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The American Republic

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




This theory is usually called the democratic theory, and it
enlists in its support the instincts, the intelligence, the
living forces, and active tendencies of the age. Kings, kaisers,
and hierarchies are powerless before it, and war against it in
vain. The most they can do is to restrain its excesses, or to
guard against its abuses. Its advocates, in returning to it,
sometimes revive in its name the old pagan superstition. Not a
few of the European democrats recognize in the earth, in heaven,
or in hell, no power superior to the people, and say not only
people-king but people-God. They say absolutely, without any
qualification, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and
make their will the supreme law, not only in politics, but in
religion, philosophy, morals, science, and the arts. The people
not only found the state, but also the church. They inspire or
reveal the truth, ordain or prohibit worships, judge of
doctrines, and decide cases of conscience. Mazzini said , when
at the bead of the Roman Republic in 1848, the question of
religion must be remitted to the judgment of the people. Yet
this theory is the dominant theory of the age, and is in all
civilized nations advancing with apparently irresistible force.

But this theory has its difficulties. Who are the collective
people that have the rights of society, or, who are the sovereign
people? The word people is vague, and in itself determines
nothing. It may include a larger or a smaller number; it may
mean the political people, or it may mean simply population; it
may mean peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders, merchants, as
distinguished from the nobility; hired laborers or workmen as
distinguished from their employer, or slaves as distinguished
from their master or owner. In which of these senses is the word
to be taken when it is said, "The people are sovereign?" The
people are the population or inhabitants of one and the same
country. That is something. But who or what determines the
country? Is the country the whole territory of the globe? That
will not be said, especially since the dispersion of mankind and
their division into separate nations. Is the territory
indefinite or undefined? Then indefinite or undefined are its
inhabitants, or the people invested with the rights of society.
Is it defined and its boundaries fixed? Who has done it? The
people. But who are the people? We are as wise as we were at
starting. The logicians say that the definition of idem per
idem, or the same by the same, is simply no definition at all.

The people are the nation, undoubtedly, if you mean by the people
the sovereign people. But who are the people constituting the
nation? The sovereign people? This is only to revolve in a
vicious circle. The nation is the tribe or the people living
under the same regimen, and born of the same ancestor, or sprung
from the same ancestor or progenitor. But where find a nation in
this the primitive sense of the word? Migration, conquest, and
intermarriage, have so broken up and intermingled the primitive
races, that it is more than doubtful if a single nation, tribe,
or family of unmixed blood now exists on the face of the earth.
A Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, German, or Englishman, may have
the blood of a hundred different races coursing in his veins.
The nation is the people inhabiting the same country, and united
under one and the same government, it is further answered. The
nation, then, is not purely personal, but also territorial.
Then, again, the question comes up, who or what determines the
territory? The government? But not before it is constituted,
and it cannot be constituted till its territorial limits are
determined. The tribe doubtless occupies territory, but is not
fixed to it, and derives no jurisdiction from it, and therefore
is not territorial. But a nation, in the modern or civilized
sense, is fixed to the territory, and derives from it its
jurisdiction, or sovereignty; and, therefore, till the territory
is determined, the nation is not and cannot be determined.

The question is not an idle question. It is one of great
practical importance; for, till it is settled, we can neither
determine who are the sovereign people, nor who are united under
one and the same government. Laws have no extra-territorial
force, and the officer who should attempt to enforce the national
laws beyond the national territory would be a trespasser. If the
limits are undetermined, the government is not territorial, and
can claim as within its jurisdiction only those who choose to
acknowledge its authority. The importance of the question has
been recently brought home to the American people by the
secession of eleven or more States from the Union. Were these
States a part of the American nation, or were they not? Was the
war which followed secession, and which cost so many lives and so
much treasure, a civil war or a foreign war? Were the
secessionists traitors and rebels to their sovereign, or were
they patriots fighting for the liberty and independence of their
country and the right of self-government? All on both sides
agreed that the nation is sovereign; the dispute was as to the
existence of the nation itself, and the extent of its
jurisdiction. Doubtless, when a nation has a generally
recognized existence as an historical fact, most of the
difficulties in determining who are the sovereign people can be
got over; but the question here concerns the institution of
government, and determining who constitute society and have the
right to meet in person, or by their delegates in convention,
to institute it. This question, so important, and at times so
difficult, the theory of the origin of government in the people
collectively, or the nation, does not solve, or furnish any means
of solving.

