inseparable from the domain.  The Unionists without the State 
+government, without any State organization, could not hold the 
+domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to 
+the United States, that is to say, ceases to exist.  The American 
+democracy is territorial, not personal.
+
+The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed 
+invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union.  
+This is the war power.  But, though apparently unlimited, the war 
+power is yet restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural 
+limitation when peace returns;, and peace returns, in a civil 
+war, when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted to 
+the national authority, and without any formal declaration.  
+During the war, or while the rebellion lasts, it can suspend the 
+civil courts, the civil laws, the State constitutions, any thing 
+necessary to the success of the
+343
+                                war--and of the necessity the 
+military authorities are the judges; but it cannot abolish, 
+abrogate, or reconstitute them.  On the return of peace they 
+revive of themselves in all their vigor.  The emancipation 
+proclamation of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in 
+certain States and parts of States, and if those whom it 
+emancipated could not be re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish 
+slavery, or change the laws authorizing it; and if the Government 
+should be sustained by Congress or by the Supreme Court in 
+counting the disorganized States as States in the Union, the 
+legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with the exception 
+of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before the 
+war.*
+
+The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it 
+attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as 
+reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it 
+is in its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being 
+effected by military force, since its validity depends entirely 
+on its being the free action of the territorial people to be 
+reconstructed, the General government had and could have, with 
+regard to it, only its ordinary
+
+* This was the case in August, 1865.  It may be quite otherwise 
+before these pages see the light.
+
+344         
+                                peace powers.  Reconstruction is 
+jure pacis, not jure belli.
+
+Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States 
+nor State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any 
+action of the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be 
+legalized by being indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial 
+people.  They are wrong, as are all usurpations; they are 
+undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt to give the minority the 
+power to rule the majority; they are dangerous inasmuch as they 
+place the State in the hands of a party that can stand only as 
+supported by the General government, and thus destroy the proper 
+freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to 
+corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to 
+retard the period of complete pacification, which might be 
+effected in three months as well as in three years, or twenty 
+years; yet they can become legal, as other governments illegal in 
+their origin become legal, with time and popular acquiescence.  
+The right way is always the shortest and easiest; but when a 
+government must oftener follow than lead the public, it is not 
+always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy to take it.  
+The general instincts of the people are right as to the end 
+345
+                                                            to be 
+gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and 
+politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession 
+party, have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political 
+control of the State when it is reconstructed.
+
+The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would, 
+even if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their 
+respective States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would 
+the Unionists, if left to themselves.  There is no party at the 
+South prepared to adopt negro suffrage, and there would be none 
+at the North if the negroes constituted any considerable portion 
+of the population.  As the reconstruction of a State cannot be 
+done under the war power, the General government can no more 
+enfranchise than it can disfranchise any portion of the 
+territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage must be 
+left, where the constitution leaves it--to the States severally, 
+each to dispose of it for itself.  Negro suffrage will, no doubt, 
+come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and 
+the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.
+
+It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the 
+reconstruction of the States disorganized by secession, for it 
+would secure their re-construction with antislavery 
+constitutions, and also
+346
+                        make sure of the proposed antislavery 
+amendment to the Constitution of the United States; but there is 
+no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in the States 
+needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom, the 
+freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they 
+understand nothing.  They would vote, for the most part, with 
+their former masters, their employers, the wealthier and more 
+intelligent classes, whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule, 
+these will treat them with greater personal consideration and 
+kindness than others.  The dislike of the negro, and hostility to 
+negro equality, increase as you descend in the social scale.  The 
+freedmen, without political instruction or experience, who have 
+had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of loyalty or of 
+disloyalty.  They have strong local attachments, but they can 
+have no patriotism.  If they adhered to the Union in the 
+rebellion, fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty, 
+but because they knew that their freedom could come only from the 
+success of the Union arms.  That freedom secured, they have no 
+longer any interest in the Union, and their local attachments, 
+personal associations, habits, tastes, likes and dislikes, are 
+Southern, not Northern.  In any contest between the
+347
+                                                    North and the 
+South, they would take, to a man, the Southern side.  After the 
+taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of the Union found, 
+until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder to bear, 
+when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and 
+hootings of the negroes.  Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty, 
+is at best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the 
+elective franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the 
+friends of the negro should, for the present, be contented with 
+securing him simply equal rights of person and property.
+
+
+
+
+348
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES.
+
+
+The most marked political tendency of the American people has 
+been, since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and 
+simple democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely 
+popular basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably 
+united to the national territory or domain, to the people as 
+simply population, either as individuals or as the race.  Their 
+tendency has unconsciously, therefore, been to change their 
+constitution from a republican to a despotic, or from a civilized 
+to a barbaric constitution.
+
+The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the 
+people are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their 
+name; that the rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to 
+them; but they are the people territorially constituted and fixed 
+to the soil, constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety 
+perhaps than he thinks, calls a "territorial democracy."  To this 
+territorial democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed 
+two
+349
+    other democracies--the one personal and the other 
+humanitarian--each alike hostile to civilization, and tending to 
+destroy the state, and capable of sustaining government only on 
+principles common to all despotisms.
+
+In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and 
+unrestrained action--a strong desire to be himself, not 
+another--to be his own master, to go when and where he pleases, 
+to do what he chooses, to take what he wants, wherever he can 
+find it, and to keep what he takes.  It is strong in all nomadic 
+tribes, who are at once pastoral and predatory, and is seldom 
+weak in our bold frontier-men, too often real "border ruffians."  
+It takes different forms in different stages of social 
+development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.  
+Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief 
+of the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its 
+enjoyment to the few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a 
+nobility--for nobleman meant originally only freeman, as it does 
+350
+his own consent, express or constructive.  This is the so-called 
+Jeffersonian democracy, in which government has no powers but 
+such as it derives from the consent of the governed, and is 
+personal democracy or pure individualism philosophically 
+considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."  Under this sort 
+of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual sovereignty, 
+expressed by politicians when they call the electoral people, 
+half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there obviously 
+can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there can 
+be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or 
+confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as 
+long as they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from 
+which they may separate or secede whenever they find it for their 
+interest or their pleasure to do so.  State sovereignty and 
+secession are based on the same democratic principle applied to 
+the several States of the Union instead of individuals.
+
+The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large 
+sections of the American people from the first, and has been 
+greatly strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that 
+government originates in compact.  The full realization of this 
+tendency, which, hap-
+351
+                    pily, is impracticable save in theory, would 
+be to render every man independent alike of every other man and 
+of society, with full right and power to make his own will 
+prevail.  This tendency was strongest in the slaveholding States, 
+and especially, in those States, in the slaveholding class, the 
+American imitation of the feudal nobility of mediaeval Europe; 
+and on this side the war just ended was, in its most general 
+expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the 
+sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian 
+democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial 
+democracy, represented by the Government.  This personal 
+democracy has been signally defeated in the defeat of the late 
+confederacy, and can hardly again become strong enough to be 
+dangerous.
+
+But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical 
+lines, effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant 
+itself on humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength, 
+and is not without menace to our future.  The solidarity of the 
+race, which is the condition of all human life, founds, as we 
+have seen, society, and creates what are called social rights, 
+the, rights alike of society in regard to individuals, and of 
+individuals in regard to society.  
+352
+                                   Territorial divisions or 
+circumscriptions found particular societies, states, or nations; 
+yet as the race is one and all its members live by communion with 
+God through it and by communion one with another, these 
+particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of 
+each other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so 
+that there is a real solidarity of nations as well as of 
+individuals--the truth underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of 
+the solidarity of peoples."
+
+The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law, 
+binding on every particular nation, and which every civilized 
+nation recognizes and enforces on its own subjects or citizens 
+through its own courts as an integral part of its own municipal 
+or national law.
+
+The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the 
+rights of society, and the rights of the particular society or 
+nation are limited by international law, or the rights of 
+universal society--the truth the ex-governor of Hungary 
+overlooked.  The grand error of Gentilism was in denying the 
+unity and therefore the solidarity of the race, involved in its 
+denial or misconception of the unity of God.  It therefore was 
+never able to assign any solid basis to international law, and 
+gave it only a
+353
+               conventional or customary authority, thus leaving 
+the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real 
+foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the 
+real world.  Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, 
+which has its basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract 
+unity asserted by the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the 
+modern Unitarians, but the living unity consisting in the 
+threefold relation in the Divine Essence, of Father, Son, and 
+Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian revelation, and believed, 
+more or less intelligently, by all Christendom.
+
+The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the 
+social basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on 
+the solidarity of the race, and to make all rights and powers 
+personal, or individual; and as only the white race has been able 
+to assert and maintain its personal freedom, only men of that 
+race are held to have the right to be free.  Hence the people of 
+those States felt no scruple in holding the black or colored race 
+as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right only of those who 
+have the ability to assert and maintain it.  Let the negro prove 
+that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his 
+freedom, and he will prove his right to be free,
+354
+                                                 and that it is a 
+gross outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till 
+then, let him be my servant, which is best for him and for me.  
+Why ask me to free him?  I shall by doing so only change the form 
+of his servitude.  Why appeal to me!  Am I my brother's keeper? 
+Nay, is he my brother?  Is this negro, more like an ape or a 
+baboon than a human being, of the same race with myself?  I 
+believe it not.  But in some instances, at least, my dear 
+slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and sometimes 
+even your son, born of your own daughter.  The tendency of the 
+Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as 
+all obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and 
+therefore all true civil society.
+
+At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite 
+tendency--a tendency to exaggerate the social element, to 
+overlook the territorial basis of the state, and to disregard the 
+rights of individuals.  This tendency has been and is strong in 
+the people called abolitionists.  The American abolitionist is so 
+engrossed with the unity that he loses the solidarity of the 
+race, which supposes unity of race and multiplicity of 
+individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and 
+authoritative in
+355
+                 geographical divisions or territorial 
+circumscriptions.  Back of these, back of individuals, he sees 
+humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states, 
+governments, and laws, and holds that he may trample on them all 
+or give them to the winds at the call of humanity or "the higher 
+law."  The principle on which he acts is as indefensible as the 
+personal or egoistical democracy of the slaveholders and their 
+sympathizers.  Were his socialistic tendency to become exclusive 
+and realized, it would found in the name of humanity a complete 
+social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very 
+generality, would break up in anarchy, in which might makes 
+right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
+
+The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its 
+generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can 
+recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much 
+out of the order of civilization, and as much in that of 
+barbarism, as is the slaveholder himself.  Wendell Phillips is as 
+far removed from true Christian civilization as was John C. 
+Calhoun, and William Lloyd Garrison is as much of a barbarian and 
+despot in principle and tendency as Jefferson Davis.  Hence the 
+great body of the people in the non-slaveholding States, wedded 
+to American democracy as they
+354
+                              were and are could never, as much 
+as they detested slavery, be induced to make common cause with 
+the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the late civil war 
+was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the time the 
+social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same 
+enemy.  The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt 
+that pure socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as 
+pure individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that 
+slavery has been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic 
+reasons but really for reasons of state, in order to save the 
+territorial democracy.  The territorial democracy would not unite 
+to eliminate even so barbaric an element as slavery, till the 
+rebellion gave them the constitutional right to abolish it; and 
+even then so scrupulous were they, that they demanded a 
+constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean work of 
+it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
+
+The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in 
+demanding its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds.  
+Slavery is really a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism 
+to American civilization.  The whole force of the national life 
+opposes it, and must finally eliminate it, or become itself 
+extinct
+357
+        and it is no mean proof of their utter want of sympathy 
+with all the living forces of modern civilization, that the 
+leading men of the South and their prominent friends at the North 
+really persuaded themselves that with cotton, rice, and tobacco, 
+they could effectually resist the anti-slavery movement, and 
+perpetuate their barbaric democracy.  They studied the classics, 
+they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that those nations 
+became great by slavery, instead of being great even in spite of 
+slavery.  They failed to take into the account the fact that when 
+Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all 
+contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if 
+they were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their 
+times, they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly 
+civilized nations of all times.  They failed also to perceive 
+that, if the Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole 
+territorial people in the political people, it yet recognized 
+both the social and the territorial foundation of the state, and 
+never attempted to rest it on pure individualism; they forgot, 
+too, that Greece and Rome both fell, and fell precisely through 
+internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the 
+force of the barbarism
+358
+                       beyond their frontiers.  The world has 
+changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves were 
+sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman 
+master.  The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and 
+solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the 
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and 
+every species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen 
+saw not.
+
+It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or 
+national, the real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise 
+question in debate is clearly and distinctly understood by either 
+party.  Slavery was only incidentally involved in the late war.  
+The war was occasioned by the collision of two extreme parties; 
+but it was itself a war between civilization and barbarism, 
+primarily between the territorial democracy and the personal 
+democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation, as much a 
+war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the 
+individualism of the slaveholder.  Yet the victory, though 
+complete over the former, is only half won over the latter, for 
+it has left the humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for 
+the moment stronger than ever.  The socialistic democracy was 
+enlisted by the territorial, not to strengthen the government at
+359
+home, as it imagines, for that it did not do, and could not do, 
+since the national instinct was even more opposed to it than to 
+the personal democracy; but under its antislavery aspect, to 
+soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign 
+intervention, which was seriously threatened.  The populations of 
+Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly 
+anti-slavery, and if the war here appeared to them a war, not 
+solely for the unity of the nation and the integrity of its 
+domain, as it really was, in which they took and could take no 
+interest, but a war for the abolition of slavery, their 
+governments would not venture to intervene.  This was the only 
+consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself 
+assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation 
+Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the 
+rebellion only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors 
+the late President only as their supposed liberator, not as the 
+preserver of the unity and integrity of the nation.  This is 
+natural enough abroad, and proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery 
+policy of the government, which had become absolutely necessary 
+to save the Republic long before it was adopted; yet it is not as 
+the emancipator of some two or three
+360
+                                     millions of slaves that the 
+American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham Lincoln, but, 
+aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and troops of 
+unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the American 
+state, and the protector of modern civilization.  His 
+anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but 
+he adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
+
+There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or 
+negro freedom.  That was only an incidental issue, as the really 
+great men of the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were 
+willing themselves at last to free and arm their own negroes, and 
+perhaps were willing to do it even at first.  This fact alone 
+proves that they had, or believed they had, a far more important 
+cause than the preservation of negro slavery.  They fought for 
+personal democracy, under the form of State sovereignty, against 
+social democracy; for personal freedom and independence against 
+social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their cause was as 
+good as that against which they took up arms; and if they had or 
+could have fought against that, without fighting at the same time 
+against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized 
+democracy, they
+361
+                would have succeeded.  It is not socialism nor 
+abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has 
+conquered.  The Union itself has won no victories over the South, 
+and it is both historically and legally false to say that the 
+South has been subjugated.  The Union has preserved itself and 
+American civilization, alike for North and South, East and West.  
+The armies that so often met in the shock of battle were not 
+drawn up respectively by the North and the South, but by two 
+rival democracies, to decide which of the two should rule the 
+future.  They were the armies of two mutually antagonistic 
+systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly conscious of 
+the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed 
+instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it 
+but dimly discerned.  On both sides the cause was broader and 
+deeper than negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the 
+abolitionists have won.  The territorial democracy alone has won, 
+and won what will prove to be a final victory over the purely 
+personal democracy, which had its chief seat in the Southern 
+States, though by no means confined to them.  The danger to 
+American democracy from that quarter is forever removed, and 
+democracy a' la Rousseau has
+362
+                             received a terrible defeat 
+throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of 
+it.
+
+But in this world victories are never complete.  The socialistic 
+democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the 
+territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not 
+patriotism, that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the 
+brave men led by McClellan, Grant, and Sherman.  The 
+humanitarians are more dangerous in principle than the egoists, 
+for they have the appearance of building on a broader and deeper 
+foundation, of being more Christian, more philosophic, more 
+generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more successful 
+than under the guise of an angel of light.  His favorite guise in 
+modern times is that of philanthropy.  He is a genuine 
+humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism 
+is Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming 
+sentiment of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes 
+both individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when 
+they believe they are earnestly and most successfully doing the 
+work of God.  Your leading abolitionists are as much affected by 
+satanophany as your leading confederates, nor are they one whit 
+more philosophical or less sophistical.  The one
+363
+                                                 loses the race, 
+the other the individual, and neither has learned to apply 
+practically that fundamental truth that there is never the 
+general without the particular, nor the particular without the 
+general, the race without individuals, nor individuals without 
+the race.  The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we are 
+taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race, 
+and Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that 
+original sin was in him actual or personal sin.
+
+The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses 
+men in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor 
+to secure the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother 
+Jansenist sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the 
+freedom of grace.  Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of 
+slavery, to-day he agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, 
+and announces that when be has secured that be will agitate for 
+female suffrage and the equality of the sexes, forgetting or 
+ignorant that the relation of equality subsists only between 
+individuals of the same sex; that God made the man the head of 
+the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for the woman.  
+Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in social, 
+in-
+364
+  dustrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and 
+agitate for equality of property.  But since property, if 
+recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he 
+must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of 
+property, as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with 
+M. Proudhon, or the Englishman Godwin.  It is unjust that one 
+should have what another wants, or even more than another.  What 
+right have you to ride in your coach or astride your spirited 
+barb while I am forced to trudge on foot?  Nor can our 
+humanitarian stop there.  Individuals are, and as long as there 
+are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and some are 
+uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger or 
+weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and 
+therefore some have natural advantages which others have not.  
+There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied 
+only by the abolition of all individualities, and the reduction 
+of all individuals to the race, or humanity, man in general.  He 
+can find no limit to his agitation this side of vague generality, 
+which is no reality, but a pure nullity, for he respects no 
+territorial or individual circumscriptions, and must regard 
+creation itself as a blunder.  This is not fancy, for he has
+365
+gone very nearly as far as it is here shown, if logical, be must 
+go.
+
+The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and 
+abroad, be interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social 
+or humanitarian democracy.  It was because they regarded the war 
+waged on the side of the Union as waged in the interest of this 
+terrible democracy, that our bishops and clergy sympathized so 
+little with the Government in prosecuting it; not, as some 
+imagined, because they were disloyal, hostile to American or 
+territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor of freedom for 
+all men, whatever their race or complexion.  They had no wish to 
+see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any 
+other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would 
+have regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; 
+but they held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy 
+represented by Northern abolitionists as hostile alike to the 
+Church and to civilization.  For the same reason that they were 
+backward or reserved in their sympathy, all the humanitarian 
+sects at home and abroad were forward and even ostentatious in 
+theirs.  The Catholics feared the war might result in encouraging 
+La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian sects 
+366
+trusted that it would.  If the victory of the Union should turn 
+out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized 
+world will have no reason to applaud it.
+
+That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be 
+taken as a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be 
+idle to deny.  It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party 
+throughout the world are in ecstasies over it.  The party claim 
+it.  The European Socialists and Red Republicans applaud it, and 
+the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict on us the deep 
+humiliation of their congratulations.  A cause that can be 
+approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must 
+be strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element.  
+It is no compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of 
+men who assert not only people-king, but people-God; and those 
+Americans who are delighted with them are worse enemies to the 
+American democracy than ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow 
+conspirators, and more contemptible, as the swindler is more 
+contemptible than the highwayman.
+
+But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their 
+host.  Not they are the real victors.  When the smoke of battle 
+has
+367
+    cleared away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by 
+the Republic, and that that alone has triumphed.  The 
+abolitionists, in so far as they asserted the unity of the race 
+and opposed slavery as a denial of that unity, have also won; but 
+in so far as they denied the reality or authority of territorial 
+and individual circumscriptions, followed a purely socialistic 
+tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a watery 
+sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been 
+crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late 
+insurrectionary States are fully reconstructed.  The Southern or 
+egoistical democrats, so far as they denied the unity and 
+solidarity of the race, the rights of society over individuals, 
+and the equal rights of each and every individual in face of the 
+state, or the obligations of society to protect the weak and help 
+the helpless, have been also defeated; but so far as they 
+asserted personal or individual rights which society neither 
+gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State 
+sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General 
+government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, 
+they share in the victory, as the future will prove.
+
+European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly 
+against all legitimate author-
+368
+                             ity, whether in Church or State, 
+have no lot or part in the victory of the American people: not 
+for them nor for men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, 
+have our brave soldiers fought, suffered and bled for four years 
+of the most terrible war in modern times, and against troops as 
+brave and as well led as themselves; not for them has the country 
+sacrificed a million of lives, and contracted a debt of four 
+thousand millions of dollars, besides the waste and destruction 
+that it will take years of peaceful industry to repair.  They and 
+their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and civilization has 
+won its most brilliant victory in all history.  The American 
+democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of 
+barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and 
+placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate 
+authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all 
+civilized governments--not with the revolutionary movements to 
+overthrow them.  The American people will always be progressive 
+as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which 
+they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught 
+them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of 
+place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a mon-
+369
+                                                          archical 
+state; and that the government should always be clothed with 
+ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its 
+destruction.  They must never be delighted again to have their 
+government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor 
+to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.  The people of the 
+Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late 
+rebellion than the people of the Southern States.  Their press 
+had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused 
+to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or 
+assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad 
+denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan 
+governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors.  
+But their own government has found it necessary for the public 
+safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they will 
+most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the 
+governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead 
+of lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins, 
+revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the 
+reign of barbarism.
+
+The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by 
+the failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the 
+disintegrating 
+370
+               element, either in the particular State or in the 
+United States, is henceforth to be apprehended.  But the tendency 
+in the opposite direction may give the American state some 
+trouble.  The tendency now is, as to the Union, consolidation, 
+and as to the particular state, humanitarianism, socialism, or 
+centralized democracy.  Yet this tendency, though it may do much 
+mischief, will hardly become exclusive.  The States that seceded, 
+when restored, will always, even in abandoning State sovereignty, 
+resist it, and still assert State rights.  When these States are 
+restored to their normal position, they will always be able to 
+protect themselves against any encroachments on their special 
+rights by the General government.  The constitution, in the 
+distribution of the powers of government, provides the States 
+severally with ample means to protect their individuality against 
+the centralizing tendency of the General government, however 
+strong it may be.
+
+The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General 
+government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look 
+upon it as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to 
+regard the several State governments as subordinate instead of 
+co-ordinate governments.  It is not improbable that the 
+Executive, since
+371
+                 the outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded 
+throughout on that supposition, and hence his extraordinary 
+assumptions of power; but when once peace is fully re-established 
+and the States have all resumed their normal position in the 
+Union, every State will be found prompt enough to resist any 
+attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.  Its instinct 
+of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will be 
+protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United 
+States.
+
+The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of 
+the States is far less than the danger that the Executive will 
+usurp all the powers of Congress and the judiciary.  Congress, 
+during the rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, 
+with dictatorial powers, and these powers the Executive continues 
+to exercise even after the rebellion is suppressed.  They were 
+given and held under the rights of war, and for war purposes 
+only, and expired by natural limitation when the war ceased; but 
+the Executive forgets this, and, instead of calling Congress 
+together and submitting the work of reconstruction of the States 
+that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to 
+reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 
+372
+and the people seem to like it.  He might and should, as 
+commander-in-chief of the army and navy, govern them as military 
+departments, by his lieutenants, till Congress could either 
+create provisional civil governments for them or recognize them 
+as self-governing States in the Union; but he has no right, under 
+the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil 
+governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in 
+regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without 
+authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.  His acts 
+in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are 
+inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do 
+them.  Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public 
+sentiment, and a deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, 
+which will be long in healing.
+
+The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not 
+originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a 
+long time before.  There is a growing disposition on the part of 
+
+Congress to throw as much of the business of government as 
+possible into the hands of the Executive.  The patronage the 
+Executive wields, even in times of peace, is so large that he has 
+indirectly an almost supreme control
+373
+                                     over the legislative branch 
+of the government.  For this, which is, and, if not checked will 
+continue to be, a growing evil, there is no obvious remedy, 
+unless the President is chosen for a longer term of office and 
+made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous doctrine 
+of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the true 
+interests of the public.  Here is matter for the consideration of 
+the American statesman.  But as to the usurpations of the 
+Executive in these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, 
+and will cease when the States are all restored.  They are 
+abuses, but only temporary abuses, and the Southern States, when 
+restored to the Union, will resume their rights in their own 
+sphere, as self-governing communities, and legalize or undo the 
+unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
+
+The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the 
+individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able 
+to become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not 
+begin at home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance.  
+In the States in which the humanitarian tendency is the 
+strongest, the territorial democracy has its most effective 
+organization.  Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion the 
+American people had asserted
+374
+                             popular sovereignty, but had never 
+rendered an account to themselves in what sense the people are or 
+are not sovereign.  They had never distinguished the three sorts 
+of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of the 
+three is the distinctively American democracy.  For them, 
+democracy was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought 
+to avoid them either by exaggerating one or the other of the two 
+exclusive tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself 
+through restrictions on suffrage.  The latter class began to 
+distrust universal suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to 
+dream of modifying the American constitution so as to make it 
+conform more nearly to the English model.  The war has proved 
+that the were wrong, for nothing is more certain than that the 
+people have saved the national unity and integrity almost in 
+spite of their government.  The General government either was not 
+disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against secession, 
+till forced to do it by the people themselves.  No wise American 
+can henceforth distrust American democracy.  The people may be 
+trusted.  So much is settled.  But as the two extremes were 
+equally democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of 
+popular sovereignty, and as the humanitarians
+375
+                                              were not unwilling 
+to allow separation, and would not and did not engage in the war 
+against secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of 
+the national domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it 
+was not democracy in the sense of either of the extremes that 
+made the war and came out of it victorious; and hence the real 
+American democracy must differ from them both, and is neither a 
+personal nor a humanitarian, but a territorial democracy.  The 
+true idea of American democracy thus comes out, for the first 
+time, freed from the two extreme democracies which have been 
+identified with it, and henceforth enters into the understandings 
+as well as the hearts of the people.  The war has enlightened 
+patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes reason--a 
+well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional conviction.
+
+In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent 
+the socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive.  In the States 
+that seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not 
+gain it, for it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions, 
+and habits of the Southern people, and the Southern people will 
+not be exterminated nor swamped by migrations either from the 
+North or from Europe.  They are and
+376
+                                    always will be an 
+agricultural people, and an agricultural people are and always 
+will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless unwittingly held 
+for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special object in 
+which they take a passionate interest.  The worst of all policies 
+is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy 
+landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and 
+depressed whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of 
+the 29th of May, 1865.  Of course that policy will not be carried 
+out, and if the negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote 
+with the wealthy landholding class, and aid them in resisting all 
+socialistic tendencies.  The humanitarians will fail for the want 
+of a good social grievance against which they can declaim.
+
+In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as 
+a speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance.  It 
+is aided much by the congregational constitution of their 
+religion; yet it is weak at home, and is resisted practically by 
+the territorial division of power.  New England means 
+Massachusetts, and nowhere is the subdivision of the powers of 
+government carried further, or the constitution of the 
+territorial democracy more complete, than in that State.  
+Philanthropy sel-
+377
+                dom works in private against private vices and 
+evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the 
+farther they are from home and the less its right to interfere 
+with them, the more in earnest and the more effective for evil 
+does it become.  Its nature is to mind every one's business but 
+its own.  But now that slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in 
+the United States a social grievance of magnitude enough to 
+enlist any considerable number of the people, even of 
+Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it.  Negro 
+enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make 
+something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a 
+question that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not 
+serve their purpose of prolonged agitation.  They could not and 
+never did carry away the nation, even on the question of slavery 
+itself, and abolitionism had comparatively little direct 
+influence in abolishing slavery; and the exclusion of negro 
+suffrage can never be made to appear to the American people as 
+any thing like so great a grievance as was slavery.
+
+Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a 
+numerous and an important portion of the population.  Their 
+increasing numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much
+378
+as the majority may dislike their religion, a constantly 
+increasing influence, and it is idle to leave them out in 
+counting the future of the country.  They will, in a very few 
+years, be the best and most thoroughly educated class of the 
+American people; and, aside from their religion, or, rather, in 
+consequence of their religion, the most learned, enlightened, and 
+intelligent portion of the American population; and as much as 
+they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army and 
+elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation 
+has won.  The best things written on the controversy have been 
+written by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their 
+religion to comprehend the real character of the American 
+constitution than any other class of Americans, the moment they 
+study it in the light of their own theology.  The American 
+constitution is based on that of natural society, on the 
+solidarity of the race, and the difference between natural 
+society and the church or Christian society is, that the one is 
+initial and the other teleological.  The law of both is the same; 
+Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is 
+exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic.  
+If they have been backward in their sympathy with
+379
+                                                  the government, 
+it has been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the 
+humanitarian or socialistic elements they detected in the 
+Republican party, joined with a prejudice against political and 
+social negro equality.  But their church everywhere opposes the 
+socialistic movements of the age, all movements in behalf of 
+barbarism, and they may always be counted on to resist the 
+advance of the socialistic democracy.  If the country has had 
+reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have, 
+in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, 
+indeed, for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to 
+their religion, which has been and is the grand protectress of 
+modern society and civilization.
+
+>From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to 
+the extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private 
+property as bases of political rights or franchises.  This 
+tendency has often been justified on the ground that the elective 
+franchise is a natural right; which is not true, because the 
+elective franchise is political power, and political power is 
+always a civil trust, never a natural right, and the state judges 
+for itself to whom it will or will not confide the trust; but 
+there can be no doubt that it is a normal tendency, and in strict
+380
+accordance with the constitution of American civil society, which 
+rests on the unity of the race, and public instead of private 
+property.  All political distinctions founded on birth, race, or 
+private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are 
+necessarily eliminated by its normal developments.  To contend 
+that none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a 
+particular race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary, 
+to the order of civilization the New World is developing.  The 
+only qualification for the elective franchise the American system 
+can logically insist on is that the elector belong to the 
+territorial people--that is, be a natural-born or a naturalized 
+citizen, be a major in full possession of his natural faculties, 
+and unconvicted of any infamous offence.  The State is free to 
+naturalize foreigners or not, and under such restrictions as it 
+judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must treat them 
+as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
+
+The naturalization question is one of great national importance.  
+The migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the 
+national population, and to the national wealth and resources, 
+but less, perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity 
+of elections, or the
+381
+                     wisdom and integrity of the government.  It 
+is impossible that there should be perfect harmony between the 
+national territorial democracy and individuals born, brought up, 
+and formed under a political order in many respects widely 
+different from it; and there is no doubt that the democracy, in 
+its objectionable sense, has been greatly strengthened by the 
+large infusion of naturalized citizens.  There can be no question 
+that, if the laboring classes, in whom the national sentiment is 
+usually the strongest, had been composed almost wholly of native 
+Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in the 
+cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of 
+persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less 
+difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies.  But 
+to leave so large a portion of the actual population as the 
+foreign born residing in the country without the rights of 
+citizens, would have been a far graver evil, and would, in the 
+late struggle, have given the victory to secession.  There are 
+great national advantages derived from the migration hither of 
+foreign labor, and if the migration be encouraged or permitted, 
+naturalization on easy and liberal terms is the wisest, the best, 
+and only safe policy.  The children of foreign-born parents are 
+real Americans.
+
+382
+Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent 
+powers of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually 
+more active, more energetic than the children of the older 
+inhabitants of the country among whom they settle.  Some of our 
+first men in civil life have been sons of foreign-born parents, 
+and so are not a few of our greatest and most successful 
+generals.  The most successful of our merchants have been 
+foreign-born.  The same thing has been noticed elsewhere, 
+especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to Holland, 
+Germany, England, and Ireland.  The immigration of so many 
+millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American 
+people much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character, 
+and made them a superior people on the whole to what they would 
+otherwise have been.  This has nothing to do with superiority or 
+inferiority of race or blood, but is a natural effect of breaking 
+men away from routine, and throwing them back on their own 
+individual energies and personal resources.
+
+Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the 
+recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to 
+freedom; but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward 
+progress of American democracy, which
+383
+                                      asserts equal rights for 
+all, and not for a race or class only.  Some would confine 
+suffrage to landholders, or, at least, to property-holders; but 
+that is inconsistent with the American idea, and is a relic of 
+the barbaric constitution which founds power on private instead 
+of public wealth.  Nor are property-owners a whit more likely to 
+vote for the public good than are those who own no property but 
+their own labor.  The men of wealth, the business men, 
+manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who 
+exert the worst influence on government in every country, for 
+they always strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their 
+own private interests.  They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let 
+government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of 
+the poor," instead of the far safer maxim, "Let government take 
+care of the weak, the strong can take care of themselves." 
+Universal suffrage is better than restricted suffrage, but even 
+universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private property from 
+having an undue political influence.
+
+The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable 
+from it, and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an 
+inferior class to those elevated by restricted suffrage.  The 
+Congress of 1860, or of 1862. was a fair average
+384
+                                                 of the wisdom, 
+the talent, and the virtue of the country, and not inferior to 
+that of 1776, or that of l789; and the Executive during the 
+rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as it was during 
+the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain, and not 
+inferior to that of France during the Crimean war.  The Crimean 
+war developed and placed in high command, either with the English 
+or the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, 
+to say nothing of others.  The more aristocratic South proved 
+itself, in both statesmanship and generalship, in no respect 
+superior to the territorial democracy of the North and West.
+
+The great evil the country experiences is not from universal 
+suffrage, but from what may be called rotation in office.  The 
+number of political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern 
+and Western States especially, the representatives in Congress 
+are changed every two or four years, and a member, as soon as he 
+has acquired the experience necessary to qualify him for his 
+position, is dropped, not through the fickleness of his 
+constituency, but to give place to another whose aid had been 
+necessary to his first or second election.  Employes are 
+"rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful, but 
+because there are others who want their places.
+385
+                                                 This is all bad, 
+but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong 
+public opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which 
+is mainly formed by it.  There is, no doubt, a due share of 
+official corruption, but not more than elsewhere, and that would 
+be much diminished by increasing the salaries of the public 
+servants, especially in the higher offices of the government, 
+both General and State.  The pay to the lower officers and 
+employes of the government, and to the privates and 
+non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in 
+general, too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both 
+the civil and military service is too low, and relatively far 
+lower than it was when the government was first organized.
+
+The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at 
+all by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility 
+to the military spirit and a standing army.  The depreciation of 
+the military spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental 
+democracy, which, like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and 
+brings about the very evils it seeks to avoid.  The hostility to 
+standing armies is inherited from England, and originated in the 
+quarrels between king and parliament, and is a 
+386
+                                               striking evidence 
+of the folly of that bundle of antagonistic forces called the 
+British constitution.  In feudal times most of the land was held 
+by military service, and the reliance of government was on the 
+feudal militia; but no real progress was made in eliminating 
+barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at its 
+command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies.  
+It is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the 
+whole, lost more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary 
+for royal supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
+
+No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the 
+military spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not 
+held in honor and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size 
+is public economy.  It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who 
+are worth more there than anywhere else; it creates honorable 
+places for gentlemen or the sons of gentlemen without wealth, in 
+which they can serve both themselves and their country.  Under a 
+democratic government the most serious embarrassment to the state 
+is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or not fitted to 
+support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in a 
+democratic government than in any other.  The civil
+387
+                                                    service, 
+divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, 
+and art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class, 
+and the army and navy would be an economy and a real service to 
+the state were they maintained only for the sake of the rank and 
+position they give to their officers, and the wholesome influence 
+these officers would exert on society and the politics of the 
+country--this even in case there were no wars or apprehension of 
+wars.  They supply an element needed in all society, to sustain 
+in it the chivalric and heroic spirit, perpetually endangered by 
+the mercantile and political spirit, which has in it always 
+something low and sordid.
+
+But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding 
+nations to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself.  
+When it can have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; 
+for the human animal, like all animals, must work off in some way 
+its fighting humor, and the only sure way of maintaining peace is 
+always to be prepared for war.  A regular standing army of forty 
+thousand men would have prevented the Mexican war, and an army of 
+fifty thousand well-disciplined and efficient troops at the 
+command of the President on his inauguration in March, 1861, 
+would have pre-
+388
+              vented the rebellion, or have instantly suppressed 
+it.  The cost of maintaining a land army of even a hundred 
+thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would have been, 
+in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion has 
+cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have 
+been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as 
+those on the side of the government, are equally to be counted.  
+The actual losses to the country have been not less than six or 
+eight thousand millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the 
+assessed value of the whole property of the United States 
+according to the census returns of 1860, and which has only been 
+partially cancelled by actual increase of property since.  To 
+meet the interest on the debt incurred will require a heavier sum 
+to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without 
+discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been 
+necessary to maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection 
+of peace and the prevention of the rebellion.
+
+The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not 
+blunder much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it 
+did in its military operations, before 1868 things will settle 
+down into their normal order; but a regular army--not militia or 
+volunteers, who are 
+389
+                    too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand 
+men of all arms, and a navy nearly as large as that of England or 
+France, will be needed as a peace establishment.  The army of a 
+hundred thousand men must form a cadre of an army of three times 
+that number, which will be necessary to place the army on a war 
+footing.  Less will answer neither for peace nor war, for the 
+nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain henceforth the rank 
+of a first-class military and maritime power, and take a leading 
+part in political movements of the civilized world, and, to a 
+great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
+
+Canning boasted that be had raised up the New World to redress 
+the balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened 
+Spain and gave the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the 
+Emperor of the French is trying, by strengthening Italy and 
+Spain, and by a French protectorate in Mexico, to secure to 
+France, both in the Old World and the New--a magnificent dream, 
+but not to be realized.  His uncle judged more wisely when he 
+sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought only to 
+secure to France the hegemony of the Old.  But the hegemony of 
+the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she 
+will have
+390
+          a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even 
+in Europe.  To maintain this position, which is imperative on 
+her, she must always have a large armed force, either on foot or 
+in reserve, which she can call out and put on a war footing at 
+short notice.  The United States must henceforth be a great 
+military and naval power, and the old hostility to a standing 
+army and the old attempt to bring the military into disrepute 
+must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
+
+Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency, 
+egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race 
+and socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the 
+race, is the most dangerous.  The egoistical form is checked, 
+sufficiently weakened by the defeat of the rebels; but the social 
+form believes that it has triumphed, and that individuals are 
+effaced in society, and the States in the Union.  Against this, 
+more especially should public opinion and American statesmanship 
+be now directed, and territorial democracy and the division of 
+the powers of government be asserted and vigorously maintained.  
+The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy is 
+conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet 
+arrived, as the Germans
+391
+                        say, at self 
+consciousness--selbsbewusstseyn--and operates only instinctively.  
+All the dominant theories and sentimentalities are against it, 
+and it is only Providence that can sustain it.
+
+
+
+
+392
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
+
+
+It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every 
+living nation receives from Providence a special work or mission 
+in the progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, 
+or the end for which it exists; and that the special mission of 
+the United States is to continue and complete in the political 
+order the Graeco-Roman civilization.
+
+Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American 
+Republic alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to 
+the civilization of the race.  Canada and the other British 
+Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and 
+the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the 
+United States without being missed by the civilized world.  They 
+represent no idea, and the work of civilization could go on 
+without them as well as with them.  If they keep up with the 
+progress of civilization, it is all that can be expected of them.  
+France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the rest of 
+Europe, and
+393
+            all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single 
+laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; 
+and it is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or 
+jointly advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman 
+Empire, except in abolishing slavery and including in the 
+political people the whole territorial people.  They can only 
+develop and give a general application to the fundamental 
+principles of the Roman constitution.  That indeed is much, but 
+it adds no new element nor new combination of preexisting 
+elements.  But nothing of this can be said of the United States.
+
+In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and 
+the great principle of the territorial constitution of power, 
+instead of the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or 
+the monarchical; and yet with true civil or political principles 
+it mixed up nearly all the elements of the barbaric constitution.  
+The gentile system of Rome recalls the patriarchal, and the 
+relation that subsisted between the patron and his clients has a 
+striking resemblance to that which subsists between the feudal 
+lord and his retainers, and may have had the same origin.  The 
+three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into which the Roman
+394
+people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may have been, 
+as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their origin, 
+but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the 
+division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not 
+local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical.  
+No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens 
+were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of 
+adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with 
+all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained 
+with the Romans.  The adopted member was considered a child of 
+the house, and took its name and inherited its goods.  Whether, 
+as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes 
+were called patres or patricians or whether the term was 
+restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of 
+the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the 
+curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse.  After all, 
+practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the 
+English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a 
+landed proprietor and of noble blood.  The plebs, though outside 
+of the political people proper, as not being included in the 
+three tribes, when they came to be a
+395
+                                     power in the republic under 
+the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and patricians was 
+forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or territorial people.
+
+The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave 
+the right to participate in political power, was the domain of 
+the state, and the tenant held it from the state.  The domain was 
+vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was 
+therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap 
+of the human race from barbarism.  In all other respects the 
+Roman constitution was no more republican than the feudal.  
+Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of 
+territorial democracy.  The division into demes or wards, whence 
+comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not 
+personal nor genealogical.  And if the equality of all men was 
+not recognized, all who were included in the political class 
+stood on the same footing.  Athens and other Greek cities, though 
+conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful 
+influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic 
+under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate, 
+which the assassins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated 
+conservative party they
+396
+                        represented, tried so hard to preserve.  
+The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives 
+of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed 
+with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were 
+established throughout the empire.
+
+The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or 
+gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity 
+of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its 
+including in the state only a particular class of the territorial 
+people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different 
+degrees of servitude.  It recognized and sustained a privileged 
+class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian 
+aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order, 
+it held all outside of it to be less than men and without 
+political rights.  Practically, power was an attribute of birth 
+and of private wealth.  Suffrage was almost universal among 
+freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by 
+orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the 
+order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election 
+over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in 
+the hands of the rich and noble few.
+
+The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under
+397
+                                            Justinian in the 
+sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts 
+the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to 
+defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality.  
+It represents it as a commutation of the punishment of death, 
+which the emperor has the right to inflict on captives taken in 
+war, to perpetual servitude; and as servitude is less severe than 
+death, slavery was really a proof of imperial clemency.  But it 
+has never yet been proved that the emperor has the right under 
+the natural law to put captives taken even in a just war to 
+death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the proud, but 
+spare the submissive."  In a just war the emperor may kill on the 
+battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as 
+now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, 
+does not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased 
+resistance, have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.  But 
+even if it did, it gives him a right only over the persons 
+captured, not over their innocent children, and therefore no 
+right to establish hereditary slavery, for the child is not 
+punishable for the offences of the parent.  The law, indeed, 
+assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a person and treated 
+him as a thing, or mere property
+398
+                                 of the conqueror, and being 
+property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only 
+to his owner.  But there is no power in heaven or earth that can 
+make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is 
+only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the 
+law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing.  
+I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt, 
+the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery 
+on the ground of its penal character, or indeed on any ground 
+whatever.  All men are born under the law of nature with equal 
+rights, and the civil law can justly deprive no man of his 
+liberty, but for a crime, committed by him personally, that 
+justly forfeits his liberty to society.
+
+These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European 
+nations have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.  They 
+can carry out practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the 
+human race, abolish slavery in every form, make all men equal 
+before the law, and the political people commensurate with the 
+territorial people.  Indeed, France has already done it.  She has 
+abolished slavery, villenage, serfage, political aristocracy, 
+asserted the equality of all men before the law, vindicated the
+399
+sovereignty of the people, and established universal suffrage, 
+complete social and territorial democracy.  The other nations may 
+do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or advance 
+farther.  Yet in France, territorial democracy the most complete 
+results only in establishing the most complete imperial 
+centralism, usually called Caesarism.
+
+The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor 
+reigns "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and 
+therefore, that by the grace of God and the will of the nation he 
+may cease to reign; but while he reigns he is supreme, and his 
+will is law.  The constitution imposes no real or effective 
+restraint on his power: while he sits upon the throne he is 
+practically France, and the ministers are his clerks; the council 
+of state, the senate, and the legislative body are merely his 
+agents in governing the nation.  This may, indeed, be changed, 
+but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic 
+centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the 
+system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called 
+constitutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great 
+Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism, 
+or mediaeval feudalism.
+
+400
+The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all 
+orders the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the 
+principle of all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all 
+opposites or extremes.  Mankind will be logical; and the worst of 
+all tyrannies is that which forbids them to draw from their 
+principles their last logical consequences, or that prohibits 
+them the free explication and application of the Divine Idea, in 
+which consists their life, their progress.  Such tyranny strikes 
+at the very existence of society, and wars against the reality of 
+things.  It is supremely sophistical, and its success is death; 
+for the universe in its constitution is supremely logical, and 
+man, individually and socially, is rational.  God is the author 
+and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its 
+order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically 
+Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.  The Son 
+or Word is the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God 
+is living God a real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not 
+abstract or dead unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, 
+Plotinus, and Proclus.  In the Holy Trinity is the principle and 
+prototype of all society, and what is called the solidarity of 
+the race is only the outward
+401
+                             expression, or copy in the external 
+order, of what theologians term the circumsession of the three 
+Divine Persons of the Godhead.
+
+Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature 
+either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity 
+alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and 
+reality.  It sins against God. and must fail of its end.  The 
+English system, which is based on antagonistic elements, on 
+opposites, without the middle term that conciliates them, unites 
+them, and makes them dialectically one, copies the Divine model 
+in its distinctions alone, which, considered alone, are opposites 
+or contraries.  It denies, if Englishmen could but see it, the 
+unity of God.  The French, or imperial system, which excludes the 
+extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites, instead 
+of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and 
+copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called 
+pantheism.  The English constitution has no middle term, and the 
+French no extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine 
+Trinity, the original basis and type of the syllogism.  The human 
+race can be contented with neither, for neither allows it free 
+scope for its inherent life and activity.  The English system 
+tends to pure individualism;
+402
+the French to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to 
+suppress an element of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.
+
+This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and 
+lifeless abstraction, but the highest theological and 
+philosophical truth, without which there were no reason, no man, 
+no society; for God is the first principle of all being, all 
+existence, all science, all life, and it is in Him that we live 
+and move and have our being.  God is at the beginning, in the 
+middle, and at the end of all things--the universal principle, 
+medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His existence 
+being directly or indirectly impugned.  In a deeper sense than is 
+commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit 
+domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.  The English 
+constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of 
+reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with 
+the others for the mastery.  For a long time the king labored, 
+intrigued, and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which 
+he was held by the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and 
+people united and humbled the crown; and now the people are at 
+work seeking to sap both the crown and the nobles.  The state is 
+consti-
+403
+      tuted to nobody's satisfaction; and though all may unite in 
+boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or 
+amend it.  The work of constituting the state with the English is 
+ever beginning, never ending.  Hence the eternal clamor for 
+parliamentary reform.
+
+Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that 
+remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with 
+the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede 
+to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so 
+doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done 
+in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for, 
+and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe.  The special 
+merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as 
+too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy 
+in the division of the powers of government, between a General 
+government and particular State governments, which are not 
+antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and 
+neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
+
+Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government 
+without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be 
+introduced into any European state.  There may be a
+404
+                                                    union of 
+states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, 
+and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous 
+empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund 
+or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what 
+the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and 
+have so signally failed to establish.  An intelligent Confederate 
+officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in operation 
+three months before it became evident that the principle on 
+which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat.  
+It was that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States 
+seceded, more than the superior resources and numbers of the 
+Government, that caused the collapse of the Confederacy.  The 
+numbers were relatively about equal, and the military resources 
+of the Confederacy were relatively not much inferior to those of 
+the Government.  So at least the Confederate leaders thought, and 
+they knew the material resources of the Government as well as 
+their own, and had calculated them with as much care and accuracy 
+as any men could.  Foreign powers also, friendly as well as 
+unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain their 
+independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the 
+loyal States.
+405
+               The failure is due to the disintegrating principle 
+of State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.  The 
+war has proved that united states are, other things being equal, 
+an overmatch for confederated states.
+
+The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals.  
+As equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of 
+Zollverein, in which each state retains its individual 
+sovereignty; if as unequals, then someone among them will aspire 
+to the hegemony, and you have over again the Athenian 
+Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the Persian war, and 
+its fate.  A union like the American cannot be created by a 
+compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.  The Emperor of the 
+French cannot erect the several Departments of France into 
+states, and divide the powers of government between them as 
+individual and as united states.  They would necessarily hold 
+from the imperial government, which, though it might exercise a 
+large part of its functions through them, would remain, as now, 
+the supreme central government, from which all governmental 
+powers emanate, as our President is apparently attempting, in his 
+reconstruction policy, to make the government of the United 
+States.  The elements of a state constituted like the American
+406
+                                                               do 
+not exist in any European nation, nor in the constitution of 
+European society; and the American constitution would have been 
+impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered it that the 
+nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
+
+Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and 
+applied it in the best way she could.  At first it was a single 
+tribe or people distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after 
+the Sabine war, a second tribe was added on terms of equality, 
+and the state was dual, composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and 
+the Tities or Quirites, and, afterward, in the time of Tullus 
+Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or Luceres, making the 
+division into three ruling tribes, each divided into one hundred 
+houses or gentes.  Each house in each tribe was represented by 
+its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of 
+senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was 
+fixed.  Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained 
+without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome 
+itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied 
+cities.  The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes 
+into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and 
+in the tribes by houses, ef-
+407
+                           fectually excluded democratic 
+centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of 
+government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate 
+had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all 
+matters, general and particular.
+
+The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the 
+tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in 
+the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of 
+government; but only a division between the positive and negative 
+powers, not between the general and the particular.  The power 
+accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is, 
+perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by 
+analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the 
+constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive 
+power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it 
+absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
+
+There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in 
+the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or 
+confederated municipalities.  These municipalities, modelled 
+chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management 
+of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not 
+co-ordi-
+408
+       inate in their own sphere with those exercised by the 
+Roman municipality, but subordinate and dependent.  The senate 
+had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights 
+subject to its will.  They were formally, or virtually, 
+subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the 
+Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of 
+freedom.  Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies 
+rather than as subjects, and at first these municipal 
+organizations secured the progress of civilization in the 
+provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served 
+only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed 
+and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the 
+empire.  So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the 
+burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial 
+edict to compel them to enter the municipal government; and it 
+became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free 
+citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal 
+burdens imposed.  There are actually imperial edicts extant 
+forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.  Thus ended the 
+Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover in 
+Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a 
+more favorable result.
