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The American Republic

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Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the modern European
sense, but to monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense.
Lacedaemon had kings; yet it was no less republican than Athens;
and Rome was called and was a republic under the emperors no less
than under the consuls. Republic, respublica, by the very force
of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English, the
commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or
private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or
domain, or a Government that vests authority in the nation, and
attaches the nation to a certain definite territory. France,
Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, even Great Britain in
substance though not in form, are all, in the strictest sense of
the word, republican states; for the king or emperor does not
govern in his own private right, but solely as representative of
the power and majesty of the state. The distinctive mark of
republicanism is the substitution of the state for the personal
chief, and public authority for personal or private right.
Republicanism is really civilization as opposed to barbarism, and
all civility, in the old Sense of the word, or Civilian in
Italian, is republican, and is applied in modern tiles to
breeding or refinement of manners, simply because these are
characteristics of a republican, or polished [from ....., city]
people. Every people that has a real civil order, or a fully
developed state or polity, is a republican people; and hence the
church and her great doctors when they speak of the state as
distinguished from the church, call it the republic, as may be
seen by consulting even a late Encyclical of Pius IX., which some
have interpreted wrongly in an anti-republican sense.

All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system remains,
or is developed without transformation, are barbaric, and really
so regarded by all Christendom. In civilized nations the
patriarchal authority is transformed into that of the city or
state, that is, of the republic; but in all barbarous nations it
retains its Private and personal character. The nation is only
the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its ancestor,
founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomination. Race has
not been supplanted by country; they are a people, not a state.
They are not fixed to the soil, and though we may find in them
ardent love of family, the tribe, or the chief, we never find
among them that pure love of country or patriotism which so
distinguished the Greeks and Romans, and is no less marked among
modern Christian nations. They have a family, a race, a chief or
king, but no patria, or country. The barbarians who overthrew
the Roman Empire, whether of the West or the East, were nations,
or confederacies of nations, but not states. The nation with
them was personal, not territorial. Their country was wherever
they fed their flocks and herds, pitched their tents, and
encamped for the night. There were Germans, but no German state,
and even to-day the German finds his "father-land" wherever the
German speech is spoken. The Polish, Sclavonian, Hungarian,
Illyrian, Italian, and other provinces held by German states, in
which the German language is not the mother-tongue, are excluded
from the Germanic Confederation. The Turks, or Osmanlis, are a
race, not a state, and are encamped, not settled, on the site of
the Eastern Roman or Greek Empire.

Even when the barbaric nations have ceased to be nomadic,
pastoral, or predatory nations, as the ancient Assyrians and
Persians or modern Chinese, and have their geographical
boundaries, they have still no state, no country. The nation
defines the boundaries, not the boundaries the nation. The
nation does not belong to the territory, but the territory to the
nation or its chief. The Irish and Anglo-Saxons, in former
times, held the land in gavelkind, and the territory belonged to
the tribe or sept; but if the tribe held it as indivisible, they
still held it as private property. The shah of Persia holds the
whole Persian territory as private property, and the landholders
among his subjects are held to be his tenants. They hold it from
him, not from the Persian state.

The public domain of the Greek empire is in theory the private
domain of the Ottoman emperor or Turkish sultan. There is in
barbaric states no republic, no commonwealth; authority is
parental, without being tempered by parental affection. The
chief is a despot, and rules with the united authority of the
father and the harshness of the proprietor. He owns the land and
his subjects.

Feudalism, established in Western Europe after the downfall of
the Roman Empire, however modified by the Church and by
reminiscences of Graeco-Roman civilization retained by the
conquered, was a barbaric constitution. The feudal monarch, as
far as he governed at all, governed as proprietor or landholder,
not as the representative of the commonwealth. Under feudalism
there are estates, but no state. The king governs as an estate,
the nobles hold their power as an estate, and the commons are
represented as an estate. The whole theory of power is, that it
is an estate; a private right, not a public trust. It is not
without reason, then that the common sense of civilized nations
terms the ages when it prevailed in Western Europe barbarous ages.

