The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny Part 4

For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the people by civil rulers, offences against G.o.d as well as against society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.

After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church with most disastrous consequences. While the Roman Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East a.s.serted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor, and owed him no civil allegiance. He became civilly independent of the Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it. To the new powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged any civil subjection, and uniformly a.s.serted, in face of them, his civil as well as spiritual independence.

This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the Pope's superior. If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the civil power is from G.o.d, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope be subject to the emperor in temporals. As at the time when the dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty itself. Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or G.o.d to man.

If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church, the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy. It would establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most hostile to social progress. Even the Jews could not, or would not, endure it, and prayed G.o.d to give them a king, that they might be like other nations.

In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and partly wrong. The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the supremacy of the moral order, or the law of G.o.d, without which governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being. The real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most approved theologians. The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is the visible chief, is a supernatural inst.i.tution, and holds immediately from G.o.d; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from G.o.d only mediately, through second causes, or the people. Yet, though derived from G.o.d only through the people, civil authority still holds from G.o.d, and derives its right from Him through another channel than the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and respect. This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she interprets and applies the law of G.o.d, both natural and revealed, she makes neither.

Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the representative of the civil society on the same level with the representative of the spiritual, or to emanc.i.p.ate the state from the law of G.o.d while they conceded the divine origin or right of government, they sought to effect its independence by a.s.serting for it only a natural or purely human origin. For nearly two centuries the most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded G.o.d from the state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored to derive authority from man alone. They have not only separated the state from the church as an external corporation, but from G.o.d as its internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at loyalty as a superst.i.tion, and consecrated not civil authority, but what is called "the right of insurrection." Under their teaching the age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who conspire against it--the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction. The established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic, tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to G.o.d, and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.

This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical principles. Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right but might. No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual or social progress. The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive. In civil society two things are necessary--stability and movement. The human is the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only successively actualized. But the element of stability can be found only in the divine, in G.o.d, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal. The doctrine that derives authority from G.o.d through the people, recognizes in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability and progress.

This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of things. It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real order. It only a.s.serts for civil government the relation to G.o.d which nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the Creator. Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of G.o.d, for nothing exists without that act.

That G.o.d "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology. G.o.d and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though distinguishable from G.o.d as the act from the actor, is inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being."

All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as through that act they partic.i.p.ate of his being. Through that act he is immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every creature. The creature deriving from his creative act can no more continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it. It is as bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that G.o.d created the universe, endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up, gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself. It cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself. It did not merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the creative act. Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no philosopher at all. Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather, Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended or discontinued, or not pa.s.sing over from the creature and returning to G.o.d.

Through the creative act man partic.i.p.ates of G.o.d, and he can continue to exist, act, or live only by partic.i.p.ating through it of his divine being. There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in every creature, and therefore it is that G.o.d is worshipped in his works without idolatry. But he creates substantial existences capable of acting as second causes. Hence, in all living things there is in their life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great Christian theologians a.s.sert to be the fact with all legitimate or real government. Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence of G.o.d any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state without G.o.d. A government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in the air. It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they really do exclude G.o.d from their politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are G.o.d.

What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason, without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real, living G.o.d himself. Hence government, like man himself, partic.i.p.ates of the divine being, and, derived from G.o.d through the people, it at the same time partic.i.p.ates of human reason and will, thus reconciling authority with freedom, and stability with progress.

The people, holding their authority from G.o.d, hold it not as an inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for it. It is not their own. If it were their own they might do with it as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an account; but holding it as a trust from G.o.d, they are under his law, and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes. Civil rulers, holding their authority from G.o.d through the people, are accountable for it both to Him and to them. If they abuse it they are justiciable by the people and punishable by G.o.d himself.

Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad government, or what in modern times is called the responsibility of power. At the same time the state is guarantied against sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, by the elevation of the civic virtues to the rank of religious, virtues, and making loyalty a matter of conscience.

Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign auxiliary, but as integral in the political order itself. Religion sustains the state, not because it externally commands us to obey the higher powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because it trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but because it and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, though distinct, parts of one and the same whole. The church and the state, as corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state the church; but both are from G.o.d, and both work to the same end, and when each is rightly understood there is no ant.i.thesis or antagonism between them. Men serve G.o.d in serving the state as directly as in serving the church. He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith. Civic virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who loves not his brother does or can love G.o.d.

