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The American Republic

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The same process is going on in the East, though it has not
advanced so far, having begun there several centuries later, and
the Graeco-Roman constitution was far feebler there than in the
West at the epoch of the conquest. The Germanic tribes that
conquered the West had long had close relations with the empire,
had served as its allies, and even in its armies, and were
partially Romanized. Most of their chiefs had received a Roman
culture; and their early conversion to the Christian faith
facilitated the revival and permanence of the old Roman
constitution. In the East it was different. The conquerors had
no touch of Roman civilization, and, followers of the Prophet,
they were animated with an intense hatred, which, after the
conquest, was changed into a superb contempt, of Christians and
Romans. They had their civil constitution in the Koran; and the
Koran, in its principles, doctrines, and spirit, is exclusive and
profoundly intolerant. The Graeco-Roman constitution was always
much weaker in the East, and had far greater obstacles to
overcome there than in the West; yet it has survived the shock of
the conquest. Throughout the limits of the ancient Empire of the
East, the barbaric constitution has received and is daily
receiving rude blows, and, but as reenforced by barbarians lying
outside of the boundaries of that empire, would be no longer able
to sustain itself. The Greek or Christian populations of the
empire are no longer in danger of being exterminated or absorbed
by the Mohammedan state or population. They are the only living
and progressive people of the Ottoman Empire, and their complete
success in absorbing or expelling the Turk is only a question of
time. They will, in all present probability, reestablish a
Christian and Roman East in much less time from the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, than it took the West from the fall of
Rome in 476 to put an end to the feudal or barbaric constitution
founded by its Germanic invaders.

Indeed, the Roman constitution, laws, and civilization not only
gain the mastery in the nations seated within the limits of the
old Roman Empire, but extend their power through out the whole
civilized world. The Graeco-Roman civilization is, in fact, the
only civilization now recognized, and nations are accounted
civilized only in proportion as they are Romanized and
Christianized. The Roman law, as found in the Institutes,
Pandects, and Novellae of Justinian, or the Corpus Legis Civilis,
is the basis of the law and jurisprudence of all Christendom.
The Graeco-Roman civilization, called not improperly Christian
civilization, is the only progressive civilization. The old
feudal system remains in England little more than an empty name.
The king is only the first magistrate of the kingdom, and the
House of Lords is only an hereditary senate. Austria is hard at
work in the Roman direction, and finds her chief obstacle to
success in Hungary, with the Magyars whose feudalism retains
almost the full vigor of the Middle Ages. Russia is moving in
the same direction; and Prussia and the smaller Germanic states
obey the same impulse. Indeed, Rome has survived the
conquest--has conquered her conquerors, and now invades every
region from which they came. The Roman Empire may be said to be
acknowledged and obeyed in lands lying far beyond the farthest
limits reached by the Roman eagles, and to be more truly the
mistress of the world than under Augustus, Trajan, or the
Antonines. Nothing can stand before the Christian and Romanized
nations, and all pagandom and Mohammedom combined are too weak to
resist their onward march.

All modern European revolutions result only in reviving the Roman
Empire, whatever the motives, interests, passions, or theories
that initiate them. The French Revolution of the last century
and that of the present prove it. France, let people say what
they will, stands at the head of the European civilized world,
and displays en grand all its good and all its bad tendencies.
When she moves, Europe moves; when she has a vertigo, all
European nations are dizzy; when she recovers her health, her
equilibrium, and good sense, others become sedate, steady, and
reasonable. She is the head, nay, rather, the heart of
Christendom--the head is at Rome--through which circulates the
pure and impure blood of the nations. It is in vain Great
Britain, Germany, or Russia disputes with her the hegemony of
European civilization. They are forced to yield to her at last,
to be content to revolve around her as the centre of the
political system that masters them. The reason is, France is
more completely and sincerely Roman than any other nation. The
revolutions that have shaken the world have resulted in
eliminating the barbaric elements she had retained, and clearing
away all obstacles to the complete triumph of Imperial Rome.
Napoleon III. is for France what Augustus was for Rome. The
revolutions in Spain and Italy have only swept away the relics of
the barbaric constitution, and aided the revival of Roman
imperialism. In no country do the revolutionists succeed in
establishing their own theories; Caesar remains master of the
field. Even in the United States, a revolution undertaken in
favor of the barbaric system has resulted in the destruction of
what remained of that system--in sweeping away the last relics of
disintegrating feudalism, and in the complete establishment of
the Graeco-Roman system, with important improvements, in the New
World.