+
+409
+Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in 
+common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric 
+elements retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to 
+realize that philosophical division of the powers of government 
+which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism 
+on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances 
+or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by 
+obstructing the exercise of power.  No greater problem in 
+statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater contribution 
+to civilization to be made.  Nowhere else than in this New World, 
+and in this New World only in the United States, can this problem 
+be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the 
+Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
+
+But the United States have a religious as well as a political 
+destiny, for religion and politics go together.  Church and 
+state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on 
+which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the 
+spiritual order--in the principles revealed or affirmed by 
+religion--and are inseparable from them.  There is no state 
+without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or 
+the Incarnation.  An atheist may be a politician, but if there 
+were
+410
+     no God there could be no politics. theological principles 
+are the basis of political principles.  The created universe is a 
+dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and 
+all its parts cohere and are essential to one another.  All has 
+its origin and prototype in the Triune God, and throughout 
+expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without 
+which there is no real being and no actual or possible life.  
+Every thing has its principle, medium, and end.  Natural society 
+is initial, civil government is medial, the church is 
+teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one 
+indissoluble whole.
+
+Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the 
+Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through 
+the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.  True, he 
+communes with God through his kind, and through external nature, 
+society in which he is born and reared, and property through 
+which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only 
+media of his communion with God, the source of life--not either 
+the beginning or the end of his communion.  They have no life in 
+themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves, can 
+impart none.  They are in the order of second causes, and second
+411
+causes, without the first cause, are nought.  Communion which 
+stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end, 
+instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of 
+life.  As religion includes all that relates to communion with 
+God, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of 
+man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men 
+must conform either their politics to their religion or their 
+religion to their politics.  Christianity is constantly at work, 
+moulding political society in its own image and likeness, and 
+every political system struggles to harmonize Christianity with 
+itself.  If, then, the United States have a political destiny, 
+they have a religious destiny inseparable from it.
+
+The political destiny of the United States is to conform the 
+state to the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine 
+Idea in creation.  Their religious destiny is to render 
+practicable and to realize the normal relations between church 
+and state, religion and politics, as concreted in the life of the 
+nation.
+
+In politics, the United States are not realizing a political 
+theory of any sort whatever.  They, on the contrary, are 
+successfully refuting all political theories, making away with 
+them, and establishing the state--not on a theory, not
+412
+                                                       on an 
+artificial basis or a foundation laid by human reason or will, 
+but on reality, the eternal and immutable principles in relation 
+to which man is created.  They are doing the same in regard to 
+religious theories.  Religion is not a theory, a subjective view, 
+an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle, a law, and 
+a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace, 
+practical conformity to what is universally true and real.  The 
+United States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad 
+havoc with religious theories as with political theories, and are 
+pressing on with irresistible force to the real or the Divine 
+order which is expressed in the Christian mysteries, which exists 
+independent of man's understanding and will, and which man can 
+neither make nor unmake.
+
+The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new 
+religion nor to found a new church.  All real religion is 
+catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and 
+everywhere true.  Even our Lord came neither to found a new 
+church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which 
+had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined 
+in eternity.  God has himself founded the church on catholic 
+principles, or principles al-
+413
+                            ways and everywhere real principles.  
+His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic 
+dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal 
+and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the 
+Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces 
+and sustains all things.  Founded on universal and immutable 
+principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the 
+church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of 
+men.  Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, 
+for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, 
+over him, and independent of him.  Religion is above and 
+independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with 
+the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it 
+does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a 
+mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
+
+But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her 
+dogmas are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and 
+unalterable, the relations between the civil and ecclesiastical 
+authorities may be changed or modified by the changes of time and 
+place.  These relations have not been always the same, but have 
+dif-
+414
+   fered in different ages and countries.  During the first three 
+centuries of our era the church had no legal status, and was 
+either connived at or persecuted by the state.  Under the 
+Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her 
+prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and 
+ecclesiastical questions, and were made, in some sense, civil 
+magistrates, and paid as such by the empire.  Under feudalism, 
+the prelates received investiture as princes and barons, and 
+formed alone, or in connection with the temporal lords, an estate 
+in the kingdom.  The Pope became a temporal prince and suzerain, 
+at one time, of a large part of Europe, and exercised the 
+arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian 
+sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects.  
+Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern 
+centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater 
+part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most 
+countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state 
+either as an enemy or as a slave.
+
+In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the 
+national church is held in strict subjection to the civil 
+authority, as in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of
+415
+the state; in the other states of Europe, as France, Austria, 
+Spain, and Italy, she is treated with distrust by the civil 
+government, and allowed hardly a shadow of freedom and 
+independence.  In France, which has the proud title of eldest 
+daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not freer than 
+they are in Turkey.  All religious are said to be free, and all 
+are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.  The 
+emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to 
+concede the church just as much and just as little freedom in the 
+empire as he judges expedient for his own secular interests.  In 
+Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South 
+American states, the policy of the civil authorities is the same, 
+or worse.  It may be safely asserted that, except in the United 
+States, the church is either held by the civil power in 
+subjection, or treated as an enemy.  The relation is not that of 
+union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave detriment 
+of both religion and civilization.
+
+It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the 
+mixture of civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in 
+the Middle Ages; and a total separation of church and state, even 
+as corporations, would, in the pres-
+416
+                                   ent state of men's minds in 
+Europe, be construed, if approved by the church, into a sanction 
+by her of political atheism, or the right of the civil power to 
+govern according to its own will and pleasure in utter disregard 
+of the law of God, the moral order, or the immutable distinctions 
+between right and wrong.  It could only favor the absolutism of 
+the state, and put the temporal in the place of the spiritual.  
+Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the entire 
+separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors 
+condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864.  
+Neither the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United 
+States, can understand practically such separation in any other 
+sense than the complete emancipation of our entire secular life 
+from the law of God, or the Divine order, which is the real 
+order.  It is not the union of church and state--that is, the 
+union, or identity rather, of religious and political 
+principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the disunion 
+or antagonism of church and state.  But this is nowhere possible 
+out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state organized 
+on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting from 
+its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, 
+or the religious order
+417
+                       really existing, in relation to which all 
+things are created and governed.  Nowhere else is it practicable, 
+at present, to maintain between the two powers their normal 
+relations.
+
+But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly 
+practicable in the New.  The state here being organized in 
+accordance with catholic principles, there can be no antagonism 
+between it and the church.  Though operating in different 
+spheres, both are, in their respective spheres, developing and 
+applying to practical life the one and the same Divine Idea.  The 
+church can trust the state, and the state can trust the church.  
+Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.  Each 
+by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the 
+other.  It is true the church is not formally established as the 
+civil law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; 
+because there is nothing in the state that conflicts with her 
+freedom and independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable 
+canons.  The need of establishing the church by law, and 
+protecting her by legal pains and penalties, as is still done in 
+most countries, can exist only in a barbarous or semi-barbarous 
+state of society, where the state is not organized on catholic 
+principles, or the civilization is based on false 
+418
+                                                  principles, and 
+in its development tends not to the real or Divine order of 
+things.  When the state is constituted in harmony with that 
+order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal 
+constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, 
+or what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a 
+superfluity.  The true religion is in the heart of the state, as 
+its informing principle and real interior life.  The external 
+establishment, by legal enactment of the church, would afford her 
+no additional protection, add nothing to her power and efficacy, 
+and effect nothing for faith or piety--neither of which can be 
+forced, because both must, from their nature, be free-will 
+offerings to God.
+
+In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the 
+true religion; but all false religions being one-sided, 
+sophistical, and uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the 
+state, which tend, by their silent but effective workings, to 
+eliminate them.  The American state recognizes only the catholic 
+religion.  It eschews all sectarianism, and none of the sects 
+have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its 
+constitution or its laws.  The state conforms to what each holds 
+that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and 
+what
+419
+     ever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province, 
+to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of 
+vitality.  The state conscience is catholic, not sectarian; hence 
+it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all religions, 
+the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic in 
+its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to 
+oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true.  The church 
+being free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, 
+in the freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the 
+security it can ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of 
+the case receive from external institutions, or from social and 
+political organizations.
+
+This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all 
+nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained 
+their majority.  The church, as well as the state, must deal with 
+men and nations as they are, not as they are not.  To deal with a 
+child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a 
+civilized nation, would be only acting a lie.  The church cannot 
+treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to 
+reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped.  She must adapt 
+her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals, 
+and
+420
+    to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization.  
+She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her 
+authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the 
+variations of time and place.  Many of her canons, very proper 
+and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many 
+which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the 
+New World.  Under the American system, she can deal with the 
+people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men 
+they are.  The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be 
+given him, or his obedience fails to be secured.  The simple 
+reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would 
+know why she commands this or that.  The full-grown free man 
+revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in 
+some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command.  
+Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be 
+expected of the people reared under the American system, not 
+because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but 
+because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile 
+obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the 
+affections alone.  They are trained to demand a reason for the 
+command given them, to dis-
+421
+                          tinguish between the law and the person 
+of the magistrate.  They can obey God, but not man, and they must 
+see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or 
+the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield 
+it a full, entire, and hearty obedience.  The reason that 
+suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the 
+reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized 
+men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their 
+civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity.  The 
+appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the 
+Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its 
+downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.
+
+This trait of the American character is not uncatholic.  An 
+intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal 
+conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its 
+logic in the Divine order--the obedience of a free man, not of a 
+slave--is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far 
+more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a 
+people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of 
+civilization than the people that must be governed as children or 
+barbarians.  It is possible that the people of the Old World
+422
+                                                             are 
+not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion any more than 
+they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have been 
+trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed 
+to look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in 
+the reason of things.  They understand no reason for obedience 
+beyond the external command, and do not believe it possible to 
+give or to understand the reason why the command itself is given.  
+They regard the authority of the church as a thing apart, and see 
+no way by which faith and reason can be harmonized.  They look 
+upon them as antagonistic forces rather than as integral elements 
+of one and the same whole.  Concede them the regimen of freedom, 
+and their religion has no support but in their good-will, their 
+affections, their associations, their habits, and their 
+prejudices.  It has no root in their rational convictions, and 
+when they begin to reason they begin to doubt.  This is not the 
+state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied 
+under the political regime established elsewhere than in the 
+United States.  In every state in the world, except the American, 
+the civil constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or 
+less, the logic of things; and, therefore, in no one of them can 
+the peo-
+423
+       ple receive a thoroughly dialectic training, or an 
+education in strict conformity to the real order.  Hence, in them 
+all, the church is more or less obstructed in her operations, and 
+prevented from carrying out in its fulness her own Divine Idea.  
+She does the best she can in the circumstances and with the 
+materials with which she is supplied, and exerts herself 
+continually to bring individuals and nations into harmony with 
+her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the nations is 
+a struggle, a warfare.
+
+The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on 
+real catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents 
+none of these obstacles, and must, in their progressive 
+development or realization of their political idea, put an end to 
+this warfare, in so far as a warfare between church and state, 
+and leave the church in her normal position in society, in which 
+she can, without let or hindrance, exert her free spirit, and 
+teach and govern men by the Divine law as free men.  She may 
+encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and indifference in 
+few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from the state, 
+which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually give way 
+before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the
+424
+                                                     truth and 
+reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of 
+her ministers.  The American people are, on the surface, 
+sectarians or indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less 
+uncatholic than the people of any other country because they are, 
+in their intellectual and moral development, nearer to the real 
+order, or, in the higher and broader sense of the word more truly 
+civilized.  The multitude of sects that obtain may excite 
+religious compassion for those who are carried away by them, for 
+men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny only by 
+truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth, 
+and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need 
+excite no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more 
+or less of catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national 
+life repel them, in so far as they are sectarian and not 
+catholic, as substances that cannot be assimilated to the 
+national life.  The American state being catholic in its organic 
+principles, as is all real religion, and the church being free, 
+whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without any support 
+in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself, it 
+must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.
+
+The sects themselves have a half unavowed
+425
+                                          conviction that they 
+cannot subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil 
+authority.  They are free, but do not feel safe in the United 
+States.  They know the real church is catholic, and that they 
+themselves are none of them catholic.  The most daring among them 
+even pretends to be no more than a "branch" of the catholic 
+church.  They know that only the catholic church can withstand 
+the pressure of events and survive the shocks of time, and hence 
+everywhere their movements to get rid of their sectarianism and 
+to gain a catholic character.  They hold conventions of delegates 
+from the whole sectarian world, form "unions," "alliances," and 
+"associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the catholic 
+church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the 
+Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost.  The 
+most they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world, 
+is to create a confederation, and confederated sects are 
+something very different from a church inherently one and 
+catholic.  It is no more the catholic church than the late 
+Southern Confederacy was the American state.  The sectarian 
+combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and retard, 
+for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state 
+organized in ac-
+426
+               cordance with catholic principles, and left to 
+themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and 
+must soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.
+
+Such being the case, no sensible Catholic can imagine that the 
+church needs any physical force against the sects, except to 
+repel actual violence, and protect her in that freedom of speech 
+and possession which is the right of all before the state.  What 
+are called religious establishments are needed only where either 
+the state is barbarous or the religion is sectarian.  Where the 
+state, in its intrinsic constitution, is in accordance with 
+catholic principles, as in the United States, the church has all 
+she needs or can receive.  The state can add nothing more to her 
+power or her security in her moral and spiritual warfare with 
+sectarianism, and any attempt to give her more would only weaken 
+her as against the sects, place her in a false light, partially 
+justify their hostility to her, render effective their 
+declamations against her, mix her up unnecessarily with political 
+changes, interests, and passions, and distract the attention of 
+her ministers from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on 
+them the duties of politicians and statesmen.  Where there is 
+nothing in the state hostile to the church,
+427
+                                            where she is free to 
+act according to her own constitution and laws, and exercise her 
+own discipline on her own spiritual subjects, civil enactments in 
+her favor or against the sects may embarrass or impede her 
+operations, but cannot aid her, for she can advance no farther 
+than she wins the heart and convinces the understanding.  A 
+spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be effected only by 
+spiritual means.  The church wants freedom in relation to the 
+state--nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from 
+God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.
+
+The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order 
+of things, and founded on principles which have their origin and 
+ground in the principles on which the church herself is founded, 
+can never establish any one of the sects as the religion of the 
+state, for that would violate their political constitution, and 
+array all the other sects, as well as the church herself, against 
+the government.  They cannot be called upon to establish the 
+church by law, because she is already in their constitution as 
+far as the state has in itself any relation with religion, and 
+because to establish her in any other sense would be to make her 
+one of the civil institutions of the,
+428
+                                      land, and to bring her 
+under the control of the state, which were equally against her 
+interest and her nature.
+
+The religious mission of the United States is not then to 
+establish the church by external law, or to protect her by legal 
+disabilities, pains, and penalties against the sects, however 
+uncatholic they may be; but to maintain catholic freedom, neither 
+absorbing the state in the church nor the church in the state, 
+but leaving each to move freely, according to its own nature, in 
+the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of things.  Their 
+mission separates church and state as external governing bodies, 
+but unites them in the interior principles from which each 
+derives its vitality and force.  Their union is in the intrinsic 
+unity of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in 
+different spheres, each obeys one and the same Divine law.  With 
+this the Catholic, who knows what Catholicity means, is of course 
+satisfied, for it gives the church all the advantage over the 
+sects of the real over the unreal; and with this the sects have 
+no right to be dissatisfied, for it subjects them to no 
+disadvantage not inherent in sectarianism itself in presence of 
+Catholicity, and without any support from the civil authority.
+
+The effect of this mission of our country fully
+429
+                                                realized, would 
+be to harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by 
+absorbing either in the other, or by obliterating the natural 
+distinction between them, but by conforming both to the real or 
+Divine order, which is supreme and immutable.  It places the two 
+powers in their normal relation, which has hitherto never been 
+done, because hitherto there never has been a state normally 
+constituted.  The nearest approach made to the realization of the 
+proper relations of church and state, prior to the birth of the 
+American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under the Christian 
+emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism, and the 
+emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be 
+made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and 
+persisted to the last in treating the church as a civil 
+institution under their supervision and control, as does the 
+Emperor of the French in France, even yet.  In the Middle Ages 
+the state was so barbarously constituted that the church was 
+obliged to supervise its administration, to mix herself up with 
+the civil government, in order to infuse some intelligence into 
+civil matters, and to preserve her own rightful freedom and 
+independence.  When the states broke away from feudalism, they 
+revived the Roman
+430
+                  constitution, and claimed the authority in 
+ecclesiastical matters that had been exercised by the Roman 
+Caesars, and the states that adopted a sectarian religion gave 
+the sect adopted a civil establishment, and subjected it to the 
+civil government, to which the sect not unwillingly consented, 
+on condition that the civil authority excluded the church and all 
+other sects, and made it the exclusive religion of the state, as 
+in England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, and the states of 
+Northern Germany.  Even yet the normal relations of church and 
+state are nowhere practicable in the Old World; for everywhere 
+either the state is more or less barbaric in its constitution, or 
+the religion is sectarian, and the church as well as civilization 
+is obliged, to struggle with antagonistic forces, for 
+self-preservation.
+
+There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce 
+what they take to be the American system; but constitutions are 
+generated, not made--providential, not conventional.  Statesmen 
+can only develop what is in the existing constitutions of their 
+respective countries, and no European constitution contains all 
+the elements of the American.  European Liberals mistake the 
+American system, and, were they to succeed in their efforts, 
+would not in-
+431
+            troduce it, but something more hostile to it than the 
+governments and institutions they are warring against.  They 
+start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and seek not 
+freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.  They suppress the 
+freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call 
+religious liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by 
+extinguishing the light without which no thought is possible, and 
+advance civilization by undermining its foundation.  The 
+condemnation of their views and movements by the Holy Father in 
+the Encyclical, which has excited so much hostility, may seem to 
+superficial and unthinking Americans even, as a condemnation of 
+our American system--indeed, as the condemnation of modern 
+science, intelligence, and civilization itself; but whoever looks 
+below the surface, has some insight into the course of events, 
+understands the propositions and movements censured, and the 
+sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy 
+Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority 
+to save religion, society, science, and civilization from utter 
+corruption or destruction.  The opinions, tendencies, and 
+movements, directly or by implication censured, are the effect of 
+narrow and superficial think-
+432
+                            ing, of partial and one-sided views, 
+and are sectarian, sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, 
+and tend, as far as they go, to throw society back into the 
+barbarism from which, after centuries of toil and struggle, it is 
+just beginning to emerge.  The Holy Father has condemned nothing 
+that real philosophy, real science does not also condemn; 
+nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the American system 
+itself.  For the mass of the people, it were desirable that 
+fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the 
+various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are 
+not, in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were 
+expected by the Holy Father to be given by the bishops and 
+prelates, to whom, not to the people, save through them, the 
+Encyclical was addressed.  Little is to be hoped, and much is to 
+be feared, for liberty, science, and civilization from European 
+Liberalism, which has no real affinity with American territorial 
+democracy and real civil and religious freedom.  But God and 
+reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the New, and 
+it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
+
+Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission, 
+and realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom
+433
+nothing is hidden.  Providence is free, and leaves always a space 
+for human free-will.  The American people can fail, and will fail 
+if they neglect the appointed means and conditions of success; 
+but there is nothing in their present state or in their past 
+history to render their failure probable.  They have in their 
+internal constitution what Rome wanted, and they are in no danger 
+of being crushed by exterior barbarism.  Their success as feeble 
+colonies of Great Britain in achieving their national 
+independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and against 
+the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national 
+unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other 
+people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their 
+future.  The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew 
+or more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the 
+Union, counted with certainty on success, and the ablest, the 
+most experienced, and best informed statesmen of the Old World 
+felt sure that the Republic was gone, and spoke of it as the late 
+United States.  Not a few, even in the loyal States, who had no 
+sympathy with the rebellion, believed it idle to think of 
+suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the best terms that 
+could be obtained.  But Ilium fuit
+434
+                                   was chanted too soon; the 
+American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified the 
+calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the 
+expectations of their friends.
+
+The attitude of the real American people during the fearful 
+struggle affords additional confidence in their destiny.  With 
+larger armies on foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their 
+line of battle stretching from ocean to ocean, across the whole 
+breadth of the continent, they never, during four long years of 
+alternate victories and defeats--and both unprecedentedly 
+bloody--for a moment lost their equanimity, or appeared less 
+calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of peace.  
+They not for a moment interrupted their ordinary routine of 
+business or pleasure, or seemed conscious of being engaged in any 
+serious struggle which required an effort.  There was no hurry, 
+no bustle, no excitement, no fear, no misgiving.  They seemed to 
+regard the war as a mere bagatelle, not worth being in earnest 
+about.  The on-looker was almost angry with their apparent 
+indifference, apparent insensibility, and doubted if they moved 
+at all, Yet move they did: guided by an unerring instinct, they 
+moved quietly on with an elemental force, in spite of a timid and 
+hesitating administration, in spite of inexpe-
+435
+                                             rienced, 
+over-cautious, incompetent, or blundering military commanders, 
+whom they gently brushed aside, and desisted not till their 
+object was gained, and they saw the flag of the Union floating 
+anew in the breeze from the capitol of every State that dared 
+secede.  No man could contemplate them without feeling that there 
+was in them a latent power vastly superior to any which they 
+judged it necessary to put forth.  Their success proves to all 
+that what, prior to the war, was treated as American arrogance or 
+self-conceit, was only the outspoken confidence in their destiny 
+as a Providential people, conscious that to them is reserved the 
+hegemony of the world.
+
+Count de Maistre predicted early in the century the failure of 
+the United States, because they have no proper name; but his 
+prediction assumed what is not the fact.  The United States have 
+a proper name by which all the world knows and calls them.  The 
+proper name of the country is America: that of the people is 
+Americans.  Speak of Americans simply, and nobody understands you 
+to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, 
+Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the 
+United States.  The fact is significant, and foretells for the 
+people of the United States a
+436
+                              continental destiny, as is also 
+foreshadowed in the so-called "Monroe doctrine," which France, 
+during our domestic troubles, was permitted, on condition of not 
+intervening in our civil war in favor of the rebellion, to 
+violate.
+
+There was no statesmanship in proclaiming the "Monroe doctrine," 
+for the statesman keeps always, as far as possible, his 
+government free to act according to the exigencies of the case 
+when it comes up, unembarrassed by previous declarations of 
+principles.  Yet the doctrine only expresses the destiny of the 
+American people, and which nothing but their own fault can 
+prevent them from realizing in its own good time.  Napoleon will 
+not succeed in his Mexican policy, and Mexico will add some 
+fifteen or twenty new States to the American Union as soon as it 
+is clearly for the interests of all parties that it should be 
+done, and it can be done by mutual consent, without war or 
+violence.  The Union will fight to maintain the integrity of her 
+domain and the supremacy of her laws within it, but she can 
+never, consistently with her principles or her interests, enter 
+upon a career of war and conquest.  Her system is violated, 
+endangered, not extended, by subjugating her neighbors, for 
+subjugation and liberty go not together.  Annexation, when it
+437
+takes place, must be on terms of perfect equality and by the free 
+act of the state annexed.  The Union can admit of no inequality 
+of rights and franchises between the States of which it is 
+composed.  The Canadian Provinces and the Mexican and Central 
+American States, when annexed, must be as free as the original 
+States of the Union, sharing alike in the power and the 
+protection of the Republic--alike in its authority, its freedom, 
+its grandeur, and its glory, as one free, independent, 
+self-governing people.  They may gain much, but must lose nothing 
+by annexation.
+
+The Emperor Napoleon and his very respectable protege, 
+Maximilian, an able man and a liberal-minded prince, can change 
+nothing in the destiny of the United States, or of Mexico 
+herself; no imperial government can be permanent beside the 
+American Republic, no longer liable, since the abolition of 
+slavery, to be distracted by sectional dissensions.  The States 
+that seceded will soon, in some way, be restored to their rights 
+and franchises in the Union, forming not the least patriotic 
+portion of the American people; the negro question will be 
+settled, or settle itself, as is most likely, by the melting away 
+of the negro population before the influx of white laborers; all 
+traces of the
+438
+              late contest in a very few years will be wiped out, 
+the national debt paid, or greatly reduced, and the prosperity 
+and strength of the Republic be greater than ever.  Its moral 
+force will sweep away every imperial throne on the continent, 
+without any effort or action on the part of the government.  
+There can be no stable government in Mexico till every trace of 
+the ecclesiastical policy established by the Council of the 
+Indies is obliterated, and the church placed there on the same 
+footing as in the United States; and that can hardly be done 
+without annexation.  Maximilian cannot divest the church of her 
+temporal possessions and place Protestants and Catholics on the 
+same footing, without offending the present church party and 
+deeply injuring religion, and that too without winning the 
+confidence of the republican party.  In all Spanish and 
+Portuguese America the relations between the church and state are 
+abnormal, and exceedingly hurtful to both.  Religion is in a 
+wretched condition, and politics in a worse condition still.  
+There is no effectual remedy for either but in religious freedom, 
+now impracticable, and to be rendered practicable by no European 
+intervention, for that subjects religion to the state, the very 
+source of the evils that now exist, instead of
+439
+                                               emancipating it 
+from the state, and leaving it to act according to its own 
+constitution and laws, as under the American system.
+
+But the American people need not trouble themselves about their 
+exterior expansion.  That will come of itself as fast as 
+desirable.  Let them devote their attention to their internal 
+destiny, to the realization of their mission within, and they 
+will gradually see the Whole continent coming under their system, 
+forming one grand nation, a really catholic nation, great, 
+glorious, and free.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of 
+THE
+
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+
+BY
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext The American Republic, by O. A. Brownson
+
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+Title:  The American Republic
+
+Author:  by O. A. Brownson
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+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
+
+CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.
+
+BY
+O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK:
+P.  O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET.
+1866.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865,
+By P. O'SHEA,
+In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States
+for the Southern District of New York.
+
+
+TO THE
+HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,
+THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT
+Historian of the United States,
+
+THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERN-
+MENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF
+THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
+IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A
+SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,
+PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,
+AND PUBLIC SERVICE,
+BY THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT                                                     15
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT                                           26
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERMENT-Continued                                  43
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Continued                                 71
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded                                106
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT                                    136
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded                          166
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE UNITED STATES                                             192
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES                             218
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION-Continued                                    244
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SECESSION                                                     277
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION                                                309
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES                                          348
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS                               392
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the
+public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving,
+my whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity,
+extent, authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government,
+and the unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny
+of the American Republic.  Many of the points treated have been
+from time to time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views
+have been presented, in my previous writings; but this work is
+newly and independently written from beginning to end, and is as
+complete on the topics treated as I have been able to make it.
+
+I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have
+used their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they
+came within the scope of my present work.  I have not felt myself
+bound to adhere to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther
+than they coincide with my present convictions, and I have written
+as freely and as independently as if I had never written or
+published any thing before.  I have never been the slave of my
+own past, and truth has always been dearer to me than my own
+opinions.  This work is not only my latest, but will be my last
+on politics or government, and must be taken as the authentic,
+and the only authentic statement of my political views and
+convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts
+with the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as
+retracted, and rejected.
+
+The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is
+an essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured
+critics will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of
+articles designed for a review, rather than a book.  It is hard to
+overcome the habits of a lifetime.  I have taken some pains to
+exchange the reviewer for the author, but am fully conscious that
+I have not succeeded.  My work can lay claim to very little
+artistic merit.  It is full of repetitions; the same thought is
+frequently recurring,--the result, to some extent, no doubt, of
+carelessness and the want of artistic skill; but to a greater
+extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought."  In composing my work I
+have followed, rather than directed, the course of my thought,
+and, having very little confidence in the memory or industry of
+readers, I have preferred, when the completeness of the argument
+required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with
+perpetual references to what has gone before.
+
+That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting
+to its publication; but how much or how little of it is really
+mine, I am quite unable to say.  I have, from my youth up, been
+reading, observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost
+said writing, at least by fits and starts, on political subjects,
+especially in their connection with philosophy, theology, history,
+and social progress, and have assimilated to my own mind what it
+would assimilate, without keeping any notes of the sources whence
+the materials assimilated were derived.  I have written freely
+from my own mind as I find it now formed; but how it has been so
+formed, or whence I have borrowed, my readers know as well as I.
+All that is valuable in the thoughts set forth, it is safe to assume
+has been appropriated from others.  Where I have been distinctly
+conscious of borrowing what has not become common property, I have
+given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's name, with three
+important exceptions which I wish to note more formally.
+
+I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality
+and the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions
+furnished by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of
+Freedom and Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning
+and profound philosophic views.  I could not have written my work
+without the aid derived from its suggestions, any more than I
+could without Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas,
+Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the Abbate Gioberti.  To these two
+last-named authors, one a humanitarian sophist, the other a
+Catholic priest, and certainly one of the profoundest
+philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted, though
+I have followed the political system of neither.  I have taken
+from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity
+of the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation
+to the creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the
+Credo and the first verse of Genesis.
+
+In treating the several questions which the preparation of this
+volume has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of
+first principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one
+important point, the views I had expressed in my previous
+writings, especially on the distinction between civilized and
+barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and the
+value to the world of the Graeco-Roman civilization.  I have
+ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism, rejected every
+species of political aristocracy, and represented the English
+constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as
+its type.  I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and
+defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial
+democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on
+the one hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the
+other.
+
+I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and
+defended from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the
+sovereignty of the American Republic vests in the States, though
+in the States collectively, or united, not severally, and thus
+escape alike consolidation and disintegration.  I find, with Mr.
+Madison, our most philosophic statesman, the originality of the
+American system in the division of powers between a General
+government having sole charge of the foreign and general, and
+particular or State governments having, within their respective
+territories, sole charge of the particular relations and
+interests of the American people; but I do not accept his
+concession that this division is of conventional origin, and
+maintain that it enters into the original Providential
+constitution of the American state, as I have done in my Review
+for October, 1863, and January and October, 1864.
+
+I maintain, after Mr.  Senator Sumner, one of the most
+philosophic and accomplished living American statesmen, that
+"State secession is State suicide," but modify the opinion I too
+hastily expressed that the political death of a State dissolves
+civil society within its territory and abrogates all rights held
+under it, and accept the doctrine that the laws in force at the
+time of secession remain in force till superseded or abrogated by
+competent authority, and also that, till the State is revived and
+restored as a State in the Union, the only authority, under the
+American system, competent to supersede or abrogate them is the
+United States, not Congress, far less the Executive.  The error
+of the Government is not in recognizing the territorial laws as
+surviving secession but in counting a State that has seceded as
+still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted as one
+of the United States in amending the Constitution.  Such State
+goes out of the Union, but comes under it.
+
+I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political
+views; to their general principles, and to show that the general
+principles asserted have their origin and ground in the great,
+universal, and unchanging principles of the universe itself.
+Hence, I have labored to show the scientific relations of
+political to theological principles, the real principles of all
+science, as of all reality.  An atheist, I have said, may be a
+politician; but if there were no God, there could be no politics.
+This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must follow
+science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
+mistake their darkness for light.
+
+I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as
+a Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real
+principles are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either
+in nature or revelation.  I am a Catholic by God's grace and
+great goodness, and must write as I am.  I could not write
+otherwise if I would, and would not if I could.  I have not
+obtruded my religion, and have referred to it only where my
+argument demanded it; but I have had neither the weakness nor
+the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it.  I could never
+have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
+of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with
+the great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of
+all that is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with
+Catholics or non-Catholics.
+
+Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction
+of sect or party, I have had more especially in view the people
+of my own religious communion.  It is no discredit to a man in
+the United States at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and
+devout Catholic.  The old sectarian prejudice may remain with a
+few, "whose eyes," as Emerson says, "are in their hind-head, not
+in their fore-head;" but the American people are not at heart
+sectarian, and the nothingarianism so prevalent among them only
+marks their state of transition from sectarian opinions to
+positive Catholic faith.  At any rate, it can no longer be
+denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing
+element in the American population, quite too numerous, too
+wealthy, and too influential to be ignored.  They have played too
+conspicuous a part in the late troubles of the country, and
+poured out too freely and too much of their richest and noblest
+blood in defence of the unity of the nation and the integrity of
+its domain, for that.  Catholics henceforth must be treated as
+standing, in all respects, on a footing of equality with any
+other class of American citizens, and their views of political
+science, or of any other science, be counted of equal importance,
+and listened to with equal attention.
+
+I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly
+by a Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house.  They
+who are not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the
+current of American literature, if it is one they must read in
+order to be up with the living and growing thought of the age.
+If it is not a book of that sort, it is not worth reading by any
+one.
+
+Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to
+exert an influence on the future of my country, for which I have
+made, or, rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which
+I tenderly love.  Now, I believe that he who can exert the most
+influence on our Catholic population, especially in giving tone
+and direction to our Catholic youth, will exert the most
+influence in forming the character and shaping the future destiny
+of the American Republic.  Ambition and patriotism alike, as well
+as my own Catholic faith and sympathies, induce me to address
+myself primarily to Catholics.  I quarrel with none of the sects;
+I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth wherever I
+find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long life,
+or a permanent possession.  I engage in no controversy with any
+one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth
+is brought out and placed in a clear light before the public,
+whatever is sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the
+morning mists before the rising sun.
+
+I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of
+my book from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics;
+but I speak to my countrymen at large.  I could not personally
+serve my country in the field: my habits as well as my
+infirmities prevented, to say nothing of my age; but I have
+endeavored in this humble work to add my contribution, small
+though it may be, to political science, and to discharge, as far
+as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism.  I would the
+book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a
+more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have
+written it.  All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a
+sincere book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects
+treated.  If well received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I
+shall endeavor to practise resignation, as I have so often done.
+
+
+O. A. BROWNSON.
+
+ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim,
+Know Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more
+important as there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge
+of himself, whence he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he
+is for, what he can do, what he ought to do, and what are his
+means of doing it.
+
+Nations are only individuals on a larger scale.  They have a
+life, an individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of
+their own, and have the same general laws of development and
+growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as the individual man.  Equally
+important, and no less difficult than for the individual, is it
+for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, its
+own powers and faculties, rights and duties, constitution,
+instincts, tendencies, and destiny.  A nation has a spiritual as
+well as a material, a moral as well as a physical existence, and
+is subjected to internal as well as external conditions of health
+and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some measure
+understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in its
+growth, and end in premature decay and death.
+
+Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself
+than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.  It has
+hardly had a distinct consciousness of its own national existence,
+and has lived the irreflective life of the child, with no severe
+trial, till the recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and
+compel it to reflect on its own constitution, its own separate
+existence, individuality, tendencies, and end.  The defection of
+the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that has
+followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at
+once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass
+from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to
+grave and reflecting manhood.  The nation has been suddenly
+compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from
+reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from
+instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does,
+and wherefore it does it.  The change which four years of civil
+war have wrought in the nation is great, and is sure to give it
+the seriousness, the gravity, the dignity, the manliness it has
+heretofore lacked.
+
+Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
+existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
+understanding of its own national constitution.  Its vision is
+still obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and
+its judgment rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild
+theories and fancies of its childhood.  The national mind has
+been quickened, the national heart has been opened, the national
+disposition prepared, but there remains the important work of
+dissipating the mists that still linger, of brushing away these
+wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to form a clear
+and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
+appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny;
+or, in other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own
+idea, and the means of its actualization in space and time.
+
+Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to
+realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or
+destiny.  Every nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God.
+The Jews were the chosen people of God, through whom the
+primitive traditions were to be preserved in their purity and
+integrity, and the Messiah was to come.  The Greeks were the
+chosen people of God, for the development and realization of the
+beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the true in
+science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
+the state, law, and jurisprudence.  The great despotic nations of
+Asia were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a
+mission, they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the
+progressive development of the human race.  History has not
+recorded their mission, and as far as they are known they have
+contributed only to the abnormal development or corruption of
+religion and civilization.  Despotism is barbaric and abnormal.
+
+The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and
+is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea.  It has
+been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and
+Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to
+either.  In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not
+rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass
+it.  In the state, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and
+surpass Rome.  Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law,
+and law with liberty.  Yet its mission is not so much the
+realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the
+state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the
+freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people without
+social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.  In
+other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the
+dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights
+of man and those of society.  The Greek and Roman republics
+asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern
+republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the
+detriment of the state.  The American republic has been
+instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with
+advantage to the other.
+
+The real mission of the United States is to introduce and
+establish a political constitution, which, while it retains all
+the advantages of the constitutions of states thus far known, is
+unlike any of them, and secures advantages which none of them did
+or could possess.  The American constitution has no prototype in
+any prior constitution.  The American form of government can be
+classed throughout with none of the forms of government described
+by Aristotle, or even by later authorities.  Aristotle knew only
+four forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and
+Mixed Governments.  The American form is none of these, nor any
+combination of them.  It is original, a new contribution to
+political science, and seeks to attain the end of all wise and
+just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
+and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
+political writers themselves.  The originality of the American
+constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of
+our own statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed
+from the constitutions of other states rather than by a profound
+study of its own principles.  They have taken too low a view of
+it, and have rarely, if ever, appreciated its distinctive and
+peculiar merits.
+
+As the United States have vindicated their national unity and
+integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history,
+nothing is more important than that they should take that new
+start with a clear and definite view of their national
+constitution, and with a distinct understanding of their
+political mission in the future of the world.  The citizen who
+can help his countrymen to do this will render them an important
+service and deserve well of his country, though he may have been
+unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.
+The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more
+difficult and more delicate than that which has been accomplished
+by our brave armies.  As yet the people are hardly better
+prepared for the political work to be done than they were at the
+outbreak of the civil war for the military work they have so
+nobly achieved.  But, with time, patience, and good-will, the
+difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past corrected,
+and the Government placed on the right track for the future.
+
+It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the
+United States is very defective or it has been very grossly
+misinterpreted by all parties.  If the slave States had not held
+that the States are severally sovereign, and the Constitution of
+the United States a simple agreement or compact, they would never
+have seceded; and if the Free States had not confounded the Union
+with the General government, and shown a tendency to make it the
+entire national government, no occasion or pretext for secession
+would have been given.  The great problem of our statesmen has
+been from the first, How to assert union without consolidation,
+and State rights without disintegration?  Have they, as yet,
+solved that problem?  The war has silenced the State sovereignty
+doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State
+rights?  Has it done it without asserting the General government
+as the supreme, central, or national government?  Has it done it
+without striking a dangerous blow at the federal element of the
+constitution?  In suppressing by armed force the doctrine that
+the States are severally sovereign, what barrier is left against
+consolidation?  Has not one danger been removed only to give
+place to another?
+
+But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood,
+solves the problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised
+precisely through misunderstanding of the constitution.  Our
+statesmen have recognized no constitution of the American people
+themselves; they have confined their views to the written
+constitution, as if that constituted the American people a state
+or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a law ordained by the
+nation already existing and constituted.  Perhaps, if they had
+recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that drawn
+up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in
+the republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the
+problem, and asserts national unity without consolidation, and
+the rights of the several States without danger of disintegration.
+The whole controversy, possibly, has originated in a
+misunderstanding of the real constitution of the United States,
+and that misunderstanding itself in the misunderstanding of the
+origin and constitution of government in general.  The
+constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay is not
+defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either
+danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and
+return and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and
+always has been.
+
+There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do
+with the rebellion, but it was not its sole cause.  The real
+cause must be sought in the program that had been made,
+especially in the States themselves, in forming and administering
+their respective governments, as well as the General government,
+in accordance with political theories borrowed from European
+speculators on government, the socalled Liberals and
+Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application
+in the United States.  The tendency of American politics, for the
+last thirty or forty years, has been, within the several States
+themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy, as if the
+American people had for their mission only the reproduction of
+ancient Athens.  The American system is not that of any of the
+simple forms of government, nor any combination of them.  The
+attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of
+government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to
+clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past.  The
+American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy,
+better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better
+than any possible combination of these several forms, because it
+accords more nearly with the principles of things, the real order
+of the universe.
+
+But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other
+states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in
+obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and
+giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its
+false development or corruption.  Under the influence of this
+false development, the people were fast losing sight of the
+political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the
+organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not
+the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the
+absolute God-given right of the majority to govern.  All the
+changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted
+in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the
+majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy.
+This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with
+provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery
+sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States.
+
+The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause,
+in spite of the short-sightedness and blundering of the
+Administration, have proved the vitality and strength of the
+national constitution, and the greatness of the American people.
+They say nothing for or against the democratic theory of our
+demagogues, but every thing in favor of the American system or
+constitution of government, which has found a firmer support in
+American instincts than in American statesmanship.  In spite of
+all that had been done by theorists, radicals, and revolutionists,
+no-government men, non-resistants, humanitarians, and sickly
+sentimentalists to corrupt the American people in mind, heart,
+and body, the native vigor of their national constitution has
+enabled them to come forth triumphant from the trial.  Every
+American patriot has reason to be proud of his country-men, and
+every American lover of freedom to be satisfied with the
+institutions of his country.  But there is danger that the
+politicians and demagogues will ascribe the merit, not to the
+real and living national constitution, but to their miserable
+theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the several
+evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has
+cost so much to suppress.  What is now wanted is, that the people,
+whose instincts are right, should understand the American
+constitution as it is, and so understand it as to render it
+impossible for political theorists, no matter of what school or
+party, to deceive them again as to its real import, or induce
+them to depart from it in their political action.
+
+A work written with temper, without passion or sectional
+prejudice, in a philosophical spirit, explaining to the American
+people their own national constitution, and the mutual relations
+of the General government and the State governments, cannot, at
+this important crisis in our affairs, be inopportune, and, if
+properly executed, can hardly fail to be of real service.  Such a
+work is now attempted--would it were by another and abler hand--
+which, imperfect as it is, may at least offer some useful
+suggestions, give a right direction to political thought,
+although it should fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.
+
+This much the author may say, in favor of his own work, that it
+sets forth no theory of government in general, or of the United
+States in particular.  The author is not a monarchist, an
+aristocrat, a democrat, a feudalist, nor an advocate of what are
+called mixed governments like the English, at least for his own
+country; but is simply an American, devoted to the real, living,
+and energizing constitution of the American republic as it is,
+not as some may fancy it might be, or are striving to make it.
+It is, in his judgment, what it ought to be, and he has no other
+ambition than to present it as it is to the understanding and
+love of his countrymen.
+
+Perhaps simple artistic unity and propriety would require the
+author to commence his essay directly with the United States; but
+while the constitution of the United States is original and
+peculiar, the government of the United States has necessarily
+something in common with all legitimate governments, and he has
+thought it best to precede his discussion of the American
+republic, its constitution, tendencies, and destiny, by some
+considerations on government in general.  He does this because he
+believes, whether rightly or not, that while the American people
+have received from Providence a most truly profound and admirable
+system of government, they are more or less infected with the
+false theories of government which have been broached during the
+last two centuries.  In attempting to realize these theories,
+they have already provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion
+which has seriously threatened the national existence, and come
+very near putting an end to the American order of civilization
+itself.  These theories have received already a shock in the
+minds of all serious and thinking men; but the men who think are
+in every nation a small minority, and it is necessary to give
+these theories a public refutation, and bring back those who do
+not think, as well as those who do, from the world of dreams to
+the world of reality.  It is hoped, therefore, that any apparent
+want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay will be pardoned
+for the sake of the end the author has had in view.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for
+himself.  He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has
+his being in God.  He exists, develops, and fulfils his existence
+only by communion with God, through which he participates of the
+divine being and life.  He communes with God through the divine
+creative act and the Incarnation of the Word, through his kind,
+and through the material world.  Communion with God through
+Creation and Incarnation is religion, distinctively taken, which
+binds man to God as his first cause, and carries him onward to
+God as his final cause; communion through the material world is
+expressed by the word property; and communion with God through
+humanity is society.  Religion, society, property, are the three
+terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the
+essential means and conditions of his existence, his development,
+and his perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the
+attainment of the end for which he is created.
+
+Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through
+his kind, is not all that man needs in order to live, to grow,
+to actualize the possibilities of his nature, and to attain to
+his beatitude, since humanity is neither God nor the material
+universe, it is yet a necessary and essential condition of his
+life, his progress, and the completion of his existence.  He is
+born and lives in society, and can be born and live nowhere else.
+It is one of the necessities of his nature.  "God saw that it was
+not good for man to be alone."  Hence, wherever man is found he
+is found in society, living in more or less strict intercourse
+with his kind.
+
+But society never does and never can exist without government of
+some sort.  As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is
+government a necessity of society.  The simplest form of society
+is the family--Adam and Eve.  But though Adam and Eve are in many
+respects equal, and have equally important though different parts
+assigned them, one or the other must be head and governor, or
+they cannot form the society called family.  They would be simply
+two individuals of different sexes, and the family would fail for
+the want of unity.
+
+Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some
+degree of family government, of some authority to direct,
+control, restrain, or prescribe.  Hence the authority of the
+husband and father is recognized by the common consent of
+mankind.  Still more apparent is the necessity of government the
+moment the family develops and grows into the tribe, and the
+tribe into the nation.  Hence no nation exists without
+government; and we never find a savage tribe, however low or
+degraded, that does not assert somewhere in the father, in the
+elders, or in the tribe itself, the rude outlines or the faint
+reminiscences of some sort of government, with authority to
+demand obedience and to punish the refractory.  Hence, as man is
+nowhere found out of society, so nowhere is society found without
+government.
+
+Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that
+its necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the
+fact that the human race by sin has fallen from its primitive
+integrity, or original righteousness.  The fall asserted by
+Christian theology, though often misinterpreted, and its effects
+underrated or exaggerated, is a fact too sadly confirmed by
+individual experience and universal history; but it is not the
+cause why government is necessary, though it may be an additional
+reason for demanding it.  Government would have been necessary if
+man had not sinned, and it is needed for the good as well as for
+the bad.  The law was promulgated in the Garden, while man
+retained his innocence and remained in the integrity of his
+nature.  It exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in heaven
+in its perfection.  Its office is not purely repressive, to
+restrain violence, to redress wrongs, and to punish the
+transgressor.  It has something more to do than to restrict our
+natural liberty, curb our passions, and maintain justice between
+man and man.  Its office is positive as well as negative.  It is
+needed to render effective the solidarity of the individuals of a
+nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a mere
+organization--to combine men in one living body, and to
+strengthen all with the strength of each, and each with the
+strength of all--to develop, strengthen, and sustain individual
+liberty, and to utilize and direct it to the promotion of the
+common weal--to be a social providence, imitating in its order
+and degree the action of the divine providence itself, and, while
+it provides for the common good of all, to protect each, the
+lowest and meanest, with the whole force and majesty of society.
+It is the minister of wrath to wrong-doers, indeed, but its nature
+is beneficent, and its action defines and protects the right of
+property, creates and maintains a medium in which religion can
+exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, fosters science
+and art, advances civilization, and contributes as a powerful
+means to the fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his
+existence.  Next after religion, it is man's greatest good; and
+even religion without it can do only a small portion of her work.
+They wrong it who call it a necessary evil; it is a great good,
+and, instead of being distrusted, hated, or resisted, except in
+its abuses, it should be loved, respected, obeyed, and if need
+be, defended at the cost of all earthly goods, and even of life
+itself.
+
+The nature or essence of government is to govern.  A government
+that does not govern, is simply no government at all.  If it has
+not the ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency,
+an instrument in the bands of individuals for advancing their
+private interests, but it is not government.  To be government it
+must govern both individuals and the community.  If it is a mere
+machine for making prevail the will of one man, of a certain
+number of men, or even of the community, it may be very effective
+sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest for evil, but
+government in the proper sense of the word it is not.  To govern
+is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and
+directs his ship.  It necessarily implies two terms, governor and
+governed, and a real distinction between them.  The denial of all
+real distinction between governor and governed is an error in
+politics analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying
+all real distinction between creator and creature, God and the
+universe, which all the world knows is either pantheism or pure
+atheism--the supreme sophism.  If we make governor and governed
+one and the same, we efface both terms; for there is no governor
+nor governed, if the will that governs is identically the will
+that is governed.  To make the controller and the controlled the
+same is precisely to deny all control.  There must, then, if
+there is government at all, be a power, force, or will that
+governs, distinct from that which is governed.  In those
+governments in which it is held that the people govern, the
+people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the
+people governed, or there is no real government.
+
+Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the
+right or authority to govern.  Power without right is not
+government.  Governments have the right to use force at need, but
+might does not make right, and not every power wielding the
+physical force of a nation is to be regarded as its rightful
+government.  Whatever resort to physical force it may be obliged
+to make, either in defence of its authority or of the rights of
+the nation, the government itself lies in the moral order, and
+politics is simply a branch of ethics--that branch which treats
+of the rights and duties of men in their public relations, as
+distinguished from their rights and duties in their private
+relations.
+
+Government being not only that which governs, but that which has
+the right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a
+mere physical necessity.  The right to govern and the duty to
+obey are correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived
+without the other.  Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable
+sentiment but a duty, a moral virtue.  Treason is not merely a
+difference in political opinion with the governing authority, but
+a crime against the sovereign, and a moral wrong, therefore a sin
+against God, the Founder of the moral Law.  Treason, if committed
+in other Countries, unhappily, has been more frequently termed by
+our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor than branded as a
+crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human governments
+have authority to punish.  The American people have been chary of
+the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the
+correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of
+law, and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign
+authority, however constituted or wherever lodged.  It is as
+necessary, as much a duty, as much a virtue in republics as in
+monarchies; and nobler examples of the most devoted loyalty are
+not found in the world's history than were exhibited in the
+ancient Greek and Roman republics, or than have been exhibited by
+both men and women in the young republic of the United States.
+Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human
+virtues, and is the human element of that sublime love or charity
+which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment of the law.
+It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice, and
+is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most
+Godlike.  There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of
+which a truly loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean,
+base, cruel, brutal, criminal, detestable, not to be expected of
+a really disloyal people.  Such a people no generous sentiment
+can move, no love can bind.  It mocks at duty, scorns virtue,
+tramples on all rights, and holds no person, no thing, human or
+divine, sacred or inviolable.  The assertion of government as
+lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and reconciles
+it with authority.  Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever one
+pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.  Freedom to
+follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any
+civil restraint, is license, not liberty.  There is no lesion to
+liberty in repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the
+commands of the authority that has the right to command.  Tyranny
+or oppression is not in being subjected to authority, but in
+being subjected to usurped authority--to a power that has no
+right to command, or that commands what exceeds its right or its
+authority.  To say that it is contrary to liberty to be forced to
+forego our own will or inclination in any case whatever, is
+simply denying the right of all government, and falling into
+no-governmentism.  Liberty is violated only when we are required
+to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no
+right to make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as
+far as authority has right to govern, and we can never have the
+right to disobey a rightful command.  The requisition, if made by
+rightful authority, then, violates no right that we have or can
+have, and where there is no violation of our rights there is no
+violation of our liberty.  The moral right of authority, which
+involves the moral duty of obedience, presents, then, the ground
+on which liberty and authority may meet in peace and operate to
+the same end.
+
+This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive
+obedience, and that the resistance to power can never be lawful.