The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because it has not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and the via inertia of the ma.s.s, but the whole physical force of the nation, at its command. The individual has, indeed, only moral guaranties against the abuse of power by the sovereign people, which may no doubt sometimes prove insufficient. But moral guaranties are always better than none, and there are none where the people are held to be sovereign in their own native right and might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside of the const.i.tution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain; since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded against it; they are accountable to n.o.body, and, let them do what they please, they can do no wrong. This would place the individual at the mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however oppressed or cruelly treated. This would establish the absolute despotism of the state, and deny every thing like the natural rights of man, or individual and personal freedom, as has already been shown.

Now as men do take part in government, and as men, either individually or collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never to be expected, under any possible const.i.tution or form of government, that authority will always be wisely and justly exercised, that wrong will ever be done, and the rights of individuals never in any instance be infringed; but with the clear understanding that all power is of G.o.d, that the political sovereignty is vested in the people or the collective body, that the civil rulers hold from G.o.d through them and are responsible to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is all the guaranty against the abuse of power by the nation, the political or organic people, that the nature of the case admits. The nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you get in the government all the available wisdom and virtue the nation has, and more is never, under any form or const.i.tution of government, practicable or to be expected.

It is a maxim with const.i.tutional statesmen, that "the king reigns, not governs." The people, though sovereign under G.o.d, are not the government. The government is in their name and by virtue of authority delegated from G.o.d through them, but they are not it, are not their own ministers. It is only when the people forget this and undertake to be their own ministers and to manage their own affairs immediately by themselves instead of selecting agents to do it for them, and holding their agents to a strict account for their management, that they are likely to abuse their power or to sanction injustice. The nation may be misled or deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular courtiers, but as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all natural rights. The wrong is done by individuals who a.s.sume to speak in their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.

L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France, and while that was conceded the French nation could have in its government no more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at least no more than he could appreciate. And under his government France was made responsible for many deeds that the nation would never have sanctioned, if it bad been recognized as the depositary of the national sovereignty, or as the French state, and answerable to G.o.d for the use it made of political power, or the conduct of its government.

But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force in the nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong, for if the sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can rightly command or authorize the employment of force, and all commissions must run in its name. Written const.i.tutions alone will avail little, for they emanate from the people, who can disregard them, if they choose, and alter or revoke them at will. The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the state must after all be on moral guaranties. In the very nature of the case there are and can be no other. But these, placed in a clear light, with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found insufficient. Hence the necessity for the protection, not of authority simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the liberty of religion and intelligence in the nation, of the general understanding that the nation holds its power to govern as a trust from G.o.d, and that to G.o.d through the people all civil rulers are strictly responsible. Let the ma.s.s of the people in any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism of atheism, or lose themselves in that supreme sophism called pantheism, the grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism, and liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty, and perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among savages, would be lost and irrecoverable.

But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of the case. It derives sovereignty from G.o.d, and thus a.s.serts the divine origin of government in the sense that the origin of nature is divine; it derives it from G.o.d through the people, collectively, or as society, and therefore concedes it a natural, human, and social element, which distinguishes it from pure theocracy. It, however, does not explain how authority comes from G.o.d to the people. The ruler, king, prince, or emperor, holds from G.o.d through the people, but how do the people themselves hold from G.o.d? Mediately or immediately? If mediately, what is the medium? Surely not the people themselves. The people can no more be the medium than the principle of their own sovereignty. If immediately, then G.o.d governs in them as he does in the church, and no man is free to think or act contrary to popular opinion, or in any case to question the wisdom or justice of any of the acts of the state, which is arriving at state absolutism by another process. Besides, this would theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all human intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall into either pantheism or atheism.

VIII. The right of government to govern, or political authority, is derived by the collective people or society, from G.o.d through the law of nature. Rulers hold from G.o.d through the people or nation, and the people or nation hold from G.o.d through the natural law. How nations are founded or const.i.tuted, or a particular people becomes a sovereign political people, invested with the rights of society, will be considered in following chapters. Here it suffices to say that supposing a political people or nation, the sovereignty vests in the community, not supernaturally, or by an external supernatural appointment, as the clergy hold their authority, but by the natural law, or law by which G.o.d governs the whole moral creation.

