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The American Republic

b >> by O. A. Brownson >> The American Republic




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughtful Americans are opposed to political propagandism, and
respect the right of every nation to choose its own form of
government; but they hold that the American system is the best in
itself, and that if other nations were as enlightened as the
American, they would adopt it. But though the American system,
rightly understood, is the best, as they hold, it is not because
other nations are less enlightened, which is by no means a fact,
that they do not adopt, or cannot bear it, but solely because
their providential constitutions do not require or admit it, and
an attempt to introduce it in any of them would prove a failure
and a grave evil.

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

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

The right of a nation to change its form of government, and its
magistrates or representatives, by whatever name called, is
incontestable. Hence the French constitution of l789, which
involved that of 1793, was not illegal, for though accompanied by
some irregularities, it was adopted by the manifest will of the
nation, and consented to by all orders in the state. Not its
legality but its wisdom is to be questioned, together with the
false and dangerous theories of government which dictated it.
There is no compact or mutual stipulation between the state and
the government. The state, under God, is sovereign, and ordains
and establishes the government, instead of making a contract, a
bargain, or covenant, with it. The common democratic doctrine on
this point is right, if by people is understood the organic
people attached to a sovereign domain, not the people as
individuals or as a floating or nomadic multitude. By people in
the political sense, Cicero, and St. Augustine after him,
understood the people as the republic, organized in reference to
the common or public good. With this understanding, the
sovereignty persists in the people, and they retain the supreme
authority over the government. The powers delegated are still
the powers of the sovereign delegating them, and may be modified,
altered, or revoked, as the sovereign judges proper. The nation
does not, and cannot abdicate or delegate away its own
sovereignty, for sovereign it is, and cannot but be, so long as
it remains a nation not subjected to another nation.

By the imperial constitution of the French government, the
imperial power is vested in Napoleon III., and made hereditary in
his family, in the male line of his legitimate descendants. This
is legal, but the nation has not parted with its sovereignty or
bound itself by contract forever to a Napoleonic dynasty.
Napoleon holds the imperial power "by the grace of God and the
will of the nation," which means simply that he holds his
authority from God, through the French people, and is bound to
exercise it according to the law of God and the national will.
The nation is as competent to revoke this constitution as the
legislature is to repeal any law it is competent to enact, and in
doing so breaks no contract, violates no right, for Napoleon and
his descendants hold their right to the imperial throne subject
to the national will from which it is derived. In case the
nation should revoke the powers delegated, he or they would have
no more valid claim to the throne than have the Bourbons, whom
the nation has unmistakably dismissed from its service.

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





CHAPTER IX.

THE UNITED STATES


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

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

An independent state or nation may, with or without its consent,
lose its sovereignty, but only by being merged in or subjected to
another. Independent sovereign states cannot by convention, or
mutual agreement, form themselves into a single sovereign state,
or nation. The compact, or agreement, is made by sovereign
states, and binds by virtue of the sovereign power of each of the
contracting parties. To destroy that sovereign power would be to
annul the compact, and render void the agreement. The agreement
can be valid and binding only on condition that each of the
contracting parties retains the sovereignty that rendered it
competent to enter into the compact, and states that retain
severally their sovereignty do not form a single sovereign state
or nation. The states in convention cannot become a new and
single sovereign state, unless they lose their several
sovereignty, and merge it in the new sovereignty; but this they
cannot do by agreement, because the moment the parties to the
agreement cease to be sovereign, the agreement, on which alone
depends the new sovereign state, is vacated, in like manner as a
contract is vacated by the death of the contracting parties.

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

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

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

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