+The tyrant may be lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of
+the word itself, is a usurper, and without authority.  Abuses of
+power may be resisted even by force when they become too great to
+be endured, when there is no legal or regular way of redressing
+them, and when there is a reasonable prospect that resistance
+will prove effectual and substitute something better in their
+place.  But it is never lawful to resist the rightful sovereign,
+for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
+sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never
+be said to abuse it.  Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful
+exercise of a power rightfully held, and when it is not so
+exercised there is no abuse or abuses to redress.  All turns,
+then, on the right of power, or its legitimacy.  Whence does
+government derive its right to govern?  What is the origin and
+ground of sovereignty?  This question is fundamental and without
+a true answer to it politics cannot be a science, and there can
+be no scientific statesmanship.  Whence, then, comes the
+sovereign right to govern?
+
+
+
+
+
+26
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT
+
+
+Government is both a fact and a right.  Its origin as a fact, is
+simply a question of history; its origin as a right or authority
+to govern, is a question of ethics.  Whether a certain territory
+and its population are a sovereign state or nation, or
+not--whether the actual ruler of a country is its rightful ruler,
+or not--is to be determined by the historical facts in the case;
+but whence the government derives its right to govern, is a
+question that can be solved only by philosophy, or, philosophy
+failing, only by revelation.
+
+Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact
+and the right, have invented various theories as to the origin of
+government, among which may be named--
+I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his
+child.
+II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.
+III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are
+sovereign.
+IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.
+V. It derives its right from the immediate and express
+appointment of God;--
+VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual
+society;--
+VII. From God through the people;--
+VIII. From God through the natural law.
+
+I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the
+origin of government as a fact.  The patriarchal system is the
+earliest known system of government, and unmistakable traces of
+it are found in nearly all known governments--in the tribes of
+Arabia and Northern Africa, the Irish septs and the Scottish
+clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman qentes, and the Russian and
+Hindoo villages.  The right of the father was held to be his
+right to govern his family or household, which, with his children,
+included his wife and servants.  From the family to the tribe the
+transition is natural and easy, as also from the tribe to the
+nation.  The father is chief of the family; the chief of the
+eldest family is chief of the tribe; the chief of the eldest
+tribe becomes chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch.
+The heads of families collected in a senate form an aristocracy,
+and the families themselves, represented by their delegates, or
+publicly assembling for public affairs, constitute a democracy.
+These three forms, with their several combinations, to wit,
+monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and mixed governments, are all
+the forms known to Aristotle, and have generally been held to be
+all that are possible.
+
+Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed
+from the patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the
+family.  Even those governments, like the ancient Roman and the
+modern feudal, which seem to be founded on landed property, may
+be traced back to a patriarchal origin.  The patriarch is sole
+proprietor, and the possessions of the family are vested in him,
+and he governs as proprietor as well as father.  In the tribe,
+the chief is the proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the
+landlord, and holds the domain.  Hence, the feudal baron is
+invested with his fief by the suzerain, holds it from him, and to
+him it escheats when forfeited or vacant.  All the great Asiatic
+kings of ancient or modern times hold the domain and govern as
+proprietors; they have the authority of the father and the owner;
+and their subjects, though theoretically their children, are
+really their slaves.
+
+In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important
+transformation.  The father retains all the power of the
+patriarch within his family, the patrician in his gens or house,
+but, outside of it, is met and controlled by the city or state.
+The heads of houses are united in the senate, and collectively
+constitute and govern the state.  Yet, not all the heads of
+houses have seats in the senate, but only the tenants of the
+sacred territory of the city, which has been surveyed and marked
+by the god Terminus.  Hence the great plebeian houses, often
+richer and nobler than the patrician, were excluded from all
+share in the government and the honors of the state, because they
+were not tenants of any portion of the sacred territory.  There
+is here the introduction of an element which is not patriarchal,
+and which transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the
+city or state, and founds the civil order, or what is now called
+civilization.  The city or state takes the place of the private
+proprietor, and territorial rights take the place of purely
+personal rights.
+
+In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the
+man the land.  When land was transferred to a new tenant, the
+practice in early times was to bury him in it, in order to
+indicate that it took possession of him, received, accepted, or
+adopted him; and it was only such persons as were taken
+possession of, accepted or adopted by the sacred territory or
+domain that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens with full
+political rights.  This, in modern language, means that the state
+is territorial, not personal, and that the citizen appertains to
+the state, not the state to the citizen.  Under the patriarchal,
+the tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, there is,
+properly speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is
+economical rather than political.  Authority--even the nation
+itself--is personal, not territorial.  The patriarch, the chief
+of the tribe, or the king, is the only proprietor.  Under the
+Graeco-Roman system all this is transformed.  The nation is
+territorial as well as personal, and the real proprietor is the
+city or state.  Under the Empire, no doubt, what lawyers call the
+eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as the
+representative and trustee of the city or state.
+
+When or by what combination of events this transformation was
+effected, history does not inform us.  The first-born of Adam, we
+are told, built a city, and called it after his son Enoch; but
+there is no evidence that it was constituted a municipality.  The
+earliest traces of the civil order proper are found in the Greek
+and Italian republics, and its fullest and grandest developments
+are found in Rome, imperial as well as republican.  It was no
+doubt preceded by the patriarchal system, and was historically
+developed from it, but by way of accretion rather than by simple
+explication.  It has in it an element that, if it exists in the
+patriarchal constitution, exists there only in a different form,
+and the transformation marks the passage from the economical
+order to the political, from the barbaric to the civil
+constitution of society, or from barbarism to civilization.
+
+The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived
+from civitas--city or state.  The Greeks and Romans call all
+tribes and nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as
+distinguished from the state, barbarians.  The origin of the word
+barbarian, barbarus, or ........, is unknown, and its primary
+sense can be only conjectured.  Webster regards its primary sense
+as foreign, wild, fierce; but this could not have been its
+original sense; for the Greeks and Romans never termed all
+foreigners barbarians, and they applied the term to nations that
+had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that
+had made respectable progress in art and sciences--the Indians,
+Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.  They applied the
+term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical
+sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which
+the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal,
+not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not
+as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or
+tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others
+barbarians.
+
+Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European
+sense, but to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense.
+Lacedaemon had kings; yet it was no less republican than Athens;
+and Rome was called and was a republic under the emperors no less
+than under the consuls.  Republic, respublica, by the very force
+of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English, the
+commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or
+private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or
+domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
+attaches the nation to a certain definite territory.  France,
+Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in
+substance though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of
+the word, republican states; for the king or emperor does not
+govern in his own private right, but solely as representative of
+the power and majesty of the state.  The distinctive mark of
+republicanism is the substitution of the state for the personal
+chief, and public authority for personal or private right.
+Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to barbarism, and
+all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian in
+Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern tiles to
+breeding or refinement of manners, simply because these are
+characteristics of a republican, or polished [from ....., city]
+people.  Every people that has a real civil order, or a fully
+developed state or polity, is a republican people; and hence the
+church and her great doctors when they speak of the state as
+distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be
+seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some
+have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.
+
+All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains,
+or is developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really
+so regarded by all Christendom.  In civilized nations the
+patriarchal authority is transformed into that of the city or
+state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous nations it
+retains its Private and personal character.  The nation is only
+the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor,
+founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomination.  Race has
+not been supplanted by country; they are a people, not a state.
+They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may find in them
+ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find
+among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
+distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among
+modern Christian nations.  They have a family, a race, a chief or
+king, but no patria, or country.  The barbarians who overthrew
+the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East, were nations,
+or confederacies of nations, but not states.  The nation with
+them was personal, not territorial.  Their country was wherever
+they fed their flocks and herds, pitched their tents, and
+encamped for the night.  There were Germans, but no German state,
+and even to-day the German finds his "father-land" wherever the
+German speech is spoken.  The Polish, Sclavonian, Hungarian,
+Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by German states, in
+which the German language is not the mother-tongue, are excluded
+from the Germanic Confederation.  The Turks, or Osmanlis, are a
+race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
+the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.
+
+Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic,
+pastoral, or predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and
+Persians or modern Chinese, and have their geographical
+boundaries, they have still no state, no country.  The nation
+defines the boundaries, not the boundaries the nation.  The
+nation does not belong to the territory, but the territory to the
+nation or its chief.  The Irish and Anglo-Saxons, in former
+times, held the land in gavelkind, and the territory belonged to
+the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as indivisible, they
+still held it as private property.  The shah of Persia holds the
+whole Persian territory as private property, and the landholders
+among his subjects are held to be his tenants.  They hold it from
+him, not from the Persian state.
+
+The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private
+domain of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan.  There is in
+barbaric states no republic, no commonwealth; authority is
+parental, without being tempered by parental affection.  The
+chief is a despot, and rules with the united authority of the
+father and the harshness of the proprietor.  He owns the land and
+his subjects.
+
+Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of
+the Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by
+reminiscences of Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the
+conquered, was a barbaric constitution.  The feudal monarch, as
+far as he governed at all, governed as proprietor or landholder,
+not as the representative of the commonwealth.  Under feudalism
+there are estates, but no state.  The king governs as an estate,
+the nobles hold their power as an estate, and the commons are
+represented as an estate.  The whole theory of power is, that it
+is an estate; a private right, not a public trust.  It is not
+without reason, then that the common sense of civilized nations
+terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous ages.
+
+It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
+constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch
+democrats, especially European democrats and revolutionists, and
+by French and Germans settled in our own country, it is
+essentially barbaric and anti-republican.  The characteristic
+principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal
+right, and when democrats assert that the elective franchise is a
+natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact
+that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle
+of barbarism and despotism.  This says nothing in favor of
+restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage.
+To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
+theoretically or practically.  Property has of itself advantages
+enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political
+rights and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as
+trustworthy as the business classes.  The wise statesman will
+never restrict suffrage, or exclude the poorer and more numerous
+classes from all voice in the government of their country.
+General suffrage is wise, and if Louis Philippe had had the sense
+to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation to the support of
+his government, he would never have had to encounter the
+revolution of 1848.  The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
+universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
+private or personal right.  It is not a private, but a political
+right, and, like all political rights, a public trust.  Extremes
+meet, and thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the
+head of the human race and lead the civilization of the age, are
+really in principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or
+taking their place with nations on whom the light of civilization
+has never yet dawned.  All is not gold that glisters.
+
+The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
+private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization
+is, that it makes it a public trust.  Barbarism knows only
+persons; civilization asserts and maintains the state.  With
+barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply by
+way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of
+transformation.  Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be
+maintained that all systems of government, as a simple historical
+fact, have been developed from the patriarchal.  The patriarchal
+has preceded them all, and it is with the patriarchal that the
+human race has begun its career.  The family or household is not
+a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
+historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well
+as the initial or inchoate nation.  But its simple direct
+development gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental
+despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom.
+It is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in
+the secular order is republican, and continues and completes the
+work of Greece and Rome.  It meets with little permanent success
+in any patriarchal or despotic nation, and must either find or
+create civilization, which has been developed from the patriarchal
+system by way of transformation.
+
+But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of
+government, and all governments have been developed or modified
+from it, the right of government to govern cannot be deduced from
+the right of the father to govern his children, for the parental
+right itself is not ultimate or complete.  All governments that
+assume it to be so, and rest on it as the foundation of their
+authority, are barbaric or despotic, and, therefore , without any
+legitimate authority.  The right to govern rests on ownership or
+dominion.  Where there is no proprietorship, there is no dominion;
+and where there is no dominion, there is no right to govern.
+Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.
+
+Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation.  The maker has
+the right to the thing made.  He, so far as he is sole creator,
+is sole proprietor, and may do what he will with it.  God is
+sovereign lord and proprietor of the universe because He is its
+sole creator.  He hath the absolute dominion, because He is
+absolute maker.  He has made it, He owns it; and one may do what
+he will with his own.  His dominion is absolute, because He is
+absolute creator, and He rightly governs as absolute and
+universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises only
+His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
+justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
+conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always
+be right, wise, just, and good.  The despot is a man attempting
+to be God upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power.  Despotism
+is based on, the parental right, and the parental right is
+assumed to be absolute.  Hence, your despotic rulers claim to
+reign, and to be loved and worshipped as gods.  Even the Roman
+emperors, in the fourth and fifth centuries, were addressed as
+divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a Christian , was addressed
+as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras--so far did barbarism
+encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.
+
+The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for
+he is the generator, not the creator of his child.  Generation is
+in the order of second causes, and is simply the development or
+explication of the race.  The early Roman law, founded on the
+confusion of generation with creation, gave the father absolute
+authority over the child--the right of life and death, as over
+his servants or slaves; but this was restricted under the Empire,
+and in all Christian nations the authority of the father is
+treated, like all power, as a trust.  The child, like the father
+himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father is
+answerable for the use he makes of his authority.  The law fixes
+the age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated;
+and even during his nonage, takes him from the father and places
+him under guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil
+or grossly abuses his trust.  This is proper, because society
+contributes to the life of the child, and has a right as well as
+an interest in him.  Society, again, must suffer if the child is
+allowed to grow up a worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a
+right to intervene, both in behalf of itself and of the child, in
+case his parents neglect to train him up in the nurture and
+admonition of the Lord, or are training him up to be a liar, a
+thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the community.  How,
+then, base the right of society on the right of the father,
+since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to the
+right of the parent?
+
+But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
+authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the
+ground of the right of society to govern.  Assume the parental
+right to be perfect and inseparable from the parental relation,
+it is no right to govern where no such relation exists.  Nothing
+true, real, solid in government can be founded on what Carlyle
+calls a "sham."  The statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains
+and conforms to the realities, the verities of things; and all
+jurisprudence that accepts legal fictions is imperfect, and even
+censurable.  The presumptions or assumptions of law or politics
+must have a real and solid basis, or they are inadmissible.  How,
+from the right of the father to govern his own child, born from
+his loins, conclude his right to govern one not his child?  Or
+how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the right of
+society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
+political authority over its members?
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
+
+
+II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking
+from asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should
+favor theocracy, and place secular society under the control of
+the clergy, and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political
+writers have sought to render government purely human, and
+maintain that its origin is conventional, and that it is founded
+in compact or agreement.  Their theory originated in the
+seventeenth century, and was predominant in the last century and
+the first third of the present.  It has been, and perhaps is yet,
+generally accepted by American politicians and statesmen, at
+least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the question
+at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
+
+The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of
+government as a social pact or compact, and explained the
+reciprocal rights and obligations of subjects and rulers by the
+general law of contracts; but they have never held that
+government originates in a voluntary agreement between the people
+and their rulers, or between the several individuals composing
+the community.  They have never held that government has only a
+conventional origin or authority.  They have simply meant, by the
+social compact, the mutual relations and reciprocal rights and
+duties of princes and their subjects, as implied in the very
+existence and nature of civil society.  Where there are rights
+and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an agreement
+voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
+compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in
+determining whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire
+whether either has broken the terms of the social compact.  They
+were engaged, not with the question whence does government derive
+its authority, but with its nature, and the reciprocal rights and
+duties of governors and the governed.  The compact itself they
+held was not voluntarily formed by the people themselves, either
+individually or collectively, but was imposed by God, either
+immediately, or mediately, through the law of nature.  "Every
+man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains there."  They
+held the same, and maintained that every one born into society
+contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
+society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law,
+every one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit
+of happiness, and owes certain duties to society for the
+protection and assistance it affords him.
+
+But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed
+from the theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine
+which they would have been the last to accept.  These theorists
+or political speculators have imagined a state of nature
+antecedently to civil society, in which men lived without
+government, law, or manners, out of which they finally came by
+entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of their number
+to be king and to govern them, or with one another to submit to
+the rule of the majority.  Hobbes, the English materialist, is
+among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of
+this theory.  He held that men lived, prior to the creation of
+civil society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and
+every one had an equal right to every thing, and to take any
+thing on which he could lay his hands and was strong enough to
+hold.  There was no law but the will of the strongest.  Hence,
+the state of nature was a state of continual war.  At length,
+wearied and disgusted, men sighed for peace, and, with one
+accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest among them: Come,
+be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and govern us; we
+surrender our natural rights and our natural independence to you,
+with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
+among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or
+cutting each other's throats.
+
+Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory,
+but asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had
+asserted it in the interests of power.  Rousseau, a citizen of
+Geneva, followed in the next century with his Contrat Social, the
+text-book of the French revolutionists--almost their Bible--and
+put the finishing stroke to the theory.  Hitherto the compact or
+agreement had been assumed to be between the governor and the
+governed; Rousseau supposes it to be between the people
+themselves, or a compact to which the people are the only parties.
+He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men lived,
+antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
+without government or law.  All men in that state were equal, and
+each was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself.  These
+equal, independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to
+have met, in convention, and entered into a compact with
+themselves, each with all, and all with each, that they would
+constitute government, and would each submit to the determination
+and authority of the whole, practically of the fluctuating and
+irresponsible majority.  Civil society, the state, the
+government, originates in this compact, and the government, as
+Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
+Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
+governed."
+
+This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that
+the individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to
+civil society, was generally adopted by the American people in
+the last century, and is still the more prevalent theory with
+those among them who happen to have any theory or opinion on the
+subject.  It is the political tradition of the country.  The
+state, as defined by the elder Adams, is held to be a voluntary
+association of individuals.  Individuals create civil society,
+and may uncreate it whenever they judge it advisable.  Prior to
+the Southern Rebellion, nearly every American asserted with
+Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or revolution, and
+sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and revolutionists,
+wherever they made their appearance.  Loyalty was held to be the
+correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and
+traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent
+lovers of liberty, and champions of the people.  The fearful
+struggle of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its
+very existence may have changed this.
+
+That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory
+assumes, may be questioned.  Certainly nothing proves that it is,
+or ever was, a real state.  That there is a law of nature is
+undeniable.  All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and
+jurisprudence assert it; the state assumes it as its own
+immediate basis, and the codes of all nations are founded on it;
+universal jurisprudence, the jus qentium of the Romans, embodies
+it, and the courts recognize and administer it.  It is the reason
+and conscience of civil society, and every state acknowledges its
+authority.  But the law of nature is as much in force in civil
+society as out of it.  Civil law does not abrogate or supersede
+natural law, but presupposes it, and supports itself on it as its
+own ground and reason.  As the natural law, which is only natural
+justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all men,
+persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its
+informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil
+state, natural society in civil society, which simply develops,
+applies, and protects it.  Man in civil society is not out of
+nature, but is in it--is in his most natural state; for society
+is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in
+some form inseparable from it.  The state of nature under the
+natural law is not, as a separate state, an actual state, and
+never was; but an abstraction, in which is considered, apart from
+the concrete existence called society, what is derived
+immediately from the natural law.  But as abstractions have no
+existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature
+has no actual existence in the world of reality as a separate
+state.
+
+But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a
+real and separate state, in which men at first lived, there is
+great difficulty in understanding how they ever got out of it.
+Can a man divest himself of his nature, or lift himself above it?
+Man is in his nature, and inseparable from it.  If his primitive
+state was his natural state, and if the political state is
+supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural, how passed he alone,
+by his own unaided powers, from the former to the latter?  The
+ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of creation,
+asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the earth,
+and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
+and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science,
+art, law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the
+prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended,
+that man could come out of that state alone by his own unaided
+efforts.  They ascribed the invention of language, art, and
+science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws,
+to the intervention of the gods.  It remained for the
+Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern successors,
+the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first cause,
+believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
+care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own
+unassisted efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out
+of the primitive state, and institute what in modern times is
+called civilta, civility, or civilization.
+
+The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which
+men have emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of
+civil society, forget that if government is not the sole
+condition, it is one of the essential conditions of progress.
+The only progressive nations are civilized or republican nations.
+Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive.  Ages on ages roll
+over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr
+has well remarked with others, that history records no instance
+of a savage tribe or people having become civilized by its own
+spontaneous or indigenous efforts.  If savage tribes have ever
+become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
+aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
+missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
+commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age.
+Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people
+to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized.  But
+the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and
+asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the
+savage.  The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe
+that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or
+feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals,
+law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there
+is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged
+state of nature have none.
+
+The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting
+into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and
+capacities of the civilized man.  It is, perhaps, not difficult
+for men who have been civilized, who have the intelligence, the
+arts, the affections, and the habits of civilization, if deprived
+by some great social convulsion of society, and thrown back on
+the so-called state of nature, or cast away on some uninhabited
+island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with the
+rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish
+and maintain civil government.  They are civilized men, and bear
+civil society in their own life.  But these are no
+representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of
+nature.  These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no
+conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to
+that in which they have thus far lived.  How then can they,
+since, on the theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is
+a purely artificial creation, even conceive of civilization,
+much less realize it?
+
+These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete
+abstraction of the civilized state, and conclude from what they
+feel they could do in case civil society were broken up, what
+men may do and have done in a state of nature.  Men cannot divest
+themselves of themselves, and, whatever their efforts to do it,
+they think, reason, and act as they are.
+
+Every writer, whatever else he writes, writes himself.  The
+advocates of the theory, to have made their abstraction complete,
+should have presented their primitive man as below the lowest
+known savage, unprogressive, and in himself incapable of
+developing any progressive energy.  Unprogressive, and, without
+foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for
+your primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from
+the alleged state of nature to that of civilization, of which he
+has no conception, and towards which no innate desire, no
+instinct, no divine inspiration pushes him?
+
+But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without
+supernatural intervention repudiated by the theory--if by some
+happy inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the
+state of nature as to conceive of civil society and of civil
+government, how could he carry his conception into execution?
+Conception is always easier than its realization, and between the
+design and its execution there is always a weary distance.  The
+poetry of all nations is a wail over unrealized ideals.  It is
+little that even the wisest and most potent statesman can realize
+of what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political,
+legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and
+favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom
+generations come and go without effecting them.  The republics of
+Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the
+communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not
+solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but
+chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in
+experience, and require for their realization the modes of
+thought, habits, manners, character, life, which only their
+introduction and realization can supply.  So to be able to
+execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature
+to civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the
+habits, and characters in the public which are not possible
+without civilization itself.  Some philosophers suppose men have
+invented language, forgetting that it requires language to give
+the ability to invent language.
+
+Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and
+convincing it may be.  They are moved by their affections,
+passions, instincts, and habits.  Routine is more powerful with
+them than logic.  A few are greedy of novelties, and are always
+for trying experiments; but the great body of the people of all
+nations have an invincible repugnance to abandon what they know
+for what they know not.  They are, to a great extent, the slaves
+of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the necessary
+exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
+better.  Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
+prejudice, habits, and usages.  Never were philosophers more
+ignorant of human nature than they, so numerous in the last
+century, who imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of
+interest, and that enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien
+entendu, suffices to found and sustain the state.  No reform, no
+change in the constitution of government or of society, whatever
+the advantages it may promise, can be successful, if introduced,
+unless it has its root or germ in the past.  Man is never a
+creator; he can only develop and continue, because he is himself
+a creature, and only a second cause.  The children of Israel,
+when they encountered the privations of the wilderness that lay
+between them and the promised land flowing with milk and honey,
+fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back to Egypt,
+and permit them to return to slavery.
+
+In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it,
+there is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil
+society would not be a development, but a complete rupture with
+the past, and an entire new creation.  When it is with the
+greatest difficulty that necessary reforms are introduced in old
+and highly civilized nations and when it can seldom be done at
+all without terrible political and social convulsions, how can we
+suppose men without society, and knowing nothing of it, can
+deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice aforethought," found
+society?  Without government, and destitute alike of habits of
+obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
+establish, and sustain government?  To suppose it, would be to
+suppose that men in a state of nature, without culture, without
+science, without any of the arts, even the most simple and
+necessary, are infinitely superior to the men formed under the
+most advanced civilization.  Was Rousseau right in asserting
+civilization as a fall, as a deterioration of the race?
+
+But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some
+miracle or other, can get out of it and found civil society, the
+origin of government as authority in compact is not yet
+established.  According to the theory, the rights of civil
+society are derived from the rights of the individuals who form
+or enter into the compact.  But individuals cannot give what they
+have not, and no individual has in himself the right to govern
+another.  By the law of nature all men have equal rights, are
+equals, and equals have no authority one over another.  Nor has
+an individual the sovereign right even to himself, or the right
+to dispose of himself as he pleases.  Man is not God,
+independent, self-existing and self-sufficing.  He is dependent,
+and dependent not only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on
+society, and even on nature, or the material world.  That on
+which he depends in the measure in which be depends on it,
+contributes to his existence, to his life, and to his well-being,
+and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right in him and to
+him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the proud
+spirit than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation
+to another.  The right of that on which man depends, and by
+communion with which he lives, limits his own right over himself.
+
+Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his
+only medium of communion with God, and therefore its right to him
+is neither absolute nor unlimited; but still be depends on it,
+lives in it, and cannot live without it.  It has, then, certain
+lights over him, and he cannot enter into any compact, league, or
+alliance that society does not authorize, or at least permit.
+These rights of society override his rights to himself, and he
+can neither surrender them nor delegate them.  Other rights, as
+the rights of religion and property, which are held directly from
+God and nature, and which are independent of society, are
+included in what are called the natural rights of man; and these
+rights cannot be surrendered in forming civil society, for they
+are rights of man only before civil society, and therefore not
+his to cede, and because they are precisely the rights that
+government is bound to respect and protect.  The compact, then,
+cannot be formed as pretended, for the only rights individuals
+could delegate or surrender to society to constitute the sum of
+the rights of government are hers already, and those which are
+not hers are those which cannot be delegated or surrendered, and
+in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is the duty, the
+chief end of government to protect each and every individual.
+
+The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no
+authority without society, to meet in convention, and enter into
+the alleged compact, because they are not independent, sovereign
+individuals.  But pass over this: suppose the convention, suppose
+the compact, it must still be conceded that it binds and can bind
+only those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into it.  This
+is conceded by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of l776,
+in the assertion that government derives its "just powers from
+the consent of the governed."  This consent, as the matter is one
+of life and death, must be free, deliberate, formal, explicit,
+not simply an assumed, implied, or constructive consent.  It must
+be given personally, and not by one for another without his
+express authority.
+
+It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms
+of the compact from the silence of the individual, and also from
+his continued residence in the country and submission to its
+government.  But residence is no evidence of consent, because it
+may be a matter of necessity.  The individual may be unable to
+emigrate, if he would; and by what right can individuals form an
+agreement to which I must consent or else migrate to some strange
+land?
+
+Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, be any
+thing but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and
+therefore invalid?  Nothing can be inferred from one's silence,
+for he may have many reasons for being silent besides approval of
+the government.  He may be silent because speech would avail
+nothing; because to protest might be dangerous--cost him his
+liberty, if not his life; because he sees and knows nothing
+better, and is ignorant that he has any choice in the case; or
+because, as very likely is the fact with the majority, he has
+never for moment thought of the matter, or ever had his attention
+called to it, and has no mind on the subject.
+
+But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from
+the compact or obligation to obey the government created by it
+all the women of a nation, all the children too young to be
+capable of giving their consent, and all who are too ignorant,
+too weak of mind to be able to understand the terms of the
+contract.  These several classes cannot be less than three-fourths
+of the population of any country.  What is to be done with them?
+Leave them without government?  Extend the power of the
+government over them?  By what right?  Government derives its
+just powers from the consent of the governed, and that consent
+they have not given.  Whence does one-fourth of the population
+get its right to govern the other three-fourths?
+
+But what is to be done with the rights of minorities?  Is the
+rule of unanimity to be insisted on in the convention and in the
+government, when it goes into operation?  Unanimity is
+impracticable, for where there are many men there will be
+differences of opinion.  The rule of unanimity gives to each
+individual a veto on the whole proceeding, which was the grand
+defect of the Polish constitution.  Each member of the Polish
+Diet, which included the whole body of the nobility, had an
+absolute veto, and could, alone, arrest the whole action of the
+government.  Will you substitute the rule of the majority, and
+say the majority must govern?  By what right?  It is agreed to in
+the convention.  Unanimously, or only by a majority?  The right
+of the majority to have their will is, on the social compact
+theory, a conventional right, and therefore cannot come into play
+before the convention is completed, or the social compact is
+framed and accepted.  How, in settling the terms of the compact,
+will you proceed?  By majorities?  But suppose a minority
+objects, and demands two-thirds, three-fourths, or four-fifths,
+and votes against the majority rule, which is carried only by a
+simple plurality of votes, will the proceedings of the convention
+bind the dissenting minority?  What gives to the majority the
+right to govern the minority who dissent from its action?
+
+On the supposition that society has rights not derived from
+individuals, and which are intrusted to the government, there is
+a good reason why the majority should prevail within the
+legitimate sphere of government, because the majority is the best
+representative practicable of society itself; and if the
+constitution secures to minorities and dissenting individuals
+their natural rights and their equal rights as citizens, they
+have no just cause of complaint, for the majority in such case
+has no power to tyrannize over them or to oppress them.  But the
+theory under examination denies that society has any rights
+except such as it derives from individuals who all have equal
+rights.  According to it, society is itself conventional, and
+created by free, independent, equal, sovereign individuals.
+Society is a congress of sovereigns, in which no one has
+authority over another, and no one can be rightfully forced to
+submit to any decree against his will.  In such a congress the
+rule of the majority is manifestly improper, illegitimate, and
+invalid, unless adopted by unanimous consent.
+
+But this is not all.  The individual is always the equal of
+himself, and if the government derives its powers from the
+consent of the governed, he governs in the government, and parts
+with none of his original sovereignty.  The government is not his
+master, but his agent, as the principal only delegates, not
+surrenders, his rights and powers to the agent.  He is free at
+any time he pleases to recall the powers he has delegated, to
+give new instructions, or to dismiss him.  The sovereignty of the
+individual survives the compact, and persists through all the
+acts of his agent, the government.  He must, then, be free to
+withdraw from the compact whenever be judges it advisable.
+Secession is perfectly legitimate if government is simply a
+contract between equals.  The disaffected, the criminal, the
+thief the government would send to prison, or the murderer it
+would hang, would be very likely to revoke his consent, and to
+secede from the state.  Any number of individuals large enough to
+count a majority among themselves, indisposed to pay the
+government taxes, or to perform the military service exacted,
+might hold a convention, adopt a secession ordinance, and declare
+themselves a free, independent, sovereign state, and bid defiance
+to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and that, too,
+without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.
+Would the government employ military force to coerce them back to
+their allegiance?  By what right?  Government is their agent,
+their creature, and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or
+creature.
+
+The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment
+be dissolved.  Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently
+maintained that one generation has no power to bind another; and,
+as if this was not enough, he asserted the right of revolution,
+and gave it as his opinion that in every nation a revolution once
+in every generation is desirable, that is, according to his
+reckoning, once every nineteen years.  The doctrine that one
+generation has no power to bind its successor is not only a
+logical conclusion from the theory that governments derive their
+just powers from the consent of the governed, since a generation
+cannot give its consent before it is born, but is very convenient
+for a nation that has contracted a large national debt; yet,
+perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new
+generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge
+the obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.  No
+man, certainly, can contract for any one but himself; and how
+then can the son be bound, without his own personal or individual
+consent, freely given, by the obligations entered into by his
+father?
+
+The social compact is necessarily limited to the individuals who
+form it, and as necessarily, unless renewed, expires with them.
+It thus creates no state, no political corporation, which
+survives in all its rights and powers, though individuals die.
+The state is on this theory a voluntary association, and in
+principle, except that it is not a secret society, in no respect
+differs from the Carbonari, or the Knights of the Golden Circle.
+When Orsini attempted to execute the sentence of death on the
+Emperor of the French, in obedience to the order of the
+Carbonari, of which the Emperor was a member, he was, if the
+theory of the origin of government in compact be true, no more an
+assassin than was the officer who executed on the gallows the
+rebel spies and incendiaries Beal and Kennedy.
+
+Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no social
+or civil element.  It does not and cannot create society.  It can
+give only an aggregation of individuals, and society is not an
+aggregation nor even an organization of individuals.  It is an
+organism, and individuals live in its life as well as it in
+theirs.  There is a real living solidarity, which makes
+individuals members of the social body, and members one of another.
+There is no society without individuals, and there are no
+individuals without society; but in society there is that which
+is not individual, and is more than all individuals.  The social
+compact is an attempt to substitute for this real living
+solidarity, which gives to society at once unity of life and
+diversity of members, an artificial solidarity, a fictitious
+unity for a real unity, and membership by contract for real
+living membership, a cork leg for that which nature herself gives.
+Real government has its ground in this real living solidarity,
+and represents the social element, which is not individual, but
+above all individuals, as man is above men.  But the theory
+substitutes a simple agency for government, and makes each
+individual its principal.  It is an abuse of language to call
+this agency a government.  It has no one feature or element of
+government.  It has only an artificial unity, based on diversity;
+its authority is only personal, individual, and in no sense a
+public authority, representing a public will, a public right, or
+a public interest.  In no country could government be adopted and
+sustained if men were left to the wisdom or justness of their
+theories, or in the general affairs of life, acted on them.
+Society, and government as representing society, has a real
+existence, life, faculties, and organs of its own, not derived or
+derivable from individuals.  As well might it be maintained that
+the human body consists in and derives all its life from the
+particles of matter it assimilates from its food, and which are
+constantly escaping as to maintain that society derives its life,
+or government its powers, from individuals.  No mechanical
+aggregation of brute matter can make a living body, if there is
+no living and assimilating principle within; and no aggregation
+of individuals, however closely bound together by pacts or oaths,
+can make society where there is no informing social principle
+that aggregates and assimilates them to a living body, or produce
+that mystic existence called a state or commonwealth.
+
+The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the
+nation to be a purely personal affair.  It gives the government
+no territorial status, and clothes it with no territorial rights
+or jurisdiction.  The government that could so originate would be,
+if any thing, a barbaric, not a republican government.  It has
+only the rights conferred on it, surrendered or delegated to it
+by individuals, and therefore, at best, only individual rights.
+Individuals can confer only such rights as they have in the
+supposed state of nature.  In that state there is
+neither private nor public domain.  The earth in
+that state is not property, and is open to the first occupant,
+and the occupant can lay no claim to any more than he actually
+occupies.  Whence, then, does government derive its territorial
+jurisdiction, and its right of eminent domain claimed by all
+national governments?  Whence its title to vacant or unoccupied
+lands?  How does any particular government fix its territorial
+boundaries, and obtain the right to prescribe who may occupy, and
+on what conditions the vacant lands within those boundaries?
+Whence does it get its jurisdiction of navigable rivers, lakes,
+bays, and the seaboard within its territorial limits, as
+appertaining to its domain?  Here are rights that it could not
+have derived from individuals, for individuals never possessed
+them in the so-called state of nature.  The concocters of the
+theory evidently overlooked these rights, or considered them of
+no importance.  They seem never to have contemplated the
+existence of territorial states, or the division of mankind into
+nations fixed to the soil.  They seem not to have supposed the
+earth could be appropriated; and, indeed, many of their followers
+pretend that it cannot be, and that the public lands of a nation
+are open lands, and whoso chooses may occupy them, without leave
+asked of the national authority or granted.  The American people
+retain more than one reminiscence of the nomadic and predatory
+habits of their Teutonic or Scythian ancestors before they
+settled on the banks of the Don or the Danube, on the Northern
+Ocean, in Scania, or came in contact with the Graeco-Roman
+civilization.
+
+Yet mankind are divided into nations, and all civilized nations
+are fixed to the soil.  The territory is defined, and is the
+domain of the state, from which all private proprietors hold
+their title-deeds.  Individual proprietors hold under the state,
+and often hold more, than they occupy; but it retains in all
+private estates the eminent domain, and prohibits the alienation
+of land to one who is not a citizen.  It defends its domain, its
+public unoccupied lauds, and the lands owned by private
+individuals, against all foreign powers.  Now whence, if
+government has only the rights ceded it by individuals, does it
+get this domain, and hold the right to treat settlers on even
+its unoccupied lands as trespassers?  In the state of nature the
+territorial rights of individuals, if any they have, are
+restricted to the portion of land they occupy with their rude
+culture, and with their flocks and herds, and in civilized
+nations to what they hold from the state, and, therefore, the
+right as held and defended by all nations, and without which the
+nation has no status, no fixed dwelling, and is and can be no
+state, could never have been derived from individuals.  The
+earliest notices of Rome show the city in possession of the
+sacred territory, to which the state and all political power are
+attached.  Whence did Rome become a landholder, and the
+governing people a territorial people?  Whence does any nation
+become a territorial nation and lord of the domain?  Certainly
+never by the cession of individuals, and hence no civilized
+government ever did or could originate in the so-called social
+compact.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-CONTINUED.
+
+
+III. The tendency of the last century was to individualism; that
+of the present is to socialism.  The theory of Hobbes, Locke,
+Rousseau, and Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still
+held by many, has latterly been much modified, if not wholly
+transformed.  Sovereignty, it is now maintained, is inherent in
+the people; not individually, indeed, but collectively, or the
+people as society.  The constitution is held not to be simply a
+compact or agreement entered into by the people as individuals
+creating civil society and government, but a law ordained by the
+sovereign people, prescribing the constitution of the state and
+defining its rights and powers.
+
+This transformation, which is rather going on than completed, is,
+under one aspect at least, a progress, or rather a return to the
+sounder principles of antiquity.  Under it government ceases to
+be a mere agency, which must obtain the assassin's consent to be
+hung before it can rightfully hang him, and becomes authority,
+which is one and imperative.  The people taken collectively are
+society, and society is a living organism, not a mere aggregation
+of individuals.  It does not, of course, exist without
+individuals, but it is something more than individuals, and has
+rights not derived from them, and which are paramount to theirs.
+There is more truth, and truth of a higher order, in this than in
+the theory of the social compact.  Individuals, to a certain
+extent, derive their life from God through society, and so far
+they depend on her, and they are hers; she owns them, and has the
+right to do as she will with them.  On this theory the state
+emanates from society, and is supreme.  It coincides with the
+ancient Greek and Roman theory, as expressed by Cicero, already
+cited.  Man is born in society and remains there, and it may be
+regarded as the source of ancient Greek and Roman patriotism,
+which still commands the admiration of the civilized world.  The
+state with Greece and Rome was a living reality, and loyalty a
+religion.  The Romans held Rome to be a divinity, gave her
+statues and altars, and offered her divine worship.  This was
+superstition, no doubt, but it had in it an element of truth.  To
+every true philosopher there is something divine in the state,
+and truth in all theories.  Society stands nearer to God, and
+participates more immediately of the Divine essence, and the
+state is a more lively image of God than the individual.  It was
+man, the generic and reproductive man, not the isolated
+individual, that was created in the image and likeness of his
+Maker.  "And God created man in his own image; in the image of
+God created he him; male and female created he them."
+
+This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it
+enlists in its support the instincts, the intelligence, the
+living forces, and active tendencies of the age.  Kings, kaisers,
+and hierarchies are powerless before it, and war against it in
+vain.  The most they can do is to restrain its excesses, or to
+guard against its abuses.  Its advocates, in returning to it,
+sometimes revive in its name the old pagan superstition.  Not a
+few of the European democrats recognize in the earth, in heaven,
+or in hell, no power superior to the people, and say not only
+people-king but people-God.  They say absolutely, without any
+qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and
+make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in
+religion, philosophy, morals, science, and the arts.  The people
+not only found the state, but also the church.  They inspire or
+reveal the truth, ordain or prohibit worships, judge of
+doctrines, and decide cases of conscience.  Mazzini said , when
+at the bead of the Roman Republic in 1848, the question of
+religion must be remitted to the judgment of the people.  Yet
+this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in all
+civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.
+
+But this theory has its difficulties.  Who are the collective
+people that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign
+people?  The word people is vague, and in itself determines
+nothing.  It may include a larger or a smaller number; it may
+mean the political people, or it may mean simply population; it
+may mean peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as
+distinguished from the nobility; hired laborers or workmen as
+distinguished from their employer, or slaves as distinguished
+from their master or owner.  In which of these senses is the word
+to be taken when it is said, "The people are sovereign?"  The
+people are the population or inhabitants of one and the same
+country.  That is something.  But who or what determines the
+country?  Is the country the whole territory of the globe?  That
+will not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and
+their division into separate nations.  Is the territory
+indefinite or undefined?  Then indefinite or undefined are its
+inhabitants, or the people invested with the rights of society.
+Is it defined and its boundaries fixed?  Who has done it?  The
+people.  But who are the people?  We are as wise as we were at
+starting.  The logicians say that the definition of idem per
+idem, or the same by the same, is simply no definition at all.
+
+The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people
+the sovereign people.  But who are the people constituting the
+nation?  The sovereign people?  This is only to revolve in a
+vicious circle.  The nation is the tribe or the people living
+under the same regimen, and born of the same ancestor, or sprung
+from the same ancestor or progenitor.  But where find a nation in
+this the primitive sense of the word?  Migration, conquest, and
+intermarriage, have so broken up and intermingled the primitive
+races, that it is more than doubtful if a single nation, tribe,
+or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face of the earth.
+A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman, may have
+the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.
+The nation is the people inhabiting the same country, and united
+under one and the same government, it is further answered.  The
+nation, then, is not purely personal, but also territorial.
+Then, again, the question comes up, who or what determines the
+territory?  The government?  But not before it is constituted,
+and it cannot be constituted till its territorial limits are
+determined.  The tribe doubtless occupies territory, but is not
+fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it, and therefore
+is not territorial.  But a nation, in the modern or civilized
+sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its
+jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory
+is determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.
+
+The question is not an idle question.  It is one of great
+practical importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither
+determine who are the sovereign people, nor who are united under
+one and the same government.  Laws have no extra-territorial
+force, and the officer who should attempt to enforce the national
+laws beyond the national territory would be a trespasser.  If the
+limits are undetermined, the government is not territorial, and
+can claim as within its jurisdiction only those who choose to
+acknowledge its authority.  The importance of the question has
+been recently brought home to the American people by the
+secession of eleven or more States from the Union.  Were these
+States a part of the American nation, or were they not?  Was the
+war which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so
+much treasure, a civil war or a foreign war?  Were the
+secessionists traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were
+they patriots fighting for the liberty and independence of their
+country and the right of self-government?  All on both sides
+agreed that the nation is sovereign; the dispute was as to the
+existence of the nation itself, and the extent of its
+jurisdiction.  Doubtless, when a nation has a generally
+recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the
+difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be
+got over; but the question here concerns the institution of
+government, and determining who constitute society and have the
+right to meet in person, or by their delegates in convention,
+to institute it.  This question, so important, and at times so
+difficult, the theory of the origin of government in the people
+collectively, or the nation, does not solve, or furnish any means
+of solving.
+
+But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another,
+and a very grave one, to overcome.  The theory assumes that the
+people collectively, "in their own native right and might," are
+sovereign.  According to it the people are ultimate, and free to
+do whatever they please.  This sacrifices individual freedom.
+The origin of government in a compact entered into by
+individuals, each with all and all with each, sacrificed the
+rights of society, and assumed each individual to be in himself
+an independent sovereignty.  If logically carried out, there
+could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and
+no public authority.  This new theory transfers to society the
+sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts
+social despotism, or the absolutism of the state.  It asserts
+with sufficient energy public authority, or the right of the
+people to govern; but it leaves no space for individual rights,
+which society must recognize, respect, and protect.  This was the
+grand defect of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilization.  The
+historian explores in vain the records of the old Greek and Roman
+republics for any recognition of the rights of individuals not
+held as privileges or concessions from the state.  Society
+recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed over
+individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his
+household, the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over
+his subjects.  The direct and indirect influence of the body of
+freemen admitted to a voice in public affairs, in determining the
+resolutions and action of the state, no doubt tempered in
+practice to some extent the authority of the state, and prevented
+acts of gross oppression; but in theory the state was absolute,
+and the people individually were placed at the mercy of the
+people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the collective
+people.
+
+Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and
+rights of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently
+of society, and not derived from God through the state.  The
+recognition of these rights by modern society is due to
+Christianity: some say to the barbarians, who overthrew the Roman
+empire; but this last opinion is not well founded.  The barbarian
+chiefs and nobles had no doubt a lively sense of personal freedom
+and independence, but for themselves only.  They had no
+conception of personal freedom as a general or universal right,
+and men never obtain universal principles by generalizing
+particulars.  They may give a general truth a particular
+application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a
+particular truth--a general or universal application.  They are
+too good logicians for that.  The barbarian individual freedom
+and personal independence was never generalized into the doctrine
+of the rights of man, any more than the freedom of the master has
+been generalized into the right of his slaves to be free.  The
+doctrine of individual freedom before the state is due to the
+Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and worth of every
+human soul, the accountability to God of each man for himself,
+and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
+rather than men.  The church practically denied the absolutism of
+the state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the
+state, in converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of
+the state authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death
+the profession of the Christian faith.  In this she practically,
+as well as theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused
+into modern society the doctrine that every individual, even the
+lowest and meanest, has rights which the state neither confers
+nor can abrogate; and it will only be by extinguishing in modern
+society the Christian faith, and obliterating all traces of
+Christian civilization, that state absolutism can be revived with
+more than a partial and temporary success.
+
+The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so
+explained as to deny the rights of society, and to become pure
+individualism; but no political system that runs to the opposite
+extreme, and absorbs the individual in the state, stands the
+least chance of any general or permanent success till
+Christianity is extinguished.  Yet the assertion of principles
+which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely harmless,
+even in Christian countries.  Error is never harmless, and only
+truth can give a solid foundation on which to build.
+Individualism and socialism are each opposed to the other, and
+each has only a partial truth.  The state founded on either
+cannot stand, and society will only alternate between the two
+extremes.  To-day it is torn by a revolution in favor of
+socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another in favor of
+individualism, and without effecting any real progress by either
+revolution.  Real progress can be secured only by recognizing and
+building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our
+theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and
+independent of our opinions.
+
+Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth
+or reality.  Society has certain rights over individuals, for she
+is a medium of their communion with God, or through which they
+derive life from God, the primal source of all life; but she is
+not the only medium of man's life.  Man, as was said in the
+beginning, lives by communion with God, and he communes with God
+in the creative act and the Incarnation, through his kind, and,
+through nature.  This threefold communion gives rise to three
+institutions--religion or the church, society or the state, and
+property.  The life that man derives from God through religion
+and property, is not derived from him through society, and
+consequently so much of his life be holds independently of
+society; and this constitutes his rights as a man as
+distinguished from his rights as a citizen.  In relation to
+society, as not held from God through her, these are termed his
+natural rights, which, she must hold inviolable, and government
+protect for every one, whatever his complexion or his social
+position.  These rights--the rights of conscience and the rights
+of property, with all their necessary implications--are
+limitations of the rights of society, and the individual has the
+right to plead them against the state.  Society does not confer
+them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
+sacred and as fundamental as her own.
+
+But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all.  The
+people can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and
+act.  The people are not God, whatever some theorists may
+pretend--are not independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing.
+They are as dependent collectively as individually, and therefore
+can exist and act only as second cause, never as first cause.
+They can, then, even in the limited sphere of their sovereignty,
+be sovereign only in a secondary sense, never absolute sovereign
+in their own independent right.  They are sovereign only to the
+extent to which they impart life to the individual members of
+society, and only in the sense in which she imparts it, or is its
+cause.  She is not its first cause or creator, and is the medial
+cause or medium through which they derive it from God, not its
+efficient cause or primary source.  Society derives her own life
+from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him.  Then she
+is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God.  Her
+dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
+derivative.
+
+This third theory does not err in assuming that the people
+collectively are more than the people individually, or in denying
+society to be a mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and
+no rights but what it derives from them; nor even in asserting
+that the people in the sense of society are sovereign, but in
+asserting that they are sovereign in their own native or
+underived right and might.  Society has not in herself the
+absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
+dominion either of herself or her members.  God gave to man
+dominion over the irrational creation, for he made irrational
+creatures for man; but he never gave him either individually or
+collectively the dominion over the rational creation.  The theory
+that the people are absolutely sovereign in their own independent
+right and might, as some zealous democrats explain it, asserts
+the fundamental principle of despotism, and all despotism is
+false, for it identifies the creature with the Creator.  No
+creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and
+consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign.
+This third theory, therefore, is untenable.
+
+IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers
+they may be called, reject the origin of government in the people
+individually or collectively.  Satisfied that it has never been
+instituted by a voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and
+confounding government as a fact with government as authority,
+maintain that government is a spontaneous development of nature.
+Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee
+constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his dam.  Nature,
+working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops society,
+and society develops government.  That is all the secret.
+Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond
+the simple positive fact, belong to the theological or
+metaphysical stage of the development of nature, but are left
+behind when the race has passed beyond that stage, and has
+reached the epoch of positive science, in which all, except the
+positive fact, is held to be unreal and non-existent.
+Government, like every thing else in the universe, is simply a
+positive development of nature.  Science explains the laws and
+conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin
+or ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world
+of space and time.
+
+These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they
+only oppose theory to theory.  The assertion that reality for the
+human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible
+order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact.
+Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is
+only in the light of principles that facts themselves are
+intelligible.  If the human mind had no science of reality that
+transcends the sensible order, or the positive fact, it could
+have no science at all.  As things exist only in their principles
+or causes, so can they be known only in their principles and
+causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as they
+really exist.  The science that pretends to deduce principles
+from particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of
+reasoning to an order that transcends facts, and in which facts
+have their origin, is undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that
+the positivists are unquestionably right.  But to maintain that
+man has no intelligence of any thing beyond the fact, no
+intuition or intellectual apprehension of its principle or cause,
+is equally chimerical.  The human mind cannot have all science,
+but it has real science as far as it goes, and real science is
+the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
+Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they
+do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not
+penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the
+methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the
+individual fact, it could never know the fact itself.  The error
+of modern philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the
+principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying
+that the human mind has direct and immediate intuition of it.
+
+Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or
+there could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we
+could never assert that development is development, or
+scientifically explain the laws and conditions of development.
+Development is explication, and supposes a germ which precedes
+it, and is not itself a development; and development, however far
+it may be carried, can never do more than realize the
+possibilities of the germ.  Development is not creation, and
+cannot supply its own germ.  That at least must be given by the
+Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.  If authority
+has not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
+spontaneously or otherwise.  All government has a governing will;
+and without a will that commands, there is no government; and
+nature has in her spontaneous developments no will, for she has
+no personality.  Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only
+presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it
+prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law.  An imperative will,
+the will of a superior who has the right to command what reason
+dictates or approves, is essential to government; and that will
+is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in nature.
+So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
+government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development.
+Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is
+the individual man.
+
+No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense
+of the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is
+placed by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be
+confounded with those laws of nature so-called, according to
+which she is productive as second cause, or produces her effects,
+which are not properly laws at all.  Fire burns, water flows,
+rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food nourishes, poisons kill,
+one substance has a chemical affinity for another, the needle
+points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said; that is, the
+effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural force.
+Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
+herself.  The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical
+law, is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on
+all moral creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason
+and free-will, and is called natural because promulgated in
+natural reason, or the reason common and essential to all moral
+creatures.  This is the moral law.  It is what the French call le
+droit naturell, natural right, and, as the theologians teach us,
+is the transcript of the eternal law, the eternal will or reason
+of God.  It is the foundation of all law, and all acts of a state
+that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains, violences
+rather than laws.  The moral law is no development of nature, for
+it is above nature, and is imposed on nature.  The only
+development there is about it is in our understanding of it.