They who a.s.sert the origin of government in nature are right, so far as they derive it from G.o.d through the law of nature, and are wrong only when they understand by the law of nature the physical force or forces of nature, which are not laws in the primary and proper sense of the term. The law of nature is not the order or rule of the divine action in nature which is rightfully called providence, but is, as has been said, law in its proper and primary sense, ordained by the Author of nature, as its sovereign and supreme Lawgiver, and binds all of his creatures who are endowed with reason and free-will, and is called natural, because promulgated through the reason common to all men.

Undoubtedly, it was in the first instance, to the first man, supernaturally promulgated, as it is republished and confirmed by Christianity, as an integral part of the Christian code itself. Man needs even yet instruction in relation to matters lying within the range of natural reason, or else secular schools, colleges, and universities would be superfluous, and manifestly the instructor of the first man could have been only the Creator himself.

The knowledge of the natural law has been transmitted from Adam to us through two channels--reason, which is in every man, and in immediate relation with the Creator, and the traditions of the primitive instruction embodied in language and what the Romans call jus gentium, or law common to all civilized nations. Under this law, whose prescriptions are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal jurisprudence, nations are providentially const.i.tuted, and invested with political sovereignty; and as they are const.i.tuted under this law and hold from G.o.d through it, it defines their respective rights and powers, their limitation and their extent.

The political sovereignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the people, not individually, but collectively, as civil or political society. It is vested in the political community or nation, not in an individual, or family, or a cla.s.s, because, under the natural law, all men are equal, as they are under the Christian law, and one man has, in his own right, no authority over another. The family has in the father a natural chief, but political society has no natural chief or chiefs.

The authority of the father is domestic, not political, and ceases when his children have attained to majority, have married and become heads of families themselves, or have ceased to make part of the paternal household. The recognition of the authority of the father beyond the limits of his own household, is, if it ever occurs, by virtue of the ordinance, the consent, express or tacit, of the political society.

There are no natural-born political chiefs, and wherever we find men claiming or acknowledged to be such, they are either usurpers, what the Greeks called tyrants, or they are made such by the will or const.i.tution of the people or the nation.

Both monarchy and aristocracy were, no doubt, historically developed from the authority of the patriarchs, and have unquestionably been sustained by an equally false development of the right of property, especially landed property. The owner of the land, or he who claimed to own it, claimed as an incident of his ownership the right to govern it, and consequently to govern all who occupied it. But however valid may be the landlord's t.i.tle to the soil, and it is doubtful if man can own any thing in land beyond the usufruct, it can give him under the law of nature no political right. Property, like all natural rights, is ent.i.tled by the natural law to protection, but not to govern.

Whether it shall be made a basis of political power or not is a question of political prudence, to be determined by the supreme political authority. It was the basis, and almost exclusive basis, in the Middle Ages, under feudalism, and is so still in most states.

France and the United States are the princ.i.p.al exceptions in Christendom. Property alone, or coupled with birth, is made elsewhere in some form a basis of political power, and where made so by the sovereign authority, it is legitimate, but not wise nor desirable; for it takes from the weak and gives to the strong. The rich have in their riches advantages enough over the poor, without receiving from the state any additional advantage. An aristocracy, in the sense of families distinguished by birth, n.o.ble and patriotic services, wealth, cultivation, refinement, taste, and manners, is desirable in every nation, is a nation's ornament, and also its chief support, but they need and should receive no political recognition. They should form no privileged cla.s.s in the state or political society.

CHAPTER VII

CONSt.i.tUTION OF GOVERNMENT.

The Const.i.tution is twofold: the const.i.tution of the state or nation, and the const.i.tution of the government. The const.i.tution of the government is, or is held to be, the work of the nation itself; the const.i.tution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its origin at least, providential, given by G.o.d himself, operating through historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the other in historical fact. The nation must exist, and exist as a political community, before it can give itself a const.i.tution; and no state, any more than an individual, can exist without a const.i.tution of some sort.