But suppose this difficulty surmounted there is still another,
and a very grave one, to overcome. The theory assumes that the
people collectively, "in their own native right and might," are
sovereign. According to it the people are ultimate, and free to
do whatever they please. This sacrifices individual freedom.
The origin of government in a compact entered into by
individuals, each with all and all with each, sacrificed the
rights of society, and assumed each individual to be in himself
an independent sovereignty. If logically carried out, there
could be no such crime as treason, there could be no state, and
no public authority. This new theory transfers to society the
sovereignty which that asserted for the individual, and asserts
social despotism, or the absolutism of the state. It asserts
with sufficient energy public authority, or the right of the
people to govern; but it leaves no space for individual rights,
which society must recognize, respect, and protect. This was the
grand defect of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilization. The
historian explores in vain the records of the old Greek and Roman
republics for any recognition of the rights of individuals not
held as privileges or concessions from the state. Society
recognized no limit to her authority, and the state claimed over
individuals all the authority of the patriarch over his
household, the chief over his tribe, or the absolute monarch over
his subjects. The direct and indirect influence of the body of
freemen admitted to a voice in public affairs, in determining the
resolutions and action of the state, no doubt tempered in
practice to some extent the authority of the state, and prevented
acts of gross oppression; but in theory the state was absolute,
and the people individually were placed at the mercy of the
people collectively, or, rather, the majority of the collective
people.

Under ancient republicanism, there were rights of the state and
rights of the citizen, but no rights of man, held independently
of society, and not derived from God through the state. The
recognition of these rights by modern society is due to
Christianity: some say to the barbarians, who overthrew the Roman
empire; but this last opinion is not well founded. The barbarian
chiefs and nobles had no doubt a lively sense of personal freedom
and independence, but for themselves only. They had no
conception of personal freedom as a general or universal right,
and men never obtain universal principles by generalizing
particulars. They may give a general truth a particular
application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a
particular truth--a general or universal application. They are
too good logicians for that. The barbarian individual freedom
and personal independence was never generalized into the doctrine
of the rights of man, any more than the freedom of the master has
been generalized into the right of his slaves to be free. The
doctrine of individual freedom before the state is due to the
Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and worth of every
human soul, the accountability to God of each man for himself,
and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
rather than men. The church practically denied the absolutism of
the state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the
state, in converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of
the state authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death
the profession of the Christian faith. In this she practically,
as well as theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused
into modern society the doctrine that every individual, even the
lowest and meanest, has rights which the state neither confers
nor can abrogate; and it will only be by extinguishing in modern
society the Christian faith, and obliterating all traces of
Christian civilization, that state absolutism can be revived with
more than a partial and temporary success.

The doctrine of individual liberty may be abused, and so
explained as to deny the rights of society, and to become pure
individualism; but no political system that runs to the opposite
extreme, and absorbs the individual in the state, stands the
least chance of any general or permanent success till
Christianity is extinguished. Yet the assertion of principles
which logically imply state absolutism is not entirely harmless,
even in Christian countries. Error is never harmless, and only
truth can give a solid foundation on which to build.
Individualism and socialism are each opposed to the other, and
each has only a partial truth. The state founded on either
cannot stand, and society will only alternate between the two
extremes. To-day it is torn by a revolution in favor of
socialism; to-morrow it will be torn by another in favor of
individualism, and without effecting any real progress by either
revolution. Real progress can be secured only by recognizing and
building on the truth, not as it exists in our opinions or in our
theories, but as it exists in the world of reality, and
independent of our opinions.