+
+There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered
+as creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in
+successive developments.  Hence the origin of space and time.
+There would have been no space if there had been no external
+creation, and no time if the creation had been completed
+externally at once, as it was in relation to the Creator.  Ideal
+space is simply the ability of God to externize his creative act,
+and actual space is the relation of coexistence in the things
+created; ideal time is the ability of God to create existences
+with the capacity of being completed by successive developments,
+and actual time is the relation of these in the order of
+succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated
+development ceases, and time is no more.  In relation to himself
+the Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with
+him there is no time, for there is no succession.  But in
+relation to itself creation is incomplete, and there is room for
+development, which may be continued till the whole possibility of
+creation is actualized.  Here is the foundation of what is true
+in the modern doctrine of progress.  Man is progressive, because
+the possibilities of his nature are successively unfolded and
+actualized.
+
+Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be
+scientifically ascertained and defined.  All generation is
+development, as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual.
+But everything is developed in its own order, and after its kind.
+The Darwinian theory of the development of species is not
+sustained by science. The development starts from the germ, and
+in the germ is given the law or principle of the development.
+>From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or the
+linden.  Every kind generates its kind, never another.  But no
+development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result
+alone of the inherent energy or force of the germ developed.
+There is not only a solidarity of race, but in some sense of all
+races, or species; all created things are bound to their Creator,
+and to one another.  One and the same law or principle of life
+pervades all creation, binding the universe together in a unity
+that copies or imitates the unity of the Creator.  No creature is
+isolated from the rest, or absolutely independent of others.  All
+are parts of one stupendous whole, and each depends on the whole,
+and the whole on each, and each on each.  All creatures are
+members of one body, and members one of another.  The germ of the
+oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can never
+grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself
+in motion.  Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is
+absolutely deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will
+you watch for its germination.  Germinate it cannot without some
+external influence, or communion, so to speak, with the elements
+from which it derives its sustenance and support.
+
+There can be no absolutely spontaneous development.  All things
+are doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it
+is an active force of some sort; but only God himself alone
+suffices for his own activity.  All created things are dependent,
+have not their being in themselves, and are real only as they
+participate, through the creative act, of the Divine being.  The
+germ can no more be developed than it could exist without God,
+and no more develop itself than it could create itself.  What is
+called the law of development is in the germ; but that law or
+force can operate only in conjunction with another force or other
+forces.  All development, as all growth, is by accretion or
+assimilation.  The assimilating force is, if you will, in the
+germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
+Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
+supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and
+knows that to raise a crop of corn, be must plant the seed in a
+soil duly prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for
+its germination, growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening.  In
+all created things, in all things not complete in themselves, in
+all save God, in whom there is no development possible, for He
+is, as say the schoolmen, most pure act, in whom there is no
+unactualized possibility, the same law holds good.  Development
+is always the resultant of two factors, the one the thing itself,
+the other some external force co-operating with it, exciting
+it, and aiding it to act.
+
+Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient
+and adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can
+begin the Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural
+when the end is supernatural.  The principle of life in all
+orders is the same, and human activity no more suffices for
+itself in one order than in another.
+
+Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a
+civilized state without communion in some form with a people
+already civilized, and why there is no moral or intellectual
+development and progress without education and instruction,
+consequently without instructors and educators.  Hence the value
+of tradition; and hence, as the first man could not instruct
+himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper philosophy than is
+dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain that God himself
+was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a full-grown
+man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full
+activity.  Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always
+contain some elements of truth, however they may distort,
+mutilate, or travesty them, make the gods the first teachers of
+the human race, and ascribe to their instruction even the most
+simple and ordinary arts of every-day life. The gods teach men to
+plough, to plant, to reap, to work in iron, to erect a shelter
+from the storm, and to build a fire to warm them and to cook
+their food.  The common sense, as well as the common traditions
+of mankind, refuses to accept the doctrine that men are developed
+without foreign aid, or progressive without divine assistance.
+Nature of herself can no more develop government than it can
+language.  There can be no language without society, and no
+society without language.  There can be no government without
+society, and no society without government of some sort.
+
+But even if nature could spontaneously develop herself, she could
+never develop an institution that has the right to govern, for
+she has not herself that right.  Nature is not God, has not
+created us, therefore has not the right of property in us.  She
+is not and cannot be our sovereign.  We belong not to her, nor
+does she belong to herself, for she is herself creature, and
+belongs to her Creator.  Not being in herself sovereign, she
+cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she develop
+government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for
+government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is
+distinct from that which is governed; but natural developments
+are nature, and indistinguishable from her.  The governor and the
+governed, the restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be
+identical.  Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction
+in terms.  When an individual is said to govern himself, he is
+never understood to govern himself in the sense in which be is
+governed.  He by his reason and will governs or restrains his
+appetites and passions.  It is man as spirit governing man as
+flesh, the spiritual mind governing the carnal mind.
+
+Natural developments cannot in all cases be even allowed to take
+their own course without injury to nature herself.  "Follow
+nature" is an unsafe maxim, if it means, leave nature to develop
+herself as she will, and follow thy natural inclinations.  Nature
+is good, but inclinations are frequently bad.  All our appetites
+and passions are given us for good, for a purpose useful and
+necessary to individual and social life, but they become morbid
+and injurious if indulged without restraint.  Each has its
+special object, and naturally seeks it exclusively, and thus
+generates discord and war in the individual, which immediately
+find expression in society, and also in the state, if the state
+be a simple natural development.  The Christian maxim, Deny
+thyself, is far better than the Epicurean maxim, Enjoy thyself,
+for there is no real enjoyment without self-denial.  There is
+deep philosophy in Christian asceticism, as the Positivists
+themselves are aware, and even insist.  But Christian asceticism
+aims not to destroy nature, as voluptuaries pretend, but to
+regulate, direct, and restrain its abnormal developments for its
+own good.  It forces nature in her developments to submit to a
+law which is not in her, but above her.  The Positivists pretend
+that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that
+cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and
+restrains natural development.
+
+The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of
+nature, and at another the law of nature with nature herself, and
+take what is called the natural law to be a natural development.
+Here is their mistake, as it is the mistake of all who accept
+naturalistic theories.  Society, no doubt, is authorized by the
+law of nature to institute and maintain government.  But the law
+of nature is not a natural development, nor is it in nature, or
+any part of nature.  It is not a natural force which operates in
+nature, and which is the developing principle of nature.  Do they
+say reason is natural, and the law of nature is only reason?
+This is not precisely the fact.  The natural law is law proper,
+and is reason only in the sense that reason includes both
+intellect and will, and nobody can pretend that nature in her
+spontaneous developments acts from intelligence and volition.
+Reason, as the faculty of knowing, is subjective and natural; but
+in the sense in which it is coincident with the natural law, it
+is neither subjective nor natural, but objective and divine, and
+is God affirming himself and promulgating his law to his
+creature, man.  It is, at least, an immediate participation of
+the divine by which He reveals himself and His will to the human
+understanding, and is not natural, but supernatural, in the sense
+that God himself is supernatural.  This is wherefore reason is
+law, and every man is bound to submit or conform to reason.
+
+That legitimate governments are instituted under the natural law
+is frankly conceded, but this is by no means the concession of
+government as a natural development.  The reason and will of
+which the natural law is the expression are the reason and will
+of God.  The natural law is the divine law as much as the
+revealed law itself, and equally obligatory.  It is not a natural
+force developing itself in nature, like the law of generation,
+for instance, and therefore proceeding from God as first cause,
+but it proceeds from God as final cause, and is, therefore,
+theological, and strictly a moral law, founding moral rights and
+duties.  Of course, all morality and all legitimate government
+rest on this law, or, if you will, originate in it.  But not
+therefore in nature, but in the Author of nature.  The authority
+is not the authority of nature, but of Him who holds nature in
+the hollow of His hand.
+
+V. In the seventeenth century a class of political writers who
+very well understood that no creature, no man, no number of men,
+not even, nature herself, can be inherently sovereign, defended
+the opinion that governments are founded, constituted, and
+clothed with their authority by the direct and express
+appointment of God himself.  They denied that rulers hold their
+power from the nation; that, however oppressive may be their
+rule, that they are justiciable by any human tribunal, or that
+power, except by the direct judgment of God, is amissible.  Their
+doctrine is known in history as the doctrine of "the divine right
+of kings, and passive obedience."  All power, says St. Paul, is
+from God, and the powers that be are ordained of God, and to
+resist them is to resist the ordination of God.  They must be
+obeyed for conscience' sake.
+
+It would, perhaps, be rash to say that this doctrine had never
+been broached before the seventeenth century, but it received in
+that century, and chiefly in England, its fullest and most
+systematic developments.  It was patronized by the Anglican
+divines, asserted by James I. of England, and lost the Stuarts
+the crown of three kingdoms.  It crossed the Channel, into
+France, where it found a few hesitating and stammering defenders
+among Catholics, under Louis XIV., but it has never been very
+generally held, though it has had able and zealous supporters.
+In England it was opposed by all the Presbyterians, Puritans,
+Independents, and Republicans, and was forgotten or abandoned by
+the Anglican divines themselves in the Revolution of 1688, that
+expelled James II. and crowned William and Mary.  It was ably
+refuted by the Jesuit Suarez in his reply to a Remonstrance for
+the Divine Right of Kings by the James I.; and a Spanish monk who
+had asserted it in Madrid, under Philip II., was compelled by the
+Inquisition to retract it publicly in the place where he had
+asserted it.  All republicans reject it, and the Church has never
+sanctioned it.  The Sovereign Pontiffs have claimed and exercised
+the right to deprive princes of their principality, and to
+absolve their subjects from the oath of fidelity.  Whether the
+Popes rightly claimed and exercised that power is not now the
+question; but their having claimed and exercised it proves that
+the Church does not admit the inamissibility of power and passive
+obedience; for the action of the Pope was judicial, not
+legislative.  The Pope has never claimed the right to depose a
+prince till by his own act he has, under the moral law or the
+constitution of his state, forfeited his power, nor to absolve
+subjects from their allegiance till their oath, according to its
+true intent and meaning, has ceased to bind.  If the Church has
+always asserted with the Apostle there is no power but from
+God--non est potestas nisi a Deo--she has always through her
+doctors maintained that it is a trust to be exercised for the
+public good, and is forfeited when persistently exercised in a
+contrary sense.  St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Suarez all
+maintain that unjust laws are violences rather than laws, and do
+not oblige, except in charity or prudence, and that the republic
+may change its magistrates, and even its constitution, if it sees
+proper to do so.
+
+That God, as universal Creator, is Sovereign Lord and proprietor
+of all created things or existences, visible or invisible, is
+certain; for the maker has the absolute right to the thing made;
+it is his, and he may do with it as he will.  As he is sole
+creator, he alone hath dominion; and as he is absolute creator,
+he has absolute dominion over all the things which he has made.
+The guaranty against oppression is his own essential nature, is
+in the plenitude of his own being, which is the plenitude of
+wisdom and goodness.  He cannot contradict himself, be other than
+he is, or act otherwise than according to his own essential
+nature.  As he is, in his own eternal and immutable essence,
+supreme reason and supreme good, his dominion must always in its
+exercise be supremely good and supremely reasonable, therefore
+supremely just and equitable.  From him certainly is all power;
+he is unquestionably King of kings, and Lord of lords.  By him
+kings reign and magistrates decree just things.  He may, at his
+will, set up or pull down kings, rear or overwhelm empires,
+foster the infant colony, and make desolate the populous city.
+All this is unquestionably true, and a simple dictate of reason
+common to all men.  But in what sense is it true?  Is it true in
+a supernatural sense?  Or is it true only in the sense that it is
+true that by him we breathe, perform any or all of our natural
+functions, and in him live, and move, and have our being?
+
+Viewed in their first cause, all things are the immediate
+creation of God, and are supernatural, and from the point of view
+of the first cause the Scriptures usually speak, for the great
+purpose and paramount object of the sacred writers, as of
+religion itself, is to make prominent the fact that God is
+universal creator, and supreme governor, and therefore the first
+and final cause of all things.  But God creates second causes, or
+substantial existences, capable themselves of acting and
+producing effects in a secondary sense, and hence he is said to
+be causa causarum, cause of causes.  What is done by these second
+causes or creatures is done eminently by him, for they exist only
+by his creative act, and produce only by virtue of his active
+presence, or effective concurrence.  What he does through them or
+through their agency is done by him, not immediately, but
+mediately, and is said to be done naturally, as what he does
+immediately is said to be done supernaturally.  Natural is what
+God does through second causes, which he creates; supernatural is
+that which he does by himself alone, without their intervention
+or agency.  Sovereignty, or the right to govern, is in him, and
+he may at his will delegate it to men either mediately or
+immediately, by a direct and express appointment, or mediately
+through nature.  In the absence of all facts proving its
+delegation direct and express, it must be assumed to be mediate,
+through second causes.  The natural is always to be presumed, and
+the supernatural is to be admitted only on conclusive proof.
+
+The people of Israel had a supernatural vocation, and they
+received their law, embracing their religious and civil
+constitution and their ritual directly from God at the hand of
+Moses, and various individuals from time to time appear to have
+been specially called to be their judges, rulers, or kings.  Saul
+was so called, and so was David. David and his line appear, also,
+to have been called not only to supplant Saul and his line, but
+to have been supernaturally invested with the kingdom forever;
+but it does not appear that the royal power with which David and
+his line were invested was inamissible.  They lost it in the
+Babylonish captivity, and never afterwards recovered it.  The
+Asmonean princes were of another line, and when our Lord came the
+sceptre was in the hands of Herod, an Idumean Or Edomite.  The
+promise made, to David and his house is generally held by
+Christian commentators to have received its fulfilment in the
+everlasting spiritual royalty of the Messiah, sprung through Mary
+from David's line.
+
+The Christian Church is supernaturally constituted and
+supernaturally governed, but the persons selected to exercise
+powers supernaturally defined, from the Sovereign Pontiff down to
+the humblest parish priest are selected and inducted into office
+through human agency.  The Gentiles very generally claimed to
+have received their laws from the gods, but it does not appear,
+save in exceptional cases, that they claimed that their princes
+were designated and held their powers by the direct and express
+appointment of the god.  Save in the case of the Jews, and that
+of the Church, there is no evidence that any particular
+government exists or ever has existed by direct or express
+appointment, or otherwise than by the action of the Creator
+through second causes, or what is called his ordinary providence.
+Except David and his line, there is no evidence of the express
+grant by the Divine Sovereign to any individual or family, class
+or caste of the government of any nation or country.  Even those
+Christian princes who professed to reign "by the grace of God,"
+never claimed that they received their principalities from God
+otherwise than through his ordinary providence, and meant by it
+little more than an acknowledgment of their dependence on him,
+their obligation to use their power according to his law and
+their accountability to him for the use they make of it.
+
+The doctrine is not favorable to human liberty, for it recognizes
+no rights of man in face of civil society.  It consecrates
+tyranny, and makes God the accomplice of the tyrant, if we
+suppose all governments have actually existed by his express
+appointment.  It puts the king in the place of God, and requires
+us to worship in him the immediate representative of the Divine
+Being.  Power is irresponsible and inamissible, and however it
+may be abused, or however corrupt and oppressive may be its
+exercise, there is no human redress.  Resistance to power is
+resistance to God.  There is nothing for the people but passive
+obedience and unreserved submission.  The doctrine, in fact,
+denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in
+the management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human
+activity.  It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes
+power an hereditary and indefeasible right, not a trust which he
+who holds it may forfeit, and of which he may be deprived if he
+abuses it.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.
+
+
+VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the
+direct and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as
+to mean that civil authority is derived from God through the
+spiritual authority.  The patriarch combined in his person both
+authorities, and was in his own household both priest and king,
+and so originally was in his own tribe the chief, and in his
+kingdom the king.  When the two offices became separated is not
+known.  In the time of Abraham they were still united.
+Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the
+earliest historical records of kings present them as offering
+sacrifices.  Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well
+as Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were
+held to be inseparable, but because they were both conferred on
+the same person by the republic.  In Egypt, in the time of Moses,
+the royal authority and the priestly were separated and held by
+different persons.  Moses, in his legislation for his nation,
+separated them, and instituted a sacerdotal order or caste.  The
+heads of tribes and the heads of families are, under his law,
+princes, but not priests, and the priesthood is conferred on and
+restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and more especially the
+family of his own brother Aaron.
+
+The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly,
+and in all primitive nations with a separate, organized
+priesthood, whether a true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is
+held to be above the king, elects or establishes the law by which
+is selected the temporal chief, and inducts him into his office,
+as if he received his authority from God through the priesthood.
+The Christian priesthood is not a caste, and is transmitted by
+the election of grace, not as with the Israelites and all
+sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation.  Like Him whose
+priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order
+of Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father
+or mother of the priestly line.  But in being priests after the
+order of Melchisedech, they are both priests and kings, as
+Melchisedech was, and as was our Lord himself, to whom was given
+by his Father all power in heaven and in earth.  The Pope, or
+Supreme Pontiff, is the vicar of our Lord on earth, his
+representative--the representative not only of him who is our
+invisible High-Priest, but of him who is King of kings and Lord
+of lords, therefore of both the priestly and the kingly power.
+Consequently, no one can have any mission to govern in the state
+any more than in the church, unless derived from God directly or
+indirectly through the Pope or Supreme Pontiff.  Many theologians
+and canonists in the Middle Ages so held, and a few perhaps hold
+so still.  The bulls and briefs of several Popes, as Gregory VII.,
+Innocent Ill., Gregory IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII.,
+have the appearance of favoring it.
+
+At one period the greater part of the medieval kingdoms and
+principalities were fiefs of the Holy See, and recognized the
+Holy Father as their suzerain.  The Pope revived the imperial
+diunity in the person of Charlemagne, and none could claim that
+dignity in the Western world unless elected and crowned by him,
+that is, unless elected directly by the Pope or by electors
+designated by him, and acting under his authority.  There can be
+no question that the spiritual is superior to the temporal, and
+that the temporal is bound in the very nature of things to conform
+to the spiritual, and any law enacted by the civil power in
+contravention of the law of God is null and void from the
+beginning.  This is what Mr. Seward meant by the higher law, a
+law higher even than the Constitution of the United States.
+Supposing this higher law, and supposing that kings and princes
+hold from God through the spiritual society, it is very evident
+that the chief of that society would have the right to deprive
+them, and to absolve their subjects, as on several occasions he
+actually has done.
+
+But this theory has never been a dogma of the Church, nor, to any
+great extent, except for a brief period, maintained by
+theologians or canonists.  The Pope conferred the imperial
+dignity on Charlemagne and his successors, but not the civil
+power, at least out of the Pope's own temporal dominions.  The
+emperor of Germany was at first elected by the Pope, and
+afterwards by hereditary electors designated or accepted by him,
+but the king of the Germans with the full royal authority could
+be elected and enthroned without the papal intervention or
+permission.  The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples,
+Aragon, Muscovy, England, and other European states, was by
+virtue of feudal relations, not by virtue of the spiritual authority
+of the Holy See or the vicarship of the Holy Father.  The right
+to govern under feudalism was simply an estate, or property; and
+as the church could acquire and hold property, nothing prevented
+her holding fiefs, or her chief from being suzerain.  The
+expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in connection
+with the special relations existing between the Pope and emperor
+in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as their
+feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
+rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
+countenance to the theory in question.
+
+These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain
+temporal rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy,
+as he has still in what is left him of the States of the Church;
+but they were exceptional or accidental relations, not the
+universal and essential relations between the church and the
+state.  The rights that grew out of these relations were real
+rights, sacred and inviolable, but only where and while the
+relations subsisted.  They, for the most part, grew out of the
+feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its barbarian
+conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order in
+which they originated.  Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
+rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or
+right to govern from God through her; but implied that their
+persons were sacred, and that violence to them would be
+sacrilege; that they held the Christian faith, and acknowledged
+themselves bound to protect it, and to govern their subjects
+justly, according to the law of God.
+
+The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of
+the two powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is
+chief of the spiritual society, his temporal principality, no
+theologian or canonist of the slightest respectability would
+argue that he derives his rights as temporal sovereign from his
+rights as pontiff.  His rights as pontiff depend on the express
+appointment of God; his rights as temporal prince are derived
+from the same source from which other princes derive their
+rights, and are held by the same tenure.  Hence canonists have
+maintained that the subjects of other states may even engage in
+war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity to
+him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
+
+The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but
+recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not
+derive from God through her.  St. Paul enjoins obedience to the
+Roman emperors for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that
+infidels and heretics may have legitimate government; and if she
+has ever denied the right of any infidel or heretical prince, it
+has been on the ground that the constitution and laws of his
+principality require him to profess and protect the Catholic
+faith.  She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic state no more
+than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has not
+condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our
+struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks
+against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the
+doctrine of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable
+doubt whether they were really rebels fighting against their
+legitimate sovereign or not.
+
+No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately
+from God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the
+state derives its authority only mediately from him, in a natural
+mode, she asserts the superiority of her authority, and that, in
+case of conflict between the two powers, the civil must yield.
+But this is only saying that supernatural is above natural.
+But--and this is the important point--she does not teach, nor
+permit the faithful to hold, that the supernatural abrogates the
+natural, or in any way supersedes it.  Grace, say the
+theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.  The
+church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it,
+elevates it, and is its firmest support.
+
+VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin,
+Suarez, and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive
+their power from God through the people, or that the people,
+though not the source, are the medium of all political authority,
+and therefore rulers are accountable for the use they make of
+their power to both God and the people.
+
+This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting
+sovereignty in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a
+particular individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from
+it, as democracy is commonly explained, in understanding by the
+people, the people collectively, not individually--the organic
+people, or people fixed to a given territory, not the people as a
+mere population--the people in the republican sense of the word
+nation, not in the barbaric or despotic sense; and in deriving
+the sovereignty from God, from whom is all power, and except from
+whom there is and can be no power, instead of asserting it as the
+underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own
+native right and might."  The people not being God, and being
+only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
+sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.  It asserts the
+divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin.
+But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal
+rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to
+govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but
+always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no
+government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate
+government.  Every such government is founded on the assumption
+that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the
+fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.
+
+The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by
+Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the
+political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers.
+Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some
+modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast
+losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government
+as they were the origin of man himself.
+
+Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the
+most faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the
+conception of creation, and never gets above that of generation
+and formation.  Things are produced by the Divine Being
+impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a
+pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.  Aristotle teaches
+substantially the same doctrine.  Things eternally exist as
+matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
+unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say,
+from materia informis to materia formata.  Even the Christian
+Platonists and Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation;
+they assert it, indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of
+revelation, not as a fact of science; and hence it is that their
+theology and their philosophy never thoroughly harmonize, or at
+least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
+
+Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were
+pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an
+emanation from God.  They had no proper conception of Providence,
+or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as
+modern physicists say, natural laws.  If they recognized the
+action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural or miraculous
+intervention of some god.  They saw no divine intervention in any
+thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws.
+Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of
+its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
+Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
+themselves.  Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
+government, or civil authority, without supposing it
+supernaturally founded, and excluding all human and natural
+agencies from its institution.  Their writings may be studied
+with advantage on the constitution of the state, on the practical
+workings of different forms of government, as well as on the
+practical administration of affairs, but never on the origin of
+the state, and the real ground of its authority.
+
+The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches
+that there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil
+obedience as a religious duty.  Conscience is accountable to God
+alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human
+origin, could not bind it.  Yet Christianity makes the civil law,
+within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the
+divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not
+blameless before the state.  No man performs faithfully his
+religious duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the
+law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and
+enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to
+the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
+not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes
+enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or
+the equally important duty of taking care of themselves.  But by
+asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity
+consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious
+character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection,
+rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree,
+sins against God as well as crimes against the state.  For the
+same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
+people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
+society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.
+
+After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
+recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
+powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the
+divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against
+the church with most disastrous consequences.  While the Roman
+Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as
+the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his
+authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the
+Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the
+Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence.
+But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his possessions in
+Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by the
+barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the
+Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the
+emperor, and owed him no civil allegiance.  He became civilly
+independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations
+with it.  To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears
+never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly
+asserted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual
+independence.
+
+This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who
+pretended to be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West,
+and called their empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and
+maintained that the Pope owed them civil allegiance, or that, in
+temporals, the emperor was the Pope's superior.  If, said the
+emperor, or his lawyers for him, the civil power is from God, as
+it must be, since non est potestas nisi a Deo, the state stands
+on the same footing with the church, and the imperial power
+emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
+emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in
+spirituals, and as the emperor is subject to the pope in
+spirituals, so must the Pope be subject to the emperor in
+temporals.  As at the time when the dispute arose, the temporal
+interests of churchmen were so interwoven with their spiritual
+rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted practically to
+the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
+ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in
+the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The
+Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and
+everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order
+is the divine sovereignty itself.  Always and everywhere, then,
+is the Pope independent of the emperor, his superior, and to
+subject him in any thing to the emperor would be as repugnant to
+reason as to subject the soul to the body, the spirit to the
+flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.
+
+If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
+imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the
+church, the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and
+civil rulers would have no functions but to do the bidding of the
+clergy.  It would establish a complete theocracy, or, rather,
+clerocracy, of all possible governments the government the most
+odious to mankind, and the most hostile to social progress.  Even
+the Jews could not, or would not, endure it, and prayed God to
+give them a king, that they might be like other nations.
+
+In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and
+distinctly perceived the true state of the question, and each was
+partly right and partly wrong.  The imperialists wanted room for
+the free activity of civil society, the church wanted to
+establish in that society the supremacy of the moral order, or
+the law of God, without which governments can have no stability,
+and society no real well-being.  The real solution of the
+difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine of the church
+herself, and had been given time and again by her most approved
+theologians.  The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
+society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely
+because he represents a superior order, but because the church,
+of which he is the visible chief, is a supernatural institution,
+and holds immediately from God; whereas civil society,
+represented by the emperor, holds from God only mediately,
+through second causes, or the people.  Yet, though derived from
+God only through the people, civil authority still holds from God,
+and derives its right from Him through another channel than the
+church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
+sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must
+recognize and respect.  This she herself teaches in teaching that
+even infidels, as we have seen, may have legitimate government,
+and since, though she interprets and applies the law of God, both
+natural and revealed, she makes neither.
+
+Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their
+false charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely
+theocratic or clerocratic government, and finding themselves
+unable to place the representative of the civil society on the
+same level with the representative of the spiritual, or to
+emancipate the state from the law of God while they conceded the
+divine origin or right of government, they sought to effect its
+independence by asserting for it only a natural or purely human
+origin.  For nearly two centuries the most popular and
+influential writers on government have rejected the divine origin
+and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the state.
+They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
+to derive authority from man alone.  They have not only separated
+the state from the church as an external corporation, but from
+God as its internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the
+state of her sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience,
+scoffed at loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil
+authority, but what is called "the right of insurrection."  Under
+their teaching the age sympathizes not with authority in its
+efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who
+conspire against it--the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists
+seeking its destruction.  The established government that seeks
+to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel
+obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic, tyrannical,
+oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God, and a
+wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
+not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat.
+There is hardly a government now in the civilized world that can
+sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to
+overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracy
+against it.
+
+This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the
+logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on
+atheistical principles.  Unless founded on the divine sovereignty,
+authority can sustain itself only by force, for political atheism
+recognizes no right but might.  No doubt the politicians have
+sought an atheistical, or what is the same thing, a purely human,
+basis for government, in order to secure an open field for human
+freedom and activity, or individual or social progress.  The end
+aimed at has been good, laudable even, but they forgot that
+freedom is possible only with authority that protects it against
+license as well as against despotism, and that there can be no
+progress where there is nothing that is not progressive.  In
+civil society two things are necessary--stability and movement.
+The human is the element of movement, for in it are possibilities
+that can be only successively actualized.  But the element of
+stability can be found only in the divine, in God, in whom there
+is no unactualized possibility, who, therefore, is immovable,
+immutable, and eternal.  The doctrine that derives authority from
+God through the people, recognizes in the state both of these
+elements, and provides alike for stability and progress.
+
+This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order
+of things.  It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in
+the real order.  It only asserts for civil government the
+relation to God which nature herself holds to him, which the
+entire universe holds to the Creator.  Nothing in man, in nature,
+in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of God,
+for nothing exists without that act.  That God "in the beginning
+created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science
+as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology.  God
+and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though
+distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
+inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our
+being."  All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and
+exist only as through that act they participate of his being.
+Through that act he is immanent as first cause in all creatures
+and in every act of every creature.  The creature deriving from
+his creative act can no more continue to exist than it could
+begin to exist without it.  It is as bad philosophy as theology,
+to suppose that God created the universe, endowed it with certain
+laws of development or activity, wound it up, gave it a jog, set
+it agoing, and then left it to go of itself.  It cannot go of
+itself, because it does not exist of itself.  It did not merely
+not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
+creative act.  Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather,
+no philosopher at all.  Providence is as necessary as creation,
+or rather, Providence is only continuous creation, the creative
+act not suspended or discontinued, or not passing over from the
+creature and returning to God.
+
+Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can
+continue to exist, act, or live only by participating through it
+of his divine being.  There is, therefore , something of divinity,
+so to speak, in every creature, and therefore it is that God is
+worshipped in his works without idolatry.  But he creates
+substantial existences capable of acting as second causes.  Hence,
+in all living things there is in their life a divine element and
+a natural element; in what is called human life, there are the
+divine and the human, the divine as first and the human as second
+cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great Christian
+theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
+government.  Government cannot exist without the efficacious
+presence of God any more than man himself, and men might as well
+attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state
+without God.  A government founded on atheistical principles were
+less than a castle in the air.  It would have nothing to rest on,
+would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision,"
+and they who imagine that they really do exclude God from their
+politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles
+which, though they know it not, are God.  What they call abstract
+principles, or abstract forms of reason, without which there were
+no logic, are not abstract, but the real, living God himself.
+Hence government, like man himself, participates of the divine
+being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the same
+time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
+authority with freedom, and stability with progress.
+
+The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
+inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to
+Him for it.  It is not their own.  If it were their own they
+might do with it as they pleased, and no one would have any right
+to call them to an account; but holding it as a trust from God,
+they are under his law, and bound to exercise it as that law
+prescribes.  Civil rulers, holding their authority from God
+through the people, are accountable for it both to Him and to
+them.  If they abuse it they are justiciable by the people and
+punishable by God himself.
+
+Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad
+government, or what in modern times is called the responsibility
+of power.  At the same time the state is guarantied against
+sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, by the elevation
+of the civic virtues to the rank of religious, virtues, and
+making loyalty a matter of conscience.  Religion is brought to
+the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign auxiliary, but as
+integral in the political order itself.  Religion sustains the
+state, not because it externally commands us to obey the higher
+powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because it
+trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
+resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but
+because it and the state are in the same order, and inseparable,
+though distinct, parts of one and the same whole.  The church and
+the state, as corporations or external governing bodies, are
+indeed separate in their spheres, and the church does not absorb
+the state, nor does the state the church; but both are from God,
+and both work to the same end, and when each is rightly
+understood there is no antithesis or antagonism between them.
+Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in serving the
+church.  He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his country
+ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith.  Civic
+virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues
+without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who
+loves not his brother does or can love God.
+
+The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because
+it has not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and
+the via inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the
+nation, at its command.  The individual has, indeed, only moral
+guaranties against the abuse of power by the sovereign people,
+which may no doubt sometimes prove insufficient.  But moral
+guaranties are always better than none, and there are none where
+the people are held to be sovereign in their own native right and
+might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside of the
+constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
+since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
+criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
+infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
+against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what
+they please, they can do no wrong.  This would place the
+individual at the mercy of the state, and deprive him of all
+right to complain, however oppressed or cruelly treated.  This
+would establish the absolute despotism of the state, and deny
+every thing like the natural rights of man, or individual and
+personal freedom, as has already been shown.  Now as men do take
+part in government, and as men, either individually or
+collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never
+to be expected, under any possible constitution or form of
+government, that authority will always be wisely and justly
+exercised, that wrong will ever be done, and the rights of
+individuals never in any instance be infringed; but with the
+clear understanding that all power is of God, that the political
+sovereignty is vested in the people or the collective body, that
+the civil rulers hold from God through them and are responsible
+to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is all the
+guaranty against the abuse of power by the, nation, the political
+or organic people, that the nature of the case admits.  The
+nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you
+get in the government all the available wisdom and virtue the
+nation has, and more is never, under any form or constitution of
+government, practicable or to be expected,
+
+It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king
+reigns, not governs."  The people, though sovereign under God,
+are not the government.  The government is in their name and by
+virtue of authority delegated from God through them, but they are
+not it, are not their own ministers.  It is only when the people
+forget this and undertake to be their own ministers and to manage
+their own affairs immediately by themselves instead of selecting
+agents to do it for them, and holding their agents to a strict
+account for their management, that they are likely to abuse their
+power or to sanction injustice.  The nation may be misled or
+deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular courtiers, but
+as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all natural
+rights.  The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak in
+their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.
+L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France,
+and while that was conceded the French nation could have in its
+government no more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at
+least no more than he could appreciate.  And under his government
+France was made responsible for many deeds that the nation would
+never have sanctioned, if it bad been recognized as the
+depositary of the national sovereignty, or as the French state,
+and answerable to God for the use it made of political power, or
+the conduct of its government.
+
+But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force
+in the nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong,
+for if the sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can
+rightly command or authorize the employment of force, and all
+commissions must run in its name.  Written constitutions alone
+will avail little, for they emanate from the people, who can
+disregard them, if they choose, and alter or revoke them at will.
+The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the state must after
+all be on moral guaranties.  In the very nature of the case there
+are and can be no other.  But these, placed in a clear light,
+with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found
+insufficient.  Hence the necessity for the protection, not of
+authority simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the
+liberty of religion and intelligence in the nation, of the
+general understanding that the nation holds its power to govern
+as a trust from God, and that to God through the people all civil
+rulers are strictly responsible.  Let the mass of the people in
+any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism of atheism, or
+lose themselves in that supreme sophism called pantheism, the
+grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism, and
+liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty,
+and perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among
+savages, would be lost and irrecoverable.
+
+But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of
+the case.  It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the
+divine origin of government in the sense that the origin of
+nature is divine; it derives it from God through the people,
+collectively, or as society, and therefore concedes it a natural,
+human, and social element, which distinguishes it from pure
+theocracy.  It, however, does not explain how authority comes
+from God to the people.  The ruler, king, prince, or emperor,
+holds from God through the people, but how do the people
+themselves hold from God?  Mediately or immediately?  If
+mediately, what is the medium?  Surely not the people themselves.
+The people can no more be the medium than the principle of their
+own sovereignty. If immediately, then God governs in them as he
+does in the church, and no man is free to think or act contrary
+to popular opinion, or in any case to question the wisdom or
+justice of any of the acts of the state, which is arriving at
+state absolutism by another process.  Besides, this would
+theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all human
+intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall
+into either pantheism or atheism.
+
+VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority,
+is derived by the collective people or society, from God through
+the law of nature.  Rulers hold from God through the people or
+nation, and the people or nation hold from God through the
+natural law.  How nations are founded or constituted, or a
+particular people becomes a sovereign political people, invested
+with the rights of society, will be considered in following
+chapters.  Here it suffices to say that supposing a political
+people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the community, not
+supernaturally, or by an external supernatural appointment, as
+the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural law, or law
+by which God governs the whole moral creation.
+
+They who assert the origin of government in nature are right, so
+far as they derive it from God through the law of nature, and
+are wrong only when they understand by the law of nature the
+physical force or forces of nature, which are not laws in the
+primary and proper sense of the term.  The law of nature is not
+the order or rule of the divine action in nature which is
+rightfully called providence, but is, as has been said, law in
+its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of nature,
+as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his
+creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is
+called natural, because promulgated through the reason common to
+all men.  Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first
+man, supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and
+confirmed by Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian
+code itself.  Man needs even yet instruction in relation to
+matters lying within the range of natural reason, or else secular
+schools, colleges, and universities would be superfluous, and
+manifestly the instructor of the first man could have been only
+the Creator himself.
+
+The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam
+to us through two channels--reason, which is in every man, and in
+immediate relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the
+primitive instruction embodied in language and what the Romans
+call jus gentium, or law common to all civilized nations.  Under
+this law. whose prescriptions are promulgated through reason and
+embodied in universal jurisprudence, nations are providentially
+constituted, and invested with political sovereignty; and as they
+are constituted under this law and hold from God through it, it
+defines their respective rights and powers, their limitation and
+their extent.
+
+The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to
+the people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or
+political society.  It is vested in the political community or
+nation, not in an individual, or family, or a class, because,
+under the natural law, all men are equal, as they are under the
+Christian law, and one man has, in his own right, no authority
+over another.  The family has in the father a natural chief, but
+political society has no natural chief or chiefs.  The authority
+of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when his
+children have attained to majority, have married and become heads
+of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the
+paternal household.  The recognition of the authority of the
+father beyond the limits of his own household, is, if it ever
+occurs, by virtue of the ordinance, the consent, express or
+tacit, of the political society.  There are no natural-born
+political chiefs, and wherever we find men claiming or
+acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the
+Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or
+constitution of the people or the nation.
+
+Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically
+developed from the authority of the patriarchs, and have
+unquestionably been sustained by an equally false development of
+the right of property, especially landed property.  The owner of
+the land, or he who claimed to own it, claimed as an incident of
+his ownership the right to govern it, and consequently to govern
+all who occupied it.  But however valid may be the landlord's
+title to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can own any thing in
+land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the law of nature
+no political right.  Property, like all natural rights, is
+entitled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.
+Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a
+question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme
+political authority.  It was the basis, and almost exclusive
+basis, in the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in
+most states.  France and the United States are the principal
+exceptions in Christendom.  Property alone, or coupled with
+birth, is made elsewhere in some form a basis of political
+power, and where made so by the sovereign authority, it is
+legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for it takes from the
+weak and gives to the strong.  The rich have in their riches
+advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the state
+any additional advantage.  An aristocracy, in the sense of
+families distinguished by birth, noble and patriotic services,
+wealth, cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable
+in every nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief
+support, but they need and should receive no political
+recognition.  They should form no privileged class in the state
+or political society.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT.
+
+
+The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or
+nation, and the constitution of the government.  The constitution
+of the government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation
+itself; the constitution of the state, or the people of the
+state, is, in its origin at least, providential, given by God
+himself, operating through historical events or natural causes.
+The one originates in law, the other in historical fact.  The
+nation must exist, and exist as a political community, before it
+can give itself a constitution; and no state, any more than an
+individual, can exist without a constitution of some sort.
+
+The distinction between the providential constitution of the
+people and the constitution of the government, is not always
+made.  The illustrious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest
+political philosophers who wrote in the last century, or the
+first quarter of the present, in his work on the Generative
+Principle of Political Constitutions, maintains that
+constitutions are generated, not made, and excludes all human
+agency from their formation and growth.  Disgusted with French
+Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so
+much, and deeply wedded to monarchy in both  church and state, he
+had the temerity to maintain that God creates expressly royal
+families for the government of nations, and that it is idle for a
+nation to expect a good government without a king who has
+descended from one of those divinely created royal families.  It
+was with some such thought, most likely, that a French
+journalist, writing home from the United States, congratulated
+the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army, so that
+when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to do,
+they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or
+emperor.  Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was
+not the descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present
+Emperor of the French, a decided parvenu.  Still, the Emperor of
+the French, if only a parvenu, bears himself right imperially
+among sovereigns, and has no peer among any of the descendants of
+the old royal families of Europe
+
+There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that
+constitutions are generated, or developed, not created de novo,
+or made all at once.  But nothing is more true than that a nation
+can alter its constitution by its own deliberate and voluntary
+action, and many nations have done so, and sometimes for the
+better, as well as for the worse.  If the constitution once given is
+fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly divine, and contain no
+human element, and the people have and can have no hand in their
+own government--the fundamental objection to the theocratic
+constitution of society.  To assume it is to transfer to civil
+society, founded by the ordinary providence of God, the
+constitution of the church, founded by his gracious or
+supernatural providence, and to maintain that the divine
+sovereignty governs in civil society immediately and
+supernaturally, as in the spiritual society.  But such is not the
+fact.  God governs the nation by the nation itself, through its
+own reason and free-will.  De Maistre is right only as to the
+constitution the nation starts with, and as to the control which
+that constitution necessarily exerts over the constitutional
+changes the nation can successfully introduce.
+
+The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential
+constitution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a
+convention of sovereign individuals the constitution, and the
+only constitution, both of the people and the government.  Prior
+to its adoption there is no government, no state, no political
+community or authority.  Antecedently to it the people are an
+inorganic mass, simply individuals, without any political or
+national solidarity.  These individuals, they suppose, come
+together in their own native right and might, organize themselves
+into a political community, give themselves a constitution, and
+draw up and vote rules for their government, as a number of
+individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve themselves
+into a temperance society or a debating club.  This might do very
+well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating
+club, a simple voluntary association, which men are free to join
+or not as they please, and which they are bound to obey no
+farther and no longer than suits their convenience.  But the
+state is a power, a sovereignty; speaks to all within its
+jurisdiction with an imperative voice; commands, and may use
+physical force to compel obedience, when not voluntarily yielded.
+Men are born its subjects, and no one can withdraw from it
+without its express or tacit permission, unless for causes that
+would justify resistance to its authority.  The right of subjects
+to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a
+tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power
+and warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more
+than the right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the
+consent and authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or
+subject belongs to the state, and is bound to it.
+
+The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a
+territory or country under one political head is a truth; but
+"the solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or
+political authority of their respective countries, so eloquently
+preached a few years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only
+a falsehood, but a falsehood destructive of all government and of
+all political organization.  Kossuth's doctrine supposes the
+people, or the populations of all countries, are, irrespective of
+their governments, bound together in solido, each for all and all
+for each, and therefore not only free, but bound, wherever they
+find a population struggling nominally for liberty against its
+government, to rush with arms in their hands to its assistance--a
+doctrine clearly incompatible with any recognition of political
+authority or territorial rights.  Peoples or nations commune with
+each other only through the national authorities, and when the
+state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its subjects
+are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention on
+either side.  There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity,
+more or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of
+the populations with and through their governments, not without
+them.  Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals
+of one and the same nation.  These are all bound together, all
+for each and each for all.  The individual is born into society
+and under the government, and without the authority of the
+government, which represents all and each, he cannot release
+himself from his obligations.  The state is then by no means a
+voluntary association.  Every one born or adopted into it is
+bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from it,
+unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no
+protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for
+his rights of conscience.  This is Vattel's doctrine, and the
+dictate of common sense.
+
+The constitution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation
+for itself is a law--the organic or fundamental law, if you will,
+but a law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power.
+That sovereign power must exist before it can act, and it cannot
+exist, if vested in the people or nation, without a constitution,
+or without some sort of political organization of the people or
+nation.  There must, then, be for every state or nation a
+constitution anterior to the constitution which the nation gives
+itself, and from which the one it gives itself derives all its
+vitality and legal force.
+
+Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident,
+for creation and providence are simply the expression of the
+Supreme Logic, the Logos, by whom all things are made.  Nations
+have originated in various ways, but history records no instance
+of a nation existing as an inorganic mass organizing itself into
+a political community.  Every nation, at its first appearance
+above the horizon, is found to have an organization of some sort.
+This is evident from the only ways in which history shows us
+nations originating.  These ways are: 1. The union of families in
+the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The migration
+of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.
+4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial,
+religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt,
+separation, and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling
+of the conquerors and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a
+new people.  These are all the ways known to history, and in none
+of these ways does a people, absolutely destitute of all
+organization, constitute itself a state, and institute and carry
+on civil government.
+
+The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet
+incipient states, or inchoate nations, with an organization,
+individuality, and a centre of social life of their own.  The
+families and tribes that migrate in search of new settlements
+carry with them their family and tribal organizations, and
+retain it for a long time.  The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul
+till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in
+Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in
+Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth.  It subsists still
+in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the
+Berbers or Kabyles of Africa.
+
+Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by,
+at least under, the authority of the mother country, whose
+political constitution, laws, manners, and customs they carry
+with them.  They receive from the parent state a political
+organization, which, though subordinate, yet constitutes them
+embryonic states, with a unity, individuality, and centre of
+public life in themselves, and which, when they are detached and
+recognized as independent, render them complete states.  War and
+conquest effect great national changes, but do not, strictly
+speaking, create new states.  They simply extend and consolidate
+the power of the conquering state.
+
+Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but
+only when they have previously existed as such, and have retained
+the tradition of their old constitution and independence; or when
+the administration has erected them into real though dependent
+political communities.  A portion of the people of a state not so
+erected or organized, that has in no sense had a distinct
+political existence of its own, has never separated from the
+national body and formed a new and independent nation.  It cannot
+revolt; it may rise up against the government, and either
+revolutionize and take possession of the state, or be put down by
+the government as an insurrection.  The amalgamation of the
+conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies the
+institutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation
+or political community.  The English of to-day are very different
+from both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time
+of Richard Coeur de Lion, but they constitute the same state or
+political community.  England is still England.
+
+The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been
+cut up into several separate and independent nations, but because
+its several provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman
+arms, been independent nations or tribes, and more especially
+because the conquerors themselves were divided into several
+distinct nations or confederacies.  If the barbarians had been
+united in a single nation or state, the Roman empire most likely
+would have changed masters, indeed, but have retained its unity
+and its constitution, for the Germanic nations that finally
+seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to destroy its name or
+nationality, for they were themselves more than half Romanized
+before conquering Rome.  But the new nations into which the
+empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without
+political or governmental organization, continued from the
+constitution of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or
+less by what was retained from the empire.
+
+It is not pretended that the constitutions of states cannot be
+altered, or that every people starts with a constitution fully
+developed, as would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre.  The
+constitution of the family is rather economical than political,
+and the tribe is far from being a fully developed state.
+Strictly speaking, the state, the modern equivalent for the city
+of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed till men began to
+build and live in cities, and became fixed to a national
+territory.  But in the first place, the eldest born of the human
+race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find
+traces of the family and tribal organization long after their
+municipal existence--in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest,
+and in Rome down to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the
+second place, the pastoral nations, though they have not
+precisely the city or state organization, yet have a national
+organization, and obey a national authority.  Strictly speaking,
+no pastoral nation has a civil or political constitution, but
+they have what in our modern tongues can be expressed by no other
+term.  The feudal regime, which was in full vigor even in Europe
+from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century, had
+nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper;
+yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system,
+though a very imperfect one?
+
+The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the
+early ages.  For a long time the national organizations bore
+unmistakable traces of having been developed from the patriarchal,
+and modelled from the family or tribe, as they do still in all
+the non-Christian world.  Religion itself, before the Incarnation,
+bore traces of the same organization.  Even with the Jews,
+religion was transmitted and disused, not as under Christianity
+by conversion, but by natural generation or family adoption.
+With all the Gentile tribes or nations, it was the same.  At
+first the father was both priest and king, an when the two
+offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
+hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we
+have seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech.
+The Jews had the synagogue, and preserved the primitive
+revelation in its purity and integrity; but the Greeks and
+Romans, more fully than any other ancient nations, preserved or
+developed the political order that best conforms to the Christian
+religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark, followed in
+the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
+establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to
+plant, the Graeco-Roman civilization.  The Graeco-Roman republics
+were hardly less a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in
+the civil order, than the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in
+the spiritual order, or in faith and worship.  In the Christian
+order nothing is by hereditary descent, but every thing is by
+election of grace.  The Christian dispensation is teleological,
+palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior to the Incarnation, was
+initial, genesiac, and continued by natural generation, as it is
+still in all nations and tribes outside of Christendom.  No
+non-Christian people is a civilized people, and, indeed, the
+human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to have
+attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
+were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated.
+He came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to
+receive him.
+
+The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the
+nation is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real
+living and efficient constitution of the state.  It is the source
+of the vitality of the state, that which controls or governs its
+action, and determines its destiny.  The constitution which a
+nation is said to give itself, is never the constitution of the
+state, but is the law ordained by the state for the government
+instituted under it.  Thomas Paine would admit nothing to be the
+constitution but a written document which he could fold up and
+put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.  The Abbe
+Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and
+he was ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no
+other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet,
+and could not go.  Many in the last century, and some, perhaps,
+in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs,
+confounded the written instrument with the constitution itself.
+No constitution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment.
+What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people
+ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to
+the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best,
+legislative instead of constitutive.  The famous Magna Charta
+drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the
+English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till
+long after the date of its concession, and even then was no
+constitution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power.
+The constitution is the intrinsic or inherent and actual
+constitution of the people or political community itself; that
+which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it from
+every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from
+one another.
+
+The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up
+and established in accordance with any preconceived theory.  What
+is theoretic in a constitution is unreal.  The constitutions
+conceived by philosophers in their closets are constitutions only
+of Utopia or Dreamland.  This world is not governed by
+abstractions, for abstractions are nullities.  Only the concrete
+is real, and only the real or actual has vitality or force.  The
+French people adopted constitution after constitution of the most
+approved pattern, and amid bonfires, beating of drums, sound of
+trumpets, roar of musketry, and thunder of artillery, swore, no
+doubt, sincerely as well as enthusiastically, to observe them,
+but all to no effect; for they had no authority for the nation,
+no hold on its affections, and formed no element of its life.
+The English are great constitution-mongers--for other nations.
+They fancy that a constitution fashioned after their own will fit
+any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into
+trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have
+found it only an embarrassment or encumbrance.  The doctor might
+as well attempt to give an individual a new constitution, or the
+constitution of another man, as the statesman to give a nation
+any other constitution than that which it has, and with which it
+is born.
+
+The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire,
+proves this thesis.  The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced
+into the nations founded on the site of the empire, a double
+constitution--the barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the
+Roman in the West, and the Tartaric or Turkish and the
+Graeco-Roman in the East.  The key to all modern history is in
+the mutual struggles of these two constitutions and the interests
+respectively associated with them, which created two societies on
+the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same
+national denomination.  The barbaric was the constitution of the
+conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and
+fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh
+hordes of barbarians, and had even brought the external
+ecclesiastical society to a very great extent into harmony with
+itself.  The Pope became a feudal sovereign, and the bishops and
+mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.  Yet, after eight
+hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman constitution got the
+upper hand, and the barbaric constitution, as far as it could not
+be assimilated to the Roman, was eliminated.  The original Empire
+of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its constitution, its
+laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any of its
+Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.
