                            THE

                    AMERICAN REPUBLIC:

                            ITS

           CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.

                             BY

                   O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.

                        NEW YORK: 
              P. O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET, 
                            1866.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by P. O'SHEA, In the 
Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern 
District of New York.

TO THE HON. GEORGE BANCROFT, THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT 
Historian of the United States, THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE 
PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE 
AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, 
AND AS A SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY, PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH, AND 
PUBLIC SERVICE, BY THE AUTHOR.

                        CONTENTS.

                                                                  PAGE

    PREFACE

                         CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION ...................................................... 1

                        CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT ....................................................... 15

                        CHAPTER III.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT ............................................. 26

                        CHAPTER IV.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT ?Continued ................................. 43

                        CHAPTER V.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT ?Continued ................................. 71

                        CHAPTER VI.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT ?Concluded ................................ 106

                        CHAPTER VII.

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT ...................................... 188

                       CHAPTER VIII.

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT ?Concluded .......................... 166

                        CHAPTER IX.

THE UNITED STATES ............................................... 192

                        CHAPTER X.

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES ............................... 218

                        CHAPTER XI.

THE CONSTITUTION ?Continued .................................... 244

                        CHAPTER XII.

SECESSION ....................................................... 277

                        CHAPTER XIII.

RECONSTRUCTION .................................................. 309

                       CHAPTER XIV.

POLITICAL TENDENCIES ............................................ 348

                        CHAPTER XV.

DESTINY ?POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS ............................... 392


______

PREFACE.

In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the public, I 
have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving, my whole thought in 
a connected form on the nature, necessity, extent, authority, origin, 
ground, and constitution of government, and the unity, nationality, 
constitution, tendencies, and destiny of the American Republic. Many of the 
points treated have been from time to time discussed or touched upon, and 
many of the views have been presented, in my previous writings; but this 
work is newly and independently written from beginning to end, and is as 
complete on the topics treated as I have been able to make it.

I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have used their 
thoughts as for as I have judged them sound and they came within the scope 
of my present work. I have not felt myself bound to adhere to my own past 
thoughts or expressions any farther than they coincide with my present 
convictions, and I have written as freely and as independently as if I had 
never written or published any thing before. I have never been the slave of 
my own past, and truth has always been dearer to me than nay own opinions. 
This work is not only my latest, but will be my last on politics or 
government, and must be taken as the authentic, and the only authentic 
statement of my political views and convictions, and whatever in any of my 
previous writings conflicts with the principles defended in its pages, must 
be regarded as retracted, and rejected.

The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is an essay 
rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured critics will, no 
doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of articles designed for a 
review, rather than a book. It is hard to overcome the habits of a lifetime. 
I have taken some pains to exchange the reviewer for the author, but am 
fully conscious that I have not succeeded. My work can lay claim to very 
little artistic merit. It is full of repetitions; the same thought is 
frequently recurring, ?the result, to some extent, no doubt, of 
carelessness and the want of artistic skill; but to a greater extent, I 
fear, of "malice aforethought" In composing my work I have followed, rather 
than directed, the course of my thought, and, having very little confidence 
in the memory or industry of readers, I have preferred, when the 
completeness of the argument required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my 
pages with perpetual references to what has gone before.

That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting to its 
publication ; but how much or how little of it is really mine, I am quite 
unable to say. I have, from my youth up, been reading, observing, thinking, 
reflecting, talking, I had almost said writing, at least by fits and starts, 
on political subjects, especially in their connection with philosophy, 
theology, history, and social progress, and have assimilated to my own mind 
what it would assimilate, without keeping any notes of the sources whence 
the materials assimilated were derived, I have written freely from my own 
mind as I find it now formed ; but how it has been so formed, or whence I 
have borrowed, my readers know as well as I. All that is valuable in the 
thoughts set forth, it is safe to assume has been appropriated from others. 
Where I have been distinctly conscious of borrowing what has not become 
common property, I have given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's 
name, with three important exceptions which I wish to note more formally.

I am principally indebted for the view of American nationality and the 
Federal Constitution I present to hints and suggestions furnished by the 
remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of Freedom and Bondage in 
the United States, a work of rare learning and profound philosophic views. I 
could not have written my work without the aid derived from its suggestions, 
any more than I could without Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, 
Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the Abbate Gioberti To these two last-named 
authors, one a humanitarian sophist, the other a Catholic priest, and 
certainly one of the profoundest philosophical writers of this century, I am 
much indebted though I have followed the political system of neither. I have 
taken from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity of 
the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation to the 
creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the Credo and the first 
verse of Genesis.

In treating the several questions which the preparation of this volume has 
brought up, in their connection, and in the light of first principles, I 
have changed or modified, on more than one important point, the views I had 
expressed in my previous writings, especially on the distinction between 
civilized and barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and 
the value to the world of the Gr?co-Roman civilization. I have ranked 
feudalism under the head of barbarism, rejected every species of political 
aristocracy, and represented the English constitution as essentially 
antagonistic to the American, not as its type, I have accepted universal 
suffrage in principle, and defended American democracy, which I define to be 
territorial democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on 
the one hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the other.

I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and defended from 
1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the sovereignty of the American 
Republic vests in the States, though in the States collectively, or united, 
not severally, and thus escape alike consolidation and disintegration. I 
find, with Mr. Madison, our most philosophic statesman, the originality of 
the American system in the division of powers between a General government 
having sole charge of the foreign and general, and particular or State 
governments having, within their respective territories, sole charge of the 
particular relations and interests of the American people; but I do not 
accept his concession that this division is of conventional origin, and 
maintain that it enters into the original Providential constitution of the 
American state, as I have done in my Review for October, 1863, and January 
and October, 1864.