Now, social despotism or state absolutism is not based on truth
or reality. Society has certain rights over individuals, for she
is a medium of their communion with God, or through which they
derive life from God, the primal source of all life; but she is
not the only medium of man's life. Man, as was said in the
beginning, lives by communion with God, and he communes with God
in the creative act and the Incarnation, through his kind, and,
through nature. This threefold communion gives rise to three
institutions--religion or the church, society or the state, and
property. The life that man derives from God through religion
and property, is not derived from him through society, and
consequently so much of his life be holds independently of
society; and this constitutes his rights as a man as
distinguished from his rights as a citizen. In relation to
society, as not held from God through her, these are termed his
natural rights, which, she must hold inviolable, and government
protect for every one, whatever his complexion or his social
position. These rights--the rights of conscience and the rights
of property, with all their necessary implications--are
limitations of the rights of society, and the individual has the
right to plead them against the state. Society does not confer
them, and it cannot take them away, for they are at least as
sacred and as fundamental as her own.

But even this limitation of popular sovereignty is not all. The
people can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and
act. The people are not God, whatever some theorists may
pretend--are not independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing.
They are as dependent collectively as individually, and therefore
can exist and act only as second cause, never as first cause.
They can, then, even in the limited sphere of their sovereignty,
be sovereign only in a secondary sense, never absolute sovereign
in their own independent right. They are sovereign only to the
extent to which they impart life to the individual members of
society, and only in the sense in which she imparts it, or is its
cause. She is not its first cause or creator, and is the medial
cause or medium through which they derive it from God, not its
efficient cause or primary source. Society derives her own life
from God, and exists and acts only as dependent on him. Then she
is sovereign over individuals only as dependent on God. Her
dominion is then not original and absolute, but secondary and
derivative.

This third theory does not err in assuming that the people
collectively are more than the people individually, or in denying
society to be a mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and
no rights but what it derives from them; nor even in asserting
that the people in the sense of society are sovereign, but in
asserting that they are sovereign in their own native or
underived right and might. Society has not in herself the
absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute
dominion either of herself or her members. God gave to man
dominion over the irrational creation, for he made irrational
creatures for man; but he never gave him either individually or
collectively the dominion over the rational creation. The theory
that the people are absolutely sovereign in their own independent
right and might, as some zealous democrats explain it, asserts
the fundamental principle of despotism, and all despotism is
false, for it identifies the creature with the Creator. No
creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and
consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign.
This third theory, therefore, is untenable.

IV. A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers
they may be called, reject the origin of government in the people
individually or collectively. Satisfied that it has never been
instituted by a voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and
confounding government as a fact with government as authority,
maintain that government is a spontaneous development of nature.
Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee
constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his dam. Nature,
working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops society,
and society develops government. That is all the secret.
Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond
the simple positive fact, belong to the theological or
metaphysical stage of the development of nature, but are left
behind when the race has passed beyond that stage, and has
reached the epoch of positive science, in which all, except the
positive fact, is held to be unreal and non-existent.
Government, like every thing else in the universe, is simply a
positive development of nature. Science explains the laws and
conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin
or ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world
of space and time.

These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they
only oppose theory to theory. The assertion that reality for the
human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible
order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact.
Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is
only in the light of principles that facts themselves are
intelligible. If the human mind had no science of reality that
transcends the sensible order, or the positive fact, it could
have no science at all. As things exist only in their principles
or causes, so can they be known only in their principles and
causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as they
really exist. The science that pretends to deduce principles
from particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of
reasoning to an order that transcends facts, and in which facts
have their origin, is undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that
the positivists are unquestionably right. But to maintain that
man has no intelligence of any thing beyond the fact, no
intuition or intellectual apprehension of its principle or cause,
is equally chimerical. The human mind cannot have all science,
but it has real science as far as it goes, and real science is
the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they
do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not
penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the
methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the
individual fact, it could never know the fact itself. The error
of modern philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the
principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying
that the human mind has direct and immediate intuition of it.

Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or
there could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we
could never assert that development is development, or
scientifically explain the laws and conditions of development.
Development is explication, and supposes a germ which precedes
it, and is not itself a development; and development, however far
it may be carried, can never do more than realize the
possibilities of the germ. Development is not creation, and
cannot supply its own germ. That at least must be given by the
Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed. If authority
has not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature
spontaneously or otherwise. All government has a governing will;
and without a will that commands, there is no government; and
nature has in her spontaneous developments no will, for she has
no personality. Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only
presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it
prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law. An imperative will,
the will of a superior who has the right to command what reason
dictates or approves, is essential to government; and that will
is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in nature.
So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development.
Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is
the individual man.