+
+The same process is going on in the East, though it has not
+advanced so far, having begun there several centuries later, and
+the Graeco-Roman constitution was far feebler there than in the
+West at the epoch of the conquest.  The Germanic tribes that
+conquered the West had long had close relations with the empire,
+had served as its allies, and even in its armies, and were
+partially Romanized.  Most of their chiefs had received a Roman
+culture; and their early conversion to the Christian faith
+facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
+constitution.  In the East it was different.  The conquerors had
+no touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet,
+they were animated with an intense hatred, which, after the
+conquest, was changed into a superb contempt, of Christians and
+Romans.  They had their civil constitution in the Koran; and the
+Koran, in its principles, doctrines, and spirit, is exclusive and
+profoundly intolerant.  The Graeco-Roman constitution was always
+much weaker in the East, and had far greater obstacles to
+overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the shock of
+the conquest.  Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of the
+East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily
+receiving rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying
+outside of the boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able
+to sustain itself.  The Greek or Christian populations of the
+empire are no longer in danger of being exterminated or absorbed
+by the Mohammedan state or population.  They are the only living
+and progressive people of the Ottoman Empire, and their complete
+success in absorbing or expelling the Turk is only a question of
+time.  They will, in all present probability, reestablish a
+Christian and Roman East in much less time from the fall of
+Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the fall of
+Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric constitution
+founded by its Germanic invaders.
+
+Indeed, the Roman constitution, 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 Institutes,
+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, passions, 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 constitution, and aided the revival of Roman
+imperialism.  In no country do the revolutionists succeed in
+establishing 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
+institutions 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
+vassals 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,
+embarrasses 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
+vassals 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 nobles themselves, than was even dreamed of
+while the feudal regime was in full vigor.  Nobles were
+themselves free, it is conceded, but not the people.  The king
+was too weak, too restricted in his action by the feudal
+constitution 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 nobility, save
+when that nobility threatened the temporalities of the church.
+The only reliance, under God, 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 circumstances, 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 God, 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 nobility 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
+nobility--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 nobles 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 class 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 constitution.  This was the great
+error of Mr. Calhoun.  No man saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun
+the utter worthlessness of simple paper constitutions, on which
+Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit reliance, or that the real
+constitution is in the state itself, in the manner in which the
+people themselves are organized; but his reliance was in
+constituting, 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 be 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 passions 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 establishing their theory, for, after all, their
+constitution 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.
+
+CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-CONCLUDED.
+
+
+Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the
+constitution 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 constitution 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 constitution.
+But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the
+several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one
+having the ascendency and suppressing the rest.  In the original
+constitution 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 constitution.  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 constitution.  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 asserted 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 constitution 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 constitution.  Retain the
+dictatorship 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 constitution from an early day, and already developed in the
+Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, 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
+constitution.  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 anticipated and surpassed 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 associated with the patrician party, which
+distrusted him--in vain Cicero declaims, Cato scolds, or parades
+his impractical virtues, Brutus and Cassius seize the assassin'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 assassination 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
+assimilated.  These nations she at first governed as tributary
+states, with their own constitutions 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, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric and
+despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only
+partially assimilated.  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 citizenship 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 constitution; 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 assimilated 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 statesmanship 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 God 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 substituting 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 constitution of the government, as distinguished from
+the state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign.  The
+constitution 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 constitution of government is the constitution 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 analogous 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 God 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
+principal 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 God, are above him.  He
+holds his power, as the Emperor of the French professes to hold
+his, by the grace of God and the national will--the only title 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 constitution, 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 be was originally to
+institute 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 assembly and the constitutional government, there was
+no legitimate government standing, and the power assumed 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 principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him
+discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said.  The
+imperial constitution 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 title, and that he holds his
+power by a title 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 constitutional 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 constitution 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" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary
+ex-governor of Hungary, the last stronghold of feudal barbarism
+in Christian Europe; for Russia has emancipated her serfs.
+
+The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute 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 class or hereditary
+nobles, 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
+God 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 God 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
+constitution, founded on public right, and held under God 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 constitution 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
+bloody 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 constitutions 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
+constitution is in that of the nation.  The constitution of the
+government must grow out of the constitution 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 constitutions 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 constitution from it, and harmonize it with it.
+Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, 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,
+assassinations, massacres, 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 constitution
+of government foreign to the national constitution, 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 constitution.
+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 constitution of l789, 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 God, 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 multitude.  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 constitution 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 God and the
+will of the nation," which means simply that he holds his
+authority from God, through the French people, and is bound to
+exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
+The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution 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 title, 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 locum 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 title, 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 God 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 pronounced 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
+constitution 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 God, 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 principal.  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
+constitution 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 constitution 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
+constitution 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.
+
+But if the sovereignty persists in the States severally, any
+State, saving its faith, may whenever it chooses to do so,
+withdraw from the Union, absolve its subjects from all obligation
+to the Federal authorities, and make it treason in them to adhere
+to the Federal government.  Secession is, then, an incontestable
+right; not a right held under the constitution or derived from
+the convention but a right held prior to it, independently of it,
+inherent in the State sovereignty, and inseparable from it.  The
+State is bound by the constitution of the Union only while she is
+in it, and is one of the States united.  In ratifying the
+constitution she did not part with her sovereignty, or with any
+portion of it, any more than France has parted with her
+sovereignty, and ceased to be an independent sovereign nation, by
+vesting the imperial power in Napoleon III. and his legitimate
+heirs male.  The principal parts not with his power to his agent,
+for the agent is an agent only by virtue of the continued power
+of the principal.  Napoleon is emperor by the will of the French
+people, and governs only by the authority of the French nation,
+which is as competent to revoke the powers it has conferred on
+him, when it judges proper, as it was to confer them.  The Union
+exists and governs, if the States are sovereign, only by the will
+of the State, and she is as competent to revoke the powers she
+has delegated as she was to delegate them.  The, Union, as far as
+she is concerned, is her creation, and what she is competent to
+make she is competent to unmake.
+
+In seceding or withdrawing from the Union a State may act very
+unwisely, very much against her own interests and the interests
+of the other members of the confederacy; but, if sovereign, she
+in doing so only exercises her unquestionable right.  The other
+members may regret her action, both for her sake and their own,
+but they cannot accuse her or her citizens of disloyalty in
+seceding, nor of rebellion, if in obedience to her authority they
+defend their independence by force of arms against the Union.
+Neither she nor they, on the supposition, ever owed allegiance to
+the Union.  Allegiance is due from the citizen to the sovereign
+state, but never from a sovereign state or from its citizens to
+any other sovereign state.  While the State is in the Union the
+citizen owes obedience to the United States, but only because his
+State has, in ratifying the Federal constitution, enacted that it
+and all laws and treaties made under it shall be law within her
+territory.  The repeal by the State of the act of ratification
+releases the citizen from the obligation even of obedience, and
+renders it criminal for him to yield it without her permission.
+
+It avails nothing, on the hypothesis of the sovereignty of the
+States as distinguished from that of the United States, to appeal
+to the language or provisions of the Federal constitution.  That
+constitutes the government, not the state or the sovereign.  It
+is ordained by the sovereign, and if the States were severally
+independent and sovereign states, that sovereign is the States
+severally, not the States united.  The constitution is law for
+the citizens of a State only so long as the State remains one of
+the United States.  No matter, then, how clear and express the
+language, or stringent the provisions of the constitution, they
+bind only the citizens of the States that enact the constitution.
+The written constitution is simply a compact, and obliges only
+while the compact is continued by the States, each for itself.
+The sovereignty of the United States as a single or political
+people must be established before any thing in the constitution
+can be adduced as denying the right of secession.
+
+That this doctrine would deprive the General government of all
+right to enforce the laws of the Union on a State that secedes,
+or the citizens thereof, is no doubt true; that it would weaken
+the central power and make the Union a simple voluntary
+association of states, no better than a rope of sand, is no less
+true; but what then?  It is simply saying that a confederation is
+inferior to a nation, and that a federal government lacks many of
+the advantages of a national government.  Confederacies are
+always weak in the centre, always lack unity, and are liable to
+be dissolved by the influence of local passions, prejudices, and
+interests.  But if the United States are a confederation of
+states or nations, not a single nation or sovereign state, then
+there is no remedy.
+
+If the Anglo-American colonies, when their independence of Great
+Britain was achieved and acknowledged, were severally sovereign
+states, it has never since been in their power to unite and form
+a single sovereign state, or to form themselves into one
+indivisible sovereign nation.  They could unite only by mutual
+agreement, which gives only a confederation, in which each
+retains its own sovereignty, as two individuals, however closely
+united, retain each his own individuality.  No sovereignty is of
+conventional origin, and none can emerge from the convention that
+did not enter it.  Either the states are one sovereign people or
+they are not.  If they are not, it is undoubtedly a great
+disadvantage; but a disadvantage that must be accepted, and
+submitted to without a murmur.
+
+Whether the United States are one sovereign people or only a
+confederation is a question of very grave importance.  If they
+are only a confederation of states--and if they ever were
+severally sovereign states, only a confederation they certainly
+are--state secession is an inalienable right, and the government
+has had no right to make war on the secessionists as rebels, or
+to treat them, when their military power is broken, as traitors,
+or disloyal persons.  The honor of the government, and of the
+people who have sustained it, is then deeply compromised.
+
+What then is the fact?  Are the United States politically one
+people, nation, state, or republic, or are they simply
+independent sovereign states united in close and intimate
+alliance, league, or federation, by a mutual pact or agreement?
+Were the people of the United States who ordained and established
+the written constitution one people, or were they not?  If they
+were not before ordaining and establishing the government, they
+are not now; for the adoption of the constitution did not and
+could not make them one.  Whether they are one or many is then
+simply a question of fact, to be decided by the facts in the
+case, not by the theories of American statesmen, the opinion of
+jurists, or even by constitutional law itself.  The old Articles
+of Conferation and the later Constitution can serve here only as
+historical documents.  Constitutions and laws presuppose the
+existence of a national sovereign from which they emanate, and
+that ordains them, for they are the formal expression of a
+sovereign will.  The nation must exist as an historical fact,
+prior to the possession or exercise of sovereign power, prior to
+the existence of written Constitutions and laws of any kind, and
+its existence must be established before they can be recognized
+as having any legal force or vitality.
+
+The existence of any nation, as an independent sovereign nation,
+is a purely historical fact, for its right to exist as such is in
+the simple fact that it does so exist.  A nation de facto is a
+nation de jure, and when we have ascertained the fact, we have
+ascertained the right.  There is no right in the case separate
+from the fact--only the fact must be really a fact.  A people
+hitherto a part of another people, or subject to another
+sovereign, is not in fact a nation, because they have declared
+themselves independent, and have organized a government, and are
+engaged in what promises to be a successful struggle for
+independence.  The struggle must be practically over; the former
+sovereign must have practically abandoned the effort to reduce
+them to submission, or to bring them back under his authority,
+and if he continues it, does it as a matter of mere form; the
+postulant must have proved his ability to maintain civil
+government, and to fulfil within and without the obligations
+which attach to every civilized nation, before it can be
+recognized as an independent sovereign nation; because before it
+is not a fact that it is a sovereign nation.  The prior
+sovereign, when no longer willing or able to vindicate his right,
+has lost it, and no one is any longer bound to respect it, for
+humanity demands not martyrs to lost causes.
+
+This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly
+philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
+nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact,
+not a right antecedent to the fact.  The repugnance felt to this
+assertion arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in
+a strictly political sense, and sometimes in its original sense
+of tribe, and understanding by it not simply the body politic,
+but a certain relation of origin, family, kindred, blood, or
+race.  But God has made of one blood, or race, all the nations of
+men; and, besides, no political rights are founded by the law of
+nature on relations of blood, kindred, or family.  Under the
+patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some extent, under
+feudalism, these relations form the basis of government, but they
+are economical relations rather than civil or political, and,
+under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the
+household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or
+body politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse.  They are
+protected by the state, but do not found or constitute it.  The
+vicissitudes of time, the revolutions of states and empires,
+migration, conquest, and intermixture of families and races, have
+rendered it impracticable, even if it were desirable, to
+distribute people into nations according to their relations of
+blood or descent.
+
+There is no civilized nation now existing that has been,
+developed from a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most
+mixed are the most civilized.  The nearer a nation approaches to
+a primitive people of pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it
+is from civilization.  All civilized nations are political
+nations, and are founded in the fact, not on rights antecedent to
+the fact.  A hundred or more lost nationalities went to form the
+Roman empire, and who can tell us how many layers of crushed
+nationalities, superposed one upon another, serve for the
+foundation of the present French, English, Russian, Austrian, or
+Spanish nationalities?  What other title to independence and
+sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any
+European nation?  Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one
+can say how many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to
+be as it has, or can have.  Whether those nationalities have been
+justly extinguished or not, is no question for the statesman; it
+is the secret of Providence.  Failure in this world is not always
+a proof of wrong; nor success, of right.  The good is sometimes
+overborne, and the bad sometimes triumphs; but it is
+consoling, and even just, to believe that the good oftener
+triumphs than the bad.
+
+In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law.
+The nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the
+nation.  Doubtless the courts of every civilized nation recognize
+and apply both the law of nature and the law of nations, but only
+on the ground that they are included, or are presumed to be
+included, in the national law, or jurisprudence.  Doubtless, too,
+the nation holds from God, under the law of nature, but only by
+virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and when it is a nation
+dependent on no other, it holds from God all the rights and
+powers of any independent sovereign nation.  There is no right
+behind the fact needed to legalize the fact, or to put the nation
+that is in fact a nation in possession of full national rights.
+In the case of a new nation, or people, lately an integral part
+of another people, or subject to another people@ the right of the
+prior sovereign must be extinguished indeed, but the extinction
+of that right is necessary to complete the fact, which otherwise
+would be only an initial, inchoate fact, not a fait accompli.
+But that right ceases when its claimant, willingly or
+unwillingly, formally or virtually, abandons it; and he does so
+when he practically abandons the struggle, and shows no ability
+or intention of soon renewing it with any reasonable prospect of
+success.
+
+The notion of right, independent of the fact as applied to
+sovereignty, is founded in error.  Empty titles to states and
+kingdoms are of no validity.  The sovereignty is, under God, in
+the nation and the title and the possession are inseparable.  The
+title of the Palaeologi to the Roman Empire of the East, of the
+king of Sicily, the king of Sardinia, or the king of Spain--for
+they are all claimants--to the kingdom of Jerusalem founded by
+Godfrey and his crusaders, of the Stuarts to the thrones of
+England, Ireland, and Scotland, or of the Bourbons to the throne
+of France, are vacated and not worth the parchment on which they
+are engrossed.  The contrary opinion, so generally entertained,
+belongs to barbarism, not to civilization.  It is in modern
+society a relic of feudalism, which places the state in the
+government, and makes the government a private estate--a private,
+and not a public right--a right to govern the public, not a right
+to govern held from or by the public.
+
+The proprietor may be dispossessed in fact of his estate by
+violence, by illegal or unjust means, without losing his right,
+and another may usurp it, occupy it, and possess it in fact
+without acquiring any right or legal title to it.  The man who
+holds the legal title has the right to oust him and re-enter upon
+his estate whenever able to do so.  Here, in the economical
+order, the fact and the right are distinguishable, and the actual
+occupant may be required to show his title-deeds.  Holding
+sovereignty to be a private estate, the feudal lawyers very
+properly distinguish between governments de facto and governments
+de jure, and argue very logically that violent dispossession of a
+prince does not invalidate his title.  But sovereignty, it has
+been shown, is not in the government, but in the state, and the
+state is inseparable from the public domain.  The people
+organized and held by the domain or national territory, are under
+God the sovereign nation, and remain so as long as the nation
+subsists without subjection to another.  The government, as
+distinguished from the state or nation, has only a delegated
+authority, governs only by a commission from the nation.  The
+revocation of the commission vacates, its title and extinguishes
+its rights.  The nation is always sovereign, and every organic
+people fixed to the soil, and actually independent of every
+other, is a nation.  There can then be no independent nation de
+facto that is not an independent nation de jure, nor de jure that
+is not de facto.  The moment a people cease to be an independent
+nation in fact, they cease to be sovereign, and the moment they
+become in fact an independent nation, they are so of right.
+Hence in the political order the fact and the right are born and
+expire together; and when it is proved that a people, are in fact
+an independent nation, there is no question to be asked as to
+their right to be such nation.
+
+In the case of the United States there is only the question of
+fact.  If they are in fact one people they are so in right,
+whatever the opinions and theories of statesmen, or even the
+decisions of courts; for the courts hold from the national
+authority, and the theories and opinions of statesmen may be
+erroneous.  Certain it is that the States in the American Union
+have never existed and acted as severally sovereign states.
+Prior to independence, they were colonies under the sovereignty
+of Great Britain, and since independence they have existed and
+acted only as states united.  The colonists, before separation
+and independence, were British subjects, and whatever rights the
+colonies had they held by charter or concession from the British
+crown.  The colonists never pretended to be other than British
+subjects, and the alleged ground of their complaint against the
+mother country was not that she had violated their natural rights
+as men, but their rights as British subjects--rights, as
+contended by the colonists, secured by the English constitution
+to all Englishmen or British su6jects.  The denial to them of
+these common rights of Englishmen they called tyranny, and they
+defended themselves in throwing off their allegiance to George III.,
+on the ground that he had, in their regard, become a tyrant, and
+the tyranny of the prince absolves the subject from his
+allegiance.
+
+In the Declaration of Independence they declared themselves
+independent states indeed, but not severally independent.  The
+declaration was not made by the states severally, but by the
+states jointly, as the United States.  They unitedly declared
+their independence; they carried on the war for independence, won
+it, and were acknowledged by foreign powers and by the mother
+country as the United States, not as severally independent
+sovereign states.  Severally they have never exercised the full
+powers of sovereign states; they have had no flag--symbol of
+sovereignty--recognized by foreign powers, have made no foreign
+treaties, held no foreign relations, had no commerce foreign or
+interstate, coined no money, entered into no alliances or
+confederacies with foreign states or with one another, and in
+several respects have been more restricted in their powers in the
+Union than they were as British colonies.
+
+Colonies are initial or inchoate states, and become complete
+states by declaring and winning their independence; and if the
+English colonies, now the United States, had separately declared
+and won their independence, they would unquestionably have become
+separately independent states, each invested by the law of nature
+with all the rights and powers of a sovereign nation.  But they
+did not do this.  They declared and won their independence
+jointly, and have since existed and exercised sovereignty only as
+states united, or the United States, that is, states sovereign in
+their union, but not in their separation.  This is of itself
+decisive of the whole question.
+
+But the colonists have not only never exercised the full powers
+of sovereignty save as citizens of states united, therefore as
+one people, but they were, so far as a people at all, one people
+even before independence.  The colonies were all erected and
+endowed with their rights and powers by one and the same national
+authority, and the colonists were subjects of one and the same
+national sovereign.  Mr. Quincy Adams, who almost alone among our
+prominent statesmen maintains the unity of the colonial people,
+adds indeed to their subjection to the same sovereign authority,
+community of origin, of language, manners, customs, and law.  All
+these, except the last, or common law, may exist without national
+unity in the modern political sense of the term nation.  The
+English common law was recognized by the colonial courts, and in
+force in all the colonies, not by virtue of colonial legislation,
+but by virtue of English authority, as expressed in English
+jurisprudence.  The colonists were under the Common Law, because
+they were Englishmen, and subjects of the English sovereign.
+This proves that they were really one people with the English
+people, though existing in a state of colonial dependence, and
+not a separate people having nothing politically in common with
+them but in the accident of having the same royal person for
+their king.  The union with the mother country was national, not
+personal, as was the union existing between England and Hanover,
+or that still existing between the empire of Austria, formerly
+Germany, and the kingdom of Hungary; and hence the British
+parliament claimed, and not illegally, the right to tax the
+colonies for the support of the empire, and to bind them in all
+cases whatsoever--a claim the colonies themselves admitted in
+principle by recognizing and observing the British navigation
+laws.  The people of the several colonies being really one people
+before independence, in the sovereignty of the mother country,
+must be so still, unless they have since, by some valid act,
+divided themselves or been divided into separate and independent
+states.
+
+The king, say the jurists, never dies, and the heralds cry, "The
+king is dead!  Live the king!" Sovereignty never lapses, is never
+in abeyance, and the moment it ceases in one people it is renewed
+in another.  The British sovereignty ceased in the colonies with
+independence, and the American took its place.  Did the
+sovereignty, which before independence was in Great Britain, pass
+from Great Britain to the States severally, or to the States
+united?  It might have passed to them severally, but did it?
+There is no question of law or antecedent right in the case, but
+a simple question of fact, and the fact is determined by
+determining who it was that assumed it, exercised it, and has
+continued to exercise it.  As to this there is no doubt.  The
+sovereignty as a fact has been assumed and exercised by the
+United States, the States united, and never by the States
+separately or severally.  Then as a fact the sovereignty that
+before independence was in Great Britain, passed, on independence
+to the States united, and reappears in all its vigor in the
+United States, the only successor to Great Britain known to or
+recognized by the civilized world.
+
+As the colonial people were, though distributed in distinct
+colonies, still one people, the people of the United States,
+though distributed into distinct and mutually independent States,
+are yet one sovereign people, therefore a sovereign state or
+nation, and not a simple league or confederacy of nations.
+
+There is no doubt that all the powers exercised by the General
+Government, though embracing all foreign relations and all
+general interests and relations of all the States, might have
+been exercised by it under the authority of a mutual compact of
+the several States, and practically the difference between the
+compact theory and the national view would be very little, unless
+in cases like that of secession.  On the supposition that the
+American people are one political people, the government would
+have the right to treat secession, in the sense in which the
+seceders understand it, as rebellion, and to suppress it by
+employing all the physical force at its command; but on the
+compact theory it would have no such right.  But the question now
+under discussion turns simply on what has been and is the
+historical fact.  Before the States could enter into the compact
+and delegate sovereign powers to the Union, they must have
+severally possessed them.  It is historically certain that they
+did not possess them before independence; they did not obtain
+them by independence, for they did not severally succeed to the
+British sovereignty, to which they succeeded only as States
+united.  When, then, and by what means did they or could they
+become severally sovereign States?  The United States having
+succeeded to the British sovereignty in the Anglo-American
+colonies, they came into possession of full national sovereignty,
+and have alone held and exercised it ever since independence
+became a fact.  The States severally succeeding only to the
+colonies, never held, and have never been competent to delegate
+sovereign powers.
+
+The old Articles of Confederation, it is conceded, were framed on
+the assumption that the States are severally sovereign; but the
+several States, at the same time, were regarded as forming one
+nation, and, though divided into separate States, the people were
+regarded as one people.  The Legislature of New York, as early as
+1782, calls for an essential change In the Articles of
+Confederation, as proved to be inadequate to secure the peace,
+security, and prosperity of "the nation."  All the proceedings
+that preceded and led to the call of the convention of 1781 were
+based on the assumption that the people of the United States were
+one people.  The States were called united, not confederated
+States, even in the very Articles of Confederation themselves,
+and officially the United States were called "the Union."  That
+the united colonies by independence became united States, and
+formed really one and only one people, was in the thought, the
+belief, the instinct of the great mass of the people.  They acted
+as they existed through State as they had previously acted
+through colonial organization, for in throwing off the British
+authority there was no other organization through which they
+could act.  The States, or people of the States, severally sent
+their delegates to the Congress of the United States, and these
+delegates adopted the rule of voting in Congress by States, a
+rule that might be revived without detriment to national unity.
+Nothing was more natural, then, than that Congress, composed of
+delegates elected or appointed by States, should draw up articles
+of confederation rather than articles of union, in order, if for
+no other reason, to conciliate the smaller States, and to prevent
+their jealousy of the larger States such as Virginia,
+Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
+
+Moreover, the Articles of Confederation were drawn up and adopted
+during the transition from colonial dependence to national
+independence.  Independence was declared in 1776, but it was not
+a fact till l782, when the preliminary treaty acknowledging it
+was signed at Paris.  Till then the United States were not an
+independent nation; they were only a people struggling to become
+an independent nation.  Prior to that preliminary treaty, neither
+the Union nor the States severally were sovereign.  The articles
+were agreed on in Congress in 1777, but they were not ratified by
+all the States till May, 1781, and in 1782 the movement was
+commenced in the Legislature of New York for their amendment.
+Till the organization under the constitution ordained by the
+people of the United States in l787, and which went into
+operation in 1789, the United States had in reality only a
+provisional government, and it was not till then that the
+national government was definitively organized, and the line of
+demarcation between the General Government and the particular
+State governments was fixed.
+
+The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected
+by the American people, precisely because it was not in harmony
+with the unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation;
+and it was not in harmony with that constitution precisely
+because it recognized the States as severally sovereign, and
+substituted confederation for union.  The failure of
+confederation and the success of union are ample proofs of the
+unity of the American nation.  The instinct of unity rejected
+State sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861.  The first and the
+last attempt to establish State sovereignty have failed, and the
+failure vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States
+united, not in the States severally.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+
+The constitution of the United States is twofold, written and
+unwritten, the constitution of the people and the constitution of
+the government.
+
+The written constitution is simply a law ordained by the nation
+or people instituting and organizing the government; the
+unwritten constitution is the real or actual constitution of the
+people as a state or sovereign community, and constituting them
+such or such a state.  It is Providential, not made by the
+nation, but born with it.  The written constitution is made and
+ordained by the sovereign power, and presupposes that power as
+already existing and constituted.
+
+The unwritten or Providential constitution of the United States
+is peculiar, and difficult to understand, because incapable of
+being fully explained by analogies borrowed from any other state
+historically known, or described by political philosophers.  It
+belongs	to the Graeco-Roman family, and is republican as
+distinguished from despotic constitutions, but it comes under the
+head of neither monarchical nor aristocratic, neither democratic
+nor mixed constitutions, and creates a state which is neither a
+centralized state nor a confederacy.  The difficulty of
+understanding it is augmented by the peculiar use under it of the
+word state, which does not in the American system mean a
+sovereign community or political society complete in itself, like
+France, Spain, or Prussia, nor yet a political society
+subordinate to another political society and dependent on it.
+The American States are all sovereign States united, but,
+disunited, are no States at all.  The rights and powers of the
+States are not derived from the United States, nor the rights and
+powers of the United States derived from the States.
+
+The simple fact is, that the political or sovereign people of the
+United States exists as united States, and only as united States.
+The Union and the States are coeval, born together, and can exist
+only together.  Separation is dissolution--the death of both.
+The United States are a state, a single sovereign state; but this
+single sovereign state consists in the union and solidarity of
+States instead of individuals.  The Union is in each of the
+States, and each of the States is in the Union.
+
+It is necessary to distinguish in the outset between the United
+States and the government of the United States, or the so-called
+Federal government, which the convention refused, contrary to its
+first intention to call the national government.  That government
+is not a supreme national government, representing all the powers
+of the United States, but a limited government, restricted by its
+constitution to certain specific relations and interests.  The
+United States are anterior to that government, and the first
+question to be settled relates to their internal and inherent
+Providential constitution as one political people or sovereign
+state.  The written constitution, in its preamble, professes to
+be ordained by "We, the people of the United States."  Who are
+this people?  How are they constituted, or what the mode and
+conditions of their political existence?  Are they the people of
+the States severally?  No; for they call themselves the people of
+the United States.  Are they a national people, really existing
+outside and independently of their organization into distinct and
+mutually independent States?  No; for they define themselves to
+be the people of the United States.  If they had considered
+themselves existing as States only, they would have said "We, the
+States," and if independently of State organization, they would
+have said "We, the people," do ordain, &c.
+
+The key to the mystery is precisely in this appellation United
+States, which is not the name of the country, for its distinctive
+name is America, but a name expressive of its political
+organization.  In it there are no sovereign people without
+States, and no States without union, or that are not united
+States.  The term united is not part of a proper name, but is
+simply an adjective qualifying States, and has its full and
+proper sense.  Hence while the sovereignty is and must be in the
+States, it is in the States united, not in the States severally,
+precisely as we have found the sovereignty of the people is in
+the people collectively or as society, not in the people
+individually.  The life is in the body, not in the members,
+though the body could not exist if it had no members; so the
+sovereignty is in the Union, not in the States severally; but
+there could be no sovereign union without the States, for there
+is no union where there is nothing united.
+
+This is not a theory of the constitution, but the constitutional
+fact itself.  It is the simple historical fact that precedes the
+law and constitutes the law-making power.  The people of the
+United States are one people, as has already been proved: they
+were one people, as far as a people at all, prior to
+independence, because under the same Common Law and subject to
+the same sovereign, and have been so since, for as united States
+they gained their independence and took their place among
+sovereign nations, and as united States they have possessed and
+still possess the government.  As their existence before
+independence in distinct colonies did not prevent their unity,
+so their existence since in distinct States does not hinder them
+from being one people.  The States severally simply continue the
+colonial organizations, and united they hold the sovereignty that
+was originally in the mother country.  But if one people, they
+are one people existing in distinct State organizations, as
+before independence they were one people existing in distinct
+colonial organizations.  This is the original, the unwritten, and
+Providential constitution of the people of the United States.
+
+This constitution is not conventional, for it existed before the
+people met or could meet in convention.  They have not, as an
+independent sovereign people, either established their union, or
+distributed themselves into distinct and mutually independent
+States.  The union and the distribution, the unity and the
+distinction, are both original in their constitution, and they
+were born United States, as much and as truly so as the son of a
+citizen is born a citizen, or as every one born at all is born a
+member of society, the family, the tribe, or the nation.  The
+Union and the States were born together, are inseparable in their
+constitution, have lived and grown up together; no serious
+attempt till the late secession movement has been made to
+separate them; and the secession movement, to all persons who
+knew not the real constitution of the United States, appeared
+sure to succeed, and in fact would have succeeded if, as the
+secessionists pretended, the Union had been only a confederacy,
+and the States had been held together only by a conventional
+compact, and not by a real and living bond of unity.  The popular
+instinct of national unity, which seemed so weak, proved to be
+strong enough to defeat the secession forces, to trample out the
+confederacy, and maintain the unity of the nation and the
+integrity of its domain.
+
+The people can act only as they exist, as they are, not as they
+are not.  Existing originally only as distributed in distinct and
+mutually independent colonies, they could at first act only
+through their colonial organizations, and afterward only through
+their State organizations.  The colonial people met in
+convention, in the person of representatives chosen by colonies,
+and after independence in the person of representatives chosen by
+States.  Not existing outside of the colonial or State
+organizations, they could not act outside or independently of
+them.  They chose their representatives or delegates by colonies
+or States, and called at first their convention a Congress; but
+by an instinct surer than their deliberate wisdom, they called it
+not the Congress of the confederate, but of the United States,
+asserting constitutional unity as well as constitutional
+multiplicity.  It is true, in their first attempt to organize a
+general government, they called the constitution they devised
+Articles of Confederation, but only because they had not attained
+to full consciousness of themselves; and that they really meant
+union, not confederation, is evident from their adopting, as the
+official style of the nation or new power, united, not
+confederate States.
+
+That the sovereignty vested in the States united, and was
+represented in some sort by the Congress, is evident from the
+fact that the several States, when they wished to adopt State
+constitutions in place of colonial charters, felt not at liberty
+to do so without asking and obtaining the permission of Congress,
+as the elder Adams informs us in his Diary, kept at the time;
+that is, they asked and obtained the equivalent of what has
+since, in the case of organizing new States, been called an
+"enabling act."  This proves that the States did not regard
+themselves as sovereign States out of the Union, but as
+completely sovereign only in it.  And this again proves that the
+Articles of Confederation did not correspond to the real, living
+constitution of the people.  Even then it was felt that the
+organization and constitution of a State in the Union could be
+regularly effected only by the permission of Congress; and no
+Territory can, it is well known, regularly organize itself as a
+State, and adopt a State constitution, without an enabling act by
+Congress, or its equivalent.
+
+New States, indeed, have been organized and been admitted into
+the Union without an enabling act of Congress; but the case of
+Kansas, if nothing else, proves that the proceeding is irregular,
+illicit, invalid, and dangerous.  Congress, of course, can
+condone the wrong and validate the act, but it were better that
+the act should be validly done, and that there should be no wrong
+to condone.  Territories have organized as States, adopted State
+constitutions, and instituted State governments under what has
+been called "squatter sovereignty;" but such sovereignty has no
+existence, because sovereignty is attached to the domain; and the
+domain is in the United States.  It is the offspring of that
+false view of popular sovereignty which places it in the people
+personally or generically, irrespective of the domain, which
+makes sovereignty a purely personal right, not a right fixed to
+the soil, and is simply a return to the barbaric constitution of
+power.  In all civilized nations, sovereignty is inseparable from
+the state, and the state is inseparable from the domain.  The
+will of the people, unless they are a state, is no law, has no
+force, binds nobody, and justifies no act.
+
+The regular process of forming and admitting new States explains
+admirably the mutual relation of the Union and the several
+States.  The people of a Territory belonging to the United States
+or included in the public domain not yet erected into a State and
+admitted into the Union, are subjects of the United States,
+without any political rights whatever, and, though a part of the
+population, are no part of the sovereign people of the United
+States.  They become a part of that people, with political rights
+and franchises, only when they are erected into a State, and
+admitted into the Union as one of the United States.  They may
+meet in convention, draw up and adopt a constitution declaring or
+assuming them to be a State, elect State officers, senators, and
+representatives in the State legislature, and representatives and
+senators in Congress, but they are not yet a State, and are, as
+before, under the Territorial government established by the
+General Government.  It does not exist as a State till recognized
+by Congress and admitted into the Union.  The existence of the
+State, and the rights and powers of the people within the State,
+depend on their being a State in the Union, or a State united.
+Hence a State erected on the national domain, but itself outside
+of the Union, is not an independent foreign State, but simply no
+State at all, in any sense of the term.  As there is no union
+outside of the States, so is there no State outside of the Union;
+and to be a citizen either of a State or of the United States, it
+is necessary to be a citizen of a State, and of a State in the
+Union.  The inhabitants of Territories not yet erected into
+States are subjects, not citizens--that is, not citizens with
+political rights.  The sovereign people are not the people
+outside of State organization, nor the people of the States
+severally, but the distinct people of the several States united,
+and therefore most appropriately called the people of the United
+States.
+
+This is the peculiarity of the American constitution and is
+substantially the very peculiarity noted and dwelt upon by
+Mr. Madison in his masterly letter to Edward Everett, published
+in the "North American Review," October, 1830.
+
+"I In order to understand the true character of the constitution
+of the United States," says Mr. Madison, "the error, not
+uncommon, must be avoided of viewing it through the medium either
+of a consolidated government or of a confederated government,
+whilst it is neither the one nor the other, but a mixture of
+both.  And having, in no model, the similitudes and analogies
+applicable to other systems of government, it must, more than any
+other, be its own interpreter, according to its text and the
+facts in the case.
+
+"From these it will be seen that the characteristic peculiarities
+of the constitution are: 1. The mode of its formation. 2. The
+division of the supreme powers of government between the States
+in their united capacity and the States in their individual
+capacities.
+
+"1. It was formed not by the governments of the component States,
+as the Federal Government, for which it was substituted, was
+formed; nor was it formed by a majority of the people of the
+United States as a single community, in the manner of a
+consolidated government.  It was formed by the States; that is,
+by the people in each of the States, acting in their highest
+sovereign capacity, and formed consequently by the same authority
+which formed the State constitution.
+
+"Being thus derived from the same source as the constitutions of
+the States, it has within each State the same authority as the
+constitution of the State, and is as much a constitution in the
+strict sense of the term, within its prescribed sphere, as the
+constitutions of the States are within their respective spheres;
+but with this obvious and essential difference, that, being a
+compact among the States in their highest capacity, and
+constituting the people thereof one people for certain purposes,
+it cannot be altered or annulled at the will of the States
+individually, as the constitution of a State may be at its
+individual will.
+
+"2. And that it divides the supreme powers of government between
+the government of the United States and the governments of the
+individual States, is stamped on the face of the instrument; the
+powers of war and of taxation, of commerce and treaties, and
+other enumerated powers vested in the government of the United
+States, are of high and sovereign a character as any of the
+powers reserved to the State governments."
+
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Webster, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and
+nearly all the old Republicans, and even the old Federalists, on
+the question as to what is the actual constitution of the United
+States, took substantially the same view; but they all, as well
+as Mr. Madison himself, speak of the written constitution, which
+on their theory has and can have only a conventional value.
+Mr. Madison evidently recognizes no constitution of the people
+prior to the written constitution, from which the written
+constitution, or the constitution of the government, derives all
+its force and vitality.  The organization of the American people,
+which he knew well--no man better,--and which he so justly
+characterizes, he supposes to have been deliberately formed by
+the people themselves, through the convention--not given them by
+Providence as their original and inherent constitution.  But this
+was merely the effect of the general doctrine which he had
+adopted, in common with nearly all his contemporaries, of the
+origin of the state in compact, and may be eliminated from his
+view of what the constitution actually is, without affecting that
+view itself.
+
+Mr. Madison lays great stress on the fact that though the
+constitution of the Union was formed by the States, it was
+formed, not by the governments, but by the people of the several
+States; but this makes no essential difference, if the people are
+the people of the States, and sovereign in their severalty, and
+not in their union.  Had it been formed by the State governments
+with the acquiescence of the people, it would have rested on as
+high authority as if formed by the people of the State in
+convention assembled.  The only difference is, that if the State
+ratified it by the legislature, she could abrogate it by the
+legislature; if in convention, she could abrogate it only in
+convention.  Mr. Madison, following Mr. Jefferson, supposes the
+constitution makes the people of the several States one people
+for certain specific purposes, and leaves it to be supposed that
+in regard to all other matters, or in all other relations, they
+are sovereign; and hence he makes the government a mixture of a
+consolidated government and a confederated government, but
+neither the one nor the other exclusively.  Say the people of the
+United States were one people in all respects, and under a
+government which is neither a consolidated nor a confederated
+government, nor yet a mixture of the two, but a government in
+which the powers of government are divided between a general
+government and particular governments, each emanating from the
+same source, and you will have the simple fact, and precisely
+what Mr. Madison means, when is eliminated what is derived from
+his theory of the origin of government in compact.  It is this
+theory of the conventional origin of the constitution, and which
+excludes the Providential or real constitution of the people,
+that has misled him and so many other eminent statesmen and
+constitutional lawyers.
+
+The convention did not create the Union or unite the States, for
+it was assembled by the authority of the United States who were
+present in it.  The United States or Union existed before the
+convention, as the convention itself affirms in declaring one of
+its purposes to be "to provide for a more perfect union."  If
+there had been no union, it could not and would not have spoken
+of providing for a more perfect union, but would have stated its
+purpose to be to create or form a union.  The convention did not
+form the Union, nor in fact provide for a more perfect union; it
+simply provided for the more perfect representation or expression
+in the General government of the Union already existing.  The
+convention, in common with the statesmen at the time, recognized
+no unwritten or Providential constitution of a people, and
+regarded the constitution of government as the constitution of
+the state, and consequently sometimes put the state for the
+government.  In intepreting its language, it is necessary to
+distinguish between its act and its theory.  Its act is law, its
+theory is not.  The convention met, among other things, to
+organize a government which should more perfectly represent the
+union of the States than did the government created by the
+Articles of Confederation.
+
+The convention, certainly, professes to grant or concede powers
+to the United States, and to prohibit powers to the States; but
+it simply puts the state for the government.  The powers of the
+United States are, indeed, grants or trusts, but from God through
+the law of nature, and are grants, trusts, or powers always
+conceded to every nation or sovereign people.  But none of them
+are grants from the convention.  The powers the convention grants
+or concedes to the United States are powers granted or conceded
+by the United States to the General government it assembled to
+organize and establish, which, as it extends over the whole
+population and territory of the Union, and, as the interests it
+is charged with relate to all the States in common, or to the
+people as a whole, is with no great impropriety called the
+government of the United States, in contradistinction from the
+State governments, which have each only a local jurisdiction.
+But the more exact term is, for the one, the general government,
+and for the others, particular governments, as having charge only
+of the particular interests of the State; and the two together
+constitute the government of the United States, or the complete
+national government; for neither the General government nor the
+State government is complete in itself.  The convention developed
+a general government, and prescribed its powers, and fixed their
+limits and extent, as well as the bounds of the powers of the
+State or particular governments; but they are the United States
+assembled in convention that do all this, and, therefore,
+strictly speaking, no powers are conceded to the United States
+that they did not previously possess.  The convention itself, in
+the constitution it ordained, defines very clearly from whom the
+General government holds its powers.  It holds them, as we I
+have seen, from "We, the people of the United States;" not we,
+the people of the States severally, but of the States united.  If
+it had meant the States severally, it would have said, We, the
+States; if it had recognized and meant the population of the
+country irrespective of its organization into particular States,
+it would have said simply, We, the people.  By saying "We, the
+people of the United States," it placed the sovereign power where
+it is, in the people of the States united.
+
+The convention ordains that the powers not conceded to the
+General government or prohibited to the particular governments,
+"are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." But
+the powers reserved to the States severally are reserved by order
+of the United States, and the powers not so reserved are reserved
+to the people.  What people?  The first thought is that they are
+the people of the States severally; for the constitution
+understands by people the state as distinguished from the state
+government; but if this had been its meaning in this place, it
+would have said, "are reserved to the States respectively, or to
+the people" thereof.  As it does not say so, and does not define
+the people it means, it is necessary to understand by them the
+people called in the preamble "the people of the United States."
+This is confirmed by the authority reserved to amend the
+constitution, which certainly is not reserved to the States
+severally, but necessarily to the power that ordains the
+constitution--"We, the people of the United States."  No power
+except that which ordains is or can be competent to amend a
+constitution of government.  The particular mode prescribed by
+the convention in which the constitution of the government may be
+amended has no bearing on the present argument, because it is
+prescribed by the States united, not severally, and the power to
+amend is evidently reserved, not indeed to the General
+government, but to the United States; for the ratification by any
+State or Territory not in the Union counts for nothing.  The
+States united, can, in the way prescribed, give more or less
+power to the General government, and reserve more or less power
+to the States individually.  The so-called reserved powers are
+really reserved to the people of the United States, who can make
+such disposition of them as seems to them good.
+
+The conclusion, then, that the General government holds from the
+States united, not from the States severally, is not invalidated
+by the fact that its constitution was completed only by the
+ratification of the States in their individual capacity.  The
+ratification was made necessary by the will of the people in
+convention assembled; but the convention was competent to
+complete it and put it in force without that ratification, had it
+so willed.  The general practice under the American system is for
+the convention to submit the constitution it has agreed on to the
+people, to be accepted or rejected by a plebiscitum; but such
+submission, though it may be wise and prudent, is not necessary.
+The convention is held to be the convention of the people, and to
+be clothed with the full authority of the sovereign people, and
+it is in this that it differs from the congress or the
+legislature.  It is not a congress of delegates or ministers who
+are obliged to act under instructions, to report their acts to
+their respective sovereigns for approval or rejection; it is
+itself sovereign, and may do whatever the people themselves can
+do.  There is no necessity for it to appeal to a plebiscitum to
+complete its acts.  That the convention, on the score of
+prudence, is wise in doing so, nobody questions; but the
+convention is always competent, if it chooses, to ordain the
+constitution without appeal.  The power competent to ordain the
+constitution is always competent to change, modify, or amend it.
+That amendments to the constitution of the government can be
+adopted only by being proposed by a convention of all the States
+in the Union, or by being proposed, by a two-thirds vote of both
+houses of Congress, and ratified by three-fourths of the States,
+is simply a conventional ordinance, which the convention can
+change at its pleasure.  It proves nothing as it stands but the
+will of the convention.
+
+The term ratification itself, because the term commonly used in
+reference to treaties between sovereign powers, has been seized
+on, since sometimes used by the convention, to prove that the
+constitution emanates from the States severally, and is a treaty
+or compact between sovereign states, not an organic or
+fundamental law ordained by a single sovereign will; but this
+argument is inadmissible, because, as we have just seen, the
+convention is competent to ordain the constitution without
+submitting it for ratification, and because the convention uses
+sometimes the word adopt instead of the word ratify.  That the
+framers of the constitution held it to be a treaty, compact, or
+agreement among sovereigns, there is no doubt, for they so held
+in regard to all constitution of government; and there is just as
+little doubt that they intended to constitute, and firmly
+believed that they were constituting a real government.
+Mr. Madison's authority on this point is conclusive.  They
+unquestionably regarded the States, prior to the ratification of
+the constitution they proposed, as severally sovereign, as they
+were declared to be by the old Articles of Confederation, but
+they also believed that all individuals are sovereign prior to
+the formation of civil society.  Yet very few, if any, of them
+believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption of the
+constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the
+conventional origin of all government,--the almost universal
+belief of the time among political philosophers,--the little
+account which they made of the historical facts that prove that
+the people of the United States were always one people, and that
+the States never existed as severally sovereign states.
+
+The political philosophers of the present day do not generally
+accept the theory held by our fathers, and it has been shown in
+these pages to be unsound and incompatible with the essential
+nature of government.  The statesmen of the eighteenth century
+believed that the state is derived from the people individually,
+and held that sovereignty is created by the people in convention.
+The rights and powers of the state, they held, were made up of
+the rights held by individuals under the law of nature, and which
+the individuals surrendered to civil society on its formation.
+So they supposed that independent sovereign states might meet in
+convention, mutually agree to surrender a portion of their
+rights, organize their surrendered rights into a real government,
+and leave the convention shorn, at least, of a portion of their
+sovereignty.  This doctrine crops out everywhere in the writings
+of the elder Adams, and is set forth with rare ability by
+Mr. Webster, in his great speech in the Senate against the State
+sovereignty doctrine of General Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, which won
+for him the honorable title of Expounder of the Constitution--and
+expound it he, no doubt, did in the sense of its framers.  He
+boldly concedes that prior to the adoption of the constitution,
+the people of the United States were severally sovereign states,
+but by the constitution they were made one sovereign political
+community or people, and that the States, though retaining
+certain rights, have merged their several sovereignty in the
+Union.
+
+The subtle mind of Mr. Calhoun, who did not hold that a state can
+originate in compact, proved to Mr. Webster that his theory could
+not stand; that, if the States went into the convention sovereign
+States, they came out of it sovereign States; and that the
+constitution they formed could from the nature of the case be
+only a treaty, compact, or agreement between sovereigns.  It
+could create an agency, but not a government.  The sovereign
+States could only delegate the exercise of their sovereign
+powers, not the sovereign powers themselves.  The States could
+agree to exercise certain specific powers of sovereignty only in
+common, but the force and vitality of the agreement depended on
+the States, parties to the agreement retaining respectively their
+sovereignty.  Hence, he maintained that sovereignty, after as
+before the convention, vested in the States severally.  Hence
+State sovereignty, and hence his doctrine that in all cases that
+cannot come properly before the Supreme Court of the United
+States for decision, each State is free to decide for itself, on
+which he based the right of nullification, or the State veto of
+acts of Congress whose constitutionality the State denies.
+Mr. Calhoun was himself no secessionist, but he laid down the
+premises from which secession is the logical deduction; and large
+numbers of young men, among the most open, the most generous, and
+the most patriotic in the country, adopted his premises, without
+being aware of this fact any more than he himself was, and who
+have been behind none in their loyalty to the Union, and in their
+sacrifices to sustain it, in the late rebellion.
+
+The formidable rebellion which is now happily suppressed, and
+which attempted to justify itself by the doctrine of State
+sovereignty, has thrown, in many minds, new light on the subject,
+and led them to re-examine the historical facts in the case from
+a different point of view, to see if Mr. Calhoun's theory is not
+as unfounded as be had proved Mr. Webster's theory to be.  The
+facts in the case really sustain neither, and both failed to see
+it: Mr. Calhoun because be had purposes to accomplish which
+demanded State sovereignty, and Mr. Webster because he examined
+them in the distorting medium of the theory or understanding of
+the statesmen of the eighteenth century.  The civil war has
+vindicated the Union, and defeated the armed forces of the State
+sovereignty men; but it has not refuted their doctrine, and as
+far as it has had any effect, it has strengthened the tendency to
+consolidation or centralism.
+
+But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding
+of the framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the
+expression will be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on
+their merits.  What binds is the thing done, not the theory on
+which it was done, or on which the actors explained their work
+either to themselves or to others.  Their political philosophy,
+or their political theory, may sometimes affect the phraseology
+they adopt, but forms no rule for interpreting their work.  Their
+work was inspired by and accords with the historical facts in the
+case, and is authorized and explained by them.  The American
+people were not made one people by the written constitution, as
+Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, Mr. Webster, and so many others
+supposed, but were made so by the unwritten constitution, born
+with and inherent in them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE CONSTITUTION--CONTINUED.
+
+
+Providence, or God operating through historical facts,
+constituted the American people one political or sovereign
+people, existing and acting in particular communities,
+organizations, called states.  This one people organized as
+states, meet in convention, frame and ordain the constitution of
+government, or institute a general government in place of the
+Continental Congress; and the same people, in their respective
+State organizations, meet in convention in each State, and frame
+and ordain a particular government for the State individually,
+which, in union with the General government, constitutes the
+complete and supreme government within the States, as the General
+government, in union with all the particular governments,
+constitutes the complete and supreme government of the nation or
+whole country.  This is clearly the view taken by Mr. Madison in
+his letter to Mr. Everett, when freed from his theory of the
+origin of government in compact.
+
+The constitution of the people as one people, and the
+distinction at the same time of this one people into particular
+States, precedes the convention, and is the unwritten
+constitution, the Providential constitution, of the American
+people or civil society, as distinguished from the constitution
+of the government, which, whether general or particular, is the
+ordination of civil society itself.  The unwritten constitution
+is the creation or constitution of the sovereign, and the
+sovereign providentially constituted constitutes in turn the
+government, which is not sovereign, but is clothed with just so
+much and just so little authority as the sovereign wills or
+ordains.
+
+The sovereign in the republican order is the organic people, or
+State, and is with us the United States, for with us the organic
+people exist only as organized into States united, which in their
+union form one compact and indissoluble whole.  That is to say,
+the organic American people do not exist as a consolidated people
+or state; they exist only as organized into distinct but
+inseparable States.  Each State is a living member of the one
+body, and derives its life from its union with the body, so that
+the American state is one body with many members; and the
+members, instead of being simply individuals, are States, or
+individuals organized into States.  The body consists of many
+members, and is one body, because the members are all members of
+it, and members one of another.  It does not exist as separate
+or distinct from the members, but exists in their solidarity or
+membership one of another.  There is no sovereign people or
+existence of the United States distinguishable from the people
+or existence of the particular States united.  The people of the
+United States, the state called the United States, are the
+people of the particular States united.  The solidarity of the
+members constitutes the unity of the body.  The difference
+between this view and Mr. Madison's is, that while his view
+supposes the solidarity to be conventional, originating and
+existing in compact, or agreement, this supposes it to be real,
+living, and prior to the convention, as much the work of
+Providence as the existence in the human body of the living
+solidarity of its members.  One law, one life, circulates
+through all the members, constituting them a living organism,
+binding them in living union, all to each and each to all.