I maintain, after Mr. Senator Sumner, one of the most philosophic and 
accomplished living American statesmen, that "State secession is State 
suicide," but modify the opinion I too hastily expressed that the political 
death of a State dissolves civil society within its territory and abrogates 
all rights held under it, and accept the doctrine that the laws in force at 
the time of secession remain in force till superseded or abrogated by 
competent authority, and also that, till the State is revived and restored 
as a State in the Union, the only authority, under the American system, 
competent to supersede or abrogate them is the United States, not Congress, 
far less the Executive. The error of the Government is not in recognizing 
the territorial laws as surviving secession, but in counting a State that 
has seceded as still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted as 
one of the United States in amending the Constitution. Such State goes out 
of the Union, but comes under it.

I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political views to their 
general principles, and to show that the general principles asserted have 
their origin and ground in the great, universal, and unchanging principles 
of the universe itself. Hence, I have labored to show the scientific 
relations of political to theological principles, the real principles of all 
science, as of all reality. An atheist, I have said, may be a politician; 
but if there were no God, there could be no politics. This may offend the 
sciolists of the age, but I must follow science where it leads, and cannot 
be arrested by those who mistake their darkness for light.

I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as a Catholic, 
because all Christian principles, nay, all real principles are catholic, and 
there is nothing sectarian either in nature or revelation. I am a Catholic 
by God's grace and great goodness, and must write as I am. I could not write 
otherwise if I would, and would not if I could, I have not obtruded my 
religion, and have referred to it only where my argument demanded it; but I 
have had neither the weakness nor the bad taste to seek to conceal or 
disguise it. I could never have written my book without the knowledge I 
have, as a Catholic, of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it 
is, with the great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of 
all that is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with Catholics or 
non-Catholics.

Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction of sect or 
party, I have had more especially in view the people of my own religious 
communion. It is no discredit to a man in the United States at the present 
day to be a firm, sincere, and devout Catholic. The old sectarian prejudice 
may regain with a few, "whose eyes," as Emerson says, "are in their hind-
head, not in their fore-head;" but the American people are not at heart 
sectarian, and the nothingarianism so prevalent among them only marks their 
state of transition from sectarian opinions to positive Catholic faith. At 
any rate, it can no longer be denied that Catholics are an integral, living, 
and growing element in the American population, quite too numerous, too 
wealthy, and too influential to be ignored. They have played too conspicuous 
a part in the late troubles of the country, and poured out too freely and 
too much of their richest and noblest blood in defence of the unity of the 
nation and the integrity of its domain, for that. Catholics henceforth must 
be treated as standing, in all respects, on a footing of equality with any 
other class of American citizens, and their views of political science, or 
of any other science, be counted of equal importance, and listened to with 
equal attention.

I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly by a 
Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house. They who are not 
Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the current of American 
literature, if it is one they must read in order to be up with the living 
and growing thought of the age. If it is not a book of that sort, it is not 
worth reading by any one.

Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to exert an 
influence on the future of my country, for which I have made, or, rather, my 
family have made, some sacrifices, and which I tenderly love. Now, I believe 
that he who can exert the most influence on our Catholic population, 
especially in giving tone and direction to our Catholic youth, will exert 
the most influence in forming the character and shaping the future destiny 
of the American Republic. Ambition and patriotism alike, as well as my own 
Catholic faith and sympathies, induce me to address myself primarily to 
Catholics. I quarrel with none of the sects; I honor virtue wherever I see 
it, and accept truth wherever I find it; but, in my belief, no sect is 
destined to a long life, or a permanent possession. I engage in no 
controversy with any one not of my religion, for, if the positive, 
affirmative truth is brought out and placed in a clear light before the 
public, whatever is sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the 
morning mists before the rising sun.

I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of my book from 
the thinking and educated classes among Catholics; but I speak to my 
countrymen at large, I could not personally serve my country in the field: 
my habits as well as my infirmities prevented, to say nothing of my age; but 
I have endeavored in this humble work to add my contribution, small though 
it may be, to political science, and to discharge, as far as I am able, my 
debt of loyalty and patriotism. I would the book were more of a book, more 
worthy of my countrymen, and a more weighty proof of the love I bear them, 
and with which I have written it. All I can say is, that it is an honest 
book, a sincere book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects treated. 
If well received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I shall endeavor to 
practise resignation, as I have so often done.

                                            O. A. Brownson.

                              Elizabeth, N. J., September 16, 1865.

______

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION.

THE ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim, Know Thyself, 
and certainly there is for an individual no more important as there is no 
more difficult knowledge, than knowledge of himself, whence ho conies, 
whither he goes, what be is, what he is for, what he can do, what he ought 
to do, and what are his means of doing it.

Nations are only individuals on a larger scale. They have a life, an 
individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of their own, and have 
the same general laws of development and growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as 
the individual man. Equally important, and no less difficult than for the 
individual, is it for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, 
its own powers and faculties, lights and duties, constitution, instincts, 
tendencies, and destiny. A nation has a spiritual as well as a material, a 
moral as well as a physical existence, and is subjected to internal as well 
as external conditions of health and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which 
it must in some measure understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, 
stunted in its growth, and end in premature decay and death.

Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than the 
United States, and no one has hitherto had less. It has hardly had a 
distinct consciousness of its own national existence, and has lived the 
irreflective life of the child, with no severe trial, till the recent 
rebellion, to throw it back on itself and compel it to reflect on its own 
constitution, its own separate existence, individuality, tendencies, and 
end. The defection of the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that 
has followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at once to a 
distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass from thoughtless, 
careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to grave and reflecting manhood. 
The nation has been suddenly compelled to study itself, and henceforth must 
act from reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from 
instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and 
wherefore it does it The change which four years of civil war have wrought 
in the nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity, 
the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.

Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own existence, 
it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear understanding of its own 
national constitution. Its vision is still obscured by the floating mists of 
its earlier morning, and its judgment rendered indistinct and indecisive by 
the wild theories and fancies of its childhood. The national mind has been 
quickened, the national heart has been opened, the national disposition 
prepared, but there remains the important work of dissipating the mists that 
still linger, of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of 
enabling it to form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true 
and just appreciation of its own constitution, tendencies, and destiny; or, 
in other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the 
means of its actualization in space and time.

Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and whose 
realization is its special work, mission, or destiny. Every nation is, in 
some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the chosen people of God, 
through whom the primitive traditions were to be preserved in their purity 
and integrity, and the Messiah was to come. The Greets were the chosen 
people of God, for the development and realization of the beautiful or the 
divine splendor in art, and of the true in science and philosophy; and the 
Romans, for the development of the state, law, and jurisprudence. The great 
despotic nations of Asia were never properly nations; or if they were 
nations with a mission, they proved false to it, and count for nothing in 
the progressive development of the human race. History has not recorded 
their mission, and as far as they are known they have contributed only to 
the abnormal development or corruption of religion and civilization. 
Despotism is barbaric and abnormal.

The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of 
God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to 
continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish a greater 
work than was assigned to either. In art, it will prove false to its mission 
if it do not rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not 
surpass it. In the state, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and 
surpass Rome. Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, and law 
with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as 
the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the 
authority of the public and the freedom of the individual ?the sovereignty 
of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without 
anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the 
dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and 
those of society. The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the 
detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or 
assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state, The American 
republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each 
with advantage to the other.

The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a 
political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of the 
constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and secures 
advantages which none of them did or could possess. The American 
constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution. The American form 
of government can be classed throughout with none of the forms of government 
described by Aristotle, or even by later authorities. Aristotle knew only 
four forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed 
Governments. The American form is none of these, nor any combination of 
them. It is original, a new contribution to political science, and seeks to 
attain the end of all wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden 
to the ancients, and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by 
American political writers themselves. The originality of the American 
constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own 
statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the 
constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its own 
principles. They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely, if ever, 
appreciated its distinctive and peculiar merits.

As the United States have vindicated their national unity and integrity, and 
are preparing to take a new start in history, nothing is more important than 
that they should take that now start with a clear and definite view of their 
national constitution, and with a distinct understanding of their political 
mission in the future of the world. The citizen who can help his countrymen 
to do this will render them an important service and deserve well of his 
country, though he may have been unable to serve in her armies and defend 
her on the battle-field. The work now to be done by American statesmen is 
even more difficult and more delicate than that which has been accomplished 
by our brave armies. As yet the people are hardly better prepared for the 
political work to be done than they were at the outbreak of the civil war 
for the military work they have so nobly achieved. But, with time, patience, 
and good-will, the difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past 
corrected, and the Government placed on the right track for the future.

It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the United 
States is very defective or it has been very grossly misinterpreted by all 
parties. If the slave States had not held that the States are severally 
sovereign, and the Constitution of the United States a simple agreement or 
compact, they would never have seceded; and if the Free States had not 
confounded the Union with the General government, and shown a tendency to 
make it the entire national government, no occasion or pretext for secession 
would have been given. The great problem of our statesmen has been from the 
first, How to assert union without consolidation, and State rights without 
disintegration? Have they, as yet, solved that problem? The war has silenced 
the State sovereignty doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to 
State rights? Has it done it without asserting the General government as the 
supreme, central, or national government? Has it done it without striking a 
dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution? In suppressing by 
armed force the doctrine that the States are severally sovereign, what 
barrier is left against consolidation? Has not one danger been removed only 
to give place to another?

But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the 
problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through 
misunderstanding of the constitution. Our statesmen have recognized no 
constitution of the American people themselves; they have confined their 
views to the written constitution, as if that constituted the American 
people a state or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a law ordained by 
the nation already existing and constituted. Perhaps, if they had recognized 
and studied the constitution which preceded that drawn up by the Convention 
of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in the republic itself, they would 
have seen that it solves the problem, and asserts national unity without 
consolidation, and the rights of the several States without danger of 
disintegration. The whole controversy, possibly, has originated in a 
misunderstanding of the real constitution of the United States, and that 
misunderstanding itself in the misunderstanding of the origin and 
constitution of government in general The constitution, as will appear in 
the course of this essay, is not defective; land all that is necessary to 
guard against either danger is to discard all our theories of the 
constitution, and return and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really 
is and always has been.

There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do with the 
rebellion, but it was not its sole cause. The real cause must be sought in 
the progress that had been made, especially in the States themselves, in 
forming and administering their respective governments, as well as the 
General government, in accordance with political theories borrowed from 
European speculators on government, the so-called Liberals and 
Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application in the 
United States, The tendency of American politics, for the last thirty or 
forty years, has been, within the several States themselves, in the 
direction of centralized democracy, as if the American people had for their 
mission only the reproduction of ancient Athens. The American system is not 
that of any of the simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. 
The attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government 
recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in the 
cast-off garments of the past. The American system, wherever practicable, is 
better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, 
better than any possible combination of these several forms, because it 
accords more nearly with the principles of things, the real order of the 
universe.

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states more 
than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the American system 
in the minds of the people, and giving them in its place pure and simple 
democracy, which is its false development or corruption. Under the influence 
of this false development, the people were fast losing sight of the 
political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the organic, 
not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not the people as simple 
population, and were beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the 
majority to govern. All the changes made in the bosom of the States 
themselves have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible 
will of the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. 
This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking 
secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, 
Central, and Western States.

