The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny

by Orestes Augustus Brownson

The king or emperor not being the state, and the government, whatever its form or constitution, being a creature of the state, he can be dethroned, and the whole government even virtually overthrown, without dissolving the state or the political society. Such an event may cause much evil, create much social confusion, and do grave injury to the nation, but the political society may survive it; the sovereign remains in the plenitude of his rights, as competent to restore government as he was originally to institute it. When, in 1848, Louis Philippe was dethroned by the Parisian mob, and fled the kingdom, there was in France no legitimate government, for all commissions ran in the king's name; but the organic or territorial people of France, the body politic, remained, and in it remained the sovereign power to organize and appoint a new government. When, on the 2d of December, 1851, the president, by a coup d'etat, suppressed the legislative assembly and the constitutional government, there was no legitimate government standing, and the power assumed by the president was unquestionably a usurpation; but the nation was competent to condone his usurpation and legalize his power, and by a plebiscitum actually did so. The wisdom or justice of the coup d'etat is another question, about which men may differ; but when the French nation, by its subsequent act, had condoned it, and formally conferred dictatorial powers on the prince-president, the principal had approved the act of his agent, and given him discretionary powers, and nothing more was to be said. The imperial constitution and the election of the president to be emperor, that followed on December 2d, 1852, were strictly legal, and, whatever men may think of Napoleon III., it must be conceded that there is no legal flaw in his title, and that he holds his power by a title as high and as perfect as there is for any prince or ruler.

But the plebiscitum cannot be legally appealed to or be valid when and where there is a legal government existing and in the full exercise of its constitutional functions, as was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in a case growing out of what is known as the Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island. A suffrage committee, having no political authority, drew up and presented a new constitution of government to the people, plead a plebiscitum in its favor, and claimed the officers elected under it as the legally elected officers of the state. The court refused to recognize the plebiscitum, and decided that it knew Rhode Island only as represented through the government, which had never ceased to exist. New States in Territories have been organized on the strength of a plebiscitum when the legal Territorial government was in force, and were admitted as States into the Union, which, though irregular and dangerous, could be done without revolution, because Congress, that admitted them, is the power to grant the permission to organize as States and apply for admission. Congress is competent to condone an offence against its own rights. The real danger of the practice is, that it tends to create a conviction that sovereignty inheres in the people individually, or as population, not as the body politic or organic people attached to a sovereign domain; and the people who organize under a plebiscitum are not, till organized and admitted into the Union, an organic or a political people at all. When Louis Napoleon made his appeal to a vote of the French people, he made an appeal to a people existing as a sovereign people, and a sovereign people without a legal government. In his case the plebiscitum was proper and sufficient, even if it be conceded that it was through his own fault that France at the moment was found without a legal government. When a thing is done, though wrongly done, you cannot act as if it were not done, but must accept it as a fact and act accordingly.

The plebiscitum, which is simply an appeal to the people outside of government, is not valid when the government has not lapsed, either by its usurpations or by its dissolution, nor is it valid either in the case of a province, or of a population that has no organic existence as an independent sovereign state. The plebiscitum in France was valid, but in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Modena, Parma, and Lucca, and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies it was not valid, for their legal governments had not lapsed; nor was it valid in the Aemilian provinces of the Papal States, because they were not a nation or a sovereign people, but only a portion of such nation or people. In the case of the states and provinces—except Lombardy, ceded to France by Austria, and sold to the Sardinian king—annexed to Piedmont to form the new kingdom of Italy, the plebiscitum was invalid, because implying the right of the people to rebel against the legal authority, and to break the unity and individuality of the state of which they form an integral part. The nation is a whole, and no part has the right to secede or separate, and set up a government for itself, or annex itself to another state, without the consent of the whole. The solidarity of the nation is both a fact and a law. The secessionists from the United States defended their action only on the ground that the States of the American Union are severally independent sovereign states, and they only obeyed the authority of their respective states.

The plebiscitum, or irregular appeal to what is called universal suffrage, since adopted by Louis Napoleon in France after the coup d'etat, is becoming not a little menacing to the stability of governments and the rights and integrity of states, and is not less dangerous to the peace and order of society than "the solidarity of peoples" asserted by Kossuth, the revolutionary ex-governor of Hungary, the last stronghold of feudal barbarism in Christian Europe; for Russia has emancipated her serfs.

The nation, as sovereign, is free to constitute government according to its own judgment, under any form it pleases—monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed—vest all power in an hereditary monarch, in a class or hereditary nobles, in a king and two houses of parliament, one hereditary, the other elective, or both elective; or it may establish a single, dual, or triple executive, make all officers of government hereditary or all elective, and if elective, elective for a longer or a shorter time, by universal suffrage or a select body of electors. Any of these forms and systems, and many others besides, are or may be legitimate, if established and maintained by the national will. There is nothing in the law of God or of nature, antecedently to the national will, that gives any one of them a right to the exclusion of any one of the others. The imperial system in France is as legitimate as the federative system in the United States. The only form or system that is necessarily illegal is the despotic. That can never be a truly civilized government, nor a legitimate government, for God has given to man no dominion over man. He gave men, as St. Augustine says, and Pope St. Gregory the Great repeats, dominion over the irrational creation, not over the rational, and hence the primitive rulers of men were called pastors or shepherds, not lords. It may be the duty of the people subjected to a despotic government to demean themselves quietly and peaceably towards it, as a matter of prudence, to avoid sedition, and the evils that would necessarily follow an attempted revolution, but not because, founded as it is on mere force, it has itself any right or legality.