+
+Such is the sovereign people, and so far the original unwritten
+constitution.  The sovereign, in order to live and act, must
+have an organ through which be expresses his will.  This organ
+under the American system, is primarily the Convention.  The
+convention is the supreme political body, the concrete sovereign
+authority, and exercises practically the whole sovereign power
+of the people.  The convention persists always, although not in
+permanent session.  It can at any time be convened by the
+ordinary authority of the government, or, in its failure, by a
+plebiscitum.
+
+Next follows the Government created and constituted by the
+convention.  The government is constituted in such manner, and
+has such and only such powers, as the convention ordains.  The
+government has, in the strict sense, no political authority
+under the American system, which separates the government from
+the convention.  All political questions proper, such as the
+elective franchise, eligibility, the constitution of the several
+departments of government, as the legislative, the judicial, and
+the executive, changing, altering, or amending the constitution
+of government, enlarging, or contracting its powers, in a word,
+all those questions that arise on which it is necessary to take
+the immediate orders of the sovereign, belong not to the
+government, but to the convention; and where the will of the
+sovereign is not sufficiently expressed in the constitution, a
+new appeal to the convention is necessary, and may always be had.
+The constitution of Great Britain makes no distinction between
+the convention and the government.  Theoretically the
+constitution of Great Britain is feudal, and there is, properly
+speaking, no British state; there are only the estates, king,
+lords, and commons, and these three estates constitute the
+Parliament, which is held to be omnipotent; that is, has the
+plenitude of political sovereignty.  The British Parliament,
+composed of the three estates, possesses in itself all the
+powers of the convention in the American constitution, and is at
+once the convention and the government.  The imperial
+constitution of France recognizes no convention, but clothes the
+senate with certain political functions, which, in some
+respects, subjects theoretically the sovereign to his creature.
+The emperor confessedly holds his power by the grace of God and
+the will of the nation, which is a clear acknowledgment that the
+sovereignty vests in the French people as the French state; but
+the imperial constitution, which is the constitution of the
+government, not of the state, studies, while acknowledging the
+sovereignty of the people, to render it nugatory, by transferring
+it, under various subtle disguises, to the government, and
+practically to the emperor as chief of the government.  The
+senate, the council of state, the legislative body, and the
+emperor, are all creatures of the French state, and have properly
+no political functions, and to give them such functions is to
+place the sovereign under his own subjects!  The real aim of the
+imperial constitution is to secure despotic power under the
+guise of republicanism.  It leaves and is intended to leave the
+nation no way of practically asserting its sovereignty but by
+either a revolution or a plebiscitum, and a plebiscitum is
+permissible only where there is no regular government.
+
+The British constitution is consistent with itself, but imposes
+no restriction on the power of the government.  The French
+imperial constitution is illogical, inconsistent with itself as
+well as with the free action of the nation.  The American
+constitution has all the advantages of both, and the
+disadvantages of neither.  The convention is not the government
+like the British Parliament, nor a creature of the state like
+the French senate, but the sovereign state itself, in a
+practical form.  By means of the convention the government is
+restricted to its delegated powers, and these, if found in
+practice either too great or too small, can be enlarged or
+contracted in a regular, orderly way, without resorting to a
+revolution or to a plebiscitum.  Whatever political grievances
+there may be, there is always present the sovereign convention
+competent to redress them.  The efficiency of power is thus
+secured without danger to liberty, and freedom without danger to
+power.  The recognition of the convention, the real political
+sovereign of the country and its separation from and
+independence of the ordinary government, is one of the most
+striking features of the American constitution.
+
+The next thing to be noted, after the convention, is the
+constitution by the convention of the government.  This
+constitution, as Mr. Madison well observes, divides the powers
+conceded by the convention to government between the General
+Government and the particular State governments.  Strictly
+speaking, the government is one, and its powers only are divided
+and exercised by two sets of agents or ministries.  This
+division of the powers of government could never have been
+established by the convention if the American people had not
+been providentially constituted one people, existing and acting
+through particular State organizations.  Here the unwritten
+constitution, or the constitution written in the people
+themselves, rendered practicable and dictated the written
+constitution, or constitution ordained by the convention and
+engrossed on parchment.  It only expresses in the government the
+fact which pre-existed in the national organization and life.
+
+This division of the powers of government is peculiar to the
+United States, and is an effective safeguard against both feudal
+disintegration and Roman centralism.  Misled by their prejudices
+and peculiar interests, a portion of the people of the United
+States, pleading in their justification the theory of State
+sovereignty, attempted disintegration, secession, and national
+independence separate from that of the United States, but the
+central force of the constitution was too strong for them to
+succeed.  The unity of the nation was too strong to be
+effectually broken.  No doubt the reaction against secession and
+disintegration will strengthen the tendency to centralism, but
+centralism can succeed no better than disintegration has
+succeeded because the General government has no subsistentia, no
+suppositum, to borrow a theological term, outside or independent
+of the States.  The particular governments are stronger, if
+there be any difference, to protect the States against
+centralism than the General government is to protect the Union
+against disintegration; and after swinging for a time too far
+toward one extreme and then too far toward the other, the public
+mind will recover its equilibrium, and the government move on in
+its constitutional path.
+
+Republican Rome attempted to guard against excessive centralism
+by the tribunitial veto, or by the organization of a negative or
+obstructive power.  Mr. Calhoun thought this admirable, and
+wished to effect the same end here, where it is secured by
+other, more effective, and less objectionable means, by a State
+veto on the acts of Congress, by a dual executive, and by
+substituting concurrent for numerical majorities.  Imperial Rome
+gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated all
+power in the hands of the emperor, became completely
+centralized, and fell.  The British constitution seeks the same
+end by substituting estates for the state, and establishing a
+mixed government, in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy
+temper, check, or balance each other; but practically the
+commons estate has become supreme, and the nobility govern not
+in the house of lords, and can really influence public affairs
+only through the house of commons.  The principle of the British
+constitution is not the division of the powers of government,
+but the antagonism of estates, or rather of interests, trusting
+to the obstructive influence of that antagonism to preserve the
+government from pure centralism.  Hence the study of the British
+statesman is to manage diverse and antagonistic parties and
+interests so as to gain the ability to act, which he can do only
+by intrigue, cajolery, bribery in one form or another, and
+corruption of every sort.  The British government cannot be
+carried on by fair, honest, and honorable means, any more than
+could the Roman under the antagonism created by the tribunitial
+veto.  The French tried the English system of organized
+antagonism in 1789, as a cure for the centralism introduced by
+Richelieu and Louis XIV., and again under the Restoration and
+Louis Philippe, and called it the system of constitutional
+guarantees; but they could never manage it, and they have taken
+refuge in unmitigated centralism under Napoleon III., who,
+however well disposed, finds no means in the constitution of the
+French nation of tempering it.  The English system, called the
+constitutional, and sometimes the parliamentary system, will not
+work in France, and indeed works really well nowhere.
+
+The American system, sometimes called the Federal system, is not
+founded on antagonism of classes, estates, or interests, and is
+in no sense a system of checks and balances.  It needs and
+tolerates no obstructive forces.  It does not pit section
+against section, the States severally against the General
+government, nor the General government against the State
+governments, and nothing is more hurtful than the attempt to
+explain it and work it on the principles of British
+constitutionalism.  The convention created no antagonistic
+powers; it simply divided the powers of government, and gave
+neither to the General government nor to the State governments
+all the powers of government, nor in any instance did it give to
+the two governments jurisdiction in the same matters. Hence each
+has its own sphere, in which it can move on without colliding
+with that of the other.  Each is independent and complete in
+relation to its own work, incomplete and dependent on the other
+for the complete work of government.
+
+The division of power is not between a NATIONAL government and
+State governments, but between a GENERAL government and
+particular governments.  The General government, inasmuch as it
+extends to matters common to all the States, is usually called
+the Government of the United States, and sometimes the Federal
+government, to distinguish it from the particular or State
+governments, but without strict propriety; for the government of
+the United States, or the Federal government, means, in
+strictness, both the General government and the particular
+Governments, since neither is in itself the complete government
+of the country.  The General government has authority within
+each of the States, and each of the State governments has
+authority in the Union.  The line between the Union and the
+States severally, is not precisely the line between the General
+government and the particular governments.  As, for instance,
+the General government lays direct taxes on the people of the
+States, and collects internal revenue within them; and the
+citizens of a particular State, and none others, are electors of
+President and Vice-President of the United States, and
+representatives in the lower house of Congress, while senators
+in Congress are elected by the State legislatures themselves.
+
+The line that distinguishes the two governments is that which
+distinguishes the general relations and interests from the
+particular relations and interests of the people of the United
+States.  These general relations and interests are placed under
+the General government, which, because its jurisdiction is
+coextensive with the Union, is called the Government of the
+United States; the particular relations and interests are placed
+under particular governments, which, because their jurisdiction
+is only coextensive, with the States respectively, are called
+State governments.  The General government governs supremely all
+the people of the United States and Territories belonging to the
+Union, in all their general relations and interests, or
+relations and interests common alike to them all; the particular
+or State government governs supremely the people of a particular
+State, as Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey, in all that
+pertains to their particular or private rights, relations, and
+interests.  The powers of each are equally sovereign, and
+neither are derived from the other.  The State governments are
+not subordinate to the General government, nor the General
+government to the State governments.  They are co-ordinate
+governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving its
+powers from the same sovereign authority.  In their respective
+spheres neither yields to the other.  In relation to the matters
+within its jurisdiction, each government is independent and
+supreme in regard of the other, and subject only to the
+convention.
+
+The powers of the General government are the power--
+
+To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay
+the debts and provide for the general welfare of the United
+States; to borrow money on the credit of the United States; to
+regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several
+States, and with the Indian tribes; to establish a uniform rule
+of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of
+bankruptcies throughout the United States; to coin money and
+regulate the value thereof, and fix the standard of weights and
+measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the
+securities and current coin of the United States; to establish
+post-offices and post-roads; to promote the progress of science
+and of the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors
+and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
+and discoveries; to define and punish piracies and felonies
+committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of
+nations; to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal,
+and make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise
+and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to make
+rules for the government of the land and naval forces; to
+provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the
+Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; to provide
+for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and of
+governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of
+the United States; to exercise exclusive legislation in all
+cases whatsoever over such district, not exceeding ten miles
+square, as may by cession of particular States and the
+acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the
+United States, and to exercise a like authority over all places
+purchased by the consent of the legislature of the State in
+which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines,
+arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings; and to make
+all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into
+execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by
+this constitution in the government of the United States, or in
+any department or office thereof.
+
+In addition to these, the General government is clothed with the
+treaty-making power, and the whole charge of the foreign
+relations of the country; with power to admit new States into
+the Union; to dispose of and make all needful rules and
+regulations concerning the territory and all other property
+belonging to the United States; to declare, with certain
+restrictions, the punishment of treason, the constitution itself
+defining what is treason against the United States; and to
+propose, or to call, on the application of the legislatures of
+two-thirds of all the states, a convention for proposing
+amendments to this constitution; and is vested with supreme
+judicial power, original or appellate, in all cases of law and
+equity arising under this constitution, the laws of the United
+States, and treaties made or to be made under their authority,
+in all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and
+consuls, in all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, in
+all controversies to which the United States shall be a party,
+all controversies between two or more States, between a State
+and citizens of another State, between citizens of different
+States, between citizens of the same State claiming lands under
+grants of different States, and between a State or the citizens
+thereof and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.
+
+These, with what is incidental to them, and what is necessary
+and proper to carry them into effect, are all the positive
+powers with which the convention vests the General government,
+or government of the United States, as distinguished from the
+governments of the particular States; and these, with the
+exception of what relates to the district in which it has its
+seat, and places of forts, magazines, &c., are of a general
+nature, and restricted to the common relations and interests of
+the people, or at least to interests and relations which extend
+beyond the limits of a particular State.  They are all powers
+that regard matters which extend beyond not only the individual
+citizen, but the individual State, and affect alike the
+relations and interests of all the States, or matters which
+cannot be disposed of by a State government without the exercise
+of extra-territorial jurisdiction.  They give the government no
+jurisdiction of questions which affect individuals or citizens
+only in their private and domestic relations which lie wholly
+within a particular State.  The General government does not
+legislate concerning private rights, whether of persons or
+things, the tenure of real estate, marriage, dower, inheritance,
+wills, the transferrence or transmission of property, real or
+personal; it can charter no private corporations, out of the
+District of Columbia, for business, literary, scientific, or
+eleemosynary purposes, establish no schools, found no colleges
+or universities, and promote science and the useful arts only by
+securing to authors and inventors for a time the exclusive right
+to their writings and discoveries.  The United States Bank was
+manifestly unconstitutional, as probably are the present
+so-called national banks.  The United States Bank was a private
+or particular corporation, and the present national banks are
+only corporations of the same sort, though organized under a
+general law.  The pretence that they are established to supply a
+national currency, does not save their constitutionality, for
+the convention has not given the General government the power
+nor imposed on it the duty of furnishing a national currency.
+To coin money, and regulate the value thereof, is something very
+different from authorizing private companies to issue bank
+notes, on the basis of the public stocks held as private
+property, or even on what is called a specie basis.  To claim
+the power under the general welfare clause would be a simple
+mockery of good sense.  It is no more for the general welfare
+than any other successful private business.  The private welfare
+of each is, no doubt, for the welfare of all, but not therefore
+is it the "general welfare," for what is private, particular in
+its nature, is not and cannot be general.  To understand by
+general welfare that which is for the individual welfare of all
+or the greater number, would be to claim for the General
+government all the powers of government, and to deny that very
+division of powers which is the crowning merit of the American
+system.  The general welfare, by the very force of the words
+themselves, means the common as distinguished from the private
+or individual welfare.  The system of national banks may or may
+not be a good and desirable system, but it is difficult to
+understand the constitutional power of the General government to
+establish it.
+
+On the ground that its powers are general, not particular, the
+General government has no power to lay a protective tariff.  It
+can lay a tariff for revenue, not for protection of home
+manufactures or home industry; for the interests fostered, even
+though indirectly advantageous to the whole people, are in their
+nature private or particular, not general interests, and chiefly
+interests of private corporations and capitalists.  Their
+incidental or even consequential effects do not change their
+direct and essential nature.  So with domestic slavery.  Slavery
+comes under the head of private rights, whether regarded on the
+side of the master or on the side of the slave.  The right of a
+citizen to hold a slave, if a right at all, is the private right
+of property, and the right of the slave to his freedom is a
+private and personal right, and neither is placed under the
+safeguard of the General government, which has nowhere, unless
+in the District of Columbia and the places over which it has
+exclusive legislative power in all cases whatsoever, either the
+right to establish it or to abolish it, except perhaps under the
+war power, as a military necessity, an indemnity for the past,
+or a security for the future.
+
+This applies to what are called Territories as well as to the
+States.  The right of the government to govern the Territories
+in regard to private and particular rights and interests, is
+derived from no express grant of power, and is held only ex
+necessitate--the United States owning the domain, and there
+being no other authority competent to govern them.  But, as in
+the case of all powers held ex necessitate, the power is
+restricted to the absolute necessity in the case.  What are
+called Territorial governments, to distinguish them from the
+State governments, are only provisional governments, and can
+touch private rights and interests no further than is necessary
+to preserve order and prepare the way for the organization and
+installation of a regular State government.  Till then the law
+governing private rights is the law that was in force, if any
+such there was, when the territory became by purchase, by
+conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the United
+States.
+
+Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance
+of l787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of
+the Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise,
+prohibiting slavery north of the parallel 36' 30'.  The Wilmot
+proviso was for the same reason unconstitutional.  The General
+government never had and has not any power to exclude slavery
+from the Territories, any more than to abolish it in the States.
+But slavery being a local institution, sustained neither by the
+law of nature nor the law of nations, no citizen migrating from
+a slave State could carry his slaves with him, and hold them as
+slaves in the Territory.  Rights enacted by local law are rights
+only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters into
+a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they
+are carried enacts to the contrary.  The only persons that could
+be held as slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves
+or the children of those who were slaves in the Territory when
+it passed to the United States.  The whole controversy on,
+slavery in the Territories, and which culminated in the civil
+war, was wholly unnecessary, and never could have occurred had
+the constitution been properly understood and adhered to by both
+sides.  True, Congress could not exclude slavery from the
+Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
+slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded,
+for the inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from
+the States after the cession to the United States, were too few
+to be counted.
+
+The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
+naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was
+very proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one
+State from gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage
+over another; but the General government has itself no power to
+naturalize a single foreigner, or in any case to say who shall
+or who shall not be citizens, either of a State or of the United
+States, or to declare who may or may not be electors even of its
+own officers.  The convention ordains that members of the house
+of representatives shall be chosen by electors who have the
+qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous
+branch of the State legislature, but the State determines these
+qualifications, and who do or do not possess them; that the
+senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures, and that the
+electors of President and Vice-President shall be appointed in
+such manner as the respective State legislatures may direct.  The
+whole question of citizenship, what shall or shall not be the
+qualifications of electors, who shall or shall not be freemen, is
+reserved to the, States, as coming under the head of personal or
+private rights and franchises.  In practice, the exact line of
+demarcation may not always have been strictly observed either by
+the General government or by the State governments; but a
+careful study of the constitution cannot fail to show that the
+division of powers is the division or distinction between the
+public and general relations and interests, rights and duties of
+the people, and their private and particular relations and
+interests, rights and duties.  As these two classes of relations
+and interests, rights and duties, though distinguishable, are
+really inseparable in nature, it follows that the two governments
+are essential to the existence of a complete government, or to
+the existence of a real government in its plenitude and
+integrity.  Left to either alone, the people would have only an
+incomplete, an initial, or inchoate government.  The General
+government is the complement of the State governments, and the
+State governments are the complement of the General government.
+
+The consideration of the powers denied by the convention to the
+General government and to the State governments respectively,
+will lead to the same conclusion.  To the General government is
+denied expressly or by necessary implication all jurisdiction in
+matters of private rights and interests, and to the State
+government is denied all jurisdiction in right, or interests
+which extend, as has been said, beyond the boundaries of the
+State.  "No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or
+confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money,
+emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a
+tender in the payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex
+post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or
+grant any title of nobility.  No State shall, without the
+consent of Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or
+exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing
+its inspection laws and the net produce of all duties and
+imposts laid by any State on imports and exports shall be for the
+use of the treasury of the United States, and all such laws
+shall be subject to the revision and control of Congress.  No
+State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of
+tonnage, keep troops or ships-of-war in time of peace, enter into
+any agreement or compact with another State or with a foreign
+power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such
+imminent danger as will not admit of delay."
+
+The powers denied to the States in some matters which are rather
+private and particular, such as bills of attainder, ex post
+facto laws, laws impairing the obligation of contracts, granting
+titles of nobility, are denied equally to the General government.
+There is evidently a profound logic in the constitution, and
+there is not a single provision in it that is arbitrary, or
+anomalous, or that does not harmonize dialectically with the
+whole, and with the real constitution of the American people.  At
+first sight the reservation to the State of the appointment of
+the officers of the militia might seem an anomaly; but as the
+whole subject of internal police belongs to the State, it should
+have some military force at its command.  The subject of
+bankruptcies, also, might seem to be more properly within the
+province of the State, and so it would be if commerce between the
+several States had not been placed under Congress, or if trade
+were confined to the citizens of the State and within its
+boundaries; but as such is not the case, it was necessary to
+place it under the General government, in order that laws on the
+subject might be uniform throughout the Union, and that the
+citizens of all the States, and foreigners trading with them,
+should be placed on an equal footing, and have the same remedies.
+The subject follows naturally in the train of commerce, for
+bankruptcies, as understood at the time, were confined to the
+mercantile class, bankers, and brokers; and since the regulation
+of commerce, foreign and inter-state, was to be placed under the
+sole charge of the General government, it was necessary that
+bankruptcy should be included.  The subject of patents is placed
+under the General government, though the patent is a private
+right, because it was the will of the convention that the patent
+should be good in all the States, as affording more encouragement
+to science and the useful arts than if good only within a single
+State, or if the power were left to each State to recognize or
+not patents granted by another.  The right created, though
+private in its nature, is Yet general or common to all the States
+in its enjoyment or exercise.
+
+The division of the powers of government between a General
+government and particular governments, rendered possible and
+practicable by the original constitution of the people
+themselves, as one people existing and acting through State
+organizations, is the American method of guarding against the
+undue centralism to which Roman imperialism inevitably tends;
+and it is far simpler and more effective than any of the
+European systems of mixed governments, which seek their end by
+organizing an antagonism of interests or classes.  The American
+method demands no such antagonism, no neutralizing of one social
+force by another, but avails itself of all the forces of society,
+organizes them dialectically, not antagonistically, and thus
+protects with, equal efficiency both public authority and
+private rights.  The General government can never oppress the
+people as individuals, or abridge their private rights or
+personal freedom and independence, because these are not within
+its jurisdiction, but are placed in charge, within each State,
+of the State government, which, within its sphere, governs as
+supremely as the General government: the State governments
+cannot weaken the public authority of the nation or oppress the
+people in their general rights and interests, for these are
+withdrawn from State jurisdiction, and placed under charge of a
+General government, which, in its sphere, governs as supremely as
+the State government.  There is no resort to a system of checks
+and balances; there is no restraint on power, and no systematic
+distrust of power, but simply a division of powers between two
+co-ordinate governments, distinct but inseparable, moving in
+distinct spheres, but in the same direction, or to a common end.
+The system is no invention of man, is no creation of the
+convention, but is given us by Providence in the living
+constitution of the American people.  The merit of the statesmen
+of 1787 is that they did not destroy or deface the work of
+Providence, but accepted it, and organized the government in
+harmony with the real orders the real elements given them.  They
+suffered themselves in all their positive substantial work to be
+governed by reality, not by theories and speculations.  In this
+they proved themselves statesmen, and their work survives; and
+the republic, laugh as sciolists may, is, for the present and
+future, the model republic--as much so as was Rome in her day;
+and it is not simply national pride nor American self-conceit
+that pronounces its establishment the beginning of a new and
+more advanced order of civilization; such is really the fact.
+
+The only apparently weak point in the system is in the
+particular States themselves.  Feudalism protected the feudal
+aristocracy effectively for a time against both the king and the
+people, but left the king and the, people without protection
+against the aristocracy, and hence it fell.  It was not adequate
+to the wants of civil society, did not harmonize all social
+elements, and protect all social and individual rights and
+interests, and therefore could not but fail.  The General
+government takes care of public authority and rights; the State
+protects private rights and personal freedom as against the
+General government: but what protects the citizens in their
+private rights, their personal freedom and independence, against
+the particular State government?  Universal suffrage, answers
+the democrat.  Armed with the ballot, more powerful than the
+sword, each citizen is able to protect himself.  But this is
+theory, not reality.  If it were true, the division of the
+powers of government between two co-ordinate, governments would
+be of no practical importance.  Experience does not sustain the
+theory, and the power of the ballot to protect the individual
+may be rendered ineffective by the tyranny of party.  Experience
+proves that the ballot is far less effective in securing the
+freedom and independence of the individual citizen than is
+commonly pretended.  The ballot of an isolated individual counts
+for nothing.  The individual, though armed with the ballot, is
+as powerless, if he stands alone, as if he had it not.  To
+render it of any avail he must associate himself with a party,
+and look for his success in the success of his party; and to
+secure the success of his party, he must give up to it his own
+private convictions and free will.  In practice, individuals are
+nothing individually, and parties are every thing.  Even the
+suppression of the late rebellion, and the support of the
+Administration in doing it, was made a party question, and the
+government found the leaders of the party opposed to the
+Republican party an obstacle hardly less difficult to surmount
+than the chiefs of the armies of the so-called Confederate
+States.
+
+Parties are formed, one hardly knows how, and controlled, no one
+knows by whom; but usually by demagogues, men who have some
+private or personal purposes, for which they wish, through party
+to use the government.  Parties have no conscience, no
+responsibility, and their very reason of being is, the
+usurpation and concentration of power.  The real practical
+tendency of universal suffrage is to democratic, instead of an
+imperial, centralism.  What is to guard against this centralism?
+Not universal suffrage, for that tends to create it;, and if the
+government is left to it, the government becomes practically the
+will of an ever shifting and irresponsible majority.  Is the
+remedy in written or paper constitutions?  Party can break
+through them, and by making the judges elective by party, for
+short terms, and re-eligible, can do so with impunity.  In
+several of the States, the dominant majority have gained the
+power to govern at will, without any let or hindrance.  Besides,
+constitutions can be altered, and have been altered, very nearly
+at the will of the majority.  No mere paper constitutions are
+any protection against the usurpations of party, for party will
+always grasp all the power it can.
+
+Yet the evil is not so great as it seems, for in most of the
+States the principle of division of powers is carried into the
+bosom of the State itself; in some States further than in
+others, but in all it obtains to some extent.  In what are
+called the New England States, the best governed portion of the
+Union, each town is a corporation, having important powers and
+the charge of all purely local matters--chooses its own
+officers, manages its own finances, takes charge of its own
+poor, of its own roads and bridges, and of the education of its
+own children.  Between these corporations and the State
+government are the counties, that take charge of another class
+of interests, more general than those under the charge of the
+town, but less general than those of the State.  In the great
+central and Northwestern States the same system obtains, though
+less completely carried out.  In the Southern and Southwestern
+States, the town corporations hardly exist, and the rights and
+interests of the poorer classes of persons have been less well
+protected in them than in the Northern and Eastern States.  But
+with the abolition of slavery, and the lessening of the
+influence of the wealthy slaveholding class, with the return of
+peace and the revival of agricultural, industrial, and
+commercial prosperity, the New England system, in its main
+features, is pretty sure to be gradually introduced, or
+developed, and the division of powers in the State to be as
+effectively and as systematically carried out as it is between
+the General government and the particular or State governments.
+So, though universal suffrage, good as far as it goes, is not
+alone sufficient, the division of powers affords with it a not
+inadequate protection.
+
+No government, whose workings are intrusted to men, ever is or
+can be practically perfect--secure all good, and guard against
+all evil.  In all human governments there will be defects and
+abuses, and he is no wise man who expects perfection from
+imperfection.  But the American constitution, taken as a whole,
+and in all its parts, is the least imperfect that has ever
+existed, and under it individual rights, personal freedom and
+independence, as well as public authority or society, are better
+protected than under any other; and as the few barbaric elements
+retained from the feudal ages are eliminated, the standard of
+education elevated, and the whole population Americanized,
+moulded by and to the American system, it will be found to
+effect all the good, with as little of the evil, as can be
+reasonably expected from any possible civil government or
+political constitution of society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+SECESSION.
+
+
+The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it
+its population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the
+unity and integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation
+have been effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the
+secessionists, though disposed to submit to superior force, and
+demean themselves henceforth as loyal citizens, most likely hold
+as firmly to the doctrine as before finding themselves unable to
+reduce it to practice, and the Union victory will remain
+incomplete till they are convinced in their understandings that
+the Union has the better reason as well as the superior military
+resources.  The nation has conquered their bodies, but it is
+hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their minds
+and win their hearts.
+
+The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right,
+or even as a conventional right.  The secessionists disclaim
+revolutionary principles, and hold that the right of secession is
+anterior to the convention, a right which the convention could
+neither give, nor take away, because inherent in the very
+conception of a sovereign State.  Secession is simply the repeal
+by the State of the act of accession to the Union; and as that
+act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she must always be
+free to repeal it.  The Union is a copartnership; a State in the
+Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to
+withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.  There is
+no power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any
+longer than be pleases.  He is undoubtedly holden for the
+obligations contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but
+for none contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice
+thereof.
+
+So of a sovereign State in the Union.  The Union itself, apart
+from the sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction,
+a nullity, and binds nobody.  All its substance and vitality are
+in the agreement by which the States constitute themselves a firm
+or copartnership, for certain specific purposes, and for which
+they open an office and establish an agency under express
+instructions for the management of the general affairs of the
+firm.  The State is held jointly and severally for all the legal
+obligations of the Union, contracted while she is in it but no
+further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases, precisely as
+an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm. The
+remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion
+against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations
+already contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
+
+The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the
+domain is attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of
+the State.  Secession, then, carries the entire State government,
+people, and domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the
+State to its original position of a sovereign State, foreign to
+the United States.  Being an independent sovereign State, she may
+enter into a new confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge
+herself in some other foreign state, as she judges proper or
+finds opportunity.  The States that seceded formed among
+themselves a new confederacy, more to their mind than the one
+formed in 1787, as they had a perfect right to do, and in the war
+just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but a people
+fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and
+true patriots de fending the independence and inviolability of
+their country against foreign invaders.  They are to be honored
+for their loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and
+punished as traitors.
+
+This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of
+revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no
+allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union,
+but simply on the original and inherent rights of the several
+States as independent sovereign States.  The argument is
+conclusive, and the defence complete, if the Union is only a firm
+or copartnership, and the sovereignty vests in the States
+severally.  The refutation of the secessionists is in the facts
+adduced that disprove the theory of State sovereignty, and prove
+that the sovereignty vests not in the States severally, but in
+the States united, or that the Union is sovereign, and not the
+States individually.  The Union is not a firm, a copartnership,
+nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real, living,
+constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble
+unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.  There is,
+indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are
+no States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union.
+There is no Union without the States, and there are no States
+without the Union.  The people are born States, and the States
+are born United States.  The Union and the States are
+simultaneous, born together, and enter alike into the original
+and essential constitution of the American state.  This the facts
+and reasonings adduced fully establish.
+
+But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into
+States, does not necessarily include the whole population or
+territory included within the jurisdiction of the United States.
+It is restricted to the people and territory or domain organized
+into States in the Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people
+were restricted to the tenants of the sacred territory, which had
+been surveyed, and its boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and
+which by no means included all the territory held by the city,
+and of which she was both the private proprietor and the public
+sovereign.  The city had vast possessions acquired by
+confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by conquest, and in
+reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were enacted, and
+which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred laws.
+In this class of territory, of which the city was the private
+owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, which was
+held to be only leased to its occupants, who were often
+dispossessed, and their lands given as a recompense by the consul
+or imperator to his disbanded legionaries.  The provincials were
+subjects of Rome, but formed no part of the Roman people, and had
+no share in the political power of the state, till at a late
+period the privileges of Roman citizens were extended to them,
+and the Roman people became coextensive with the Roman empire.
+So the United States have held and still hold large territorial
+possessions, acquired by the acknowledgment of their independence
+by Great Britain, the former sovereign, the cession of particular
+states, and purchase from France, Spain, and Mexico.  Till
+erected into States and admitted into the Union, this territory,
+with its population, though subject to the United States, makes
+no part of the political or sovereign territory and people of the
+United States.  It is under the Union, not in it, as is indicated
+by the phrase admitting into the Union--a legal phrase, since the
+constitution ordains that "new States may be admitted by the
+Congress into this Union."
+
+There can be no secession that separates a State from the
+national domain, and withdraws it from the territorial
+sovereignty or jurisdiction of the United States; yet what
+hinders a State from going out of the Union in the sense that it
+comes into it, and thus ceasing to belong to the political people
+of the United States?
+
+If the view of the constitution taken in the preceding chapters
+be correct, and certainly no facts tend to disprove it, the
+accession of a Territory as a State in the Union is a free act of
+the territorial people.  The Territory cannot organize and apply
+for admission as a State, without what is called an "enabling act"
+of Congress or its equivalent; but that act is permissive, not
+mandatory, and nothing obliges the Territory to organize under it
+and apply for admission.  It may do so or not, as it chooses.
+What, then, hinders the State once in the Union from going out or
+returning to its former condition of territory subject to the
+Union?  The original States did not need to come in under an
+enabling act, for they were born States in the Union, and were
+never territory outside of the Union and subject to it.  But they
+and the new States, adopted or naturalized States, once in the
+Union, stand on a footing of perfect equality, and the original
+States are no more and no less bound than they to remain States
+in the Union.  The ratification of the constitution by the
+original States was a free act, as much so as the accession of a
+new State formed from territory subject to the Union is a free
+act, and a free act is an act which one is free to do or not to
+do, as he pleases.  What a State is free to do or not to do, it
+is free to undo, if it chooses.  There is nothing in either the
+State constitution or in that of the United States that forbids
+it.
+
+This is denied.  The population and domain are inseparable in the
+State; and if the State could take itself out of the Union, it
+would take them out, and be ipso facto a sovereign State foreign
+to the Union.  It would take the domain and the population out of
+the Union, it is conceded and even maintained, but not therefore
+would it take them out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or would
+they exist as a State foreign to the Union; for population and
+territory may coexist, as Dacota, Colorado, or New Mexico, out of
+the Union, and yet be subject to the Union, or within the
+jurisdiction of the United States.
+
+But the Union is formed by the surrender by each of the States of
+its individual sovereignty, and each State by its admission into
+the Union surrenders its individual sovereignty, or binds itself
+by a constitutional compact to merge its individual sovereignty
+in that of the whole.  It then cannot cease to be a State in the
+Union without breach of contract.  Having surrendered its
+sovereignty to the Union, or bound itself by the constitution to
+exercise its original sovereignty only as one of the United States,
+it can unmake itself of its state character, only by consent of
+the United States, or by a successful revolution.  It is by
+virtue of this fact that secession is rebellion against the
+United States, and that the General government, as representing
+the Union, has the right and the duty to suppress it by all the
+forces at its command.
+
+There can be no rebellion where there is no allegiance.  The
+States in the Union cannot owe allegiance to the Union, for they
+are it, and for any one to go out of it is no more an act of
+rebellion than it is for a king to abdicate his throne.  The
+Union is not formed by the surrender to it by the several States
+of their respective individual sovereignty.  Such surrender
+could, as we have seen, form only an alliance, or a
+confederation, not one sovereign people; and from an alliance, or
+confederation, the ally or confederate has, saving its faith, the
+inherent right to secede.  The argument assumes that the States
+were originally each in its individuality a sovereign state, but by
+the convention which framed the constitution, each surrendered
+its sovereignty to the whole, and thus several sovereign states
+became one sovereign political people, governing in general
+matters through the General government, and in particular matters
+through particular or State governments.  This is Mr. Madison's
+theory, and also Mr. Webster's; but it has been refuted in the
+refutation of the theory that makes government originate in
+compact.  A sovereign state can, undoubtedly, surrender its
+sovereignty, but can surrender it only to something or somebody
+that really exists; for to Surrender to no one or to nothing is,
+as has been shown, the same thing as not to surrender at all; and
+the Union, being formed only by the surrender, is nothing prior
+to it, or till after it is made, and therefore can be no
+recipient of the surrender.
+
+Besides, the theory is the reverse of the fact.  The State does
+not surrender or part with its sovereignty by coming into the
+Union, but acquires by it all the rights it holds as a State.
+Between the original States and the new States there is a
+difference of mode by which they become States in the Union, but
+none in their powers, or the tenure by which they hold them.  The
+process by which new States are actually formed and admitted into
+the Union, discloses at once what it is that is gained or lost by
+admission.  The domain and population, before the organization of
+the Territory into one of the United States, are subject to the
+United States, inseparably attached to the domain of the Union,
+and under its sovereignty.  The Territory so remains, organized
+or unorganized, under a Territorial Government created by
+Congress.  Congress, by an enabling act, permits it to organize
+as a State, to call a convention to form a State constitution, to
+elect under it, in such way as the convention ordains, State
+officers, a State legislature, and, in the way prescribed by the
+Constitution of the United States, senators and representatives
+in Congress.  Here is a complete organization as a State, yet,
+though called a State, it is no State at all, and is simply
+territory, without a single particle of political power.  To be a
+State it must be recognized and admitted by Congress as a State
+in the Union, and when so recognized and admitted it possesses,
+in union with the other United States, supreme political
+sovereignty, jointly in all general matters, and individually in
+all private and particular matters.
+
+The Territory gives up no sovereign powers by coming into the
+Union, for before it came into the Union it had no sovereignty,
+no political rights at all.  All the rights and powers it holds
+are held by the simple fact that it has become a State in the
+Union.  This is as true of the original States as of the new
+States; for it has been shown in the chapter on The United States,
+that the original British sovereignty under which the colonies
+were organized and existed passed, on the fact of independence,
+to the States United, and not to the States severally.  Hence if
+nine States had ratified the constitution, and the other four had
+stood out, and refused to do it, which was within their
+competency, they would not have been independent sovereign
+States, outside of the Union, but Territories under the Union.
+
+Texas forms the only exception to the rule that the States have
+never been independent of the Union.  All the other new States
+have been formed from territory subject to the Union.  This is
+true of all the States formed out of the Territory of the
+Northwest, and out of the domain ceded by France, Spain, and
+Mexico to the United States.  All these cessions were held by the
+United States as territory immediately subject to the Union,
+before being erected into States; and by far the larger part is
+so held even yet.  But Texas was an independent foreign state,
+and was annexed as a State without having been first subjected as
+territory to the United States.  It of course lost by annexation
+its separate sovereignty.  But this annexation was held by many
+to be unconstitutional; it was made when the State sovereignty
+theory had gained possession of the Government, and was annexed
+as a State instead of being admitted as a State formed from
+territory belonging to the United States, for the very purpose of
+committing the nation to that theory.  Its annexation was the
+prologue, as the Mexican war was the first act in the secession
+drama, and as the epilogue is the suppression of the rebellion on
+Texan soil.  Texas is an exceptional case, and forms no
+precedent, and cannot be adduced as invalidating the general
+rule.  Omitting Texas, the simple fact is, the States acquire all
+their sovereign powers by being States in the Union, instead of
+losing or surrendering them.
+
+Our American statesmen have overlooked or not duly weighed the
+facts in the case, because, holding the origin of government in
+compact, they felt no need of looking back of the constitution to
+find the basis of that unity of the American people which they
+assert.  Neither Mr. Madison nor Mr. Webster felt any difficulty
+in asserting it as created by the convention of 1787, or in
+conceding the sovereignty of the States prior to the Union, and
+denying its existence after the ratification of the constitution.
+If it were not that they held that the State originates in
+convention or the social compact, there would be unpardonable
+presumption on the part of the present writer in venturing to
+hazard an assertion contrary to theirs.  But, if their theory was
+unsound, their practical doctrine was not; for they maintained
+that the American people are one sovereign people, and Mr. Quincy
+Adams, an authority inferior to neither, maintained that they
+were always one people, and that the States hold from the Union,
+not the Union from the States.  The States without the Union
+cease to exist as political communities: the Union without the
+States ceases to be a Union, and becomes a vast centralized and
+consolidated state, ready to lapse from a civilized into a
+barbaric, from a republican to a despotic nation.
+
+The State, under the American system, as distinguished from
+Territory, is not in the domain and population fixed to it, nor
+yet in its exterior organization, but solely in the political
+powers, rights, and franchises which it holds from the United
+States, or as one of the United States.  As these are rights, not
+obligations, the State may resign or abdicate them and cease to
+be a State, on the same principle that any man may abdicate or
+forego his rights.  In doing so, the State breaks no oath of
+allegiance, fails to fulfil no obligation she contracted as a
+State: she simply forgoes her political rights and franchises.
+So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not
+unconstitutional or unlawful.  But it is, as Mr. Sumner and
+others have maintained, simply State suicide.  Nothing hinders a
+State from committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than
+there was something which compelled the Territory to become a
+State in the Union against its will.
+
+It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to
+the Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not
+destroy the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and
+independence, as the secessionists maintain.  Certainly, if the
+States were, Prior to the Union, sovereign States; but this is
+precisely what has been denied and disproved; for prior to the
+Union there were no States.  Secession restores, or reduces,
+rather, the State to the condition it was in before its admission
+into the Union; but that condition is that of Territory, or a
+Territory subject to the United States, and not that of an
+independent sovereign state.  The State holds all its political
+rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out
+of it, or in the condition in which its population and domain
+were before being a State in the Union.
+
+State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and
+territory from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no
+rebellion where there is no allegiance, resistance by its
+population and territory to the Union, even war against the
+Union, would not be rebellion, but the simple assertion of
+popular sovereignty.  This is only the same objection in another
+form.  The lapse of the State releases the population and
+territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their allegiance
+to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State, and
+they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the
+United States.  A State owes no allegiance to the United States,
+for it is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.  The relation
+between the United States and the State is not the relation of
+suzerain and liegeman or vassal.  A State owes no allegiance, for
+it is not subject to the Union; it is never in their State
+capacity that its population and territory do or can rebel.
+Hence, the Government has steadily denied that, in the late
+rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
+
+But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union;
+and therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the
+States that passed secession ordinances are and all along have
+been States in the Union.  No State can rebel, but it does not
+follow therefrom that no State can secede or cease to exist as a
+State: it only follows that secession, in the sense of State
+suicide, or the abdication by the State of its political rights
+and powers, is not rebellion.  Nor does it follow from the fact
+that no State has rebelled, that no State has ceased to be a
+State; or that the States that passed secession ordinances have
+been all along States in the Union.
+
+The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not
+within the competency of the State, and	therefore null and void
+from the beginning.  Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within
+the competency of the State, so far as intended to alienate any
+portion of the national domain and population thereto annexed,
+they certainly were, and so far were void and of no effect; but
+so far as intended to take the State simply as a State out of the
+Union, they were within the competency of the State, were not
+illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null and void.
+Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in others
+are not wholly void.  The unconstitutionality vitiates only the
+unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and
+recognized and enforced as such by the courts.
+
+The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed
+by the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them
+and usurped the authority of the State.  This argument implies
+that, if a secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of
+the State, it is valid; which is more than they who urge it
+against the State suicide doctrine are prepared to concede.  But
+the secession ordinances were in every instance passed by the
+people of the State in convention legally assembled, therefore by
+them in their highest State capacity--in the same capacity in
+which they ordain and ratify the State constitution itself; and
+in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and
+confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a
+genuine plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.  In all cases
+they were adopted by a decided majority of the political people
+of the State, and after their adoption they were acquiesced in
+and indeed actively supported by very nearly the whole people.
+The people of the States adopting the secession ordinances were
+far more unanimous in supporting secession than the people of the
+other States were in sustaining the Government in its efforts to
+suppress the rebellion by coercive measures.  It will not do,
+then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to a faction.  The
+people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the majority.
+
+There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few
+Union men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few
+ambitious and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their
+violence, and their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the
+people of their respective States into secession against their
+convictions and their will.  No doubt there were leaders at the
+South, as there are in every great movement at the North; no
+doubt there were individuals in the seceding States that held
+secession wrong in principle, and were conscientiously attached
+to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men who adhered to the
+Union, not because they disapproved secession, but because they
+disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because they
+were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not succeed, that
+the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it
+they would become the great and leading men of their respective
+States, which they certainly could not be under secession.
+Others sympathized fully with what was called the Southern cause,
+held firmly the right of secession, and hated cordially the
+Yankees, but doubted either the practicability or the expediency
+of secession, and opposed it till resolved on, but, after it was
+resolved on, yielded to none in their earnest support of it.
+These last comprised the immense majority of those who voted
+against secession.  Never could those called the Southern leaders
+have carried the secession ordinances, never could they have
+carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with
+such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four
+years, making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh
+doubtful, if they had not had the Southern heart with them, if
+they had not been most heartily supported by the overwhelming
+mass of the people.  They led a popular, not a factious movement.
+
+No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.  The
+State is territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its
+territory and population out of the Union, no State can secede.
+Out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the
+sovereign or national domain, very true; but out of the Union as
+a State, with rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not
+true.  Secession is political, not territorial.
+
+But the State holds from the territory or domain.  The people are
+sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the
+domain because held by a sovereign people, as was established by
+the analysis of the early Roman constitution.  The territory of
+the States corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which
+was attached the Roman sovereignty.  That territory, once
+surveyed and consecrated, remained sacred and the ruling
+territory, and could not be divested of its sacred and governing
+character.  The portions of the territory of the United States
+once erected into States and consecrated as ruling territory can
+never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or successful
+revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
+
+The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by
+public, not by private wealth, and is always respublica or
+commonwealth, in distinction from despotism or monarchy in its
+oriental sense, which is founded on private wealth, or which
+assumes that the authority to govern, or sovereignty, is the
+private estate of the sovereign.  All power is a domain, but
+there is no domain without a dominus or lord.  In oriental
+monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is the
+public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the
+people in their territorial, and not in their personal or
+genealogical relation.  The people of The United States are
+sovereign only within the territory or domain of the United
+States, and their sovereignty is a state, because fixed,
+attached, or limited to that specific territory.  It is fixed to
+the soil, not nomadic.  In barbaric nations power is nomadic and
+personal, or genealogical, confined to no locality, but attaches
+to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.  The Gothic chiefs
+hold their power by a personal title, and have the same authority
+in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the
+Elbe or the Danube.  Power migrates with the chief and his
+people, and may be exercised wherever he and they find
+themselves, as a Swedish queen held when she ordered the
+execution of one of her subjects at Paris, without asking
+permission of the territorial lord.  In these nations, power is a
+personal right, or a private estate, not a state which exists
+only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the domain,
+exists independently of the chief or the government.  The
+distinction is between public domain and private domain.
+
+The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some
+democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is
+territorial, not personal; not territorial because the majority
+of the people are agriculturists or landholders, but because all
+political rights, powers, or franchises are territorial.  The
+sovereign people of the United States are sovereign only within
+the territory of the United States.  The great body of the
+freemen have the elective franchise, but no one has it save in
+his State, his county, his town, his ward, his precinct.  Out of
+the election district in which he is domiciled, a citizen of the
+United States has no more right to vote than has the citizen or
+subject of a foreign state.  This explains what is meant by the
+attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the
+state on the domain.  The state, in republican states, exists
+only as inseparably united with the public domain; under
+feudalism, power was joined to territory or domain, but the
+domain was held as a private, not as a public domain.  All
+sovereignty rests on domain or proprietorship, and is dominion.
+The proprietor is the dominus or lord, and in republican states
+the lord is society, or the public, and the domain is held for
+the common or public good of all.  All political rights are held
+from society, or the dominus, and therefore it is the elective
+franchise is held from society, and is a civil right, as
+distinguished from a natural, or even a purely personal right.
+
+As there is no domain without a lord or dominus, territory alone
+cannot possess any political rights or franchises, for it is not
+a domain.  In the American system, the dominus or lord is not the
+particular State, but the United States, and, the domain of the
+whole territory, whether erected into particular States or not,
+is in the United States alone.  The United States do not part
+with the dominion of that portion of the national domain included
+within a particular State.  The State holds the domain not
+separately but jointly, as inseparably one of the United States:
+separated, it has no dominion, is no State, and is no longer a
+joint sovereign at all, and the territory that it included falls
+into the condition of any other territory held by the United
+States not erected into one of the United States.
+
+Lawyers, indeed, tell us that the eminent domain is in the
+particular State, and that all escheats are to the State, not to
+the United States.  All escheats of private estates, but no
+public or general escheats.  But this has nothing to do with the
+public domain.  The United States are the dominus, but they have,
+by the constitution, divided the powers of government between a
+General government and particular State governments, and ordained
+that all matters of a general nature, common to all the States,
+should be placed under the supreme control of the former, and all
+matters of a private or particular character under the supreme
+control of the latter.  The eminent domain of private estates is
+in the particular State, but the sovereign authority in the
+particular State is that of the United States expressing itself
+through the State government.  The United States, in the States
+as well as out of them, is the dominus, as the States
+respectively would soon find if they were to undertake to
+alienate any part of their domain to a foreign power, or even to
+the citizens or subjects of a foreign State, as is also evident
+from the fact that the United States, in the way prescribed by
+the constitution, may enlarge or contract at will the rights and
+powers of the States.  The mistake on this point grows out of the
+habit of restricting the action of the United States to the
+General government, and not recollecting that the United States
+govern one class of subjects through the General government and
+another class through State governments, but that it is one and
+the same authority that governs in both.
+
+The analogy borrowed from the Roman constitution, as far as
+applicable, proves the reverse of what is intended.  The dominus
+of the sacred territory was the city, or the Roman state, not the
+sacred territory itself.  The territory received the tenant, and
+gave him as tenant the right to a seat in the senate; but the
+right of the territory was derived not from the domain, but from
+the dominus, that is, the city.  But the city could revoke its
+grant, as it practically did when it conferred the privileges of
+Roman citizenship on the provincials, and gave to plebeians seats
+in the senate.  Moreover, nothing in Roman history indicates that
+to the validity of a senatus consultum it was necessary to count
+the vacant domains of the sacred territory.  The particular
+domain must, under the American system, be counted when it is
+held by a State, but of itself alone, or even with its
+population, it is not a State, and therefore as a State domain is
+vacant and without any political rights or powers whatever.
+
+To argue that the territory and population once a State in the
+Union must needs always be so, would be well enough if a State in
+the Union were individually a sovereign state; for territory,
+with its population not subject to another, is always a sovereign
+state, even though its government has been subverted.  But this
+is not the fact, for territory with its population does not
+constitute a State in the Union; and, therefore, when of a State
+nothing remains but territory and population, the State has
+evidently disappeared.  It will not do then to maintain that
+State suicide is impossible, and that the States that adopted
+secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be States
+in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their
+representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in
+Congress.  They must be reorganized first.
+
+There would also be some embarrassment to the government in
+holding that the States that passed the secession ordinance
+remain, notwithstanding, States in the Union.  The citizens of a
+State in the Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless
+they are rebels to their State; and rebels to their State they
+are not, unless they resist its authority and make war on it.
+The authority of the State in the Union is a legal authority, and
+the citizen in obeying it is disloyal neither to the State nor to
+the Union.  The citizens in the States that made war on the
+United States did not resist their State, for they acted by its
+authority.  The only men, on this supposition, in them, who have
+been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have
+refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted,
+even with armed force, the secession ordinances.  The several
+State governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on
+the war for the destruction of the Union, if the States are in
+the Union, were legal and loyal governments of their respective
+States, for they were legally elected and installed, and
+conformed to their respective State constitutions.  All the acts
+of these governments have been constitutional.  Their entering
+into a confederacy for attaining a separate nationality has been
+legal, and the debts contracted by the States individually, or by
+the confederacy legally formed by them, have been legally
+contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against the
+United States.  The war against them has been all wrong, and the
+confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United
+States.  The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can
+blockade its own ports, and the captures and seizures under it,
+robberies.  The Supreme Court has been wrong in declaring the war
+a territorial civil war, as well as the government in acting
+accordingly.  Now, all these conclusions are manifestly false and
+absurd, and therefore the assumption that the States in question
+have all along been States in the Union cannot be sustained.
+
+It is easy to understand the resistance the Government offers to
+the doctrine that a State may commit suicide, or by its own act
+abdicate its rights and cease to be a State in the Union.  It is
+admissible on no theory of the constitution that has been widely
+entertained.  It is not admissible on Mr. Calhoun's theory of
+State sovereignty, for on that theory a State in going out of the
+Union does not cease to be a State but simply resumes the powers
+it had delegated to the General government.  It cannot be
+maintained on Mr. Madison's or Mr. Webster's theory, that the
+States prior to the Union were severally sovereign, but by the
+Union were constituted one people; for, if this one people are
+understood to be a federal people, State secession would not be
+State suicide, but State independence; and if understood to be
+one consolidated or centralized people, it would be simply
+insurrection or rebellion against the national authority,
+laboring to make itself a revolution.  The government seems to
+have understood Mr. Madison's theory in both senses--in the
+consolidated sense, in declaring the secessionists insurgents and
+rebels, and in the federal sense, in maintaining that they have
+never seceded, and are still States in the Union, in full
+possession of all their political or State rights.  Perhaps, if
+the government, instead of borrowing from contradictory theories
+of the constitution which have gained currency, had examined in
+the light of historical facts the constitution itself, it would
+have been as constitutional in its doctrine as it has been loyal
+and patriotic, energetic and successful in its military
+administration.