The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, in spite of 
the short-sightedness and blundering of the Administration, have proved the 
vitality and strength of the national constitution, and the greatness of the 
American people. They say nothing for or against the democratic theory of 
our demagogues, but every thing in favor of the American system or 
constitution of government, which has found a firmer support in American 
instincts than in American statesmanship. In spite of all that had been done 
by theorists, radicals, and revolutionists, no-government men, non-
resistants, humanitarians, and sickly sentimentalists to corrupt the 
American people in mind, heart, and body, the native vigor of their national 
constitution has enabled them to come forth triumphant from the trial. Every 
American patriot has reason to be proud of bis countrymen, and every 
American lover of freedom to be satisfied with the institutions of his 
country. But there is danger that the politicians and demagogues will 
ascribe the merit, not to the real and living national constitution, but to 
their miserable theories of that constitution, and labor to aggravate the 
several evils and corrupt tendencies which caused the rebellion it has cost 
so much to suppress. What is now wanted is, that the people, whose instincts 
are right, should understand the American constitution as it is, and so 
understand it as to render it impossible for political theorists, no matter 
of what school or party, to deceive them again as to its real import, or 
induce them to depart from it in their political action.

A work written with temper, without passion or sectional prejudice, in a 
philosophical spirit, explaining to the American people their own national 
constitution, and the mutual relations of the General government and the 
State governments, cannot, at this important crisis in our affairs, be 
inopportune, and, if properly executed, can hardly fail to be of real 
service. Such a work is now attempted ?would it were by another and abler 
hand ?which, imperfect as it is, may at least offer some useful 
suggestions, give a right direction to political thought, although it should 
fail to satisfy the mind of the reader.

This much the author may say in favor of his own work, that it sets forth no 
theory of government in general, or of the United States in particular. The 
author is not a monarchist, an aristocrat, a democrat, a feudalist, nor an 
advocate of what are called mixed governments like the English, at least for 
his own country; but is simply an American, devoted to the real, living, and 
energizing constitution of the American republic as it is, not as some may 
fancy it might be, or are striving to make it. It is, in his judgment, what 
it ought to be, and he has no other ambition than to present it as it is to 
the understanding and love of his countrymen. Perhaps simple artistic unity 
and propriety would require the author to commence his essay directly with 
the United States; but while the constitution of the United States is 
original and peculiar, the government of the United States has necessarily 
something in common with all legitimate governments, and he has thought it 
best to precede his discussion of the American republic, its constitution, 
tendencies, and destiny, by some considerations on government in general. He 
does this because he believes, whether rightly or not, that while the 
American people have received from Providence a most truly profound and 
admirable system of government, they are more or less infected with the 
false theories of government which have been broached during the last two 
centuries. In attempting to realize these theories, they have already 
provoked or rendered practicable a rebellion which has seriously threatened 
the national existence, and come very near putting an end to the American 
order of civilization itself. These theories have received already a shock 
in the minds of all serious and thinking men; but the men who think are in 
every nation a small minority, and it is necessary to give these theories a 
public refutation, and bring back those who do not think, as well as those 
who do, from the world of dreams to the world of reality. It is hoped, 
therefore, that any apparent want of artistic unity or symmetry in the essay 
will be pardoned for the sake of the end the author has had in view.

______

CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT.

MAN is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself. He 
lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God. He 
exists, develops, and fulfils his existence only by communion with God, 
through which he participates of the divine being and life. He communes with 
God through the divine creative act and the Incarnation of the Word, through 
his kind, and through the material world. Communion with God through 
Creation and Incarnation is religion, distinctively taken, which binds man 
to God as his first cause, and carries him onward to God as his final cause; 
communion through the material world is expressed by the word property; and 
communion with God through humanity is society. Religion, society, property, 
are the three terms that embrace the whole of man's life, and express the 
essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and his 
perfection, or the fulfilment of his existence, the attainment of the end 
for which he is created.

Though society, or the communion of man with his Maker through his kind, is 
not all that man needs in order to live, to grow, to actualize the 
possibilities of his nature, and to attain to his beatitude, since humanity 
is neither God nor the material universe, it is yet a necessary and 
essential condition of his life, his progress, and the completion of his 
existence. He is born and lives in society, and can be born and live nowhere 
else. It is one of the necessities of his nature. "God saw that it was not 
good for man to be alone." Hence, wherever man is found he is found in 
society, living in more or less strict intercourse with his kind.

But society never does and never can exist without government of some sort. 
As society is a necessity of man's nature, so is government a necessity of 
society. The simplest form of Society is the family ?Adam and Eve. But 
though Adam and Eve are in many respects equal, and have equally important 
though different parts assigned them, one or the other must be head and 
governor, or they cannot form the society called family. They would, be 
simply two individuals of different sexes, and the family would fail for the 
want of unity.

Children cannot be reared, trained, or educated without some degree of 
family government, of some authority to direct, control, restrain, or 
prescribe. Hence the authority of the husband and father is recognized by 
the common consent of mankind. Still more apparent is the necessity of 
government the moment the family develops and grows into the tribe, and the 
tribe into the nation. Hence no nation exists without government; and we 
never find a savage tribe, however low or degraded, that does not assert 
somewhere, in the father, in the elders, or in the tribe itself, the rude 
outlines or the faint reminiscences of some sort of government, with 
authority to demand obedience and to punish the refractory. Hence, as man is 
nowhere found out of society, so nowhere is society found without 
government.