No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense
of the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is
placed by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be
confounded with those laws of nature so-called, according to
which she is productive as second cause, or produces her effects,
which are not properly laws at all. Fire burns, water flows,
rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food nourishes, poisons kill,
one substance has a chemical affinity for another, the needle
points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said; that is, the
effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural force.
Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
herself. The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical
law, is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on
all moral creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason
and free-will, and is called natural because promulgated in
natural reason, or the reason common and essential to all moral
creatures. This is the moral law. It is what the French call le
droit naturell, natural right, and, as the theologians teach us,
is the transcript of the eternal law, the eternal will or reason
of God. It is the foundation of all law, and all acts of a state
that contravene it are, as St. Augustine maintains, violences
rather than laws. The moral law is no development of nature, for
it is above nature, and is imposed on nature. The only
development there is about it is in our understanding of it.

There is, of course, development in nature, for nature considered
as creation has been created in germ, and is completed only in
successive developments. Hence the origin of space and time.
There would have been no space if there had been no external
creation, and no time if the creation had been completed
externally at once, as it was in relation to the Creator. Ideal
space is simply the ability of God to externize his creative act,
and actual space is the relation of coexistence in the things
created; ideal time is the ability of God to create existences
with the capacity of being completed by successive developments,
and actual time is the relation of these in the order of
succession, and when the existence is completed or consummated
development ceases, and time is no more. In relation to himself
the Creator's works are complete from the first, and hence with
him there is no time, for there is no succession. But in
relation to itself creation is incomplete, and there is room for
development, which may be continued till the whole possibility of
creation is actualized. Here is the foundation of what is true
in the modern doctrine of progress. Man is progressive, because
the possibilities of his nature are successively unfolded and
actualized.

Development is a fact, and its laws and conditions may be
scientifically ascertained and defined. All generation is
development, as is all growth, physical, moral, or intellectual.
But everything is developed in its own order, and after its kind.
The Darwinian theory of the development of species is not
sustained by science. The development starts from the germ, and
in the germ is given the law or principle of the development.
>From the acorn is developed the oak, never the pine or the
linden. Every kind generates its kind, never another. But no
development is, strictly speaking, spontaneous, or the result
alone of the inherent energy or force of the germ developed.
There is not only a solidarity of race, but in some sense of all
races, or species; all created things are bound to their Creator,
and to one another. One and the same law or principle of life
pervades all creation, binding the universe together in a unity
that copies or imitates the unity of the Creator. No creature is
isolated from the rest, or absolutely independent of others. All
are parts of one stupendous whole, and each depends on the whole,
and the whole on each, and each on each. All creatures are
members of one body, and members one of another. The germ of the
oak is in the acorn, but the acorn left to itself alone can never
grow into the oak, any more than a body at rest can place itself
in motion. Lay the acorn away in your closet, where it is
absolutely deprived of air, heat, and moisture, and in vain will
you watch for its germination. Germinate it cannot without some
external influence, or communion, so to speak, with the elements
from which it derives its sustenance and support.

There can be no absolutely spontaneous development. All things
are doubtless active, for nothing exists except in so far as it
is an active force of some sort; but only God himself alone
suffices for his own activity. All created things are dependent,
have not their being in themselves, and are real only as they
participate, through the creative act, of the Divine being. The
germ can no more be developed than it could exist without God,
and no more develop itself than it could create itself. What is
called the law of development is in the germ; but that law or
force can operate only in conjunction with another force or other
forces. All development, as all growth, is by accretion or
assimilation. The assimilating force is, if you will, in the
germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and
knows that to raise a crop of corn, be must plant the seed in a
soil duly prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for
its germination, growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening. In
all created things, in all things not complete in themselves, in
all save God, in whom there is no development possible, for He
is, as say the schoolmen, most pure act, in whom there is no
unactualized possibility, the same law holds good. Development
is always the resultant of two factors, the one the thing itself,
the other some external force co-operating with it, exciting
it, and aiding it to act.

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