It may seem a paradox to class democracy with the barbaric
constitutions, and yet as it is defended by many stanch
democrats, especially European democrats and revolutionists, and
by French and Germans settled in our own country, it is
essentially barbaric and anti-republican. The characteristic
principle of barbarism is, that power is a private or personal
right, and when democrats assert that the elective franchise is a
natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact
that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle
of barbarism and despotism. This says nothing in favor of
restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage.
To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing,
theoretically or practically. Property has of itself advantages
enough, without clothing its holders with exclusive political
rights and privileges, and the laboring classes any day are as
trustworthy as the business classes. The wise statesman will
never restrict suffrage, or exclude the poorer and more numerous
classes from all voice in the government of their country.
General suffrage is wise, and if Louis Philippe had had the sense
to adopt it, and thus rally the whole nation to the support of
his government, he would never have had to encounter the
revolution of 1848. The barbarism, the despotism, is not in
universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a
private or personal right. It is not a private, but a political
right, and, like all political rights, a public trust. Extremes
meet, and thus it is that men who imagine that they march at the
head of the human race and lead the civilization of the age, are
really in principle retrograding to the barbarism of the past, or
taking their place with nations on whom the light of civilization
has never yet dawned. All is not gold that glisters.

The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority a
private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization
is, that it makes it a public trust. Barbarism knows only
persons; civilization asserts and maintains the state. With
barbarians the authority of the patriarch is developed simply by
way of explication; in civilized states it is developed by way of
transformation. Keeping in mind this distinction, it may be
maintained that all systems of government, as a simple historical
fact, have been developed from the patriarchal. The patriarchal
has preceded them all, and it is with the patriarchal that the
human race has begun its career. The family or household is not
a state, a civil polity, but it is a government, and,
historically considered, is the initial or inchoate state as well
as the initial or inchoate nation. But its simple direct
development gives us barbarism, or what is called Oriental
despotism, and which nowhere exists, or can exist, in Christendom.
It is found only in pagan and Mohammedan nations; Christianity in
the secular order is republican, and continues and completes the
work of Greece and Rome. It meets with little permanent success
in any patriarchal or despotic nation, and must either find or
create civilization, which has been developed from the patriarchal
system by way of transformation.

But, though the patriarchal system is the earliest form of
government, and all governments have been developed or modified
from it, the right of government to govern cannot be deduced from
the right of the father to govern his children, for the parental
right itself is not ultimate or complete. All governments that
assume it to be so, and rest on it as the foundation of their
authority, are barbaric or despotic, and, therefore , without any
legitimate authority. The right to govern rests on ownership or
dominion. Where there is no proprietorship, there is no dominion;
and where there is no dominion, there is no right to govern.
Only he who is sovereign proprietor is sovereign lord.

Property, ownership, dominion rests on creation. The maker has
the right to the thing made. He, so far as he is sole creator,
is sole proprietor, and may do what he will with it. God is
sovereign lord and proprietor of the universe because He is its
sole creator. He hath the absolute dominion, because He is
absolute maker. He has made it, He owns it; and one may do what
he will with his own. His dominion is absolute, because He is
absolute creator, and He rightly governs as absolute and
universal lord; yet is He no despot, because He exercises only
His sovereign right, and His own essential wisdom, goodness,
justness, rectitude, and immutability, are the highest of all
conceivable guaranties that His exercise of His power will always
be right, wise, just, and good. The despot is a man attempting
to be God upon earth, and to exercise a usurped power. Despotism
is based on, the parental right, and the parental right is
assumed to be absolute. Hence, your despotic rulers claim to
reign, and to be loved and worshipped as gods. Even the Roman
emperors, in the fourth and fifth centuries, were addressed as
divinities; and Theodosius the Great, a Christian , was addressed
as "Your Eternity," Eternitas vestras--so far did barbarism
encroach on civilization, even under Christian emperors.

The right of the father over his child is an imperfect right, for
he is the generator, not the creator of his child. Generation is
in the order of second causes, and is simply the development or
explication of the race. The early Roman law, founded on the
confusion of generation with creation, gave the father absolute
authority over the child--the right of life and death, as over
his servants or slaves; but this was restricted under the Empire,
and in all Christian nations the authority of the father is
treated, like all power, as a trust. The child, like the father
himself, belongs to the state, and to the state the father is
answerable for the use he makes of his authority. The law fixes
the age of majority, when the child is completely emancipated;
and even during his nonage, takes him from the father and places
him under guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil
or grossly abuses his trust. This is proper, because society
contributes to the life of the child, and has a right as well as
an interest in him. Society, again, must suffer if the child is
allowed to grow up a worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a
right to intervene, both in behalf of itself and of the child, in
case his parents neglect to train him up in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord, or are training him up to be a liar, a
thief, a drunkard, a murderer, a pest to the community. How,
then, base the right of society on the right of the father,
since, in point of fact, the right of society is paramount to the
right of the parent?