Government is necessary: but let it be remarked by the way, that its 
necessity does not grow exclusively or chiefly out of the fact that the 
human race by sin has fallen from its primitive integrity, or original 
righteousness. The fall asserted by Christian theology, though often 
misinterpreted, and its effects underrated or exaggerated, is a fact too 
sadly confirmed by individual experience and universal history; but it is 
not the cause why government is necessary, though it may be an additional 
reason for demanding it. Government would have been necessary if man had not 
sinned, and it is needed for the good as well as for the bad. The law was 
promulgated in the Garden, while man retained his innocence and remained in 
the integrity of his nature. It exists in heaven as well as on earth, and in 
heaven in its perfection. Its office is not purely repressive, to restrain 
violence, to redress wrongs, and to punish the transgressor. It has 
something more to do than to restrict our natural liberty, curb our 
passions, and maintain justice between man and man. Its office is positive 
as well as negative. It is needed to render effective the solidarity of the 
individuals of a nation, and to render the nation an organism, not a mere 
organization ?to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen all with 
the strength of each, and each with the strength of all ?to develop, 
strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and direct it to 
the promotion of the common weal ?to be a social providence, imitating in 
its order and degree the action of the divine providence itself, and, while 
it provides for the common good of all, to protect each, the lowest and 
meanest, with the whole force and majesty of society. It is the minister of 
wrath to wrong doers, indeed, but its nature is beneficent, and its action 
defines and protects the right of property, creates and maintains a medium 
in which religion can exert her supernatural energy, promotes learning, 
fosters science and art, advances civilization, and contributes as a 
powerful means to the fulfilment by man of the Divine purpose in his 
existence. Next after religion, it is man's greatest good; and even religion 
without it can do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call 
it a necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted, 
hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved, respected, 
obeyed, and, if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly goods, and even 
of life itself.

The nature or essence of government is to govern. A government that does not 
govern, is simply no government at all. If it has not the ability to govern 
and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument in the hands of 
individuals for advancing their private interests, but it is not government. 
To be government, it must govern both individuals and the community. If it 
is a mere machine for making prevail the will of one man, of a certain 
number of men, or even of the community, it may be very effective sometimes 
for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest for evil, but government in the 
proper sense of the word it is not. To govern is to direct, control, 
restrain, as the pilot controls and directs his ship. It necessarily implies 
two terms, governor and governed, and a real distinction between them. The 
denial of all real distinction between governor and governed is an error in 
politics analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real 
distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which all 
the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism ?the supreme sophism. 
If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface both terms; for 
there is no governor nor governed, if the will that governs is identically 
the will that is governed. To make the controller and the controlled the 
same, is precisely to deny all control. There must, then, if there is 
government at all, be a power, force, or will that governs, distinct from 
that which is governed. In those governments in which it is held that the 
people govern, the people governing do and must act in a diverse relation 
from the people governed, or there is no real government.

Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right or 
authority to govern. Power without right is not government. Governments have 
the right to use force at need, but might does not make right, and not every 
power wielding the physical force of a nation is to be regarded as its 
rightful government. Whatever resort to physical force it may be obliged to 
make, either in defence of its authority or of the rights of the nation, the 
government itself lies in the moral order, and politics is simply a branch 
of ethics ?that branch which treats of the rights and duties of men in 
their public relations, as distinguished from their rights and duties in 
their private relations.

Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the right 
to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere physical 
necessity. The right to govern and the duty to obey are correlatives, and 
the one cannot exist or be conceived without the other. Hence loyalty is not 
simply an amiable sentiment, but a duty, a moral virtue. Treason is not 
merely a difference in political opinion with the governing authority, but a 
crime against the sovereign, and a moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, 
the Founder of the Moral Law. Treason, if committed in other countries, 
unhappily, has been more frequently termed by our countrymen patriotism and 
loaded with honor than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, 
that human governments have authority to punish. The American people have 
been chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the 
correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law, and 
is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority, however 
constituted or wherever lodged. It is as necessary, as much a duty, as much 
a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler examples of the most 
devoted loyalty are not found in the world's history than were exhibited in 
the ancient Greek and Roman republics, or than have been exhibited by both 
men and women in the young republic of the United States. Loyalty is the 
highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and is the human 
element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us 
is the fulfilment of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of 
self-sacrifice, and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the 
most Godlike. There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a 
truly loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal, 
criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people. Such a 
people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind. It mocks at duty, 
acorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no person, no thing, human 
or divine, sacred or inviolable. The assertion of government as lying in the 
moral order, defines civil liberty, and reconciles it with authority. Civil 
liberty is freedom to do whatever one pleases that authority permits or does 
not forbid. Freedom to follow in all things one's own will or inclination, 
without any civil restraint, is license, not liberty. There is no lesion to 
liberty in repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of 
the authority that has the right to command. Tyranny or oppression is not in 
being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped authority ?
to a power that has no right to command, or that commands what exceeds its 
right or its authority. To say that it is contrary to liberty to be forced 
to forego our own will or inclination in any case whatever, is simply 
denying the right of all government, and falling into no-governmentism. 
Liberty is violated only when we are required to forego our own will or 
inclination by a power that has no right to make the requisition; for we are 
bound to obedience as far as authority has right to govern, and we can never 
have the right to disobey a rightful command. The requisition, if made by 
rightful authority, then, violates no right that we have or can have, and 
where there is no violation of our rights there is no violation of our 
liberty. The moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of 
obedience, presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may 
meet in peace and operate to the same end. This has no resemblance to the 
slavish doctrine of passive obedience, and that the resistance to power can 
never be lawful. The tyrant may be lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by 
force of the word itself, is a usurper, and without authority. Abuses of 
power may be resisted even by force when they become too great to be 
endured, when there is no legal or regular way of redressing them, and when 
there is a reasonable prospect that resistance will prove effectual and 
substitute something better in their place. But it is never lawful to resist 
the rightful sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the 
rightful sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be 
said to abuse it. Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a 
power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no abuse or 
abuses to redress. All turns, then, on the right of power, or its 
legitimacy. Whence does government derive its right to govern? What is the 
origin and ground of sovereignty? This question is fundamental, and without 
a true answer to it politics cannot be a science, and there can be no 
scientific statesmanship. Whence, then, comes the sovereign right to govern?