The Roman system is republican, in the broad sense of the term,
because under it power is never an estate, never the private
for the public good. As it existed under the Caesars, and is
revived in modern times, whether under the imperial or the
democratic form, it, no doubt, tends to centralism, to the
concentration of all the powers and forces of the state in one
central government, from which all local authorities and
institutions emanate. Wise men oppose it as affording no
guaranties to individual liberty against the abuses of power.
This it may not do, but the remedy is not in feudalism. The
feudal lord holds his authority as an estate, and has over the
people under him all the power of Caesar and all the rights of
the proprietor. He, indeed, has a guaranty against his
liege-lord, sometimes a more effective guaranty than his
liege-lord has against him; but against his centralized power his
vassals and serfs have only the guaranty that a slave has against
his owner.

Feudalism is alike hostile to the freedom of public authority and
of the people. It is essentially a disintegrating element in the
nation. It breaks the unity and individuality of the state,
embarrasses the sovereign, and guards against the abuse of public
authority by overpowering and suppressing it. Every feudal lord
is a more thorough despot in his own domain than Caesar ever was
or could be in the empire; and the monarch, even if strong enough,
is yet not competent to intervene between him and his people, any
more than the General government in the United States was to
intervene between the negro slave and his master. The great
vassals of the crown singly, or, if not singly, in
combination--and they could always combine in the interest of
their order--were too strong for the king, or to be brought under
any public authority, and could issue from their fortified
castles and rob and plunder to their hearts' content, with none
to call them to an account. Under the most thoroughly
centralized government there is far more liberty for the people,
and a far greater security for person and property, except in the
case of the feudal nobles themselves, than was even dreamed of
while the feudal regime was in full vigor. Nobles were
themselves free, it is conceded, but not the people. The king
was too weak, too restricted in his action by the feudal
constitution to reach them, and the higher clergy were ex officio
sovereigns, princes, barons, or feudal lords, and were led by
their private interests to act with the feudal nobility, save
when that nobility threatened the temporalities of the church.
The only reliance, under God, left in feudal times to the poor
people was in the lower ranks of the clergy, especially of the
regular clergy. All the great German emperors in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, who saw the evils of feudalism, and
attempted to break it up and revive imperial Rome, became
involved in quarrels with the chiefs of the religious society,
and failed, because the interest of the Popes, as feudal
sovereigns and Italian princes, and the interests of the
dignified clergy, were for the time bound up with the feudal
society, though their Roman culture and civilization made them at
heart hostile to it. The student of history, however strong his
filial affection towards the visible head of the church, cannot
help admiring the grandeur of the political views of Frederic the
Second, the greatest and last of the Hohenstaufen, or refrain
from dropping a tear over his sad failure. He had great faults
as a man, but he had rare genius as a statesman; and it is some
consolation to know that he died a Christian death, in charity
with all men, after having received the last sacraments of his
religion.

The Popes, under the circumstances, were no doubt justified in
the policy they pursued, for the Swabian emperors failed to
respect the acknowledged rights of the church, and to remember
their own incompetency in spirituals; but evidently their
political views and aims were liberal, far-reaching, and worthy
of admiration. Their success, if it could have been effected
without lesion to the church, would have set Europe forward some
two or three hundred years, and probably saved it from the
schisms of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. But it is
easy to be wise after the event. The fact is, that during the
period when feudalism was in full vigor, the king was merely a
shadow; the people found their only consolation in religion, and
their chief protectors in the monks, who mingled with them, saw
their sufferings, and sympathized with them, consoled them,
carried their cause to the castle before the feudal lord and
lady, and did, thank God, do something to keep alive religious
sentiments and convictions in the bosom of the feudal society
itself. Whatever opinions may be formed of the monastic orders
in relation to the present, this much is certain, that they were
the chief civilizers of Europe, and the chief agents in
delivering European society from feudal barbarism.

