The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
by Orestes Augustus Brownson · English · Gutenberg #2053 · 581,051 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
Author: Orestes Augustus Brownson
Release date: January 1, 2000 [eBook #2053]
Most recently updated: December 31, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC: ITS CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY ***
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 f
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