______

CHAPTER III.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT.

GOVERNMENT is both a fact and a right. Its origin as a fact, is simply a 
question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is a 
question of ethics. Whether a certain territory and its population are a 
sovereign state or nation, or not ?whether the actual ruler of a country is 
its rightful ruler, or not ?is to be determined by the historical facts in 
the case; but whence the government derives its right to govern, is a 
question that can be solved only by philosophy, or, philosophy failing, only 
by revelation.

Political writers, not carefully distinguishing between the fact and the 
right, have invented various theories as to the origin of government, among 
which may be named ?

     I. Government originates in the right of the father to govern his 
     child.

     II. It originates in convention, and is a social compact.

     III. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are 
     sovereign.

     IV. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.

     V. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of 
     God; ?

     VI. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual 
     society; ?

     VII. From God through the people; ?

     VIII. From God through the natural law.

I. The first theory is sound, if the question is confined to the origin of 
government as a fact. The patriarchal system is the earliest known system of 
government, and unmistakable traces of it are found in nearly all known 
governments ?in the tribes of Arabia and Northern Africa, the Irish septs 
and the Scottish clans, the Tartar hordes, the Roman gentes, and the Russian 
and Hindoo villages. The right of the father was held to be his right to 
govern his family or household, which, with his children, included his wife 
and servants. From the family to the tribe the transition is natural and 
easy, as also from the tribe to the nation. The father is chief of the 
family; the chief of the eldest family is chief of the tribe; the chief of 
the eldest tribe becomes chief of the nation, and, as such, king or monarch. 
The heads of families collected in a senate form an aristocracy, and the 
families themselves, represented by their delegates, or publicly assembling 
for public affairs, constitute a democracy. These three forms, with their 
several combinations, to wit, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and mixed 
governments, are all the forms known to Aristotle, and have generally been 
held to be all that are possible.

Historically, all governments have, in some sense, been developed from the 
patriarchal, as all society has been developed from the family. Even those 
governments, like the ancient Roman and the modern feudal, which seem to be 
founded on landed property, may be traced back to a patriarchal origin. The 
patriarch is sole proprietor, and the possessions of the family are vested 
in him, and he governs as proprietor as well as father. In the tribe, the 
chief is the proprietor, and in the nation, the king is the landlord, and 
holds the domain. Hence, the feudal baron is invested with his fief by the 
suzerain, holds it from him, and to him it escheats when forfeited or 
vacant. All the great Asiatic kings of ancient or modern times hold the 
domain and govern as proprietors; they have the authority of the father and 
the owner; and their subjects, though theoretically their children, are 
really their slaves.

In Rome, however, the proprietary right undergoes an important 
transformation. The father retains all the power of the patriarch within his 
family, the patrician in his gens or house, but, outside of it, is met and 
controlled by the city or state. The heads of houses are united in the 
senate, and collectively constitute and govern the state. Yet, not all the 
heads of houses have seats in the senate, but only the tenants of the sacred 
territory of the city, which has been surveyed and marked by the god 
Terminus. Hence the great plebeian houses, often richer and nobler than the 
patrician, were excluded from all share in the government and the honors of 
the state, because they were not tenants of any portion of the sacred 
territory. There is here the introduction of an element which is not 
patriarchal, and which transforms the patriarch or chief of a tribe into the 
city or state, and founds the civil order, or what is now called 
civilization. The city or state takes the place of the private proprietor, 
and territorial rights take the place of purely personal rights.

In the theory of the Roman law, the land owns the man, not the man the land. 
When land was transferred to a new tenant, the practice in early times was 
to bury him in it, in order to indicate that it took possession of him, 
received, accepted, or adopted him; and it was only such persons as were 
taken possession of, accepted or adopted by the sacred territory or domain 
that, though denizens of Rome, were citizens with full political rights. 
This, in modern language, means that the state is territorial, not personal, 
and that the citizen appertains to the state, not the state to the citizen. 
Under the patriarchal, the tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems, 
there is, properly speaking, no state, no citizens, and the organization is 
economical rather than political. Authority ?even the nation itself ?is 
personal, not territorial. The patriarch, the chief of the tribe, or the 
king, is the only proprietor. Under the Grco-Roman system all this is 
transformed. The nation is territorial as well as personal, and the real 
proprietor is the city or state. Under the Empire, no doubt, what lawyers 
call the eminent domain was vested in the emperor, but only as the 
representative and trustee of the city or state.

When or by what combination of events this transformation was effected, 
history does not inform us. The first-born of Adam, we are told, built a 
city, and called it after his son Enoch; but there is no evidence that it 
was constituted a municipality. The earliest traces of the civil order 
proper are found in the Greek and Italian republics, and its fullest and 
grandest developments are found in Rome, imperial as well as republican. It 
was no doubt preceded by the patriarchal system, and was historically 
developed from it, but by way of accretion, rather than by simple 
explication, It has in it an element that, if it exists in the patriarchal 
constitution, exists there only in a different form, and. the transformation 
marks the passage from the economical order to the political, from the 
barbaric to the civil constitution of society, or from barbarism to 
civilization.

The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from 
civitas ?city or state. The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and nations 
in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished from the state, 
barbarians. The origin of the word barbarian, barbarus, or barbaroV, is 
unknown, and its primary sense can be only conjectured. Webster regards its 
primary sense as foreign, wild, fierce; but this could not have been its 
original sense; for the Greeks and Romans never termed all foreigners 
barbarians, and they applied the term to nations that bad no inconsiderable 
culture and refinement of manners, and that had made respectable progress in 
art and science ?as the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and 
Assyrians, They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or 
an sthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in 
which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, not 
territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not as a public 
trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or tribe, and not in the 
state; for they never term any others barbarians.