The aristocracy have been claimed as the natural allies of the
throne, but history proves them to be its natural enemies,
whenever it cannot be used in their service, and kings do not
consent to be their ministers and to do their bidding. A
political aristocracy has at heart only the interests of its
order, and pursues no line of policy but the extension or
preservation of its privileges. Having little to gain and much
to lose, it opposes every political change that would either
strengthen the crown or elevate the people. The nobility in the
French Revolution were the first to desert both the king and the
kingdom, and kings have always found their readiest and firmest
allies in the people. The people in Europe have no such bitter
feelings towards royalty as they have towards the feudal
nobility--for kings have never so grievously oppressed them. In
Rome the patrician order opposed alike the emperor and the
people, except when they, as chivalric nobles sometimes will do,
turned courtiers or demagogues. They were the people of Rome and
the provinces that sustained the emperors, and they were the
emperors who sustained the people, and gave to the provincials
the privileges of Roman citizens.

Guaranties against excessive centralism are certainly needed, but
the statesman will not seek them in the feudal organization of
society--in a political aristocracy, whether founded on birth or
private wealth, nor in a privileged class of any sort. Better
trust Caesar than Brutus, or even Cato. Nor will he seek them in
the antagonism of interests intended to neutralize or balance
each other, as in the English constitution. This was the great
error of Mr. Calhoun. No man saw more clearly than Mr. Calhoun
the utter worthlessness of simple paper constitutions, on which
Mr. Jefferson placed such implicit reliance, or that the real
constitution is in the state itself, in the manner in which the
people themselves are organized; but his reliance was in
constituting, as powers in the state, the several popular
interests that exist, and pitting them against each other--the
famous system of checks and balances of English states men. He
was led to this, because be distrusted power, and was more
intention guarding against its abuses than on providing for its
free, vigorous, and healthy action, going on the principle that
"that is the best government which governs least." But, if the
opposing interests could be made to balance one another perfectly,
the result would be an equilibrium, in which power would be
brought to a stand-still; and if not, the stronger would succeed
and swallow up all the rest. The theory of checks and balances
is admirable if the object be to trammel power, and to have as
little power in the government as possible; but it is a theory
which is born from passions engendered by the struggle against
despotism or arbitrary power, not from a calm and philosophical
appreciation of government itself. The English have not
succeeded in establishing their theory, for, after all, their
constitution does not work so well as they pretend. The landed
interest controls at one time, and the mercantile and
manufacturing interest at another. They do not perfectly balance
one another, and it is not difficult to see that the mercantile
and manufacturing interest, combined with the moneyed interest,
is henceforth to predominate. The aim of the real statesman is
to organize all the interests and forces of the state
dialectically, so that they shall unite to add to its strength,
and work together harmoniously for the common good.





CHAPTER VIII.

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-CONCLUDED.


Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the
constitution of an individual, and cannot be radically changed
without the destruction of the state, it must not be supposed
that it is wholly withdrawn from the action of the reason and
free-will of the nation, nor from that of individual statesmen.
All created things are subject to the law of development, and may
be developed either in a good sense or in a bad; that is, may be
either completed or corrupted. All the possibilities of the
national constitution are given originally in the birth of the
nation, as all the possibilities of mankind were given in the
first man. The germ must be given in the original constitution.
But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the
several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one
having the ascendency and suppressing the rest. In the original
constitution of Rome the patrician element was dominant, showing
that the patriarchal organization of society still retained no
little force. The king was only the presiding officer of the
senate and the leader of the army in war. His civil functions
corresponded very nearly to those of a mayor of the city of New
York, where all the effective power is in the aldermen, common
council, and heads of departments. Except in name he was little
else than a pageant. The kings, no doubt, labored to develop and
extend the royal element of the constitution. This was natural;
and it was equally natural that they should be resisted by the
patricians. Hence when the Tarquins, or Etruscan dynasty,
undertook to be kings in fact as well as in name, and seemed
likely to succeed, the patricians expelled them, and supplied
their place by two consuls annually elected. Here was a
modification, but no real change of the constitution. The
effective Power, as before, remained in the senate.

