If we go beyond Europe, and carry our observation to other times and countries, we encounter on all sides this idea of political legitimacy, and find it clinging to some portion of the ruling government, to some of its institutions, forms, or maxims. There is no country or time in which a certain portion of the social system, of the public powers, has not bestowed upon itself, and had recognised as inherent in it, this character of legitimacy derived from antiquity and stability.
And what is this principle! What are its elements? How came its introduction into European civilisation?
All systems of power are, at their origin, mixed up with force. I do not mean to say that they are all based upon force alone, or that if they had not originally had other titles than force, they would have been established. They most certainly needed others; powers are established in accordance with certain social wants, and with reference to the state of society, to manners and opinions. But we cannot avoid perceiving that force has sullied the foundation of all the systems of power in the world, whatever may have been their nature and form.
But every one repudiates this origin, all the systems of every description deny it, and there is none that will consent to spring from force. An invincible instinct apprises governments that force does not confer right, and that if their claims rested upon that alone, right could never be deduced. For this reason, when we recur to ancient times, and unmask the different systems and powers abandoned to violence, all hasten to exclaim, 'I was earlier, I subsisted previously, and by virtue of other titles; society belonged to me before this state of violence and strife in which you discover me; I was legitimate; my just prerogatives were contested and wrenched from me.'
This single fact demonstrates that the maxim of force is not the groundwork of political legitimacy, and that it reposes upon some other base. What is the effect of this formal repudiation of force by all the systems? Their acknowledgment that there is another legitimacy, the veritable foundation for all others, the legitimacy of reason, justice, and right. Such is the origin to which they are all eager to cling. And because they discard force as their initiatory element, they are driven to assert themselves robed with a different title, quoting their antiquity. The main characteristic, then, of political legitimacy, is to deny force as the source of power, and to allege it as cohesive with a moral idea and force, with the idea, in fact, of right, justice, and reason. This is the fundamental element which constitutes the principle of political legitimacy. It has taken its rise therefrom, receiving a helping hand from time and stability. We will trace the process.
Force having presided at the dawn of all governments and societies, time progresses and effects changes in the operations of force; it administers correctives, from the very circumstance that a society endures and is composed of men. Man bears within him a certain number of notions of order, justice, and reason, and a certain craving to give them sway, and to introduce them into the facts amidst which he lives. To attain this object, he labours unremittingly; and if the social state in which he is located continues, his labours are not fruitless. Man brings reason and right to bear in the sphere he moves in.
Independently of the exertions of man, there is a law of Providence too palpable to be denied, a law analogous to that which rules the material world, by which a certain measure of order, reason, and justice, is indispensable to the continuance of a society. Indeed, from the mere fact of durability, we may be assured that any particular society is not utterly absurd, insensate, or iniquitous, and that it is not entirely bare of that element of reason, truth, and justice, which can alone give life to any society. If, furthermore, the society is developed, if it becomes more vigorous and powerful, if its terms are from time to time accepted by an increasing number of people, then are we sure that by the action of time, more reason, justice, and right have been infused into it; for facts imperceptibly arrange themselves according to true legitimacy.
Thus has the idea of political legitimacy spread over the world, and from the world penetrated men's minds. For foundation or first origin, it has, in a certain degree, at least, moral legitimacy, justice, reason, and truth; and afterwards the sanction of time, which gives ground for belief that reason has become part and parcel of existing facts, that, in reality, true undeniable legitimacy has been introduced into external matters. In the epoch we are about to open upon, we shall find force and falsehood ingredients in the first composition of royalty, aristocracy, democracy, and even of the church; and then force and falsehood will be perceived undergoing gradual reformation under the plastic hand of time, and right and truth taking their places in civilisation. It is this introduction of right and truth into the social state that has developed by degrees the principle of political legitimacy, and it is thus that it has become established in modern civilisation.
When attempts have been made at various times to raise this idea as the banner of absolute power, its real origin has been grossly mistaken or perverted. So utterly apart is it from identification with absolute power, that right and justice are the titles by which it has been diffused, and has taken root in the world. It is not in any degree exclusive, it appertains to none in particular, but is planted wherever right finds development. Political legitimacy, I assert again, is as much bound up with liberty as with power, and with individual rights equally with the forms, whatever they may be, by which public functions are exercised. We will meet it in our progress, in the most discordant systems—equally in the feudal system, in the municipalities of Flanders and Germany, in the republics of Italy, as in monarchy. It is a character partaken of by all the different elements of modern civilisation, and it behoves us fully to comprehend it in investigating the history of that civilisation.