+
+Another reason why the doctrine that State secession is State
+suicide has appeared so offensive to many, is the supposition
+entertained at one time by some of its friends, that the
+dissolution of the State vacates all rights and franchises held
+under it.  But this is a mistake.  The principle is well known
+and recognized by the jurisprudence of all civilized nations,
+that in the transfer of a territory from one territorial
+sovereign to another, the laws in force under the old sovereign
+remain in force after the change, till abrogated, or others are
+enacted in their place by the new sovereign, except such as are
+necessarily abrogated by the change itself of the sovereign; not,
+indeed, because the old sovereign retains any authority, but,
+because such is presumed by the courts to be the will of the new
+sovereign.  The principle applies in the case of the death of a
+State in the Union.  The laws of the State are territorial, till
+abrogated by competent authority, remain the lex loci, and are in
+full force.  All that would be vacated would be the public rights
+of the State, and in no case the private rights of citizens,
+corporations, or laws affecting them.
+
+But the same conclusion is reached in another way.  In the lapse
+of a State or its return to the condition of a Territory, there
+is really no change of sovereignty.  The sovereignty, both before
+and after, is the United States.  The sovereign authority that
+governs in the State government, as we have seen, though
+independent of the General government, is the United States.  The
+United States govern certain matters through a General
+government, and others through particular State governments.  The
+private rights and interests created, regulated, or protected by
+the particular State, are created, regulated, or protected by the
+United States, as much and as plenarily as if done by the General
+government, and the State laws creating, regulating, or protecting
+them can be abrogated by no power known to the constitution, but
+either the State itself, or the United States in convention legally
+assembled.  If this were what is meant by the States that have
+seceded, or professed to secede, remaining States in the Union,
+they would, indeed, be States still in the Union, notwithstanding
+secession and the government would be right in saying that no
+State can secede.  But this is not what is meant, at least not
+all that is meant.  It is meant not only that the private rights
+of citizens and corporations remain, but the citizens retain all
+the public rights of the State, that is, the right to
+representation in Congress and in the electoral college, and the
+right to sit in the convention, which is not true.
+
+But the correction of the misapprehension that the private rights
+and interests are lost by the lapse of the State may remove the
+graver prejudices against the doctrine of State suicide, and
+dispose loyal and honest Union men to bear the reasons by which
+it is supported, and which nobody has refuted or can refute on
+constitutional grounds.  A Territory by coming into the Union
+becomes a State; a State by going out of the Union becomes a
+Territory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+RECONSTRUCTION.
+
+
+The question of reconstructing the States that seceded will be
+practically settled before these pages can see the light, and
+will therefore be considered here only so far as necessary to
+complete the view of the constitution of the United States.  The
+manner in which the government proposed to settle, has settled,
+or will settle the question, proves that both it and the American
+people have only confused views of the rights and powers of the
+General government, but imperfectly comprehend the distinction
+between the legislative and executive departments of that
+Government, and are far more familiar with party tactics than
+with constitutional law.
+
+It would be difficult to imagine any thing more unconstitutional,
+more crude, or more glaringly impolitic than the mode of
+reconstruction indicated by the various executive proclamations
+that have been issued, bearing on the subject, or even by the
+bill for guaranteeing the States republican governments, that
+passed Congress, but which failed to obtain the President's
+signature.  It is, in some measure, characteristic of the
+American government to understand how things ought to be done
+only when they are done and it is too late to do them in the
+right way.  Its wisdom comes after action, as if engaged in a
+series of experiments.  But, happily for the nation, few blunders
+are committed that with our young life and elasticity are
+irreparable, and that, after all, are greater than are ordinarily
+committed by older and more experienced nations.  They are not of
+the most fatal character, and are, for the most part, such as are
+incident to the conceit, the heedlessness, the ardor, and the
+impatience of youth, and need excite no serious alarm for the
+future.
+
+There has been no little confusion in the public mind, and in
+that of the government itself, as to what reconstruction is, who
+has the power to reconstruct, and how that power is to be
+exercised.  Are the States that seceded States in the Union, with
+no other disability than that of having no legal governments? or
+are they Territories subject to the Union?  Is their
+reconstruction their erection into new States, or their
+restoration as States previously in the Union?  Is the power to
+reconstruct in the States themselves? or is it in the General
+government?  If partly in the people and partly in the General
+government, is the part in the General government in Congress, or
+in the Executive?  If in Congress, can the Executive, without the
+authority of Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it
+for Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State?   If
+the power is partly in the people of the disorganized States who
+or what defines that people, decides who may or may not vote in
+the reorganization?  On all these questions there has been much
+crude, if not erroneous, thinking, and much inconsistent and
+contradictory action.
+
+The government started with the theory that no State had seceded
+or could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in
+rebellion continued to be States in the Union.  That is, it held
+secession to be a purely personal and not a territorial
+insurrection.  Yet it proclaimed eleven States to be in
+insurrection against the United States, blockaded their ports,
+and interdicted all trade and intercourse of any kind with them.
+The Supreme Court, in order to sustain the blockade and interdict
+as legal, decided the war to be not a war against simply
+individual or personal insurgents but "a territorial civil war."
+This negatived the assumption that the States that took up arms
+against the United States remained all the while peaceable and
+loyal States, with all their political rights and powers in the
+Union.  The States in the Union are integral elements of the
+political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation
+vests in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the
+eleven States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a
+formidable war against the United States, were in the Union, an
+integral element of that sovereign authority which was carrying
+on a yet more formidable war against them.  Nevertheless, the
+government still held to its first assumption, that the States in
+rebellion continued to be States in the Union--loyal States, with
+all their rights and franchises unimpaired!
+
+That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in
+the doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union,
+is not to be wondered at.  The extent and determination of the
+secession movement were imperfectly understood, and the belief
+among the supporters of the government, and, perhaps, of the
+government itself, was, that it was a spasmodic movement for a
+temporary purpose, rather than a fixed determination to found an
+independent separate nationality; that it was and would be
+sustained by the real majority of the people of none of the
+States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the
+true policy of the government would be to treat the seceders with
+great forbearance, to avoid all measures likely to exasperate
+them or to embarrass their loyal fellow-citizens, to act simply
+on the defensive, and to leave the Union men in the several
+seceding States to gain a political victory at the polls over the
+secessionists, and to return their States to their normal
+position in the Union.
+
+The government may not have had much faith in this policy, and
+Mr. Lincoln's personal authority might be cited to the effect
+that it had not, but it was urged strongly by the Union men of
+the Border States.  The administration was hardly seated in
+office, and its members were new men, without administrative
+experience; the President, who had been legally elected indeed,
+but without a majority of the popular votes, was far from having
+the full confidence even of the party that elected him; opinions
+were divided; party spirit ran high; the excitement was great,
+the crisis was imminent, the government found itself left by its
+predecessor without an army or a navy, and almost without arms or
+ordnance; it knew not how far it could count on popular support,
+and was hardly aware whom it could trust or should distrust; all
+was hurry and confusion; and what could the government do but to
+gain time, keep off active war as long as possible, conciliate
+all it could, and take ground which at the time seemed likely to
+rally the largest number of the people to its support?  There
+were men then, warm friends of the administration, and still
+warmer friends of their country, who believed that a bolder, a
+less timid, a less cautious policy would have been wiser, that in
+revolutionary times boldness, what in other times would be
+rashness, is the highest prudence, on the side of the government
+as well as on the side of the revolution; that when once it has
+shown itself, the rebellion that hesitates, deliberates, consults,
+is defeated and so is the government.  The seceders owed from the
+first their successes not to their superior organization, to
+their better preparation, or to the better discipline and
+appointment of their armies, but to their very rashness, to their
+audacity even, and the hesitancy, cautious and deliberation of
+the government.  Napoleon owed his successes as general and
+civilian far more to the air of power he assumed, and the
+conviction he produced of his invincibility in the minds of his
+opponents, than to his civil or military strategy and tactics,
+admirable as they both were.  But the government believed it
+wisest to adopt a conciliatory and, in many respects, a
+temporizing policy, and to rely more on weakening the
+secessionists in their respective States than on strengthening
+the hands and hearts of its own staunch and uncompromising
+supporters.  It must strengthen the Union party in the
+insurrectionary States, and as this party hoped to succeed by
+political manipulation rather than by military force, the
+government must rely rather on a show of military power than on
+gaining any decisive battle.  As it hoped, or affected to hope,
+to suppress the rebellion in the States that seceded through
+their loyal citizens, it was obliged to assume that secession was
+the work of a faction, of a few ambitious and disappointed
+politicians, and that the States were all in the Union, and
+continued in the loyal portion of their inhabitants.  Hence its
+aid to the loyal Virginians to organize as the State of Virginia,
+and its subsequent efforts to organize the Union men in
+Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and its disposition to
+recognize their organization in each of those States as the State
+itself, though including only a small minority of the territorial
+people.  Had the facts been as assumed, the government might have
+treated the loyal people of each State as the State itself,
+without any gross usurpation of power; but, unhappily, the facts
+assumed were not facts, and it was soon found that the Union
+party in all the States that seceded, except the western part of
+Virginia and the eastern section of Tennessee, after secession
+had been carried by the popular vote, went almost unanimously
+with the secessionists; for they as well as the secessionists
+held the doctrine of State sovereignty; and to treat the handful
+of citizens that remained loyal in each State as the State
+itself, became ridiculous, and the government should have seen
+and acknowledged it.
+
+The rebellion being really territorial, and not personal, the
+State that seceded was no more continued in the loyal than in the
+disloyal population.  While the war lasted, both were public
+enemies of the United States, and neither had or could have any
+rights as a State in the Union.  The law recognizes a solidarity
+of all the citizens of a State, and assumes that, when a State is
+at war, all its citizens are at war, whether approving the war or
+not.  The loyal people in the States that seceded incurred none
+of the pains and penalties of treason, but they retained none of
+the political rights of the State in the Union, and, in
+reorganizing the State after the suppression of the rebellion,
+they have no more right to take part than the secessionists
+themselves.  They, as well as the secessionists, have followed
+the territory.  It was on this point that the government
+committed its gravest mistake.  As to the reorganization or
+reconstruction of the State, the whole territorial people stood
+on the same footing.
+
+Taking the decision of the Supreme Court as conclusive on the
+subject, the rebellion was territorial, and, therefore, placed
+all the States as States out of the Union, and retained them only
+as population and territory, under or subject to the Union.  The
+States ceased to exist, that is, as integral elements of the
+national sovereignty.  The question then occurred, are they to be
+erected into new States, or are they to be reconstructed and
+restored to the Union as the identical old States that seceded?
+Shall their identity be revived and preserved, or shall they be
+new States, regardless of that identity ?  There can be no
+question that the work to be done was that of restoration, not of
+creation; no tribe should perish from Israel, no star be struck
+from the firmament of the Union.  Every inhabitant of the fallen
+States, and every citizen of the United States must desire them
+to be revived and continued with their old names and boundaries,
+and all true Americans wish to continue the constitution as it
+is, and the Union as it was.  Who would see old Virginia, the
+Virginia of revolutionary fame, of Washington, Jefferson,
+Madison, of Monroe, the "Old Dominion," once the leading State of
+the Union, dead without hope of resurrection? or South Carolina,
+the land of Rutledge, Moultrie, Laurens, Hayne, Sumter, and
+Marion?  There is something grating to him who values State
+associations, and would encourage State emulation and State
+pride, in the mutilation of the Old Dominion and the erection
+within her borders of the new State called West Virginia.  States
+in the Union are not mere prefectures, or mere dependencies on
+the General government, created for the convenience of
+administration.  They have an individual, a real existence of
+their own, as much so as have the individual members of society.
+They are free members, not of a confederation indeed, but of a
+higher political community, and reconstruction should restore the
+identity of their individual life, suspended for a moment by
+secession, but capable of resuscitation.
+
+These States had become, indeed, for a moment, territory under
+the Union; but in no instance had they or could they become
+territory that had never existed as States.  The fact that the
+territory and people had existed as a State, could with regard to
+none of them be obliterated, and, therefore, they could not be
+erected into absolutely new States.  The process of
+reconstructing them could not be the same as that of creating new
+States.  In creating a new State, Congress, ex necessitate,
+because there is no other power except the national convention
+competent to do it, defines the boundaries of the new State, and
+prescribes the electoral people, or who may take part in the
+preliminary organization but in reconstructing States it does
+neither, for both are done by a law Congress is not competent to
+abrogate or modify, and which can be done only by the United
+States in convention assembled, or by the State itself after its
+restoration.  The government has conceded this, and, in part, has
+acted on it.  It preserves, except in Virginia, the old
+boundaries, and recognizes, or rather professes to recognize the
+old electoral law, only it claims the right to exclude from the
+electoral people those who have voluntarily taken part in the
+rebellion.
+
+The work to be done in States that have seceded is that of
+reconstruction, not creation; and this work is not and cannot be
+done, exclusively nor chiefly by the General government, either
+by the Executive or by Congress.  That government can appoint
+military, or even provisional governors, who may designate the
+time and place of holding the convention of the electoral people
+of the disorganized State, as also the time and place of holding
+the elections of delegates to it, and superintend the elections
+so far as to see the polls are opened, and that none but
+qualified electors vote, but nothing more.  All the rest is the
+work of the territorial electoral people themselves, for the
+State within its own sphere must, as one of the United States, be
+a self-governing community.  The General government may concede
+or withhold permission to the disorganized State to reorganize,
+as it judges advisable, but it cannot itself reorganize it.  If it
+concedes the permission, it must leave the whole electoral people
+under the preexisting electoral law free to take part in the work
+of reorganization, and to vote according to their own judgment.
+It has no authority to purge the electoral people, and say who
+may or may not vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the
+qualifications of electors is left to the State, and can be
+settled neither by an act of Congress nor by an Executive
+proclamation.
+
+If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized
+States remain States in the Union, the General government could
+have nothing to say on the subject, and could no more interfere
+with elections in any one of them than it could with elections in
+Massachusetts or New York.  But even on the doctrine here
+defended it can interfere with them only by way of general
+superintendence.  The citizens have, indeed, lost their political
+rights, but not their private rights.  Secession has not
+dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws of the
+disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.
+The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws
+survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law,
+or lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the
+State, that has, as a State, really lapsed.  They do so by will
+of the United States, which enacted them through the individual
+State, and which has not in convention abrogated them, save the
+law authorizing slavery, and its dependent laws.
+
+This point has already been made, but as it is one of the
+niceties of the American constitution, it may not be amiss to
+elaborate it at greater length.  The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson,
+Mr. Madison, and the majority of our jurists, would see to be
+that the States, under God, are severally sovereign in all
+matters not expressly confided to the General government, and
+therefore that the American sovereignty is divided, and the
+citizen owes a double allegiance--allegiance to his State, and
+allegiance to the United States--as if there was a United States
+distinguishable from the States.  Hence Mr. Seward, in an
+official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James,
+says: "The citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United
+States."  And nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union
+at all, hold that it is also due to the States, only that which
+is due to the United States is paramount, as that under feudalism
+due to the overlord.  But this is not the case.  There is no
+divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.  Sovereignty is one,
+and vests not in the General government or in the State
+government, but in the United States, and allegiance is due to
+the United States, and to them alone.  Treason can be committed
+only against the United States, and against a State only because
+against the United States, and is properly cognizable only by the
+Federal courts.  Hence the Union men committed no treason in
+refusing to submit to the secession ordinances of their
+respective States, and in sustaining the national arms against
+secession.
+
+There are two very common mistakes: the one that the States
+individually possess all the powers not delegated to the General
+government; and the other that the Union, or United States, have
+only delegated powers.  But the United States possess all the
+powers of a sovereign state, and the States individually and the
+General government possess only such powers as the United States
+in convention delegate to them respectively.  The sovereign is
+neither the General government nor the States severally, but the
+United States in convention.  The United States are the one
+indivisible sovereign, and this sovereign governs alike general
+matters in the General government, and particular matters in the
+several State governments.  All legal authority in either
+emanates from this one indivisible and plenary sovereign, and
+hence the law enacted by a State are really enacted by the United
+States, and derive from them their force and vitality as laws.
+Hence, as the United States survive the particular State, the
+lapse of the State does not abrogate the State laws, or dissolve
+civil society within its jurisdiction.
+
+This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular
+State does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on
+the United States.  Hence all civil rights of every sort created
+by the individual State are really held from the United States,
+and therefore it was that the people of non-slaveholding States
+were, as citizens of the United States, responsible for the
+existence of slavery in the States that seceded.  There is a
+solidarity of States in the Union as there is of individuals in
+each of the States.  The political error of the Abolitionists was
+not in calling upon the people of the United States to abolish
+slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the
+General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in
+their sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which
+were the abrogation of all government and civil society itself,
+instead of calling upon them to do it as the United States in
+convention assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of
+the United States in the way ordained by that constitution
+itself.  This understood, the constitution and laws of a defunct
+State remain in force by virtue of the will of the United States,
+till the State is raised from the dead, restored to life and
+activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they are repealed
+or altered by the United States or the national convention.  But
+as the defunct State could not, and the convention had not
+repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the
+General government had no alternative but to treat them and all
+rights created by them as the territorial law, and to respect
+them as such.
+
+What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose
+by secession?  They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal,
+the pains and penalties of treason, their political rights, or
+right, as has just been said, to be in their own department
+self-governing communities, with the right of representation in
+Congress and the electoral colleges, and to sit in the national
+convention, or of being counted in the ratification of amendments
+to the constitution--precisely what it was shown a Territorial
+people gain by being admitted as a State into the Union.  This is
+the difference between the constitutional doctrine and that
+adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.  But
+what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General
+government gain over the people of States that secede, that it
+has not over others!  As to their internal constitution, their
+private rights of person or property, it gains none.  It has over
+them, till they are reconstructed and restored to the Union, the
+right to institute for them provisional governments, civil or
+military, precisely as it has for the people of a territory that
+is not and has never been one of the United States; but in their
+reconstruction it has less, for the geographical boundaries and
+electoral people of each are already defined by a law which does
+not depend on its will, and which it can neither abrogate nor
+modify.  Here is the difference between the constitutional
+doctrine and that of the so-called radicals.  The State has gone,
+but its laws remain, so far as the United States in convention
+does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the State
+survives, but because the United States so will, or are presumed
+to will.  The United States have by a constitutional amendment
+abrogated the laws of the several States authorizing slavery, and
+prohibited slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the Union;
+and no State can now be reconstructed and be admitted into the
+Union with a constitution that permits slavery, for that would be
+repugnant to the constitution of the United States.  If the
+constitutional amendment is not recognized as ratified by the
+requisite number of States, it is the fault of the government in
+persisting in counting as States what are no States.  Negro
+suffrage, as white suffrage, is at present a question for
+States.
+
+The United States guarantee to such State a republican form of
+government.  And this guarantee, no doubt, authorizes Congress to
+intervene in the internal constitution of a State so far as to
+force it to adopt a republican form of government, but not so far
+as to organize a government for a State, or to compel a
+territorial people to accept or adopt a State constitution for
+themselves.  If a State attempts to organize a form of government
+not republican, it can prevent it; and if a Territory adopts an
+unrepublican form, it can force it to change its constitution to
+one that is republican, or compel it to remain a Territory under
+a provisional government.  But this gives the General government
+no authority in the organization or re-organization of States
+beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the
+territorial people is republican.  To press it further, to make
+the constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire
+control of the organization or re-organization of a State, is a
+manifest abuse--a palpable violation of the constitution and of
+the whole American system.  The authority given by the clause is
+specific, and is no authority for intervention in the general
+reconstruction of the lapsed State.  It gives authority in no
+question raised by secession or its consequences, and can give
+none, except, from within or from without, there is an overt
+attempt to organize a State in the Union with an unrepublican
+form of government.
+
+The General government gives permission to the territorial people
+of the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with
+suffering them, without special recognition, to reorganize in
+their own way, and apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to
+Congress to admit them as a State, or not, according to its own
+discretion, in like manner as it admits a new State; but the
+re-organization itself must be the work of the territorial people
+themselves, under their old electoral law.  The power that
+reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that admits
+them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress.  The
+Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that
+of seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever
+power he assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions
+given to the provisional governors, civil or military, is simply
+a usurpation of the power of Congress, which it rests with
+Congress to condone or not, as it may see fit.  Executive
+proclamations, excluding a larger or a smaller portion of the
+electoral or territorial people from the exercise of the elective
+franchise in reorganizing the State, and executive efforts to
+throw the State into the hands of one political party or another,
+are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the President, in
+relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace powers of
+the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer of
+the Union.  His business is to execute the laws, not to make
+them.  His legislative authority is confined to his qualified
+veto on the acts of Congress, and to the recommendation to
+Congress of such measures as he believes are needed by the
+country.
+
+In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the
+Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace.
+The Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex
+necessitate, pace it ad interim under a military governor, but he
+cannot appoint even a provisional civil governor till Congress
+has created the office and given him authority to fill it; far
+less can be legally give instructions to the civil governor as to
+the mode or manner of reconstructing the disorganized State, or
+decide who may or may not vote in the preliminary reorganization.
+The Executive could do nothing of the sort, even in regard to a
+Territory never erected into a State.  It belongs to Congress,
+not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or provisional
+governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska,
+and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines the
+boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines
+the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act
+herself.  Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life
+and vigor in the Union a disorganized State, has nothing to say
+as to its boundaries or its electoral people, nor any right to
+interfere between parties in the State, to throw the
+reconstructed State into the hands of one or another party.  All
+that Congress can insist on is, that the territorial people shall
+reconstruct with a government republican in form; that its
+senators and representatives in Congress, and the members of the
+State legislature, and all executive and judicial officers of the
+State shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support and defend
+the constitution of the United States.  In the whole work the
+President has nothing to do with reconstruction, except to see
+that peace is preserved and the laws are fully executed.
+
+It may be at least doubted that the Executive has power to
+proclaim amnesty and pardon to rebels after the civil war has
+ceased, and ceased it has when the rebels have thrown down their
+arms and submitted; for his pardoning power is only to pardon
+after conviction and judgment of the court: it is certain that he
+has no power to proscribe or punish even traitors, except by due
+process of law.  When the war is over he has only his ordinary
+peace powers.  He cannot then disfranchise any portion of the
+electoral people of a State that seceded, even though there is no
+doubt that they have taken part in the rebellion, and may still
+be suspected of disloyal sentiments.  Not even Congress can do
+it, and no power known to the constitution till the State is
+reconstructed can do it without due process of law, except the
+national convention.  Should the President do any of the things
+supposed, he would both abuse the power he has and usurp power
+that he has not, and render himself liable to impeachment.  There
+are many things very proper, and even necessary to be done, which
+are high crimes when done by an improper person or agent.  The
+duty of the President, when there are steps to be taken or things
+to be done which he believes very necessary, but which are not
+within his competency, is, if Congress is not in session, to
+call it together at the earliest practicable moment, and submit
+the matter to its wisdom and discretion.
+
+It must be remembered that the late rebellion was not a merely
+personal but a territorial rebellion.  In such a rebellion,
+embracing eleven States, and, excluding slaves, a population of
+at least seven millions, acting under an organized territorial
+government, preserving internal civil order, supporting an army
+and navy under regularly commissioned officers, and carrying on
+war as a sovereign nation--in such a territorial rebellion no one
+in particular can be accused and punished as a traitor.  The
+rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or reckless leaders,
+but of the people, and the responsibility of the crime, whether
+civil or military, is not individual, but common to the whole
+territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half
+of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise
+Their defeat and the failure of their cause must be their
+punishment.  The interest of the country, as well the sentiment
+of the civilized world--it might almost be said the law of
+nations--demands their permission to return to their allegiance,
+to be treated according to their future merits, as an integral
+portion of the American people.
+
+The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its
+former severity toward political offenders.  It regards with
+horror the savage cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate
+Jacobites, after their defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden,
+in 1746, their barbarous treatment of the United Irishmen in
+1798, and her brutality to the mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the
+harshness of Russia toward the insurgent Poles, defeated in their
+mad attempts to recover their lost nationality; the severity of
+Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated Magyars.  The liberal
+press kept up for years, especially in England and the United
+States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and Neapolitan
+governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired to
+overthrow them.  Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than
+Jefferson Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release
+from a Turkish prison, and sent a national ship to bring him
+hither as the nation's guest.  The people of the United States
+have held from the first "the right of insurrection," and have
+given their moral support to every insurrection in the Old or New
+World they discovered, and for them to treat with severity any
+portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at the very worst,
+only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly avowed and
+pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the
+civilized world as little less than infamous.
+
+Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any
+severity toward the people lately in arms against the government.
+The interest of the nation demands not the death or the expulsion
+of the secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes
+proscribed by the President's proclamation of the 29th of May,
+1865, nor even their disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary;
+but their restoration to citizenship, and their loyal
+co-operation with all true-hearted Americans, in hearing the
+wounds inflicted on the whole country by the civil war.  There
+need be no fear to trust them.  Their cause is lost; they may or
+may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever.  They
+appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from
+the ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated,
+terribly defeated.  They know it and feel it.  There is no
+further appeal for them; the judgment of the court of last resort
+has been rendered, and rendered against them.  The cause is
+finished, the controversy closed, never to be re-opened.
+Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is worse than idle to
+attempt to renew the war against it.  Henceforth their lot is
+bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and
+interests, for themselves and their children, and their
+children's children, depend on their being permitted to demean
+themselves henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens.
+They must seek their freedom, greatness, and glory in the
+freedom, greatness, and glory of the American republic, in which,
+after all, they can be far freer, greater, more glorious than in
+a separate and independent confederacy.  All the arguments and
+considerations urged by Union men against their secession, come
+back to them now with redoubled force to keep them henceforth
+loyal to the Union.
+
+They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot
+afford to lose them.  To hang or exile them, and depopulate and
+suffer to run to waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad
+thrift, sadder than that of deporting four millions of negroes
+and colored men.  To exchange only those excepted from amnesty
+and pardon by President Johnson, embracing some two millions or
+more, the very pars sanior of the Southern population, for what
+would remain or flock in to supply their place, would be only the
+exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for brass; to disfranchise
+them, confiscate their estates, and place them under the
+political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and the
+ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render
+rebellion chronic, and to convert seven millions of Americans,
+willing and anxious to be free, loyal American citizens,
+eternal enemies.  They have yielded to superior numbers and
+resources; beaten, but not disgraced, for they have, even in
+rebellion, proved themselves what they are--real Americans.  They
+are the product of the American soil, the free growth of the
+American republic, and to disgrace them were to disgrace the
+whole American character and people.
+
+The wise Romans never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for
+victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.  In civil war, the
+victory won by the government troops is held to be a victory for
+the country, in which all parties are victors, and nobody is
+vanquished.  It was as truly for the good of the secessionists to
+fail, as it was for those, who sustained the government to
+succeed; and the government having forced their submission and
+vindicated its own authority, it should now leave them to enjoy,
+with others, the victory which it his won for the common good of
+all.  When war becomes a stern necessity, when it breaks out, and
+while it lasts, humanity requires it to be waged in earnest,
+prosecuted with vigor, and made as damaging, as distressful to
+the enemy as the laws of civilized nations permit.  It is the way
+to bring it to a speedy close, and to save life and property.
+But when it is over, when the enemy submits, and peace returns,
+the vanquished should be treated with gentleness and love.  No
+rancor should remain, no vengeance should be sought; they who met
+in mortal conflict on the battle-field should be no longer
+enemies, but embrace as comrades, as friends, as brothers.  None
+but a coward kicks a fallen foe; a brave people is generous, and
+the victors in the late war can afford to be generous generously.
+They fought for the Union, and the Union has no longer an enemy;
+their late enemies are willing and proud to be their countrymen,
+fellow-citizens, and friends; and they should look to it that
+small politicians do not rob them in the eyes of the world, by
+unnecessary and ill-timed severity to the submissive, of the
+glory of being, as they are, a great, noble, chivalric, generous,
+and magnanimous people.
+
+The government and the small politicians, who usually are the
+most influential with all governments, should remember that none
+of the secessionists, however much in error they have been, have
+committed the moral crime of treason.  They held, with the
+majority of the American people, the doctrine of State
+sovereignty, and on that doctrine they had a right to secede, and
+have committed no treason, been guilty of no rebellion.  That
+was, indeed, no reason why the government should not use all its
+force, if necessary, to preserve the national unity and the
+integrity of the national domain; but it is a reason, and a
+sufficient reason, why no penalty of treason should be inflicted
+on secessionists or their leaders, after their submission, and
+recognition of the sovereignty of the United States as that to
+which they owe allegiance.  None of the secessionists have been
+rebels or traitors, except in outward act, and there can, after
+the act has ceased, be no just punishment where there has been no
+criminal intent.  Treason is the highest crime, and deserves
+exemplary punishment; but not where there has been no treasonable
+intent, where they who committed it did not believe it was
+treason, and on principles held by the majority of their
+countrymen, and by the party that had generally held the
+government, there really was no treason.  Concede State
+sovereignty, and Jefferson Davis was no traitor in the war he
+made on the United States, for he made none till his State had
+seceded.  He could not then be arraigned for his acts after
+secession, and at most, only for conspiracy, if at all, before
+secession.
+
+But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the
+State who, under the old electoral law, have the elective
+franchise, you throw the State into the hands of those who have
+been disloyal to the Union.  If so, and you cannot trust them,
+the remedy is not in disfranchising the majority, but in
+prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the territorial
+people still longer under the provisional government, civil or
+military.  The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been
+convicted of treason either to the State or the United States,
+and neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others
+disqualified on account of disloyalty.  But you must throw the
+State into the hands of those who took part, directly or
+indirectly, in the rebellion, if you reconstruct the States at
+all, for they are undeniably the great body of the territorial
+people in all the States that seceded.  These people having
+submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct the State
+as a State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of the
+United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime
+by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them.  It is
+impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with
+those alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the
+Union throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States.
+The State, resting on so small a portion of the people, would
+have no internal strength, no self-support, and could stand only
+as upheld by federal arms, which would greatly impair the free
+and healthy action of the whole American system.
+
+The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana,
+Arkansas, and Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but
+without authority and without success.  The organizations,
+effected at great expense, and sustained only by military force,
+were neither States nor State governments, nor capable of being
+made so by any executive or congressional action.  If the
+disorganized States, as the government held, were still States in
+the Union, these organizations were flagrantly revolutionary, as
+effected not only without, but in defiance of State authority; if
+they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was the fact, they
+were equally unconstitutional and void of authority, because not
+created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who alone
+are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.
+
+If the Unionists had retained the State organization and
+government, however small their number, they would have held the
+State, and the government would have been bound to recognize and
+to defend them as such with all the force of the Union.  The
+rebellion would then have been personal, not territorial.  But
+such was not the case.  The State organization, the State
+government, the whole State authority rebelled, made the
+rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists, very
+respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at
+home, in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective
+States, and shorn of all political status or rights.  Their
+political status was simply that of the old loyalists, or
+adherents of the British crown in the American war for
+Independence, and it was as absurd to call them the State, as it
+would have been for Great Britain to have called the old Tories
+the colonies.
+
+The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
+disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that
+the people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the
+power of the Union vests in the General government.  The first,
+as we have seen, is the principle of so-called "squatter
+sovereignty," embodied in the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which
+gave birth, in opposition, to the Republican party of 1856.  The
+people are sovereign only as the State, and the State is
+inseparable from the domain.  The Unionists without the State
+government, without any State organization, could not hold the
+domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to
+the United States, that is to say, ceases to exist.  The American
+democracy is territorial, not personal.
+
+The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
+invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union.
+This is the war power.  But, though apparently unlimited, the war
+power is yet restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural
+limitation when peace returns;, and peace returns, in a civil
+war, when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted to
+the national authority, and without any formal declaration.
+During the war, or while the rebellion lasts, it can suspend the
+civil courts, the civil laws, the State constitutions, any thing
+necessary to the success of the war--and of the necessity the
+military authorities are the judges; but it cannot abolish,
+abrogate, or reconstitute them.  On the return of peace they
+revive of themselves in all their vigor.  The emancipation
+proclamation of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in
+certain States and parts of States, and if those whom it
+emancipated could not be re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish
+slavery, or change the laws authorizing it; and if the Government
+should be sustained by Congress or by the Supreme Court in
+counting the disorganized States as States in the Union, the
+legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with the exception
+of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before the
+war.*
+
+The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
+attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
+reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it
+is in its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being
+effected by military force, since its validity depends entirely
+on its being the free action of the territorial people to be
+reconstructed, the General government had and could have, with
+regard to it, only its ordinary
+
+* This was the case in August, 1865.  It may be quite otherwise
+before these pages see the light.
+
+                                peace powers.  Reconstruction is
+jure pacis, not jure belli.
+
+Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States
+nor State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any
+action of the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be
+legalized by being indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial
+people.  They are wrong, as are all usurpations; they are
+undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt to give the minority the
+power to rule the majority; they are dangerous inasmuch as they
+place the State in the hands of a party that can stand only as
+supported by the General government, and thus destroy the proper
+freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to
+corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to
+retard the period of complete pacification, which might be
+effected in three months as well as in three years, or twenty
+years; yet they can become legal, as other governments illegal in
+their origin become legal, with time and popular acquiescence.
+The right way is always the shortest and easiest; but when a
+government must oftener follow than lead the public, it is not
+always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy to take it.
+The general instincts of the people are right as to the end to be
+gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and
+politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession
+party, have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political
+control of the State when it is reconstructed.
+
+The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would,
+even if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their
+respective States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would
+the Unionists, if left to themselves.  There is no party at the
+South prepared to adopt negro suffrage, and there would be none
+at the North if the negroes constituted any considerable portion
+of the population.  As the reconstruction of a State cannot be
+done under the war power, the General government can no more
+enfranchise than it can disfranchise any portion of the
+territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage must be
+left, where the constitution leaves it--to the States severally,
+each to dispose of it for itself.  Negro suffrage will, no doubt,
+come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and
+the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.
+
+It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the
+reconstruction of the States disorganized by secession, for it
+would secure their re-construction with antislavery
+constitutions, and also make sure of the proposed antislavery
+amendment to the Constitution of the United States; but there is
+no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in the States
+needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom, the
+freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they
+understand nothing.  They would vote, for the most part, with
+their former masters, their employers, the wealthier and more
+intelligent classes, whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule,
+these will treat them with greater personal consideration and
+kindness than others.  The dislike of the negro, and hostility to
+negro equality, increase as you descend in the social scale.  The
+freedmen, without political instruction or experience, who have
+had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of loyalty or of
+disloyalty.  They have strong local attachments, but they can
+have no patriotism.  If they adhered to the Union in the
+rebellion, fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty,
+but because they knew that their freedom could come only from the
+success of the Union arms.  That freedom secured, they have no
+longer any interest in the Union, and their local attachments,
+personal associations, habits, tastes, likes and dislikes, are
+Southern, not Northern.  In any contest between the North and the
+South, they would take, to a man, the Southern side.  After the
+taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of the Union found,
+until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder to bear,
+when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and
+hootings of the negroes.  Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty,
+is at best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the
+elective franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the
+friends of the negro should, for the present, be contented with
+securing him simply equal rights of person and property.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+POLITICAL TENDENCIES.
+
+
+The most marked political tendency of the American people has
+been, since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and
+simple democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely
+popular basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably
+united to the national territory or domain, to the people as
+simply population, either as individuals or as the race.  Their
+tendency has unconsciously, therefore, been to change their
+constitution from a republican to a despotic, or from a civilized
+to a barbaric constitution.
+
+The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the
+people are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their
+name; that the rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to
+them; but they are the people territorially constituted and fixed
+to the soil, constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety
+perhaps than he thinks, calls a "territorial democracy."  To this
+territorial democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed
+two other democracies--the one personal and the other
+humanitarian--each alike hostile to civilization, and tending to
+destroy the state, and capable of sustaining government only on
+principles common to all despotisms.
+
+In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
+unrestrained action--a strong desire to be himself, not
+another--to be his own master, to go when and where he pleases,
+to do what he chooses, to take what he wants, wherever he can
+find it, and to keep what he takes.  It is strong in all nomadic
+tribes, who are at once pastoral and predatory, and is seldom
+weak in our bold frontier-men, too often real "border ruffians."
+It takes different forms in different stages of social
+development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
+Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief
+of the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its
+enjoyment to the few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a
+nobility--for nobleman meant originally only freeman, as it does
+his own consent, express or constructive.  This is the so-called
+Jeffersonian democracy, in which government has no powers but
+such as it derives from the consent of the governed, and is
+personal democracy or pure individualism philosophically
+considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."  Under this sort
+of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual sovereignty,
+expressed by politicians when they call the electoral people,
+half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there obviously
+can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there can
+be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
+confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as
+long as they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from
+which they may separate or secede whenever they find it for their
+interest or their pleasure to do so.  State sovereignty and
+secession are based on the same democratic principle applied to
+the several States of the Union instead of individuals.
+
+The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
+sections of the American people from the first, and has been
+greatly strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that
+government originates in compact.  The full realization of this
+tendency, which, happily, is impracticable save in theory, would
+be to render every man independent alike of every other man and
+of society, with full right and power to make his own will
+prevail.  This tendency was strongest in the slaveholding States,
+and especially, in those States, in the slaveholding class, the
+American imitation of the feudal nobility of mediaeval Europe;
+and on this side the war just ended was, in its most general
+expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
+sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
+democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
+democracy, represented by the Government.  This personal
+democracy has been signally defeated in the defeat of the late
+confederacy, and can hardly again become strong enough to be
+dangerous.
+
+But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical
+lines, effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant
+itself on humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength,
+and is not without menace to our future.  The solidarity of the
+race, which is the condition of all human life, founds, as we
+have seen, society, and creates what are called social rights,
+the, rights alike of society in regard to individuals, and of
+individuals in regard to society.  Territorial divisions or
+circumscriptions found particular societies, states, or nations;
+yet as the race is one and all its members live by communion with
+God through it and by communion one with another, these
+particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of
+each other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so
+that there is a real solidarity of nations as well as of
+individuals--the truth underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of
+the solidarity of peoples."
+
+The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law,
+binding on every particular nation, and which every civilized
+nation recognizes and enforces on its own subjects or citizens
+through its own courts as an integral part of its own municipal
+or national law.
+
+The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the
+rights of society, and the rights of the particular society or
+nation are limited by international law, or the rights of
+universal society--the truth the ex-governor of Hungary
+overlooked.  The grand error of Gentilism was in denying the
+unity and therefore the solidarity of the race, involved in its
+denial or misconception of the unity of God.  It therefore was
+never able to assign any solid basis to international law, and
+gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus leaving
+the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
+foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the
+real world.  Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race,
+which has its basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract
+unity asserted by the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the
+modern Unitarians, but the living unity consisting in the
+threefold relation in the Divine Essence, of Father, Son, and
+Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian revelation, and believed,
+more or less intelligently, by all Christendom.
+
+The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the
+social basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on
+the solidarity of the race, and to make all rights and powers
+personal, or individual; and as only the white race has been able
+to assert and maintain its personal freedom, only men of that
+race are held to have the right to be free.  Hence the people of
+those States felt no scruple in holding the black or colored race
+as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right only of those who
+have the ability to assert and maintain it.  Let the negro prove
+that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
+freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a
+gross outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till
+then, let him be my servant, which is best for him and for me.
+Why ask me to free him?  I shall by doing so only change the form
+of his servitude.  Why appeal to me!  Am I my brother's keeper?
+Nay, is he my brother?  Is this negro, more like an ape or a
+baboon than a human being, of the same race with myself?  I
+believe it not.  But in some instances, at least, my dear
+slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and sometimes
+even your son, born of your own daughter.  The tendency of the
+Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as
+all obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and
+therefore all true civil society.
+
+At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite
+tendency--a tendency to exaggerate the social element, to
+overlook the territorial basis of the state, and to disregard the
+rights of individuals.  This tendency has been and is strong in
+the people called abolitionists.  The American abolitionist is so
+engrossed with the unity that he loses the solidarity of the
+race, which supposes unity of race and multiplicity of
+individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
+authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
+circumscriptions.  Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
+humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states,
+governments, and laws, and holds that he may trample on them all
+or give them to the winds at the call of humanity or "the higher
+law."  The principle on which he acts is as indefensible as the
+personal or egoistical democracy of the slaveholders and their
+sympathizers.  Were his socialistic tendency to become exclusive
+and realized, it would found in the name of humanity a complete
+social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very
+generality, would break up in anarchy, in which might makes
+right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.
+
+The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
+generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
+recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much
+out of the order of civilization, and as much in that of
+barbarism, as is the slaveholder himself.  Wendell Phillips is as
+far removed from true Christian civilization as was John C.
+Calhoun, and William Lloyd Garrison is as much of a barbarian and
+despot in principle and tendency as Jefferson Davis.  Hence the
+great body of the people in the non-slaveholding States, wedded
+to American democracy as they were and are could never, as much
+as they detested slavery, be induced to make common cause with
+the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the late civil war
+was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the time the
+social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
+enemy.  The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt
+that pure socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as
+pure individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that
+slavery has been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic
+reasons but really for reasons of state, in order to save the
+territorial democracy.  The territorial democracy would not unite
+to eliminate even so barbaric an element as slavery, till the
+rebellion gave them the constitutional right to abolish it; and
+even then so scrupulous were they, that they demanded a
+constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean work of
+it, without any blow to individual or State rights.
+
+The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in
+demanding its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds.
+Slavery is really a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism
+to American civilization.  The whole force of the national life
+opposes it, and must finally eliminate it, or become itself
+extinct and it is no mean proof of their utter want of sympathy
+with all the living forces of modern civilization, that the
+leading men of the South and their prominent friends at the North
+really persuaded themselves that with cotton, rice, and tobacco,
+they could effectually resist the anti-slavery movement, and
+perpetuate their barbaric democracy.  They studied the classics,
+they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that those nations
+became great by slavery, instead of being great even in spite of
+slavery.  They failed to take into the account the fact that when
+Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
+contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if
+they were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their
+times, they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly
+civilized nations of all times.  They failed also to perceive
+that, if the Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole
+territorial people in the political people, it yet recognized
+both the social and the territorial foundation of the state, and
+never attempted to rest it on pure individualism; they forgot,
+too, that Greece and Rome both fell, and fell precisely through
+internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the
+force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.  The world has
+changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves were
+sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
+master.  The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
+solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
+jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and
+every species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen
+saw not.
+
+It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or
+national, the real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise
+question in debate is clearly and distinctly understood by either
+party.  Slavery was only incidentally involved in the late war.
+The war was occasioned by the collision of two extreme parties;
+but it was itself a war between civilization and barbarism,
+primarily between the territorial democracy and the personal
+democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation, as much a
+war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
+individualism of the slaveholder.  Yet the victory, though
+complete over the former, is only half won over the latter, for
+it has left the humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for
+the moment stronger than ever.  The socialistic democracy was
+enlisted by the territorial, not to strengthen the government at
+home, as it imagines, for that it did not do, and could not do,
+since the national instinct was even more opposed to it than to
+the personal democracy; but under its antislavery aspect, to
+soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
+intervention, which was seriously threatened.  The populations of
+Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly
+anti-slavery, and if the war here appeared to them a war, not
+solely for the unity of the nation and the integrity of its
+domain, as it really was, in which they took and could take no
+interest, but a war for the abolition of slavery, their
+governments would not venture to intervene.  This was the only
+consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
+assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
+Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the
+rebellion only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors
+the late President only as their supposed liberator, not as the
+preserver of the unity and integrity of the nation.  This is
+natural enough abroad, and proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery
+policy of the government, which had become absolutely necessary
+to save the Republic long before it was adopted; yet it is not as
+the emancipator of some two or three millions of slaves that the
+American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham Lincoln, but,
+aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and troops of
+unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the American
+state, and the protector of modern civilization.  His
+anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but
+he adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
+
+There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or
+negro freedom.  That was only an incidental issue, as the really
+great men of the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were
+willing themselves at last to free and arm their own negroes, and
+perhaps were willing to do it even at first.  This fact alone
+proves that they had, or believed they had, a far more important
+cause than the preservation of negro slavery.  They fought for
+personal democracy, under the form of State sovereignty, against
+social democracy; for personal freedom and independence against
+social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their cause was as
+good as that against which they took up arms; and if they had or
+could have fought against that, without fighting at the same time
+against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
+democracy, they would have succeeded.  It is not socialism nor
+abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has
+conquered.  The Union itself has won no victories over the South,
+and it is both historically and legally false to say that the
+South has been subjugated.  The Union has preserved itself and
+American civilization, alike for North and South, East and West.
+The armies that so often met in the shock of battle were not
+drawn up respectively by the North and the South, but by two
+rival democracies, to decide which of the two should rule the
+future.  They were the armies of two mutually antagonistic
+systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly conscious of
+the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
+instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it
+but dimly discerned.  On both sides the cause was broader and
+deeper than negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the
+abolitionists have won.  The territorial democracy alone has won,
+and won what will prove to be a final victory over the purely
+personal democracy, which had its chief seat in the Southern
+States, though by no means confined to them.  The danger to
+American democracy from that quarter is forever removed, and
+democracy a' la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
+throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of
+it.
+
+But in this world victories are never complete.  The socialistic
+democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
+territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not
+patriotism, that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the
+brave men led by McClellan, Grant, and Sherman.  The
+humanitarians are more dangerous in principle than the egoists,
+for they have the appearance of building on a broader and deeper
+foundation, of being more Christian, more philosophic, more
+generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more successful
+than under the guise of an angel of light.  His favorite guise in
+modern times is that of philanthropy.  He is a genuine
+humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism
+is Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming
+sentiment of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes
+both individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when
+they believe they are earnestly and most successfully doing the
+work of God.  Your leading abolitionists are as much affected by
+satanophany as your leading confederates, nor are they one whit
+more philosophical or less sophistical.  The one loses the race,
+the other the individual, and neither has learned to apply
+practically that fundamental truth that there is never the
+general without the particular, nor the particular without the
+general, the race without individuals, nor individuals without
+the race.  The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we are
+taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race,
+and Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that
+original sin was in him actual or personal sin.
+
+The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses
+men in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor
+to secure the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother
+Jansenist sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the
+freedom of grace.  Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of
+slavery, to-day he agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality,
+and announces that when be has secured that be will agitate for
+female suffrage and the equality of the sexes, forgetting or
+ignorant that the relation of equality subsists only between
+individuals of the same sex; that God made the man the head of
+the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for the woman.
+Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in social,
+industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
+agitate for equality of property.  But since property, if
+recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he
+must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of
+property, as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with
+M. Proudhon, or the Englishman Godwin.  It is unjust that one
+should have what another wants, or even more than another.  What
+right have you to ride in your coach or astride your spirited
+barb while I am forced to trudge on foot?  Nor can our
+humanitarian stop there.  Individuals are, and as long as there
+are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and some are
+uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger or
+weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
+therefore some have natural advantages which others have not.
+There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied
+only by the abolition of all individualities, and the reduction
+of all individuals to the race, or humanity, man in general.  He
+can find no limit to his agitation this side of vague generality,
+which is no reality, but a pure nullity, for he respects no
+territorial or individual circumscriptions, and must regard
+creation itself as a blunder.  This is not fancy, for he has
+gone very nearly as far as it is here shown, if logical, be must
+go.
+
+The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and
+abroad, be interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social
+or humanitarian democracy.  It was because they regarded the war
+waged on the side of the Union as waged in the interest of this
+terrible democracy, that our bishops and clergy sympathized so
+little with the Government in prosecuting it; not, as some
+imagined, because they were disloyal, hostile to American or
+territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor of freedom for
+all men, whatever their race or complexion.  They had no wish to
+see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
+other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would
+have regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up;
+but they held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy
+represented by Northern abolitionists as hostile alike to the
+Church and to civilization.  For the same reason that they were
+backward or reserved in their sympathy, all the humanitarian
+sects at home and abroad were forward and even ostentatious in
+theirs.  The Catholics feared the war might result in encouraging
+La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian sects
+trusted that it would.  If the victory of the Union should turn
+out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized
+world will have no reason to applaud it.
+
+That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be
+taken as a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be
+idle to deny.  It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party
+throughout the world are in ecstasies over it.  The party claim
+it.  The European Socialists and Red Republicans applaud it, and
+the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict on us the deep
+humiliation of their congratulations.  A cause that can be
+approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must
+be strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element.
+It is no compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of
+men who assert not only people-king, but people-God; and those
+Americans who are delighted with them are worse enemies to the
+American democracy than ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow
+conspirators, and more contemptible, as the swindler is more
+contemptible than the highwayman.
+
+But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their
+host.  Not they are the real victors.  When the smoke of battle
+has cleared away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by
+the Republic, and that that alone has triumphed.  The
+abolitionists, in so far as they asserted the unity of the race
+and opposed slavery as a denial of that unity, have also won; but
+in so far as they denied the reality or authority of territorial
+and individual circumscriptions, followed a purely socialistic
+tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a watery
+sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
+crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late
+insurrectionary States are fully reconstructed.  The Southern or
+egoistical democrats, so far as they denied the unity and
+solidarity of the race, the rights of society over individuals,
+and the equal rights of each and every individual in face of the
+state, or the obligations of society to protect the weak and help
+the helpless, have been also defeated; but so far as they
+asserted personal or individual rights which society neither
+gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
+sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
+government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action,
+they share in the victory, as the future will prove.
+
+European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
+against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State,
+have no lot or part in the victory of the American people: not
+for them nor for men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams,
+have our brave soldiers fought, suffered and bled for four years
+of the most terrible war in modern times, and against troops as
+brave and as well led as themselves; not for them has the country
+sacrificed a million of lives, and contracted a debt of four
+thousand millions of dollars, besides the waste and destruction
+that it will take years of peaceful industry to repair.  They and
+their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and civilization has
+won its most brilliant victory in all history.  The American
+democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of
+barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
+placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate
+authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all
+civilized governments--not with the revolutionary movements to
+overthrow them.  The American people will always be progressive
+as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which
+they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught
+them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of
+place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical
+state; and that the government should always be clothed with
+ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its
+destruction.  They must never be delighted again to have their
+government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
+to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.  The people of the
+Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late
+rebellion than the people of the Southern States.  Their press
+had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused
+to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or
+assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad
+denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan
+governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors.