But there was from early times a plebeian element in the
population of the city, though forming at first no part of the
political people. Their origin is not very certain, nor their
original position in the city. Historians give different
accounts of them. But that they should, as they increased in
numbers, wealth, and importance, demand admission into the
political society, religious or solemn marriage, a voice in the
government, and the faculty of holding civil and military offices,
was only in the order of regular development. At first the
patricians fought them, and, failing to subdue them by force,
effected a compromise, and bought up their leaders. The
concession which followed of the tribunitial veto was only a
further development. By that veto the plebeians gained no
initiative, no positive power, indeed, but their tribunes, by
interposing it, could stop the proceedings of the government.
They could not propose the measures they liked, but they could
prevent the legal adoption of measures they disliked--a faculty
Mr. Calhoun asserted for the several States of the American Union
in his doctrine of nullification, or State veto, as he called it.
It was simply an obstructive power.

But from a power to obstruct legislative action to the power to
originate or propose it, and force the senate to adopt it through
fear of the veto of measures the patricians had at heart, was
only a still further development. This gained, the exclusively
patrician constitution had disappeared, and Marius, the head of a
great plebeian house, could be elected consul and the plebeians
in turn threaten to become predominant, which Sylla or Sulla, as
dictator, seeing, tried in vain to prevent. The dictator was
provided for in the original constitution. Retain the
dictatorship for a time, strengthen the plebeian element by
ruthless proscriptions of patricians and by recruits from the
provinces, unite the tribunitial, pontifical, and military powers
in the imperator designated by the army, all elements existing in
the constitution from an early day, and already developed in the
Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, which
retained to the last the senate and consuls, though with less and
less practical power. These changes are very great, but are none
of them radical, dating from the recognition of the plebs as
pertaining to the Roman people. They are normal developments,
not corruptions, and the transition from the consular republic to
the imperial was unquestionably a real social and political
progress. And yet the Roman people, had they chosen, could have
given a different direction to the developments of their
constitution. There was Providence in the course of events, but
no fatalism.

Sulla was a true patrician, a blind partisan of the past. He
sought to arrest the plebeian development led by Marius, and to
restore the exclusively patrician government. But it was too late.
His proscriptions, confiscations, butcheries, unheard-of cruelties
which anticipated and surpassed those of the French Revolution of
1793, availed nothing. The Marian or plebeian movement,
apparently checked for a moment, resumed its march with renewed
vigor under Julius, and triumphed at Pharsalia. In vain Cicero,
only accidentally associated with the patrician party, which
distrusted him--in vain Cicero declaims, Cato scolds, or parades
his impractical virtues, Brutus and Cassius seize the assassin's
dagger, and strike to the earth "the foremost man of all the
world;" the plebeian cause moves on with resistless force,
triumphs anew at Philippi, and young Octavius avenges the murder
of his uncle, and proves to the world that the assassination of a
ruler is a blunder as well as a crime. In vain does Mark Antony
desert the movement, rally Egypt and the barbaric East, and seek
to transfer the seat of empire from the Tiber to the banks of the
Nile or the Orontes; plebeian and imperial Rome wins a final
victory at Actium, and definitively secures the empire of the
civilized world to the West.

Thus far the developments were normal, and advanced civilization.
But Rome still retained the barbaric element of slavery in her
bosom, and had conquered more barbaric nations than she had
assimilated. These nations she at first governed as tributary
states, with their own constitutions and national chiefs;
afterwards as Roman provinces, by her own proconsuls and prefects.
When the emperors threw open the gates of the city to the
provincials, and conceded them the rights and privileges of Roman
citizens, they introduced not only a foreign element into the
state, destitute of Roman patriotism, but the barbaric and
despotic elements retained by the conquered nations as yet only
partially assimilated. These elements became germs of
anti-republican developments, rather of corruptions, and prepared
the downfall of the empire. Doubtless these corruptions might
have been arrested, and would have been, if Roman patriotism had
survived the changes effected in the Roman population by the
concession of Roman citizenship to provincials; but it did not,
and they were favored as time went on by the emperors themselves,
and more especially by Dioclesian, a real barbarian, who hated
Rome, and by Constantine, surnamed the Great, a real despot, who
converted the empire from a republican to a despotic empire.
Rome fell from the force of barbarism developed from within, far
more than from the force of the barbarians hovering on her
frontiers and invading her provinces.