The distinction between the providential const.i.tution of the people and the const.i.tution of the government, is not always made. The ill.u.s.trious Count de Maistre, one of the ablest political philosophers who wrote in the last century, or the first quarter of the present, in his work on the Generative Principle of Political Const.i.tutions, maintains that const.i.tutions are generated, not made, and excludes all human agency from their formation and growth. Disgusted with French Jacobinism, from which he and his kin and country had suffered so much, and deeply wedded to monarchy in both church and state, he had the temerity to maintain that G.o.d creates expressly royal families for the government of nations, and that it is idle for a nation to expect a good government without a king who has descended from one of those divinely created royal families. It was with some such thought, most likely, that a French journalist, writing home from the United States, congratulated the American people on having a Bonaparte in their army, so that when their democracy failed, as in a few years it was sure to do, they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or emperor. Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the French, a decided parvenu. Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no peer among any of the descendants of the old royal families of Europe.

There is a truth, however, in De Maistre's doctrine that const.i.tutions are generated, or developed, not created de novo, or made all at once.

But nothing is more true than that a nation can alter its const.i.tution by its own deliberate and voluntary action, and many nations have done so, and sometimes for the better, as well as for the worse. If the const.i.tution once given is fixed and unalterable, it must be wholly divine, and contain no human element, and the people have and can have no hand in their own government--the fundamental objection to the theocratic const.i.tution of society. To a.s.sume it is to transfer to civil society, founded by the ordinary providence of G.o.d, the const.i.tution of the church, founded by his gracious or supernatural providence, and to maintain that the divine sovereignty governs in civil society immediately and supernaturally, as in the spiritual society. But such is not the fact. G.o.d governs the nation by the nation itself, through its own reason and free-will. De Maistre is right only as to the const.i.tution the nation starts with, and as to the control which that const.i.tution necessarily exerts over the const.i.tutional changes the nation can successfully introduce.

The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau recognize no providential const.i.tution, and call the written instrument drawn up by a convention of sovereign individuals the const.i.tution, and the only const.i.tution, both of the people and the government. Prior to its adoption there is no government, no state, no political community or authority.

Antecedently to it the people are an inorganic ma.s.s, simply individuals, without any political or national solidarity. These individuals, they suppose, come together in their own native right and might, organize themselves into a political community, give themselves a const.i.tution, and draw up and vote rules for their government, as a number of individuals might meet in a public hall and resolve themselves into a temperance society or a debating club. This might do very well if the state were, like the temperance society or debating club, a simple voluntary a.s.sociation, which men are free to join or not as they please, and which they are bound to obey no farther and no longer than suits their convenience. But the state is a power, a sovereignty; speaks to all within its jurisdiction with an imperative voice; commands, and may use physical force to compel obedience, when not voluntarily yielded. Men are born its subjects, and no one can withdraw from it without its express or tacit permission, unless for causes that would justify resistance to its authority. The right of subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to the state, and is bound to it.

The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a territory or country under one political head is a truth; but "the solidarity of peoples," irrespective of the government or political authority of their respective countries, so eloquently preached a few years since by the Hungarian Kossuth, is not only a falsehood, but a falsehood destructive of all government and of all political organization. Kossuth's doctrine supposes the people, or the populations of all countries, are, irrespective of their governments, bound together in solido, each for all and all for each, and therefore not only free, but bound, wherever they find a population struggling nominally for liberty against its government, to rush with arms in their hands to its a.s.sistance--a doctrine clearly incompatible with any recognition of political authority or territorial rights. Peoples or nations commune with each other only through the national authorities, and when the state proclaims neutrality or non-intervention, all its subjects are bound to be neutral, and to abstain from all intervention on either side. There may be, and indeed there is, a solidarity, more or less distinctly recognized, of Christian nations, but of the populations with and through their governments, not without them.

Still more strict is the solidarity of all the individuals of one and the same nation. These are all bound together, all for each and each for all. The individual is born into society and under the government, and without the authority of the government, which represents all and each, he cannot release himself from his obligations. The state is then by no means a voluntary a.s.sociation. Every one born or adopted into it is bound to it, and cannot without its permission withdraw from it, unless, as just said, it is manifest that he can have under it no protection for his natural rights as a man, more especially for his rights of conscience. This is Vattel's doctrine, and the dictate of common sense.