+But their own government has found it necessary for the public
+safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they will
+most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
+governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead
+of lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
+revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the
+reign of barbarism.
+
+The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by
+the failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the
+disintegrating element, either in the particular State or in the
+United States, is henceforth to be apprehended.  But the tendency
+in the opposite direction may give the American state some
+trouble.  The tendency now is, as to the Union, consolidation,
+and as to the particular state, humanitarianism, socialism, or
+centralized democracy.  Yet this tendency, though it may do much
+mischief, will hardly become exclusive.  The States that seceded,
+when restored, will always, even in abandoning State sovereignty,
+resist it, and still assert State rights.  When these States are
+restored to their normal position, they will always be able to
+protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
+rights by the General government.  The constitution, in the
+distribution of the powers of government, provides the States
+severally with ample means to protect their individuality against
+the centralizing tendency of the General government, however
+strong it may be.
+
+The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
+government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look
+upon it as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to
+regard the several State governments as subordinate instead of
+co-ordinate governments.  It is not improbable that the
+Executive, since the outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded
+throughout on that supposition, and hence his extraordinary
+assumptions of power; but when once peace is fully re-established
+and the States have all resumed their normal position in the
+Union, every State will be found prompt enough to resist any
+attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights.  Its instinct
+of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will be
+protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United
+States.
+
+The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of
+the States is far less than the danger that the Executive will
+usurp all the powers of Congress and the judiciary.  Congress,
+during the rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could,
+with dictatorial powers, and these powers the Executive continues
+to exercise even after the rebellion is suppressed.  They were
+given and held under the rights of war, and for war purposes
+only, and expired by natural limitation when the war ceased; but
+the Executive forgets this, and, instead of calling Congress
+together and submitting the work of reconstruction of the States
+that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
+reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign;
+372
+and the people seem to like it.  He might and should, as
+commander-in-chief of the army and navy, govern them as military
+departments, by his lieutenants, till Congress could either
+create provisional civil governments for them or recognize them
+as self-governing States in the Union; but he has no right, under
+the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil
+governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in
+regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without
+authority and without the slightest plea of necessity.  His acts
+in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
+inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do
+them.  Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public
+sentiment, and a deep wound is inflicted on the constitution,
+which will be long in healing.
+
+The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
+originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a
+long time before.  There is a growing disposition on the part of
+
+Congress to throw as much of the business of government as
+possible into the hands of the Executive.  The patronage the
+Executive wields, even in times of peace, is so large that he has
+indirectly an almost supreme control over the legislative branch
+of the government.  For this, which is, and, if not checked will
+continue to be, a growing evil, there is no obvious remedy,
+unless the President is chosen for a longer term of office and
+made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous doctrine
+of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the true
+interests of the public.  Here is matter for the consideration of
+the American statesman.  But as to the usurpations of the
+Executive in these unsettled times, they will be only temporary,
+and will cease when the States are all restored.  They are
+abuses, but only temporary abuses, and the Southern States, when
+restored to the Union, will resume their rights in their own
+sphere, as self-governing communities, and legalize or undo the
+unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.
+
+The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
+individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able
+to become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not
+begin at home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance.
+In the States in which the humanitarian tendency is the
+strongest, the territorial democracy has its most effective
+organization.  Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion the
+American people had asserted popular sovereignty, but had never
+rendered an account to themselves in what sense the people are or
+are not sovereign.  They had never distinguished the three sorts
+of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of the
+three is the distinctively American democracy.  For them,
+democracy was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought
+to avoid them either by exaggerating one or the other of the two
+exclusive tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself
+through restrictions on suffrage.  The latter class began to
+distrust universal suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to
+dream of modifying the American constitution so as to make it
+conform more nearly to the English model.  The war has proved
+that the were wrong, for nothing is more certain than that the
+people have saved the national unity and integrity almost in
+spite of their government.  The General government either was not
+disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against secession,
+till forced to do it by the people themselves.  No wise American
+can henceforth distrust American democracy.  The people may be
+trusted.  So much is settled.  But as the two extremes were
+equally democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of
+popular sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling
+to allow separation, and would not and did not engage in the war
+against secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of
+the national domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it
+was not democracy in the sense of either of the extremes that
+made the war and came out of it victorious; and hence the real
+American democracy must differ from them both, and is neither a
+personal nor a humanitarian, but a territorial democracy.  The
+true idea of American democracy thus comes out, for the first
+time, freed from the two extreme democracies which have been
+identified with it, and henceforth enters into the understandings
+as well as the hearts of the people.  The war has enlightened
+patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes reason--a
+well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional conviction.
+
+In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent
+the socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive.  In the States
+that seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not
+gain it, for it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions,
+and habits of the Southern people, and the Southern people will
+not be exterminated nor swamped by migrations either from the
+North or from Europe.  They are and always will be an
+agricultural people, and an agricultural people are and always
+will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless unwittingly held
+for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special object in
+which they take a passionate interest.  The worst of all policies
+is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
+landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and
+depressed whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of
+the 29th of May, 1865.  Of course that policy will not be carried
+out, and if the negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote
+with the wealthy landholding class, and aid them in resisting all
+socialistic tendencies.  The humanitarians will fail for the want
+of a good social grievance against which they can declaim.
+
+In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as
+a speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance.  It
+is aided much by the congregational constitution of their
+religion; yet it is weak at home, and is resisted practically by
+the territorial division of power.  New England means
+Massachusetts, and nowhere is the subdivision of the powers of
+government carried further, or the constitution of the
+territorial democracy more complete, than in that State.
+Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
+evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the
+farther they are from home and the less its right to interfere
+with them, the more in earnest and the more effective for evil
+does it become.  Its nature is to mind every one's business but
+its own.  But now that slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in
+the United States a social grievance of magnitude enough to
+enlist any considerable number of the people, even of
+Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it.  Negro
+enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
+something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a
+question that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not
+serve their purpose of prolonged agitation.  They could not and
+never did carry away the nation, even on the question of slavery
+itself, and abolitionism had comparatively little direct
+influence in abolishing slavery; and the exclusion of negro
+suffrage can never be made to appear to the American people as
+any thing like so great a grievance as was slavery.
+
+Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
+numerous and an important portion of the population.  Their
+increasing numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much
+as the majority may dislike their religion, a constantly
+increasing influence, and it is idle to leave them out in
+counting the future of the country.  They will, in a very few
+years, be the best and most thoroughly educated class of the
+American people; and, aside from their religion, or, rather, in
+consequence of their religion, the most learned, enlightened, and
+intelligent portion of the American population; and as much as
+they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army and
+elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
+has won.  The best things written on the controversy have been
+written by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their
+religion to comprehend the real character of the American
+constitution than any other class of Americans, the moment they
+study it in the light of their own theology.  The American
+constitution is based on that of natural society, on the
+solidarity of the race, and the difference between natural
+society and the church or Christian society is, that the one is
+initial and the other teleological.  The law of both is the same;
+Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
+exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic.
+If they have been backward in their sympathy with the government,
+it has been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the
+humanitarian or socialistic elements they detected in the
+Republican party, joined with a prejudice against political and
+social negro equality.  But their church everywhere opposes the
+socialistic movements of the age, all movements in behalf of
+barbarism, and they may always be counted on to resist the
+advance of the socialistic democracy.  If the country has had
+reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
+in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them,
+indeed, for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to
+their religion, which has been and is the grand protectress of
+modern society and civilization.
+
+>From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to
+the extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private
+property as bases of political rights or franchises.  This
+tendency has often been justified on the ground that the elective
+franchise is a natural right; which is not true, because the
+elective franchise is political power, and political power is
+always a civil trust, never a natural right, and the state judges
+for itself to whom it will or will not confide the trust; but
+there can be no doubt that it is a normal tendency, and in strict
+accordance with the constitution of American civil society, which
+rests on the unity of the race, and public instead of private
+property.  All political distinctions founded on birth, race, or
+private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
+necessarily eliminated by its normal developments.  To contend
+that none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a
+particular race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary,
+to the order of civilization the New World is developing.  The
+only qualification for the elective franchise the American system
+can logically insist on is that the elector belong to the
+territorial people--that is, be a natural-born or a naturalized
+citizen, be a major in full possession of his natural faculties,
+and unconvicted of any infamous offence.  The State is free to
+naturalize foreigners or not, and under such restrictions as it
+judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must treat them
+as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.
+
+The naturalization question is one of great national importance.
+The migration of foreigners hither has added largely to the
+national population, and to the national wealth and resources,
+but less, perhaps, to the development of patriotism, the purity
+of elections, or the wisdom and integrity of the government.  It
+is impossible that there should be perfect harmony between the
+national territorial democracy and individuals born, brought up,
+and formed under a political order in many respects widely
+different from it; and there is no doubt that the democracy, in
+its objectionable sense, has been greatly strengthened by the
+large infusion of naturalized citizens.  There can be no question
+that, if the laboring classes, in whom the national sentiment is
+usually the strongest, had been composed almost wholly of native
+Americans, instead of being, as they were, at least in the
+cities, large towns, and villages, composed almost exclusively of
+persons foreign born, the Government would have found far less
+difficulty in filling up the depleted ranks of its armies.  But
+to leave so large a portion of the actual population as the
+foreign born residing in the country without the rights of
+citizens, would have been a far graver evil, and would, in the
+late struggle, have given the victory to secession.  There are
+great national advantages derived from the migration hither of
+foreign labor, and if the migration be encouraged or permitted,
+naturalization on easy and liberal terms is the wisest, the best,
+and only safe policy.  The children of foreign-born parents are
+real Americans.
+
+Emigration has, also, a singular effect in developing the latent
+powers of the emigrant, and the children of emigrants are usually
+more active, more energetic than the children of the older
+inhabitants of the country among whom they settle.  Some of our
+first men in civil life have been sons of foreign-born parents,
+and so are not a few of our greatest and most successful
+generals.  The most successful of our merchants have been
+foreign-born.  The same thing has been noticed elsewhere,
+especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to Holland,
+Germany, England, and Ireland.  The immigration of so many
+millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American
+people much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character,
+and made them a superior people on the whole to what they would
+otherwise have been.  This has nothing to do with superiority or
+inferiority of race or blood, but is a natural effect of breaking
+men away from routine, and throwing them back on their own
+individual energies and personal resources.
+
+Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
+recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to
+freedom; but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward
+progress of American democracy, which asserts equal rights for
+all, and not for a race or class only.  Some would confine
+suffrage to landholders, or, at least, to property-holders; but
+that is inconsistent with the American idea, and is a relic of
+the barbaric constitution which founds power on private instead
+of public wealth.  Nor are property-owners a whit more likely to
+vote for the public good than are those who own no property but
+their own labor.  The men of wealth, the business men,
+manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who
+exert the worst influence on government in every country, for
+they always strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their
+own private interests.  They act on the beautiful maxim, "Let
+government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of
+the poor," instead of the far safer maxim, "Let government take
+care of the weak, the strong can take care of themselves."
+Universal suffrage is better than restricted suffrage, but even
+universal suffrage is too weak to prevent private property from
+having an undue political influence.
+
+The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable
+from it, and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an
+inferior class to those elevated by restricted suffrage.  The
+Congress of 1860, or of 1862. was a fair average of the wisdom,
+the talent, and the virtue of the country, and not inferior to
+that of 1776, or that of l789; and the Executive during the
+rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as it was during
+the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain, and not
+inferior to that of France during the Crimean war.  The Crimean
+war developed and placed in high command, either with the English
+or the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman,
+to say nothing of others.  The more aristocratic South proved
+itself, in both statesmanship and generalship, in no respect
+superior to the territorial democracy of the North and West.
+
+The great evil the country experiences is not from universal
+suffrage, but from what may be called rotation in office.  The
+number of political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern
+and Western States especially, the representatives in Congress
+are changed every two or four years, and a member, as soon as he
+has acquired the experience necessary to qualify him for his
+position, is dropped, not through the fickleness of his
+constituency, but to give place to another whose aid had been
+necessary to his first or second election.  Employes are
+"rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful, but
+because there are others who want their places.  This is all bad,
+but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong
+public opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which
+is mainly formed by it.  There is, no doubt, a due share of
+official corruption, but not more than elsewhere, and that would
+be much diminished by increasing the salaries of the public
+servants, especially in the higher offices of the government,
+both General and State.  The pay to the lower officers and
+employes of the government, and to the privates and
+non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in
+general, too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both
+the civil and military service is too low, and relatively far
+lower than it was when the government was first organized.
+
+The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at
+all by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility
+to the military spirit and a standing army.  The depreciation of
+the military spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental
+democracy, which, like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and
+brings about the very evils it seeks to avoid.  The hostility to
+standing armies is inherited from England, and originated in the
+quarrels between king and parliament, and is a striking evidence
+of the folly of that bundle of antagonistic forces called the
+British constitution.  In feudal times most of the land was held
+by military service, and the reliance of government was on the
+feudal militia; but no real progress was made in eliminating
+barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at its
+command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies.
+It is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the
+whole, lost more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary
+for royal supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
+
+No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the
+military spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not
+held in honor and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size
+is public economy.  It absorbs in its ranks a class of men who
+are worth more there than anywhere else; it creates honorable
+places for gentlemen or the sons of gentlemen without wealth, in
+which they can serve both themselves and their country.  Under a
+democratic government the most serious embarrassment to the state
+is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or not fitted to
+support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in a
+democratic government than in any other.  The civil service,
+divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science,
+and art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing class,
+and the army and navy would be an economy and a real service to
+the state were they maintained only for the sake of the rank and
+position they give to their officers, and the wholesome influence
+these officers would exert on society and the politics of the
+country--this even in case there were no wars or apprehension of
+wars.  They supply an element needed in all society, to sustain
+in it the chivalric and heroic spirit, perpetually endangered by
+the mercantile and political spirit, which has in it always
+something low and sordid.
+
+But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding
+nations to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself.
+When it can have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war;
+for the human animal, like all animals, must work off in some way
+its fighting humor, and the only sure way of maintaining peace is
+always to be prepared for war.  A regular standing army of forty
+thousand men would have prevented the Mexican war, and an army of
+fifty thousand well-disciplined and efficient troops at the
+command of the President on his inauguration in March, 1861,
+would have prevented the rebellion, or have instantly suppressed
+it.  The cost of maintaining a land army of even a hundred
+thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would have been,
+in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion has
+cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
+been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as
+those on the side of the government, are equally to be counted.
+The actual losses to the country have been not less than six or
+eight thousand millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the
+assessed value of the whole property of the United States
+according to the census returns of 1860, and which has only been
+partially cancelled by actual increase of property since.  To
+meet the interest on the debt incurred will require a heavier sum
+to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
+discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been
+necessary to maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection
+of peace and the prevention of the rebellion.
+
+The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not
+blunder much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it
+did in its military operations, before 1868 things will settle
+down into their normal order; but a regular army--not militia or
+volunteers, who are too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand
+men of all arms, and a navy nearly as large as that of England or
+France, will be needed as a peace establishment.  The army of a
+hundred thousand men must form a cadre of an army of three times
+that number, which will be necessary to place the army on a war
+footing.  Less will answer neither for peace nor war, for the
+nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain henceforth the rank
+of a first-class military and maritime power, and take a leading
+part in political movements of the civilized world, and, to a
+great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
+
+Canning boasted that be had raised up the New World to redress
+the balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened
+Spain and gave the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the
+Emperor of the French is trying, by strengthening Italy and
+Spain, and by a French protectorate in Mexico, to secure to
+France, both in the Old World and the New--a magnificent dream,
+but not to be realized.  His uncle judged more wisely when he
+sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought only to
+secure to France the hegemony of the Old.  But the hegemony of
+the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she
+will have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even
+in Europe.  To maintain this position, which is imperative on
+her, she must always have a large armed force, either on foot or
+in reserve, which she can call out and put on a war footing at
+short notice.  The United States must henceforth be a great
+military and naval power, and the old hostility to a standing
+army and the old attempt to bring the military into disrepute
+must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
+
+Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency,
+egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race
+and socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the
+race, is the most dangerous.  The egoistical form is checked,
+sufficiently weakened by the defeat of the rebels; but the social
+form believes that it has triumphed, and that individuals are
+effaced in society, and the States in the Union.  Against this,
+more especially should public opinion and American statesmanship
+be now directed, and territorial democracy and the division of
+the powers of government be asserted and vigorously maintained.
+The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy is
+conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet
+arrived, as the Germans say, at self
+consciousness--selbsbewusstseyn--and operates only instinctively.
+All the dominant theories and sentimentalities are against it,
+and it is only Providence that can sustain it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
+
+
+It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every
+living nation receives from Providence a special work or mission
+in the progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny,
+or the end for which it exists; and that the special mission of
+the United States is to continue and complete in the political
+order the Graeco-Roman civilization.
+
+Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American
+Republic alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to
+the civilization of the race.  Canada and the other British
+Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and
+the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the
+United States without being missed by the civilized world.  They
+represent no idea, and the work of civilization could go on
+without them as well as with them.  If they keep up with the
+progress of civilization, it is all that can be expected of them.
+France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the rest of
+Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
+laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race;
+and it is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or
+jointly advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman
+Empire, except in abolishing slavery and including in the
+political people the whole territorial people.  They can only
+develop and give a general application to the fundamental
+principles of the Roman constitution.  That indeed is much, but
+it adds no new element nor new combination of preexisting
+elements.  But nothing of this can be said of the United States.
+
+In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and
+the great principle of the territorial constitution of power,
+instead of the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or
+the monarchical; and yet with true civil or political principles
+it mixed up nearly all the elements of the barbaric constitution.
+The gentile system of Rome recalls the patriarchal, and the
+relation that subsisted between the patron and his clients has a
+striking resemblance to that which subsists between the feudal
+lord and his retainers, and may have had the same origin.  The
+three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into which the Roman
+people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may have been,
+as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their origin,
+but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
+division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not
+local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical.
+No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens
+were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of
+adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with
+all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained
+with the Romans.  The adopted member was considered a child of
+the house, and took its name and inherited its goods.  Whether,
+as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes
+were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
+restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of
+the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the
+curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse.  After all,
+practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the
+English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a
+landed proprietor and of noble blood.  The plebs, though outside
+of the political people proper, as not being included in the
+three tribes, when they came to be a power in the republic under
+the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and patricians was
+forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or territorial people.
+
+The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave
+the right to participate in political power, was the domain of
+the state, and the tenant held it from the state.  The domain was
+vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was
+therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap
+of the human race from barbarism.  In all other respects the
+Roman constitution was no more republican than the feudal.
+Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of
+territorial democracy.  The division into demes or wards, whence
+comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not
+personal nor genealogical.  And if the equality of all men was
+not recognized, all who were included in the political class
+stood on the same footing.  Athens and other Greek cities, though
+conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful
+influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic
+under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate,
+which the assassins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated
+conservative party they represented, tried so hard to preserve.
+The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives
+of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed
+with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were
+established throughout the empire.
+
+The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
+gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity
+of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its
+including in the state only a particular class of the territorial
+people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different
+degrees of servitude.  It recognized and sustained a privileged
+class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian
+aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order,
+it held all outside of it to be less than men and without
+political rights.  Practically, power was an attribute of birth
+and of private wealth.  Suffrage was almost universal among
+freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by
+orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the
+order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election
+over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in
+the hands of the rich and noble few.
+
+The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the
+sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts
+the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to
+defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality.
+It represents it as a commutation of the punishment of death,
+which the emperor has the right to inflict on captives taken in
+war, to perpetual servitude; and as servitude is less severe than
+death, slavery was really a proof of imperial clemency.  But it
+has never yet been proved that the emperor has the right under
+the natural law to put captives taken even in a just war to
+death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the proud, but
+spare the submissive."  In a just war the emperor may kill on the
+battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
+now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation,
+does not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased
+resistance, have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.  But
+even if it did, it gives him a right only over the persons
+captured, not over their innocent children, and therefore no
+right to establish hereditary slavery, for the child is not
+punishable for the offences of the parent.  The law, indeed,
+assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a person and treated
+him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror, and being
+property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only
+to his owner.  But there is no power in heaven or earth that can
+make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is
+only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the
+law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing.
+I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt,
+the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery
+on the ground of its penal character, or indeed on any ground
+whatever.  All men are born under the law of nature with equal
+rights, and the civil law can justly deprive no man of his
+liberty, but for a crime, committed by him personally, that
+justly forfeits his liberty to society.
+
+These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European
+nations have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.  They
+can carry out practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the
+human race, abolish slavery in every form, make all men equal
+before the law, and the political people commensurate with the
+territorial people.  Indeed, France has already done it.  She has
+abolished slavery, villenage, serfage, political aristocracy,
+asserted the equality of all men before the law, vindicated the
+sovereignty of the people, and established universal suffrage,
+complete social and territorial democracy.  The other nations may
+do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or advance
+farther.  Yet in France, territorial democracy the most complete
+results only in establishing the most complete imperial
+centralism, usually called Caesarism.
+
+The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor
+reigns "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and
+therefore, that by the grace of God and the will of the nation he
+may cease to reign; but while he reigns he is supreme, and his
+will is law.  The constitution imposes no real or effective
+restraint on his power: while he sits upon the throne he is
+practically France, and the ministers are his clerks; the council
+of state, the senate, and the legislative body are merely his
+agents in governing the nation.  This may, indeed, be changed,
+but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic
+centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the
+system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called
+constitutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great
+Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism,
+or mediaeval feudalism.
+
+The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all
+orders the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the
+principle of all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all
+opposites or extremes.  Mankind will be logical; and the worst of
+all tyrannies is that which forbids them to draw from their
+principles their last logical consequences, or that prohibits
+them the free explication and application of the Divine Idea, in
+which consists their life, their progress.  Such tyranny strikes
+at the very existence of society, and wars against the reality of
+things.  It is supremely sophistical, and its success is death;
+for the universe in its constitution is supremely logical, and
+man, individually and socially, is rational.  God is the author
+and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its
+order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically
+Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.  The Son
+or Word is the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God
+is living God a real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not
+abstract or dead unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes,
+Plotinus, and Proclus.  In the Holy Trinity is the principle and
+prototype of all society, and what is called the solidarity of
+the race is only the outward expression, or copy in the external
+order, of what theologians term the circumsession of the three
+Divine Persons of the Godhead.
+
+Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature
+either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity
+alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and
+reality.  It sins against God. and must fail of its end.  The
+English system, which is based on antagonistic elements, on
+opposites, without the middle term that conciliates them, unites
+them, and makes them dialectically one, copies the Divine model
+in its distinctions alone, which, considered alone, are opposites
+or contraries.  It denies, if Englishmen could but see it, the
+unity of God.  The French, or imperial system, which excludes the
+extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites, instead
+of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and
+copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called
+pantheism.  The English constitution has no middle term, and the
+French no extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine
+Trinity, the original basis and type of the syllogism.  The human
+race can be contented with neither, for neither allows it free
+scope for its inherent life and activity.  The English system
+tends to pure individualism; the French to pure socialism or
+despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element of the one
+living and indissoluble TRUTH.
+
+This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and
+lifeless abstraction, but the highest theological and
+philosophical truth, without which there were no reason, no man,
+no society; for God is the first principle of all being, all
+existence, all science, all life, and it is in Him that we live
+and move and have our being.  God is at the beginning, in the
+middle, and at the end of all things--the universal principle,
+medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His existence
+being directly or indirectly impugned.  In a deeper sense than is
+commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit
+domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.  The English
+constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of
+reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with
+the others for the mastery.  For a long time the king labored,
+intrigued, and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which
+he was held by the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and
+people united and humbled the crown; and now the people are at
+work seeking to sap both the crown and the nobles.  The state is
+constituted to nobody's satisfaction; and though all may unite in
+boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or
+amend it.  The work of constituting the state with the English is
+ever beginning, never ending.  Hence the eternal clamor for
+parliamentary reform.
+
+Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that
+remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with
+the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede
+to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so
+doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done
+in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for,
+and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe.  The special
+merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as
+too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy
+in the division of the powers of government, between a General
+government and particular State governments, which are not
+antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and
+neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
+
+Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government
+without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be
+introduced into any European state.  There may be a union of
+states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain,
+and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous
+empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund
+or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what
+the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and
+have so signally failed to establish.  An intelligent Confederate
+officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in operation
+three months before it became evident that the principle on
+which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat.
+It was that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States
+seceded, more than the superior resources and numbers of the
+Government, that caused the collapse of the Confederacy.  The
+numbers were relatively about equal, and the military resources
+of the Confederacy were relatively not much inferior to those of
+the Government.  So at least the Confederate leaders thought, and
+they knew the material resources of the Government as well as
+their own, and had calculated them with as much care and accuracy
+as any men could.  Foreign powers also, friendly as well as
+unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain their
+independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the
+loyal States.  The failure is due to the disintegrating principle
+of State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy.  The
+war has proved that united states are, other things being equal,
+an overmatch for confederated states.
+
+The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals.
+As equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of
+Zollverein, in which each state retains its individual
+sovereignty; if as unequals, then someone among them will aspire
+to the hegemony, and you have over again the Athenian
+Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the Persian war, and
+its fate.  A union like the American cannot be created by a
+compact, or by the exercise of supreme power.  The Emperor of the
+French cannot erect the several Departments of France into
+states, and divide the powers of government between them as
+individual and as united states.  They would necessarily hold
+from the imperial government, which, though it might exercise a
+large part of its functions through them, would remain, as now,
+the supreme central government, from which all governmental
+powers emanate, as our President is apparently attempting, in his
+reconstruction policy, to make the government of the United
+States.  The elements of a state constituted like the American do
+not exist in any European nation, nor in the constitution of
+European society; and the American constitution would have been
+impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered it that the
+nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
+
+Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and
+applied it in the best way she could.  At first it was a single
+tribe or people distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after
+the Sabine war, a second tribe was added on terms of equality,
+and the state was dual, composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and
+the Tities or Quirites, and, afterward, in the time of Tullus
+Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or Luceres, making the
+division into three ruling tribes, each divided into one hundred
+houses or gentes.  Each house in each tribe was represented by
+its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of
+senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
+fixed.  Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
+without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
+itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
+cities.  The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes
+into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and
+in the tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic
+centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of
+government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate
+had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all
+matters, general and particular.
+
+The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the
+tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in
+the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of
+government; but only a division between the positive and negative
+powers, not between the general and the particular.  The power
+accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is,
+perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by
+analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the
+constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive
+power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it
+absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
+
+There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in
+the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or
+confederated municipalities.  These municipalities, modelled
+chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management
+of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not
+co-ordiinate in their own sphere with those exercised by the
+Roman municipality, but subordinate and dependent.  The senate
+had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights
+subject to its will.  They were formally, or virtually,
+subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the
+Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of
+freedom.  Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies
+rather than as subjects, and at first these municipal
+organizations secured the progress of civilization in the
+provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served
+only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed
+and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the
+empire.  So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
+burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial
+edict to compel them to enter the municipal government; and it
+became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free
+citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal
+burdens imposed.  There are actually imperial edicts extant
+forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.  Thus ended the
+Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover in
+Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a
+more favorable result.
+
+Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in
+common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric
+elements retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to
+realize that philosophical division of the powers of government
+which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism
+on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances
+or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by
+obstructing the exercise of power.  No greater problem in
+statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater contribution
+to civilization to be made.  Nowhere else than in this New World,
+and in this New World only in the United States, can this problem
+be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
+Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
+
+But the United States have a religious as well as a political
+destiny, for religion and politics go together.  Church and
+state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on
+which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the
+spiritual order--in the principles revealed or affirmed by
+religion--and are inseparable from them.  There is no state
+without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or
+the Incarnation.  An atheist may be a politician, but if there
+were no God there could be no politics. theological principles
+are the basis of political principles.  The created universe is a
+dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and
+all its parts cohere and are essential to one another.  All has
+its origin and prototype in the Triune God, and throughout
+expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without
+which there is no real being and no actual or possible life.
+Every thing has its principle, medium, and end.  Natural society
+is initial, civil government is medial, the church is
+teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one
+indissoluble whole.
+
+Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the
+Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through
+the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.  True, he
+communes with God through his kind, and through external nature,
+society in which he is born and reared, and property through
+which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only
+media of his communion with God, the source of life--not either
+the beginning or the end of his communion.  They have no life in
+themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves, can
+impart none.  They are in the order of second causes, and second
+causes, without the first cause, are nought.  Communion which
+stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
+instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of
+life.  As religion includes all that relates to communion with
+God, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of
+man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men
+must conform either their politics to their religion or their
+religion to their politics.  Christianity is constantly at work,
+moulding political society in its own image and likeness, and
+every political system struggles to harmonize Christianity with
+itself.  If, then, the United States have a political destiny,
+they have a religious destiny inseparable from it.
+
+The political destiny of the United States is to conform the
+state to the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine
+Idea in creation.  Their religious destiny is to render
+practicable and to realize the normal relations between church
+and state, religion and politics, as concreted in the life of the
+nation.
+
+In politics, the United States are not realizing a political
+theory of any sort whatever.  They, on the contrary, are
+successfully refuting all political theories, making away with
+them, and establishing the state--not on a theory, not on an
+artificial basis or a foundation laid by human reason or will,
+but on reality, the eternal and immutable principles in relation
+to which man is created.  They are doing the same in regard to
+religious theories.  Religion is not a theory, a subjective view,
+an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle, a law, and
+a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace,
+practical conformity to what is universally true and real.  The
+United States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad
+havoc with religious theories as with political theories, and are
+pressing on with irresistible force to the real or the Divine
+order which is expressed in the Christian mysteries, which exists
+independent of man's understanding and will, and which man can
+neither make nor unmake.
+
+The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new
+religion nor to found a new church.  All real religion is
+catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and
+everywhere true.  Even our Lord came neither to found a new
+church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which
+had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined
+in eternity.  God has himself founded the church on catholic
+principles, or principles always and everywhere real principles.
+His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic
+dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal
+and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the
+Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces
+and sustains all things.  Founded on universal and immutable
+principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the
+church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of
+men.  Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith,
+for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him,
+over him, and independent of him.  Religion is above and
+independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with
+the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it
+does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a
+mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
+
+But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her
+dogmas are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and
+unalterable, the relations between the civil and ecclesiastical
+authorities may be changed or modified by the changes of time and
+place.  These relations have not been always the same, but have
+differed in different ages and countries.  During the first three
+centuries of our era the church had no legal status, and was
+either connived at or persecuted by the state.  Under the
+Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her
+prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and
+ecclesiastical questions, and were made, in some sense, civil
+magistrates, and paid as such by the empire.  Under feudalism,
+the prelates received investiture as princes and barons, and
+formed alone, or in connection with the temporal lords, an estate
+in the kingdom.  The Pope became a temporal prince and suzerain,
+at one time, of a large part of Europe, and exercised the
+arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian
+sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects.
+Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern
+centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater
+part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most
+countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state
+either as an enemy or as a slave.
+
+In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the
+national church is held in strict subjection to the civil
+authority, as in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of
+the state; in the other states of Europe, as France, Austria,
+Spain, and Italy, she is treated with distrust by the civil
+government, and allowed hardly a shadow of freedom and
+independence.  In France, which has the proud title of eldest
+daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not freer than
+they are in Turkey.  All religious are said to be free, and all
+are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.  The
+emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to
+concede the church just as much and just as little freedom in the
+empire as he judges expedient for his own secular interests.  In
+Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South
+American states, the policy of the civil authorities is the same,
+or worse.  It may be safely asserted that, except in the United
+States, the church is either held by the civil power in
+subjection, or treated as an enemy.  The relation is not that of
+union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave detriment
+of both religion and civilization.
+
+It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the
+mixture of civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in
+the Middle Ages; and a total separation of church and state, even
+as corporations, would, in the present state of men's minds in
+Europe, be construed, if approved by the church, into a sanction
+by her of political atheism, or the right of the civil power to
+govern according to its own will and pleasure in utter disregard
+of the law of God, the moral order, or the immutable distinctions
+between right and wrong.  It could only favor the absolutism of
+the state, and put the temporal in the place of the spiritual.
+Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the entire
+separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
+condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864.
+Neither the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United
+States, can understand practically such separation in any other
+sense than the complete emancipation of our entire secular life
+from the law of God, or the Divine order, which is the real
+order.  It is not the union of church and state--that is, the
+union, or identity rather, of religious and political
+principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the disunion
+or antagonism of church and state.  But this is nowhere possible
+out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state organized
+on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting from
+its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church,
+or the religious order really existing, in relation to which all
+things are created and governed.  Nowhere else is it practicable,
+at present, to maintain between the two powers their normal
+relations.
+
+But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly
+practicable in the New.  The state here being organized in
+accordance with catholic principles, there can be no antagonism
+between it and the church.  Though operating in different
+spheres, both are, in their respective spheres, developing and
+applying to practical life the one and the same Divine Idea.  The
+church can trust the state, and the state can trust the church.
+Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.  Each
+by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
+other.  It is true the church is not formally established as the
+civil law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be;
+because there is nothing in the state that conflicts with her
+freedom and independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable
+canons.  The need of establishing the church by law, and
+protecting her by legal pains and penalties, as is still done in
+most countries, can exist only in a barbarous or semi-barbarous
+state of society, where the state is not organized on catholic
+principles, or the civilization is based on false principles, and
+in its development tends not to the real or Divine order of
+things.  When the state is constituted in harmony with that
+order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
+constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment,
+or what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a
+superfluity.  The true religion is in the heart of the state, as
+its informing principle and real interior life.  The external
+establishment, by legal enactment of the church, would afford her
+no additional protection, add nothing to her power and efficacy,
+and effect nothing for faith or piety--neither of which can be
+forced, because both must, from their nature, be free-will
+offerings to God.
+
+In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the
+true religion; but all false religions being one-sided,
+sophistical, and uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the
+state, which tend, by their silent but effective workings, to
+eliminate them.  The American state recognizes only the catholic
+religion.  It eschews all sectarianism, and none of the sects
+have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its
+constitution or its laws.  The state conforms to what each holds
+that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and
+what ever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province,
+to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of
+vitality.  The state conscience is catholic, not sectarian; hence
+it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all religions,
+the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic in
+its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
+oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true.  The church
+being free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has,
+in the freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the
+security it can ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of
+the case receive from external institutions, or from social and
+political organizations.
+
+This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all
+nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained
+their majority.  The church, as well as the state, must deal with
+men and nations as they are, not as they are not.  To deal with a
+child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a
+civilized nation, would be only acting a lie.  The church cannot
+treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to
+reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped.  She must adapt
+her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals,
+and to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization.
+She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her
+authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the
+variations of time and place.  Many of her canons, very proper
+and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many
+which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the
+New World.  Under the American system, she can deal with the
+people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men
+they are.  The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be
+given him, or his obedience fails to be secured.  The simple
+reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would
+know why she commands this or that.  The full-grown free man
+revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in
+some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command.
+Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
+expected of the people reared under the American system, not
+because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but
+because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile
+obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the
+affections alone.  They are trained to demand a reason for the
+command given them, to distinguish between the law and the person
+of the magistrate.  They can obey God, but not man, and they must
+see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or
+the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield
+it a full, entire, and hearty obedience.  The reason that
+suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the
+reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized
+men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their
+civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity.  The
+appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the
+Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its
+downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.
+
+This trait of the American character is not uncatholic.  An
+intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal
+conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its
+logic in the Divine order--the obedience of a free man, not of a
+slave--is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far
+more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a
+people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of
+civilization than the people that must be governed as children or
+barbarians.  It is possible that the people of the Old World are
+not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion any more than
+they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have been
+trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed
+to look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in
+the reason of things.  They understand no reason for obedience
+beyond the external command, and do not believe it possible to
+give or to understand the reason why the command itself is given.
+They regard the authority of the church as a thing apart, and see
+no way by which faith and reason can be harmonized.  They look
+upon them as antagonistic forces rather than as integral elements
+of one and the same whole.  Concede them the regimen of freedom,
+and their religion has no support but in their good-will, their
+affections, their associations, their habits, and their
+prejudices.  It has no root in their rational convictions, and
+when they begin to reason they begin to doubt.  This is not the
+state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied
+under the political regime established elsewhere than in the
+United States.  In every state in the world, except the American,
+the civil constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or
+less, the logic of things; and, therefore, in no one of them can
+the people receive a thoroughly dialectic training, or an
+education in strict conformity to the real order.  Hence, in them
+all, the church is more or less obstructed in her operations, and
+prevented from carrying out in its fulness her own Divine Idea.
+She does the best she can in the circumstances and with the
+materials with which she is supplied, and exerts herself
+continually to bring individuals and nations into harmony with
+her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the nations is
+a struggle, a warfare.
+
+The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on
+real catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents
+none of these obstacles, and must, in their progressive
+development or realization of their political idea, put an end to
+this warfare, in so far as a warfare between church and state,
+and leave the church in her normal position in society, in which
+she can, without let or hindrance, exert her free spirit, and
+teach and govern men by the Divine law as free men.  She may
+encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and indifference in
+few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from the state,
+which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually give way
+before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the truth and
+reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of
+her ministers.  The American people are, on the surface,
+sectarians or indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less
+uncatholic than the people of any other country because they are,
+in their intellectual and moral development, nearer to the real
+order, or, in the higher and broader sense of the word more truly
+civilized.  The multitude of sects that obtain may excite
+religious compassion for those who are carried away by them, for
+men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny only by
+truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth,
+and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need
+excite no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more
+or less of catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national
+life repel them, in so far as they are sectarian and not
+catholic, as substances that cannot be assimilated to the
+national life.  The American state being catholic in its organic
+principles, as is all real religion, and the church being free,
+whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without any support
+in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself, it
+must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.
+
+The sects themselves have a half unavowed conviction that they
+cannot subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil
+authority.  They are free, but do not feel safe in the United
+States.  They know the real church is catholic, and that they
+themselves are none of them catholic.  The most daring among them
+even pretends to be no more than a "branch" of the catholic
+church.  They know that only the catholic church can withstand
+the pressure of events and survive the shocks of time, and hence
+everywhere their movements to get rid of their sectarianism and
+to gain a catholic character.  They hold conventions of delegates
+from the whole sectarian world, form "unions," "alliances," and
+"associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the catholic
+church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the
+Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost.  The
+most they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world,
+is to create a confederation, and confederated sects are
+something very different from a church inherently one and
+catholic.  It is no more the catholic church than the late
+Southern Confederacy was the American state.  The sectarian
+combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and retard,
+for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state
+organized in accordance with catholic principles, and left to
+themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and
+must soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.
+
+Such being the case, no sensible Catholic can imagine that the
+church needs any physical force against the sects, except to
+repel actual violence, and protect her in that freedom of speech
+and possession which is the right of all before the state.  What
+are called religious establishments are needed only where either
+the state is barbarous or the religion is sectarian.  Where the
+state, in its intrinsic constitution, is in accordance with
+catholic principles, as in the United States, the church has all
+she needs or can receive.  The state can add nothing more to her
+power or her security in her moral and spiritual warfare with
+sectarianism, and any attempt to give her more would only weaken
+her as against the sects, place her in a false light, partially
+justify their hostility to her, render effective their
+declamations against her, mix her up unnecessarily with political
+changes, interests, and passions, and distract the attention of
+her ministers from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on
+them the duties of politicians and statesmen.  Where there is
+nothing in the state hostile to the church, where she is free to
+act according to her own constitution and laws, and exercise her
+own discipline on her own spiritual subjects, civil enactments in
+her favor or against the sects may embarrass or impede her
+operations, but cannot aid her, for she can advance no farther
+than she wins the heart and convinces the understanding.  A
+spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be effected only by
+spiritual means.  The church wants freedom in relation to the
+state--nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from
+God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.
+
+The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order
+of things, and founded on principles which have their origin and
+ground in the principles on which the church herself is founded,
+can never establish any one of the sects as the religion of the
+state, for that would violate their political constitution, and
+array all the other sects, as well as the church herself, against
+the government.  They cannot be called upon to establish the
+church by law, because she is already in their constitution as
+far as the state has in itself any relation with religion, and
+because to establish her in any other sense would be to make her
+one of the civil institutions of the, land, and to bring her
+under the control of the state, which were equally against her
+interest and her nature.
+
+The religious mission of the United States is not then to
+establish the church by external law, or to protect her by legal
+disabilities, pains, and penalties against the sects, however
+uncatholic they may be; but to maintain catholic freedom, neither
+absorbing the state in the church nor the church in the state,
+but leaving each to move freely, according to its own nature, in
+the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of things.  Their
+mission separates church and state as external governing bodies,
+but unites them in the interior principles from which each
+derives its vitality and force.  Their union is in the intrinsic
+unity of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in
+different spheres, each obeys one and the same Divine law.  With
+this the Catholic, who knows what Catholicity means, is of course
+satisfied, for it gives the church all the advantage over the
+sects of the real over the unreal; and with this the sects have
+no right to be dissatisfied, for it subjects them to no
+disadvantage not inherent in sectarianism itself in presence of
+Catholicity, and without any support from the civil authority.
+
+The effect of this mission of our country fully realized, would
+be to harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by
+absorbing either in the other, or by obliterating the natural
+distinction between them, but by conforming both to the real or
+Divine order, which is supreme and immutable.  It places the two
+powers in their normal relation, which has hitherto never been
+done, because hitherto there never has been a state normally
+constituted.  The nearest approach made to the realization of the
+proper relations of church and state, prior to the birth of the
+American Republic, was in the Roman Empire under the Christian
+emperors; but the state had been perverted by paganism, and the
+emperors, inheriting the old pontifical power, could never be
+made to understand their own incompetency in spirituals, and
+persisted to the last in treating the church as a civil
+institution under their supervision and control, as does the
+Emperor of the French in France, even yet.  In the Middle Ages
+the state was so barbarously constituted that the church was
+obliged to supervise its administration, to mix herself up with
+the civil government, in order to infuse some intelligence into
+civil matters, and to preserve her own rightful freedom and
+independence.  When the states broke away from feudalism, they
+revived the Roman constitution, and claimed the authority in
+ecclesiastical matters that had been exercised by the Roman
+Caesars, and the states that adopted a sectarian religion gave
+the sect adopted a civil establishment, and subjected it to the
+civil government, to which the sect not unwillingly consented,
+on condition that the civil authority excluded the church and all
+other sects, and made it the exclusive religion of the state, as
+in England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, and the states of
+Northern Germany.  Even yet the normal relations of church and
+state are nowhere practicable in the Old World; for everywhere
+either the state is more or less barbaric in its constitution, or
+the religion is sectarian, and the church as well as civilization
+is obliged, to struggle with antagonistic forces, for
+self-preservation.
+
+There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce
+what they take to be the American system; but constitutions are
+generated, not made--providential, not conventional.  Statesmen
+can only develop what is in the existing constitutions of their
+respective countries, and no European constitution contains all
+the elements of the American.  European Liberals mistake the
+American system, and, were they to succeed in their efforts,
+would not introduce it, but something more hostile to it than the
+governments and institutions they are warring against.  They
+start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and seek not
+freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.  They suppress the
+freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call
+religious liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by
+extinguishing the light without which no thought is possible, and
+advance civilization by undermining its foundation.  The
+condemnation of their views and movements by the Holy Father in
+the Encyclical, which has excited so much hostility, may seem to
+superficial and unthinking Americans even, as a condemnation of
+our American system--indeed, as the condemnation of modern
+science, intelligence, and civilization itself; but whoever looks
+below the surface, has some insight into the course of events,
+understands the propositions and movements censured, and the
+sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy
+Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority
+to save religion, society, science, and civilization from utter
+corruption or destruction.  The opinions, tendencies, and
+movements, directly or by implication censured, are the effect of
+narrow and superficial thinking, of partial and one-sided views,
+and are sectarian, sophistical, and hostile to all real progress,
+and tend, as far as they go, to throw society back into the
+barbarism from which, after centuries of toil and struggle, it is
+just beginning to emerge.  The Holy Father has condemned nothing
+that real philosophy, real science does not also condemn;
+nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the American system
+itself.  For the mass of the people, it were desirable that
+fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
+various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are
+not, in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were
+expected by the Holy Father to be given by the bishops and
+prelates, to whom, not to the people, save through them, the
+Encyclical was addressed.  Little is to be hoped, and much is to
+be feared, for liberty, science, and civilization from European
+Liberalism, which has no real affinity with American territorial
+democracy and real civil and religious freedom.  But God and
+reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the New, and
+it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
+
+Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission,
+and realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom
+nothing is hidden.  Providence is free, and leaves always a space
+for human free-will.  The American people can fail, and will fail
+if they neglect the appointed means and conditions of success;
+but there is nothing in their present state or in their past
+history to render their failure probable.  They have in their
+internal constitution what Rome wanted, and they are in no danger
+of being crushed by exterior barbarism.  Their success as feeble
+colonies of Great Britain in achieving their national
+independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and against
+the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national
+unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other
+people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their
+future.  The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew
+or more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the
+Union, counted with certainty on success, and the ablest, the
+most experienced, and best informed statesmen of the Old World
+felt sure that the Republic was gone, and spoke of it as the late
+United States.  Not a few, even in the loyal States, who had no
+sympathy with the rebellion, believed it idle to think of
+suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the best terms that
+could be obtained.  But Ilium fuit was chanted too soon; the
+American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified the
+calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the
+expectations of their friends.
+
+The attitude of the real American people during the fearful
+struggle affords additional confidence in their destiny.  With
+larger armies on foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their
+line of battle stretching from ocean to ocean, across the whole
+breadth of the continent, they never, during four long years of
+alternate victories and defeats--and both unprecedentedly
+bloody--for a moment lost their equanimity, or appeared less
+calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of peace.
+They not for a moment interrupted their ordinary routine of
+business or pleasure, or seemed conscious of being engaged in any
+serious struggle which required an effort.  There was no hurry,
+no bustle, no excitement, no fear, no misgiving.  They seemed to
+regard the war as a mere bagatelle, not worth being in earnest
+about.  The on-looker was almost angry with their apparent
+indifference, apparent insensibility, and doubted if they moved
+at all, Yet move they did: guided by an unerring instinct, they
+moved quietly on with an elemental force, in spite of a timid and
+hesitating administration, in spite of inexperienced,
+over-cautious, incompetent, or blundering military commanders,
+whom they gently brushed aside, and desisted not till their
+object was gained, and they saw the flag of the Union floating
+anew in the breeze from the capitol of every State that dared
+secede.  No man could contemplate them without feeling that there
+was in them a latent power vastly superior to any which they
+judged it necessary to put forth.  Their success proves to all
+that what, prior to the war, was treated as American arrogance or
+self-conceit, was only the outspoken confidence in their destiny
+as a Providential people, conscious that to them is reserved the
+hegemony of the world.
+
+Count de Maistre predicted early in the century the failure of
+the United States, because they have no proper name; but his
+prediction assumed what is not the fact.  The United States have
+a proper name by which all the world knows and calls them.  The
+proper name of the country is America: that of the people is
+Americans.  Speak of Americans simply, and nobody understands you
+to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile,
+Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the
+United States.  The fact is significant, and foretells for the
+people of the United States a continental destiny, as is also
+foreshadowed in the so-called "Monroe doctrine," which France,
+during our domestic troubles, was permitted, on condition of not
+intervening in our civil war in favor of the rebellion, to
+violate.
+
+There was no statesmanship in proclaiming the "Monroe doctrine,"
+for the statesman keeps always, as far as possible, his
+government free to act according to the exigencies of the case
+when it comes up, unembarrassed by previous declarations of
+principles.  Yet the doctrine only expresses the destiny of the
+American people, and which nothing but their own fault can
+prevent them from realizing in its own good time.  Napoleon will
+not succeed in his Mexican policy, and Mexico will add some
+fifteen or twenty new States to the American Union as soon as it
+is clearly for the interests of all parties that it should be
+done, and it can be done by mutual consent, without war or
+violence.  The Union will fight to maintain the integrity of her
+domain and the supremacy of her laws within it, but she can
+never, consistently with her principles or her interests, enter
+upon a career of war and conquest.  Her system is violated,
+endangered, not extended, by subjugating her neighbors, for
+subjugation and liberty go not together.  Annexation, when it
+takes place, must be on terms of perfect equality and by the free
+act of the state annexed.  The Union can admit of no inequality
+of rights and franchises between the States of which it is
+composed.  The Canadian Provinces and the Mexican and Central
+American States, when annexed, must be as free as the original
+States of the Union, sharing alike in the power and the
+protection of the Republic--alike in its authority, its freedom,
+its grandeur, and its glory, as one free, independent,
+self-governing people.  They may gain much, but must lose nothing
+by annexation.
+
+The Emperor Napoleon and his very respectable protege,
+Maximilian, an able man and a liberal-minded prince, can change
+nothing in the destiny of the United States, or of Mexico
+herself; no imperial government can be permanent beside the
+American Republic, no longer liable, since the abolition of
+slavery, to be distracted by sectional dissensions.  The States
+that seceded will soon, in some way, be restored to their rights
+and franchises in the Union, forming not the least patriotic
+portion of the American people; the negro question will be
+settled, or settle itself, as is most likely, by the melting away
+of the negro population before the influx of white laborers; all
+traces of the late contest in a very few years will be wiped out,
+the national debt paid, or greatly reduced, and the prosperity
+and strength of the Republic be greater than ever.  Its moral
+force will sweep away every imperial throne on the continent,
+without any effort or action on the part of the government.
+There can be no stable government in Mexico till every trace of
+the ecclesiastical policy established by the Council of the
+Indies is obliterated, and the church placed there on the same
+footing as in the United States; and that can hardly be done
+without annexation.  Maximilian cannot divest the church of her
+temporal possessions and place Protestants and Catholics on the
+same footing, without offending the present church party and
+deeply injuring religion, and that too without winning the
+confidence of the republican party.  In all Spanish and
+Portuguese America the relations between the church and state are
+abnormal, and exceedingly hurtful to both.  Religion is in a
+wretched condition, and politics in a worse condition still.
+There is no effectual remedy for either but in religious freedom,
+now impracticable, and to be rendered practicable by no European
+intervention, for that subjects religion to the state, the very
+source of the evils that now exist, instead of emancipating it
+from the state, and leaving it to act according to its own
+constitution and laws, as under the American system.
+
+But the American people need not trouble themselves about their
+exterior expansion.  That will come of itself as fast as
+desirable.  Let them devote their attention to their internal
+destiny, to the realization of their mission within, and they
+will gradually see the Whole continent coming under their system,
+forming one grand nation, a really catholic nation, great,
+glorious, and free.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext The American Republic, by O. A. Brownson
+
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