All other forms of government are republican in their essential constitution, founded on public right, and held under God from and for the commonwealth, and which of them is wisest and best for the commonwealth is, for the most part, an idle question. "Forms of government," somebody has said, "are like shoes—that is the best form which best fit the feet that are to wear them." Shoes are to be fitted to the feet, not the feet to the shoes, and feet vary in size and conformation. There is, in regard to government, as distinguished from the state, no antecedent right which binds the people, for antecedently to the existence of the government as a fact, the state is free to adopt any form that it finds practicable, or judges the wisest and best for itself. Ordinarily the form of the government practicable for a nation is determined by the peculiar providential constitution of the territorial people, and a form of government that would be practicable and good in one country may be the reverse in another. The English government is no doubt the best practicable in Great Britain, at present at least, but it has proved a failure wherever else it has been attempted. The American system has proved itself, in spite of the recent formidable rebellion to overthrow it, the best and only practicable government for the United States, but it is impracticable everywhere else, and all attempts by any European or other American state to introduce it can end only in disaster. The imperial system apparently works well in France, but though all European states are tending to it, it would not work well at all on the American continent, certainly not until the republic of the United States has ceased to exist. While the United States remain the great American power, that system, or its kindred system, democratic centralism, can never become an American system, as Maximilian's experiment in Mexico is likely to prove.

Political propagandism, except on the Roman plan, that is, by annexation and incorporation, is as impracticable as it is wanting in the respect that one independent people owes to another. The old French Jacobins tried to propagate, even with fire and sword, their system throughout Europe, as the only system compatible with the rights of man. The English, since 1688, have been great political propagandists, and at one time it seemed not unlikely that every European state would try the experiment of a parliamentary government, composed of an hereditary crown, an hereditary house of lords, and an elective house of commons. The democratic Americans are also great political propagandists, and are ready to sympathize with any rebellion, insurrection, or movement in behalf of democracy in any part of the world, however mean or contemptible, fierce or bloody it may be; but all this is as unstatesmanlike as unjust; unstatesmanlike, for no form of government can bear transplanting, and because every independent nation is the sole judge of what best comports with its own interests, and its judgment is to be respected by the citizens as well as by the governments of other states. Religious propagandism is a right and a duty, because religion is catholic and of universal obligation; and so is the jus gentium of the Romans, which is only the application to individuals and nations of the great principles of natural justice; but no political propagandism is ever allowable, because no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.

Thoughtful Americans are opposed to political propagandism, and respect the right of every nation to choose its own form of government; but they hold that the American system is the best in itself, and that if other nations were as enlightened as the American, they would adopt it. But though the American system, rightly understood, is the best, as they hold, it is not because other nations are less enlightened, which is by no means a fact, that they do not adopt, or cannot bear it, but solely because their providential constitutions do not require or admit it, and an attempt to introduce it in any of them would prove a failure and a grave evil.

Fit your shoes to your feet. The law of the governmental constitution is in that of the nation. The constitution of the government must grow out of the constitution of the state, and accord with the genius, the character, the habits, customs, and wants of the people, or it will not work well, or tend to secure the legitimate ends of government. The constitutions imagined by philosophers are for Utopia, not for any actual, living, breathing people. You must take the state as it is, and develop your governmental constitution from it, and harmonize it with it. Where there is a discrepancy between the two constitutions, the government has no support in the state, in the organic people, or nation, and can sustain itself only by corruption or physical force. A government may be under the necessity of using force to suppress an insurrection or rebellion against the national authority, or the integrity of the national territory, but no government that can sustain itself, not the state, only by physical force or large standing armies, can be a good government, or suited to the nation. It must adopt the most stringent repressive measures, suppress liberty of speech and of conscience, outrage liberty in what it has the most intimate and sacred, and practise the most revolting violence and cruelty, for it can govern only by terror. Such a government is unsuited to the nation.

This is seen in all history: in the attempt of the dictator Sulla to preserve the old patrician government against the plebeian power that time and events had developed in the Roman state, and which was about to gain the supremacy, as we have seen, at Pharsalia, Philippi, and Actium; in the efforts to establish a Jacobinical government in France in 1793; in Rome in 1848, and the government of Victor Emmanuel in Naples in 1860 and 1861. These efforts, proscriptions, confiscations, military executions, assassinations, massacres, are all made in the name of liberty, or in defence of a government supposed to guaranty the well-being of the state and the rights of the people. They are rendered inevitable by the mad attempt to force on a nation a constitution of government foreign to the national constitution, or repugnant to the national tastes, interests, habits, convictions, or whole interior life. The repressive policy, adopted to a certain extent by nearly all European governments, grows out of the madness of a portion of the people of the several states in seeking to force upon the nation an anti-national constitution. The sovereigns may not be very wise, but they are wiser, more national, more patriotic than the mad theorists who seek to revolutionize the state and establish a government that has no hold in the national traditions, the national character, or the national life; and the statesman, the patriot, the true friend of liberty sympathizes with the national authorities, not with the mad theorists and revolutionists.