Republic is opposed not to monarchy, in the-modern European sense, but to 
monarchy in the ancient or absolute sense. Lacedmon 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 civilt?in Italian, is 
republican, and is applied in modern times to breeding, or refinement of 
manners, simply because these are characteristics of a republican, or 
polished [from poliV, 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 unlimited 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 Grco-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

Lath the absolute dominion, because He is absolute mater. 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 
light, 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 Lave 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 hold 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 test-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 gentium 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 Joes 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 
caves 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 civilt? 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 solo condition, it is one of the essential 
conditions of progress. The only progressive nations are civilized or 
republican nations. Savage and barbarous tribes are unprogressive. Ages on 
ages roll over them without changing any thing in their state; and Niebuhr 
has well remarked with others, that history records no instance of a savage 
tribe or people having become civilized by its own spontaneous or indigenous 
efforts. If savage tribes have ever become civilized, it has been by 
influences from abroad, by the aid of men already civilized, through 
conquest, colonies, or missionaries; never by their own indigenous efforts, 
nor even by commerce, as is so confidently asserted in this mercantile age. 
Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of 
itself from the savage state to the civilized. But the primitive man, as 
described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, 
and others, is far below the savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most 
debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered has at least some rude 
outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, 
law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there is a 
reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged state of nature 
have none. The advocates of the theory deceive themselves by transporting 
into their imaginary state of nature the views, habits, and capacities of 
the civilized man. It is, perhaps, not difficult for men who have been 
civilized, who have the intelligence, the arts, the affections, and the 
habits of civilization, if deprived by some great social convulsion of 
society, and thrown back on the so-called state of nature, or cast away on 
some uninhabited island in the ocean, and cut off from all intercourse with 
the rest of mankind, to reconstruct civil society, and re-establish and 
maintain civil government. They are civilized men, and bear civil society in 
their own life. But these are no representatives of the primitive man in the 
alleged state of nature. These primitive men have no experience, no 
knowledge, no conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to 
that in which they have thus far lived. How then can they, since, on the 
theory, civil society has no root in nature, but is a purely artificial 
creation, even conceive of civilization, much less realize it?

These theorists, as theorists always do, fail to make a complete abstraction 
of the civilized state, and conclude from what they feel they could do in 
case civil society were broken up, what men may do and have done in a state 
of nature. Men cannot divest themselves of themselves, and, whatever their 
efforts to do it, they think, reason, and act as they are. Every writer, 
whatever else he writes, writes himself. The advocates of the theory, to 
have made their abstraction complete, should have presented their primitive 
man as below the lowest known savage, unprogressive, and in himself 
incapable of developing any progressive energy. Unprogressive, and, without 
foreign assistance, incapable of progress, how is it possible for your 
primitive man to pass, by his own unassisted efforts, from the alleged state 
of nature to that of civilization, of which he has no conception, and 
towards which no innate desire, no instinct, no divine inspiration pushes 
him?

But even if, by some happy inspiration, hardly supposable without 
supernatural intervention, repudiated by the theory ?if by some happy 
inspiration, a rare individual should so far rise above the state of nature 
as to conceive of civil society and of civil government, how could he carry 
his conception into execution? Conception is always easier than its 
realization, and between the design and its execution there is always a 
weary distance. The poetry of all nations is a wail over unrealized ideals. 
It is little that even the wisest and most potent statesman can realize of 
what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political, legislative, or 
judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and favored by authority, are 
hard to be effected, and not seldom generations come and go without 
effecting them. The republics of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, 
Harrington, as the communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, 
not solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly 
because they are innovations, have no support in experience, and require for 
their realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life, 
which only their introduction and realization can supply. So to be able to 
execute the design of passing from the supposed state of nature to 
civilization, the reformer would need the intelligence, the habits, and 
characters in the public which are not possible without civilization itself. 
Some philosophers suppose men have invented language, forgetting that it 
requires language to give the ability to invent language.

Men are little moved by mere reasoning, however clear and convincing it may 
be. They are moved by their affections, passions, instincts, and habits. 
Routine is more powerful with them than logic. A few are greedy of 
novelties, and are always for trying experiments; but the great body of the 
people of all nations have an invincible repugnance to abandon what they 
know for what they know not. They are, to a great extent, the slaves of 
their own vis inerti? and will not make the necessary exertion to change 
their existing mode of life, even for a better. Interest itself is powerless 
before their indolence, prejudice, habits, and usages. Never were 
philosophers more ignorant of human nature than they, so numerous in the 
last century, who imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of 
interest, and that enlightened self-interest, l'intert bien entendu, 
suffices to found and sustain the state. No reform, no change in the 
constitution of government or of society, whatever the advantages it may 
promise, can be successful, if introduced, unless it has its root or germ in 
the past. Man is never a creator; he can only develop and continue, because 
ho is himself a creature, and only a second cause. The children of Israel, 
when they encountered the privations of the wilderness that lay between them 
and the promised land flowing with milk and honey, fainted in spirit, and 
begged Moses to lead them back to Egypt, and permit them to return to 
slavery. In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, 
there is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil society would 
not be a development, but a complete rupture with the past, and an entire 
new creation, When it is with the greatest difficulty that necessary reforms 
are introduced in old and highly civilized nations, and when it can seldom 
he done at all without terrible political and social convulsions, how can we 
suppose men without society, and knowing nothing of it, can deliberately, 
and, as it were, with "malice aforethought," found society? Without 
government, and destitute alike of habits of obedience and habits of 
command, how can they initiate, establish, and sustain government? To 
suppose it, would be to suppose that men in a state of nature, without 
culture, without science, without any of the arts, even the most simple and 
necessary, are infinitely superior to the men formed under the most advanced 
civilization. Was Rousseau right in asserting civilization as a fall, as a 
deterioration of the race?