The const.i.tution drawn up, ordained, and established by a nation for itself is a law--the organic or fundamental law, if you will, but a law, and is and must be the act of the sovereign power. That sovereign power must exist before it can act, and it cannot exist, if vested in the people or nation, without a const.i.tution, or without some sort of political organization of the people or nation. There must, then, be for every state or nation a const.i.tution anterior to the const.i.tution which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives itself derives all its vitality and legal force.

Logic and historical facts are here, as elsewhere, coincident, for creation and providence are simply the expression of the Supreme Logic, the Logos, by whom all things are made. Nations have originated in various ways, but history records no instance of a nation existing as an inorganic ma.s.s organizing itself into a political community. Every nation, at its first appearance above the horizon, is found to have an organization of some sort. This is evident from the only ways in which history shows us nations originating. These ways are: 1. The union of families in the tribe. 2. The union of tribes in the nation. 3. The migration of families, tribes, or nations in search of new settlements.

4. Colonization, military, agricultural, commercial, industrial, religious, or penal. 5. War and conquest. 6. The revolt, separation, and independence of provinces. 7. The intermingling of the conquerors and conquered, and by amalgamation forming a new people. These are all the ways known to history, and in none of these ways does a people, absolutely dest.i.tute of all organization, const.i.tute itself a state, and inst.i.tute and carry on civil government.

The family, the tribe, the colony are, if incomplete, yet incipient states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a centre of social life of their own. The families and tribes that migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time. The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth. It subsists still in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers or Kabyles of Africa.

Colonies, of whatever description, have been founded, if not by, at least under, the authority of the mother country, whose political const.i.tution, laws, manners, and customs they carry with them. They receive from the parent state a political organization, which, though subordinate, yet const.i.tutes them embryonic states, with a unity, individuality, and centre of public life in themselves, and which, when they are detached and recognized as independent, render them complete states. War and conquest effect great national changes, but do not, strictly speaking, create new states. They simply extend and consolidate the power of the conquering state.

Provinces revolt and become independent states or nations, but only when they have previously existed as such, and have retained the tradition of their old const.i.tution and independence; or when the administration has erected them into real though dependent political communities. A portion of the people of a state not so erected or organized, that has in no sense had a distinct political existence of its own, has never separated from the national body and formed a new and independent nation. It cannot revolt; it may rise up against the government, and either revolutionize and take possession of the state, or be put down by the government as an insurrection. The amalgamation of the conquering and the conquered forms a new people, and modifies the inst.i.tutions of both, but does not necessarily form a new nation or political community. The English of to-day are very different from both the Normans and the Saxons, or Dano-Saxons, of the time of Richard Coeur de Lion, but they const.i.tute the same state or political community. England is still England.

The Roman empire, conquered by the Northern barbarians, has been cut up into several separate and independent nations, but because its several provinces had, prior to their conquest by the Roman arms, been independent nations or tribes, and more especially because the conquerors themselves were divided into several distinct nations or confederacies. If the barbarians had been united in a single nation or state, the Roman empire most likely would have changed masters, indeed, but have retained its unity and its const.i.tution, for the Germanic nations that finally seated themselves on its ruins had no wish to destroy its name or nationality, for they were themselves more than half Romanized before conquering Rome. But the new nations into which the empire has been divided have never been, at any moment, without political or governmental organization, continued from the const.i.tution of the conquering tribe or nation, modified more or less by what was retained from the empire.

It is not pretended that the const.i.tutions of states cannot be altered, or that every people starts with a const.i.tution fully developed, as would seem to be the doctrine of De Maistre. The const.i.tution of the family is rather economical than political, and the tribe is far from being a fully developed state. Strictly speaking, the state, the modern equivalent for the city of the Greeks and Romans, was not fully formed till men began to build and live in cities, and became fixed to a national territory. But in the first place, the eldest born of the human race, we are told, built a city, and even in cities we find traces of the family and tribal organization long after their munic.i.p.al existence--in Athens down to the Macedonian conquest, and in Rome down to the establishment of the Empire; and, in the second place, the pastoral nations, though they have not precisely the city or state organization, yet have a national organization, and obey a national authority. Strictly speaking, no pastoral nation has a civil or political const.i.tution, but they have what in our modern tongues can be expressed by no other term. The feudal regime, which was in full vigor even in Europe from the tenth to the close of the fourteenth century, had nothing to do with cities, and really recognized no state proper; yet who hesitates to speak of it as a civil or political system, though a very imperfect one?