The law of all possible developments is in the providential or
congenital constitution; but these possible developments are many
and various, and the reason and free-will of the nation as well
as of individuals are operative in determining which of them
shall be adopted. The nation, under the direction of wise and
able statesmen who understood their age and country, who knew how
to discern between normal developments and barbaric corruptions,
placed at the head of affairs in season, might have saved Rome
from her fate, eliminated the barbaric and assimilated the
foreign elements, and preserved Rome as a Christian and
republican empire to this day, and saved the civilized world from
the ten centuries of barbarism which followed her conquest by the
barbarians of the North. But it rarely happens that the real
statesmen of a nation are placed at the head of affairs.

Rome did not fall in consequence of the strength of her external
enemies, nor through the corruption of private morals and manners,
which was never greater than under the first Triumvirate. She
fell from the want of true statesmanship in her public men, and
patriotism in her people. Private virtues and private vices are
of the last consequence to individuals, both here and hereafter;
but private virtues never saved, private vices never ruined a
nation. Edward the Confessor was a saint, and yet be prepared
the way for the Norman conquest of England; and France owes
infinitely less to St. Louis than to Louis XI., Richelieu, and
Napoleon, who, though no saints, were statesmen. What is
specially needed in statesmen is public spirit, intelligence,
foresight, broad views, manly feelings, wisdom, energy,
resolution; and when statesmen with these qualities are placed at
the head of affairs, the state, if not already lost, can, however
far gone it may be, be recovered, restored, reinvigorated,
advanced, and private vice and corruption disappear in the
splendor of public virtue. Providence is always present in the
affairs of nations, but not to work miracles to counteract the
natural effects of the ignorance, ineptness, short-sightedness,
narrow views, public stupidity, and imbecility of rulers, because
they are irreproachable and saintly in their private characters
and relations, as was Henry VI. of England, or, in some respects,
Louis XVI. of France. Providence is God intervening through the
laws he by his creative act gives to creatures, not their
suspension or abrogation. It was the corruption of the
statesmen, in substituting the barbaric element for the proper
Roman, to which no one contributed more than Constantine, the
first Christian emperor, that was the real cause of the downfall
of Rome, and the centuries of barbarism that followed, relieved
only by the superhuman zeal and charity of the church to save
souls and restore civilization.

But in the constitution of the government, as distinguished from
the state, the nation is freer and more truly sovereign. The
constitution of the state is that which gives to the people of a
given territory political existence, unity, and individuality,
and renders it capable of political action. It creates political
or national solidarity, in imitation of the solidarity of the
race, in which it has its root. It is the providential charter
of national existence, and that which gives to each nation its
peculiar character, and distinguishes it from every other nation.
The constitution of government is the constitution by the
sovereign authority of the nation of an agency or ministry for
the management of its affairs, and the letter of instructions
according to which the agent or minister is to act and conduct
the matters intrusted to him. The distinction which the English
make between the sovereign and the ministry is analogous to that
between the state and the government, only they understand by the
sovereign the king or queen, and by the ministry the executive,
excluding, or not decidedly including, the legislature and the
judiciary. The sovereign is the people as the state or body
politic, and as the king holds from God only through the people,
he is not properly sovereign, and is to be ranked with the
ministry or government. Yet when the state delegates the full or
chief governing power to the king, and makes him its sole or
principal representative, he may, with sufficient accuracy for
ordinary purposes, be called sovereign. Then, understanding by
the ministry or government the legislative and judicial, as well
as the executive functions, whether united in one or separated
into distinct and mutually independent departments, the English
distinction will express accurately enough, except for strictly
scientific purposes, the distinction between the state and the
government.

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