But suppose the state of nature, even suppose that men, by some miracle or 
other, can get out of it and found civil society, the origin of government 
as authority in compact is not yet established. According to the theory, the 
rights of civil society are derived from the rights of the individuals who 
form or enter into the compact. But individuals cannot give what they have 
not, and no individual has in himself the right to govern another. By the 
law of nature all men have equal rights, are equals, and equals have no 
authority one over another. Nor has an individual the sovereign right even 
to himself, or the right to dispose of himself as he pleases. Man is not 
God, independent, self-existing, and self-sufficing. He is dependent, and 
dependent not only on his Maker, but on his fellow-men, on society, and even 
on nature, or the material world. That on which he depends, in the measure 
in which he depends on it, contributes to his existence, to his life, and to 
his well-being, and has, by virtue of its contribution, a right in him and 
to him; and hence it is that nothing is more painful to the proud spirit 
than to receive a favor that lays him under an obligation to another. The 
right of that on which man depends, and by communion with which he lives, 
limits his own right over himself.

Man does not depend exclusively on society, for it is not his only medium of 
communion with God, and therefore its right to him is neither absolute nor 
unlimited; but still he depends on it, lives in it, and cannot live without 
it. It has, then, certain rights over him, and he cannot enter into any 
compact, league, or alliance that society does not authorize, or at least 
permit. These rights of society override his rights to himself, and he can 
neither surrender them nor delegate them. Other rights, as the rights of 
religion and property, which are held directly from God and nature, and 
which are independent of society, are included in what are called the 
natural rights of man; and these rights cannot be surrendered in forming 
civil society, for they are rights of man only before civil society, and 
therefore not his to cede, and because they are precisely the rights that 
government is bound to respect and protect. The compact, then, cannot be 
formed as pretended, for the only rights individuals could delegate or 
surrender to society to constitute the sum of the rights of government are 
hers already, and those which are not hers are those which cannot be 
delegated or surrendered, and in the free and full enjoyment of which, it is 
the duty, the chief end of government to protect each and every individual.

The convention not only is not a fact, but individuals have no authority 
without society, to meet in convention, and enter into the alleged compact, 
because they are not independent, sovereign individuals. But pass over this: 
suppose the convention, suppose the compact, it must still be conceded that 
it binds and can bind only those who voluntarily and deliberately enter into 
it. This is conceded by Mr. Jefferson and the American Congress of 1776, in 
the assertion that government derives its "just powers from the consent of 
the governed," This consent, as the matter is one of life and death, must be 
free, deliberate, formal, explicit, not simply an assumed, implied, or 
constructive consent. It must be given personally, and not by one for 
another without his express authority.

It is usual to infer the consent or the acceptance of the terms of the 
compact from the silence of the individual, and also from his continued 
residence in the country and submission to its government. But residence is 
no evidence of consent, because it may be a matter of necessity. The 
individual may be unable to emigrate, if he would; and by what right can 
individuals form an agreement to which I must consent or else migrate to 
some strange land? Can my consent, under such circumstances, even if given, 
be any thing but a forced consent, a consent given under duress, and 
therefore invalid? Nothing can be inferred from one's silence, for he may 
have many reasons for being silent besides approval of the government. He 
may be silent because speech would avail nothing; because to protest might 
be dangerous ?cost him his liberty, if not hie life; because he sees and 
knows nothing better, and is ignorant that he has any choice in the case; or 
because, as very likely is the fact with the majority, he has never for a 
moment thought of the matter, or ever had his attention called to it, and 
has no mind on the subject.

But however this may be, there certainly must be excluded from the compact 
or obligation to obey the government created by it all the women of a 
nation, all the children too young to be capable of giving their consent, 
and all who are too ignorant, too weak of mind to be able to understand the 
terms of the contract. These several classes cannot be less than three-
fourths of the population of any country. What is to be done with them? 
Leave them without government? Extend the power of the government over them? 
By what right? Government derives its just powers from the consent of the 
governed, and that consent they have not given. Whence does one-fourth of 
the population get its right to govern the other three-fourths?

But what is to be done with the rights of minorities? Is the rule of 
unanimity to be insisted on in the convention, and in the government, when 
it goes into operation? Unanimity is impracticable, for where there are many 
men there will be differences of opinion. The rule of unanimity gives to 
each individual a veto on the whole proceeding, which was the grand defect 
of the Polish constitution. Each member of the Polish Diet, which included 
the whole body of the nobility, had an absolute veto, and could, alone, 
arrest the whole action of the government. Will you substitute the rule of 
the majority, and say the majority must govern? By what right? It is agreed 
to in the convention. Unanimously, or only by a majority? The right of the 
majority to have their will is, on the social compact theory, a conventional 
right, and therefore cannot come into play before the convention is 
completed, or the social compact is framed and accepted, How, in settling 
the terms of the compact, will you proceed? By majorities? But suppose a 
minority objects, and demands two-thirds, three-fourths, or four-fifths, and 
votes against the majority rule, which is carried only by a simple plurality 
of votes, will the proceedings of the convention bind the dissenting 
minority?

What gives to the majority the right to govern the minority who dissent from 
its action?

On the supposition that society has rights not derived from individuals, and 
which are intrusted to the government, there is a good reason why the 
majority should prevail within the legitimate sphere of government, because 
the majority is the best representative practicable of society itself; and 
if the constitution secures to minorities and dissenting individuals their 
natural rights and their equal rights as citizens, they have no just cause 
of complaint, for the majority in such c