The civil order, as it now exists, was not fully developed in the early ages. For a long time the national organizations bore unmistakable traces of having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.

Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same organization. Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and disused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations, it was the same. At first the father was both priest and king, an when the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and hereditary cla.s.s or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark, followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the Graeco-Roman civilization. The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in faith and worship. In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary descent, but every thing is by election of grace. The Christian dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of Christendom. No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and, indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive him.

The providential const.i.tution is, in fact, that with which the nation is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and efficient const.i.tution of the state. It is the source of the vitality of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines its destiny. The const.i.tution which a nation is said to give itself, is never the const.i.tution of the state, but is the law ordained by the state for the government inst.i.tuted under it. Thomas Paine would admit nothing to be the const.i.tution but a written doc.u.ment which he could fold up and put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole. The Abbe Sieyes p.r.o.nounced politics a science which he had finished, and he was ready to turn you out const.i.tutions to order, with no other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet, and could not go.

Many in the last century, and some, perhaps, in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs, confounded the written instrument with the const.i.tution itself. No const.i.tution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people ratify by their votes, is no const.i.tution, for it is extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best, legislative instead of const.i.tutive. The famous Magna Charta drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons at Runnymede, was no const.i.tution of England till long after the date of its concession, and even then was no const.i.tution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power. The const.i.tution is the intrinsic or inherent and actual const.i.tution of the people or political community itself; that which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it from every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from one another.

The const.i.tution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up and established in accordance with any preconceived theory. What is theoretic in a const.i.tution is unreal. The const.i.tutions conceived by philosophers in their closets are const.i.tutions only of Utopia or Dreamland. This world is not governed by abstractions, for abstractions are nullities. Only the concrete is real, and only the real or actual has vitality or force. The French people adopted const.i.tution after const.i.tution of the most approved pattern, and amid bonfires, beating of drums, sound of trumpets, roar of musketry, and thunder of artillery, swore, no doubt, sincerely as well as enthusiastically, to observe them, but all to no effect; for they had no authority for the nation, no hold on its affections, and formed no element of its life. The English are great const.i.tution-mongers--for other nations. They fancy that a const.i.tution fashioned after their own will fit any nation that can be persuaded, wheedled, or bullied into trying it on; but, unhappily, all that have tried it on have found it only an embarra.s.sment or enc.u.mbrance. The doctor might as well attempt to give an individual a new const.i.tution, or the const.i.tution of another man, as the statesman to give a nation any other const.i.tution than that which it has, and with which it is born.

The whole history of Europe, since the fall of the Roman empire, proves this thesis. The barbarian conquest of Rome introduced into the nations founded on the site of the empire, a double const.i.tution--the barbaric and the civil--the Germanic and the Roman in the West, and the Tartaric or Turkish and the Graeco-Roman in the East. The key to all modern history is in the mutual struggles of these two const.i.tutions and the interests respectively a.s.sociated with them, which created two societies on the same territory, and, for the most part, under the same national denomination. The barbaric was the const.i.tution of the conquerors; they had the power, the government, rank, wealth, and fashion, were reinforced down to the tenth century by fresh hordes of barbarians, and had even brought the external ecclesiastical society to a very great extent into harmony with itself. The Pope became a feudal sovereign, and the bishops and mitred abbots feudal princes and barons.

Yet, after eight hundred years of fierce struggle, the Roman const.i.tution got the upper hand, and the barbaric const.i.tution, as far as it could not be a.s.similated to the Roman, was eliminated. The original Empire of the West is now as thoroughly Roman in its const.i.tution, its laws, and its civilization, as it ever was under any of its Christian emperors before the barbarian conquest.

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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution. 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 const.i.tution in the Koran; and the Koran, in its principles, doctrines, and spirit, is exclusive and profoundly intolerant. The Graeco-Roman const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution founded by its Germanic invaders.