I affirm, and the simplest common sense must coincide, that the sovereignty of right, complete and permanent, can belong to no individual, and that all attribution thereof to any human power whatever is false and dangerous. Hence comes the necessity for limiting all powers, whatever may be their names and forms; and hence also comes the radical illegitimacy of every absolute power, whether its origin may rest on conquest, hereditary claim, or election. Differences may exist as to the best means to be employed in establishing the supremacy of right; indeed they must be varied according to times and places; but at no time, in no place, can any power be legitimately the independent possessor of that supremacy.
This principle being laid down, it is nevertheless certain that royalty, in whatever system it is contemplated, protrudes itself as the personification of the sovereign right. Here is the theocratic system; it tells us that kings are the image of God on earth, which means nothing else than that they are the personification of sovereign justice, truth, and goodness. Here are the jurisconsults; they tell us that the king is the living law; which again means that the king is the personification of sovereign right and of the just law which has a prerogative to govern society. Here is royalty itself in a system of pure monarchy; it asserts itself the personification of the state, of the general interest. In whatever conjunction or situation it is beheld, it is always found gathering itself into an allegation of its representing and giving embodiment to that sovereign right which is alone entitled legitimately to govern society.
In this there is no occasion for astonishment. What are the characteristics of supreme right, such as it derives from its very nature? First, it is by itself alone; for as there is but one truth, and one justice, there can be but one supreme right. Furthermore, it is permanent, always the same: truth changes not. It is placed in a situation superior and unknown to all the vicissitudes, all the hazards, of this world: in some degree it is of this world only as a judge and spectator—such is its part. Now, it is royalty which substantively brings out these rational and natural characteristics of right under the most sensible outward form, and seems their most faithful representative. M. Benjamin Constant has ingeniously likened royalty to a neutral moderating power, raised above the accidents and contests of society, and interfering only in great crises. This is, as it were, the very attitude of supreme right in the government of human affairs. This idea must have had something calculated to convince the judgment, for it passed with surprising rapidity from books to facts. One sovereign made it the very base of his throne, in the constitution of Brazil, in which royalty appears as a moderator, raised above the active powers as spectator and judge.
Under whatever point of view the institution may be regarded, when tested in comparison with sovereign right, it will be found to possess a great external resemblance, naturally calculated to strike the minds of men. Thus, whenever their reflection or their imagination has been turned towards the contemplation or study of the nature of the sovereignty of right and of its essential characteristics, they have inclined towards royalty. As, for instance, in those periods in which religious ideas had predominance, the habitual contemplation of the attributes of God has led mankind to the monarchical system. So, also, when jurisconsults have swayed society, the habit of studying, under the name of law, the nature of the supremacy of right, has been conducive to the dogma of its being personified in royalty. The attentive application of the human intellect to the investigation of the nature and the qualities of rightful sovereignty, when other causes have not interfered to destroy its operation, has invariably given strength and credit to royalty, as portraying its likeness.
Furthermore, there are times peculiarly favourable to this personification, times in which individual forces range through the world with all their accidents and caprices, and in which selfishness rules paramountly over individuals from ignorance and brutality, or from corruption of manners. Then society, abandoned to the conflict of personal wills, and unable to constitute by their free concurrence a common and general will capable of rallying and controlling them, passionately longs for a superior to whom all individuals may be compelled to yield obedience; and as soon as any institution presents itself which bears some of the characteristics of rightful supremacy, and holds out to society its legitimate empire, all cling to it with eager haste as fugitives fly to a sanctuary. This is witnessed in the season of the disorganised youth of nations, in times such as we have surveyed. Royalty is admirably adapted for those eras of anarchy in which society longs for constitution and regularity, and cannot accomplish its aspiration by the free concord of individual inclinations.
There are other times in which, from a totally different cause, it has the same good quality. How did the Roman world, on the verge of dissolution at the end of the republic, still subsist for nearly fifteen centuries under the name of that empire which, after all, was but a continual decay, a prolonged agony! Royalty alone could have produced such an effect, it alone could have repressed a society which corruption was perpetually tending to destroy. Thus the imperial power bore up for fifteen centuries against the ruin of the Roman world.
Hence there are periods in which royalty alone is able to retard the dissolution of society, and also periods in which it alone can accelerate its formation. And in both cases it exercises this power over events, because it represents more vividly and energetically the sovereignty of right than any other form of government.