But even waiving this, and granting what is not the fact that the
authority of the father is absolute, unlimited, it cannot be the
ground of the right of society to govern. Assume the parental
right to be perfect and inseparable from the parental relation,
it is no right to govern where no such relation exists. Nothing
true, real, solid in government can be founded on what Carlyle
calls a "sham." The statesman, if worthy of the name, ascertains
and conforms to the realities, the verities of things; and all
jurisprudence that accepts legal fictions is imperfect, and even
censurable. The presumptions or assumptions of law or politics
must have a real and solid basis, or they are inadmissible. How,
from the right of the father to govern his own child, born from
his loins, conclude his right to govern one not his child? Or
how, from my right to govern my child, conclude the right of
society to found the state, institute government, and exercise
political authority over its members?





CHAPTER IV.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.


II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking
from asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should
favor theocracy, and place secular society under the control of
the clergy, and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political
writers have sought to render government purely human, and
maintain that its origin is conventional, and that it is founded
in compact or agreement. Their theory originated in the
seventeenth century, and was predominant in the last century and
the first third of the present. It has been, and perhaps is yet,
generally accepted by American politicians and statesmen, at
least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the question
at all, which it must be confessed is not far.

The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of
government as a social pact or compact, and explained the
reciprocal rights and obligations of subjects and rulers by the
general law of contracts; but they have never held that
government originates in a voluntary agreement between the people
and their rulers, or between the several individuals composing
the community. They have never held that government has only a
conventional origin or authority. They have simply meant, by the
social compact, the mutual relations and reciprocal rights and
duties of princes and their subjects, as implied in the very
existence and nature of civil society. Where there are rights
and duties on each side, they treat the fact, not as an agreement
voluntarily entered into, and which creates them, but as a
compact which binds alike sovereign and subject; and in
determining whether either side has sinned or not, they inquire
whether either has broken the terms of the social compact. They
were engaged, not with the question whence does government derive
its authority, but with its nature, and the reciprocal rights and
duties of governors and the governed. The compact itself they
held was not voluntarily formed by the people themselves, either
individually or collectively, but was imposed by God, either
immediately, or mediately, through the law of nature. "Every
man," says Cicero, "is born in society, and remains there." They
held the same, and maintained that every one born into society
contracts by that fact certain obligations to society, and
society certain obligations to him; for under the natural law,
every one has certain rights, as life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, and owes certain duties to society for the
protection and assistance it affords him.

But modern political theorists have abused the phrase borrowed
from the theologians, and made it cover a political doctrine
which they would have been the last to accept. These theorists
or political speculators have imagined a state of nature
antecedently to civil society, in which men lived without
government, law, or manners, out of which they finally came by
entering into a voluntary agreement with some one of their number
to be king and to govern them, or with one another to submit to
the rule of the majority. Hobbes, the English materialist, is
among the earliest and most distinguished of the advocates of
this theory. He held that men lived, prior to the creation of
civil society, in a state of nature, in which all were equal, and
every one had an equal right to every thing, and to take any
thing on which he could lay his hands and was strong enough to
hold. There was no law but the will of the strongest. Hence,
the state of nature was a state of continual war. At length,
wearied and disgusted, men sighed for peace, and, with one
accord, said to the tallest, bravest, or ablest among them: Come,
be our king, our master, our sovereign lord, and govern us; we
surrender our natural rights and our natural independence to you,
with no other reserve or condition than that you maintain peace
among us, keep us from robbing and plundering one another or
cutting each other's throats.

Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory,
but asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had
asserted it in the interests of power. Rousseau, a citizen of
Geneva, followed in the next century with his Contrat Social, the
text-book of the French revolutionists--almost their Bible--and
put the finishing stroke to the theory. Hitherto the compact or
agreement had been assumed to be between the governor and the
governed; Rousseau supposes it to be between the people
themselves, or a compact to which the people are the only parties.
He adopts the theory of a state of nature in which men lived,
antecedently to their forming themselves into civil society,
without government or law. All men in that state were equal, and
each was independent and sovereign proprietor of himself. These
equal, independent, sovereign individuals met, or are held to
have met, in convention, and entered into a compact with
themselves, each with all, and all with each, that they would
constitute government, and would each submit to the determination
and authority of the whole, practically of the fluctuating and
irresponsible majority. Civil society, the state, the
government, originates in this compact, and the government, as
Mr. Jefferson asserts in the Declaration of American
Independence, "derives its just powers from the consent of the
governed."

This theory, as so set forth, or as modified by asserting that
the individual delegates instead of surrendering his rights to
civil society, was generally adopted by the American people in
the last century, and is still the more prevalent theory with
those among them who happen to have any theory or opinion on the
subject. It is the political tradition of the country. The
state, as defined by the elder Adams, is held to be a voluntary
association of individuals. Individuals create civil society,
and may uncreate it whenever they judge it advisable. Prior to
the Southern Rebellion, nearly every American asserted with
Lafayette, "the sacred right of insurrection" or revolution, and
sympathized with insurrectionists, rebels, and revolutionists,
wherever they made their appearance. Loyalty was held to be the
correlative of royalty, treason was regarded as a virtue, and
traitors were honored, feasted, and eulogized as patriots, ardent
lovers of liberty, and champions of the people. The fearful
struggle of the nation against a rebellion which threatened its
very existence may have changed this.

That there is, or ever was, a state of nature such as the theory
assumes, may be questioned. Certainly nothing proves that it is,
or ever was, a real state. That there is a law of nature is
undeniable. All authorities in philosophy, morals, politics, and
jurisprudence assert it; the state assumes it as its own
immediate basis, and the codes of all nations are founded on it;
universal jurisprudence, the jus qentium of the Romans, embodies
it, and the courts recognize and administer it. It is the reason
and conscience of civil society, and every state acknowledges its
authority. But the law of nature is as much in force in civil
society as out of it. Civil law does not abrogate or supersede
natural law, but presupposes it, and supports itself on it as its
own ground and reason. As the natural law, which is only natural
justice and equity dictated by the reason common to all men,
persists in the civil law, municipal or international, as its
informing soul, so does the state of nature persist in the civil
state, natural society in civil society, which simply develops,
applies, and protects it. Man in civil society is not out of
nature, but is in it--is in his most natural state; for society
is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in
some form inseparable from it. The state of nature under the
natural law is not, as a separate state, an actual state, and
never was; but an abstraction, in which is considered, apart from
the concrete existence called society, what is derived
immediately from the natural law. But as abstractions have no
existence, out of the mind that forms them, the state of nature
has no actual existence in the world of reality as a separate
state.

But suppose with the theory the state of nature to have been a
real and separate state, in which men at first lived, there is
great difficulty in understanding how they ever got out of it.
Can a man divest himself of his nature, or lift himself above it?
Man is in his nature, and inseparable from it. If his primitive
state was his natural state, and if the political state is
supernatural, preternatural, or subnatural, how passed he alone,
by his own unaided powers, from the former to the latter? The
ancients, who had lost the primitive tradition of creation,
asserted, indeed, the primitive man as springing from the earth,
and leading a mere animal life, living in eaves or hollow trees,
and feeding on roots and nuts, without speech, without science,
art, law, or sense of right and wrong; but prior to the
prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, they never pretended,
that man could come out of that state alone by his own unaided
efforts. They ascribed the invention of language, art, and
science, the institution of civil society, government, and laws,
to the intervention of the gods. It remained for the
Epicureans--who, though unable, like their modern successors,
the Positivists or Developmentists, to believe in a first cause,
believed in effects without causes, or that things make or take
care of themselves--to assert that men could, by their own
unassisted efforts, or by the simple exercise of reason, come out
of the primitive state, and institute what in modern times is
called civilta, civility, or civilization.

The partisans of this theory of the state of nature from which
men have emerged by the voluntary and deliberate formation of
civil society, forget that if government is not the sole
condition, it is one of the essential conditions of progress.
The only progressive nations are civilized or republican nations.
Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive. Ages on ages roll
over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr
has well remarked with others, that history records no instance
of a savage tribe or people having become civilized by its own
spontaneous or indigenous efforts. If savage tribes have ever
become civilized, it has been by influences from abroad, by the
aid of men already civilized, through conquest, colonies, or
missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, nor even by
commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age.
Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people
to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized. But
the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and
asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the
savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe
that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or
feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals,
law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there
is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged
state of nature have none.

The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting
into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and
capacities of the civilized man. It is, perhaps, not difficult
for men who have been civilized, who have the intelligence, the
arts, the affections, and the habits of civilization, if deprived
by some great social convulsion of society, and thrown back on
the so-called state of nature, or cast away on some uninhabited
island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with the
rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish
and maintain civil government. They are civilized men, and bear
civil society in their own life. But these are no
representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of
nature. These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no
conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to
that in which they have thus far lived. How then can they,
since, on the theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is
a purely artificial creation, even conceive of civilization,
much less realize it?

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